Beijing Watch You Long Time

Hey Olympic corporate sponsors, enjoy your blue balls while you are over at the games in China:

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's government has told discos, karaoke bars and other entertainment venues to install windows in private rooms and ensure staff dress modestly from Oct 1 as part of an effort to crack down on prostitution and drugs.

According to rules released on the Ministry of Public Security's website entertainment venues must install transparent partitions between rooms that ensure "the whole environment of the consumer's entertainment area in the room can be seen."

"When open for business, the transparent part of rooms and windows to rooms at singing and dancing entertainment venues must not be obstructed," the rules say.

Discos, karaoke nightclubs and other bars in China frequently have private rooms for hire, and are a favorite places for businessmen to entertain guests, sometimes with prostitutes, which is illegal in China.

Staff clothing is also covered in the new rules. "Staff members should dress tastefully, and not be too exposing."

Other rules demand closed circuit television cameras be installed and security guards placed at discos.

Beijing Adding 40,000 Smoking Inspectors for Olympic Games

40,000 on top of the already hired 60,000 smoking inspectors in the city. That's a lot.

I smell a cultural exchange program here...China gives us adorable pandas, in return we could give China cuddly anti-smoking zealots.

First on the list: Mike Huckabee.

In China, They Do Things Differently

I know it's a racial stereotype and all but, really, does any word other than "inscrutable" describe the thinking of the people in this story?

A five-star hotel in China dressed its window cleaners as Spiderman in an effort to avoid disturbing guests.

Shanghai Sheraton Hotel says they wanted to minimise the affect of the week-long cleaning.

"Nobody wants to see a person suddenly appear outside their window, so we thought of dressing them as movie characters, which should be fun and harmless," said a hotel spokesman.

The hotel says they were not expecting the Spiderman cleaners to attract so much attention.

Many guests have asked to have their photos taken with them, reports China News Network.

'Cause is anything more relaxing than looking out the window of your high-rise hotel room and seeing a masked guy dressed like Spiderman?

China Reaches the Moon 30 Years Later

The New York Times reports that the Chinese has sent their first lunar probe into space. This is the first step in an ambitious 10 year plan, after which the Chinese hope to be able to retrieve their moon rover. This launch comes weeks after Japan did the very same thing.

Don’t these Asian countries get that the US and the USSR did this 30 years ago? It means nothing to everyone. It’s like that kid at school who was always the last one to get everything.

A Couple of Big Business Moves for China

Today the New York Times ran a pair of stories on Chinese businesses. Citic Securities of China today announced the investment of $1 billion into Bear Sterns. The American firm hopes that this move will help access the Chinese market, a place dominated by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

PetroChina will begin to sell shares on the Shanghai Market. It is easy to see the investment potential of the fuel provider of one of fastest growing economies in the world with a rapidly expanding middle-class.

EU in Trade Deficit with China

The United States isn’t the only country to have an uneven balance of trade with China. EU Trade Commissioner, Peter Mandelson, is worried about the very same problem for Europe. The trade deficit is increasing at the astounding rate of 10 million pounds an hour, leading Mandelson to comment that China’s industry is “to some extent, out of control.” Now it looks like Europeans are worried about the fairness of Chinese trading policies. Story from the BBC.

The NBA's Drive Towards China's Market

The Unites States government and its policies are not the most popular abroad. That really doesn’t matter if U.S. culture continues to spread to the world’s youth. The march of U.S. soft diplomacy persists as the NBA has decided to start a subsidiary marketing company in China according to the International Herald Tribune.

Basketball is a sport that I could care less about and I couldn’t be happier for its waning popularity in the U.S, but I was completely unaware of its mass appeal in China. According to the article, one-third of all website traffic to NBA.com is routed through their Mandarin site. Moreover, the NBA estimates that 300 million people play basketball in China, equal to the population of the United States.

The Difference Between Us and Them

Libertarians: We want to forcibly strip and shave tax collectors.

Socialists: They want to forcibly strip and shave people who advertise.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Security guards in a southern Chinese city stripped and shaved the head of a man they found illegally posting advertisements on walls to earn a bit of money, a domestic newspaper reported Tuesday.
[...]
The men, who traveled on scooters and identified themselves as "city inspectors," also beat Liu and forced him to get down on his knees so they could shave his hair in punishment, the newspaper added.
[...]
Clashes are common between members of the public and the inspectors, who are mainly responsible for cracking down on unlicensed hawkers suspected of selling unsanitary food or fake goods to "maintain social order." In June, hundreds of students in Henan fought with police after street inspectors beat up a female student.

More here.

Sorry, No More Pandas

China has announced that it is ending one of its more successful forms of diplomacy, giving away pandas. This form of Chinese foreign policy has lasted over 1,300 years. China’s relationship with Sudan could get very interesting after the bears stop flowing, which could cause Sudan to stop the oil flowing back to China.

One another note, nothing disappointed me more as a small child than seeing the Pandas at the National Zoo. These bears did nothing and reached levels of fame in the DC area I could never hope to achieve. I have attempted to apply to apply the same strategy in my life with little success. Story from The Guardian.

