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 [...]

Greetings from Lanzhou

I just got an interesting e-mail from my dad, who’s arrived in Lanzhou safe and sound. I thought his message was pretty amusing, and I can definitely tell that he’s getting a sense of that difficult to describe dose of oddness that many westerns get when they first go to China.
He writes,
“This has so far [...]

Anyone have any experience with Lanzhou?

My father is leaving for Beijing tomorrow–his first trip to China–and then, later in the week, over to Lanzhou to visit a factory of a company he is affiliated with.
I think he’s hoping for Lanzhou to be a cool place to visit, but the Wikipedia entry on it is less than thrilling.
If any of you [...]

Beijing’s Penis Emporium

In this BBC article, you can read about government officials eating penis hotpot and discover all of the various types of animal penis available to eat in the Beijing restaurant Guolizhuang, which claims to be China’s only penis emporium:
There are many thousands of Chinese restaurants around in the UK and everyone has their favourite dish, [...]

China Unable to Sustain Current Economic Path, says Bank of China Vice President

During his lecture yesterday entitled “2007: Global Economy and Financial Markets” at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs, Zhu Min, the vice president of the Bank of China, said that China’s path of rapid economic growth and prosperity will be unable to continue without incurring serious costs.
Zhu Min graduated from the [...]

Getting your children to study Chinese

The ‘Pursuits’ section of today’s Wall Street Journal has an article titled “Just One word: 塑料. (That’s Chinese for ‘Plastics’)” Remember the Graduate?
Today’s China-oriented CEOs are encouraging their children to take Chinese so that they may “get an edge in the global economy increasingly dominated by China.”
The article is painful in the sense that these [...]

China’s rising middle class, democracy, and property rights.

Before going to university, before attending courses on China, I sometimes talked with my father about the consequences of China’s growing middle class on the prospect of democracy—a subject that neither of us were knowledgeable about, but found interesting. What came out of those talks, at least, for me, was the belief that as Chinese [...]

The Nature of China’s Business Press

My journalism course on China’s Mass Media had a guest speaker today—-Arthur Kroeber, the managing director and head of research for Dragonomics and editor-in-chief of the China Economic Quarterly. Mr. Kroeber talked to us about the evolution of the business press in China since the reform and opening began in 1978, how economic reportage has [...]