CHINA - Torrential rain battering southern China has forced more than 150,000 people from their homes, toppled hundreds of houses and punched a dangerous hole in the spillway of a dam, Xinhua news agency reported.

INDIA - Indian paramilitary rescue teams rushed on Saturday to an island in one of Asia's largest rivers, where nearly 100,000 people took refuge after heavy monsoon rains flooded their homes, said a local administrator. Nearly 300,000 people in remote northeastern Assam state have seen their homes flooded in three days of nonstop monsoon rain, said state Revenue Minister Bhumidhar Barman.

BANGLADESH - Torrential rains triggered landslides and flash floods killing six people and stranding half a million in their homes in Bangladesh, officials said on Saturday. The landslides occurred near Habiganj district town, some 200 km (125 miles) northeast of the capital Dhaka Saturday, burying all six members of a family. Officials said the situation had worsened at three other nearby districts, with some 500,000 people stranded at their homes as the rivers Surma and Khusiara, flowing into Bangladesh from northeastern India, burst their banks following incessant rains over the last four days.

The refugees from the SWAT valley may also be in dire trouble.

Beijing | June 20

Reuters - Google has been "ordered to comply with China's laws and regulations and completely filter pornographic content to prevent pornographic material from entering from overseas", Xinhua said.

The order coincides with plans by the city of Beijing to recruit tens of thousands of volunteers to monitor the Internet.

The volunteers would be asked to report to the authorities if they came across "lewd" content or find Internet users exhibiting "uncivilised behaviour" when surfing the Internet, Xinhua said.

LoL! What will be left?

Beijing | June 18

Reuters - Several dams on tributaries of China's Yellow River are near collapse shortly after being built, highlighting risks that parts of China's hastily built infrastructure may not be safe, media reported on Friday.

At least five newly built dams in Huan county, in Gansu province in arid northeast China, are "in very fragile condition", the China Daily said, citing a report from the China Youth Daily.

Reports blamed improper construction and embezzlement of funds.

Lara Farrar | Shanghai | June 16

CNN - On Saturday at 10 a.m. it's show time for Brenda Zhang and her subtitle team. They roll out of bed, meet each other online and chat, while their modems download the latest episode of "Prison Break," which just aired half a world away on Friday night in America.

Once they have the show on their hard drives, the team spends the rest of the day creating subtitles for it in Chinese before putting it back online for other fans to watch.

Dozens of such groups exist in China. They are voluntary and are translating a mix of media, from books and magazines to games, TV shows and movies. The translated products are for an audience whose primary means of accessing foreign entertainment is the Internet.

Biswajyoti Das | Guwahati, India | June 8

Reuters -

India will deploy thousands of additional troops and build airstrips along its remote northeastern border with China, in a sign of persisting wariness between the two countries despite growing business ties.

India and China fought a brief war over their 3,500 km (2,200 mile) Himalayan border in 1962, and both sides claim the other is occupying big but largely uninhabited chunks of their territory.

Although India and China have signed a treaty to maintain "peace and tranquility" along the disputed frontier and agreed to find a political solution to the row, talks have made little progress.

Last year, the army said Chinese soldiers had crossed the border in Arunachal Pradesh state illegally and entered their territory, urging the government to deploy more troops.

"Two army divisions comprising 25,000 to 30,000 soldiers each will be deployed along the border in Arunachal," said J.J. Singh, the governor of the remote state.

Clifford Coonan | June 4

The Independent -

On this day in 1989, the brutal crushing of a popular protest shocked the world. But in China today, the events are all but forgotten, reports Clifford Coonan

Twenty years after Chinese troops brought the massive pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square to a bloody end, Beijing is in lockdown.

Active dissidents have been confined to their homes or forced to leave the city and their mobile phones have been shut down. Social networking and image-sharing websites such as Twitter and Flickr have been closed to prevent discussion of the anniversary. Near the square itself, workmen have been preparing Chang'an Avenue, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, for a huge parade to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Communist Party's accession to power, but the 4 June massacre will be marked with tight-lipped silence and a steadfast official refusal to revisit the events of that day.

