FEATURED ARTICLENew Initiatives in Religion Circles (October 2, 2012, Global China Center)The official Chinese media in late September reported several new initiatives to be promoted within the TSPM-CCC circles: a charities week and a five-year theological exchange campaign. As with other such formal pronouncements, “tea leaf reading” is always a fun challenge. The nuances are important; often what is NOT said (the implicit) is more important than what IS said explicitly. Often too, government pronouncementsin this as in other sectorsin essence are intended to catch up with reality. They legitimize practices already well established. GOVERNMENT / POLITICS / FOREIGN AFFAIRSCPC to convene 18th National Congress on Nov. 8 (September 28, 2012, Xinhua)The 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is proposed to convene on Nov. 8 in Beijing. The Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee decided at a meeting on Friday to submit the proposal to the seventh plenary meeting of the 17th CPC Central Committee, which will be held on Nov. 1. The Political Bureau meeting, presided over by Hu Jintao, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, studied the preparatory work for the November meetings. Participants of the meeting also reviewed the draft work report of the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to be submitted to the upcoming Party congress.China’s Bo Xilai expelled and faces criminal charges (September 28, 2012, BBC News)Top Chinese politician Bo Xilai has been expelled from the Communist Party and will face justice, state media say. Mr Bo, the ex-Communist Party leader in the city of Chongqing, is accused of abuse of power and corruption. His wife, Gu Kailai, was given a suspended death sentence in August for murdering UK national Neil Heywood.The Bo Xilai Case: Chinas Pandoras Box (September 28, 2012, Letter from China)In seeking to purge him with a finality that can restore short-term political balance, the Party may have raised a more dangerous spectre: the full-scale accounting of a life in government. The results could reveal a culture of self-dealing and personal enrichment that exceeds even the Chinese publics considerable tolerance of official abuse. It may start a conversation that will be hard to end.China may struggle to move beyond Bo Xilai scandal (September 28, 2012, The Los Angeles Times)Even though the struggle over Bo’s fate took place largely behind closed doors, the damage is apparent. And it is far from clear that a new generation of leaders to be anointed at a party congress now set to begin Nov. 8 will find it easy to put it behind.With Bo Purged, Netizens Call For Fuller Reckoning of the Past (September 29, 2012, Tea Leaf Nation)The widely-publicized Party expulsion of Bo Xilai has not just made Chinas netizens angry; its made them tired. Commenters have called for a final reckoning with the awful legacy of Chairman Maos Cultural Revolution in hopes of ending Chinas ongoing legacy of sensational political strife.Elite and Deft, Xi Aimed High Early in China (September 29, 2012, The New York Times)At the time, millions of young people were still clawing their way back to Chinas urban centers after being exiled to the countryside in the Mao era. But 30-year-old Xi Jinping bucked the trend, giving up a secure post as adviser to a top military leader to navigate the tumultuous village politics of Zhengding, in Hebei Province. The move offers a window on the political savvy of Mr. Xi, who, despite a recent two-week absence from public view that raised questions about his health, is on the cusp of taking over as Chinas supreme leader at a party congress that officials announced Friday would begin Nov. 8.A spectacular fall (September 29, 2012, Analects)If he ever fell, it was going to have to be a great spectacle. And so it has become. Bo Xilai, a former member of the Politburo who had aggressively sought promotion to the most elite circle of power, was expelled from the Communist Party of China in grand communist fashion, with a litany of lurid charges (including mistresses and bribe-taking) heaped high upon him in an account released on Friday, September 28th by Xinhua, an official news service.China’s lines around islands suggest more conflict (September 29, 2012, AP)China hastily published the map to help maintain public outrage over the Japanese government’s purchase of some of the islands from their private Japanese owners. Beijing also has engaged in another type of mapmaking that may end up escalating the conflict. It has drawn new territorial markers, or baselines, around the islands and submitted them to the United Nations. That could lead to a more serious attempt to claim the islands, and broad swaths of valuable ocean around them.Xi Jinpings recent absence: back spasm or knee jerk?