Dishes eaten at Chinese New Year carry great significance, as does the way a Burns Night supper is presented. But these are not the only meals which represent something to diners and the reasons we attach meaning are as myriad as the food itself.

It seems odd that a small parcel of tasty filling encased in a light dough wrapper can represent so much.

But the jiaozi dumpling symbolises prosperity to diners, who traditionally sit down for a family feast on the eve of Chinese New Year. It also means wealth when the dumpling is crescent shaped, like the gold ingot once used in ancient China as money.

Chinese security forces have opened fire on ethnic Tibetan protesters in the province of Sichuan, killing at least one man, Tibetan activists say.

Rights groups and the self-declared Tibetan parliament-in-exile quote eyewitnesses as saying scores of people were injured, many of them by gunfire.

The activists say the demonstrators demanded freedom for Tibet.

The official Xinhua news agency confirmed that one protester was killed and five police officers were injured.

Harrowing photographs of more than 1,000 dogs crammed into tiny cages have enraged animal rights activists in China and around the world.

The number of microbloggers expressing themselves in the relative privacy of cyberspace has exploded – quadrupling from 63 million in 2010 to just over 250 million in 2011, or half the entire internet population, the figures show.
Such self-expression on such sites run by Sina Corp and Tencent Holdings, greatly worries the government, however.
Over recent weeks, security officials have stepped up already very strict internet censorship by ordering social media users in major cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, to register with police using their real names. ...

The number of microbloggers expressing themselves in the relative privacy of cyberspace has exploded – quadrupling from 63 million in 2010 to just over 250 million in 2011, or half the entire internet population, the figures show.

Such self-expression on such sites run by Sina Corp and Tencent Holdings, greatly worries the government, however.

Over recent weeks, security officials have stepped up already very strict internet censorship by ordering social media users in major cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, to register with police using their real names.

 

China has uncovered 531bn yuan ($84bn; £54bn) of irregularities in local government debts.

The National Audit Office said breaches included "irregular credit guarantees", "irregular collateral" and "fraudulent and underpayment of registered capital".

There are growing concerns about the amount of bad loans being held by local governments.

Official figures show they held debt of 10.7tn yuan ($1.7tn; £1.1tn) in 2010.

"The State Council is studying proposals to enhance local government debt management and to address fiscal and financial risks," the audit office said in the report.

Satellite broadcasters in China have cut entertainment TV by two-thirds following a government campaign, state news agency Xinhua has reported.

An order by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) to curb ''excessive entertainment'' came into effect on 1 January.

The number of entertainment shows aired during prime time each week has dropped to 38 from 126, said the watchdog body.

The news came as the president warned of the influence of Western culture.

China says about 44,000 ancient ruins, temples and other cultural sites have disappeared.

That's the conclusion of the country's first heritage census for more than 20 years.

About a quarter of the sites that remain are in a poor state of repair.

Explaining the results, an official quoted by Chinese state media said many such sites were unprotected and had been demolished to make way for construction projects.

Beijing's public security bureau has launched a six-month crackdown on so-called black jails operated by private security firms in the Chinese capital.

Local governments hire the firms to stop people who travel to Beijing to voice grievances about perceived injustices in their areas.

The police say the firms are involved in illegal detention, violence and running underground jails.

The government usually prefers not to admit these kind of operations exist.

Hillary Clinton's arrival in Burma has worried many in Beijing that a new Great Game is under way in Asia, with editorials in the state-run media asking whether the United States is trying to "encircle" China.

China has ordered a ban on advertisements during TV dramas as part of its reform of cultural activities.

Adverts will not be allowed in the middle of programmes lasting for 45 minutes from 1 January next year.

The authorities said this was in line with the "spirit" of a recent Communist Party meeting.

Senior leaders said then that they wanted to develop a "socialist culture", although they did not elaborate on exactly what that means.

Hours after a creditor and his gang of tattooed thugs hustled Zhong Maojin into a coffee shop in Wenzhou, he says he wouldn’t yield to their demands.
They wanted to take over one of the pharmacies in a chain he’d built by borrowing from private lenders. Instead, he made an offer of traditional retribution in this eastern Chinese city, known for loan sharks who have sometimes meted out violence to bad debtors.
“If you like, you can cut off one of my fingers instead,” Zhong, 42, says he told them.
Giving up the store would have made it impossible to pay back another 130 creditors, Zhong said. He’d borrowed 30 million yuan ($4.7 million) at interest rates as high as 7 percent a month to expand the business. Many of the lenders were elderly neighbors who’d mortgaged their homes.
At least 90 bosses in similar situations to Zhong have fled the city since April, and two killed themselves, according to Zhou Dewen, head of a small business association in Wenzhou.

For a while there I thought the United States was preparing itself for a lecture from the Chinese about the atrocious disregard for human rights shown at Guantanamo Bay. "Discussions," said the official statement, "will focus on human rights developments, including the recent negative trend of forced disappearances, extralegal detentions, and arrests and convictions, as well as rule of law, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, labor rights, minority rights and other human rights issues of concern."

It certainly seemed to fit in with the latest Wikileaks disclosures of men wasting years of their lives in Guantanamo, long after the Americans realized they were no threat, were not “enemy combatants”and should never have been picked up in the first place.

But no. These annual talks were to have no mea culpa from a United States official. With perfectly straight faces the Americans were in Beijing to reprimand the Chinese. They must have no shame.

Court life in the dying days of Imperial China was a hotbed of sex and scandal, according to a salacious memoir by a British sinologist that has lain unpublished for more than half a century.

A former manager of the Queen's polo grounds is introducing the sport back to China where it was first played 1,800 years ago.

Chinese authorities are censoring internet references to protests in Egypt, fuelling speculation the government is deeply concerned about the effects Middle East unrest could have in China.

Two of the country's biggest web portals have blocked search words such as "Cairo" and "Egypt".

This follows discussion on Chinese social media websites where bloggers have drawn parallels between the uprisings in Cairo and similar incidents in China, including the 2009 protests in the north-western province of Xinjiang.

Chinese schoolchildren are to sit mandatory manners classes in an attempt to smooth some of the rougher edges off modern Chinese society, the country's ministry of education has announced.

China is preparing for conflict 'in every direction', the defence minister said on Wednesday in remarks that threaten to overshadow a visit to Beijing by his US counterpart next month.

A critical breakthrough has been made in efforts to save the giant panda, one that could kick-start attempts to reintroduce the animals to the wild.
Conservationists say they have perfected the difficult task of reproducing pandas, having reached their target of successfully raising 300 of the bears in captivity.

The leaders of the G20 ... in Seoul...had the feeling of the first post-Western summit. China ... believes that the financial crisis was actually a "North Atlantic crisis". Now that the worst of it is over, Beijing sees little reason to swallow the medicine for someone else's sickness. The summit therefore broke up – none too amicably – without really addressing the trade imbalances that were one of the root causes of the crisis, or America's worry that Beijing is gaining an unfair advantage by artificially keeping its currency weak. Instead, China flexed its muscles and got what it wanted: a watered-down statement that will not force it to change course.

Walt Disney Co and Shanghai's city government have formally agreed to open up a long-awaited Disney theme park in China's commercial capital.

China's endangered giant pandas are enjoying a baby boom this year with a record number of births in captivity in 2010, conservationists reported on Tuesday.

US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is to visit China at a time of tension between the two countries over the value of China's currency, the yuan.

Mr Geithner is due to discuss bilateral economic issues with the Vice Premier, Wang Qishan, in the port of Qingdao.

US officials have said China is keeping the value of the yuan artificially low to make its exports more competitive. Beijing has rejected the allegation.

On Saturday, G20 finance ministers said they would refrain from such tactics.

