China

This column is the first of a monthly series we’ll be running on what’s happening in China from a political, social, environmental, music and arts perspective. If you’d like to contribute to the series, know of some great links, websites, magazines, contacts or just harbor a passion for China, feel free to drop me a line: lucy@thepunch.com.au.

Today in China there are approximately 123,509,752 children under 14 years of age. By the end of this year, 20 million others will be born.

Thanks to the one-child policy, 70 per cent of these children will go through life without a sibling. The average Chinese parent will spend up to two-fifths of their yearly income to educate them.

By 2040, this generation will form part of a minority: the workforce of a country that has grown old before reaching its full economic potential. Here’s how they’re growing up.

Continue reading "ChinaWatch: Growing up in a brewing social disaster" »

Striding along Rome’s Piazza Navona in late September, his “Nikon necklace’’ bouncing off his chest as a sign of a duty-free camera indulgence, was Paul Keating.

He was, he told a group of Australians, constantly being stopped by Australian tourists who wanted a chat and to get in a photo with him.

It was suggested to him he was having the same public popularity problems as Kevin Rudd.

Continue reading "Rudd not a Caucus winner, but an expert on talkfests" »

It’s hard to pick the most disturbing moment. Is it when the van hits two-year-old Yueyue, pauses, then drives off? Is it the mother and small child who detour around her prone body? Or is it the sheer number of people who clearly see her and do nothing?

Warning: Disturbing footage

The video of the Chinese toddler, who wandered away from her mother and into trouble, makes you heartsick. It makes you question humanity. It makes you want to shake those people - shake them until their teeth rattle.

And of course, even as Yueyue lies in hospital with critical head injuries, it makes you wonder whether a similar evil negligence could happen here, or whether life is cheaper in places where it’s so much more abundant.

Continue reading "What kind of person ignores a dying two-year-old girl?" »

Jobs are being lost, buildings are closing; hundreds of people are moving overseas.

Australian manufacturing is facing a major slump, with thousands more jobs expected in light of the carbon tax policy - especially in places like the La Trobe Valley in Victoria.

According to recent research from the Australian Trade and Industry Alliance, less than nine per cent of the one million manufacturing workforce are employed by firms that will receive compensation for the carbon tax.

Continue reading "One green job created, 3.7 jobs destroyed elsewhere" »

As the carbon tax starts to make its way through the legislative process, the Federal Opposition and peak business groups like the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Australian Industry Group, the Master Builders Association and others claim our economy or their part of it will be ruined by a price on carbon.

A similar view was apparent at a recent Oxford-style debate organised by Tom Switzer, editor of the conservative Spectator Magazine Australia.

The topic debated was “is a carbon tax needed to combat global warming”.

Continue reading "We can’t look beyond coal without pricing carbon" »

We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Australia is still in a “different” economic league to the rest of the world and there are five rocks underpinning those solid foundations.

The global financial turmoil is definitely a worry. Many are saying it’s based on fear… and they’d be right.

But it is also based on reality. Some of the economic numbers coming out of the US and Europe are seriously bad. So bad that the global market reaction has been justified.

Continue reading "Aussie economy kicking goals, a league above the rest" »

Have you heard of Changsha, Chengdu and Chongqing? How about Wuhan or Weifang? Indeed try a little test: name seven cities in China … you can even count Hong Kong.

To my shame, I was unaware of any of these places before I set off for China last week. I was also unable to name seven Chinese cities.

As a late ring in for our Foreign Minister – who had something on even closer to his heart than China – I joined Trade Minister Craig Emerson in leading a trade delegation to China of a hundred Australian businesses.

Continue reading "A city the size of London in the middle of China" »

Australian politicians have spent more than 20 years thinking up reasons not to tackle climate change, but the latest from Tony Abbott really must take the cake.

According to the Opposition Leader, it now seems that until Communist China introduces a market-based mechanism to reduce their emissions, Australia shouldn’t either.

That should buy us some time then.

Continue reading "Abbott reads from Mao’s little green book of nonsense" »

OK – time to wake The Punch out of its self-imposed-carbon-tax-debate-hibernation… a-thon.

