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isaac Mao

Internet Helps Liberate, Create Music in China : NPR Music - 0 views

www.npr.org/...story.php

2 music

shared by isaac Mao on 26 Jun 08 - Cached
  • When America was rocking to the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, the airwaves in China were dominated by songs with lyrics from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book.
  • isaac Mao on 26 Jun 08
     
    Internet Helps Liberate, Create Music in China By Laura Sydell Listen Now [7 min 48 sec] add to playlist Chinese electronic musician B6 B6, a Shanghai-based electronic musician, explored Western music first on pirated CDs and then at music-sharing sites on the Web. Now he collaborates online with other performers. B6's studio equipment -- a jumble of keyboards, etc. Enlarge B6 works out of a home studio in a Shanghai high-rise. Above, some of his musical arsenal. Discover China's Indie Music Neocha Web site image Neocha.com With Sean Leow, B6 co-founded the music-sharing site Neocha.com, an ad-supported service that lets listeners discover music and pays musicians a share of advertising revenue. * Neocha.com * Neocha's "Next" Player Morning Edition, June 25, 2008 - Second in a three-part series. When America was rocking to the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, the airwaves in China were dominated by songs with lyrics from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book. It's more open today, but the Communist government still bans anything that mentions sex or violence, or that has "low class humor" - which bans an awful lot of American music. So the music most likely to come pouring out of the radio in China is syrupy ballads usually produced in Hong Kong or Taiwan. But Chinese musicians and fans are finding a whole new universe of sound on the Internet. And it's helping to create and nourish a new generation of independent artists in China. From Black-Market Discs to Napster and Beyond One of them is B6, a 27-year-old electronic musician. He lives and works on the first floor of a high-rise on the outskirts of Shanghai. He's part of China's burgeoning electronic-music scene. Growing up, the CDs B6 listened to were mostly sold on the black market. "When I was in high school, I used to listen to rock 'n' roll music," he says. "At that time, it was very difficult to get foreign or Western music." And then, in 1999, the Internet came to China - and B6 and his fr
feng37

…My heart's in Accra » Studying Twitter and the Moldovan protests - 0 views

www.ethanzuckerman.com/...tter-and-the-moldovan-protests

shared by feng37 on 14 Apr 09 - Cached
  • At some point on Friday, we hit a peak tweet density - 410 of 100,000 tweets included the #pman tag. Had I been scraping results by iterating 100,000 tweets at a time, I would have had four pages of new results - my script is only looking at the first page, so I’d be dropping results. If I ran the script again, I’d try to figure out the maximum tweet density by looking for the moment where the meme was most hyped, try to do a back of the envelope calculation as to an optimum step size and then halve it - that would probably have me using 20,000 steps for this set.
  • Density of tweets charted against blocks of 100,000 tweets
  • http://search.twitter.com/search?max_id=1511783811&page=2&q=%23pman&rpp=100 Picking apart the URL: max_id=1511783811 - Only return results up to tweet #1511783811 in the database page=2 - Hand over the second page of results q=%23pman - The query is for the string #pman, encoded to escape the hash rpp=100 - Give the user 100 results per page While you can manipulate these variables to your heart’s content, you can’t get more than 100 results per page. And if you retrieve 100 results per page, your results will stop at around 15 pages - the engine, by default, wants to give you only 1500 results on any search. This makes sense from a user perspective - it’s pretty rare that you actually want to read the last 1500 posts that mention the fail whale - but it’s a pain in the ass for researchers.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • What you need to do is figure out the approximate tweet ID number that was current when the phenomenon you’re studying was taking place. If you’re a regular twitterer, go to your personal timeline, find a tweet you posted on April 7th, and click on the date to get the ID of the tweet. In the early morning (GMT) of the 7th, the ID for a new tweet was roughly 1468000000 - the URL http://search.twitter.com/search?max_id=1468000000&q=%23pman&rpp=100 retrieves the first four tweets to use the tag #pman, including our Ur-tweet: evisoft: neata, propun sa utilizam tag-ul #pman pentru mesajele din piata marii adunari nationale My Romanian’s a little rusty, but Vitalie Eşanu appears to be suggesting we use the tag #pman - short for Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, the main square in Chisinau where the protests were slated to begin - in reference to posts about the protests. His post is timestamped 4:40am GMT, suggesting that there were at least some discussions about promoting the protests on Twitter before protesters took to the streets.
  • Now the key is to grab URLs from Twitter, increasing the max_id variable in steps so that we’re getting all results from the start tweet ID to the current tweet ID. My perl script to do this steps by 10,000 results at a time, scraping the results I get from Twitter (using the Atom feed, not the HTML) and dumping novel results into a database. This seems like a pretty fine-toothed comb to use… but if you want to be comprehensive, it’s important to figure out what maximum “tweet density” is before running your code.
  • feng37 on 14 Apr 09
     
