Tibet is remade by hand of Chinese government

… the broader aim seems to be remaking Tibet – a region with its own culture, language and religious traditions – in order to have firmer political control over its population. It comes as China prepares for an influx of millions of tourists in the run-up to next year’s Summer Olympic Games.

China’s learning: a potent anniversary

Today, Chinese universities have been fully brought into the administrative system and can be seen as government institutions. The position of principal at a top university carries with it the rank of “vice-minister” and the heads of less prestigious universities are at the level of “bureau head”. Academic ethics have been corrupted, and plagiarism is rife. In April 2007, North Carolina’s Duke University announced the results of an investigation into thirty-eight freshman MBA students accused of plagiarism. Nine of the students were expelled, fifteen were made to repeat the year, ten were given a zero grade, and four were found innocent. This was apparently Duke University’s biggest scandal for thirty years, and moreover the only incident of its kind at a north American business school in ten years. Regrettably, all of the students involved came from China. This incident almost entirely sums up the condition of Chinese higher education.

‘MADE IN CHINA’ LABEL WON’T SURVIVE WITHOUT RULE OF LAW

With an independent judiciary, a vibrant civil society and a free media, China could have contained such ills of crony capitalism. Nothing is more effective in fighting systemic corruption than transparency, public opinion and an impartial third-party enforcer. Unfortunately, China does not have these institutional and social assets because the CCP views them as threats to its survival.

Thousands clash with police over polluting Chinese brewery

Several thousand residents in Sichuan province took to the streets to protest contamination of drinking and irrigation water by China Resources Breweries, said the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy.

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A pen for the people

Text Publishing is releasing the English translation of Serve the People, a sexy, funny satire about the idiocies of the Cultural Revolution, in Australia next month. Set in 1967, when the cult of Mao Zedong was at its zenith and defacing an image of the chairman could be punished by death, Serve the People outraged the censors, who declared that it slandered Mao and his army and was “overflowing with sex . . . Do not distribute, pass around, comment on, excerpt from it or report on it.”

Earth Day Eyewitness: Chinese Air Pollution

James Reynolds, BBC News

Test any website and see if it’s censored in China

www.greatfirewallofchina.org

Endless Assembly Lines and Giant Cafeterias; Inside China’s Vast Factories

“Toronto photographer Ed Burtynsky has photographed industrial landscapes for more than 25 years. From 2003 to 2005, he traveled to China several times to capture images of the country’s industrial growth.”

CONTESTING CONFUCIUS

“Billeter calls for the demythification of China as a ‘fundamental other’. The necessity to understand its philosophy as an imperial ideology is a political one: ‘not in order to reduce the role it has played in history, but to determine the approach we want to take to it’. This becomes all the more urgent because, although ‘in the past the Europeans and the Chinese lived apart, this ancient separation is no more. Today we are facing the same historical moment, and should act together and understand each other.’ The myth of the other now deters mutual understanding between China and the West. This is the ultimate insult to Jullien, whose purported aim has always been to bring about this understanding. Billeter puts it bluntly: ‘Those who endorse a critical reflection on the past in fact subscribe to political liberty and democracy, while the comparatists accommodate more readily to the state of power’.”