wdh122253's clips tagged china

I love China and so should you :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Other Views

wdh122253 — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 20:25:39 -0000

As it turned out, there's a small factory town in China, Shengzhou in Zhejiang Province, where more than 60 percent of the world's neckties are made. I learned that some Chinese entrepreneurs traveled to Italy some years ago and purchased a bunch of high-tech necktie-looming machines that the Italians developed to make their ties. The Chinese them shipped these machines back to their homeland, and began manufacturing neckties.

China's mixed role in Africa - The Boston Globe

wdh122253 — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 23:54:51 -0000

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China has become the largest new investor, trader, buyer, and aid donor in a raft of African countries and a major new economic force in sub-Saharan Africa . Chinese trade with Africa is growing at 50 percent a year. Already, that trade has jumped in value from $10 billion in 2000 to $25 billion last year. (US trade with sub-Saharan Africa in 2005 totaled nearly $61 billion.) China is building roads, railways, harbors, petrochemical installations, and military barracks; it is pumping oil, farming, taking trees, supplying laborers, and offering physicians. A number of African nations now depend critically on Chinese cash and initiative.

Growing rapidly and bursting out of its long underdeveloped cocoon to become a major world power and global economic source, China needs sources of energy and the raw materials -- including copper, cobalt, cadmium, magnesium, platinum, nickel, lead, zinc, coltan, titanium -- that African nations can supply. China competes with the United States for Angola's oil, controls most of the Sudan's oil, and is exploring for oil onshore and offshore in five other African countries. It is a major purchaser of timber from West Africa.

China Makes, The World Takes

wdh122253 — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 02:02:21 -0000

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alf the time I have spent in China I have spent in factories. At least that’s how it feels—and it’s a feeling I sought. The factories where more than 100 million Chinese men and women toil, and from which cameras, clothes, and every other sort of ware flow out to the world, are to me the most startling and intense aspect of today’s China. For now, they are also the most important. They are startling above all in their scale. I was prepared for the skyline of Shanghai and its 240-mph Maglev train to the airport, and for the nonstop construction, dust, and bustle of Beijing. Every account of modern China mentions them. But I had no concept of the sweep of what has become the world’s manufacturing center: the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province (the old Canton region), just north of Hong Kong. That one province might have a manufacturing workforce larger than America’s. Statistics from China are largely guesses, but Guangdong’s population is around 90 million. If even one-fifth of its people hold manufacturing jobs, as seems likely in big cities, that would be 18 million—versus 14 million in the entire United States.

A Shining Model of Wealth Without Liberty - washingtonpost.com

wdh122253 — Sat, 19 May 2007 13:17:06 -0000

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For authoritarian leaders around the world seeking to maintain their grip on power, China increasingly serves as a blueprint. We're used to thinking of China as an economic miracle, but it's also becoming a political model. Beijing has shown dictators that they don't have to choose between power and profit; they can have both. Today's China demonstrates that a regime can suppress organized opposition and need not establish its legitimacy through elections. It shows that a ruling party can maintain considerable control over information and the Internet without slowing economic growth. And it indicates that a nation's elite can be bought off with comfortable apartments, the chance to make money, and significant advances in personal, non-political freedoms (clothes, entertainment, sex, travel abroad).

George F. Will - Real Change In China? - washingtonpost.com

wdh122253 — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 23:54:00 -0000

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His most disturbing thesis is that "the newly enriched, Starbucks-sipping, apartment-buying, car-driving denizens" of the large cities that American visitors to China see will be not the vanguard of democracy but the opposition to it. There may be 300 million such denizens, but there are 1 billion mostly rural and very poor Chinese. Will the minority prospering economically under a Leninist regime think majority rule is in their interest?