(September 30, 2012, East Asia Forum)This is a reflection of the fact that China is ruled by a collective leadership structure, and decision-making is based on consensus. Leaders are debate moderators, and final arbiters only in a stalemate. So decisions will never be made solely on what the leader remembers from that brilliant discussion they had in Canberra one afternoon. Itll be based on a compromise between the different interests and opinions of the entire senior leadership, with further input coming from trusted advisors or Party insiders and ex-leaders.Bo Xilai: China leaders try to put scandal behind them (September 30, 2012, BBC News)Ever since the scandal surrounding Bo Xilai erupted into the open, China’s leaders have seemed divided, the political narrative here uncharacteristically adrift. Now, having decided how to deal with Mr Bo, the Communist Party is, finally, moving to reclaim the initiative and re-focus attention on its coming leadership change. But the whole affair has exposed tensions which run to the very heart of the way the party exerts power in China, and which its next generation of leaders will have to grapple with.Hosannas for the Eighteenth Party Congress (September 30, 2012, The China Story)The date of the Eighteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was announced on 28 September 2012 following the Seventh Plenary Session of the Seventeenth Party Congress in Beijing and on the eve of an extended ten-day holiday marking the 1 October National Day. In the formal celebration of 1 October, the Party congratulated itself on the successes achieved by travelling the Chinese Path , a formulation that has now replaced the sometimes-favoured China Model , a topic of contention among theorists and China analysts for some time. The Peoples Daily editorial marking the 1 October festival was titled Advance Along the Chinese Path that is Brimming With Hope 63.Is Chinas Communist Party Doomed?(October 1, 2012, Foreign Policy)The questions on many people’s minds these days are how long the party can hold on to its power and whether the party can manage a democratic transition to save itself.Beijing Blocks Dissidents Art Company(October 1, 2012, The New York Times)Liu Xiaoyuan, a lawyer friend of Ai Weiwei, the artist and frequent critic of the Communist Party, has said in an online posting that Chinese officials have revoked the business license of Mr. Ais art production company, Beijing Fake Cultural Development. The move came after a court last week rejected an appeal from Mr. Ai in which he argued that tax officials should not be allowed to collect $2.4 million that the officials said the company owed in back taxes and penalties. Mr. Ai had already given the tax authorities $1.3 million as a bond, and he said he now expects the officials to keep that. If the company shuts down, then it might not be required to pay the remaining $1.1 million. The officials revoking the companys business license did not cite the tax case, but said the company had failed to complete registration requirements this year, according to Mr. Liu, who posted his message on Sunday. Chinas leadership transition (October 1, 2012, East Asia Forum)The outcome of the process that almost certainly will project Xi Jinping to the Party Chairmanship and Presidency of China and Li Keqiang to the Chinese Premiership is well known, although there is less certainty about the composition of the leadership team in the Politburo, and the Bo affair meant that there may be some unexpected bumps along the way to declaring the ballot. The process by which this outcome was determined, of course, is less clear, but perhaps less so than some would have us believe.China Jails 4 Tibetans Linked to Self-Immolation Protests (October 3, 2012, The New York Times)Four Tibetans, including two teenage Buddhist monks, have been given lengthy prison terms for supporting the resistance movement to Chinese rule that has involved the self-immolation of more than 50 people since 2009, according to Radio Free Asia, a news organization financed by the United States government. The sentences, from 7 to 11 years, reflect Beijings hard-line approach to a protest campaign that has so far proved difficult to tame. Two of the four Tibetan men were charged with leaking news of the protests to outside contacts, and the other two were accused of helping a fellow monk burn himself to death at Kirti Monastery, a hotbed of anti-Chinese resistance in Sichuan Province. All of the men were incommunicado for several months; the news that they had been tried and convicted was relayed to Radio Free Asia through two exiled Tibetan monks with contacts in the region. The Mixed Bag of Socialism (October 4, 2012, China Media Project)Keyword: socialism with Chinese characteristics (). In China, there is a popular phrase people use when referring to the seemingly whimsical world of the political slogan: Its an open basket, theyll say of this or that watchword, Anything can be thrown in there. This could be said of just about all the specialized vocabularies I have covered in this series. And it is certainly true of one of the most central phrases now in use by the Chinese Communist Party socialism with Chinese characteristics, or zhongguo tese shehui zhuyi. RELIGIONMissiological Implications of Chinese Christians in Europe (July, 2012, ChinaSource)The author tells us where Mainland Chinese are found in Europe, what they are involved in and their relationships to Christianity. He discusses their ties with established European Chinese churches, their impact upon the church in China as many return to their homeland and the outreach of European churches to the Chinese diaspora among them.September A Month of Prayer for Chinese Churches (September 28, 2012, Chinese Church Voices)Hong Kong-based ministry CCL called for September to be a month of prayer for China. This article, in the Christian Times summarizes the