Free Republic

China warned the United States last night not to interfere in its legal affairs after President George W. Bush expressed deep concern over the fate of a Hong Kong man facing the death penalty for allegedly smuggling Bibles into the mainland. US administration officials said Mr Bush had asked the State Department to make urgent inquiries into the plight of businessman Lai Kwong-keung, who may be tried as early as Saturday. A formal protest to Beijing is being considered. The US Consulate in Hong Kong contacted a friend of Lai's yesterday and asked him to follow up the case with ...

Policy hawk John Foster Dulles was never China's favourite American official. It was he who, as former president Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of state, refused to shake hands with then-premier Zhou Enlai at a meeting in 1954. Dulles considered communism, and communists, evil. But, regardless of one's views of Dulles as a Cold War warrior, his policy has special relevance for China as it prepares for a transition from a third to a fourth generation of party leaders. Dulles enunciated the policy of "peaceful evolution" rather than war as the means for freeing the "enslaved people" in the Soviet Union, China ...

BEIJING (Reuters) - China, Russia and four Central Asian states, seeking to revive their role in the global war on terror that has been led by the United States, pledged on Monday to combat terrorism in all forms at home and abroad. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation also hailed the demise of the Taliban regime, hoping it would end Afghanistan's days as a source of terror and narcotics, and stressed there should be no meddling in the country's affairs. Analysts said the group, which also includes Tajikistan, Kyrgzstan, Tajikistan and new member Uzbekistan, unveiled few major initiatives and largely extended counter-terror ...

Russia has secured a US$1 billion (HK$7.8 billion) contract to supply China with two modified Sovremenny-class destroyers, a report said. The announcement, made against the backdrop of an accelerated military build-up by Beijing and Taipei, follows Washington's offer last year of its biggest arms package to Taiwan in a decade - including four Kidd-class destroyers. Sovremenny destroyers pack more firepower than their older Kidd counterparts. Moscow has already shipped such warships to China, assembled from hulls laid down in the Soviet days. Itar-Tass news agency said the two new 956-EM vessels were due for delivery in four years and would ...

China tested a new re-entry vehicle for its Dongfeng-31 long-range missile, but the test failed when the rocket carrying it exploded, US officials were quoted as saying. A re-entry vehicle carries a missile's warhead or warheads. The Chinese military carried out the test of the re-entry vehicle for the Dongfeng-31, its newest long-range missile, on Wednesday, the officials told the Washington Times. The test was monitored from the missile and space launch centre in central China to its planned impact at the remote Lop Nur test range in northwestern China. The launch took place at night-time on Wednesday, the paper ...

All copies of a magazine containing an article attacking the wealth of National People's Congress chairman Li Peng and his family have been confiscated. Copies of the November 24 edition of Securities Weekly were seized before vendors could sell them. The magazine is a weekly economic journal with a circulation of about five million. It is run by the China Securities Market Design and Co-ordination Office. Sources who have seen the offending article say it was written by Ma Hailin, an officer in the People's Armed Police, and that he had since been arrested. It reported allegations against Mr Li ...

<p>International tension followed U.S. decisions last month on international arms control agreements, including the Antiballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) made with the Soviet Union in 1972 and the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).</p> <p>In December, the Bush administration announced that the United States was unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty. And a U.S. delegation to a meeting of signatories of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) announced that it would not support the proposed language to a BWC "legally binding verification protocol." The meeting ended prematurely and discussions on the framework for this protocol were suspended until November 2002.</p>

The fight against corruption is among the many challenges that confront China following its entry into the World Trade Organisation. But by excluding and, in some cases, persecuting some of the country's best journalists for their investigative efforts, the Government's anti-corruption campaign is looking more like a fox guarding a very well-stocked hen-house. As part of the campaign, a recent People's Daily article laid out guidelines for officials: ''They should observe discipline ... [and] readily accept supervision by party organisations and the masses ... This is what the party and people demand of them, and it is where the hope ...

Mission Hills Golf Club - the name sounds like something overlooking the Pacific Ocean from San Diego or maybe something at Pebble Beach. Mission Hills is in Shenzhen. And Mission Hills has competition. Surrounding Guangdong province has almost 100 courses, with bookings starting at HK$650. Golf has become popular in China over the past decade and the trend shows no signs of topping out, because Chinese executives need open space to relax and do certain business the Western way. One other thing: Chinese walk, not drive, the six or seven kilometres from the first to the 18th hole. "It's to ...

With many people expecting textile exports from China to soar as the mainland enters the World Trade Organisation, the amount of returned goods has risen dramatically. Last month, 300,000 jackets were returned from Europe because the metal in the zips did not meet with European safety standards. One of the biggest fears on the mainland is that once trade tariffs are lowered, other non-trade barriers will be put up. Among those perceived as the most threatening is the ''green barrier'', a series of technical standards designed to protect the importing country's environment. China knows a large amount of its low-cost ...

