China Chronicles November 19, 2012
- Regional integration progressing at ASEAN talks
members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations should bring the treaties ratified into practice in their joint endeavor to realize the ASEAN Community by 2015, a top official said yesterday.
At the ongoing ASEAN summit in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan said that participating leaders, in their talks, have been satisfied with the progress made in seeking regional integration.
"Some 74-75 percent of major instruments of cooperation among ASEAN members on establishing the community have been ratified by the member states," Pitsuwan said.
However, he stressed: "Each member state will have to bring the treaties to implementation and practice from regional level down to the state level."
Delegates told reporters that the AEC will be launched at the end of 2015 - December 31 - rather than on January 1, 2015 as originally envisioned.
The community would integrate the diverse nations' economies, covering trade, investment and other measures.
Thai Foreign Minister Surapong Tovichakchaikul said Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen had proposed the later start date and won the approval of all members. He said the ASEAN Economic Ministers Meeting had earlier agreed the implementation could begin on January 1, 2015, but the leaders agreed yesterday that much work had yet to be done.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao arrived in the Cambodia capital yesterday to join expanded ASEAN meetings for the next two days.
US President Barack Obama will also fly to Cambodia today to attend the so-called East Asia Summit, an annual forum where ASEAN leaders and their counterparts from eight other nations, including China and the US, would discuss security and economic concerns.
During the summit, the leaders are expected to announce the start of negotiations for an expanded free-trade area involving ASEAN member countries and six regional economic powerhouses that include China but exclude the US.
- Reforestation restoring lushness to barren hills
NIU Hentai remembers the Loess Plateau as dismal, dusty and dry seven years ago.
"There were barren hills, but see how it is flourishing now!" Niu said of the hills now dotted with plants and the land to the west checkered with brown poplars and lush forest after a municipal reforestation program.
Born in Dacaoping Village, Shanxi Province, Niu left his hometown to run a transportation business in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region because the land was good for nothing but grazing in his hometown, which is located at an altitude of 2,100 meters and was once home to a record 10,000 sheep.
But overgrazing and deforestation stripped away vegetation, allowing the desert to encroach upon the Loess Highlands, where Dacaoping Village is located.
"Overnight, people could not open their doors because of the sand outside," Niu recalled.
Niu chose to return home to plant trees in 2005, hoping to help restore the damaged environment that was jeopardizing grazing and to take advantage of many measures issued by the local government.
In 2003 in Shuozhou, a coal-rich city in which Dacaoping Village is located, the municipal government started encouraging villagers like Niu to contract land free of charge for five years and plant trees on barren hills.
Niu, 52, signed a contract for 800 hectares, but drought prevailed early on. Now, after seven years, Niu has planted over 1.2 million trees.
"I find relaxation just by looking at the lush forest," Niu said, adding that his fledgling forest will be fully grown in two or three years.
- Government helps renew quake-hit monasteries
THE Dontson Monastery has bid farewell to decades of isolation.
Young monks, including Jigme Tongdrup, have moved from makeshift tents to the rebuilt Sakyapa monastery in the quake-hit Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwest China's Qinghai Province.
As part of the ongoing construction project, amid 5,000-meter-high mountains surrounding it, the days of drilling frozen rivers for water have ended thanks to newly installed pipelines. The government-funded project means tap water, electricity, roads and communications services are available for 87 monasteries, including Dontson, which was damaged by the deadly earthquake that struck Yushu in April 2010. The 7.1-magnitude quake claimed 2,698 lives and injured more than 12,000.
"Watching the 500-year-old sutra hall and monks' apartments become dilapidated overnight, I felt overwhelmed by grief," according to the director of Dontson's Management Committee, who goes by Dechen. The 42-year-old, at times, felt he would not see the monastery re-established because of a lack of money.
Dontson, like other area monasteries, used to be financed by residents. A government policy has made monasteries financially independent.
Dechen said he was surprised when the government said it would spend 990 million yuan (US$159 million) in renovating the damaged monasteries and housing the homeless after the earthquake.
- Outrage as little girls don bikinis at auto show
VISITORS to an auto show in central Wuhan City were shocked to see a five-year-old girl wearing only a bikini and a wig blowing them a kiss while her other hand gently caressed a car.
She was one of three child models, aged four to five, wearing bikinis and striking "sexy" poses at the auto exhibition in the Hubei Province capital last Friday.
The display may have been at attempt to amuse visitors bored with the usual array of scantily-clad young women but instead the overwhelming reaction was one of outrage.
Tens of thousands of netizens expressed their fury at the girls' parents and show organizers for "being willing to ruin their children's lives for money" and "attracting public attention by crossing the moral red line."
In a set of photos and a video recording, the three bikini girls are seen posing with other adult models. In one picture, a girl is seen trying to mimic a "sexy" pose by bending over while holding a car's rearview mirror.
The photos and the video spread like wildfire on the Internet, stirring huge waves of controversy.
"Now even little girls have fallen victims to businessmen's pursuit of profit," was one online comment.
Another netizen asked: "What kind of evil minds are driving the parents and the organizers to dress the children in bikinis just to attract more eyes and satisfy pedophiles? And to those who filmed and pictured them, where is their conscience?"
In a poll on Weibo.com, more than 11,700 people said the show should never have used the children as bikini models.
However, 979 people supported the show by agreeing it should introduce some new ideas.
One of the show's organizers, a woman surnamed Liu, told the Chutian Golden Newspaper that they wanted to provide a platform for the child models to "boost their confidence" and the performances were agreed to by all of their parents. Besides the three bikini models, two other girls presented Latin dance, she said.
