Recently I stick around in the neighborhood of Yokohama China Town, where I live,
because I'm physically too weak to take an excursion every time I eat out, I can't
afford to have a meal any more decent than livestock feed, and now it wouldn't make any
difference to my health whether or not I avoid oily, stinky Chinese food. That's
why these days I have befriended many local Chinese. Since most of them are quite
intelligent, I can learn from both mainlanders and Taiwanese much more than I can from my brain-dead compatriots.
Last night I had a talk with a Chinese student working in a nearby eatery.
The guy majoring in business administration here told me that he remembers
what it was like to see the Tiananmen tumult even though he was a preschool kid in
1989. At the end of our stand talking in Japanese, he concluded: "I think our
policymakers are no different from their foreign counterparts. They all stink." I
said, "That's why you are studying business administration rather
than political science. Is that right?" "You bet," exclaimed the guy.
Actually, if you compare the two governments between China and the U.S., it's almost a toss-up, but in a way Beijing has outdone Washington in recent years. In China their memories of the June 4 massacre are fading away
by now. On the contrary the Japanese have yet to get over the scar from WWII because
the "umbilical cord" that has connected us to America since 1960 is still there. Now totally eroded, it has started festering all over. As a result our entire nation remains crippled.
On the eve of the 20th anniversary of the incident, U.S. Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton reportedly touched on her pet subject, calling on the Beijing
government to release all those still imprisoned in connection with the
protests, stop harassing those who took part and begin a dialogue with
the victims' families. In response, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang
said Clinton's remarks amounted to "crudely meddling in Chinese domestic
affairs."
Gang was right. Clinton has no moral authority to give the Chinese her
annual lecture on human rights. · read more (95 words)
Tuesday, September 30 2008 @ 11:01 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,090
Climatic aberration engineered by China?
Sometimes a conspiracy theory is not only entertaining but also so wild and inventive
as to catch us off guard when we mentally lazy people take it for granted
that media's stories are by and large truthful. On the other hand, most of other allegations of conspiracies are little more than hogwash.
However, there is one thing in common between such theories which deserve
a serious scrutiny and ones to be classified as rubbish; they always point
a finger at Americans, especially Jewish-Americans. No "truth seekers"
have put the blame on Chinese for any evil plot as if only Americans have
malicious motives and enabling technologies.
For one thing some conspiracy theorists, also known as truth seekers, have recently started broadcasting that a network
of Jewish cabals headed by David Rockefeller has put the HAARP technology
in use to artificially cause devastating earthquakes such as ones in Niigata,
Japan (July 2007) and Sichuan, China (May 2008). HAARP stands for High
Frequency Active Auroral Research Program based in Alaska. Some
of them even go on to say that China is now thinking about retaliating
against the terror attacks from the ionospheric research facility.
Actually we have seen China prioritizing the developments of various state-of-the-art
technologies such as ones for:
* repelling rain-bearing clouds from the skies over Beijing on August 8 so the
Opening Ceremony of the 29th Olympics wouldn't be ruined
* doctoring the welcome performance at the Opening Ceremony by making the
supposedly better looking girl lip-sync a song sung by a less telegenic kid
* making the fireworks more spectacular by airing something pretaped by
computer graphics
* mass production of melamine-tainted powder milk for export to Japan
* mass production of pesticide-tainted food stuff for export to Japan
* terrorizing the cyberspace all over the world
etc, etc. · read more (382 words)
Tuesday, July 24 2007 @ 05:30 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,843
Minxin Pei, Senior Associate and Director of the China Program at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, titles his recent essay "Execution
may not curb venality in China." (Use of italics is mine.) In the piece that
deals with the execution of the country's former chief food and drug regulator
on the charge of bribery, Pei concludes:
"Short-term fixes, such as making examples of a few corrupt officials,
cannot solve China's food safety problem. To regain the confidence of the
consumers of Chinese products, [the Beijing government] must demonstrate
sustained political commitment and undertake many of the institutional
reforms it has resisted for years."