Twenty years ago Tiananmen Square was full of frantic students wearing headbands and lobbying for democratic change. Today it is full of tourists eager to get their photograph taken in front of the Forbidden City with its huge portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong. Shiny Mercedes and Buicks now swish along the road at the point on the avenue where a lone, unknown protester stood in front of the tanks with his shopping bags 20 years ago, and briefly halted the advance of the People's Liberation Army. The Communist Party has forbidden discussion of the events of that day 20 years ago, and the official line is that the crackdown, officially called "the political incident", was necessary to ensure stability. The student movement that drove the democracy activism in late 1980s China has largely evaporated, its leaders all in exile or no longer active.

Chris Buckley | Beijing | May 31

Reuters - Twenty years after China's pro-democracy crackdown, dissidents contend with a Communist Party that has in many ways strengthened its hold on power, defying their hopes it would crumble along with the Soviet bloc.

That has forced dissidents to rethink their tactics after their goal of democratic reform was dashed when the Party ordered tanks and troops to quell huge protests centered on Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4, 1989, killing hundreds.

For Li Baiguang, spending 37 days in a foul Chinese prison cell in 2004 was enough to convince him the Party would not collapse.

Li, now a human rights lawyer living in Beijing, was detained for helping farmers try to oust local officials they accused of corrupt land grabs, ending up in a police cell packed with dozens of men accused of robbery, rape or graft.

"We thought that after 1989 the Party would immediately collapse," said Li, 40, who plunged into student protests in his home province of Hunan and in Beijing 20 years ago.

Instead of being tossed from power like their ideological brethren in the former Soviet bloc, as many critics predicted, China's Communists launched market reforms and honed new ways to counter discontent, said Teresa Wright, a political scientist at California State University, Long Beach.

"To shift the balance in favor of the dissidents now, something would have to change fundamentally, such as an economic crisis or a split in the upper echelons of the Party," said Wright, whose forthcoming study, Accepting Authoritarianism, examines the Chinese government's success in maintaining authority. "There are no signs of either," she added.

May 29

Spiegel Online - 'Men Live Better Where Women Are In Charge'

How does a matriarchy really work? Argentinian writer Ricardo Coler decided to find out and spent two months with the Mosuo in southern China. "Women have a different way of dominating," the researcher told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Are men raised to be incompetent?

Coler: For the Mosuo, women are simply the more effective and reliable gender. However, they do say that the "really big" decisions -- like buying a house or a machine or selling a cow -- are made by the men. Men are good for this kind of decision-making as well as physical labor. The official governmental leader of the village, the mayor, is a man. I walked with him through the village -- nobody greated him or paid him any attention. As a man he doesn't have any authority.

Wild

Peter Ford | Beijing | May 28

CSM - Twenty of China's most courageous and outspoken civil rights lawyers face being disbarred next Monday, as judicial authorities reject or delay their applications to renew their professional licenses, according to three of the lawyers affected.

Forbidding them to practice after a May 31 deadline would, at a stroke, decapitate the budding "rights protection movement" that is at the heart of activists' efforts to build a civil society in China.

"If these 20 lose their licenses it would be the biggest step back in legal reform for 20 years," warns Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher with Human Rights Watch based in Hong Kong. "It would be really very dramatic."

The lawyers who have reported problems having their annual licenses renewed have all represented plaintiffs or defendants in politically sensitive cases over the past year, such as members of the banned Falun Gong religious group, parents of children killed at their school desks in the Sichuan earthquake last May, and people arrested in the March 2008 crackdown in Tibet.

What they have in common, says Jiang Tianyong, who recently successfully represented a Tibetan monk charged with concealing weapons, is that "we do not take orders from the [government's] Judicial Affairs Bureau" about which cases to take.

Bert Wilkinson | Georgetown, Guyana | May 27

IPS - Since the year began, China has given the clearest signals yet that Latin America and the Caribbean will be its new commercial and strategic focus, as it doles out billions in soft loans and grant aid, and ties up sweet trade agreements with countries ranging Brazil to finance-starved Cuba.

