Free Republic

Chen Liangyu Elected Shanghai Mayor WED, FEB 27, 2002     Chen Liangyu, acting mayor of Shanghai, was elected Tuesday mayor of this east China metropolis at the fifth session of the 11th Shanghai Municipal People's Congress. Chen, 56, is a native of Ningbo, east China's Zhejing Province. He studied in the Chinese People's Liberation Army's Logistic Engineering Institute from 1963 to 1968. He also took positions in factories and government bodies. The newly elected mayor acted as deputy secretary of Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China and vice mayor of Shanghai before he was appointed acting mayor of...

"To many Japanese, and to many Americans, it is simply incomprehensible that the United States has not implemented strict gun controls or prohibitions along the Japanese model. Gun control in Japan is the most stringent in the democratic world. The weapons law begins by stating 'No-one shall possess a fire-arm or fire-arms or a sword or swords', and very few exceptions are allowed. Gun ownership is minuscule, and so is gun crime. As gun crime in other nations increases, many advocates of gun control urge that Japan's gun control policy be imitated. But before other nations, particularly the United States,...

  Scenic Spots to See More Sanitary Restroom Spaces Xinhuanet 2001.08.15 15:11:56     BEIJING  August ¨Xinhuanet--Flush with cash to provide the city's  toilet  facilities  Beijing plans to improve every lavatory at all its  tourist attractions by the end  of 2002 according to today's China Daily.     A pot of 240 million yuan US$29 million  has been set up by the  municipal  government to build or fix toilets, a movement prompted by  constant public complaints.     Already 70 toilets have been constructed or renovated at five major  historical sites  including the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace and  the Temple of Heaven, Beijing tourism official Zhou Shuyu said.     "We also stepped our efforts to make the appearance of toilets harmonious  with the  scenic spots," Zhou said. "The toilets that sit amid ancient  architecture must also be in  the ancient style."     Zhou, who oversees public toilets, noted all facilities at historical  and scenic sites  will be free of charge.     Foreign tourists have complained vociferously about unsanitary toilet  conditions in  China.     "Of the 206 tour-related complaints received during last October's  week-long  National Day holiday 20 per cent mentioned that there were  few good toilets at tourist  attractions, " said Yang Weiyuan, an official  with the Beijing Consumers'  Association.     But the improvements that have already been made have prompted immediate  results.     "We have not received any complaints on toilets this year," Yang  said.     The new bathrooms have improved odors and better overall hygiene.     "Our goal is to make things convenient for our tourists, whether  you are a man, woman, baby, child, senior citizen or a person with  a disability," Zhou said.     One key improvement is equipping toilets with flushing devices that  do not require  human touch. The infrared trigger reduces the chance of  tourists contracting bacterial  infections, officials said.     Women's lavatories will be 20 per cent bigger than men's to provide  bigger space for  women to make up. In the pastthey were half the size  of the men's rooms.     The ladies' rooms also will have desks, beds or chairs to diaper  babies and make  mothers more comfortable while feeding.     Special lavatory pans designed for the disabled and for children will  be provided.     Zhou said workers will receive special training to ensure optimal  loos.     Tourists, too, may need some potty training. At the Summer Palace,  two  infrared devices have been destroyed through misuse, park officials  said.     More money for this effort is likely to be poured in as more toilets  are built and  renovated before the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. 

<p>"The stake is a boost for Indonesia, where fighting last year with rebels in Aceh forced ExxonMobil to shutter its gas plant"</p> <p>HONG KONG, China -- Chinese oil producer CNOOC Ltd. has agreed to pay $585 million for the Indonesian oil operations of Repsol-YPF.</p>

Wang's Woes The dismissal of one of China's top bankers begs the question: What took so long? By Susan V. Lawrence and David Murphy/BEIJING Chinese state-sector executives didn't come any better than Wang Xuebing. The 49-year-old president of state-owned China Construction Bank was an expert banker and fluent English-speaker, an innovator in the financial world, at ease both behind the dais at high-profile international conferences and on the golf course. But last week Chinese authorities confirmed that Wang had been dismissed from his post as chief executive of the China Construction Bank, one of China's big four state banks, ...

