State media said the barrage of charges against Zhou Yongkang included taking bribes, helping relatives and cronies plunder government assets and leaking official secrets, Chris Buckley reports. Read more »
Joshua Wong, the student leader who helped set off a monthslong confrontation, says he knows his hunger strike is aimed at achieving “the impossible,” Chris Buckley and Alan Wong report. Read more »
Premier Li Keqiang of China has met with a visiting Japanese friendship delegation, in a sign of the increasing thaw between the neighbors after more than two years of political tension.
On Thursday, Mr. Li, the second-highest-ranking Chinese leader, held talks with members of the 21st Century Committee for China-Japan Friendship, a government advisory body made up of retired diplomats and scholars. The members of the Japanese delegation, led by Taizo Nishimuro, had arrived in Beijing on Wednesday and met with their Chinese counterparts, headed by Tang Jiaxuan, a former Chinese State Council member.
During Thursday’s meeting in Beijing, Mr. Li told the group that the “healthy and stable growth” of bilateral relations was “of vital importance” to both countries as well as the region, according to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.
Mr. Li also said that moving forward required “the spirit of drawing lessons from history,” but did not address a continuing territorial dispute in the East China Sea directly, Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported, citing a Japanese government official.
Cleanliness is crucial to academic success at one Chinese university where compulsory labor is part of a program designed to award class credits while instilling students with proper moral values.
But for many students at the Shengda Economics, Trade and Management College in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, the program is an unnecessary burden, one they say detracts from their studies. It also carries echoes of China’s camps for so-called re-education through labor, which were used to silence activists and dissidents before they were abolished last year.
During winter, the sky is still dark at 6:30 a.m. when the university’s first-year students begin sweeping the 165-acre campus. Another cleaning shift awaits them later in the day. Each shift can take up to an hour, students said. Afterward, inspectors check the students’ work. Should a student miss a piece of trash or errant cigarette butt, he or she can lose academic credits and the opportunity to compete for certain titles and scholarships.
Read more…
“Choking,” “post-apocalyptic” or just “crazy bad,” Beijing’s air pollution problem is obvious to anyone who spends more than a little time in the city. In a survey by the Pew Research Center last year, 47 percent of Chinese respondents cited air pollution as a “very big problem,” comparable to corruption and income disparity. The figure was up from 36 percent in 2012. But Beijing is also not the only city to have faced dire pollution. On a recent visit to Beijing, Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, reminded participants at a seminar at Peking University that America’s second-most-populous city also once wrestled with foul air.
“Our first smog attack came during World War II, and it was so bad that some thought it was a chemical weapons attack by Japanese forces,” Mr. Garcetti said. He listed rapid population growth and an increase in the number of motor vehicles as contributors to environmental woes in both Beijing and Los Angeles.
Another who has drawn parallels between the two cities’ fight for clean air is Chip Jacobs, an author based in Los Angeles who has written extensively about this “hazy brotherhood.” In 2008, Mr. Jacobs and William J. Kelly, a senior correspondent at California Current, an energy publication, wrote “Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles.” Now they have turned their attention to China in “The People’s Republic of Chemicals,” the story of how the country finds itself, in the authors’ words, “a toxified netherworld.” A Chinese edition is set for release next year by the Central Party School Publishing House. In an interview, Mr. Jacobs discussed Beijing, Los Angeles and the role of the public in battling smog:
Read more…
Ending the occupation won’t be a capitulation, especially not for the young, who have had a political awakening, Benny Tai Yiu-ting writes in an op-ed. Read more »
China’s own satellite navigation system has won a stamp of approval from an international maritime body, an important step toward its goal of global acceptance for its answer to the United States’ Global Positioning System (GPS).
The Maritime Safety Committee of the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations body that sets standards for international shipping, formally included Beidou in the World-Wide Radionavigation System during its Nov. 17-21 meeting. This means that the Chinese system has become the third system, after GPS and Russia’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), recognized by the United Nations body for operations at sea.
The inclusion of Beidou “is a recognition that Beidou can provide positioning data of adequate accuracy for its coverage area,” said Kevin Pollpeter, who focuses on China’s space program and information warfare issues at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, San Diego.
Read more…
One group said on Thursday that it would decide within about a week whether to give up the street occupations that have lasted more than two months, Chris Buckley and Alan Wong report. Read more »
China will stop using organs from executed prisoners in transplants on Jan. 1, the firmest deadline given to date for ending the widely criticized practice, an official said this week.
Dr. Huang Jiefu, a surgeon in charge of revamping China’s organ transplant system, said at a conference in the southern city of Kunming on Wednesday that the number of voluntary organ donors had risen quickly over the past year, but was still quite low, The Southern Metropolis Daily reported. As a result, China will face extreme pressure in providing suitable organs for the estimated 1.5 million people awaiting transplants.
Dr. Huang said that so far this year, organs had been collected from 1,500 people who had previously agreed to be donors upon their deaths. In the previous three years combined, there were only 1,448 voluntary donors.
In recent years, Taiwan has seen the development of a number of eco-friendly initiatives, from a protected marine habitat to a high-speed rail system to a ban on shark-fin soup, Adam H. Graham reports. Read more »