The march of the Chinese has so unsettled political watchers in the United States that earlier this month Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described it as "quite disturbing", contending that China is cultivating "very strong economic and political connections" in Latin America and the Caribbean for its own geopolitical reasons.

She warned that it would be dangerous and not in the interests of Washington "to turn our backs on countries in our own hemisphere," an unheeded point several regional leaders have been making for years.

Her remarks were designed to defend the policy of the Barack Obama administration in reaching out to states like Cuba and Venezuela. Just days later, Beijing and South American economic powerhouse Brazil offered confirmation of China’s strategic march through the hemisphere, signing off on a slew of trade and economic agreements including a 10-billion-dollar loan to state energy company Petrobras that virtually ensures oil supplies for years to come.

May 24

BBC -
A man threatening to commit suicide by jumping from a Chinese bridge was approached by a passer-by who shoved him over the edge, local media say.

Lai Jiansheng, 66, said he was fed up with the desperate man's "selfish activity" which caused huge traffic jams in Guangzhou, southern China.

Chen Fuchao fell 26ft (8m) on to an air cushion and is recovering in hospital, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Xinhua said Mr Lai was "taken away by police", but gave no further details.

The drama unfolded when Mr Chen climbed on to Haizhu Bridge in Guangzhou on Thursday and threatened to jump.
..
"I pushed him off because jumpers like Chen are very selfish," the newspaper quoted Mr Lai as saying.

"Their action violates a lot of public interests. They do not really dare to kill themselves. Instead, they just want to raise the relevant government authorities' attention to their appeals."

Gary Duffy | Sao Paulo, Brazil | May 20

BBC - The meeting between the Presidents of Brazil and China in Beijing on Tuesday brings together two powerful forces among the world's developing nations.

Against the background of the economic crisis, and strengthening bonds between the two countries, Presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Hu Jintao will have much to discuss.

China has been a "strategic partner" of Brazil for some years, but the high expectations surrounding this relationship have not always been fulfilled.

At a difficult time for economies everywhere, however, the last few months have brought some encouraging news for South America's biggest economy.

Despite fears about the impact of the crisis, Brazilian exports to China have grown 64.7% in the first four months of 2009 when compared with the same period last year.

During March and April, for the first time, China became Brazil's biggest trading partner, displacing the United States.

Tania Branigan | May 18

The Guardian - In the first part of a week-long series, Tania Branigan reports on city workers forced back to village life

Unemployment forces Chinese migrants back to the countryside

Until a week ago, Liu Xiao was part of the Pearl river delta's army: one of the thousands of workers streaming along a Shenzhen road, gulping down breakfast, texting, lighting a final cigarette, teasing friends and swapping gossip – rushing rushing rushing to the factory for another shift making bras, computers and plastic toys for the world.

Today she waits patiently at the railway station across town. This region was the motor of China's economic boom, but plummeting exports have forced it to slow and millions of those who kept it running have given up and gone home. Liu Xiao is one of the latest to return to the countryside: in her case to a village of just 200 people a 10-hour ride – and a world away – from Shenzhen.

Julian Borger | May 18

The Guardian - David Miliband today described China as the 21st century's "indispensable power" with a decisive say on the future of the global economy, climate change and world trade.

The foreign secretary predicted that over the next few decades China would become one of the two "powers that count", along with the US, and Europe could emerge as a third only if it learned to speak with one voice.

The remarks, in a Guardian interview, represented the most direct acknowledgement to date from a senior minister, or arguably from any western leader, of China's ascendant position in the global pecking order.

Darlene Superville | Washington | may 16

CSM - Governor Jon Huntsman of Utah is a Republican moderate and China expert seen as a possible presidential candidate.

With a reach across the political divide for Utah Governor Jon Huntsman as ambassador to China, President Barack Obama may have sidelined for now a potentially formidable Republican moderate and possible White House challenger in 2012.

Yet Gov. Huntsman, who has upset the GOP’s conservative base by supporting gay civil unions, may gain, too. The appointment, which requires Senate approval, gives him a chance to burnish his credentials and position himself as a viable presidential contender in 2016, if Obama appears to be a strong candidate for a second term in 2012.

