Luo Jinquan is an unlikely poster boy for China’s spectacular economic development. A peasant from Yunnan, he he is a down-to-earth man of the soil.
Jonathan Watts reports from the Philippines, where poor farmers are struggling to feed their families as the cost of rice soars. But the fault does not lie only with the Philippines. The world has been consuming more food than it produces for five years now. Global rice stocks are down to levels not seen since 1976.
For foreign correspondents in China, the past week’s unrest in Tibet and neighbouring provinces is arguably the biggest story for almost 20 years. It is definitely proving the toughest to cover. The only way to be sure of anything is to see it with your own eyes. But even that has been impossible for most journalists most of the time.
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/ 7 February 2008
The Spring Festival is traditionally the time for China to put up its feet and relax. That has rarely been more necessary. With food prices rising, Olympic expectations growing and much of the country snarled up in snow and ice, China enters the Year of the Rat under more pressure than at any time in more than a decade.
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/ 2 February 2008
Chinese state security forces have arrested one of the country’s most prominent civil rights activists in an apparent crackdown on dissent ahead of the Olympics. Hu Jia — who used blogs, webcasts and video to expose human rights abuses — is expected to face charges of inciting subversion of state power, his lawyers said on Saturday.
The risks of food riots and malnutrition will surge in the next two years as the global supply of grain comes under more pressure than at any time in 50 years, according to one of the world’s leading agricultural researchers. Recent pasta protests in Italy, tortilla rallies in Mexico and onion demonstrations in India are just the start of the social instability to come, writes Jonathan Watts.
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/ 21 December 2007
When he was sent to the countryside at 15 and his father was jailed, Xi Jinping learned a lesson in political pragmatism that has helped carry him to within a step of the pinnacle of power in China. Eschewing the turbulent fervour of the Cultural Revolution in favour of stable growth, he has spent the 30 years since then working his way up the Communist Party hierarchy.
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/ 17 October 2007
Gingerly touching the bruises on her forehead, Enkhmaa — a middle-aged mother and illegal gold miner — explains why she is afraid to go out on the street with a green plastic bowl. Three days earlier, she says, the Mongolian police seized, beat and imprisoned her for wandering too close to a foreign-owned mine.
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/ 14 September 2007
China’s concubines have struck again. A corrupt senior official in Shaanxi province has been brought down by his 11 mistresses, according to recent reports in the state media. Pang Jiayu, the former deputy head of the provincial political advisory body, has been sacked and expelled from the Communist Party after his former girlfriends exposed him, the People’s Daily said.
The business management philosophy that one person’s crisis is another’s opportunity may perhaps never have been taken to such bizarre extremes. A plague of two billion mice in central China was described just days ago as being so bad that it resembled a scene from a horror movie, with hillsides turned black with rodents.