    http://search.twitter.com/search?max_id=1511783811&page=2&q=%23pman&rpp=100 Picking apart the URL: max_id=1511783811 - Only return results up to tweet #1511783811 in the database page=2 - Hand over the second page of results q=%23pman - The query is for the string #pman, encoded to escape the hash rpp=100 - Give the user 100 results per page While you can manipulate these variables to your heart's content, you can't get more than 100 results per page. And if you retrieve 100 results per page, your results will stop at around 15 pages - the engine, by default, wants to give you only 1500 results on any search. This makes sense from a user perspective - it's pretty rare that you actually want to read the last 1500 posts that mention the fail whale - but it's a pain in the ass for researchers. What you need to do is figure out the approximate tweet ID number that was current when the phenomenon you're studying was taking place. If you're a regular twitterer, go to your personal timeline, find a tweet you posted on April 7th, and click on the date to get the ID of the tweet. In the early morning (GMT) of the 7th, the ID for a new tweet was roughly 1468000000 - the URL http://search.twitter.com/search?max_id=1468000000&q=%23pman&rpp=100 retrieves the first four tweets to use the tag #pman, including our Ur-tweet: evisoft: neata, propun sa utilizam tag-ul #pman pentru mesajele din piata marii adunari nationale My Romanian's a little rusty, but Vitalie Eşanu appears to be suggesting we use the tag #pman - short for Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, the main square in Chisinau where the protests were slated to begin - in reference to posts about the protests. His post is timestamped 4:40am GMT, suggesting that there were at least some discussions about promoting the protests on Twitter before protesters took to the streets. Now the key is to grab URLs from Twitter, increasing the max_id variable in steps so that we're getting all results from the st
feng37

Digital Resistance and the Orange Revolution « iRevolution - 0 views

irevolution.wordpress.com/...ance-and-the-orange-revolution

shared by feng37 on 19 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Maidan was a group of tech-savvy pro-democracy activists who used the Internet as a tool to support their movement. Maidan in Ukranian means public square and Maidan’s website features the slogal “You CAN chnage the world you live in. And you can do it now. In Ukraine.”
    • feng37
      feng37 on 19 Feb 09
       
      买单？
  • The main activity of Maidan was election monitoring and networking with other pro-democracy organizations around Eastern Europe.
  • “websites cannot produce an activist organization.”
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • it was crucial for Maidan to frequently host real world meetings as their membership base increased. The human element was particularly important. This explains why Maidan encouraged users to disclose their identity whenever possible.
  • The community benefited from centralized leadership that developed the organization’s culture, controlled its assets and provided the strategy to achieve desired goals. The Maidan experience thus demonstrates a hybrid organization.
  • Pora, meaning “It’s Time” in Ukranian, was a well-organized group of  pro-democracy volunteers that “emerged as an information sharing campaign and during the elections morphed into coordinators of mass protest centered around tent cities in towns throughout Ukraine. The grassroots movement took its inspiration from Serbia’s Otpor movements as well as “older civic movements in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.”
  • “the active use of modern communication systems in the campaign’s management,” and “mobile phones played an important role for mobile fleet of activists.”
  • “a ssytem of immedate dissemination of information by SMS was put in place and proved important.” In addition, “some groups provided the phones themselves, while others provided SIM cards, and most provided airtime.”
  • roviding rapid reporting in a way that no other medium could. As tent cities across the Ukraine became the sign of the revolution,
  • The news feed from the regions [became] vitally important. Every 10 to 15 minutes another tent city appeared in some town or other, and the fact was soon reported on the air.
  • While the government certainly saw the Internet as a threat, the government had not come to consensus regarding the “legal and political frameworks it would use to silence journalists that published openly on this new medium.”
  • many online journalists unlike mainstream journalists were free from the threat of defamation charges.
  • one of the earliest examples of what Steven Mann calls “sousveillance,” meaning, “the monitoring of authority figures by grassroots groups, using the technologies and techniques of surveillance.”
  • Technology certainly does not make possible a direct democracy, where everyone can participate in a decision, nor representative democracy where decision makers are elected; nor is it really a one-person-one-vote referendum style democracy. Instead it is a consultative process known as ‘rough consensus and running code.’
  • the real power of traditional media. Natalia Dmytruk worked for the Ukraine’s state-run television news program as an interpreter of sign language for the hearing-impaired. As the revolution picked up momentum, she decided she couldn’t lie anymore and broke from the script with the following message: I am addressing everybody who is deaf in the Ukraine. Our president is Victor Yushchenko. Do not trust the results of the central election committee. They are all lies. . . . And I am very ashamed to translate such lies to you. Maybe you will see me again…
  • “Dmytruk’s live silent signal helped spread the news, and more people began spilling into the streets to contest the vote.”
  • itizen journalists and digital activists participated in civil resistance trainings across the country, courtesy of Otpor. The use of humor and puns directed at the regime is a classic civil resistance tactic.
  • one of key reasons that explains the success of the revolution has to do with the fact that “the protesters were very well trained and very good at protesting… very, very good.”
  • Digital activists need to acquire the tactical and strategic know-how developed over decades of civil resistance movements. Otherwise, tactical victories by digital activists may never translate into overall strategic victory for a civil resistance movement.
feng37

