China could learn and gain from Nordic Democracy to govern progressive diverse nation - best of both worlds for capitalism and socialism in practice

While many Finnish are knowledgeable, wise and analytical, there are some who do not read widely and become susceptible to hearsay from journalists promoting sensational news and ill disciplined liberalism without regard for history, culture and national sovereignty and international peace.

http://www.eaea.org/index.php?k=12041
The truth about Tibet and Dalai Lama

By Eirik Granqvist (China Daily)

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2011-12/21/content_14297105.htm

Most Finns (Swedes and Swiss) are well educated, widely read and well travelled people.

Chinese are pragmatic people. Its government and intellectuals are better off studying the Nordic democratic models which suit China than looking at the elusive and failed American and Greek models of democracy.

In the past, religions such as Buddhism have been imported into China and given a Chinese cultural identity. The same can be said of growing Christian foothold in China which play an important social role while not forgetting practices that are traditionally Chinese.

Some visionary forecasters are placing their bets on a cohesive multicultural Chinese surviving the odds and challenges of globalisation and development than say "democratic" divisive and sectarian  India.

At the end of the tunnel, China will find its way to build a unique model of democracy suited to its own needs. It will not benefit much from a foreign formula that is out of place with Chinese culture.

Who is Chinese defector / dissident / blogger / spy novelist Yang Hengjun?

Before anyone throw their weight behind dissidents who dared to stand up against the mighty Chinese government, ask if you really know who is this latest enigma who disappeared and reappeared : Yang Hengjun 杨恒均.

http://baike.baidu.com/view/1005189.htm

After the big uproar over secret police detaining Yang, he has emerged and appeared to have taken ill and was hospitalised. His mobile ran out of power.  Many speculations have been thrown up, the most popular being the all powerful Chinese government bowing down and seeking compromise? More like journalists who built up a storm in the teacup trying to save face. Firstly, it is unlikely that the Chinese authorities would arrest and release a criminal so quickly. Don't they always plan and plot against the enemies? One possibility is some upstart in the police had overreacted and acted on the own accord. Yang's activities are indeed dubious and cause some concern. It is not suprising that it should come under scrutiny.

http://blogs.voanews.com/breaking-news/2011/03/30/mystery-deepens-as-missing-australian-writer-contacts-friends/

Yang Hengjun is no innocent retiree contented with writing spy novels. He has an axe to grind. He even has a website which churns out dozens of articles a week which are strident and harsh towards the Chinese government. In an interview conducted by danwei in 2008, Hengjun acknowledged that the Chinese authorities are less stringent and have not been as rigorous in censoring his blog articles.

http://www.danwei.org/blogs/cnbloggercon_2008_interview_se.php
http://yanghengjun.com/

Before becoming an Australian, Yang Hengjun worked for China's foreign affairs department.  He "retired"  from the Chinese Foreign Ministry and became a successful businessman.   Yang is by all counts a part of the Chinese elite, having received his education in Fudan university and later worked as a senior government official, coveted position hankered by millions of educated Chinese. Yang had also earned two higher degrees from Wales and University of Technology Sydney.

Should we believe the words of people in the likes of Yang wholesale without questioning any more than we distrust and condemn the CCP so willingingly? We know some former Chinese officials who live among us who have conducted businesses on the sideline and accumulated wealth.  The likely path was to empty their assets from China, a common figure of speech for planning an escape after one has dug enough gold and want to avoid being caught. Yet many of us in western countries and the free world admire these ex-Chinese officials who denounce their former governments even though they have much unexplained intrigues attached to their biodata. Those who are always inclined to point to the massive corruption of the Chinese bureaucracy and CCP are willing to forget Yang and the others' past. To give them the benefit of doubt, maybe Yang and others have reformed. But the bottomline is that these dissidents capitalising on their advantage of possessing a foreign passport have no right to claim moral high ground.
The backdrop of liberal democratic 'jasmine' revolutions in the Middle East would have caused many long reigning governments and regimes to take precautions. The jitters have rippled to the ordinary folks as well. Upheavals, no matter how one justifies it, would be disruptive in the short run.  It is certainly difficult to rationalise one happening in China now. More unacceptable is when these are supported by external parties.