China's annual gross domestic production (GDP) growth has slowed to 9.6 per cent in the third quarter, coming in slightly above market forecasts.

According to China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), GDP growth slowed compared to the 10.3 per cent economic expansion in the second quarter.

Economists had forecast third-quarter growth of 9.5 per cent.

NBS says China attributed the slowing pace of economic growth to a volatile domestic and international environment.

Chinese consumer prices rose by 3.6 per cent in the year to September, the highest reading since October 2008.

US trade officials say they are looking into a New York Times report that China is blocking shipments of rare earths to the US and Europe.

China mines 97% of the specialist metals crucial to green technology.

The report, citing anonymous industry sources, said Chinese customs officials had broadened export restrictions.

Menawhile China's commerce ministry has denied a report by the official China Daily that it will cut quotas by 30% next year to stop overmining.

"The report is completely false," the ministry said in a statement.

Rescuers said there was little hope that 11 missing miners survived a gas leak in a central Chinese coal mine that killed 26 of their colleagues, after Chile offered help in the operation.

Du Bo, the deputy director of the rescue operation, said it would take days to find the miners, who were trapped when a "sudden coal and gas outburst" hit Saturday (local time) in the central province of Henan, state media reported.

"There is not much of a chance that the 11 trapped miners could have survived and it will take three to four days to find them," Mr Du was quoted as saying by the official China news service.

Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, has seen parts of his speeches blacked out by Chinese censors at least four times in recent months, it has emerged.

Chinese supporters of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo have been arrested in Beijing and Shanghai.

The awarding of the prize to prominent dissident Mr Liu prompted celebrations by Chinese human rights activists, but have now been cut short by local police.

In Beijing, 14 supporters of Mr Liu tried to hold a small celebratory gathering and for doing so they were all detained. In Shanghai, there have been more arrests as dissidents tried to celebrate.

The Chinese government has slammed the Nobel award, describing Mr Liu as a criminal.

He is currently serving an 11-year jail term for co-authoring a document calling for widespread democratic reforms in China.

An airport in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, was forced to shut to prevent passenger jets crashing into a UFO, according to reports.
Three flights to Baotou from Shanghai and Beijing were reportedly forced to circle the airport until the UFO disappeared.
Two other flights were diverted away from Baotou and to the nearby cities of Ordos and Taiyuan. The airport was shut for around an hour "to guarantee safety" according to a spokesman.

Trade tensions between the US and China have deepened further after the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow punitive trade tariffs to be imposed on artificially cheap Chinese exports

Chinese manufacturing accelerated for a second month in September, further easing fears about the economy after the government tightened up on lending to prevent a property bubble.

China has warned the Nobel Peace Prize committee not to award the prize to well-known dissident Liu Xiaobo.

The Chinese foreign ministry said giving him the prize would be against Nobel principles.

Mr Liu is serving a long prison sentence for calling for democracy and human rights in China.

A foreign ministry spokeswoman told reporters in Beijing that Liu Xiaobo was serving a jail term because he had violated Chinese law.

Continue reading the main story
Related stories

China dissident's appeal rejected
Liu Xiaobo: 20 years of activism
Awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize would send the wrong message to the world, the spokeswoman said.

China has issued a health alert in its south-western region of Tibet after five people were diagnosed with the plague, an often fatal infectious disease.

One of the five has already died from a severe lung infection attributed to the pneumonic plague, while one other patient was in a critical condition, the Tibet health department said in a statement on its website.

China has chosen the Royal Australian Navy as its partner for what are being called the most intense war games with a foreign power in the nation's history.

China has never allowed Western media onto one of its navy ships during live target practice before but times are changing.

The ABC was granted exclusive access aboard Chinese Navy frigate Luoyang as it took part in the exercises on the Yellow Sea off northern China.

China's top-ranking UN diplomat embarked on a drunken rant against the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, telling his boss he'd "never liked" him, and adding for good measure that he didn't like Americans either.

The Chinese Government holds the largest stockpile of currency reserves at $2.45 trillion (£1.59 trillion), with 65pc held in dollars, 26pc in euros, 5pc in pounds, and 3pc in yen.
The report was published in official newspaper the China Securities Journal and confirmed analysts' estimates that about two-thirds of the reserves are invested in dollars.

China has signalled a shift away from dollar assets in recent months, in a bid to diversify. It has sharply increased its net purchases of Japanese debt, and has raised its holdings of South Korean bonds.
The latest data also shows it has moderately reduced its holdings of US Treasuries, to $843.7bn in June from $894.8bn at the beginning of the year.
China however remains the biggest single holder of US Government bonds, and the China Securities Journal suggested that further significant diversification away from dollar assets in the short-term was unlikely.

Organic food sales have taken off in China after a series of safety scares, including the disclosure that one in 10 meals is cooked using oil dredged from the sewer.

A massive traffic jam in China has slowed vehicles to a crawl for nine days near Beijing, local media say.

Vehicles, mostly lorries bound for Beijing, are in a queue for about 100km (62 miles) because of heavy traffic, road works and breakdowns.

As the Sino-American showdown in the South China and Yellow Seas escalates into the gravest superpower clash since the Cold War, the United States cannot wisely rely on China to help fund its budget deficit for any longer.

The cacophony of voices in Beijing questioning or mocking the credit-worthiness of the US is now deafening, from premier Wen Jiabao on down. The results are in any case manifest: US Treasury data show that China has cut its holdings of Treasury debt by roughly $100bn (£65bn) over the past year to $844bn.

A total of 10,276 people in China's Inner Mongolia have broken the world record for the biggest human domino chain, state media say.

The participants in the city of Ordos sat cross-legged and fell backwards in sequence in a record which took an hour and 20 minutes on Thursday.

The group of mainly high school students spent more than twelve hours over three days to train for the event.

The previous record had been set in 2000 by 9,234 Singaporean students.

If there is one lesson to be learned from a study of capitalism, it is that competition eventually finds a way of breaking through. Super profits do not go on forever. And while that day of reckoning may still be a long way off for Australia’s iron ore and coal industries, the headline from this morning’s China Dailyshould be seen as a salutary reminder.

The story quotes Chinese industry leaders saying rising domestic iron ore production and slowing steel demand have hit some foreign miners. China’s iron ore imports dropped for the third straight month to 47.2 million tons in June, while spot prices have dropped to about $122 per ton after peaking at $185 per ton in April.

Not that the Australian industry giant Rio Tinto seems to have any immediate concerns about the future of the iron ore market. Itannounced overnight that it is to invest a further $US790 million in its drive to expand the annual capacity of iron ore operations in the Pilbara to 330 million tonnes with the current annual capacity its Port Lambert loading facility going from 80 million tonnes to 180 million tonnes by 2016.

Figures on international trade from the Australian Bureau of Statistics this morning show that notwithstanding any supposed Chinese decline in their imports that the local exporters are having a boom time.

The increased prices for iron ore and the extra tonnages of coal resulted in the June trade surplus swelling to $A3.54 billion ($3.2 billion) from a revised $A1.83 billion in May.

China has overtaken Japan to become the world's second-largest economy, the fruit of three decades of rapid growth that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

Depending on how fast its exchange rate rises, China is on course to overtake the United States and vault into the No.1 spot sometime around 2025, according to projections by the World Bank, Goldman Sachs and others.

Two different countries. Two newspapers. And two quite different economic problems. In India the Economic Times is warning its readers that the country's central bank is expected to put up interest rates by a quarter of a percent this week to cool double digit inflation.

In the United States the Los Angeles Times has brought fears, not of rising prices but of deflation striking the economy, from up the back of the book on the finance pages to become the front page lead.