It’s been a nice reprieve, but a debate this frustrating, and this ridiculously overblown, can’t be ignored forever. Especially when so much of the debate rests on weak foundations.

Let me just say upfront that I am not exactly what you would call undecided on this issue of a carbon tax. In fact, I am totally in favour of it.

Continue reading "Australia should innovate and let China copy" »

Recently a colleague mockingly asked me why I bothered writing. I replied: because the quality of debate is appallingly bad.

Exactly, she said. Thus with a sense of light-hearted despair at the recent banter in the media, I weigh into Australia’s strategic policy apropos the on-rushing war with China.

It appears that the conservative minds that discuss strategic policy are aligning. China is growing, the world is changing, and power is being redistributed. According to those who subscribe to the various brands of “Realist” international relations theory, this situation necessarily entails armed conflict between states.

Continue reading "Should we defend the Great Wall or the Grand Canyon?" »

Smoking inside will be banned in enclosed public spaces in China as of May 1 this year.

So that leaves at least 300 million people just five weeks to break the habit of a lifetime.

Given that China is the world’s largest producer of cigarettes and that one in three smokers worldwide are Chinese, this is a social undertaking of epic proportions.

Continue reading "Why China’s May 1 smoking ban won’t work" »

So Kevin Rudd’s been musing about the Chinese and how we might need to be ready to “deploy force” if efforts to integrate the PRC into the rest of the world go horribly wrong.

We established long ago the former PM has a tendency to get a bit carried away in discussions with other world leaders. Remember how he allegedly got off the phone from George W Bush and regaled his dinner guests with the cracking yarn that the then-US president didn’t know what the G20 was.

Or how in Copenhagen he went off about how the Chinese were trying to “rat-f**k us”. And who can forget his nickname for the UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon - “Spanky Banky”.

Continue reading "Kevin Rudd’s bravado is actually a bit of a worry" »

Australian Ambassador to Japan, Murray McLean OAM, caught up with Thom Woodroofe at APEC this week and discussed the prospect of him moving to be our man in Beijing, and the behaviour of the Chinese at Copenhagen last year .

Reports in the Australian Financial Review last weekend suggested that Murray McLean is on the shortlist to be our head diplomat in Beijing.

While the job has been advertised internally in DFAT, the mandarin speaking Ambassador humbly brushed off the suggestion he was being considered for the shift to China. He says he will go “wherever the government wants him to go” when his term expires “sometime in 2011”, but he may be asked to pack his bags for Beijing before then.

Ambassador McLean has been our main man in Tokyo for almost six years now, a lengthy appointment by any measure. But his CV oozes China.

Continue reading "Who will be our man in Beijing?" »

Chiang Kai-Shek became the Chairman of the Republic of China in 1928.

Welcome to Wednesday at The Punch. What’s on your mind? Share it here.

While we in peaceful democratic Australia have been conducting our political battles at public meetings and settling our disputes at the ballot box, in less fortunate places politics is being conducted by other means.

In Tibet, where the Chinese authorities have launched a new crackdown, these include arrests in the night, secret trials, long prison sentences on spurious charges, and beatings and other forms of violence.

In early August He Guoqiang, a member of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo and head of its Central Commission for Discipline, visited Tibet. Apparently he was not pleased by what he found, despite the intensive repression that has taken place in Tibet since the riots in 2008 in which at least 200 people were killed. He ordered a fresh crackdown on Tibetan “separatists” and intellectuals, particularly the Buddhist monks and nuns who have been at the forefront of the protests against Chinese rule over the past few years.

Continue reading "In Tibet they’d die for a hung parliament" »

So what is the Resource Super Profits Tax all about?  And what is a resource rent tax anyway? 

As it happens, I did a PhD in economics on these very questions, under the supervision of Professor Ross Garnaut.  And as an economic adviser to Resources and Energy Minister, Senator Peter Walsh in the Hawke Government, I had the opportunity to implement my PhD findings by helping design the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax in 1984.

Let’s start with resource rent.  Minerals like iron ore, coal, oil and gas possess two special features – they are non-renewable and deposits of them vary in quality and closeness to markets.  These features give rise to resource rent.