John Kamm - Blinded By the Firewall - washingtonpost.com - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2008080602512.html

shared by feng37 on 07 Aug 08 - Cached
  • The fact that the Chinese people think the world loves China helps explain why it is so difficult to persuade Beijing to address human rights and other issues. The Chinese people, after all, see no need for changes to improve the country's image. In contrast, polls have shown that Americans are aware that the United States' image overseas has been badly damaged in recent years, and there is widespread agreement that work must be done to improve that image. In China, the Communist Party controls most of the information to which people have access, and that information does not include material showing how unpopular the country has become.
  • The people in developed countries who think it was a mistake to award the Olympics to Beijing (43 percent of Americans, vs. 41 percent who told Pew it was the correct decision) are less likely to watch.
  • Three in four Chinese think the world likes China, while only one in 10 thinks foreigners don't like the country. More than 80 percent believe China takes other countries' interests into account when formulating foreign policy. Just 3 percent think China's economic growth has a negative effect on other countries. Only 1 percent knew a lot about the recall of Chinese products for quality and safety reasons. if ( show_doubleclick_ad && ( adTemplate & INLINE_ARTICLE_AD ) == INLINE_ARTICLE_AD && inlineAdGraf ) { placeAd('ARTICLE',commercialNode,20,'inline=y;',true) ; } Pew's Global Attitudes Survey of public opinion in 24 countries, released in June, makes clear that international opinion toward China is very different from what people in China think it is.
  • feng37 on 07 Aug 08
     
    The fact that the Chinese people think the world loves China helps explain why it is so difficult to persuade Beijing to address human rights and other issues. The Chinese people, after all, see no need for changes to improve the country's image. In contrast, polls have shown that Americans are aware that the United States' image overseas has been badly damaged in recent years, and there is widespread agreement that work must be done to improve that image. In China, the Communist Party controls most of the information to which people have access, and that information does not include material showing how unpopular the country has become.
feng37

Unrestricted Warfare | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters - 0 views

www.adbusters.org/...unrestricted_warfare.html

shared by feng37 on 07 Feb 09 - Cached
  • The most interesting thesis is the idea that China could use international law as a weapon, or “lawfare” for short. The authors argue that citizens of democracies increasingly demand that their countries uphold international rules, particularly ones that govern human rights and the conduct of war. Governments are, therefore, constrained by regional or worldwide organizations, such as the European Union, ASEAN, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the WTO and the United Nations. The authors argue that China should copy the European model of using international law to pin down the USA: “there are far-sighted big powers which have clearly already begun to borrow the power of supra-national, multinational, and non-state players to redouble and expand their own influence.” They think that China could turn the United Nations and regional organizations into an amplifier of the Chinese worldview – discouraging the USA from using its might in campaigns like the Iraq War.
  • Beijing has been willing to allow the Organization of Islamic States to take the lead in weakening the new Human Rights Council. This subtle diplomacy has been devastatingly effective – contributing to a massive fall in US influence: in 1995 the USA won 50.6 percent of the votes in the United Nations general assembly; by 2006, the figure had fallen to just 23.6 percent. On human rights, the results are even more dramatic: China’s win-rate has rocketed from 43 percent to 82 percent, while the USA’s has tumbled from 57 per cent to 22 percent. The New York Times’ UN correspondent James Traub has detected a paradigm shift in the United Nations’ operations: “it’s a truism that the Security Council can function only insofar as the United States lets it. The adage may soon be applied to China as well.” Traub may be right. China’s capacity to influence the United Nations is increasing, and soon we may be complaining about Chinese behavior on big policy issues
feng37

Inside the precision hack « Music Machinery - 0 views

musicmachinery.com/...inside-the-precision-hack

shared by feng37 on 22 Apr 09 - Cached
  • At 4AM this morning I received an email inviting me to an IRC chatroom where someone would explain to me exactly how the Time.com 100 Poll was precision hacked. Naturally, I was a bit suspicious. Anyone could claim to be responsible for the hack - but I ventured onto the IRC channel (feeling a bit like a Woodward or Bernstein meeting Deep Throat in a parking garage). After talking to ‘Zombocom’ (not his real nick) for a few minutes, it was clear that Zombocom was a key player in the hack. He explained how it all works. The Beginning Zombocom told me that it all started out when the folks that hang out on the random board of 4chan (sometimes known as /b/) became aware that Time.com had enlisted moot (the founder of 4chan) as one of the candidates in the Time.com 100 poll. A little investigation showed that a poll vote could be submitted just by doing an HTTP get on the URL:        http://www.timepolls.com/contentpolls/Vote.do ?pollName=time100_2009&id=1883924&rating=1 where ID is a number associated with the person being voted for (in this case 1883924 is Rain’s ID). Soon afterward, several people crafted ‘autovoters’ that would use the simple voting URL protocol to vote for moot. These simple autovoters could be triggered by an easily embeddable ’spam URL’. The autovoters were very flexible allowing the rating to be set for any poll candidate. For example, the URL           http://fun.qinip.com/gen.php?id=1883924 &rating=1&amount=160 could be used to push 160 ratings of 1 (the worst rating) for the artist Rain to the Time.com poll.
  • “Needless to say, we were enraged” says Zombocom. /b/ responded by getting organized - they created an IRC channel (#time_vote) devoted to the hack, and started to recruit. Shortly afterward, one of the members discovered that the ’salt’, the key to authenticating requests, was poorly hidden in Time.com’s voting flash application and could be extracted. With the salt in hand - the autovoters were back online, rocking the vote.
feng37