For Australia, comfortably caught at what was thought to be the end of the global financial crisis between a still rapidly growing Asia and a stagnant or slowly growing United States and Europe, there are clear dangers from the quite different problems of both regions.

The Indians are not the only Asians confronting the problem of the inflationary pressures that come from rapid growth. China is experiencing problems of its own as the authorities try to confront the dangerous social tensions created by a housing price boom that is making basic shelter unaffordable by the workers whose toil is generating the export led development. Dearer housing has not yet been matched by price rises in other areas and in June China's consumer price index rose 2.9% from a year earlier, down from May's 3.1% rise. Yet the People's Bank of China clearly is concerned about future possibilities. On Monday it laid out how a more flexible exchange rate will help alleviate inflationary pressures in the Chinese economy and generally improve the effectiveness of its monetary policy. The central bank Vice Gov. Hu Xiaolian explained in a statement reported by the Asian Wall Street Journal that especially since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, foreign capital has flowed into the country via its massive payments surpluses with the outside world.

To preserve the relative stability of the currency, the central bank has been forced to buy up the incoming foreign currency with yuan, thus increasing domestic money supply, she said. To prevent that new money from causing inflation, the central bank has in turn been compelled to "sterilize" that new money creation through various measures that soak up liquidity such as issuing bonds and raising the reserve requirement ratio for banks. Ms. Hu said that in recent years, those sterilization measures "have had some effect," but the central bank hasn't been able to fully counteract the capital inflows, and "excess liquidity pressure has been difficult to fundamentally resolve." In addition, the costs to the central bank of undertaking sterilization operations have been rising, she said.

A more flexible exchange rate can therefore help the central bank curb inflation and asset price bubbles, help alleviate imported inflationary pressures, and help deal with external economic shocks, she said.

It would be prudent for Australians to interpret those remarks as indicating that the recent 10% plus Chinese growth rate will slacken at least a little in coming months taking away some of the boom in prices for our commodity exports.

While the emergence of a rapidly growing China and other parts of Asia has taken away the simplistic truth of the old saying that when America sneezes Australia catches a cold, it is wrong to think that we would escape unscathed from an America in a deflationary spiral if for no other reason than exports from those Asian economies would be seriously affected. Hence the reason to be at least disturbed by the LA Timesdiscovery of a deflationary problem. As the paper explained in its page one story:

The White House prediction Friday that the deficit would hit a record $1.47 trillion this year poured new fuel on the fiery argument over whether the government should begin cutting back to avoid future inflation or instead keep stimulating the economy to help the still-sputtering recovery.

But increasingly, economists and other analysts are expressing concern that the United States could be edging closer to a different problem — the kind of deflationary trap that cost Japan more than a decade of growth and economic progress.

And as Tokyo's experience suggests, deflation can be at least as tough a problem as the soaring prices of inflation or the financial pain of a traditional recession.

The question of whether or not Google has left China seems a little hard to answer under the current situation. Google has moved part of its search services under the domain name of Google.cn to Hong Kong, but it has maintained its sales team and R&D operations on the Chinese mainland and has not closed its site in China.

Google's "paradoxical" departure has received some harsh comments.
Google's contradictory move highlights the dilemma of a commercial company undergoing self-politicization. What happened to Google in the span of time between when it entered China in 2006 and when it threatened to leave China?

China will keep the yuan exchange rate ''basically stable'' in 2010, central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan said Saturday.

China's LGBT community, which is an acronym that refers to lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people, has adapted the terms tongzhi to refer to gays, lala for lesbians, ku'er for queer - an umbrella term for those who do not identify as heterosexual with regard to sexuality, sexual anatomy or gender identity.

Traditional Chinese medicine Professor Jia Yucheng holds a burning stick he used to create a vacume on a glass cup he attached to a patient's leg at a clinic in central Beijing November 24, 2009. Jia uses the technique called "wet-cupping" to draw "bad" blood from behind a patient's knees as a remedy for colds and flu. The clinic is offering their traditional treatments as an alternative to vaccinations and facial masks in an effort to combat the HINI virus, popularly known as swine flu.

A Chinese diplomat told reporters Wednesday a substantial content is more important than the title of the outcome of the forthcoming climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark.

United States President Barack Obama should understand China's opposition to the Dalai Lama as a black president who lauded Abraham Lincoln for ending slavery, said the Foreign Ministry yesterday.

Perhaps the reason George W. Bush did not know what the G20 was when he spoke with our leader Kevin Rudd was that the United States is not really very interested in it. Certainly the diplomatic talk in recent days is that the US wants a grouping with Japan, China and the European Union to be the really influential economic decision making body.

The Japanese newspaper The Mainichi Daily News had a lengthy piece this week discussing the origin back in 2005 of the American plans for a Group of Four. In that year the US, China and Japan met together before a meeting of the G7 and nutted out an agreement, which saw an appreciation of the Yuan.

Key to the US interest is the harsh truth that it is China and Japan, which together largely finance the huge US budget deficit. The European Union was tossed in to make up a quartet, much to the annoyance of major European nations who think they should be in the big-time in their own right.

The Mainichi Daily story says that in the upcoming summit with President Barack Obama, the new Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama is expected to not only confirm that the two countries should strengthen their bilateral alliance but also consider how Japan can serve as a go-between between the United States and China.

Police in Chifeng, the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, slapped the charge of "coercive indecency" on a man whose tongue was bitten off by a woman he forcibly kissed on the street in September.

Up to 1,900 UK jobs were under threat today after Waterford Wedgwood, the 250-year-old fine china and glassware maker, collapsed into receivership.

The company, whose brands include Royal Doulton, announced this morning that the Irish-listed company had been placed into receivership and that the bulk of its 10 UK subsidiaries would go into administration later today.

16 May: People in China might know that Jim Walton, the president of CNN, has apologized for remarks made on the international television news network that the Chinese Government found insulting but readers of the CNN website would be blissfully unaware. The People's Daily trumpets the apology today and the story has risen to the top of the site's most read story list despite the competition from the devastating earthquake in Sichuan . The official Communist Party paper illustrates its account of Mr Walton's apology with what looks like a copy of something that might have appeared on CNN itself.
A check this morning of cnn.com found nothing remotely like The People's Daily graphic which apparently was dummied up by a Lin Hanzhi for the official Xinhua newsagency. The last story about the remarks made by CNN commentator Jack Cafferty was on 17 April when it reported the Chinese Foreign Ministry saying that CNN hadnot done enough to ease its concerns over a commentator who referred to the Chinese as "goons and thugs" and said products manufactured in China were junk." The People's Daily report quotes Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang saying that Mr Walton, in a letter to Chinese ambassador to the United States Zhou Wenzhong, wrote that "On behalf of CNN I'd like to apologize to the Chinese people for that."