YANG BIN: The Perils of Flower Power "Yang Bin made his fortune in the orchid trade. Behind his public success are a risky property project and a lattice-work of deals that are making some investors in his listed company nervous" By Bruce Gilley/SHENYANG Issue cover-dated January 10, 2002 ONE OF CHINA'S richest men, Yang Bin is a paradox. To the outside world, he's a diligent orchid grower who made it big with a string of greenhouses across China. At home, however, he's the eccentric tycoon who is building a vast Dutch-style property development and theme park on former cornfields ...

HSBC to acquire minority shareholding in Bank of Shanghai29 December 2001 The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited has today signed an agreement to acquire an eight per cent equity stake in the Bank of Shanghai for RMB517.92 million (approximately US$62.6 million) in cash. The Bank of Shanghai was established in mainland China in 1995. It has assets of RMB96,325 million (approximately US$11,639 million) as at 31 December 2000, 196 branches throughout Shanghai and 4,500 staff. The bank serves a broad range of customers and provides personal and corporate banking services as well as payment, trade finance and treasury services. ...

'SUPERSTITION' IN THE PIGEON B. F. Skinner Indiana University First published in Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38, 168-172. To say that a reinforcement is contingent upon a response may mean nothing more than that it follows the response. It may follow because of some mechanical connection or because of the mediation of another organism; but conditioning takes place presumably because of the temporal relation only, expressed in terms of the order and proximity of response and reinforcement. Whenever we present a state of affairs which is known to be reinforcing at a given drive, we must suppose that conditioning ...

Year of the Water Horse February 12, 2002 - January 31, 2003 Chinese Astrology by Shelly Wu Horse years are notorious historical turning points. Turbulent, untamed, and chaotic. Every 12 years the Horse comes around asking it’s pinching question "Are you awake?" The Yang force is at it’s peak during Horse years, requiring action and movement. Of the 5 elements, the Horse is accompanied by Fire. This can bring to a boil the Water element of 2002, which can flare-up when least expected. Rigor and severity are also chronicled with unusual excesses befalling governing forces. The oratory Horse leads ...

Competivity Difficult To Say—Even Harder To AchieveAfter decades of losing their money to hyperinflation and routine devaluations, Argentines have been enjoying currency stability for more than 10 years now.But an unusually muscular Argentine peso tied at par with the U.S. dollar also happens to have its downside - companies complain that the high value of the local currency makes exports a nearly impossible task while giving foreign competitors an edge over local producers.The peso’s value has risen by 33 percent against the currencies of countries such as Germany, Spain or France, protests, chairman of the Argentine Industrial Union . Europe ...

Massoud's Letter To The People Of America Date: 1998 A Message to the People of the United States of America I send this message to you today on behalf of the freedom and peace-loving people of Afghanistan, the Mujahedeen freedom fighters who resisted and defeated Soviet communism, the men and women who are still resisting oppression and foreign hegemony and, in the name of more than one and a half million Afghan martyrs who sacrificed their lives to uphold some of the same values and ideals shared by most Americans and Afghans alike. This is a crucial and unique ...

Cornell Magazine Profile of Lee Teng-Hui LEE TENG-HUI: A MAN OF THE COUNTRY by James Carman (Reproduced with permission from Cornell Magazine, June, 1995. This version is from an uncorrected galley proof and may differ slightly from the verison published in the Magazine.) On February 28 of this year the people of Taiwan witnessed an extraordinary event. For more than four decades, they had been allowed to speak only in whispered tones of the massacre known as "two-two-eight"--in February 1947, the day Nationalist troops wiped out between 18,000 and 28,000 Taiwanese demonstrators in a single bloody day. But on this ...

History and other information about China's little-known Muslim population China's Muslim Hui Community: Migration, Settlement and Sects by Michael Dillon. Pub: Curzon Press, Richmond, UK, 1999. Pp: 208. Hbk: UK40.00. By Leila Juma Twenty years ago, few Muslims realised that they were huge Muslim communities in what was then Russia. On western-drawn maps, the Muslim areas of Central Asia - which have gained 'independence' by default after the collapse of the Soviet Union - were all shown as part of communist Russia and effectively divorced from the 'Muslim world'. A few better-read Muslims knew that Russia had a 'Muslim ...

