China must restrict its textile exports to avoid destabilising world trade with a flood of cheap goods, the European trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, warned last week. Speaking in China for the first time since taking on the European Union trade portfolio, Mandelson said many developing nations were unwilling to enter a new round of negotiations because they feared China would seize the lion’s share of benefits.
There cannot be many babies named after disasters, but then there cannot be many babies that nature has thrown so totally on the comfort of strangers as 20-day-old Wave. In his short life, the Thai boy has escaped a tsunami that appears to have killed his parents and the poverty that forced his carer to abandon him three days later.
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/ 3 December 2004
In a world that boasts many temples of consumerism, this may be the biggest of them all. With more than 1 000 shops, 230 escalators and a giant restaurant area, the Golden Resources mega-mall in west Beijing claims to have more space than any other. There will soon be an artificial ski slope, a cinema complex and a spa in the mall, which spreads over 56ha.
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/ 12 November 2004
Shanghai is triply blessed with water: it sits at the junction of the nation’s biggest river (the Yangtze), an impressively large tributary of that river (the Huangpu), and the world’s biggest ocean (the Pacific). Yet that blessing is in danger of becoming a curse because of the speed at which China is fouling its waterways. The wealthiest city in China, Shanghai’s thirst has never been harder to quench, nor its effluent harder to manage.
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/ 6 September 2004
It felt as though China had broken its Olympic promises on day one. In securing the bid for Beijing to host the 2008 Games, the city’s representatives pledged that the world media would enjoy full freedom to report all aspects of China. Yet less than 24 hours after the Olympic flag was handed to Beijing’s mayor last Sunday, there I was detained and harassed for covering a demonstration that challenged the government’s position on Tibet.
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/ 6 September 2004
China’s leaders have raised the alarm about their country’s ability to feed itself as rapid development sucks land, water and people from the food-producing countryside into increasingly large and hungry cities. After a steady fall in grain harvests, the world’s most populous nation recently became a net importer of food for the first time in its history, driving up international prices of wheat, rice and soya.
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/ 3 September 2004
More than 4 000 corrupt Chinese officials have absconded overseas with at least -million worth of public funds in the past 20 years, according to a government report. The study by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce is thought to underplay the scale of the problem, but it highlights growing concerns that corruption could undermine the authority of the Communist Party of China.
The world was offered a lesson in how to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty at an international conference in Shanghai last week, posing a powerful alternative to Western development models. Presidents and heads of international institutions paid homage to China’s successes.
Considerate to a fault, the Chinese authorities have closed down more than 8 600 unlicensed Internet cafés in the past three months to ensure the ”healthy development” of the nation’s impressionable young minds. Domestic media controlled by the government have described the move in benign terms, as the nanny state tightening safety standards at businesses that take up an increasing amount of teenage time and money.
It was the smallest of collisions, but the minor traffic accident between a top-of-the-range BMW and a rickety farmer’s tractor has prompted the Chinese authorities to take drastic action to prevent a head-on collision between the top and bottom classes of its increasingly divided society. ”The BMW incident” has highlighted China’s class divide.