China – The People's Daily: CNN president apologizes for Jack Cafferty's remarks on China

United States – LA Times: Alleged MySpace 'cyber-bully' indicted in teen's suicide

United States – USA Today: Lifeline Live Blog: Entertainment News & Rumors - Hollywood detective convicted

UK – The Independent: I give up, says Brazilian minister who fought to save the rainforest

UK – The Times: Billion-pixel panoramas — from your own camera

Singapore – The Straits Times: Petrol, diesel pump prices up again

Canada – Toronto Globe and Mail: Fairy-tale marriage of Shania Twain comes to an end

India – Times of India : 80 killed, 150 wounded in Jaipur blasts

Australia – The Australian: Billionaires cheer as Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest ships his first iron ore

Hop in to the wine cask

If politicians were fair dinkum about believing that the price mechanism is the best way to reduce alcohol consumption they would not be fiddling around with what rate of excise should be applied to sweet and fizzy alco pops – they would be hopping right in and changing the way that wine is taxed. Beer and spirits in this country both are taxed on the basis of the amount of pure alcohol contained in the drink with spirit drinkers being slugged considerably more for their booze than beer drinkers. Whisky, gin, rum and other spirits, including after this week those alco pops, have an excise of $66.67 per litre of alcohol content. (There is a slight reduction for brandy drinkers where the rate is $62.25 per lal) With beer in cans and bottles that is stronger than 3.5% alcohol by volume, excise is levied at $39.36 per lal by which the percentage by volume of alcohol of the goods exceeds 1.15% There is a lower rate for bulk beer and for those with an alcohol content below 3.5% but let's not confuse ourselves with those. For the best selling beers like VB the formula works out that government slug is around $29 for every litre of alcohol – substantially less than paid on spirits including the dreaded alco pops. With wine the tax regime is based not on alcohol content but on the price it is sold at to retailers. The wine equalisation tax (WET) is 29.5% of the value. On cask wine that retails for around $12 for four litres of wine normally containing about 10.5% alcohol by volume, the tax works out around $5 per lal! No wonder then that the alcoholic on a budget gets stuck into the wine casks. If wine was taxed in the same way as beer, the tax alone on a wine cask would be greater than the current total selling price! The good news from that form of taxation would be that expensive bottled wine would become cheaper.

A somber Prime Minister

Treasurer Wayne Swan tried to have his poker face on when Brendan Nelson was giving his budget speech last night but could not contain traces of an occasional smirk. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, by contrast, remained dead pan and serious throughout as well he might have. Dr Nelson's words showed that there is every prospect of a repeat of the problems that confronted the Whitlam Government which had to govern without a Senate majority back in the 1970s. The Coalition partners are showing no sign of accepting that there is anything like a mandate for Labor and are promising to be as obstructionist as possible. Governing under these circumstances is going to be tough and the arrival of a few more Greens and an Independent after 1 July is not going to improve things much.

The Daily Reality Check

The budget speech itself caused barely a ripple of interest so it is no surprise that the right of reply exercised by Leader of the Opposition Dr Brendan Nelson is hardly top of the pops this morning. Not a single most read sticker on the internet sites we survey but the prospect of defeat in the Senate for some of Labor's key proposals at least had Dr Nelson on the top five lists of The Australian, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.

The Pick of this Morning's Political Coverage

Brendan Nelson fuels budget brawl in budget-in-reply speech – Matthew Franklin, The Australian

Nelson's threat to block budget tax measures – Peter Martin and Danielle Cronin, Canberra Times

Education boss John Della Bosca cleans his foul mouth – Clare Masters, Sydney Daily Telegraph

Govt shut down, 'hacker' charged – Phoebe Stewart, Northern Territory News

Liberals to keep convention but not vote on merger – Steven Wardill, Brisbane Courier Mail

Rann's secret world tour revealed – Nick Henderson, Adelaide Advertiser

Chair sniffing Buswell in crotch grabbing controversy – Kate Campbell, West Australian

Top cop threatens pubs, clubs with midnight bar – Joseph Catanzaro, West Australian

Quote of the Day

How can any government boast of a budget that proposes to put 134,000 Australians out of work? Under the Coalition it was 'welfare to work'. Under Labor, we are headed again on the road of work to welfare.

Dr Brendan Nelson, Leader of the Opposition, in his budget reply speech.

15 May - Out of sight, out of mind. People dying from an earthquake in China still have the attention of the world. People starving from the aftermath of a cyclone in Burma are quickly being forgotten.
The suffering in both cases is similar but in China the world is seeing the sad pictures of suffering on their home television sets. In Burma there are few pictures and the power of words is not sufficient to influence editors let alone readers. Naturally enough the Chinese earthquake leads the site of the People's Daily and the sympathy from Singapore's predominantly Chinese population makes it no surprise that the story is the most read at The Straits Times. The international reputation of the London Times shows through too with a story about Chinese bloggers advancing conspiracy theories being most read. All of the nine international internet news sites in the Crikey survey report the earthquake prominently but only USA Today gives any real prominence to the tragedy still unfolding in Burma .

United States – LA Times: Richard Riordan grows his restaurant empire

United States – USA Today: W.Va. blowout bolsters Clinton's resolve

UK – The Independent: Body works: Photographs from the weird world of bodybuilding

UK – The Times: China bloggers cook up quake conspiracies

Singapore – The Straits Times: China quake damage tied to corruption, says expert

China – The People's Daily: Chinese, U.S. presidents talk over phone on quake, ties, Tibet

Canada – Toronto Globe and Mail: Homes market flooded by sellers

India – Times of India : 80 killed, 150 wounded in Jaipur blasts

Australia – The Australian: We won't raid $44bn fund pool, says PM Kevin Rudd

Longevity in the lobbying business is clearly no impediment to speed. Stephen Carney set up his shingle on 1 st February 1979 and has darted around the corridors of power for four years of Malcolm Fraser, 13 years of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, 12 with John Howard and how the first six months of Kevin Rudd. And now he is the first (and sofar the only) member of his trade to register under the rules of the Lobbyist Register and Code of Conduct announced on Tuesday by Special Minister of State Senator John Faulkner. The more tardy lobbyists have until 1 st July to follow his example and declare who they are operating for.

The final details of the lobbyist registration procedures have been changed in a way that should see at least some of those working for legal and accounting firms having to register and the system will be all the better for that.

Judging the budget

This year we will not need an opinion pollster to tell us what people think of the budget and the performance so far of a new government. The Gippsland by-election on 28 June will give us a real, live measure and Labor must be approaching it with some confidence. Back in November Peter McGauran won it for the Nationals with 55.91% of the two party preferred vote. Now that he has retired a swing to Labor of just under six percent looks quite achievable if the budget has done nothing to end the Kevin Rudd honeymoon as would appear to be the public reaction.

Problems with the net

Liberal politicians seem to be having more than their fair share of troubles with the internet. In Victoria Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu has been dealing with dissident Liberal Party staffers posting critical comments about him on a blog. Now the West Australian Opposition Leader Troy Buswell finds himself fending off an allegation which appeared on a blog back in January that he played football with a cuddly quokka. This internet scuttlebutt is getting as ridiculous as the weekly women's magazines!

The Daily Reality Check

Day two and the budget had a few more readers although what interests them is not what the Labor politicians might want. The Sydney Daily Telegraph has discovered stay-at-home mums resent working mum's getting all the give away goodies. Envy is a wonderful thing!

The Pick of this Morning's Political Coverage

Senate threat to alcopop tax haul – Michelle Grattan, Melbourne Age

Mr Somersault's agile, but that thin ice could crack – Annabel Crabb, Sydney Morning Herald

Chair sniffer Troy buswell denies quokka abuse – Warwick Stanley, Sydney Daily Telegraph

Mums at War: Rudd's first Budget splits stay-at-home and working mums – Sue Dunlevy, Sydney Daily Telegraph

No room in masterplan for mention of broken promises – Dennis Atkins, Brisbane Courier Mail

Swan shows cool as Libs in disarray – Gerard McManus, Melbourne Herald Sun

MP Bullies 'reduced Lynda to tears': Lynda Voltz threatened in opposing power sale – Joe Hildebrand, Sydney Daily Telegraph

Baillieu leadership under fire – Paul Austin, Melbourne Age

Quotes of the Day

A journalist's twin points of references should be the real and the important. But for months the focus of the election coverage was on trivia. Every insignificant detail got blown out of proportion, with every chipmunk becoming a Godzilla. According to a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, over 60 percent of election coverage by the US media has been focused on campaign strategies, tactics or personalities -- but not on actual political content. Reporters focused the most attention on such pressing questions as whether Barack Obama was wearing an American flag lapel pin, whether John McCain had a mistress eight years ago or whether former first lady Hillary Clinton was incorrectly recalling her 1996 trip to Bosnia.

