Kevin Charles Redmon - China’s Growing Unhappiness Gap

In 1974, a University of Pennsylvania economics professor named Richard Easterlin published the innocuously titled study, “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?” (The conventional wisdom at the time being, “Duh.”) In it, he examined 30 surveys conducted in 19 countries, and came up with an unexpected conclusion: while income correlated closely to happiness within countries—richer Nigerians were happier than poorer Nigerians—it wasn’t clear that, on balance, richer countries were any happier than poorer countries. Happiness was purely relative.

The so-called Easterlin Paradox became a cornerstone of “happiness economics” and remains hotly contested. (Critics says its rubbish, and absolute $ = absolute ☺. Easterlin stands by his evidence.) Now, a new study (PDF) from Easterlin and his colleagues at USC builds on the theory. In the case of China, the authors found, a booming economy may be making everyone wealthier—but only a fraction of them are happier because of it.

For the last two decades, China has hewed closely to the old capitalist saw, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Across demographics and geographies—rich and poor, young and old, urban and rural—economic liberalization has meant higher incomes and standards of living for all Chinese. Per capita consumption has increased four-fold, the authors report, but “life satisfaction” hasn’t risen with it. Instead, a growing wealth gap has created a shadow happiness gap.

Read More:

http://www.psmag.com/culture/chinas-growing-unhappiness-gap-42517/?utm_source=Newsletter216&utm_medium=email&utm_content=0605&utm_campaign=newsletters

Vienna dismisses Beijing objections to Dalai Lama meet

Up to 10,000 people came out to greet the Dalai Lama on Saturday after Vienna ignored warnings from China that ties with Beijing could be harmed by hosting the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader.

China made its objections clear to the 76-year-old Nobel Peace Laureate's meetings with Austrian leaders but Chancellor Werner Faymann said he would decide whom to meet.

The Dalai Lama, who is on an 11-day visit to Austria with the prime minister of Tibet's government-in-exile Lobsang Sangay, spoke at Vienna's historic Heldenplatz (Heroes' Square) for about 30 minutes to a crowd of 10,000, organisers said.

Speaking from a stand emblazoned with the words "Tibet needs you now", he underscored the importance of protecting Buddhist culture, the environment and human rights.

"Our time will come, it is close. Democracy is universal," said Sangay, who spoke before the Dalai Lama.

He referred to the Arab Spring uprisings that toppled veteran dictators in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia as well as Myanmar pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi who was released from seven straight years of house arrest in November 2010 and has now been issued with a passport, enabling her to travel abroad for the first time in 24 years.

"All the promises that were made in 2008 at the time of the Olympic games have been broken. The Tibetans are in a minority in their own region," a member of the Save Tibet organisation who gave her name as Erika told AFP at the rally.

Read More:

http://www.sinodaily.com/reports/Vienna_dismisses_Beijing_objections_to_Dalai_Lama_meet_999.html

China hits back at critical U.S. human rights report

China hit back on Friday at the U.S. State Department's annual survey of human rights, saying that only the Chinese people could pass judgment on what the Foreign Ministry said were the country's obvious achievements in the area.

Asked about criticism of China in the report, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei condemned it for being prejudiced.

"The United States State Department's annual report on human rights maligns other countries, and the content concerning China ignores the facts and is filled will prejudice, confusing black and white," he told a daily news briefing.

Since the launch of landmark economic reforms more than three decades ago, Hong said: "China's human rights endeavors have made achievements that are plain for all the world to see. The Chinese people themselves have the most right to speak about China's human rights situation".

"In human rights, there is no such thing as the best; there is only doing even better," he added.

Human rights have long been a source of friction between China and the United States, especially since 1989 when the United States and other Western countries imposed sanctions on China after a crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.

Read More:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/25/us-china-usa-rights-idUSBRE84O0DM20120525

Chinese Chaos is the Immediate Threat to the Dollar

In twenty or thrity years, I expect future monetary historians looking back on this period of history to frequently misquote Ernest Hemingway:

How did the dollar die? First it died slowly — then all at once.

The slow death began with the dollar’s birth as a global reserve currency. America was creditor and manufacturer to the world, and the capitalist superpower. People around the globe transacted overwhelmingly in dollars. Above all else, people needed dollars to conduct trade, and they were willing to pay richly for them, and for dollar-denominated debt .

By the ’90s America began enjoying a tremendous free lunch — the world provided America with goods, resources and services, and Americans provided the global reserve currency, as well as acting as world military policing global shipping. Why manufacture at home, or produce resources at home when the world wants your currency? To get what you want, all you have to do is run your printing press — which was much easier after 1971, when Nixon ended the gold exchange standard. In a flat free-trade world, supply chains and technology agglomerated wherever the labour was cheapest, which was predominantly Asia. So America let her industrial base and her domestic supply webs degenerate, to enjoy the free lunch that the dollar brought:

Read More:

http://azizonomics.com/2012/05/26/chinese-chaos-is-the-immediate-threat-to-the-dollar/

Emily Flitter - Exclusive: U.S. lets China bypass Wall Street for Treasury orders

China can now bypass Wall Street when buying U.S. government debt and go straight to the U.S. Treasury, in what is the Treasury's first-ever direct relationship with a foreign government, according to documents viewed by Reuters.

The relationship means the People's Bank of China buys U.S. debt using a different method than any other central bank in the world. The other central banks, including the Bank of Japan, which has a large appetite for Treasuries, place orders for U.S. debt with major Wall Street banks designated by the government as primary dealers. Those dealers then bid on their behalf at Treasury auctions.

China, which holds $1.17 trillion in U.S. Treasuries, still buys some Treasuries through primary dealers, but since June 2011, that route hasn't been necessary.