Cory Doctorow: Big Brother is not watching | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...surveillance.database

shared by feng37 on 18 Jun 08 - Cached
  • Needles in a haystackThe problem of sifting through vast amounts of data was highlighted by the US 9/11 Commission, which concluded that the American intelligence community knew in advance that the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were in the offing, they just didn't know they knew it. The pieces were all there for anyone who knew to look for them, needles buried in a haystack of irrelevancies. The answer in both America and Britain has been to collect more haystacks: useless, indiscriminately acquired information onpeople who've done nothing to arouse suspicion. We even inveigle our citizens to become amateur curtain-twitchers and pecksniffs, demanding that they report "suspicious" activity to the authorities.
  • feng37 on 18 Jun 08
     
    Needles in a haystack The problem of sifting through vast amounts of data was highlighted by the US 9/11 Commission, which concluded that the American intelligence community knew in advance that the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were in the offing, they just didn't know they knew it. The pieces were all there for anyone who knew to look for them, needles buried in a haystack of irrelevancies. The answer in both America and Britain has been to collect more haystacks: useless, indiscriminately acquired information on people who've done nothing to arouse suspicion. We even inveigle our citizens to become amateur curtain-twitchers and pecksniffs, demanding that they report "suspicious" activity to the authorities.
evawoo

RGE - Adapting to the state's growing role in global equity markets - 0 views

www.rgemonitor.com/...-role-in-global-equity-markets

shared by evawoo on 26 Apr 08 - Cached
  • Central bank purchases of traditional reserve assets still dwarf sovereign wealth fund purchases of riskier assets -- as well as central bank purchases of equities. But over time, it is reasonable to expect that many over-reserved sovereigns will diversify their portfolios. The recent decision to increase the share of the CIC's initial $205-210 billion in capital that it can invest abroad and SAFE's increased willingness to purchase equities as well as bonds are examples.
  • A far more challenging issue is how the huge increase in financial assets managed by potentially non-economic agents will affect the efficiency of the global capital market and the allocation of risk and resources. ….
  • And then there is China. China enormous foreign asset growth in the first quarter implies that it might be able to add more to its reserves and sovereign fund in 2008 than all the oil-exporters combined even if oil stays at its current levels.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • China consequently has an enormous latent capacity to alter the composition of global capital flows by changing the composition of its portfolio:
  • The offsetting risk is that state owners of assets will in some sense abuse their ownership rights, and use their rights to promote “state” objectives.
  • Qatar’s advertising in Forbes says as much: the QIA's evaluation criteria include “added value to the State of Qatar" such as "economic synergies or benefits for Qatar and its people."  Mubadala has made a string of investments (Ferrari, the “National”) designed to elevate the profile of Abu Dhabi.
  • China’s fund, like Singapore’s fund, reports directly to the top levels of China’s state. It has yet to build up enough of a track record to show how it will be used. However, China’s management of its state stakes in domestic industries suggests the need for some caution. One example: Three of China's four large state commercial banks have been listed, but they still aren’t managed in a fully commercial manner.
  • The Peterson Institute’s Ted Truman recently updated his “sovereign wealth fund scorecard.” His impressive and detailed work is worth reading carefully. Truman’s latest scorecard illustrates how the practices of many large existing sovereign funds – particularly those originating in non-democratic countries – differ from the practices of US state pension funds as well as Norway's government fund.
  • Kjaer’s framing implicitly raises a third issue, one that I don’t think has gotten enough attention. The surge in sovereign investment in safe government bonds that accompanied the surge in global reserve growth likely contributed to a “bond market bubble” – one that pushed down the real yields on government bonds in both the US. That contributed to a host of additional market distortions, as private investors scrambled to find higher returns.
  • evawoo on 26 Apr 08
     