If you have read an accounting primer, you know that in the Assets part
of the Balance Sheet, there is an item called Deferred Charges, or Deferred
Costs. (Minxin Pei also refers to them as "huge delayed costs.")
What is tricky about the rules of accounting is that some costs incurred in the past are classified in assets, not liabilities, in a special treatment accountants term "capitalization." Since in general, the more assets you have, the more likely it is the B/S of your company whets a good
appetite of investors, people are sometimes misled by your B/S when it is bloated with the fake assets.
This is especially true when investors are not used to looking at the other side of the B/S. Professional analysts, on the other hand, will never be misled where unsettled liabilities associated with the deferred charges are still there. But they are sometimes deceived, too, when the liabilities aren't there anymore. You may have already
paid them up somehow. But when you can hardly afford to repay your debts, it's more likely that you have duped a benevolent person into shouldering the burden on your behalf. Or you may even have put them off the B/S arbitrarily. (Accountants call such an off-the-B/S indebtedness a "Contingent Liability".) When your company is on the verge
of bankruptcy, you, therefore, have a good reason to resort to one or two of these financial gimmicks so the B/S still looks in good shape to you creditors. More often than not this works - unless the auditor you retain is an honest man. · read more (422 words)
Monday, July 16 2007 @ 07:36 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,612
In May, Chinese environmentalist groups in
the coastal city of Xiamen finally succeeded in making city's Vice Mayor Ding Guoyan say, "The city government has listened to the opinions
expressed [by the citizens who took to the streets in response largely to text messages disseminated by environmental protection groups] and has
decided, after careful consideration, that the project must be reevaluated."
The aborted project was to produce a petrochemical substance called p-Xylene, which is an essential raw material for colorants in fabrics, solvents
for pharmaceuticals and pesticides, and some other things. P-Xylene is a highly toxic
substance that can cause dire birth defects over time.
Now that the countdown for the Beijing Olympics has started, it seems the
Beijing government and local authorities in Xiamen had to "listen
to the opinions." And yet, it remains true that the ostensible success was attributable to the fact the organizers could mobilize a big crowd by cellphone. So far so good. · read more (513 words)
Left: Li Hongzhi, founder of Falun Gong Center: Wang Wenyi, heckler at White House ceremony Right: Falun Gong protesters in Yokohama China Town
I have grown all the more curious about the school of people who are practicing their proprietary type of qigong called Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa, since Wang
Wenyi ruined Hu Jintao's great moment when the Chinese leader was in the
middle of the pageantry of the welcome ceremony at the White House on April
20.
Ms. Wang, 47, is a doctor and journalist who is practicing Falun Gong in
the U.S. Reports have it that she yelled at the Chinese leader and his host, "President Hu, your
days are numbered. President Bush, make him stop persecuting Falun Gong,"
before she was escorted away by the guard. Bush was quick enough to apologize
to his Chinese counterpart and order his men to consider legal action against
the transgressor. In response, Wang reportedly said, "It's not a crime, but an
act of civil disobedience." But she now could face six months in jail
for "harassing, intimidating and threatening a foreign official."
Encouraged by Wang's "individual act of conscience", predominantly
Chinese Falun Gong practitioners living in Japan look to have stepped up
their protests against the persecution inflicted on their colleagues in
mainland China, especially those who were imprisoned and had their organs
"harvested", after or sometimes even before the execution. According
to them these organs are being sold in the blackmarket at the price of
500 bucks apiece.
Since many decades ago I have known of the generic term "qigong", kikou in Japanese, which points to some esoteric thing practiced by people who believe that the human body has
an "energy field" generated by respiration (qi or ki means breath in Chinese and Japanese, respectively). Some of them even
theorize illnesses can be cured by the therapeutic effect that a certain
state of the spirit has on the body if it's cultivated through practicing
qigong. I think this idea is in part truthful as well as superstitious
at the same time. For one thing, I opted to go uninsured, medical cost-wise,
for various reasons when I called it a career. And ever since I have never
been hospitalized despite an even increasing amount of tobacco consumption
(80 pieces everyday) and many other habits widely believed to cause illnesses.
