Humanoid Robot in Japan Welcomes Merkel

Ms Michelle Obama, How's Beijing Smell?

Ms Michelle Obama, first lady of America, visited the Great Wall in the mountain of Mutianyu with the two first daughters during their staying in Beijing. The picture above demonstrated how happy they were at the top of the Great Wall.

Well, I'm curious but may I have the honor to ask a question: how does the air smell, ma'am? Not so comfortable huh?

The police had cleaned the travelers out in advance to make sure that the first family would not be disturbed while enjoying the view, yet, although they were able to clean the people out, they were unable to clean the smog/haze out of the Great Wall.

Air pollution keeps a concerned issue in Beijing. Some temporary steps, like shut-down of factories, are taken in case of some big events like the national congress conferences or first family's trip to China to clean the air for a couple of days, however, lasting measurements are hard to applied due to various governmental obstacles.

Well, now, First Lady tasted the real smog/haze herself, maybe she would understand more how normal Chinese live their everyday lives.

Excellent Photo of Putin

Conflict between Russia and Ukraine

Russia: From February to March

Comments on "The longer walk to equality" from Economists

Comments:

1, In contrast to many people's imagination, the racial gap in the post-Mandela era is larger than the time when Mandela was jailed.

2, Actually this situation is expected, as you can not turn around until you slow down at first while driving.

3, As discussed in the article, the slower growth of nonwhite's income is because of misguided governance, low-quality education and skills shortages. Massive unemployment is one result of these reasons.

4, To decrease the real income gap is really a long walk to go. South Africa needs patience. It would be useless to subsidize nonwhite directly. They need really to improve nonwhite's practical education and labor skills.

5, I wonder whether South Africa is on the right way, but it should realize they need to endure the extending gap before they can shrink it.

South African inequality over the lifetime of Nelson Mandela

ROLIHLAHLA MANDELA (later Madiba to his countrymen, Nelson to the wider world) was born into a British-ruled South Africa in 1918. The Natives Land Act—passed just five years previously—was already enforcing mass segregation. By the time Mandela reached the age of 30, government laws were becoming even more oppressive and the Apartheid system was introduced. Prospects for black citizens were deteriorating, with average income increasingly dwarfed by the wages of ethnic whites.

At the point of Mr Mandela's arrest in 1962, the wage gap had yawned wider still, continuing along the same trend throughout the majority of his years behind bars. Against immense international opposition and the pressures of sanctions, black nationals remained suppressed beneath Apartheid rule, despite constituting an increasingly larger proportion of the populous. Towards the end of Mandela's incarceration—through to the abolition of Apartheid—fortunes did reverse slightly, but by now the disparity had grown so large that it barely made a dent. Income growth improved substantially for all South Africans after his 1994 election victory, but sufficiently more so for whites, and the balance has been disproportionately weighted in their favour—and increasingly that of Asian South Africans—since he stepped down in 1999.

Under its own majority rule, the lot of the ever-growing black population—today forming over three-quarters of the national total—has been notably poor. Misguided governance, low-quality education, skills shortages and massive unemployment levels of around 40% have left it more disadvantaged today than when Nelson Mandela was still behind bars. Black income has virtually flat-lined, betraying tremendous gulfs between the wealth of the different racial groups. Sadly, the nation Mandela leaves behind today remains one of the least equal in the world.

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What Do China and North Korea Have in Common as for Their Top Leaders? No.2

Another similarity between China and North Korea is: Half of the coffin-watchers of the last leader were killed or jailed by the rest half.

In 1976, Mao Zedong passed away. Soon after his death Jiang Qing his wife ( the woman in black in the picture above), together with some so-called counter-revolutionists, was jailed by other CPC tycoons.

In 2013, after Jang Song-thaek was arrested and executed soon, 5 of the 7 people who ever walked around Kim Jong il's coffin car were cleared or jailed.

This is the destiny of tyrannies, isn't it?

//Dear President of China

Thomas L. Friedman

MEMO to: China’s President Xi Jingping.
From: A Friend of Your Country.

Dear President Xi, in recent years there’s been a tug of war inside the global investment community between those who think China is a bubble about to burst and therefore a “screaming short” and those who believe that China has big problems — but also big tools and smart leaders — and will find a way forward, even if at a more normal growth rate. I lean toward the second camp, but looking at some of China’s recent behavior I’m beginning to wonder: Maybe your system is more frail than I thought?

I say that as someone who wants to see China succeed in empowering its people to realize their full potential so they can better participate in shaping China’s future and integrate with the world. Anyone who is telling you that American policy makers want to see China fail doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Our two economies and fates are totally intertwined today.