Gabor Steingart writing in De Spiegel

"Get a real job, you f. . . . . . c. . . ."

NSW Education Minister John Della Bosca sets children a good example while chatting with a photographer when riding his bike to work after losing his driving licence for speeding. See pictures of the bike riding minister here . It's not a pretty sight.

PD Online received a letter from 9-year-old twins Xu Ping and Xu Bin in the U.S., which has moved all the editors. The twins feel sad for the children in the quake-hit areas; and they would like a chance to donate some money to them.

WHAT THE WORLD IS READING ON THE NET
Wednesday 7 May 2008

There's nothing subtle about the effort of the People's Daily to portray the pre-Chinese rulers of Tibet as cruel and heartless feudal oppressors. Pictures from an exhibition at the Cultural Palace of Nationalities in Beijing which are top of today's most viewed list on the paper's internet site concentrate on eye gouging and other forms of torture by the Dalai Lama's team.

The paper quotes Xue Qinglin, a teacher from Lankao city of Henan province, writing in the visitors' book: "This exhibition is significant as it shows the truth about Tibet . Without the Party, the Tibetan people would still be suffering under the cruel rule of serf owners." Meanwhile, over in the UK , readers of The Independent gave the nod to a voluntary form of body torture. The photos of body builders are from a portfolio by Joachim Ladefoged who describes his work as "art documentary"

Australia – The Australian: Treasury slams Labor's IR plan

United States – LA Times: 96 arrested in San Diego State University drug probe

United States – USA Today: Lifeline Live Blog: Entertainment News & Rumors

UK – The Independent: Body works: Photographs from the weird world of bodybuilding

UK – The Times: Scared prostitutes 'shunned Josef Fritzl' at brothel

Singapore – The Straits Times: Man pinned under glass panel in freak construction accident

China – The People's Daily: Tibet of China: Past and Present

Canada – Toronto Globe and Mail: Sales of existing homes forecast to drop this year

India – Times of India : Seven Indians among top 100 intellectuals

Just in the time for the Olympics, the Chinese government has proved itself to be a pioneer as well as a top exporter in cutting-edge online censorship methods. And Western firms still give Beijing their active support.

"Virtual police" cartoons remind Web users in China that the government can see what they're doing.
REUTERS

"Virtual police" cartoons remind Web users in China that the government can see what they're doing.
Conventional wisdom has it that the Internet can withstand anything. Attempts to censor it are about as futile as trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. Experts have claimed that if blocked, the flow of information will simply reroute to reach its target. Too bad China isn't listening to the experts.

RICHARD FARMER'S DAILY POLITICAL ROUND UP Friday 2 May 2008

The Daily Reality Check

Good to see that western tabloid newspaper values have taken over the English language site of the People's Daily. Normally the site is a very staid affair with the most read list headed by such stories as: World's longest sea bridge to open in east China . But for just a little while this morning a story featuring this picture found its way to the top:

The contestants for the upcoming Miss Philippines Earth 2008 pageant, it was recorded by the Chinese Government Xinhua newsagency, hold signs encouraging motorists to cut emissions as they are presented to the media at a hotel in Manila April 29, 2008. Even though it is hard to get more serious than that environmentally correct message, the pageant did not stay on the list for long. Within hours that bridge had claimed top position

Australia – The Australian: Harbour joy ride turns to tragedy

United States – LA Times: Barbara Walters reveals past affair with U.S. senator

United States – USA Today: U.S. has Mandela on terrorist list

UK – The Guardian: Since when is sexual assault funny?

UK – The Times: Josef Fritzl 'threatened to gas his captives'

Singapore – The Straits Times: Bank staff members foil two kidnap scams

China – The People's Daily: Miss Philippines Earth 2008 contestants presented to media

Canada – Toronto Globe and Mail: Martin freed from Mexican jail

India – Times of India : Mukesh Ambani's $2 billion home world's most expensive: Forbes

Bully boy ways (1)

Labor Party staffers are gaining quite a reputation for their bully boy ways with John Olenich, who is on the staff of Federal Climate Change and Water Minister Penny Wong, the latest to engage in the game of bludgeoning journalists. Rosslyn Beeby, the Environment writer for the Canberra Times, told the story of the Olenich stand over tactics, which has led to her being black listed from the department's media list, in her column this week. Last month, wrote Ms Beeby, we reported a comment from Senator Wong's adviser John Olenich that the minister was "too busy with something called COAG" to comment on the impact of funding cuts to the integrity of Australia's climate records. A Senate Estimates committee hearing revealed the Bureau of Meteorology is so cash-strapped because of Rudd Government razor gang cuts that it can't hire any graduates this year, can't upgrade ageing computer equipment and is likely top close regional weather observation stations. Ms Beeby thought that these decisions, which put the accuracy of Australia 's climate records at risk, was worth a ministerial comment but when none was forthcoming wrote her story with the "too busy" comment included. Mr Olenich responded with an email stating that Senator Wong's office would no longer deal with Ms Beeby as the newspaper's environment reporter – on any issue at any level – and she would be expunged from the media list. "This threat has been carried out," Ms Beeby wrote this week. Yesterday I rang and spoke with Mr Olenich and asked for his reaction to the Canberra Times column. He said he would like some time to consider what was written and I suggested he ring me this morning. He did not do so.

Bully boy ways (2)

Punishing the press is not just a Federal Labor phenomenon. They are pretty good at it over in Perth too. On Wednesday16 police from the Major Fraud Squad raided the offices of the Murdoch owned Sunday Times and tried to find a confidential document allegedly leaked to journalist Paul Lampathakis for a story about election funding. The complaint to police, and to the Corruption and Crime Commission, came from the department of Premier Alan Carpenter, a former journalist.

Rudd's retreat on privatization

The way Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has used weasel words to try and escape any embarrassment from the humiliation NSW Premier Morris Iemma is facing at the hands of his Labor Party hardly inspires confidence about his ability to stick with difficult decisions. Back in February the PM was right behind Premier Iemma's decision to sell off electricity assets but now at best he is equivocal. "Well, I have been absolutely clear cut in my support for Premier Iemma and I do not back away from that one bit,'' he told Sydney radio 2UE yesterday before adding his "but" "But this is a very difficult negotiation and what I have encouraged all sides of this argument to do is to try and find a reasonable compromise through this."

The Pick of this Morning's Political Coverage

$17 billion! $21 billion! Any increase on $21 billion? The budget prediction auction is well and truly underway as the political journalists of Canberra endeavour to show how clever they are by telling us now what Treasurer Wayne Swan will reveal on 13 May. This morning we can choose between a budget surplus of $17 billion offered by Dennis Shanahan in The Australian and $21 billion from the Sydney Morning Herald's Peter Hartcher. Seeing who gets closest will add some interest during the hours the journos spend in the budget lock-up. Perhaps Crikey readers would like to enter the game. Add your guess at what Treasurer Swan will predict the 2008-09 budget surplus will be as a comment on this item. The winner will be rewarded with budget bragging rights.

Rudd's recipe for restraint: a $21b budget surplus – Peter Hartcher, Sydney Morning Herald

Budget on track for $17bn surplus – Dennis Shanahan, The Australian

Labor Warhorse Ray To Retire Early – Sid Marris, The Australian

Garnaut Calls For Binding Targets – Matthew Warren, The Australian

What Tassie Has To Score – Brett Stubbs, Hobart Mercury

Sex Diseases Strike Kids – Matt Cunningham, Northern Territory News

Justice suffers in the name of the children – Richard Ackland, Sydney Morning Herald

Quote of the Day

This is a disturbing reminder that governments in Australia will resort to legal muscle to redress political embarrassment. If there are laws that allow people telling the truth to be charged and convicted, those laws need to be changed.