HERE'S a sobering fact. If you had invested $1,000 in the Singapore stock market in 1985, and taken the Straits Times Index as a proxy, your money would have grown to $2,613 today. But the same $1,000 invested in the US market or the Dow Jones Industrial Average would have ballooned to $8,509. While the annual compounded returns of 5.8 per cent over the last 17 years in the Singapore market are still respectable when compared with fixed deposit interest rates, they are nowhere nearly as rewarding as the returns from the US market of 13.4 per cent per annum. ...

Mobile phone operators China Mobile and China Unicom face challenges this year with a market slowdown and greater competition. Although the number of mobile phone users in China doubled in 2000 and grew strongly last year, analysts say the country cannot sustain such growth in the coming years. The Ministry of Information Industry, the telecommunications regulator, predicts mobile phone use will hit 290 million by 2005. With 139.9 million users as of November, the growth rate is likely to slow to an average 37.5 per cent in the next four years. According to the regulator's latest data, only 3.9 million ...

Mainland companies raised 119.2 billion yuan (about HK$113 billion) from domestic stock markets last year, down about 22.72 per cent from 2000. About 95.74 billion yuan was raised from the Shanghai stock market - a 4.08 per cent increase - and 23.47 billion yuan was tapped from Shenzhen, a far cry from 2000's 62.89 billion yuan. Plans that will potentially make Shanghai the main board and Shenzhen the home for the second board for high-technology start-ups helped explain the latter's sharp fall in funds raised. Almost all new listings last year, which totalled 74, took place in Shanghai. Additional share ...

Overseas degrees may open the door to top jobs, but graduates and employers agree the pressure is on returning mainlanders to match expectations. Employers - some of whom have foreign degrees - expect returning Chinese to demonstrate the skills for which they are paid a premium. If they fail to show real ability, they risk undermining the confidence held in foreign education. Already, some doubts have begun to emerge about the value of overseas degrees, and whether all such sought-after documents are legitimate. Media reports raising allegations that a prominent television executive had risen through the ranks with a fake ...

Vice-President Hu Jintao has called for bold and innovative measures to promote young cadres ahead of the 16th Communist Party congress next year. Mr Hu urged cadres to make personnel changes ahead of the congress, which will elect the new leadership. "Party committees at all levels must realise the importance and urgency of promoting young cadres," Mr Hu was quoted as saying by the China News Service. Mr Hu was speaking over the weekend at a national conference for Organisation Department cadres, who are responsible for appointing party personnel. Analysts said Mr Hu's presence at the conference indicated that he ...

In the minds of the public, 2001 will go down as a banner year characterised by four big pride-generating, spirit-lifting events. But not everyone agrees on which four. Some say they are the Communist Party's 80th anniversary on July 1, Beijing winning the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games, Shanghai's hosting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) forum summit in October and China formally entering the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on December 11. Everyone agrees on the Olympics and the WTO, but some dismiss the party anniversary, others Apec. Instead, they name China's first football World Cup qualification on ...

Once sworn adversaries, China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have intensified talks on economic and political interests. The most eye-catching move in this process was the announcement, at the end of the Asean-plus-three meetings in Brunei last month, of a plan to create a free-trade area between China and the 10-member Asean within 10 years. Sources of distrust between China and Asean have included multilateral territorial disputes, especially on the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea; China's historic support for Southeast Asia's communist parties; and China's growing economic and military capabilities. But China's admission to the World ...

BEIJING (Reuters) - An unidentified man attacked controversial Chinese starlet Vickie Zhao Wei during a live television broadcast on Friday, the Beijing Evening News said on Saturday. The actress sparked a furious media campaign this month when she modelled a mini-dress printed with the old Japanese naval flag. The incident triggered a backlash among patriots in China still resentful of Tokyo's past aggression. Zhao published a letter of apology in state media after a tabloid based in Nanjing, where Japanese troops killed hundreds of thousands of people in 1937, demanded a boycott of the actress and advertisements in which she ...

Good news is news, bad news is not news, is how Professor Li Xiguang, dean of the Department of Communications at Tsinghua University in Beijing, describes the attitude of the propagandists who have traditionally controlled China's official media. And he adds: Always make bad news look like good news. However, according to Professor Li, in recent years the Chinese press has gradually won new freedoms, including freedom to make money, to debate politics, to publish unflattering opinions - and to report bad news. He attributed the progress to forces unleashed by market reforms and globalisation, as well as new technologies ...

The notion of class is a sensitive issue in a socialist regime whose ultimate goal is to create a classless communist society. So it is significant that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has conducted a study on the country's class structure. The fact that the study was closely supervised by academy chief Li Tieying, also a member of the Politburo, showed the exercise had a definite political objective. What is encouraging is that the study openly admits that the class theories developed by Karl Marx and Mao Zedong for bygone eras are no longer applicable. Their theories were meant ...