So you can distance yourself from Japanese quacks who are so prone to commit
fatal errors if you cultivate a certain state of mind deep inside. · read more (2,229 words)
Earlier this month, the British rock group's longtime dreams finally came
true. Their plans for China tour had been aborted a couple of times in
the last 25 years, most recently when the SARS epidemic thwarted their
concerts in 2003. Apparently we are supposed to see here yet another sign that the once-reclusive
country is further opening itself up, gradually but steadfastly. But I see no reason to be encouraged by the China's recent moves. We already knew that the opening up in a similar way of the feudal Japan in the mid-19th century has gotten us nowhere, perhaps but hell.
Neither did I feel betrayed by Mick Jagger and other stones who went ahead with their gig in China even though they had to comply with the demand by Chinese officials not to play several numbers blacklisted as too risque and offending. Fortunately enough, though, this did not mean anything to me because I hadn't particularly held the U.S.-based rock musicians in high esteem from the beginning.
Instead I
couldn't but feel scared watching the big crowd of people, who are not allowed to choose their own leader, go wild
over the live performance just like any other audience of a rock concert everywhere else in the world. I just wondered all a new how far these people will go on living like this, clinging to the sheer falsehood and self-deception, and perhaps more importantly, how far America and other Western nations keep dancing with them just because of their big appetite for the world's most populous consumer market. This also brought me back to Karl Marx's 1857 writing I read some 50 years ago. · read more (1,078 words)
From left: Mephistopheles, the Devil; Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft; Steven A. Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft
In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, when the Roman leader finds Marcus Junius Brutus, his right-hand man,
among a group of senators who are seeking his life, he says, "Et tu, Brute?" (And even you, Brutus?) That's exactly how Chinese bloggers must have
felt when Microsoft's MSN Online Division shut down a blog run by Zhao
Jing, alias An Ti, hours before the turn of the year. Zhao worked for the Beijing Bureau of the New York Times as a research assistant, and recently stepped up his pro-democracy rhetoric to support the reporters at the Beijing News who had gone on strike in protest against the dismissal of a progressive editor.
According to the Beijing Bureau of Associated Press, Brooke Richardson,
group-product manager at the Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., said, "When
we operate in markets around the world, we have to ensure that our [blog-hosting]
service complies with global laws as well as local laws and norms."
Richardson added that they shut down Zhao's blog for violating Microsoft's
code of conduct which stipulates that users must be in compliance with
laws in the country in which the user is based. · read more (781 words)
Saturday, July 02 2005 @ 10:00 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,551
On June 9 the Daily Yomiuri carried an analytical report titled "Sooner
or later, China will embrace democracy" it borrowed from Financial
Times. I read through the article written by Victor Mallet to see if there
was any substance behind this truistic headline, by any chance. I found none.
According to Mallet, Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. defense secretary, had a
talk with Cui Tiankai, China's senior foreign ministry official, on June
4 when they attended the Asian security conference of the International
Institute for Strategic Studies held in Singapore.
After accusing China of under-reporting its military budget, Rumsfeld "strayed
beyond the normal boundaries of defense policy" and warned Cui that
China should accelerate its process toward "a more open and representative
government." · read more (629 words)
On Saturday, April 9, Chinese people took to the streets in Beijing in yet another wave of anti-Japanese rallies staged to protest the newest versions of junior-high history textbooks that the Education Ministry-sponsored screening body had approved, on Tuesday, as compliant with its guidelines. According to the Japanese media the number of people that pelted stones and pejorative and derogatory words at the Japanese Embassy, banks, restaurants and other businesses reached 20,000, the biggest Japan-phobic crowd since the 1972 normalization of diplomatic ties between the two nations. These people were not only protesting against the newly approved textbooks that "gloss over" or "whitewash" Japan's wartime atrocities against their parents and grandparents, but also campaigning to thwart Japan's desperate bid for buying, "at any cost," a permanent seat at the U.N. Security Council. Some say they were just diverting their mounting anger to the wrong government. But they were not really that wrong when they chanted, "(Japan's Prime minister) Koizumi is a dog, and dogs are no good," because from the TFP's point of view, Koizumi is no good at all and he isn't any better than Chinese leader Hu Jintao. · read more (1,436 words)
Sunday, December 12 2004 @ 09:29 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,563
We all knew the answer to this question when Japan started it some thirty
years ago. But not anymore, as far as its China part is concerned, now that those fallacy artists such as Junichiro Koizumi,
Hu Jintao, and the media both in China and Japan have started to give a variety
of opportunistic definitions to this abbreviation.