Yang is utterly irresponsible when he called on Chinese citizens to go to Tiananmen if they wanted to show patriotism. Must change necessarily accompany bloodshed? The TAM incident was a grave mistake on the part of the intransigent students and the government crackdow. It is not unique in the history of developing country and developed nations in the past. Like some so-called victims Tiananmen many of us may know personally, stories were often exaggerated or even concocted to gain a passport to a better life overseas.  The true heroes stayed behind - some unfortunately sacrificed their lives, some were detained and many more are living a peaceful lives now. There are many channels Chinese citizens could express their views on social issues and complaints are taken seriously and do see the day of light.

When the populace and netizens rally behind the Chinese government, it is not considered democracy. It must be brainwashing based on the assumption that Chinese people have no minds or voices or their own at all.  Freedom of speech does not work both ways. Pro-western idealists, activists and liberal commentators who criticise the CCP and Chinese patriotism are beyond reproach.

Thousands of years ago when Chinese historians first documented significant events, there have been numerous cases of insiders who either failed in their duty as gatekeepers or collaborated with foreigners to invade China. Some are deemed traitors who worked solely for their personal interests and gains while others' motivations and goals are less clearly defined or determinable when they claimed to save the populace from tyrants. The Chinese civilisation has lasted many centuries, longer than the glorious Romans and Greek could claim credit for. Surely, they must have got many things right.

Smart and Green - Made in China and the real inside story behind currency manipulation allegations and trade deficits

While China is entering the brave new world at breaking neck speed and setting new records every year, many of us in the developed who have been lulled into complacency have developed a penchant for blaming others for our own slack.    

Smart and green - and made in China

Excerpts

The beat goes on about America's massive trade deficit with China, China's mountain of accumulated greenbacks, and its unwillingness to let its currency rise against the staggering US dollar.

But the headlines about the world's biggest and most unbalanced bilateral economic relationship obscure what is really going on in US-China economic relations.

These imbalances are no doubt an enormous political problem. Americans complain that unfair Chinese trade costs them millions of manufacturing jobs. Beijing is spooked by the prospect of a hot money asset bubble. The G20 thinks US-China-led global imbalances threaten a sustainable recovery.
But the world economy is way ahead of the politics. Enter Apple's iPhone and BYD's E6 electric car.

The trade statistics show that last year more than 11 million iPhones were "made in China" and shipped to the US at a total value of just over $US2 billion. There were about $US100 million in American parts in these iPhones. So iPhones added about $US1.9 billion to the official US trade deficit with China.

But research by the Asian Development Bank uncovers the economic reality written on the back of every iPhone, "designed in California, assembled in China". It says components from Germany, Japan and Korea make up about two-thirds of the $US200 wholesale price of an iPhone. Chinese assembly of them is worth only about $US6 per iPhone, less than half the cost of the American parts.

As a result iPhones were a net export of about $US50 million from the US to China, not the $US2 billion deficit in the trade statistics. Germany, Japan and Korea were net exporters to China. And none of this takes into account the 50 per cent or so profit Apple made on iPhone retail sales.

If Americans want to complain about the evils of iPhone globalisation, they should be worrying about why the disk drives, memory and screens come from Germany, Japan and Korea rather than the US.

In fact, iPhones are a perfect example of where China no longer wants to be in the global economy. For the past 25 years, China has been a low-cost assembler of products like Apple's. This has helped lift hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty.

Now Chinese citizens in coastal mega cities, such as Shanghai and Shenzhen, earn too much and want better working conditions than Apple assembly jobs. Cheap assembly jobs are moving to countries such as Vietnam. Protests against working conditions in Chinese factories are rising.

This is why China is trying to position itself as a global greentech leader. BYD, "build your dream", offers a window into the transformation that is taking place in the Chinese economy.

The US is BYD's first target market for the E6, through its new Los Angeles headquarters for marketing and distribution. The E6 will sell in the US for about $US40,000, more expensive than the hybrid Prius but about half the cost of a Tesla, the Silicon Valley electric sports car that competes for attention with Porsches rather than the Prius.

BYD E6 electric car sales in the US will be tiny next year. Americans may demand more creature comforts than BYD offers. But the fact that a Chinese company is pioneering what could be the must-have consumer durable of the next decade is extraordinary.

Rather than fretting about low-tech Chinese assembly of goods often designed in America, the US should be worrying about mass Chinese production of high-tech electric cars to get ahead in the coming green race.

-  written by Professor Geoffrey Garrett is chief executive of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. 

Published on December 23, 2010

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/smart-and-green--and-made-in-china-20101222-195ho.html

China's latest Hormone Milk Scandal Update

Following the major upheaval over domestically manufactured melamine tainted milk powder in 2008, recent news reports are not more platable to consumers. 