    中国外储投资对于世界资本市场的终极影响
arden dzx

Victim or Victor? China's Olympic Odyssey - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...SB121279005063553131.html

china olympics

shared by arden dzx on 08 Jun 08 - Cached
  • Modern Chinese nationalism often veers between Mr. Coubertin's and Mr. Maurras's ideas of nationhood. Officially, the government likes to talk about friendship between peoples, and harmony and peace, while at the same time promoting an injured sense of historical Chinese victimhood at the hands of foreign powers. When demonstrations of Chinese nationalism run out of control, with or without official encouragement, the feeling of national hurt can turn to violent aggression. It has been happening of late in the U.S., among other places, when Chinese students attacked Tibetans, or indeed anyone who "offended the feelings of the Chinese people."
  • This type of official patriotism is based on a peculiarly skewed view of history. Rather than celebrate the high points of Chinese civilization, the emphasis falls entirely on suffering at the hands of foreigners. The sense of victimhood runs so deep that it is impossible for most Chinese to view themselves as aggressors. The idea that Tibetans, for example, might have some reason to see themselves as victims of the Chinese, is absurd. More than that, many Chinese genuinely believe that this type of Tibetan "propaganda" has been deliberately taken up by the Western press to inflict yet another humiliation on the Chinese people.
  • This does not mean, however, that democracy would be an automatic cure. In the unlikely event that China were suddenly to have a peaceful transformation to a liberal democracy, nationalism would not go away. No party seen to be soft on foreign powers, especially Japan and the U.S., would be. Modern Chinese history has been so bloody that the scars will take a long time to heal. Ethnic nationalism can be a kind of poison, especially when it is based on a feeling of victimhood. Political freedom should help to soothe such feelings in the long run, but this will not happen in time for the Beijing Olympics.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Aggressive nationalism usually goes together with authoritarian politics. When people have no legitimate means to show dissent, vent their frustrations, express critical opinions in public, and generally take part in politics, nationalism fills the void. As long as they can control it, this suits authoritarian rulers. In China, a certain unspoken sense of guilt may also play a role. The same people who demanded democracy in 1989, when they were students, are now often among the fiercest nationalists. The educated urban elite has prospered since the Tiananmen Massacre, and when people are reminded of the political compromises this involved, resentment can flare up easily.
feng37

Obama's support for the FISA "compromise" - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

shared by feng37 on 22 Jun 08 - Cached
  • This bill doesn't legalize every part of Bush's illegal warrantless eavesdropping program but it takes a large step beyond FISA towards what Bush did. There was absolutely no reason to destroy the FISA framework, which is already an extraordinarily pro-Executive instrument that vests vast eavesdropping powers in the President, in order to empower the President to spy on large parts of our international communications with no warrants at all. This was all done by invoking the scary spectre of Terrorism -- "you must give up your privacy and constitutional rights to us if you want us to keep you safe" -- and it is Obama's willingness to embrace that rancid framework, the defining mindset of the Bush years, that is most deserving of intense criticism here.
  • Beyond that, this attitude that we should uncritically support Obama in everything he does and refrain from criticizing him is unhealthy in the extreme. No political leader merits uncritical devotion -- neither when they are running for office nor when they occupy it -- and there are few things more dangerous than announcing that you so deeply believe in the Core Goodness of a political leader, or that we face such extreme political crises that you trust and support whatever your Leader does, even when you don't understand it or think that it's wrong. That's precisely the warped authoritarian mindset that defined the Bush Movement and led to the insanity of the post-9/11 Era, and that uncritical reverence is no more attractive or healthy when it's shifted to a new Leader.
  • feng37 on 22 Jun 08
     
    This bill doesn't legalize every part of Bush's illegal warrantless eavesdropping program but it takes a large step beyond FISA towards what Bush did. There was absolutely no reason to destroy the FISA framework, which is already an extraordinarily pro-Executive instrument that vests vast eavesdropping powers in the President, in order to empower the President to spy on large parts of our international communications with no warrants at all. This was all done by invoking the scary spectre of Terrorism -- "you must give up your privacy and constitutional rights to us if you want us to keep you safe" -- and it is Obama's willingness to embrace that rancid framework, the defining mindset of the Bush years, that is most deserving of intense criticism here.
feng37

Stephen Fry » Blog Archive » The BBC and the future of broadcasting - 0 views

stephenfry.com/blog

shared by feng37 on 19 Jun 08 - Cached
  • Here was a report that really delivered a blow to the BBC’s solar plexus. Peacock began to foresee the possibility of digital diversity on an unimagined scale, it also put forward the ideas of a consumer-led, market driven broadcasting world, one in which the very principles of a licence fee funded public service broadcasting system would naturally be seen as obsolete. This suited the tenor of the times: deregulation, privatisation and a rigorous dismantling of the frontiers of the state – it was happening in the city and in industry and the utilities, why not broadcasting? The BBC, long seen as harbouring tendencies and personnel that were socialistic at best, Marxist at worst, was suddenly no longer a secure and unassailable acropolis. It was no secret that Norman Tebbit and some of the more fundamentalist free-marketeers and red-baiters of the administration would have been very happy indeed to dismantle the entire structure of the BBC. Peacock prevaricated and the charter appeared safe, but at a great price. Nothing would ever be the same again, the old certainties were dead and the harsh realities of capitalism arrived at Wood Lane and Portland Place. Whole departments were razed and working practices abolished, and something called an internal market was put in place. Radio Times was outsourced, the permanent make-up staff went, engineers, editors and set-designers were suddenly out of a job. Twenty-five percent of the BBC’s output was commanded to be produced from outside sources and a whole new independent sector was born. Companies like Hat Trick and Talk Back achieved almost instant success.
evawoo

