links for Oct 08, 2007

Two articles from the Washington Post:

On the environment:

• In China, a Green Awakening

For almost three decades, the city had welcomed some of the world’s biggest polluters. Churning out paper, photographic film, dye, fertilizer, cement and other products for the global marketplace, the businesses helped make Wuxi into one of China’s wealthiest industrial cities. They also poisoned the province’s vast network of lakes, rivers and canals. In late May, when the toxic sludge reached Tai Lake, which is the main source of potable water for Wuxi’s 5.8 million residents, people turned on their taps and got only sludge.

City officials decided they’d had enough. In a series of radical proclamations that sent shudders though the business community, Wuxi declared itself a newly reformed green city.

On China in Africa:

• Struggling Chadians Dream of a Better Life—in China

As resource-hungry China cultivates relationships with countries across Africa — most recently here, for oil — African leaders are debating the merits of that growing influence. Skeptics are troubled, for instance, by China’s role in enabling governments such as Sudan’s, which is accused of carrying out a brutal campaign of violence in its western Darfur region.

But as that debate goes on, something less tangible is happening on the ground, even in this remote, conflict-ridden region where electricity and plumbing are still luxuries:

The idea of China as a symbol of potential prosperity is taking hold, seeping into the consciousness of ordinary Africans and occupying a place that the United States, and to some extent European countries, once claimed.

A great article on the succession struggle from Jottings from the Granite Studio:

• Li Datong on China’s next generation of leadership or “What Michael Corleone and the Yongzheng Emperor taught me about succession struggles”

nobody is going to be losing their heads this time around, that era has thankfully passed, and certainly the CCP leadership has shown itself capable of orderly transitions of power. But a situation in which three or four likely candidates have five years to jockey for position ahead of the next party congress is one fraught with possibilities.