China's Health Ministry orders probe into milk powder hormone claims. 

Parents and doctors in Hubei were reported earlier this month voicing fears that milk powder produced by Syrutra had caused at least three infant girls to develop prematurely.

Ministry spokesman Deng Haihua said at a regular press conference that food safety authorities were already testing samples of milk powder made by Syrutra, a dairy company set up in Qingdao, a coastal city in east China's Shandong Province, in 1998.

Causes for sexual prematurity of children were complicated and could be caused by a wide range of factors, and experts had no way to definitely determine if food or environmental factors were involved yet, he said.
Deng said a 2008 regulation banned sales and reproduction of products made from livestock under the influence of drugs, or those failing to pass health and quarantine inspection standards.

He said estrogen hormones were forbidden in milk powder products and the Ministry of Agriculture had formulated test procedures for estrogen hormones and had provided them to Hubei authorities.

Syrutra's stock prices at Nasdaq fell by almost 27 percent on Monday.
The statement said it was "unscientific and unreasonable for some media to blame premature puberty on the milk formula."

Syrutra's claim was backed by some experts.

Yao Hui, deputy head of the endocrine department of Wuhan Children's Hospital, said among the latest cases treated for the condition at the hospital, three of the four children had never eaten baby formula made by Syrutra. The other baby used to eat Syrutra formula, but switched to other brands last year.


Unlike the melamine case, dairy companies would gain no commercial benefit from adding hormones to its products, Monday's Beijing Times quoted Wang as saying.

But that did not make the milk formula hormone-free, Wang said, adding the substance might have entered the food chain when cattle were reared by farmers.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-08/10/c_13438812.htm

Owing to the benefit of its quick modernisation, surely China could learn from past mistakes and skip the scandals that plagued the USA milk industry in the last century.

The Birth of America’s Dairy Industry

During the early years of commercial dairy production in the US, most dairies were in cities - and they were filthy. Stables held up to 2,000 cows that were fed the waste residues from grain used in nearby liquor distilleries and breweries. The milk produced by these urban dairies was known as “swill milk,” which would later be referred to by historians as “white poison.”

Because of the close relationship between alcohol production and swill dairies, some of the first reformers to call for stricter standards in the dairy industry were the anti-alcohol temperance groups. These early reformers pushed for the importation of “country milk” into the cities, taking advantage of new railroads and other transportation improvements. v Milk was transported into the cities by rail, but because it was transported without refrigeration, it was no healthier than swill milk.

The High Price of Factory Farmed Milk

With each passing year, more small to mid-sized dairy farmers go out of business. Worn down by production costs that always go up and income that is unpredictable at best, dairymen and women who have been in the business for generations are calling it quits, and are selling off their herds to corporate operations or selling their land for development. Others have tried to adapt by getting big instead of getting out—increasing production through the use of artificial hormones, antibiotics, and highly-concentrated feed, and moving cows off pasture and into large confinement facilities.

Meanwhile, consumers are buying low-quality milk that is potentially harmful to their health. The only winners in this system are the dairy corporations that are willing to go to great lengths to cut costs and increase profit, regardless of the consequences for consumers, animals and the environment.
http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/dairy/

Breeding, Artificial Hormones and Feed

Because it’s cheaper to produce more milk from fewer cows (smaller herds require less space, feed and other inputs), the corporate dairy industry aims to maximize efficiency by increasing the amount of milk that each cow produces. As a result, the use of breeding, feeding inputs and new technology led to a quadrupling of the average amount of milk produced per dairy cow between 1950 and 2005.

With the invention of artificial insemination, farmers have been able to take tight control over the breeding and genetic makeup of their dairy herds. Using this technology, a single bull may sire tens of thousands of cows, thus minimizing the diversity of the dairy cow gene pool.

Not only are cows bred to produce maximum quantities of milk, their feed consists of fat, energy, and protein-rich grains to increase milk production and replace the energy lost by giving off such large quantities of milk. However, since cows are naturally grass-eaters, they develop digestive problems when they feed on primarily grains like corn and soy. xxi But perhaps the most drastic measure that dairies take to boost milk production is the use of artificial growth hormones such as rBGH - said to increase per-cow milk yield by 10-15 percent.

All of these practices do not only result in health problems in cows, they may also be dangerous to humans that consume their milk.