The owners of the Empire State celebrated the 60th anniversary of the communist takeover of China by illuminating the top of the building in red and yellow for two consecutive nights. I wonder if any landmark buildings in China ever celebrate the 4th of July.
What do the Labour government in the U.K. and the Communist (at least nominally) regime in China have in common? Both seem to be afraid of their people:
Britain has one and a half times as many surveillance cameras as communist China, despite having a fraction of its population, shocking figures revealed yesterday.
There are 4.2million closed circuit TV cameras here, one per every 14 people.
But in police state China, which has a population of 1.3billion, there are just 2.75million cameras, the equivalent of one for every 472,000 of its citizens. . . .
It is estimated that Britain has 20 per cent of cameras globally and that each person in the country is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily. . . .
Figures released today showed that in Britain the number of Big Brother snooping missions by police, town halls and other public bodies has soared by 44 per cent in two years.
One request is made every minute for officials to spy on someone’s phone records or email accounts.
Last year there were 504,073 new cases – an average of 1,381 a day. It is the equivalent of one adult in 78 coming under state-sanctioned surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
Two people have died, a town of 10,000 is under quarantine, and the area within a 17-mile radius around it has been sealed to contain a pneumonic plague outbreak:
Chinese authorities have put a whole town in quarantine after an outbreak of horrifying pneumonic plague.
Two people have died from the highly contagious disease, an even more powerful brother of The Black Death – the bubonic plague believed to have wiped out a quarter of the population of Europe in the 14th Century.
Pneumonic plague is one of the most virulent and deadly diseases on earth, usually fatal within 24 hours.
It attacks the lungs and kills nearly everyone who catches it unless they get rapid treatment with antibiotics.
A dozen people in the stricken town of Ziketan have so far been infected. The disease spreads fast and is passed from person to person by coughing.
Authorities in northwest China have sealed off the remote town of 10,000 people and begun a treatment and quarantine programme.
Residents are terrified, shops have been shuttered, homes disinfected, face masks distributed, there has been panic buying and streets are deserted, witnesses reported.
The World Health Organisation said it was in close contact with Chinese health authorities and that measures taken so far were appropriate.
It looks serious, but the Chinese regime isn’t limited by anything in its choice of means to keep the disease from spreading. People are just worker ants for them.
UPDATE: According to a reader, the report of plague is a cover-up for the real events – a political uprising in the sealed-off town and the government’s crackdown, and the two reported plague victims are the leaders of the uprising killed by government forces. Well, dissent is like plague for China’s Communist rulers.
But not because the Chinese government has suddenly accepted that people should be free to have as many children as they want. It’s simply that after 30 years of effectively forbidding its people from having more than one child, China has woken up to the looming demographic crisis and shortage of workers. So they are now actively encouraging couples to have two children, trying the new policy in Shanghai for now.
China is busy buying much more copper and other industrial metals than its industry needs. Are they up to something clever?
So the Party has ordered. The global market for traditional cars is overcrowded, so China has decided it has a better chance of grabbing a large slice of the emerging EV market.
As if something like a “vast electronic spying operation [that] has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama,” could happen in Red China without the government having ordered it.
He says that China is NOT America’s banker, and that it needs the U.S. a lot more than the U.S. needs China:
(Via Townhall Blog.)
Dave Schuler sees both opportunities and challenges for American companies.
References to communism and dissent lost in translation.
People in China are emulating Jewish behavior hoping to become as successful as Jews:
It is one of those mornings in Beijing when you can’t tell whether it’s likely to pour or whether the sun is simply behind a blanket of smog. I stuff a rain jacket into the basket of my new $40 bicycle and, from my hotel, pedal west to the 10-level Wangfujing Bookstore on Wangfujing Street.
Along a cramped aisle of the business section, heads are bent over books whose cover art includes stars of David, the word “Talmud” in gilded letters and images of Moses embracing the Ten Commandments. I ask a small, fortyish woman if she can translate one title for me. It’s the “Jewish People’s Bible for Business and Managing the World,” she replies, adding that the book is a bestseller.
I pick up a book whose cover reads, in Chinese and English, The Wisdom of Judaic Trader, and flip through the pages, which are illustrated with big-nosed caricatures. Other tomes that people around me are reading offer morals via spiritual fables; some barely mention religion. In many, the content is simply fabricated, highlighting, for instance, the success of financier J.P. Morgan (who was Episcopalian, not Jewish). I walk upstairs to peruse the broad selection of child-rearing books and notice a Chinese man, a little boy by his side, engrossed in The Jewish Way of Raising Children. I ask why this title interests him. “Because the Jewish people are very clever,” he answers.
(Via Chris Blattman.)
It’s in Hong Kong, of course.
(Via Tyler Cowen.)
It’s dog meat in northern China, cat meat in the country’s south. (Via Interested Participant.)
Somewhere, Rachel Lucas is filled with joy.
Beijing started blocking the newspaper’s Web site on Thursday Dec. 18 and it says it is its right to to censor sites that have material it deems illegal.