sinodaily.com - Unrest challenging China before leadership change

by Staff Writers

http://www.sinodaily.com/reports/Unrest_challenging_China_before_leadership_change_999.html

Beijing (AFP) Dec 18, 2011

An open revolt against officialdom by Chinese villagers last week demonstrated the challenge social unrest poses to the Communist party as it prepares for a generational leadership handover.

Angered by decades of government land grabs, the villagers of Wukan drove out local Communist officials and police, erecting roadblocks to stop them re-entering and electing their own leaders.

The protest has become a symbol of rising public anger over a plethora of perceived injustices, from corruption to income disparities, that analysts say will bring growing difficulties forChina's leaders as economic growth slows.

"What's enabled the leadership to maintain stability is the economic pie's growth. If the pie shrinks, the unrest is more likely to grow," said Willy Lam, history professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

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Michael Klare - Obama’s Risky Oil Threat to China

Posted on December 6, 2011, Printed on December 6, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175476/

Obama’s Risky Oil Threat to China 
By Michael T. Klare

When it comes to China policy, is the Obama administration leaping from the frying pan directly into the fire?  In an attempt to turn the page on two disastrous wars in the Greater Middle East, it may have just launched a new Cold War in Asia -- once again, viewing oil as the key to global supremacy.

The new policy was signaled by President Obama himself on November 17th in an address to the Australian Parliament in which he laid out an audacious -- and extremely dangerous -- geopolitical vision.  Instead of focusing on the Greater Middle East, as has been the case for the last decade, the United States will now concentrate its power in Asia and the Pacific.  “My guidance is clear,” he declared in Canberra. “As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.”  While administration officials insist that this new policy is not aimed specifically at China, the implication is clear enough: from now on, the primary focus of American military strategy will not be counterterrorism, but the containment of that economically booming land -- at whatever risk or cost.

The Planet’s New Center of Gravity

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Franklin Spinney - The China “Threat” Rises Again

DECEMBER 2-4, 2011

HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/2011/12/02/THE-CHINA-THREAT-RISES-AGAIN/

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

When the Cold War ended in 1991, the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) was left high and dry, floundering like a beached whale, because there was no superpower threat to sustain its bloated existence.  But the MICC is a self-organizing adaptable cultural organism, and when one looks back on the 1990s, it becomes clear that the early 1990s became years of experimentation in the MICC’s struggle to evolve a new threat (what the Pentagon lovingly calls a peer competitor) or a combination of threats (in Pentagonese, ‘near-peer’ competitors) to justify a continuation of high budgets and hi-tech business as usual.

The initial focus in the early 1990s was to build up China as a peer competitor, but that could not stand even casual scrutiny, and the China threat quickly petered out.  It turned out that the Wars of the Yugoslavian Succession, especially Kosovo, provided the decisive pivot by establishing and legitimating the illegal warfighting theories of Humanitarian Intervention and Regime Change.  These models solved the ’threat problem’ by establishing the paramountcy of perpetual small wars, or the threat of small wars, as the planning and budget justification models for the post-cold-war MICC, as I explained in greater detail last January (here).

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Michelle Chen - Is China’s Economic Miracle Hitting the Fan?

Published on Thursday, December 1, 2011 by In These Times

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/12345/is_chinas_economic_miracle_hitting_the_fan/

by Michelle Chen

If you believe the hype about living in the “Pacific Century,” then the new millennium is bound to be a pretty rowdy one.

A few days ago about 1,000 workers in the heart of China’s manufacturing belt walked off the job at the Taiwan-owned Jingmo Electronics Corporation, saying they were tired of being cheated by overtime pay. Around the same time in the Guangdong boomtown known as Dongguan, thousands of shoe factory workers protested over overtime pay and marched with their grievances to a local government office.

This may seem like a reprise of the powerful 2010 strike wave that rippled through big-name manufacturing plants, including Toyota and Honda. Last year, workers' newfound militancy yielded some significant gains—mainly in the form of pay hikes and other concessions. But whether they’ll be able to wrest a fairer paycheck from the management this time around hinges not so much on workers’ will, as on the global economic house of cards that’s getting rocked by countless factors that the labor force can’t control. Though concessions could be coming down the pipeline for some workers, in the backdrop is an alarming slowdown in China’s exports, which drive the country’s development and stuff consumers in rich countries with an endless stream of cheap goods.

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SEED DAILY - China to look to Africa for food: study

by Staff Writers, SEED DAILY
Johannesburg (AFP) Nov 23, 2011

http://www.seeddaily.com/reports/China_to_look_to_Africa_for_food_study_999.html

China will increasingly look to Africa over the next decade as the world's most populous nation seeks to ensure it has sufficient food supplies, according to a study published Wednesday.

While China has is recent years turned to Africa to secure energy and raw material resources to fuel its rapidly-growing economy, it will soon be for food commodities, according to Standard Bank research analysts Simon Freemantle and Jeremy Stevens.

"Sub-Saharan Africa's (SSA) immense and largely untapped agricultural potential is being increasingly viewed by China as a cog in an unfolding and inclusive food security strategy," they said in their report.

They noted Africa's underperforming agricultural sector gives China an opportunity to build and improve bilateral ties with the provision of developmental and technical assistance.

