corruption

Never offend your rulers by inappropriate answers.
When you are blue just knock on wood.
      

Reporting from Foshan, China -- The last time his parents saw Liao Mengjun alive, he was heading to school to pick up his junior high school diploma.

A few hours later, they were called to the morgue. They found that their lanky 15-year-old son's forehead had been bashed in. His right knee jutted through the skin. Both his arms had been broken. He had several stab wounds, internal injuries and a swollen foot.

His index finger was slashed, suggesting his tormentors had tried to make him write something in his own blood.
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The internet can facilitate friendship and understanding between the nations of the world. Umm… realization, anyway.
The China Digital Times published the text and a translation of an act that is apparently taught to Chinese schoolchildren - probably a local initiative by some nice Chinese patriotic teachers and unlikely to be publicly endorsed by the CCP [...]

After the indictment and intermittend detention of recent Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian, the Special Investigation Panel of the Supreme Prosecutor’s office said yesterday it would investigate former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) on suspicion of money laundering.  — Story here.
At first glance, I would congratulate Taiwan for its efficient judiciary. They seem to achieve something that France [...]

Cabbage doesn’t find as many buyers this year as expected. The wholesale price in Zhifang Township, Ruzhou (汝州), Henan Province, was around 6 Fen per kilogram in early December, according to dahe.cn, and it was six Mao per kilogramm a year ago, according to that source. Last year, farmers could count on buyers from places [...]

I hadn’t seen anything that might count as real evidence before. (Maybe that is because I didn’t pay much attention to the theory anyway.) But Michael Bristow of the BBC quoted an official paper four days ago, and that looks somewhat more substantial. According to Bristow’s article, local authorities started hiring commenters some years ago [...]

A lot of things can wait in China. The country’s poor are long-suffering people. That’s what experience suggests, anyway. But when it comes to the effects of the global economic crisis on China, not everyone with a say appears to be phlegmatic.
“The redistribution of wealth through theft and robbery could dramatically increase and menaces to [...]

The relationship between the provinces and Beijing is one of the most complex and difficult to fathom in China. Usually however, the central government can use it undoubted muscle in situations where it deems it politically necessary. [...]
      

The following is from Pu Cheng City’s (晋城市, Shanxi Province) municipal party committee’s website of today, concerning VRT journalist Tom van de Weghe’s trip to Shangqiu, Henan Province on November 27.
Henan Province denied yesterday that three Belgian journalists had recently been violently attacked when interviewing AIDS victims.
Xinhua quotes Henan Province Foreign Affairs Office Deputy Director of Information Services [...]