A Hongqi L5 limousine was parked outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing during a welcoming ceremony for Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain last December.Credit Petar Kujundzic/Reuters
Powerful and modern yet with a nod to past glories, the Hongqi L5 limousine appears to be the perfect vehicle for the image the Chinese government wants to project, and this the week state media reported that it has been designated an official car for a gathering of global leaders in Beijing next month.
On Tuesday, a photo of rows of the shiny black limousines — 18 feet long and outfitted with bulletproof windows — dominated the front page of The Beijing News. “Domestically produced Hongqi will take the spotlight at APEC,” the headline read, referring to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in the Chinese capital on Nov. 5-11. People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, posted a slide show on its website featuring photos of the limousine. It listed its price at 6 million renminbi, or $980,000.
With President Xi Jinping leading a campaign promoting national pride under the rubric “The Chinese Dream,” state media coverage of the limousine is not surprising. The country’s only domestically produced luxury car will be a feature of the summit meeting, a chance to show off China’s increasing power. President Obama is slated to attend, as are the leaders of Russia, Japan and other countries among APEC’s 21 members. Read more…
A Taiwanese television story on the incident reported at the Din Tai Fung restaurant in the Taipei 101 skyscraper.
Reports of Chinese tourists letting their toddlers urinate in public in Taipei have set off fresh debate about the manners of mainland visitors and whether they’re being unfairly stigmatized.
Parents allowing their children to relieve themselves over trash cans, pieces of paper or sometimes just the sidewalk are not uncommon sights on the mainland. But mainland parents permitting similar behavior while visiting Hong Kong or Taiwan have triggered a backlash among locals who see it as evidence of the harmful influence of huge numbers of Chinese tourists on their quality of life.
On Sunday, the Taiwan-based Apple Daily reported that a mainland family had allowed their 3-year-old boy to urinate into a bottle at one of Taipei’s best-known restaurants, the Din Tai Fung outlet in the Taipei 101 skyscraper, on Oct. 2. The bottle then splashed on their table, and Apple Daily’s report on the ensuing mess — and the family’s subsequent demand that the restaurant replace their food — raised complaints in Taiwan about the behavior of mainland visitors. Read more…
Jiang Jiatin, accused of leading a criminal gang, listened as he was sentenced to death in a court in Kunming, Yunnan Province, in 2009.Credit Xue Luo/European Pressphoto Agency
The Chinese government regards how many people it puts to death each year a state secret, making it difficult to gain an exact understanding of the scale of capital punishment in a country long thought to execute more people than the rest of the world combined.
But according to estimates by the San Francisco-based human rights group Dui Hua, about 2,400 people were executed in China last year, far fewer than the 12,000 put to death in 2002. Despite that downward trend, China still leads the rest of the world, Dui Hua said in a statement this week. According to Amnesty International, at least 778 people were executed last year outside China.
Dui Hua said it expected the number of executions in China to remain steady this year, with the broader move away from capital punishment offset in part by its increased use in the far western region of Xinjiang, where tensions have erupted in violence between the authorities and ethnic Uighurs, the mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking minority who say their religious and cultural rights are being ignored. Read more…
However negotiations proceed between pro-Chinese government officials and pro-democracy student leaders, basic political and economic issues will endure, according to an editorial in The New York Times. Read more »
Should China build a new development bank, despite U.S. opposition? David Dollar, Hugh White, Oliver Rui and Elizabeth Economy address the issue in Room for Debate. Read more »
Cybersecurity monitoring groups and security experts said iCloud users in China may have given away login information to a third party, Paul Mozur, Nicole Perlroth and Brian X. Chen report. Read more »
After more than three weeks of protests, the meeting resembled less a negotiating session than a high school debate, Michael Forsythe and Alan Wong report. Read more »
A couple posed for wedding photographs against a backdrop of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong on Oct. 1.Credit Philippe Lopez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Last Wednesday night, platoons of students, some wearing colorful handkerchiefs across their faces like bank robbers in a spaghetti western, others wearing surgical masks, fanned out across the heart of the Central financial district in Hong Kong. In small packs they approached the Stock Exchange and the skyscrapers housing some of the world’s biggest banks, hoping to set up new street barricades.
Some found their way into the eastbound lanes of a highway tunnel next to the Mandarin Oriental hotel, closed to traffic by a barricade the pro-democracy protesters had set up about 200 yards from its exit. There, they encountered Adrian Ng and Claudia Ho — engaged to be married — with their wedding photographer.
Mr. Ng and Ms. Ho, both 25, have known each other since their childhood in Hong Kong, but only became romantically involved when he was in his first year as a student in Canada. Now they have the quintessential establishment jobs: He’s a corporate headhunter, she’s a public relations professional for a major real estate company. But both were wearing the yellow ribbons that symbolize support for the antiestablishment, pro-democracy Occupy Central movement which has captured attention around the world. Read more…
Footage of a mother panda and cub taken this month in Sichuan Province.
A national park in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan has released a video of a mother panda and cub, which Chinese news media say is the first time an infrared camera has been used to film such scenes at night. The footage, shot with a camera set up this year in the Blackwater River Nature Reserve, shows the mother panda sleeping with the cub, apparently not very soundly. Later, she carefully looks around, then takes the cub by the scruff of its neck and walks out of the den.
Wei Liao, an official with the nature reserve, told the Chengu Daily that the cub appeared to be about 40 days old, and that it and the mother appeared healthy. Estimates of the wild panda population range from 1,600 to 3,000, while about 300 of the endangered animals live in zoos in China and around the world.
A slowing in the pace of growth, partly by design, has made assessing the Chinese economy and predicting its prospects difficult, Neil Gough reports. Read more »