RGE - Ut-oh! Is China starting to blame the US for its currency losses? - 0 views

www.rgemonitor.com/...the-us-for-its-currency-losses

shared by evawoo on 26 Apr 08 - Cached
  • It is commonly argued that growing economic ties tend to create common interests that will reduce tension between nations (see FT's Alphaville). The enormous amount China has lent to the US -- a total that the US data (which tends to underestimate Chinese holdings) now puts above $1 trillion -- will, according to this view, prevent other sources of conflict from getting out of hand. Alas, relations between creditors and debtors are rarely quite so free of tension. Creditors want to get paid back in full. Debtors would rather pay back at little as possible. Mei Xinyu, a senior researcher under the Chinese commerce ministry writing in a personal capacity for the Shanghai Daily, argues that China needs to put pressure on the US at the Strategic Economic Dialogue to do more defend the dollar. With the dollar at 1.60 against the euro, it isn't hard to see why. Mei goes on to argue that if the US doesn't do more to defend the dollar, it is effectively defaulting on China.
  • Mei's complaint, in other words, should be directed in part at China's own policy makers. When they bought long-term US dollar-denominated debt they took the risk that the dollar would depreciate over time. They effectively gave the US the option to pay China back in depreciated dollars. What's more, they didn't charge a premium for the option. That was China's own choice. China wanted to keep the RMB down even if that meant over-paying for US assets.
  • China, for complicated reasons, has decided to lend to the US in US dollars and to lend to Europe in euros and pounds. China's European lending - incidentally -- could prove to be as risky as lending to the US in dollars; SAFE and the CIC are really over paying for euros.
  • evawoo on 26 Apr 08
     
    中美经济关系的精辟分析
feng37

Mutant Palm » Blog Archive » Chinese & Western Overreactions to Charter 08 - 0 views

www.mutantpalm.org/...erreactions-to-charter-08.html

shared by feng37 on 05 Feb 09 - Cached
  • On the other hand, I’ve seen no one addressing the questions of actual political and bureaucratic process. What comes first? Elections in major urban centers like Shanghai, a sort of Special Democratic Zone? Loosening of Internet controls? Judiciary reform? Privatization of state media? Releasing political prisoners? Local officials already abuse existing structures, how much more will they abuse transitional processes? If you don’t want a revolution, then there has to be some sort of proposed process that the current government can work with and Chinese citizens can feel both moves reform forward and doesn’t threaten to unravel society. If you don’t say anything about how you might accomplish such a thing, but simply describe the end result in which the government becomes something unrecognizable from the existing one, you may not have explicitly called for its overthrow but you sure didn’t call for something else instead. Not to mention its difficult not to see it as just a wish list. Anybody can make a wishlist - who’s going to do the real work?
  • I think the commenter who asks whether Charter 08 is really calling for a revolution has a point, and it’s not fair to riposte “well, if this all happened it would be revolutionary”. It wouldn’t be if the changes happened gradually or in a controlled and orderly way (as they did in other countries). The party itself, after all, keeps promising political reform, and many of the people who support it so heartily do so on the assumption that it is serious about eventually keeping that promise. The people I spoke to (and quoted) did not think this was a substitute for tackling concrete real life issues, but thought it important to have a framework within which to do so.
  • Notice, also that I said a “revolution of the system of government”. Not the government, the system. The problems I’m referring to is that when the system, the way things are done, from paying your electricity bill to detemining holders of public office, changes radically, 180 degrees, then there can be terrible consequences. How should one try to avoid those consequences? How can you make the transition smoothly? These are the things that ought to be discussed, and these are the things that will persuade people that your ideals can actually be realized. That might get you a groundswell of demand for change - abstract philosophical manifestos, though, don’t cut it.
feng37

Naomi Klein: The Olympics: Unveiling Police State 2.0 - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ics-unveiling-po_b_117403.html

shared by feng37 on 08 Aug 08 - Cached
  • The games have been billed as China's "coming out party" to the world. They are far more significant than that. These Olympics are the coming out party for a disturbingly efficient way of organizing society, one that China has perfected over the past three decades, and is finally ready to show off. It is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarianism communism -- central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance -- harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism. Some call it "authoritarian capitalism," others "market Stalinism," personally I prefer "McCommunism."
  • By next year, the Chinese internal security market is set to be worth $33-billion. Several of the larger Chinese players in the field have recently taken their stocks public on U.S. exchanges, hoping to cash in the fact that, in volatile times, security and defense stocks are seen as the safe bets. China Information Security Technology, for instance, is now listed on the NASDAQ and China Security and Surveillance is on the NYSE. A small clique of U.S. hedge funds has been floating these ventures, investing more than $150-million in the past two years. The returns have been striking. Between October 2006 and October 2007, China Security and Surveillance's stock went up 306 percent.
  • Ever since the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, U.S. companies have been barred from selling police equipment and technology to China, since lawmakers feared it would be directed, once again, at peaceful demonstrators. That law has been completely disregarded in the lead up to the Olympics, when, in the name of safety for athletes and VIPs (including George W. Bush), no new toy has been denied the Chinese state.
evawoo

