Interesting op-ed that explores the roll of blogs is playing in changing the political landscape of China:

All this underscores how the Internet is beginning to play the watchdog role in China that the press plays in the West. The Internet is also eroding the leadership’s monopoly on information and is complicating the traditional policy of “nei jin wai song” – cracking down at home while pretending to foreigners to be wide open. …

The authorities have arrested a growing number of Web dissidents. But there just aren’t enough police to control the Internet, and when sites are banned, Chinese get around them with proxy servers.

One of the leaders of the Tiananmen democracy movement, Chen Ziming, is now out of prison and regularly posts essays on an Internet site. Jiao Guobiao, a scholar, is officially blacklisted but writes scathing essays that circulate by e-mail all around China. One senior government official told me that he doesn’t bother to read Communist Party documents any more, but he never misses a Jiao Guobiao essay.

The world’s most populous nation, which has powered its stunning economic rise with a cheap and supposedly bottomless pool of labor, is experiencing shortages of about two million workers in Guangdong and Fujian, the two provinces at the heart of China’s export-driven economy. …

March is one of the most important hiring months for China’s factories, yet some analysts said that the current shortfalls were the beginning of a long-term trend that is already bringing wage pressures and could eventually erode China’s position as the world’s dominant low-cost producer.

“It’s not the end of the great China manufacturing story,” said Jonathan Anderson, the chief Asia-Pacific economist for the Swiss bank UBS. “But you’re no longer going to be talking about China having labor so radically cheap that it will capture all the investment flows. This is an opening for Vietnam, it’s an opening for India and Cambodia.”

The shift, which experts say will happen gradually, began last year and is a result of two decades of strict family planning, which has made China one of the most rapidly aging countries in the world.

And I’m still boycotting Chinese goods.

The Chinese governement is stepping up its repression measures lately:

The Chinese police on Monday detained three leading intellectuals who have been critical of the government, apparently stepping up a campaign to silence public dissent.

Yu Jie and Liu Xiaobo, leading literary activists, and Zhang Zuhua, a political theorist, were detained in afternoon raids at their homes, relatives and friends said. Yu’s relatives were handed a warrant that said he was suspected of “participating in activities harmful to the state,” his wife said.

The detentions were the latest in a string of arrests and official harassment of journalists, writers and scholars who have spoken out against government policies or written articles or essays that officials have deemed damaging.

Remember this when you go Christmas shopping and pick up something that says “Made in China” on it. Hopefully you’ll do what I do — put it back and find something else.

A local newspaper printed a picture of a kettle-shaped capsule which appeared to be about two metres long, lying amid broken bricks, beams and roof tiles.

The satellite was part of a space probe to carry out land surveys and other research, Xinhua news agency said.

“The satellite landed in our home. Maybe this means we’ll have good luck this year,” the tenant of the wrecked apartment was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

Smashed house = good luck. I don’t think that will be the case in China.

In America, yes — there would be a line of high-powered attorneys lined up for the chance to sue the government, quasi-governmental agencies, and even the private contractors that made the crostostinators that went inside the beveled chromium flagilators that may just have contributed to whole thing spinning out of control! (or at least that’s what they would convince the jury of).

But in China, I’m thinking no.

Taiwan doctors have warned liver patients of the dangers of receiving liver transplants in China because the success rate is only 50%, two Taiwan newspapers said on Sunday.

The warning was made by two chief surgeons at a symposium Saturday on liver disease, the China Times and Liberty Times reported….

“Since the livers were hastily harvested from executed prisoners and the quality of surgery varies from hospital to hospital, the survival rate of Taiwan recipients is only 50%, compared to the 85% survival rate in Taiwan,” Lee and Cheng said.

“We heard that most of the livers were harvested from executed prisoners. From execution to cremation, there are only 20 minutes, so the livers were hastily harvested in dimly-lit ambulances. By the time the livers were transplanted, the livers have been without blood circulation for a long time and their quality has been affected,” China Times quoted Dr Cheng as saying….

International human rights groups have condemned the underground organ trade in China, especially harvested organs from prisoners even before they have stopped breathing. But Beijing has turned a blind eye to the practice because it brings in foreign currency for Chinese hospitals.

Let’s see . . . China — that would be the country that we approved for full membership in the WTO because we thought we could use that to “change” them. Much like a woman marries a man because she knows she can make him better. Does that ever really work?

Forbes prints an interesting little article about Thomas Rawski, an economics professor that has made it his life’s work to try and cut through the manipulated figures and hidden numbers of the Chinese economy to arrive at the truth.

Earlier this year, for example, Goldman Sachs began its own calculations of China’s GDP, and endorsed Rawski’s take that the Chinese economy was caught in a downdraft in the late 1990s, estimating a 3.5% GDP growth rate for 1998 versus the 7.8% rate officially reported. (Goldman equally believes that China’s vibrant but underreported service sector means its GDP can also be understated in some aspects.)

But the government’s handling of the SARS epidemic earlier this year has also strengthened Rawski’s case. “Now everybody knows the Chinese government suppressed health statistics until a Beijing physician pulled the plug on them,” he says. “The only question now is whether [the government's suppression of bad news] spreads into the economics area as well as health. There is no question that falsification of economic data at the local and provincial level is widespread. We know this because in 1999 the National Bureau of Statistics, on the front page of a national daily, said the provincial statistics were ‘cooked’ [by local officials]. That was the term they used.”

Banking in China is under a severe strain, with a large number of bad loans. The official number is 30%, but Rawski says it is larger.

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