News Limited chairman and chief executive John Hartigan commenting on the police raiding the office of Perth 's Sunday Times.

Soaring oil prices have not slowed China's consumption of oil as statistics show that China's apparent consumption of crude oil and refined oil products both hit record highs in the first quarter of the year.

According to statistics released Tuesday by the China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Association (CPCIA), China's apparent consumption of oil products composed of gasoline, diesel and kerosene rose by 16.5 percent year on year to 52.73 million tonnes in the first three months, and crude oil, rose by eight percent to91.8 million tonnes.

The Internet population in China reached 221 million by the end of February, which outnumbered the figure in the United States to rank the first in the world, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information.

The Tibetan feudal serfdom under theocracy was a combined dictatorship of monks and aristocrats

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Jiang Yu said (at a press conference on April 8): "The Dalai Lama is the head representative of the serf system, which integrated religion with politics in old Tibet. Such a serf system, which harbors no democracy, freedom or human rights in any form, was the darkest slavery system in human history. Only serf owners could enjoy special privileges under such a system."

Protests against "Tibet independence" continue in a few Chinese cities on Sunday.

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd will sidestep a potentially embarrassing diplomatic moment by avoiding the Olympic torch when it comes to Australia, although controversy is growing over Chinese security for the event.

A scheme aimed at curbing pollution by tightening loans to polluters has not fared well, the country's top environmental agency acknowledged yesterday.

"Implementation of the green credit policy has yielded initial achievements in the past half year, but it still falls far behind our expectations," vice-minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) Pan Yue said.

Given the highly vulnerable state of the US and European economies, what would happen to global growth if the Chinese juggernaut also started sputtering? Few investors or policymakers seem to be seriously contemplating this scenario.

China's remarkable resilience to both the 2001 global recession and the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis has convinced almost everyone that another year of double-digit growth is all but inevitable. In fact, the odds of a significant growth recession in China – at least one year of sub-6 per cent growth – during the next couple of years are 50:50. With Chinese inflation spiking, notable backpedalling on market reforms and falling export demand, 2008 could be particularly challenging.

An American tourist was seriously injured after he was apparently attacked by wild Asian elephants roaming in a nature reserve in southwest China's Yunnan Province on Thursday, officials confirmed on Sunday.

The Chinese tradition of keeping crickets dates back at least as far as the 7th century Tang dynasty, when it was a favorite pastime of spoiled princelings. After the Communists came to power in 1949, crickets acquired a bad reputation as the playthings of a dissipated elite, and the tradition nearly died out. Now it is back in fashion.

Crickets are taken very seriously in this city, where the best specimens can cost thousands of dollars. But it's not all about money. Crickets are being rediscovered by young Beijingers eager to appreciate an old and unique part of their own culture. Fanciers here also are organizing cricket fights, and the sponsors of the recent singing contest are planning a competition for the best-looking cricket.

Friday, January 11, 2008
It is far from an everyday occurrence for the Treasurer of Australia to have a chat on the phone with his United States counterpart. When they do contact each other you can be sure it is not just a social call. One of them is telling the other something of importance and US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson yesterday morning would hardly have been asking Wayne Swan for advice on how to handle the American banking crisis. This call from Secretary Paulson to Minister Swan was surely part of an international effort to have governments ensure that the people in the world's major economies do not panic and cause a major disruption to the financial system.
It is a phone call that should make sensible people more than a little apprehensive about what lies ahead. When Mr Swan thought he should reveal that Mr Paulson did not think the US was about to enter in to recession I heard alarm bells, I began to understand why the markets now put the probability of a US recession above 55%. Politicians are hard to trust at the best of times and difficult indeed to trust when we are approaching bad times.
In Australia the popular wisdom of the economic pundits, most of whom are nothing more than the paid public relations hacks of the banks which pay them to peddle views that are in the best interests of the bank, is that our country can escape relatively unscathed from a US recession. The wonder economies of China and India, it is argued, will protect us.
Yet the news from China suggests that the wonder economy is not without a few problems of its own in coping with the rapid growth that is to be Australia's saviour. The People's Daily online today carries the following story:
Measures aim to stabilize prices
08:22, January 10, 2008
The government will introduce a range of temporary price-intervention measures in a bid to stabilize the cost of daily necessities, a State Council executive meeting said yesterday.
According to the meeting, large-scale producers of such products must seek government approval before imposing any price increases.
Similarly, large-scale wholesalers and retailers that want to raise prices will first have to notify the government.
The State Council has not yet specified what the products are, or when the measures will be introduced.
The country's Price Law stipulates that the State Council can temporarily freeze prices or centralize the price-setting power on part of or the whole market if the prices undergo strong fluctuations.
The prices of the country's major foods, including grain, pork and cooking oil, surged last year, lifting the consumer price index to an 11-year high of 6.9 percent in November, well above the government's target of 3 percent.
Despite a secure supply, China still faces the prospect of further price hikes as the global prices of crude oil and food surge, the State Council said.
It also ordered a halt to any price rises in crude oil, natural gas, electricity, water, heating, public transportation, education and healthcare.
Pledging to crack down on market manipulation or hoarding, the central government will also arrange special campaigns to oversee local authorities in stabilizing prices ahead of the festive season.
According to the State Council, attempts are also being made to revise a regulation to curb illegal price fixing, which will impose heavier punishments on industry associations found guilty of manipulation.
Cheng Guoqiang, deputy director of the Market Economy Institute with the Development and Research Center of the State Council said: "The measures aim to regulate market order, stabilize price expectations and ensure a healthy and normal market."
"Due to its wide coverage, price rises in the daily necessities market, especially the grain sector, might magnify and spread to other sectors," he said.
"Therefore stable prices in these sectors are key for the stability of the market as a whole."
Cheng said the measures are systematic, taken after key government meetings held last year set the tone of "preventing economic growth from evolving from rapid to overheating and preventing price hike shifts from going from structural to inflationary".

The Chinese State Council has officially approved a plan to expand the country's installed capacity of nuclear generating units by 23 million kilowatts from 2005 to 2020, according to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

The ratio of installed nuclear power capacity will be increased by half to account for 4 percent of China's total installed power generating capacity.

China's rural population stood at 737 million - 56 percent of the total population of more than 1.3 billion - at the end of 2006, Xie Fuzhan, director of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said on Monday.

China has seen its rural population shrink in recent years as the country's urbanization has gathered momentum.

The rural population in China was recorded at 64 percent of the total 1.3 billion in 2001 and 74 percent in 1990.

China's top legislature on Sunday adopted a draft amendment to the Law on Lawyers which will make it easier for lawyers to meet criminal suspects and obtain evidence.

The draft amendment to the Law on Lawyers was approved after being put to the vote at the end of the five-day session of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) after the third reading.

Chinese attorneys have long complained of difficulties in meeting criminal suspects and having access to files and evidence when defending criminal cases.

Frailty, thy name is man. So said China's doctors Sunday on the eighth "Men's Health Day".

Men in China are widely affected by bad living habits, a lack of awareness about mental and physical health issues, and a lack of exercise.

The trial of the author of the notorious computer virus "Xiongmao Shaoxiang", or "Panda burning joss stick", that crippled millions of computers nationwide began in central China's Hubei Province on Monday, according to the People's Court of Xiantao City.

The Chinese Communist Party has selected 53 "national moral models" in its largest campaign since the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 to improve the moral standards of its people.

The identities of the role models were announced at the Great Hall of the People on Tuesday and they were divided into five categories: helping another person, acting bravely for a just cause, being honest and trustworthy, working hard and "making great contributions", and showing filial piety and love to their parents and family members.