John Weaver, a one-time senior strategist for John McCain’s presidential campaign who now advises Huntsman, said the governor put country ahead of personal partisan interest. Huntsman was national co-chairman of McCain’s failed bid against Obama.

“It’s no more complicated than that, though it is so unusual in Washington everyone has to take a magnifying glass to it,” Mr. Weaver said after Obama introduced Huntsman in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room.

“He was asked by the president to serve in a major diplomatic post, in a mission with a country most important to our economy, in dealing with Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea. Jon is uniquely qualified and thus you don’t turn your nation down,” Weaver said.

Taipei | May 15

AFP - Taiwan's pro-independence opposition will take to the streets this weekend in what they say will be the biggest anti-China rally since the island's Beijing-friendly administration came to power.

The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is hoping for a turnout of 300,000 for the march through downtown Taipei, and for a further 100,000 to attend an all-night sit-in protest in the presidential office square.

"We want to tell the world that Taiwan's future is not up to President Ma Ying-jeou or the Kuomintang (KMT)," DPP spokesman Cheng Wen-tsang said, ahead of Ma's first anniversary as the president.

However, just 32 per cent of 1,019 people surveyed this week by the TVBS cable news network backed the march, which organisers said is aimed at stopping the island's sovereignty from being undermined by the KMT's close ties with China.

Forty-four per cent said they opposed the rally.

Clifford Coonan | Beijing | May 15

The Independent - Secret memoir of Communist party leader who opposed crackdown is finally published

The secret memoirs of Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader ousted for opposing the military crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square, exploded into the open yesterday, four years after his death.

Dictated during his years of house arrest and smuggled out on cassettes disguised as children's music or Peking opera, the book will be pored over for clues about the workings of the secretive group of men who make up the inner core of China's Communist Party. The decisions made in Beijing's Zhongnanhai compound have global impact as China is an emerging superpower, but little is known about how it functions. Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang may change all that.

The publishers, Simon and Schuster, were so worried about news of the Zhao book leaking that they listed it as Untitled by Anonymous in their catalogue. It was not supposed to go on sale until next Tuesday but several stores in Hong Kong broke the embargo and put it on the shelves. And the clamour – just ahead of the 20th anniversary of the 4 June Tiananmen Square massacre, when tensions are high about political dissent in China – was intense.

Ritt Goldstein | Dalarna, Sweden | May 13

CSM - The US has cleared the Uighur prisoners at Gitmo of wrongdoing, but China calls them "terrorists." Seventeen Uighurs are seeking political asylum in Sweden, Canada, the US, and Germany.

Newly revealed documents provide a rare glimpse at the diplomatic pressure used by China in its unsuccessful efforts to stop the Swedish government from granting asylum to a Uighur prisoner released from the Guantánamo prison.

Resettling the remaining 17 Uighur prisoners is widely viewed as a critical milestone in the Obama administration's plan to close the prison camp. If Sweden's example is any indication, the imprisoned Uighurs present a foreign-policy Gordian knot.

The men are members of a largely Muslim minority in western China. They have been ruled innocent, but are considered terrorists at home. And while they are among the 30 of Guantánamo's 241 remaining prisoners who have been cleared for release, they remain behind bars.

The formerly classified Swedish government documents show how foreign-policy concerns could be contributing to their ongoing detention. Given China's rising economic and political clout, much could be at stake for countries who agree to offer homes.

Clifford Coonan | May 7

The Independent - Clifford Coonan reveals how he was caught in the clampdown by Chinese police struggling to stifle dissent from angry parents

Private interviews are forbidden." the police officer told me. "This is a sensitive time." His words, uttered yesterday at a barracks in Juyuan, a town devastated by the earthquake in Sichuan province last year, made absolutely clear why I had just been detained by police for doing my job as a reporter. They also showed there is a total shutdown on media coverage of China's "sensitive" areas, despite a much applauded initial openness in allowing foreign journalists to witness the aftermath of the quake. Since then, the voices of angry parents who lost their children in the wreckage have been silenced because public anger over shoddily-built schools is seen as politically destabilising.