prayer requests included in the ministrys September newsletter. Of course you can use these as prayer points for October.How to Make the Church Chinese? Three Perspectives (October 2, 2012, Chinese Church Voices)Originally published in the official China Nationalities News, it examines the question of how Chinese the church is in China. While most Chinese Christians would likely agree that todays church is already Chinese both in character and leadership, many in the larger society have yet to acknowledge Christianity as genuinely a Chinese religion. The process of Sinicization, this writer argues, involves not only Christians themselves, but also Chinas intellectual and political elites.HEALTHChina steps up campaign against healthcare bribery (September 28, 2012, Xinhua)China’s Ministry of Health has ordered patients and hospitals to sign a document agreeing that no bribes will be offered or accepted by the two parties. When a public hospital accepts a new inpatient, both sides should sign the agreement in which the patient promises no bribe, and the hospital and doctors no acceptance of a bribe, according to a circular issued by the ministry on Friday. The agreement will be archived as part of the patient’s medical record, the circular said. In China, some patients and their family members offer “red envelopes” that contain cash to doctors before surgery, so to ensure better care during and after procedures. The ministry on Friday published three documents relating to prevention and control of corruption risk in the country’s public hospitals. The documents asked hospitals to strengthen control and supervision of administrative power and practices of medical workers.China moves to block SARS-like bug(September 30, 2012, Shanghai Daily)CHINA’S top quarantine authority yesterday ordered a three-month intensified quarantine to prevent the entry of a new type of virus from the same family as SARS. In a statement, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine demanded increased body temperature monitoring and other medical inspections on travelers from Britain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, after the World Health Organization (WHO) said the new type of coronavirus, has left a Qatari citizen in critical condition in London. A man in Saudi Arabia has died of the virus. The administration requires travelers from the three nations to inform China’s entry-exit inspection and quarantine institutions if they develop acute respiratory symptoms such as fever, a cough or shortness of breath.SOCIETY / LIFEBachelor Padding(September 28, 2012, Foreign Policy)How lonely single men created China’s dangerous real estate bubble. Working the system(September 29, 2012, The Economist)When township officials need to get into the locked government office of Shibaihu Village, they know to come to the home of Li Peng, sidestep his goats and dogs, and ask him (or his elderly mother) for the key. Mr Li (pictured) is not an official nor a Communist Party member. He is an activist, and a rather effective one.The Great Moon Cake Exchange (September 30, 2012, Outside-In)Moon cakes are sent to people with whom you do business. Clients send to suppliers, suppliers to clients. Moon cakes are exchanged among colleagues. Teachers give them to students; students to teachers. Friends to friends; family members to family members. Its one giant mooncake exchange. how to get a girlfriend how to get your ex back Beijing v. Shanghai From Two People Who Know (October 1, 2012, China Law Blog)Virtually nobody gets tired of comparing Beijing and Shanghai, myself included. There really is a dichotomy, with neither side (yes, side) having much appreciation or understanding for the other. When asked by people who have never been to China to compare the two cities, I usually sum it up by saying something like the following:The Last Maoist Village in China (October 1, 2012, The Atlantic)In Nanjie Village, locals still wake to loudspeakers blaring “The East Is Red,” the classic anthem of People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Nanjie, with more than 3,100 residents, is touted as one of the last models of communist China, where the principles of the late Chairman Mao still strictly guide the people’s daily lives.Video: China’s ‘left behind’ children growing up without parents(October 1, 2012, BBC News)For many people in China, the mid-autumn festival and National Day holiday, falling within days of each other this year, means a week off work and a chance to spend time with friends and family. But for millions of China’s migrant workers, this is a working week like any other. Many of them have young children back in their villages and do not see them for months or even years on end. One Beijing organisation, the All China Women’s Federation, estimates there are some 58m of these “left behind children”. This is the story of just one girl, Tang Xiaoqian from Anhui province in central China.China’s rocketing elderly population prompts a rethink on pensions (October 1, 2012, The Guardian)Neighbouring countries such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, face similar problems. But these countries are already developed; China is unique in that it is getting old before getting rich.Analysis: China slides faster into pensions black hole (October 1, 2012, Reuters)Policy makers and economists have long