Continue reading "Going boom: the economic case for the mining tax" »

EAST Timorese Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao has taken in recent weeks to heavily bagging Australia, including a strange speech in which he, seemingly apropos of nothing, dug deep into the past and said Australia had selfishly cost the lives of 60,000 East Timorese by coming to Timor to “wage war” against the Japanese in World War II.

Gusmao has also been claiming Australian interference in its sovereign rights. Australia is studying the rhetoric closely, with good reason. As Gusmao slams Australia, his country’s biggest aid donor, Gusmao has allowed China for the first time to gain a small de facto military foothold in East Timor.

China now has naval training crews operating out of Dili aboard two gunboats which East Timor bought from China, and which were formally handed over last week. Gusmao’s attacks on Australia, and his newfound military cooperation with China, are seen as related.

Continue reading "Watching East Timor as China gets a military toehold" »

The Prime Minister has his mojo back on the domestic front thanks to some Kevin07-style plain-speaking and a victorious health debate. Now it is time for him to strut his stuff on the world stage and become an “arse-kicking Prime Minister”, starting with China.

A lot has been written about acting and politics in the last few weeks since Opposition Leader Tony Abbott turned down acting lessons. In my favourite movie Love Actually there is a famous scene involving the heartthrob British Prime Minister played by Hugh Grant. Annoyed by a misogynist American President he stands up to him for taking advantage of their bilateral friendship.

“I love that word relationship,” the Prime Minister begins, with his beautiful admirer of a secretary Natalie walking in on the press conference.

Continue reading "Rudd needs a Hugh Grant moment to stand up to China" »

The decision by a Shanghai court to sentence Stern Hu to ten years should teach us a lesson about the future of our relationship with China: Australia cannot expect to continue to reap the benefits of Chinese cash without periodically accepting some of its pernicious qualities.

Following the Hu sentence there will no doubt be a temptation to invoke what could be called the “Corby Protocol”, which assumes that whenever an Australian is arrested in a non-Western country they are ipso facto innocent and victims of a corrupt and dictatorial regime.

But in this case it would probably be in our interest to understand that while Hu has become a victim of the workings of the Chinese state and business, he was also very much a product of it. This was a position that up until this point had made him, and by extension Australia, very wealthy.

Continue reading "With China it’s not all beer and dim sum" »

China’s ‘“little emperors”, the adored children born under the country’s one-child policy with a reputation of being pampered and spoiled, are entering parenthood and have been accused of raising a generation of brats.

Chinese media this week ran reports in which men and women born in one-child families after 1980, known as “first generation only child”, were accused of producing selfish children with personality problems.

“Now that they have entered their 30s, many of them have already married and most have chosen to have one child. These children are called “second generation only child”,” the People’s Daily reported.

Continue reading "China’s second generation of spoilt brats" »

Chinese Lunar New Year is just three days away and Beijing is once again preparing to become a hotbed of pyromania.

Residents have been busily stockpiling firecrackers to set off on Chinese Lunar New Year’s Eve, which this year falls on February 13, and on New Year’s Day.

Chinese New Year, also known as Spring Festival, is all about reuniting with family, and a typical Lunar New Year’s Eve might include a special dinner and setting off firecrackers at midnight to welcome in the new year, which this year will be the Year of the Tiger.

Continue reading "Chinese Lunar New Year: a hotbead of pyromania" »

The hottest story in the Information Security world right now is the much publicised hacking of Google’s corporate network in China.

If you were skimming the headlines, you might think this story is somehow related to Google blocked searches and Chinese Government censorship. That is how it is being presented in much of the mainstream press, both locally and internationally.

For those who missed the initial story: Early last week Google suddenly announced that it may suspend its operations in China due to a highly sophisticated attack against its corporate network. Within days, it was revealed that up to 30 other tech companies (including Adobe) had been targeted by the same attackers.

Continue reading "China vs Google, a thrilling tale of IT espionage" »

Bridget Jones has a generation of Chinese sisters. They are unmarried, aged 30 or above and known as shengnu or leftover women.

Shengnu was once an offensive term and popular only in Shanghai but an increase in the number of singles has meant these women are now a small social force in cities like Beijing. A popular newspaper reported recently: “The era of the shengnu is here”.