Colonel Tsuji of Malaya Colonel Masanobu Tsuji (I put his family name last, in the western convention) was a tactical genius, a master of improvisation, and one of the criminals to wear uniform in the period 1932-1945. These are notes I put together in 1994 from various sources. They're presented in chronological order, divided into rough "chapters." I have omitted source references, to make the text easier to read, but it's followed by a bibliography. - Dan Ford (later: the file concludes with comments from readers of this page) Education of a soldier Tsuji was born in Ishikawa Prefecture ...

_______________________________________________________________________________ Article by Laurie Barber The Yamashita War Crimes Trial Revisited. &nbsp; &nbsp; The trial of the Imperial Japanese Army General Tomoyuki Yamashita was the first of the Far East war crimes trials to follow from World War II and arguably the most contentious. Inherent constitutional, judicial and legal infringements have been focused upon in most subsequent critique and these will be discussed inter alia in this paper. However, those procedural and natural justice concerns, important though they be, distract from the far reaching command responsibility implications of the guilty verdict in the Yamashita case. Whether or not the ...

"Batteaux and 'Battoe Men': An American Colonial Response to the Problem of Logistics in Mountain Warfare" Joseph F. Meany Jr. Mountains, and the strategic corridors through them, were the central geographic conditions of colonial North America. The great mountain chain that rises just south of the Saint Lawrence River and parallels the Atlantic seaboard - combining the White and Green Mountains of New England, the Adirondack, Helderberg, and Catskill Mountains of New York, and the Alleghenies and Great Smokies of the Middle Atlantic and Southern colonies - comprised an impenetrable physical barrier a thousand miles in length that separated the ...

THE ASSASSINS by Philip K. Hitti The Assassin movement, called the "new propaganda" by its members, was inaugurated by al-Hasan ibn-al-Sabbah (died in 1124), probably a Persian from Tus, who claimed descent from the Himyarite kings of South Arabia. The motives were evidently personal ambition and desire for vengeance on the part of the heresiarch. As a young man in al-Rayy, al-Hasan received instruction in the Batinite system, and after spending a year and a half in Egypt returned to his native land as a Fatimid missionary. Here in 1090 he gained possession of the strong mountain fortress Alamut, ...

KMT rejects stabilization alliance offer Opposition Kuomintang (KMT) leaders announced yesterday that their party would not participate in a new National Stabilization Alliance proposed by President Chen Shui-bian. The ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is hoping to establish a majority presence in the legislative branch through a coalition-style alliance. DPP strategists have indicated that they are aiming at putting together an alliance of 120 legislators, out of a total number of 225. The DPP won a total of 87 seats, while the Taiwan Solidarity Union, a party created for the stated purpose of helping the president out in the ...

What if . . . &quot;China Attacks Taiwan!&quot; RICHARD L. RUSSELL © 2001 Richard L. Russell From Parameters, Autumn 2001, pp. 76-91. &quot;The Lacedaemonians gave sentence that the peace was broken and that war was to be made, not so much for the words of the confederates as for fear the Athenian greatness should still increase. For they saw that a great part of Greece was fallen already into their hands.&quot; -- Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War &quot;Attack when they are unprepared, make your move when they do not expect it.&quot; &quot;So a military force is established by deception, mobilized ...

China's Hunger: The Consequences of a Rising Demand for Food and Energy THOMAS M. KANE and LAWRENCE W. SEREWICZ © 2001 Thomas M. Kane and Lawrence W. Serewicz From Parameters, Autumn 2001, pp. 63-75. The People's Republic of China (PRC) has begun to assert itself in international affairs, and in ways that the established powers find not to their liking. China has fired missiles over the Taiwan Strait, opposed humanitarian intervention in Kosovo, seized islands in the South China Sea, and promiscuously exported ballistic missile technology to states inclined to challenge the international status quo. Chinese words have been ...