Transcript: James Miles interview on Tibet - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...tibet.miles.interview

tibet

shared by evawoo on 21 Mar 08 - Cached
  • BEIJING, China (CNN) -- James Miles, of The Economist, has just returned from Lhasa, Tibet. The following is a transcript of an interview he gave to CNN. James Miles
  • So in effect what they did was sacrifice the livelihoods of many, many ethnic Han Chinese in the city for the sake of letting the rioters vent their anger. And then being able to move in gradually with troops with rifles that they occasionally let off with single shots, apparently warning shots, in order to scare everybody back into their homes and put an end to this.
  • Well the Chinese response to this was very interesting. B
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • What I saw was calculated targeted violence against an ethnic group, or I should say two ethnic groups, primarily ethnic Han Chinese living in Lhasa, but also members of the Muslim Hui minority in Lhasa.
  • Well we didn't see any evidence of any organized activity, at least there was nothing in what I sensed and saw during those couple of days of unrest in Lhasa, there was anything organized behind it.
  • Now numerous Hans that I spoke to say that they are so afraid they may leave the city, which may have very damaging consequences for Lhasa's economy, Tibet's economy.
  • But their fear now is that Tibetans will blow up the railway line. That it is now actually safer to fly out of Tibet than to go by railway.
  • And also many troops there whose uniforms were distinctly lacking in the usual insignia of either the police or the riot police. So my very, very strong suspicion is that the army is out there and is in control in Lhasa. A
  • I've been a journalist in China now for 15 years altogether. This is the first time that I've ever got official approval to go to Tibet. And it's remarkable I think that they decided to let me stay there and probably they felt that it was a bit of a gamble. But as the protests went on I think they also probably felt that having me there would help to get across the scale of the ethnically-targeted violence that the Chinese themselves have also been trying to highlight.
  • And the authorities were responding to these occasional clashes with Tibetans not by moving forward rapidly with either riot police and truncheons and shields, or indeed troops with rifles. But for a long time, just with occasional, with the very occasional round of tear gas
  • evawoo on 21 Mar 08
     
    Save Bookmark
evawoo

Should the Fed Buy Securities Outright? - Finance Blog - Felix Salmon - Market Movers -... - 0 views

www.portfolio.com/...he-fed-buy-securities-outright

shared by evawoo on 04 Apr 08 - Cached
  • Suppose that the value of the asset the Fed holds falls to zero after the trade. The trade was permanent, so there's no margin call or anything like that - the Fed owns the asset and it is worth nothing. Then, in the end, it is no different than the Fed simply printing that same amount of money and giving it to the banks as new reserves, it is an increase in the money supply.
  • If the central bank, or some other government agency, were to act as Market Maker of Last Resort and buy the impaired asset at a price no greater than its fair value but higher than what it would fetch in the free but unfair illiquid market, such a purchase would not be a bail-out. It would also be welfare-increasing...
  • My feeling is that it's not going to happen, mainly for political reasons. In this particular crisis, the distressed assets the Fed would end up buying would almost certainly be mortgage-backed bonds. But buying up mortgage-backed bonds looks very much like giving money to big banks and investors instead of giving it straight to struggling homeowners: the optics are simply terrible. If the collapse of Bear Stearns is seen as a bailout, this would be much worse. It might be a good idea, but its time
  • evawoo on 04 Apr 08
     
    看看美国的救市讨论
arden dzx

Cover story: 'China's new intelligentsia' by Mark Leonard | Prospect Magazine March 200... - 0 views

www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php

china intellectual

shared by arden dzx on 28 Feb 08 - Cached
  • I will never forget my first visit, in 2003, to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing. I was welcomed by Wang Luolin, the academy's vice-president, whose grandfather had translated Marx's Das Kapital into Chinese, and Huang Ping, a former Red Guard. Sitting in oversized armchairs, we sipped ceremonial tea and introduced ourselves. Wang Luolin nodded politely and smiled, then told me that his academy had 50 research centres covering 260 disciplines with 4,000 full-time researchers. As he said this, I could feel myself shrink into the seams of my vast chair: Britain's entire think tank community is numbered in the hundreds, Europe's in the low thousands; even the think-tank heaven of the US cannot have more than 10,000. But here in China, a single institution—and there are another dozen or so think tanks in Beijing alone—had 4,000 researchers. Admittedly, the people at CASS think that many of the researchers are not up to scratch, but the raw figures were enough.
  • China, according to the new political thinkers, will do things the other way around: using elections in the margins but making public consultations, expert meetings and surveys a central part of decision-making. This idea was described pithily by Fang Ning, a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He compared democracy in the west to a fixed-menu restaurant where customers can select the identity of their chef, but have no say in what dishes he chooses to cook for them. Chinese democracy, on the other hand, always involves the same chef—the Communist party—but the policy dishes which are served up can be chosen "à la carte."
arden dzx

