China welcomes its first high level political delegation including a gay partnership. Said partner undertook a "programme typical for a foreign dignitary's spouse". Also on Shanghaiist, i-pad clone maker sues Apple for cloning its clone with i-pad.
Comparing the Sichuan and Haitian earthquakes. More on China’s involvement in Haiti. Haiti, incidentally, is one of the few places that still recognizes Taiwan diplomatically. Not for long, maybe.
As China moves towards its first animal cruelty law, interested economic stakeholders weigh in:
When the news of possible ban on eating cats and dogs came out, the community heavily discussed the news in particular, Pei County, Xuzhou, famous for their industry of breeding Meaty Dogs. Pei County has a very prosperous dog meat industry; their products are exported to Russia, Japan, Korea, Singapore and other countries. Meaty Dog industry employs approximately 100,000 people, with annual sales of nearly 1 billion yuan. If “Anti-Animal Cruelty Law (experts suggested draft)” really is implemented, it will undoubtedly have enormous impact to the local economy.
Pei County Meaty Dogs Breeding Association President, Dog Meat Processing Association vice president Fan Xiantao told the reporter, “Pei County dog meat” is Pei County’s famous dish, which uses high quality dog meat, coupled with clove, Chinese prickly ash, Amomum tsao-ko, Ginger, Amomum villosum, large fennel, small fennel and Chinese cinnamon etc spices, after simmering in a stew and finished with the draining of the soup and coloring.
More background on commercial dog farming in northern Jiangsu here. And if it does get banned, there’s always Cane Toads.
Meet Dongguan double cleaver underwear man.
Internal documents from the Domestic Security Department, China’s counter subversion organ, have been leaked and released online: go here, here and here. I found this snippet from the third part interesting:
Through early detection and punishment as well as through the functioning of mechanisms to work with the masses, 107 mass incidents were dissolved or stopped.
I don’t know the timeframe, but that’s from one city in Zhejiang Province.
"Through early detection and punishment as well as through the functioning of mechanisms to work with the masses, 107 mass incidents were dissolved or stopped."
In Habsburg Italy, the secret police didn't pay much attention to Italian nationalists. They paid a lot of attention to the Habsburg government, though, on the basis that if it was seen to be screwing up, this might lead to delegitimisation and thus disorder. I wonder if, among its other roles, the DSD might be nipping some MSGs in the bud by getting the underlying problem (or proto-prblem) sorted out.
Posted by: Chris Williams | January 30, 2010 at 02:04 PM
Very probably, I'd guess. Malfeasance in the Communist Party is handled through the Central Discipline Inspection Commission. That's basically a reactive body. Some racket gets blown up, CDIC come to town and everyone knows that means someone's going to be shot.
Now amongst other things, the CP regard MGIs as management failures. Having one go off on your patch means, for officials, the end of any chance of promotion at the very least. It woiuld make sense for those likely to be held responsible to use the DSD to monitor potential flashpoints from within local government.
Posted by: jamie | January 30, 2010 at 02:36 PM