Quote by Obama:

“Recall that earlier generations faced down communism and fascism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

Quote by Whitehouse.gov:

Seek New Partnerships in Asia: Obama and Biden will forge a more effective framework in Asia that goes beyond bilateral agreements, occasional summits, and ad hoc arrangements, such as the six-party talks on North Korea. They will maintain strong ties with allies like Japan, South Korea and Australia; work to build an infrastructure with countries in East Asia that can promote stability and prosperity; and work to ensure that China plays by international rules.

Quote by Timothy Geithner:

“President Obama — backed by the conclusions of a broad range of economists — believes that China is manipulating its currency,”

Quote by James Fallows:

...to boil it down to the bald assertion that "China is manipulating its currency" ignores, vulgarizes, and misconstrues a lot more than it clarifies.

Quote by James Fallows:

Usually journalists are in the position of being told that they have lamentably "oversimplified" or "hyped" their discussion of topics -- and told this by the real policy experts in academia or think tanks or specialized government agencies. Often enough, the accusation is true. Part of journalism's basic function is to explain, in simpler (and often necessarily less nuanced) terms, what the real experts are trying to say. If they do that well enough, they can reach people who would never sit still for the full, rococo, expert version and give them a better understanding of important ideas and problems than they would otherwise have.

Though in recent years CCTV has sought to compete with grittier programming from local stations, with shows that forgo nationalist themes (one runaway hit was Divorce, Chinese Style), network executives are also obligated to abide by China’s rigid propaganda rules. In 2007, the main television regulator, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, instructed CCTV and other networks to limit prime-time programming to “ethically inspiring TV series” that could “reflect the reality of China in a positive way.”

The network’s flagship evening news programme, Xinwen Lianbao, or “Network News”, is carried on every local news channel across the country, by orders of the government, and has an estimated nightly viewership of more than 660 million. But rather than Who, What, Where and When, the programme concentrates on Hu and Wen – China’s president and premier – with lavish coverage of their every statement and gesture

Quote by Wikipedia:

The concept of the Mandate of Heaven was often invoked in ancient China as a way to curtail the abuse of power by the political rulers. The Mandate of Heaven was a well-accepted idea among the common people of China, as it allows the removal of incompetent or despotic rulers, and provided an incentive for rulers to rule well and justly.

Quote by Kendrick:

Charter 08 calls for, among other radical changes, freedom of speech and more than one political party. And the Communist Party's response so far has been enacted in predictable fashion, with censorship and arrests. Someone needs to tell China that this is not the behavior of a government to which the Heavenly Mandate still applies.

Quote by Chinese Media ():

Gao Jianguo, Vice Secretary General of the China Association for Disaster Prevention said the Zipingpu reservoir couldn’t have brought about so large an earthquake, as a reservoir has never created an earthquake registering over 7.0 in modern history. Experts believe that in covering China’s natural disasters, Western media should use a more objective and scientific approach.

By Rodman's calculations, 500 million square feet of commercial real estate has been developed in Beijing since 2006, more than all the office space in Manhattan. And that doesn't include huge projects developed by the government. He says 100 million square feet of office space is vacant -- a 14-year supply if it filled up at the same rate as in the best years, 2004 through '06, when about 7 million square feet a year was leased.

"The scale of development was unprecedented anywhere in the world," said Rodman, a Los Angeles native who lives in Beijing, running a firm called Global Distressed Solutions. "It defied logic. It just doesn't make sense."

The National Stadium, known as the Bird's Nest, has only one event scheduled for this year: a performance of the opera "Turandot" on Aug. 8, the one-year anniversary of the Olympic opening ceremony. China's leading soccer club backed out of a deal to play there, saying it would be an embarrassment to use a 91,000-seat stadium for games that ordinarily attract only 10,000 spectators.

The venue, which costs $9 million a year to maintain, is expected to be turned into a shopping mall in several years, its owners announced last month.

CC Image from Jonas in China.

China opened 47 new airports between 1990 and 2002, and its highway network grew by 800,000 kilometers (500,000 miles) from 1981 to 2002. By 2030, China's population is expected to have grown from 1.3 to 1.5 billion people. More and more urban households will adopt a Western lifestyle by then, complete with air-conditioning, refrigerators, television sets, computers and other appliances.

This will steeply drive up energy demand in China. The IEA and NBS predict that to satisfy this demand, the country's power plants will have to supply more than 8,600 terawatts of electricity in 2030 -- about three times as much as in 2006.

[...]

The sobering result of this utopian scenario is that even with all new coal power plants equipped with CCS, China's CO2 emissions would increase by 80 percent by 2030.

Quote by The Followup:

I attended a family wedding in New Delhi a couple of years ago, and the priest took several calls during the ceremony.

• No one uses voicemail. When some one calls you on your mobile phone, you generally pick it up.

• China uses SMS more intensively. The first thing Chinese do in the morning is check their IM first, not their email.

• Only 56% of all Chinese internet users have email addresses.

• Ownership of PCs is much lower, especially in 2nd and 3rd tier cities, where heavy PC usage is at Internet cafes.

• Unlike the West, where e-commerce was Web 1.0 and social media is Web 2.0, China's internet usage started as a social phenomenon first and is just now moving to more utilitarian purposes.