Facing more hackers' attacks, China insists on calling for international cooperation to prevent hackers' attacks instead of blame the attacks on any country, an expert said in Beijing Saturday.

Recently, some foreign report said several western countries government or military computer system were attacked by hackers, said Wang Xinjun, researcher of Academy of Military Sciences.

China's top legislature on Wednesday publicized a draft of the Water Pollution Prevention and Control Law, which promises heavier punishments for water polluters and irresponsible officials, to solicit public opinion.

The General Office of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) publicized the draft, which has been submitted to the 29th session of the NPC Standing Committee for the first review, inviting the public to convey their opinions through the standing committees of provincial or municipal people's congresses, the Law Committee of the NPC or the NPC website.

Authorities in China say almost all cases of top-level corruption involve sex.

State media says out of the 16 recent cases where high-ranking officials were sacked for corruption, 14 of the offenders had illicit lovers.

President Hu Jintao, who is currently in Australia for the APEC leaders' conference, has called the fight against corruption a matter of life and death for China's ruling Communist Party, which holds its key five-yearly congress next month.

Social engineering is a wonderful thing to behold. Attempts by do-gooders to force changes in human behaviour invariably lead to some fascinating consequences. And nowhere has that phenomenon become more apparent than in modern China where 28 years of rigorously enforced family planning have resulted in the country having 37 million more males than females.

Now in some ways thee one child per family policy introduced in 1979 has had a beneficial result. According to the government controlled Xinhua newsagency, the policy has helped China to reduce the speed of population growth, delaying by four years the 1.3 billion figure reached at the beginning of 2005. Among the prices paid is a sex ratio that has given China a surplus of males three and a half times the total number of men in Australia.

The reason for the growing imbalance is clear. When limited to one child, couples prefer, for a variety of cultural reasons, for that child to be a male. Female foetuses are regularly aborted. Statistics from the Information Office of the State Council show the sex ratio for newborns is 119 boys to 100 girls. The China Family Planning Association (CFPA), recently called for attention to be given to "the severe challenges in population affairs." The CFPA drew attention to the fact that the sex ratio for newborns aged zero to four had reached 163.5 boys to 100 girls by the end of 2005 in Lianyungang, a city in east China's Jiangsu Province. Similarly alarming figures have also been recorded in Hainan, Henan, Guangdong and Anhui, with Hainan chalking up a ratio of 136 to 100. A total of 99 cities had sex ratios higher than 125 and the national average figure reached 119 in 2005, the CFPA said. The Association maintains the normal sex ratio should be kept below 107:100, according to the United Nations standards.
In the face of such a dramatic change in the population balance it appears that there will soon be changed and stricter enforcement of the one child policy. A report in the People's Daily quoted Wang Yongqing, deputy head of the Office of Legislative Affairs of the State Council saying "several laws and regulations on family planning have been listed on State Council's legislative plan for 2007 including the regulation to ban sex-selection abortion." The State Council are studying the regulation and will release it at proper time, he said.

The new regulation will make clear the responsibility of governments and related departments at all levels and to ban sex-selection abortion for non-medical purpose. Though sex-selection is banned by the existing Population and Family Planning Law and the Law on Maternal and Infant Health, there are currently no provisions on the applicable punishment for such acts.

I did not really want to hear what Paul Keating was saying during a television interview last week about how he experienced the seemingly irrational views of Japanese and Chinese leaders when he was chatting informally with them as our Prime Minister. The distrust between the two nations that Mr Keating detected from his talks just seemed too incredible to take seriously. Surely Paul was taking an egg-beater to some meaningless asides that were well short of meriting the concern he was showing about future conflict in north Asia.

Then at the weekend I came across the story on the website of the Chinese People's Daily which appears alongside:

It was a measured but pointed Chinese response to a visit that the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made while

visiting Kolkata (Calcutta) in India to meet the 81 year old Prasanta Pal, whose father Radhabinod Pal, according to another and earlier People's Daily report, was the only member of the 11-judge Allied war crimes tribunal after World War II to voice dissent at the process, criticizing the panel as an example of victors' justice.

The Chinese report said Japanese media have said Abe's meeting in Kolkata could fray improving relations with China, which suffered under Japan's military aggression in the first half of the 20th century. An editorial last week in Chosun Ilbo, South Korea's biggest newspaper, criticized Abe's planned meeting with Pal, saying that it was aimed at claiming innocence for the war criminals. "He will travel all the way to India to embrace the descendants of a judge hailed as a hero by Japanese militarists for claiming innocence for Class-A war criminals," it said.

Reading this made me ponder again what Paul Keating had said in that 7.30 Report interview with Kerry O'Brien.

Well, I was at a dinner with him one night and I was Treasurer then and he was Finance Minister of Japan. He later became Prime Minister.

And, you know, I've been friendly with him a long time and he said to me, "Mr Keating, let me ask you this, do you think the Chinese will attack us?"

And I said, "No, Mr Miyazawa, I don't". He said quizingly, "But why not?" And you could feel the hair on the back of your neck go up, a thing like that.

Another event I had was on the Chinese side one of the three people who managed China in the '90s said to me quite candidly, "If the Japanese ever go to nuclear weapons, we would take them out before they started", meaning they would attack them first.

No good ever happens in that relationship between China and Japan. It's just simmered along in resentment and mistrust since the war.

And then a little later in the interview, this exchange:

KERRY O'BRIEN: Do you believe, really, that the tensions between China and Japan are as potentially explosive today as they were back when you had those conversations with Miyazawa and the Chinese?

PAUL KEATING: They're kind of worse. Worse than then, because China, I mean, in those days China was on the ropes trying to come out of Tiananmen Square, you know. And Japan was still top of the pops in economic growth, it hadn't gone through the big '90s recession.

Now, it's reversed. China is now the second or third largest economy in the world. It's the same size as Japan. Japan grows at 1 per cent, China grows at 11 per cent. China's ageing demographic means the country's shrinking. China has got a much younger demographic.

And the Japanese very much resent the rising power of China, and the Chinese resent the fact that the Japanese are still trying to call the war history like some kind of self defence thing. So, the game remains nasty, and anyone in the Australian polity who doesn't know that, knows nothing.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But why aren't the major leaders seeing this, if it's such a compelling argument?

PAUL KEATING: In the end they're turkeys Kerry, they won't take the big issues on.

To get up and say to the Chinese, "You will find a place for the Japanese in your scheme of things," and to the Japanese, "You will atone for the sins of the Second World War and make a point of accommodation with China".

The Americans are in there playing their game with their mates, the Japanese, and trying to push the Chinese off to one side, and they might need the Japanese to defend the old colony, Taiwan, in the past, their old colony of the past.

But this is where leadership comes in. This is why we've now wasted two US presidencies on these issues. At least with Bill Clinton the last thing I did as Prime Minister was get Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin to have reciprocal visits. That bettered the relationship between China and the US, got China into the World Trade Organisation.

Sex ratio for newborns aged zero to four had reached 163.5 boys to 100 girls by the end of 2005 in Lianyungang, a city in east China's Jiangsu Province.

Similarly alarming figures have also been recorded in Hainan, Henan, Guangdong and Anhui, with Hainan chalking up a ratio of 136 to 100, according to a report of the China Family Planning Association (CFPA), which called for attention to the severe challenges in population affairs.

A total of 99 cities had sex ratios higher than 125 and the national average figure reached 119 in 2005, the CFPA said.

A regulation is expected to be made to ban sex-selection abortion in China against the increasingly larger gender imbalance, according to the State Council.

The US dollar plays an important role in the global monetary system and dollar assets are an important part of China's foreign exchange reserve, the central bank said yesterday.

The announcement by the People's Bank of China (PBOC), experts said, should scotch rumors that Beijing would sell off its US dollar reserve in response to Washington's pressure to revaluate the yuan.