been worried about the financial burden of China’s expanding patchwork of pension schemes, but those concerns have recently escalated as its rural pension scheme took off in the past three years. The funding shortage is daunting: economists say it could blow out to a whopping $10.8 trillion in the next 20 years from $2.6 trillion in 2010, towering over China’s $3 trillion onshore savings, the biggest hoard of domestic savings in the world. Time is not on China’s side. Its fast-maturing society and economythanks to a one-child policy and a rapid rise in living standardsdemand better pension coverage in future. Yet China is already straining to hold things up.How Online Sleuths Are Transforming Chinese Officialdom (October 2, 2012, Tea Leaf Nation)For many netizens, the online war against corruption is essentially the only way to hold officials accountable to the public. Given the lack of transparency in Chinas politics, institutionalized channels to supervise government officials seldom function. Social media provides the public with an available and effective way to build a last line of defense against abuse of public power. When combined, netizens attention and anger generate an unprecedented degree of influence in the contemporary political arena. Oh, to be Jewish in China (October 2, 2012, The Los Angeles Times)When I tell people in China that I am Jewish, I often get the same response. Ah, so clever! the Chinese person will say with a nudge. So good with money! The Chinese and the Jews we have so much in common! Aside from visits to the Chabad community center for the High Holy Days and Passover meals shared in Jewish friends courtyard homes, little differentiates me from the thousands of other Europeans living in Chinas capital.Chinas Massive Holiday Traffic Mess (October 2, 2012, The Daily Beast)For the first time in a decade, Chinas roads became toll-free, and millions took to their cars as the countrys Mid-Autumn Festival began with traffic jams on major motorways. Watch: Spectacular fireworks in HK to mark China’s 63rd National Day (October 2, 2012, The Telegraph, via Shanghaiist)Hong Kong Ferry Disaster: A City on the Sea Mourns the Drowned (September 3, 2012, Time)Three days of mourning have been declared, and crew members and both captains have been arrested, for a collision that claimed 38 livesWatch: Golden Week tourists swamp every attraction in China(September 4, 2012, Shanghaiist)Amazing Images: Chinese Tourist Season Rapidly Becoming an Overcrowded Disaster (October 4, 2012, Tea Leaf Nation)Tea Leaf Nation features some of the most memorable images from Weibo and their accompanying tweets below:With U.S. Opening Doors to Taiwanese Wider, Mainland Chinese Ponder the Greatest Distance on Earth(October 4, 2012, Tea Leaf Nation)Taiwan has now joined the U.S. visa waiver program. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security officially announced on October 2 that beginning December 1, Taiwanese may travel to the U.S. and stay there for 90 days without a visa. But Chinese netizens had mixed reactions to the news since, as the Washington Post succinctly noted, visa waiver status is not a privilege enjoyed by China.SCIENCE / TECHNOLOGY / ENVIRONMENTChina’s dams a threat to the Mekong (October 1, 2012, UPI)The longest river in Southeast Asia, the Mekong stretches 3,000 miles to the South China Sea and is home to more than 700 species of freshwater fish, including the endangered Mekong catfish. “China’s Mekong dams are so remote they receive little coverage in the Western media,” Milton Osborne, a Southeast Asian expert at Lowy Institute, an international policy think tank, wrote in a blog. Yet the dams, Osborne said, “will eventually alter the productive capabilities of mainland Southeast Asia’s longest and most important river, a river vital to the sustenance of the 60 million people of the Lower Mekong Basin.”China to build more high-speed railways(September 2, 2012, Xinhua)China is aiming to build separate passenger and freight networks within its railway system, one of the world’s busiest. It may come true on some bustling lines in 2015, when a high-speed passenger transport network is expected to become fully operational. According to a five-year plan on China’s transport system recently approved by the State Council, China’s cabinet, China will create a high-speed railway backbone network featuring four east-west lines and four north-south lines by the end of 2015.The Ministry of Railways told Xinhua that the total milage of high-speed railway will reach some 18,000 km by then.. and the end of the English-language internet(October 3, 2012, Shanghaiist)CINIC (China Internet Network Information Centre) will beginning rolling-out the brand new top level domain (TLD) . this month. This marks an important turning point for the internet as we will see more and more countries using their own languages and scripts to browse and communicate via the web, and English becomes just one of many languages of the internet rather than its dominant lingua franca.BUSINESS / ECONOMICS / FOREIGN TRADEChina manufacturing continues to slump (September 29, 2012, CNN, via Yahoo! News)China’s manufacturing sector remains in a slump, renewing concerns that the world’s second-largest economy is in the midst of a sharp slowdown sparked by Europe’s debt crisis. The HSBC Purchasing Managers’ Index, a key measure of manufacturing produced by global banking giant HSBC (HBC) and data research firm Markit, came in at 47.9 in September. That was up slightly from 47.6 in August and higher than an initial estimate of 47.8 for September that was released last week. However, any reading below 50 is an indication that the manufacturing sector is contracting.Chinas Economy Is Down. Your Opportunities Are Up?