Shengnu also carry the unflattering title of 3S women, meaning single, born in the seventies and considered “stuck” (although many would insist they have chosen to remain single). They are educated and well paid but remain unmarried despite being past the age traditionally considered most appropriate for getting hitched in China.

Continue reading "Postcard from Beijing: China’s man drought" »

Welcome to the weekend @ The Punch

Today in 1984 Britain signs a historical agreement that would return Hong Kong back to China in 1997. The agreement ended 156 years of British colonial rule.

I never thought I would be writing about pandas. But this weekend - following millions of dollars and high-level diplomacy – a Chinese couple from Szechuan Province will settle into their new air-conditioned home in sunny Adelaide.

They are arriving by plane, not by boat. There will be no problems at either customs, or passport control.

After a year where there’s been a few tensions between two old friends, the Adelaide connection will help build a new bridge between China and Australia.

Continue reading "The bear facts on pandas" »

I was a nineteen-year-old student, not yet a journalist, when I travelled through China during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. I was visiting my father, then the British Ambassador to Outer Mongolia, and there were no international flights.

The only way to get to the Mongolian capital Ulan Bator in those days - it was 1971 - was to fly to Hong Kong, then go by train through China.

It was an intimidating journey for a young man: the train from Hong Kong took me only to the Chinese border, where I had to disembark and lug my enormous suitcase (I had packed for a two-month stay) about three hundred metres in the tropical summer heat, to the frontier itself.

Continue reading "No guarantee that China is the next world superpower" »

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit it, but if it wasn’t for Kevin Rudd, I would be among the majority of Australians who can only speak one language.

It was almost two years ago, and I was watching the news coverage of the Sydney APEC summit, enthralled by the pre-election battle between John Howard and Kevin Rudd.

Though the outcome already seemed a foregone conclusion, a few sentences of cool, calm and collected Mandarin from the PM-in-waiting seemed to put that final nail in the coffin.

Continue reading "Our PM shouldn’t be so shy about his language skills" »

In the past few months we have seen the highs and lows of our relationship with China on display.

Firstly we saw Australia avoid recession largely because of the strong demand by China for Australia’s resources. 

Then we saw a series of diplomatic incidents including the arrest of Australian businessman Stern Hu on grounds which are yet to become clear.  In addition it appears the Chinese Government has taken proactive action to show their displeasure at Australia for granting a visa to Chinese dissident leader Rebiya Kadeer.

Continue reading "Spot the difference between China and Stephen Conroy" »

I recently received a bribe in China. The 300 yuan ($52) was a reward for attending a local government press conference promoting a trade fair. At least that’s what I think it was about, everyone spoke in Chinese.

What did I give them? I’m not really sure. I’m a journalist but my role in this transaction was simply to be the token foreigner in the audience.

Like everyone else there, I was handed a bag that contained the cash in a white envelope and a glossy booklet promoting the trade fair.

Continue reading "Covering news China-style: the day I was bribed" »

Superficially, it’s an arthouse issue that affects a small number of culture vultures and cineastes who won’t see a movie unless it’s got subtitles.

It’s actually one of the most compelling and alarming stories in Australia today, as it shows how the most pernicious features of a totalitarian regime have been imported into our own country. And we should all be rallying behind its victim, the Melbourne Film Festival, as it tries to defend freedom of expression and assembly in the face of intimidation on behalf of the Chinese dictatorship.

The Punch spoke last night with the director of the festival, Richard Moore, who is trying to manage this event against a backdrop of website hacking, telephone sabotage, suspected surveillance and direct threats, all from supporters of Beijing who want the festival to pull one of its movies and cancel the Melbourne visit by the woman it profiles.

Continue reading "China exports censorship to an Australian film festival" »

The Uyghurs need a good spin doctor. 

These forgotten people of northwest China are the Tibetans the world doesn’t care about.

It might be because they’re Muslims.

Continue reading "At last, a voice for the latest victims of Chinese brutality" »

The world is entering a new dynamic which is merely a repetition of the recasting of the political, social and economic order that has happened for as long as man can write about it.

History is punctuated with the ebbs and flows of kingdoms, empires and political movements and the conflicts that are always apparent at the peripheries of influence that abuts competing interests. In the past, the cycle of influence was over, sometimes thousands and generally hundreds of years.