China's media watchdogs have launched a crackdown on interactive programs on TV, radio and the Internet that raise money from their audiences through telecoms scams.

The Ministry of Information Industry (MII) said the campaign would focus on eliminating programs, such as fortune-telling, horoscopes and gambling, that lure participants into costly interactive services.

A risque joke, a suggestive text message, a naughty email. Any one of these could end up landing an amorous male in east China''s Zhejiang Province in court if the object of his affections takes offence.

The Zhejiang provincial legislative body on Thursday passed an amendment to its implementation of the country''s law to protect women''s rights, stipulating that, from September 1, a woman can file a sexual harassment lawsuit against a man if he oversteps the line in conversation or during online chat or via text message.

China's press watchdog has called on the public to report news stories they suspect of being fake by issuing two hotline numbers, in the wake of the mysterious "cardboard bun" scandal.

The allegedly fabricated "cardboard dumplings" story which aroused public concern was produced by a Beijing Television reporter who, according to police, instructed four "baozi" -- stuffed buns -- cooks to fill their products with chopped waste cardboard earlier this month.

The economy has to be stopped from becoming overheated and to ensure that officials at all levels will implement the central government's policies, the country's highest leadership said yesterday.

The Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) gave the call after central government inspection teams found some local governments are ignoring the State Council's decision to save energy and cut greenhouse gas emission, and are still investing heavily in high resource-consuming sectors.

While Australian wine producers, like most of the world's manufacturers, look longingly at China and calculate what just a tiny little increase in consumption might do to sales, news from the land of 1.3 billion people suggests they should be worrying about Chinese wine exports rather than contemplating the imports.

The Xinhua newsagency reported this week that China's wine output has been growing by 15 percent annually in the last three years, meaning more job opportunities and better lives of many Chinese farmers.

"Driven by soaring wine demand," Xinhua reported, "the grape planting bases in Shandong, Hebei, Gansu, Xinjiang and Ningxia have been expanding quickly, creating more job opportunities for local farmers and increasing their income, said a report of the China National Wine Quality Supervision and Inspection Center. According to the report, there are 46 wine companies in Penglai of east China's Shandong Province. More than 30,000 farmers are planting grapes for the companies. Xintian International Liquor Company Ltd. in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has 10,005 hectares of planting areas. The company provides a total of 300 million yuan for 20,000 farmers who plant grapes for it."

The report also said the nation's wine industry needs to create more diversified products to maintain its healthy development.

As to the place of imports, the China Wines Information website describes their role in this way:

"Among the 53126 tons of wine imported in 2005, only 10340 tons of them are wines in package less than 2 liters. The quantity of small package wine captures only 2% of the Chinese wine market. In Q1 2006, the quantity of imported wine was 21 thousand tons, increasing by 75% on an annual basic. But the proportion of wine with small package less than 2 litre is only 14%, decreased by 3%. It shows that the big package bulk wine captured the biggest portion of the imported wine. According to the statistic, most of the bulk wines are imported from Chile, France and Spain. Because the customers are not aware of the real origin of wine, the importation of bulk wine won't make a large impact on domestic wine brands."

Two major United Nations organizations this week took the unusual step of issuing a warning about proven weaknesses in food safety systems around the world. The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) referred to "recent food safety incidents, like the discovery of the industrial chemical melamine in animal and fish feed, or the unauthorized use of certain veterinary drugs in intensive aquaculture" without naming China as the principal culprit. Meanwhile in Australia health authorities have remained silent about the dangers posed by imported food stuffs.

Such food safety incidents are often caused by lack of knowledge of food safety requirements and of their implications, or by the illegal or fraudulent use of ingredients including unauthorized food additives or veterinary drugs. During the last 12 months, an average of up to 200 food safety incidents per month have been investigated by WHO and FAO to determine their public health impact.

Australians, whose supermarkets are relying more and more on Chinese imports for their own brand products should keep in mind the UN warning that food production systems in developing countries are facing a series of challenges: population growth and urbanization, changing dietary patterns, intensification and industrialization of food and agricultural production. Climate conditions, poor sanitation and weak public infrastructure compound these difficulties. Food safety legislation in many developing countries is often incomplete or obsolete or not in line with international requirements. Responsibility for food safety and control tends to be dispersed across many institutions. Laboratories lack essential equipment and supplies.

Elusive mystical creatures emerged again in Kanas Lake of China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. According to the administration of the Kanas scenic spot, on July 5th at 8:20pm, huge ripples were seen on the surface of the lake by a few tourists carrying their portable video cameras.

China's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) might overtake Germany's this year, leaping to world third and only next to the United States and Japan, China Securities Journal quoted analysts as saying.

China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) Wednesday released the 20th "Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China". It was right in 10 years ago when CNNIC published its first report.

According to the report, as of June 30, China has had 162 million Internet users, only second to the United States, 211 million. Comparing to the end of 2006, it has 25 million new Internet users, which means the country reports nearly 100 new Internet users every minute.

You would have to say that the Chinese Government is at last getting serious about quality control. On Tuesday the country's former drug and food safety watchdog chief was executed after being found guilty of corruption and dereliction of duty. Zheng Xiaoyu, 62, who ran the State Food and Drug Administration from 1998 to 2005, was convicted of taking bribes worth some 6.5 million yuan ($A996,000) from eight companies. The China Daily reported that Zheng's death sentence was unusually heavy even for China, and indicated "the leadership's determination to confront the country's dire product safety record."

The food security issue burst into the international spotlight after tainted additives exported from China contaminated pet food in North America. Subsequent exports of toxic medicines, foods and toys, including a toothpaste that had to be withdrawn from sale in Australia, have begun to threaten China's reputation.

Less than a week ago inspectors in southern China found nearly half of mobile phone batteries and liquor tested to be below standard. The tests on the phone batteries were carried out after a migrant worker was killed in the northwestern province of Gansu last month when his mobile phone battery exploded in his chest pocket. In a similar incident, a worker was injured in Guangdong's provincial capital, Guangzhou, last month.

Reuters quoted the official Legal Daily saying tests conducted by Guangdong province's bureau of industry and commerce showed that 40 percent of mobile phone batteries were defective, including recharging capacity that was less than labeled. Also last week the Guangdong Express said nearly half its tests of liquor sold in markets in the area were substandard, containing excessive additives or ingredients inconsistent with labels.

China has become the most imbalanced country in gender ratio of newborn babies in the world. This period of imbalance is also the longest time in the world. In 2005, the ratio between newborn girls and boys was 100:118.88, far from the average ratio of 100 to 104-107. In Jiangxi, Guangdong, Hainan, Anhui and Hunan provinces, the ratio is even higher- 100:130.

CHINA has launched a crackdown on US food imports, seizing "rancid" pistachio nuts and vowing tough inspections in the wake of Washington's own offensive rejecting suspect Chinese food and drug ingredients.

The People's Daily believes the rapid growth of China to continue this year.

Setting foot on the "four comprehensive understandings", "making overall plans to handle five major relationships" and having "two maximums" in mind have given rise to a brand-new thesis based on the Marxist outlook concerning the religious issue, namely, giving scope to the positive role of religions in promoting social harmony.

The People's Daily has a strong commentary piece saying that the recent fall in world oil prices makes a mockery of the view commonly expressed in recent months that it was demand from China that caused oil to reach prices over $70 a barrel.

Telling sexist jokes, emailing porn to colleagues or sexually-salacious texting are all set to be outlawed under a draft bill currently under review by the city authorities.

Once approved by the Standing Committee of the Shanghai People's Congress, the Shanghai Supplement to the Women's Protection Law will become the first law in China's history to clearly define sexual harassment.