(September 29, 2012, China Law Blog)Twice in the last week, clients told me that their China sales had greatly increased in the last few months due to (not in spite of) Chinas economic and other problems. One of these companies sells a high end (but definitely not top of the line) home item. The other sells industrial testing equipment. Both have been doing business with China for years. Both are getting not only seeing increasing sales, but they both are getting all sorts of new (and real) offers to distribute their products. Why?Old Age in China Is a Fledgling Business Opportunity (October 1, 2012, The New York Times)As in most East Asian societies, the elderly in China have traditionally been looked after by their children at home. But for people born in the one-child era after 1980, that could mean caring for two parents and four grandparents by themselves. For married couples, that might be eight grandparents to handle. About 22 percent of the Chinese population will be older than 65 by 2040, up from 9 percent now. Chinas Low Glass Ceiling Threatens Its Growth (October 2, 2012, Bloomberg)A sea change is rippling through many Chinese factories. A workforce once dominated by women is now increasingly male. Chinas one-child policy chips away daily at its competitive advantage in manufacturing for export, first by choking the supply of labor of both sexes, then by restricting the flow of women into factory jobs. The result is a more restive male workforce, frustrated by crude management and a thick, low glass ceiling.ARTICLES IN CHINESE (September 28, 2012, Gospel Times) (September 28, 2012, Gospel Times)() (October 4, 2012, Gospel Times)LINKS FOR RESEARCHERSThe Art of Interpreting Nonexistent Inscriptions Written in Invisible Ink on a Blank Page(October 11, 1990)To find ones way in this maze, ingenuity and astuteness are not enough; one also needs a vast amount of experience. Communist Chinese politics are a lugubrious merry-go-round (as I have pointed out many times already), and in order to appreciate fully the dj-vu quality of its latest convolutions, you would need to have watched it revolve for half a century. The main problem with many of our politicians and pundits is that their memories are too short, thus forever preventing them from putting events and personalities in a true historical perspective.Beijing of Dreams website archives old photos of Beijing (September 28, Old China Books Book Blog)The new Beijing of Dreams website photo archive is a fine collection to place together with the work of John Thompson and Felice Beato (photogs in China during the mid-1860s). The images were scanned in high resolution and where necessary digitally enhanced, and they are presented in great variety, studies often of old gates and walls. Theres even an interactive map, for tourists with handheld devices walking around Beijing, but also for researchers and novelists wanting detailed location information; the site is an advance over the lithographs in the narratives of the Second China War (which, for example, may show only one view of the Anting Gate). Glossary of Manchurian terms (Royal Ark)BOOKSTHE CIVIL SERVANTS NOTEBOOK By Wang Xiaofang (September 28, 2012, China Rhyming)A northeastern city in Dongzhou province needs a new Mayor, and there are plenty of candidates eager for the top job. As the mandarins of the local Communist Party go through the motions of selecting their nominee, insinuation and subterfuge run rampant. Dangerous factions begin to form around two contenders and longstanding rivals, Vice-Mayors Liu Yihe and Peng Guoliang.Han Han: Why Arent You Grateful?(October 1, 2012, New York Review of Books)A collection of some of his most interesting and politically relevant essays, it is filled with commentary poking fun at officials and nationalists. But Han is careful not to go too far and risk becoming a dissident. Hes a player in the reality of Chinese society today, and wants to remain one (though its worth pointing out that, contrary to what his US publishers claim, Han is not quite the most popular blogger in China). He can be outrageous and funny, but also carefully elliptical and shrewdly vague.ZGBriefs is a weekly compilation of the news in China, condensed from published sources and emailed free-of-charge to more than 6,000 readers in China and abroad. ZGBriefs brings you not only the most important stories of the week, but also links to blogs, commentaries, articles, and resources to help fill out your understanding of what is happening in China today. Coverage includes domestic and international politics, economics, culture, and social trends, among other areas. Seeking to explore all facets of life in China, ZGBriefs also includes coverage of spiritual movements and the role of religious believers and faith-based groups in China. The publication of ZGBriefs is supported by readers who find this weekly service useful. ZGBriefs is a publication of ChinaSource. zp8497586rq zp8497586rq