From the initial cultivation of land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and the Sumerian civilisation, to the Greeks, to the Romans, to the Qin Dynasty, the first imperial dynasty of the Chinese, to the British Empire, we notice that the rise and fall of empires accelerates as technology, personified by communications, military hardware, economic processes and other associated influences advances.

Continue reading "The real price of economic prosperity might be freedom" »

If you ever find yourself in a foreign prison awaiting representation from Australia on your behalf just pray that West Australian Premier Colin Barnett does not come through the door.

Not only is he unlikely to put up any kind of a fight for you, after a big Yum Cha lunch he may well agree to pull the hanging lever should your executioner be off sick.

Like the prince of a Chinese tributary kingdom of the middle-ages Colin Barnett travelled to Shanghai to assure his leaders that he wasn’t angry at them over the arrest of Stern Hu – actually it was our fault as Australians for over-reacting.

Continue reading "The best eunuch in the Chinese court: Colin Barnett" »

While the Australian media is working itself into a frenzy over the jailing of Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu, the public seems to be forming a more pragmatic view of our relationship with China.

The Federal Opposition’s attempts to whip up a new round of dog whistling over the arrest have fallen on deaf ears as the public accepts there are things that are outside the power of even a Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister.

But the failure of the Hu jailing to bite with the public may speak to a broader maturing in out attitude towards the emerging superpower to which our fortunes are so closely tied.

Continue reading "What we really think about Stern Hu" »

One of the more bracing moments of my adolescence involved going to the movies with a female friend, also in her late teens, to see the French film Betty Blue which opens with an explosive 10-minute sex scene which is arousing enough to fire up an entire retirement village, let alone an 18-year-old lad who is already as toey as a roman sandal.

When Beatrice Dalle finally got around to having her orgasm and the actual dialogue began - aside from the “oui! oui! oui! oui! oui!” spectacle we’d just witnessed - my friend, a hysterical young Francophile who’d just spent an off-year living in Paris, whispered to me: “This just isn’t going to survive the translation.”

Her pretence was eclipsed only by mine as, in the same way that she had a terminal dose of the French, I’d just come back from an off-year living in Mexico, and was so badly afflicted by a showy determination to steer any conversation in the direction of Latin America that it’s remarkable the two of us ever managed to have an intelligible conversation at all…

Continue reading "PM latest victim of bourgeois bilingual showpony disorder" »

He may be known as the Ruddbot, but when it comes to his much vaunted specialist skills on China, it would seem that batteries were not included.

As the Prime Minister plays catch up on being caught flat footed on the Stern Hu case, he needs to demonstrate that his special China skills are not just a party trick, but can genuinely be used in Australia’s interests.

When in Opposition, Kevin Rudd was quick to criticise John Howard, claiming he was “dragging his feet on providing Mr Hicks with a fair trial”. These were his exact words in a door stop he gave almost four years ago on August 2.

Continue reading "Free David Hicks, but fumble on Stern Hu" »

Nothing that follows is personally approved by David Penberthy or Rupert Murdoch, let alone Kevin Rudd. That’s the beauty of writing for a free media in a democracy.

However, it’s equally ludicrous to suggest that every word that appears in China’s state-owned media every day represents the personal views of Chinese president Hu Jintao.

I don’t know Hu - who really does? - but I’m not sure he would have chosen the noun “perfidy” to describe Rio Tinto’s betrayal of Chinalco a couple of months back. Yet that phrase was quickly interpreted as the semi-official, if colourful, position of China Inc to the collapse of the deal - purely because it ran on the “state-owned” Xinhua news agency.

Continue reading "How a man’s jailing exposed China’s state-run spin" »

餵。我的名字是凱文，我有一個非常大的問題 (Translation: Hello, my name is Kevin and I have a very big problem).

Oh how Kevin Rudd must be wishing right now for a dirty stoush with, oh, let’s say Malaysia, or Indonesia, or even better, one of the African nations.

How terribly unlucky for the Prime Minister that his first bona fide diplomatic crisis involves China. Our man in Beijing is facing calls to personally intervene in the case of Australian Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu, who’s being held without charge by Chinese authorities on suspicion of commercial espionage.