I Hope To the People is this Important

A spy in my humble opinion is a sign of status. You don’t matter if international spies aren’t monitoring your every move. This is one reason why I try not to leave my dark dwelling and constantly search my room or through my poo for surveillance bugs. So far nothing, but if I find something I will be sure to let everyone know.

The Washington Post reports that the Chinese government has employed 30,000 internet spies to censor electronic communications. Seems like you would need a billion people to effectively monitor that vastness of the internet, oh wait…

We Have Ways of Moving the Block

A study in the journal Psychological Science purports to tell us why Americans can't get along with the rest of the planet: Class warfare.

The study, though oversimplified compared to real life, was instructive. Keysar and his colleagues arranged two blocks on a table so participants could see both. However, a piece of cardboard obstructed the view of one block so a "director," sitting across from the participant, could only see one block.

When the director asked 20 American participants (none of Asian descent) to move a block, most were confused as to which block to move and did not take into account the director's perspective. Even though they could have deduced that, from the director's seat, only one block was on the table.

Most of the 20 Chinese participants, however, were not confused by the hidden block and knew exactly which block the director was referring to. While following directions was relatively simple for the Chinese, it took Americans twice as long to move a block.

"That strong, egocentric communication of Westerners was nonexistent when we looked at Chinese," Keysar said. "The Chinese were very much able to put themselves in the shoes of another when they were communicating."

Or maybe the Chinese participants come from a society that puts the "chop" in "chop-chop."

"Of course, these are very gross oversimplifications," said Keysar. "Even in America, you can find collectivist societies. For example, working class people tend to be much more collective."

Damn those paper-pushing bourgeoisie and their individualist ways!

Article, headlined "Study: Americans Don't Understand Others," here.

UPDATE: Found a more appropriate photo.

Two Months

That's my guess of how long it will take before public health fascists start adopting this anti-obesity plan in the United States.

Dance classes soon will be mandatory for Chinese elementary and secondary students because of worries about increased obesity, state media reported Tuesday.

It said the dances will be performed during class breaks or during extracurricular time. The newspaper cited recent reports that said heavy loads of schoolwork had cut into the amount of physical activity student perform and that "obesity has been on the rise."

'Cause it's way better to be thin and dumb than fat and smart. But wait, it gets worse.

Last month, the official Xinhua New Agency reported that besides good grades students also could have to prove their physical fitness to earn a place in a Chinese university under a ministry proposal.

Xinhua said the ministry was considering recording the results of physical tests in students' academic files, and could use them as a way to split university applicants who have the same score on written tests. Competition for spots at China's top universities is grueling.

How long before MeMe Roth suggests that overweight people be denied access to a college education in order to "send a message" to our youth? I say about two months.

Chinese +1, Chinese Government -3

China has stepped up efforts to enforce its abominable one-child policy via on-the-spot forced abortions and a new tax scheme known as the "social child-raising fee". The enforcement efforts ultimately had the desired effect -- limiting the country's population -- when opponents of the policy apparently rioted and killed several officials seeking to enforce it.

Villagers and visitors to several counties of Guangxi autonomous region in southwestern China said rioters smashed and burned government offices, overturned official vehicles, and clashed with the riot police in a series of confrontations over the past four days.

They gave varying accounts of injuries and deaths, with some asserting that as many as five people were killed, including three officials responsible for population-control work.

This delicious irony is exactly the sort of population control the Chinese government's actions call for. More here from the NYT.

A Romantic Vacation to China

I'm not saying this is good or bad, but at least we know where Rob is taking his next vacation....

Chinese tourism authorities are seeking investment to build a novel concept attraction -- the world's first "women's town," where men get punished for disobedience, an official said Thursday.
[...]
"Traditional women dominate and men have to be obedient in the areas of Sichuan province and Chongqing, and now we are using it as an idea to attract tourists and boost tourism," the official, surname Li, said by telephone.
[...]
The motto of the new town would be "women never make mistakes, and men can never refuse women's requests," Chinese media have reported.

When tour groups enter the town, female tourists would play the dominant role when shopping or choosing a place to stay, and a disobedient man would be punished by "kneeling on an uneven board" or washing dishes in restaurant, media reports said.

Chinese Couches are Racist

As China looks to crack down on bad English in advance of hosting the Olympics...

Shangri-La is in you mind, but your Buffalo is not.

...the government might want to look to curb its racist furniture.

Doris Moore was shocked when her new couch was delivered to her home with a label that used a racial slur to describe the dark brown shade of the upholstery.

[Ellipsis]

The mother complained to the furniture store, which blamed the supplier, who pointed to a computer problem as the source of the derogatory label.

Kingsoft Corp., a Chinese software company, acknowledged its translation program was at fault and said it was a regrettable error.

"I know this is a very bad word," Huang Luoyi, a product manager for the Beijing-based company's translation software, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

He explained that when the Chinese characters for "dark brown" are typed into an older version of its Chinese-English translation software, the offensive N-word description comes up.

More here.