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Beijing worries about ‘green opium’
May 8, 2009 (WiC 14)

You can get quarterly GDP statistics, and monthly tallies of electricity output, but there is one Chinese statistic that is much more elusive: how many golf courses are there in the country? In a report released in April, Globrand, a Chinese ...

Tikka to Tamiflu

A Chinese spice to ward off the flu
May 8, 2009 (WiC 14)

Even a global pandemic can have a silver lining. In China, news of the latest flu strain H1N1 will not unduly perturb growers of the star aniseed spice. As cultivators of the core ingredient in leading anti-flu drugs like Tamiflu, they will ...

Wish we weren’t here

Mexicans bear the brunt of swine flu response
May 8, 2009 (WiC 14)

As far as Mao was concerned, enemies of the state could come in all shapes and sizes. Take the Kill a Sparrow campaign – the best known of a series of measures designed to counter the Four Pests in the late 1950s – in which citizens banged ...

Water, water, not everywhere

Polluting a reservoir in the interests of great television
May 8, 2009 (WiC 14)

Could a battle between the forces of Zhuge Liang and Cao Cao in 209 AD really cause a present day environmental disaster? It seems that it could. The disaster site was the Yangxi Reservoir in Zhejiang province, which was used by a TV crew to ...

Steelmakers and miners are still at loggerheads over the price of iron ore
May 8, 2009 (WiC 14)

Based on the archeological evidence, China first discovered iron ore in 600 BC. And it keeps on finding more. The People’s Daily reports that an “enormous” 2 billion tonne iron deposit has been found in the city of Benxi. This discovery ...

Sock it to them

How two cities are thriving despite a collapse in exports
May 8, 2009 (WiC 14)

In spite of an unprecedented drop in exports, Datang and Zhili – two manufacturing cities in Zhejiang Province – are bucking the trend, and booming. Their secret? Sticking to their knitting. Referred to as the “sock capital of the ...

After 700 years of acrimony are Sino-Japanese relations looking up?
May 8, 2009 (WiC 14)

Rivalry between China and Japan dates back some time. In 1274, China’s Emperor Khubilai Khan established an ‘Office for the Chastisement of Japan’. Chastisement took a more practical turn in 1281, when he sent an invasion fleet of 4,400 ...

A new kind of bridge loan

China’s big banks are lending like there’s no tomorrow
May 8, 2009 (WiC 14)

How do you make a grown man cry? Make him watch Marley & Me, perhaps? Or in the case of Wang Jian tell him he can lend you the money to build a bridge. Wang told Southern Weeked that he indeed did shed tears – of joy – when his ...

A novel about 1970s China
Apr 30, 2009 (WiC 13)

It is not often a Chinese novel gets translated into English; and in this case the book’s title seems to make the point – the novel is simply named English. Set in the grim days of the Cultural Revolution, Wang Gang’s ...

Everything must go

Why Chinese consumers benefit when export firms cut prices and sell locally
Apr 30, 2009 (WiC 13)

A case of the pen being mightier than the sword? Not exactly, but the protests at a Dongguan factory gate did involve pencils, reports the 21CN Business Herald. They were brandished by an angry group of domestic supermarket bosses. “We ...

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