I had been driving to Dujiangyan, one of the towns badly hit by the quake, to pick up a special press pass needed to visit earthquake zones. Since Juyuan is on the way to Dujiangyan, I decided I would try to revisit its middle school, where I had been the day after the quake. Up to 300 children died in this school, which folded in on itself as buildings all around stayed standing: a horrible sight that turned the grief of parents into outrage. A year ago, I witnessed hellish scenes as parents dug their children out of the mud and rubble. Since the quake, families have been harassed and arrested as they continue to seek justice for their children.

May 5

Asia Times - It's only a matter of time before China develops and deploys its first aircraft carrier. But rather than protest, worried nations like Japan could keep in mind that such a project will take Beijing decades, and at considerable cost. In any event, a Chinese carrier strike group will be no match for the United States.

Beijing | May 5

Reuters - A county government in central China has rescinded an order which was intended to make officials smoke more to help the local economy, local authorities said on Tuesday.

Functionaries in Gongan county in rural Hubei province had been ordered to smoke at least 23,000 packs of cigarettes a year, worth nearly 4 million yuan ($586,700), to cushion government finances, according to regional media reports.

Those who failed to meet smoking targets or were caught smoking brands from other provinces would have been fined, the reports added, citing a government document issued earlier this year.

But the government has now backtracked after an uproar in the local press criticising the policy as being harmful to health and a waste of public money.

** Chinese ordered to smoke more to boost economy

Scott Canon | Apr 30

Kansas City Star - The warehouse at Top Innovations on Troost Avenue is stocked from ceiling to floor with boxes of infomercial wonders of steam.

Gadgets for cleaning and shining and making wrinkles disappear just like that. And each shiny metal and plastic gadget is made in China.

Company president Benny Lee’s trip to five Chinese cities last month revealed the recession on full display. Half-empty hotels. Shuttered factories. An exodus of workers from coastal manufacturing hubs.

“You can feel it,” he said. “They have too much of everything” — raw materials, production capacity, people seeking wages — “and having too much of something is usually a problem.”

The old cliche: When the U.S. economy catches cold, the rest of the world comes down with pneumonia.

The wheezing from America and China — the world’s largest economy and its largest work force, respectively — shows just how contagious globalization has made our economic ills:

Alexa Olesen | Beijing | May 1

LA Times - For some imprisoned in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, getting out of jail has not meant freedom.

Imprisoned at 21 for destroying a videotape of clashes between soldiers and Beijing residents, Zhang Yansheng spent nearly 14 years in prison before his life sentence was commuted in 2003. He served another five years of parole, barred from media interviews, publishing, free speech or travel.

Now he's out of prison, but he cannot find steady work and shares his elderly mother's apartment and meager pension.

Finally able to tell his story at 41, Zhang says: "Most of us were in our 20's, just starting out, and then our lives were ruined, just like that. ... Now, after so many years we get out and no one cares. There is no one to look after us."

There is a report indicating Obama admin's plan on releasing 17 Uighurs captured in Pakistan and held in Guantanamo Bay since 2002.

The uighurs are muslims from Xinjang province of China which prior to 1949 chinese invasion was considered as Turkestan populated mostly by turkic nations such as uighurs,kazakhs,kyrgyz,uzbe k etc.There are parallels between Tibet and Xinjiang provinces for one reason which is continuing effort for independence from Chinese rule.China has been brutally repressing uighur activists for independence since the invasion which resulted in discriminatory policies placed against ethnic uighurs,kazakhs,kyrgyz and uzbeks etc.

Tania Branigan | Beijing | Apr 23

The Guardian -
_{Chinese warships and nuclear powered submarines on parade in Qingdao, Shandong province, China(Guang Niu/Getty Image)}

China will unveil its nuclear submarines this week at an international fleet review marking the 60th anniversary of its navy, official media reported yesterday.

The first known public appearance of the craft, off the northern port of Qingdao, will underscore the growing might of the People's Liberation Army navy and its attempts to build goodwill by increasing transparency.

China's nuclear submarines have gained prominence lately thanks to participation in the fleet battling pirates off the coast of Somalia - the first active mission outside the Pacific - and a confrontation with the US in the South China Sea last month.