Your irregular China round-up

[P3nT4gR4m]

The government statement said that the number of pigs being salvaged from the river appeared to be decreasing.

Proof that the Chinese will fish anything to extinction 

[Cain]

"This pork has been fished from sustainable sources." Lies, all of it.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The government statement said that the number of pigs being salvaged from the river appeared to be decreasing.

Proof that the Chinese will fish anything to extinction 

[Cain]

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/03/15/question-as-xi-is-elected-who-cast-the-no-vote/?mod=WSJBlog&utm_source=buffer&buffer_share=117ae

As expected, China's new Communist Party chief Xi Jinping was elected president of China on Thursday by a landslide. The final tally: 2,952 in favor, with one opposed and three abstentions.

In other words, Mr. Xi nabbed 99.86% of the vote, beating out electoral luminaries like Paul Kagame, who was elected president of Rwanda with 95% of the vote in 2003, and Syria's Bashar al-Assad, who won re-election with 97.6% of the vote in 2007.

The question now burning up Chinese social media sites: Who was the lone voter who dared vote against the country's anointed leader?

[Cain]

I have to say, I like Jamie K's take on Hu Jintao:

I found Hu's deliberate cultivation of anti-charisma fascinating. One European leader supposedly called him the most boring man he ever met, which is no doubt true, but it would be humanly impossible to be quite as boring as Hu seemed to be. Writers are supposed to cultivate negative capability. Hu cultivated negative personality.

There was something obsessive-compulsive about it all. It's speculated that people with OCD adopt rituals and rigid patterns as a kind of evocation, to keep their world from spinning apart and Hu's use of Chinese communist jargon and ritual seemed to have a lot of the same quality. He preached the 'peaceful rise' but as the man behind the curtain he knew that China's rise had a heaving, protean quality of almost Lovecraftain dimensions. So he preached stability even as he couldn't help spreading anxiety.

Xi is an altogether smoother chap. Perhaps he's already come to terms with Chulthu. He smiles because he nows that when the time comes, he will be eaten first.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I have to say, I like Jamie K's take on Hu Jintao:

I found Hu's deliberate cultivation of anti-charisma fascinating. One European leader supposedly called him the most boring man he ever met, which is no doubt true, but it would be humanly impossible to be quite as boring as Hu seemed to be. Writers are supposed to cultivate negative capability. Hu cultivated negative personality.

There was something obsessive-compulsive about it all. It's speculated that people with OCD adopt rituals and rigid patterns as a kind of evocation, to keep their world from spinning apart and Hu's use of Chinese communist jargon and ritual seemed to have a lot of the same quality. He preached the 'peaceful rise' but as the man behind the curtain he knew that China's rise had a heaving, protean quality of almost Lovecraftain dimensions. So he preached stability even as he couldn't help spreading anxiety.

Xi is an altogether smoother chap. Perhaps he's already come to terms with Chulthu. He smiles because he nows that when the time comes, he will be eaten first.

That... is all rather lovely.

[Telarus]

 

[Cain]

China is discovering some of the downsides to mindless authoritariansim and obedience to authority:

With his bouffant black hair, white short-sleeve shirt and endless boring speeches, he certainly seemed like a high-ranking Communist party official.

But Zhao Xiyong, who has claimed since 2010 to be the head of China's State Council Research Office - giving him the rank of vice-minister - was an artful impostor.

For years, Mr Zhao pulled off a pitch-perfect impersonation of a leader from Beijing that local officials in the south western province of Yunnan, being subordinate in rank, did not dare to question.

He was allowed to give keynote talks at important conferences, seated with pride of place at the banquet table, and grovelled to by local officials.

[LMNO]

That's kind of awesome.

[Elder Iptuous]

wow. that's impressive. 
three years of obeisance, and he's on the lam now rather than being in a labor camp!
i am rather disappointed at what they are calling a bouffant, though.

[Junkenstein]

I sense his key mistake was not picking a title that didn't exist. I hope there's a few still in the system who are smarter and never get caught.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Wow. 

[Junkenstein]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22056661

China is to begin running tourism cruises to a chain of disputed islands in the South China Sea by next month, state media reports.

The Xinhua news agency said tourists would live on board ships, as the largest island has only one hotel and no fresh water.

The islands, known in China as Xisha but the Paracels elsewhere, are claimed by China, Vietnam and Taiwan.

China has controlled them since a short war with South Vietnam in 1974.

Didn't China just do this? Cue the reveal of prospecting results....

[Junkenstein]

Also:

http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/china-off-balance-sheet-lending-risks-lurk-shadows-073231716--sector.html

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China's banks are feeding unwanted assets into the country's "shadow banking system" on an unprecedented scale, reinforcing suspicions that bank balance sheets reflect only a fraction of the actual credit risk lurking in the financial system.
Banks' latest earnings reports only added to concerns. Despite the slowest economic growth in 13 years in 2012, the banking system's official non-performing loan (NPL) ratio actually declined, renewing a debate about how reliable those figures are.
But the key question is no longer how much risk banks are carrying. Rather, it's how many risky loans have been shifted to the lightly regulated shadow banking institutions - mainly trust companies, brokerages and insurance companies.
The risk to the overall financial system is not clear, because of insufficient data about the quality of credit in the shadow banking sector.

Well this sounds perfectly sane.

"They don't share the traditional bank culture - cautious and standardized," said a risk officer at a large commercial bank, referring to bankers involved with passageway loans.
"It's a trading-infused style. As long as the product is well received (by investors), it's all good. They don't pay enough attention to the fundamentals of the loan."

[Junkenstein]

Yet more:

http://www.treehugger.com/clean-water/around-28000-rivers-go-missing-chinas-lastest-waterway-survey.html

Until recently, China's government estimated that there were over 50,000 rivers and waterways with catchment areas of at least 100 square kilometers. But after sending 800,000 surveyors around China for three years to do the first ever first national census of water, the actual number of rivers that meet that size criteria is lower. Much lower. The revised number is less than half the old one, with only 22,909 rivers and waterways having catchment areas of at least 100 sq km.

No-one has yet suggested that this is due to impromptu livestock damns.