So, I wish China’s people well. Many Americans do. That is why I am writing you today. I believe you’re about to make a terrible, terrible mistake.

The Chinese-language websites of The Wall Street Journal and Reuters were recently blocked, and those of Bloomberg News and The New York Times have both been blocked for months. More important, The Times and Bloomberg together have more than 20 journalists in China whose visas are up for renewal by the end of December and, so far, your government is refusing to act on them — in apparent retaliation for both organizations exposing the enormous wealth amassed by relatives of senior Chinese leaders, including yours. The rumor is that you intend to deny both organizations the right to report from China.

China experts tell me that this unprecedented crackdown is prompted by your feeling that we’ve crossed a red line. You apparently thought the rules of the game were that the foreign press, local media and social media could write anything they wanted about corruption and social protests at the local and provincial level — indeed, it was a way for the central government to track and curb corruption — but that such focus should never be brought to the financial dealings of the top leaders of the Communist Party.

Sir, if a red line has been crossed, it has been by your officials and by technology. How so? There have been enough small stories in your own media — tips of icebergs — that suggest a widespread amassing of assets by family members of the most senior Communist Party officials. This kind of asset grab may not be illegal in all cases, but it surely could not happen at this scale without people taking advantage of their positions and the lack of transparency at the top.

Just last March, Chinese authorities quickly deleted from the blogosphere photos of a fatal Beijing car crash, believed to involve the son of a close ally of then-President Hu Jintao. The car was a Ferrari. The driver was killed and two young women with him badly injured. How could such a young man afford a Ferrari?

There was no way the foreign press was going to permanently ignore such stories that so many Chinese were talking about online. And that became even more true with the financialization of your economy and the emergence of a shareholding culture that required your companies and markets to comply with international norms for public filings of corporate structures and shareholders.

It was inevitable that once those filings were in place reporters in China would, as we did, hire accountants and lawyers to scrutinize these public records and discover things — like the fact that former Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s 90-year-old mother, a retired schoolteacher, had in her name an investment in a large Chinese financial services company valued around $100 million and Wen’s son, daughter, younger brother and brother-in-law had all also become extraordinarily wealthy.

Who crossed the red line here? We’d argue that it was some of your colleagues and their kids in opting for industrial-scale greed — combined with the new technology to expose it. That technology is not going away, so the excesses and corruption better. The Times and Bloomberg did your leadership a huge service in exposing this. It was a warning heart attack. The No. 1 cause of death of Chinese regimes in history is greed and corruption.

If you throw all our correspondents out of China, I can tell you exactly what will happen: They will set up offices in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea and do nothing other than comb through financial records from afar, without the balancing alternative to travel in China, meet and hear from Chinese people face to face, and write with nuance about other issues. Also, it will force us to evict your journalists. We will not let you enjoy our openness while you blind us.

President Xi, you are right that exposure of huge, high-level asset grabs poses an existential threat to your party’s rule. But you’re wrong if you blame those exposing these excesses rather than those perpetrating them.

When China was taking off in the 1980s and 1990s, it could get away with maintaining open markets with a closed political system. I don’t believe that will be possible in this century, certainly not to the degree of the past. Over the last 10 years, the world has gone from connected to hyper-connected. The net effect is that in more and more countries — including China — wealth is getting concentrated at the top, but, at the same time, more power to speak and organize is being distributed at the bottom and more power to see — transparency — is being injected everywhere.

CHINA has more than 300 million micro-bloggers on your Twitter equivalent, Weibo, half of China is now on the Internet and China has 1 billion cellphones in use, many with cameras. There is no way in such a world that the focus on corruption and financial excesses can just stay localized. See dictionary for: Occupy Wall Street, Tahrir Square and Edward Snowden. They are all stories of what happens when wealth gets concentrated at the top, power gets distributed at the bottom and transparency gets injected everywhere.

Beijing ought to be concerned about what the general public will do if the secretive, back-room dealing that has enriched some elites — which every day more Chinese can see and discuss among themselves — remains a forbidden topic for public discussion and reform, and therefore mass protest becomes the only option to address it.

President Xi, for your sake and the sake of stability in China, please don’t make the mistake of blaming the messengers. The Great Chinese Firewall you need to construct can’t be against the truth. It has to be against corruption.

Sincerely yours,

A Friend of China.

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What Do China and North Korea Have in Common as for Their Top Leaders?

What do China and North Korea the two communist countries have in common as for their top leaders?