Liu said that the girls present! ed the bikini show as part of a child model competition in which the winners could win free trips to Hong Kong and Macau. No money had been paid to the parents.
A woman surnamed Li, mother of one of the models, told the newspaper she sent her daughter to the show to help her gain confidence but now, having seen the reaction, deeply regretted her decision.
"I would never let my daughter read those online comments and I hope she still believed that it was a beautiful show. But I will never send her to such activities again," Li said.
Another of the mothers said she felt upset when reading the online comments as she felt there was nothing wrong in what the children were doing. The country doesn't ban parents from dressing their children in bikinis, she said.
Modelling was a perfectly healthy activity, she said, and suggested that netizens had "got the wrong idea."
However, some experts quoted by the newspaper said such performances could have a negative effect on the children by teaching them they could make money by exposing themselves.
- Carbon monoxide killed 5 boys in dumpster
FIVE children who were found dead inside a dumpster in southwest China were poisoned by carbon monoxide, local authorities confirmed yesterday.
Remains of burned charcoal were found inside the dumpster, indicating that the boys might have used the charcoal for heat before they died, according to sources with the publicity department of the Bijie City Committee of the Communist Party of China in Guizhou Province.
They were believed to have been living on the street.
Autopsies showed that the boys, all aged about 10, died from carbon monoxide, and the possibility of injuries or mechanical asphyxia was ruled out, the sources said.
The bodies of the children were found by a trash collector in a dumpster along Huandong Road in Qixingguan District of Bijie City on Friday morning, according to The Beijing News.
Photos that were uploaded by Internet users showed that the dumpster is about 1.5 meters long and 1.3 meters wide, and the lid could have formed an airtight seal.
Local security authorities have identified three of the victims, all from Qixingguan District, while the confirmation of the identity of the other two is under way, the sources said.
Bijie is a mountainous city in northwest Guizhou, some 200 kilometers from the provincial capital of Guiyang.
It drizzled on Thursday night and the temperature went as low as 6 degrees Celsius, according to the local weather reports.
A further investigation into the case is under way.
The incident has triggered widespread uproar on the Internet, and the posts on Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging service, have topped the most-viewed topics of the day, with hits exceeding 2.5 million as of 8pm yesterday.
While some netizens posted accused the local government of negligence, others said the parents of the dead children are also to blame for their lack of responsibility in looking after their kids.
"Both the government and the families of the children should take the blame for the tragedy! ," said a Weibo user with the screen name Fanxin Wudi.
"It reminded me of The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. Isn't it that such things only happen in fairy tales?" another user, Saludika, said.
"What a cold world this must be for the five children!" netizen Lu Yao posted.
- 73 held in crackdown on luxury goods ring
THOUSANDS of fake luxury products have been confiscated and 73 suspects detained in southern China in a crackdown on what police say was a major source of counterfeit goods.
More than 20,000 bags and suitcases purporting to be famous brands such as Louis Vuitton, Hermes and Coach were confiscated in the suspects' hideouts along with 17 manufacturing machines, 91 bank cards and deposit books, the Ministry of Public Security said.
Investigators said that more than 960,000 fake bags of various brands had been manufactured by the ring and many of them had been exported to the United States and the Middle East.
They estimated the value of the infringement of intellectual property rights case to be 5 billion yuan (US$802 million).
In January this year, police received information that the suspects, led by a man surnamed Qian, were making fake Louis Vuitton and Coach bags in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province, and exporting them to countries including the United States.
Export network
Police launched an investigation and contacted US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for their help.
Throughout the next few months, police in Guangdong, Fujian and Anhui provinces mapped the gang's manufacturing, storing, transport and export network with the cooperation of the US authorities.
Police launched a raid to capture Qian and his accomplices as they tried to smuggle another batch of fake bags to the US.
Police said that in 2010 Qian rented several stores in Guangzhou to handle orders and set up more than 10 hideouts for the manufacture of fake bags and other leather items and accessories.
The gang then smuggled the fake products to the US and the Middle East with the help of overseas clients, police said.
Qian and the gang are said to have made huge profits from the business.
They had even managed to buy more than 33,000 square meters of land in Anhui Province where they were planning to build a factory, police said.
- Goodbye autumn, Hello winter
Von Andre has added a photo to the pool:
It's getting colder and colder now. Getting lazy to take photos outside. Good thing I had NBA fantasy to keep myself busy. :-)
Have a great winter days ahead my flickr friends!- Creek Art Center BW
- Foggy Ningbo
Von Andre has added a photo to the pool:
It's a foggy Sunday in Ningbo. Overlooking view of downtown cityscape, (Jiangdong).
Best view on black.- Cold front persists in N China
COLD fronts will continue to affect north China over the next few days, bringing heavy snow, strong winds and temperature drops, the country's meteorological authority said today.
Today and tomorrow, a weak cold front will lower temperatures by three to eight degrees Celsius and bring gales across northern regions, the National Meteorological Center said.
In the period, moderate or showery snow will fall in eastern parts of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and some regions in the northeast, with parts of Jilin Province seeing heavy snow and snowstorms, the center said.
Affected by another strong cold front, northern parts of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region will see moderate, showery or heavy snow accompanied by temperature drops and gales starting Tuesday, the center said.
Meanwhile, rains are likely to soak most southern areas starting Tuesday, with heavy rain expected in Hunan and Jiangxi provinces, the center said.- The Bund Retake
shanghaifoodie has added a photo to the pool:
Could never get tired of this bridge. Will come back again for late night shot with no people
- Follow me sons...
- Goodbye autumn, Hello winter
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