They noted it is already clear that Beijing is seeking to build deeper relationships in agriculture with land-rich and politically stable countries that are friendly to China, such as Mozambique where China has made extensive agricultural investments.

"For now, China's strategy is overtly developmental and, though commercialism inspires many of the cooperative farming projects, profits are generated almost entirely in local and regional markets," said the report.

"Most of these initiatives will look to bolster China's agricultural trade ties with Africa, though some, as has been evident in nascent moves in Latin America, will position Chinese firms to control the external source of production," they added.

The authors noted that China can offer Africa capital and skills that are desparately needed, but authorities will need to ensure that investmentsare properly structured to ensure that domestic food security interests are protected.

"Managed well, partnerships with China can be meaningful. However, domestic food security must be placed first," the wrote.

William Pfaff - Why Does Obama Suddenly Want a War With China?

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_does_obama_suddenly_want_a_war_with_china_20111122/

Posted on Nov 22, 2011

By William Pfaff

One might think that a bitter Central Asian war in Afghanistan, spilling into Pakistan, with no sign of ending, and an as yet ambiguous military commitment to a defeated and incompletely reconstituted Iraq, now overshadowed by Iran and the Arab Awakening across the Middle East, would be enough for President Barack Obama to cope with.

He was, after all, elected to reduce American military commitments. He was going to end things in Iraq, fight the “right war” in Afghanistan, which Gen. David Petraeus told him could be wound up in a year. Unaccustomed to generals as he might have been, he surely did not expect “Af-Pak” to turn into a permanent activity and a source of income for the Pentagon and the American arms industry.

Why then does he now want a war with China? No one seems to have made much of this in American press reports and comment, but others have noticed, most of all in China. His journey to Asia this month proclaimed a Pax Americana for Asia—which as such is absurd. The effort is likely to become just the opposite: a steadily deepening and costly engagement in suppressing China’s attempt to reclaim the Asian preeminence it held for more than a thousand years.

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Chinese Hands Video - Simply Brilliant

Malcolm Moore - US Weapons 'Full of Fake Chinese Parts'

Published on Wednesday, November 9, 2011 by The Telegraph/UK

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8876656/US-weapons-full-of-fake-Chinese-parts.html

Thousands of United States' warplanes, ships and missiles contain fake electronic components from China, leaving them open to malfunction, according to a US Senate committee.

by Malcolm Moore in Shanghai

The US Senate Armed Services Committee said its researchers had uncovered 1,800 cases in which the Pentagon had been sold electronics that may be counterfeit.

In total, the committee said it had found more than a million fake parts had made their way into warplanes such as the Boeing C-17 transport jet and the Lockheed Martin C-130J "Super Hercules".

It also found fake components in Boeing's CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter and the Theatre High-Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missile defence system.

"A million parts is surely a huge number. But I want to repeat this: we have only looked at a portion of the defence supply chain. So those 1,800 cases are just the tip of the iceberg," said Senator Carl Levin.

In around seven in 10 cases, the fake parts originated in China, while investigators traced another 20 per cent of cases to the United Kingdom and Canada, known resale points for Chinese counterfeits.

In the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, counterfeit microchips are often smuggled out of factories, or burned off old computer circuit boards before having their identifying marks sanded off and repainted as new.

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Lijia Zhang - How can I be proud of my China if we are a nation of 1.4bn cold hearts?

The death of the two-year-old run over as passersby ignored her is symptomatic of a deepening moral crisi

Lijia Zhang

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 22 October 2011 17.07 ED

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/22/china-nation-cold-hearts

Shame on us Chinese! Last Thursday a two-year-old girl was run over twice, about 100 metres from her home in a hardware market district of Foshan, a prosperous city in southern China. As she lay on the ground, writhing in pain, before being hit by the second vehicle, 18 people, on their bicycles, in cars or on foot, passed by but chose to ignore her. Among them a young woman with her own child.

Finally, a 58-year-old female rubbish collector came to the girl's rescue, but it was too late. By the time she was brought to the hospital, the girl Yueyue, (whose name translates as Little Joy), was brain dead. She was declared dead early on Friday morning. She was a good girl, full of life, her mother said a few days ago in an interview. She said she had just brought Yueyue back from her kindergarten. She popped out to collect the dry clothes and returned to find Yueyue gone – probably trying to look for her elder brother.

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"Seed Daily" - China says 100 mln farmers to move to cities by 2020

Staff Writers, Seed Daily
Beijing (AFP) Oct 10, 2011

http://www.seeddaily.com/reports/China_says_100_mln_farmers_to_move_to_cities_by_2020_999.html 

More than 100 million Chinese farmers will move to cities by 2020, posing huge challenges for urban planners and already stretched social welfare systems, according to a new official forecast.

China has seen an unprecedented wave of urbanisation as millions of migrant workers have flooded cities to provide the cheap labour that has helped the world's second-largest economy achieve breakneck growth.

A new government report released to some state media on Sunday said the urban population would top 800 million by 2020, up from 666 million in 2010, as more rural Chinese sought better incomes in the cities.

China's rapid urbanisation is already creating social problems, with migrant workers often treated as class citizens, and the National Population and Family Planning Commission report called for "equal public services" for all.

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