The answers are somewhat intriguing: the leaders of both China and North Korea are marked as the unprecedented revolutionary leaders in the world, while their most close relatives are all counter-revolutionists.

China:

Mao Zedong, the husband and revolutionist

versus

Jiang Qing, the wife and counter-revolutionist.

North Korea:

Kim Jong-un, the nephew and revolutionist

versus

Chang Song-thaek, the uncle and counter-revolutionist

Is it weird? NO. This is the very portrays of totalitarian regimes.

Current Heated Topic in China: "You're Nothing Without The Motherland"

Cartoon by @变态辣椒
Translate by me

News source:

Business Insider:

"An anonymous anti-Western post called 'You're Nothing Without The Motherland' is blowing up on Chinese blogs and social media sites like Weibo, reports the South China Morning Post.

"'You're Nothing Without The Motherland' warns China's citizens to keep an eye out for Western powers that wish to destabilize the nation and “take advantage of social instability to harm Chinese people”.

"“China would be in chaos if it lost the leadership of the CCP and this would be a catastrophe for the 1.3 billion Chinese people,” the post says.

"This comes amid tensions between the U.S., Japan, South Korea, and China over air space over the South China Sea. Moreover, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron arrived in Beijing yesterday — a Bloomberg reporter was barred from a presser with Cameron and Premier Li Keqiang — and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is about to arrive for a state visit as well.

"In the post, the United States is singled out as “an initiator of plots” to foment chaos."

However, lots of netizens made jokes or cartoons to satire the official propaganda. Like the image above.

China's ADZ Demonstrates Its Over-self-conceit

The China's claim of ADZ, short for Air Defence Zone, and the reactions of its neighbors (mainly the US, Japan and South Korea), demonstrates China's over self-conceit.

US Air Force Chose Slow B-52 to Challenge China's ADZ

*: ADZ=Air Defence Zone

As soon as China unilaterally declared her Air Defence Zone, US Air Force flew two B-52 bomber to challenge the zone. The reason why they chose the slow and clumsy B-52 was so simple (above).

China "Air Defence Zone" Challenged Continuously

Image from weibo.com; Translated by me.

News source:
China claimed an expanding Air Defence Zone including Diaoyu Islands/Senkaku Islands the disputed territory; however US, Japan, South Korea declared continuously they would not obey China's instruction and continue their exiting flight plans.

Gary Locke, the U.S. Ambassador to China, Resigned

Gary Locke, the US Ambassador to China, made a statement about his resign. He said he would leave Beijing for Seattle in the beginning of 2014.

Locke did not explain his real reasons why he resigned, but I think he had to resign because he may have caught lung cancer due to the choking Beijing air if he continued his job as an ambassador. See my meme cartoon above.

--OK, I am just kidding above. I believe Locke did not resign for catching lung cancer; however, the Beijing air condition is doubtlessly very terrible:

The Change of Russian Leaders

Chinese Protesters Over-reacted to Jimmy Kimmel's "Kids' Table"

As a Chinese guy, I do think that the Chinese protesters over-reacted to Jimmy Kimmel and ABC about the "Kids' Table" issue.

First, most Chinese protesters do not understand the connection between the Kids' Table show and the novel "Lord of the Flies"; they do not know this is Not a racist talk show but a serious conference about human nature.

Second, some Chinese protesters were assigned by domestic orders. These people protested just for some money.

Last but not least, the protesters are so weak inside to protest in America, why not try to protest in China for some China's sin? They dare not to, because they know they would be killed or jailed if they did so. The reason why they are able to protest is because America is a democratic country. They enjoy the freedom of protesting in America, but they oppose other's freedom of speech. What a sarcasm!

Dawn of Pyongyang

Everything in Pyongyang is in dark, while only the portraits of Kim Jong Il （the late leader） and Kim Jong-un （the current leader） are illuminated by lights.

Funny Portrait of Naughty Korea's Leaders

Jimmy Kimmel Unnecessary to Apologize for the Debatable "Kids' Table" Segment Show

During the Oct. 16 episode of ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live", host Kimmel held a "kids table" segment on the government shutdown. Kimmel posed this question to four kids: "America owes China a lot of money, $1.3 trillion. How should we pay them back" he asked. Right away, one child suggests "killing everyone in China."

This segment has now raised all sorts of issues. Some Chinese people protested as they took this TV show as a much insulting one. Domestic China's media, like CCTV, strongly criticized this segment also.

Well, in my opinion, the kid just publicized what the China's government has been doing then, so it is unnecessary for Jimmy Kimmel or ABC to say sorry to Chinese people. See below:

News source

Funny International Relations