Continue reading "Hu’s Rudd’s biggest headache" »

CHINA is a huge country. Its landmass is 25 per cent bigger than Australia, its economy is 10 times larger, it has 60 times as many people and, I am led to be believe, significantly more BBQ duck restaurants.

Thankfully, Australia is still ahead in a few areas. We have more stars on our flag, we have won more cricket World Cups and, as developments in the past few weeks prove, we trounce the Chinese in corporate haggling.

Increasingly, Australian business is going to rub up against China. The People’s Republic is our No2 trading partner but is likely to regain the No1 slot from Japan this year or next. And Beijing’s “go global’’ directive, or zou chu qu, means China’s state-owned firms will continue to eye opportunities to join with, or buy outright, Australian companies.

Continue reading "China will have learned from failed mega-deal" »

This week there is an amazing discussion going on in Tokyo between Chinese and Japanese companies, academics and Government representatives about how to cooperate in the area of new energy. It is part of the ‘PVJapan Solar Power/Photovoltaic 2009’ conference and trade show.

Both countries are realizing that the new kind of economy we need to cut greenhouse gases, is itself going to become an opportunity for jobs and development. 

Japan’s PM Mr. Taro Aso raised the stakes back on June 9 when he said that solar power and electric cars are the foundation of Japan’s future economic growth and the way out of the financial crisis. He announced that by 2020 Japan’s new low-carbon sector will be a 50 trillion yen market ($AU650 billion), employing 1.4 million people.

Continue reading "Solar power puts China and Japan on top of the world" »

On Wednesday night China’s censors temporarily blocked Google and Gmail, an essential part of my communication with friends and family in Australia and used more than 20 million Chinese.

It was perhaps naive and even a little old fashioned of me to rely on just one e-mail account in Beijing. I know that the country’s net nanny is unpredictable and have been watching the escalating feud between the government and the world’s most popular search engine, which is being accused of containing excessive links to pornography.

The outage happened at about 9.30pm. A friend telephoned me and said that Google had been blocked. I tried several times to open Google.com and Gmail but the pages either timed out or I received a message that the connection was interrupted. China-based site Google.cn was also down.

Continue reading "When China pulls the plug on the Internet" »

Who needs Pauline Hanson when you’ve got Nathan Rees and Eric Roozendaal?

If you’re reading this article, it means that the Rees Government has done its bit to murder Australia’s reputation as a modern, sensible, civilised trading partner, a mature open economy which understands that while some jobs have gone offshore, many thousands of new ones have been created by pulling down our trade barriers.

These pre-Whitlamite drongos on Macquarie Street have effectively trashed Australia’s reputation by pandering to prejudice and an unsophisticated grasp of how modern economies work.

Continue reading "Labor’s new Hansonites - and your cheap Chinese shirts" »

You know things are bad in New South Wales when its government led by left-wing Premier, Nathan Rees, is trying to find ways to blame the Red Menace for its economic woes.

Today’s State budget includes protectionist measures to give priority for nearly $4 billion in goods and services to be purchased from Aussie companies, mostly at the expense of China.

It’s an idea with the intellectual depth of a children’s cartoon. Admittedly, by the end of the clip I am not really sure whether NSW Treasurer, Eric Roozendaal, is the scarecrow or the lion. But I know the NSW public is represented by the tin man who ultimately gets a punch in the face.

Continue reading "Labor finds red herrings under Chinese-made beds" »

It is 20 years to the day that the student protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were put down with brutal force by the Chinese Government.

This calculated act of state-sponsored violence was the most audacious expression of the Chinese dictatorship’s disregard for human rights. In full view of the world, with the above video still standing as a defining moment in history, China cemented its standing as a rogue state.

The face of modern Australia was also changed by Tiananmen. Our then prime minister Bob Hawke famously broke down on television, announcing that all 20,000 Chinese students then resident in our country could stay permanently. Today, Bob Hawke is a lobbyist with an office in Shanghai, and has spent much of the past week ducking requests for interviews.

Continue reading "Tiananmen: Never forget, unless you’re Bob Hawke" »