The documents viewed by Reuters show the U.S. Treasury Department has given the People's Bank of China a direct computer link to its auction system, which the Chinese first used to buy two-year notes in late June 2011.

Read More:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/21/us-usa-treasuries-china-idUSBRE84K11720120521

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - World edges closer to deflationary slump as money contracts in China

Narrow M1 data for April is the weakest since modern records began. Real M1 deposits – a leading indicator of economic growth six months or so ahead – have contracted since November.

They are shrinking faster that at any time during the 2008-2009 crisis, and faster than in Spain right now, according to Simon Ward at Henderson Global Investors.

If China were a normal country, it would be hurtling into a brick wall. A "hard-landing" later this year would already be baked into the pie.

Whether this hybrid system of market Leninism – with banks run by Party bosses – conforms to Western monetary theory is a hotly contested point. The issue will be settled one way or the other soon.

What seems clear is that China's economy did not bottom out as expected in the first quarter. It is flirting with real trouble. Yao Wei from Societe Generale says a blizzard of awful data "screams out for easing".

Read More:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/9263196/World-edges-closer-to-deflationary-slump-as-money-contracts-in-China.html

Bianca Jagger - Why Tibet Matters

His Holiness the Dalai Lama is in London this week to receive the Templeton Prize in recognition of his outstanding achievements and spiritual wisdom.

Tibet has a long-standing connection to Britain. Prior to the Chinese invasion in 1949-50, Britain was the only country to formally recognize Tibet as an independent nation. British representatives were stationed in Lhasa from 1904 to 1947 to liaise with the Tibetan government. In 1949 the newly-victorious leader of the China Communist Party Mao Zedong announced, over the radio waves, his intention to "liberate" Tibet from this "foreign imperialism."

Over the past 60 years, Tibet has been anything but "liberated" by the Chinese Communist Party.

On the 10th of May I delivered two reports to 10 Downing Street. The reports, by the Society for Threatened People and the International Campaign for Tibet, document the devastating impact of Chinese Communist Party rule in Tibet.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/15-2

Ron Unz - China’s Rise, America’s Fall. Which Superpower is more Threatened by its “Extractive Elites”?

The rise of China surely ranks among the most important world developments of the last 100 years. With America still trapped in its fifth year of economic hardship, and the Chinese economy poised to surpass our own before the end of this decade, China looms very large on the horizon. We are living in the early years of what journalists once dubbed “The Pacific Century,” yet there are worrisome signs it may instead become known as “The Chinese Century.”

But does the Chinese giant have feet of clay? In a recently published book, Why Nations Fail, economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson characterize China’s ruling elites as “extractive”—parasitic and corrupt—and predict that Chinese economic growth will soon falter and decline, while America’s “inclusive” governing institutions have taken us from strength to strength. They argue that a country governed as a one-party state, without the free media or checks and balances of our own democratic system, cannot long prosper in the modern world. The glowing tributes this book has received from a vast array of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, including six Nobel laureates in economics, testifies to the widespread popularity of this optimistic message.

Yet do the facts about China and America really warrant this conclusion? 

China Shakes the World

By the late 1970s, three decades of Communist central planning had managed to increase China’s production at a respectable rate, but with tremendous fits and starts, and often at a terrible cost: 35 million or more Chinese had starved to death during the disastrous 1959–1961 famine caused by Mao’s forced industrialization policy of the Great Leap Forward.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30621

Paul Craig Roberts - Brewing a Conflict with China

Washington has pressured the Philippines, whose government it owns, into conducting joint military exercises in the South China Sea. Washington's excuse is that China has territorial disputes with the Philippines, Indonesia, and other countries concerning island and sea rights in the South China Sea. Washington asserts that China's territorial disputes with the like of Indonesia and the Philippines are a matter of United States' national interests.

Washington has not made it clear what Washington's stake is in the disputes. The reason Washington cannot identify why China's disputes with the Philippines and Indonesia are threats to the United States is that there is no reason. Nevertheless, the undefined "threat" has become the reason Washington needs more naval bases in the Philippines and South Korea.

What this is all about is provoking a long-term cold war conflict with China that will keep profits and power flowing into Washington's military-security complex. Large profits flow to armaments companies. A portion of the profits reflow into campaign contributions to "the people's representatives" in DC and to presidential candidates who openly sell out their country to private interests.

Washington is going to construct new naval bases in the Philippines and on the environmentally protected Jeju Island belonging to South Korea. Washington will waste tax revenues, or print more money, in order to build the unnecessary fleets to occupy these bases. Washington is acquiring bases in Australia for US Marines to protect Australia from China, despite the lack of Chinese threats against Australia. Bush and Obama are the leading models of the "people's president" who sell out the people, at home and abroad, to private interests.

Read More:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Brewing-a-Conflict-with-Ch-by-Paul-Craig-Roberts-120430-587.html

Merrin Fabre - Lighting up to take down bacteria

Whilst some bacteria can provide health benefits there are others that can do annoying things - like kill you. So in order to save ourselves we should probably kill them first. So, stand aside bacterial wipes, hand sanitisers and antiseptic sprays there is a new bug zapper in town.

Bring in the plasma flashlight - a torch that emits a plasma jet that kills bacteria on the skin in an instant. Developed by a group of Chinese and Australian scientists, including CSIRO, the flashlight is completely mobile, light, efficient, and works at room temperature.

Due to its mobility it could be used in ambulance emergency calls, natural disaster sites, military combat operations and many other instances where treatment is required in remote locations.

Kostya Ostrikov from CSIRO was one of the researchers working on the flashlight.

"'The plasma flashlight is an exciting development in potential health treatments," Kostya said. "It not only inactivates individual bacterial cells but also bacterial biofilms."

Read More:

http://www.interndaily.com/reports/Lighting_up_to_take_down_bacteria_999.html