And for most of young people, they don't have a lot of grievances against the government. People have lots of personal freedom as long as they don't touch politics. As for those political-minded, the communist party is always eager to recruit them. There are ample economic opportunities to absorb their mind and energy. They don't identify with the students 20 years ago the same way young people in US don't identify themselves with protesters during the Vietnam War.

The Chinese teacher is a woman in her mid-twenties (I'll keep that it present tense as we still have contact with her). She came to Tempe with another teacher from Zhenjiang who had also participated in the exchange. I didn't pass up the chance to have good guest speakers, so both of the Chinese teachers accompanied me to my high school one day. 

They both did a very nice job presenting, but partway through the day, our teacher friend began to dig through all of my own history books any time she had a few minutes. Later in the morning, when I finally didn't have any classes, she approached me. Looking furtively from side to side (literally), she whispered, "What do you know about.... Tiananmen Square?"

During my time in Beijing over the past year and a half, I've often seen the square itself totally closed off to visitors, as it is at the moment. There are always plenty of security forces around -- soldiers in green uniforms, various kinds of police in blue uniforms, and "plainclothes" forces who are pretty easy to pick out, like strapping young men in buzz cuts all wearing similar-looking "leisure" clothes. But I have not seen before anything like the situation at the moment.

There are more representatives in all categories -- soldiers, police, obvious plainclothesmen -- than I recall seeing even during the Tibet violence in early 2008 or through the Olympic games. Also many people whom you would normally classify as fruit vendors, tourists from the Chinese provinces, youngish white collar workers male and female, and skateboarder-looking characters wearing cargo shorts and with fauxhawk haircuts, were last night walking up and down the sidewalks with their eyes constantly on visitors and drifting up next to people who were holding conversations.

[...]

But to point a camera in any direction not shown in these shots is to ask for immediate trouble. In particular if security forces in any of the categories above are in the field of view. I say this with first-hand certainty, based on experiences I will describe later when I am living someplace else.

I was really shocked to see the square itself open to the public during the day. Or, as I realized later,  open to the "public". There were thousands of people on the square, but there was something odd about the scene.  I realized by the end of the afternoon that this crowd was deliberate, and the casual afternoon at Tian'anmen was as orchestrated as the Opening Ceremonies.

[...]

I would guess about 85% of people on the square were there officially. You could tell that because the security lines were basically unpopulated, while all the "deputies" just walked around the screeners without being checked. There were very few tourists, foreign or otherwise. There were mostly uniformed and non-uniformed police. Some foreigners were taking pictures, seemingly unmolested. Any footage and photos will be dull-looking; the shots would look "normal". It was just the feeling of intense orchestration and deliberate crowd-building that gave it away. And also a distinct sense of high-tension, which carried around the front of the Forbidden City, but evaporated just around the corners.

The rest of the city was oblivious. Crowds, shopping, shoving, everything perfectly normal, as far as I could see.

Quote by Techdirt:

So it was with this skepticism that my friend Gersham viewed the latest piece of propaganda emerging from our friends in China that we have now reached the new height of 338 million Chinese Internet users; a 13 percent increase since the end of 2008, and just about exactly one quarter of the country's population.

[...]

Any way you slice it, if China's internet userbase is as large as Beijing says it is, and if Baidu's market share of that audience is what it's widely purported to be, then both the number of uniques reported by external traffic sites and the revenues reported by the public company that owns Baidu should be exponentially greater.

These stats seem to either indicate that Chinese do not use search very often, or that there just aren't too many of them heading out into the wilds of the Internet. Either way, statistics emanating exclusively from bureaucratic sources within Beijing, particularly those which seem to fly in the face of all other external metrics, are not to be believed.

Quote by Alistair Thornton:

I have a sinking feeling that this could turn out to be the worst PR stunt of all time. To me, it screams, 'Hey! You in the West! How's the recession? We just nailed 9% growth. Scared of a rising China? Check out all of our tanks and never-seen-before missiles'. It's not really the vibe you want to give off in the midst of unprecedented shifts in geopolitical power.

Quote by James Fallows:

But the other obvious point is that all politics is local, in China as well as anywhere else, and impressing the home crowd will always outweigh the hand-wringing concerns from the diplomats.

Quote by James Fallows (again):

"China's government at times resembles an exasperated parent trying to rein in a pack of rebellious children. Its edicts are persistently flouted by censor-dodging Internet users, wayward local officials and rioting Uighurs."

Quote by NFG:

I've said for a long time that they've got a hard job, shepherding the people from mud huts to steel-and-glass towers.  It can't be easy keeping a lid on a billion people who are coming to grips with massive social change and rapid expansions on their personal spheres of influence.

Quote by James Fallows:

For each deployment of tanks, there has been a Farmers' Coop float. For each regiment of goosestepping female soldiers, all exactly the same height and with skirts exactly the same length, there has been a group of Clean Energy workers, accompanying a display of wind turbines and solar panels -- or a group of athletes from the Phys Ed university. Plus some pompom group whose ID on the screen I couldn't understand, and miscellaneous other celebrations. And a float from each province or region, with waving local beauties! This is becoming truer to the randomness of China as I think of it.  Happy 60th birthday.

Quote by NFG:

This is what scares/annoys/fascinates me about China: they just don't care what happens outside their borders.