The World of Business: The Brass Ring: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...080630fa_fact_bruck

china politics

shared by arden dzx on 14 Jul 08 - Cached
  • In July, 2001, after arriving in Beijing, Adelson and Weidner saw Olympic banners flying along the streets. They soon learned that the country was waiting to find out whether it would be selected as the site for the 2008 Summer Games. In addition to seeing the Vice-Premier, Adelson and Weidner met with the mayor of Beijing, who asked Adelson for help with a matter pending in the U.S. House of Representatives, which he believed was threatening China’s chance to host the Olympics. (In the United States, China was widely perceived as the frontrunner, and it is not clear that Congress’s position would have had any impact on its chances.) Adelson said in court that he immediately made calls on his cell phone to Republican friends in Congress—including Tom DeLay, then the majority whip—who had received generous support from Adelson. DeLay told him that there was indeed a resolution pending about China and the Olympics. (Representative Tom Lantos, then the highest-ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, had introduced a resolution opposing China’s Olympic bid, saying, “China’s abominable human rights record violates the spirit of the games and should disqualify Beijing from consideration.”)
  • arden dzx on 14 Jul 08
     
    如今收紧内地居民赴澳门赌博的签注，既是防腐败官方烂赌掏空国库，也是为制衡这些美国赌王留一手？
evawoo

The Hypocrisy and Danger of Anti-China Demonstrations - CommonDreams.org - 0 views

www.commondreams.org/...8287

shared by evawoo on 20 Apr 08 - Cached
  • We hear that Tibetans suffer “demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide”. But we do not hear those terms applied to Spanish and French policies toward the Basque minority. We do not hear those terms applied to the US annexation of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1898. And Diego Garcia? In 1973, not so long ago, the UK forcibly deported the entire native Chagossian population from the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. People were allowed one suitcase of clothing. Nothing else. Family pets were gassed, then cremated. Complete ethnic cleansing. Complete cultural destruction. Why? In order to build a big US air base. It has been used to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq, and soon maybe to bomb Iran and Pakistan. Diego Garcia, with nobody there but Brits and Americans, is also a perfect place for rendition, torture and other illegal actions.
  • The Chinese Context The Chinese government is responsible for the well-being and security of one-fourth of humanity. Race riots and rebellion cannot be tolerated, not even when done by Buddhist monks. Chinese Civilization was already old when the Egyptians began building pyramids. But the last 200 years have not gone well, what with two Opium Wars forcing China to import drugs, and Europeans seizing coastal ports as a step to complete colonial control, then the Boxer Rebellion, the collapse of the Manchu Dynasty, civil war, a brutal invasion and occupation by Japan, more civil war, then Communist consolidation and transformation of society, then Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Such events caused tens of millions of people to die. Thus, China’s recent history has good reasons why social order is a higher priority than individual rights. Race riots and rebellion cannot be tolerated. Considering this context, China’s treatment of its minorities has been exemplary compared to what the Western world has done to its minorities. After thousands of years of Chinese dominance, there still are more than 50 minorities in China. After a few hundred years of European dominance in North and South America, the original minority cultures have been exterminated, damaged, or diminished.
  • China’s one-child-policy seems oppressive to Westerners, but it has not applied to minorities, only to the Han Chinese. Tibetans can have as many children as they choose. If Han people have more than one child, they are punished. There is a similar preference given to minorities when it comes to admission to universities. For example, Tibetan students enter China’s elite Peking University with lower exam scores than Han Chinese students. China is not a perfect nation, but on matters of minority rights, it has been better than most Western nations. And China achieved this in the historical context of restoring itself and recovering from 200 years of continual crisis and foreign invasion.
  • evawoo on 20 Apr 08
     
    一篇还算公道的为所谓中国对西藏"种族侵略""文化清洗"做辩护的英文文章
arden dzx

Message on the Twentieth Anniversary of Tiananmen Square - 0 views

www.state.gov/...124292.htm

june4 democracy

shared by arden dzx on 04 Jun 09 - No Cached
  • Message on the Twentieth Anniversary of Tiananmen SquareHillary Rodham Clinton Secretary of State Washington, DC June 3, 2009On this the 20th anniversary of the violent suppression of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square by Chinese authorities, we should remember the tragic loss of hundreds of innocent lives and reflect upon the meaning of the events that preceded that day. Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets for weeks, in Beijing and around the country, first to honor the late reformist leader Hu Yaobang and then to demand basic rights denied to them.A China that has made enormous progress economically, and that is emerging to take its rightful place in global leadership, should examine openly the darker events of its past and provide a public accounting of those killed, detained or missing, both to learn and to heal. This anniversary provides an opportunity for Chinese authorities to release from prison all those still serving sentences in connection with the events surrounding June 4, 1989. We urge China to cease the harassment of participants in the demonstrations and begin dialogue with the family members of victims, including the Tiananmen Mothers. China can honor the memory of that day by moving to give the rule of law, protection of internationally-recognized human rights, and democratic development the same priority as it has given to economic reform.
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