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: Vyoos news
China mega-city

Listen up, Dubai, with your tall toy tower and pretty island residential developments, when it comes to really big, you have a way to go to catch up to China.

The world's biggest economy (yes, America, get used to it) has just announced an infrastructure scheme which dwarfs anything in history.


They plan to spend more than US$1 trillion creating a mega-city of more than 40 million people. They will do it by connecting a series of existing cities in the Pearl River Delta, including Guangzhou and Shenzhen, currently China's third and fourth-largest cities.

In all, eight existing cities, ranging in population from just under two million to almost 12 million, will become a mega-city with a population of more than 40 million, all linked by super-modern road, public transport and telecommunications infrastructure.

Try an exercise of this size anywhere else, such as those problematic countries where residents get a vote and like to have a say in planning issues, and such a project would get bogged down for centuries in committee hearings.

The Chinese, however, are planning to have the whole thing finished within six years.

As an interesting aside, literally, the mega-city will border both China's reclaimed territories, Hong Kong (with its estimated 7 million people) and Macau, and will have superfast train links to them.

The planners have only one problem - they haven't decided yet what to call the world's largest city. We respectively suggest that much of the world has heard of the Pearl River and its fertile delta. Pearl River City sounds good to us.

telegraph.co.uk


shanghai skyscrapers
Shanghai (including an artist's impression of the Shanghai Tower, right, which is still under construction) is just a village of 20 million compared to the new Pearl River mega-city.






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China's committee work-around

December 22nd 2010 02:05
: Vyoos news
committee meeting
'I have a question: what are we talking about?'

Chinese authorities have announced a ban on the use of foreign words in the media and state press. The ban, they say, addresses a need to end an erosion of the purity of Chinese language.

The ban, I say, proves that Chinese committees produce the same brain-dead nonsense as their counterparts in the rest of the world.

In practice, the Chinese decision will work. Neither privatised nor state-owned media will have any concerns about following the edict, because they won't have to change anything to comply. English words do not make it into written Chinese, in the way they make it into written Italian or Norwegian, for example, because Chinese publishing systems are not set up to handle alphabet-based characters. Further, although many mainland Chinese these days might understand some English words popularised through the internet (mainstream English words such as thanx, LOL and porn), few would recognise their written form.

The Chinese decision works in principle, as well, in the same way that xenophobic, politically self-serving propaganda works. The authorities pronounce it; the workers ignore it.

For this reason we can see that, while committee meetings in China are just as full of hot air and devoid of common sense as committee meetings anywhere else, the trappings of totalitarianism remain sufficiently evident that foolish edicts can be treated as such. This makes Chinese committee decisions much less dangerous than elsewhere, a fact which has enormous benefits for the economy, for due process and for individual freedom.

This capacity to take the decisions of committees out of real-time processes lifts the efficiency rating across all Chinese sectors well above anything seen in more backward and underprivileged countries, such as the United States, where people still live in hope of committees producing something useful.

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message in a bottle

Sitting snugly in a traditional bottle, a message of friendship has travelled about 11,000 kilometres, from Henan in China to a beach off Victoria, Australia.

The message, found on Sunday by a teenager and his father, was written in Chinese and says: “Happy to connect with you. I would like to make friends with you. Would you like too?”

It was not dated, but was signed “Li Xing Bo”, who gave an address in Liu village, Jin Ling town, Luo Yang city, Henan province, China.

Today’s Geelong Advertiser newspaper reported the father, Michael Lawrence, as saying, “It's remarkably well-preserved and someone has had the forethought to put in some tissue paper to absorb any moisture.''

Mr Lawrence, of Lorne, says he will ask his son, Pete, to write a return letter to Mr Li.

image: atbc2008.org
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orient express

The old Orient Express had many incarnations but is associated mostly with the journey from Paris to Istanbul. The time the journey took varied, but it was at all times the stuff of legend, luxury and romance. It was mentioned in the literary works of Bram Stoker, Agatha Christie, Graham Greene, George McDonald Fraser and Ian Fleming.