On November 30 in Vientiane, the Laotian capital, Prime Minister Koizumi
had an audience with his Chinese counterpart Wen Jiabao after his aides
had repeatedly begged for the bilateral talks. Prior to the meeting between
the two prime ministers, many people had voiced their more or less twisted opinions based on their own definitions of the three-letter word. On Nov. 28 Koizumi
himself told the reporters in his retinue: "As China has achieved
remarkable economic development, it may be time that it 'graduates' from
Japan's official development assistance'. Here Koizumi was just reiterating
his decision announced back home on Nov. 26. On Nov. 27 China's foreign
minister Li Zhaoxing "shrugged off" the Japan's decision saying
"The Chinese people only need to rely on their own intelligence, power,
unity and determination to build a developed country." · read more (962 words)
Tuesday, November 16 2004 @ 10:23 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,687
Let us reconstruct from available news reports how the things unfolded
around the recent intrusion of a Chinese nuclear submarine into Japanese
waters:
November 8, afternoon - The government was informed by the U.S. that a
nuclear sub of unknown nationality had been spotted.
November 8, late at night - Maritime Self-Defense Force P-3C reconnaissance
aircraft spotted the sub in the Pacific Ocean, south of Okinawa. The Defense
Agency determined it was a little outdated Han-class nuclear sub from the
Chinese Navy judging from the characteristic screw sounds. P3-C continued
to trail it around the clock. · read more (779 words)
It's yet another territorial dispute, with some implication of oil exploitation
rights, if you want to call it that when one side is acting like unruly pirates
and the other side like timid suckers.
The dispute stems from the fact that the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea stipulates that waters up to 200 nautical miles from the coastline of a country should be considered its EEZ (exclusive economic zone) whereas the distance between Japan and China is less than 400 NM, and that it is believed there lie largely untapped veins of natural resources just around the disputed demarcation. For one thing the Chunxiao gas field, where China has kicked an offshore exploration project into high gear, is located so close to the alternative EEZ demarcation proposed by Japan (based on the equidistance rule) that China will most probably hit veins which extend to the Japan's side of the median line.
· read more (1,029 words)
Wednesday, September 15 2004 @ 12:20 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 2,046
When Wen Jiabao, alias "bu dao weng" (tumble doll) visited the U.S. last December, George W. Bush became
the first president of the United States that had discouraged a democracy
while encouraging a totalitarian regime by warning Chen Shui-bian that
he wouldn't tolerate the "defensive referendum" Chen was planning
for March on the grounds that it would destabilize the status quo in the
region. At that time many neocons, including Robert Kagan and William Kristol
said: "President Bush performed a kowtow that would have made Bill
Clinton blush."
· read more (229 words)
Earlier this month, the British rock group's longtime dreams finally came
true. Their plans for China tour had been aborted a couple of times in
the last 25 years, most recently when the SARS epidemic thwarted their
concerts in 2003. Apparently we are supposed to see here yet another sign that the once-reclusive
country is further opening itself up, gradually but steadfastly. But I see no reason to be encouraged by the China's recent moves. We already knew that the opening up in a similar way of the feudal Japan in the mid-19th century has gotten us nowhere, perhaps but hell.