[ Click here to read more ]
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Today's news: Google smacks China

January 13th 2010 01:42
google china
Google has accused China of hacking into Gmail accounts, and has threatened to walk out of China as a consequence.

Google has just issued a statement saying it has uncovered a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China". The email accounts targeted were those of human rights activists


[ Click here to read more ]
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China's birthday party

September 29th 2009 23:13
china propaganda poster
The art of propaganda. Translation: 'Make art and propaganda one integrated part of the revolutionary mechanism. Use it as a powerful weapon to organise people, educate people, strike the enemy and eliminate the enemy!'

We would like to wish China's Communist Party a happy birthday. But we won't.

[ Click here to read more ]
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wedding dress kovacs
Hannah Kovacs in her $18 wedding dress

In 1991, just before moving overseas to live, I decided to consolidate all my addresses and phone numbers in a new contact book. This item, basically a few blank sheets of paper stuck together with glue, cost me just under A$10. A similar item in an Australian newsagent today will cost a fraction of the price.

[ Click here to read more ]
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Panda politics

December 23rd 2008 11:34
panda giant china taiwan

Things have been warming for some time between Taiwan and the erstwhile bully boys across the strait, but today the relationship got downright chummy.

[ Click here to read more ]
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Changing Fortune 500

July 12th 2008 10:21
Goodbye Nike, hello China

Hello China indeed. Our heading summarises the 2008 Fortune 500 list, released last Thursday. The iconic sports shoe maker and eight other American companies fell off the list of the world's top 500 companies measured by revenue, cutting the American presence from 162 in 2007 to 153


[ Click here to read more ]
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Spend a penny

July 8th 2008 05:52
The great Asian clean-up is gathering pace. I blame the Brits, who started it by changing a deeply embedded cultural tradition a few decades ago when they stopped Hong Kongers spitting in the streets.

Then came the news last week that the authorities in China are aiming to make the same change in time for the Olympics.

[ Click here to read more ]
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Panda tale of survival

July 7th 2008 03:03
panda birth china
Proud mother: Chinese earthquake survivor Guo Guo carries in her mouth one of two giant panda cubs born on July 6
Picture: Xinhua

The first giant panda cubs to be born in captivity in the world so far this year were delivered safely yesterday (Sunday, July 6) in Ya'an City, Sichuan Province, China. The birth of the twins, a happy enough event in its own right, is in fact the end of a dramatic story which could have been tragic.

[ Click here to read more ]
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Beijing has more of everything

July 3rd 2008 23:15
Chinese anti-terrorist training
Picture: Xinhua

Beijing is planning for the Olympics by, amongst other things, preparing a welcome committee for would-be terrorists, telling the President of France that he's not welcome, and annoying just about everybody seeking a tourist visa.

[ Click here to read more ]
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Chinese embassy bombing

May 18th 1999 09:54
I lived in Hong Kong for 16 years until 2007. In 1998 and 1999 I wrote a series of political and social commentaries for a quirky institutional newsletter - quirky in that it was intended to be as much contentious, offbeat and humorous as it was informative. I was working as an editor, and I wrote the articles under the pseudonym Red Inque. I post them here for anyone interested in a look at life in Asia at the time, and in Hong Kong just after its return to Chinese sovereignty.


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Chill wind from Beijing

February 8th 1999 03:57
I lived in Hong Kong for 16 years until 2007. In 1998 and 1999 I wrote a series of political and social commentaries for a quirky institutional newsletter - quirky in that it was intended to be as much contentious, offbeat and humorous as it was informative. I was working as an editor, and I wrote the articles under the pseudonym Red Inque. I post them here for anyone interested in a look at life in Asia at the time, and in Hong Kong just after its return to Chinese sovereignty.

They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake. -- Alexander Pope

[ Click here to read more ]
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