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Newly-wed couples take a ride on Line 1 to experience a "subway wedding" in Shenyang, capital of northeast China's Liaoning province on Sept 27, 2010. Line 1 started operation on Monday complete with 50 couples on their wedding day
A groom buys subway tickets before boarding Line 1 in Shenyang, capital of northeast China's Liaoning province on Sept 27, 2010
China is all set to launch its second lunar probe, Chang'e-2, by early October, which would be the 58th satellite to be launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the country.
According to China Daily, the probe is likely to blast off from the No 2 launch pad on October 1 this year.
Chang'e-2 would test key soft-landing technologies for the Chang'e-3 and provide high-resolution photographs of the landing area, space authorities said.
"It is estimated Chang'e-2 can reach lunar orbit within five days, compared to 13 days, 14 hours and 19 minutes for Chang'e-1," the paper quoted Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist at the China Lunar Exploration Project, as saying.
Chang'e-2 will also orbit 100 kilometres closer to the moon and carry a higher resolution camera, he added.
China launched its first lunar probe, Chang'e-1, named after China's mythical Moon Goddess, on October 24, 2007. Its 16-month mission ended on March 1, 2009, when it crashed into the moon's surface.
According to China's three-phase moon exploration road map, the country will launch the Chang'e-2 lunar orbiter and then land Chang'e-3 on the moon in 2013. It is hoped that a sample of moon rock can be brought back to Earth in 2017.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are throwing a charity banquet in Beijing. On September 29th, the two American tycoons will host a dinner for China’s wealthiest magnates to convince them to give their monies away to charity. This event has caused a stir in the Chinese world. Everyone from movie stars to industry moguls is involved. Doonesbury is talking about it. Some billionaires have publicly declined to dine with the dynamic duo, wondering aloud if the event was planned to publicly part them from their new fortunes. Their response has called into question China’s “charitable impulse” and given rise to questions about China’s ability to “do philanthropy.”
Headlines in the international press have sharpened this controversy. The Financial Times’ “US Tycoons Take Philanthropy to Chinese Peers” [editor’s note: the headline has since been changed to “Buffett and Gates on Chinese mission”]; the Global Times’ “Uncaring rich may stifle Buffett-Gates”; or the NYT’s “Chinese Attitudes Towards Generosity are Tested” portray the visit as an American effort to bring an enlightened stance on giving to a nation of billionaires badly in need of tutelage.
Though Gates’ and Buffett’s efforts are certainly well meaning, in fact the Chinese do not need Americans to teach them about philanthropy. China has a centuries-old tradition of charitable work, funding education, cleaning up after natural disasters, and helping the poor and elderly. My own work on the Chinese Red Cross Society, founded in 1904 by dedicated Chinese philanthropists—the billionaires of the age—shows that the Chinese have been engaged in these kinds of activities, as well as feeding the hungry, clothing the destitute, caring for the sick and burying the dead, through well articulated networks of charitable giving long before America was even born.
A growing literature on China’s charitable traditions (Joanna Handlin Smith on the late Ming, Nara Dillon and Jean Oi on the 1930s and 40s, Vivienne Shue in the contemporary period (see Stanley Katz’s Philanthropy in the World’s Traditions)) confirms these findings, and the topic has rightly become a hot one in academic circles. While Mao’s Communist experiment did indeed interrupt the normal course of Chinese philanthropy for five or six decades, this hiatus is trivial in light of the five or six centuries that China’s wealthy have been caring for their poor in China and beyond.
In recent newspaper articles, references to the Great American Philanthropic Past are rife. Gates and Buffett are called the Rockefeller and Carnegie of the age (NYT). But China’s history of philanthropy is either misrepresented or reduced to the last twenty years, a period hardly representative of China’s past. Rupert Hoogewerf, an expert on China’s wealthy, is also cited as an expert on China’s philanthropic traditions. He seems to be sadly misinformed, however. Hoogewerf is quoted as trumpeting worn and baseless assertions about Chinese philanthropy, the same ones this author has heard from other Western mouths:
“The Chinese have been very generous for a long period of time,” Rupert Hoogewerf, who publishes the Hurun Report, said by telephone. “The difference has been that they do it between families, and don’t publicize it. What we’re seeing now is a new era of transparency.” (NYT)
Here Hoogewerf—who elsewhere has characterized Western philanthropy as “pure” and Chinese philanthropy as its opposite (FT)—falls prey to a stereotyped vision of China’s charitable activity promoted by EuroAmerican missionaries at the turn of the twentieth century. These missionaries, anxious to legitimate the social gospel they were preaching to the Chinese, coined these characterizations to highlight the importance of their own work in China, ignoring the indigenous activities occurring all around them. Later social reformers and well-meaning Americans—such as the head of the American Red Cross in China during the 1910s and 20s—perpetuated these cultural myths to underscore China’s need for Western (particularly American) social and political interventions.
In fact, China’s philanthropists in the pre-Communist period confronted some of the largest natural and manmade disasters in the world with generosity and remarkable initiative. They gave to strangers across their large country—for example, Shanghai capitalists donating for refugee repatriation from Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905—publicly and proudly, with newspapers heralding their work and keeping public records of donations. They donated to San Francisco Fire victims in 1906 and to the victims of the Tokyo earthquake of 1923. This is hardly the clannish and secretive philanthropy suggested by some Western “experts.”
Many Chinese are themselves not aware of their own philanthropic past, including Chinese film star Jet Li, who (according to AFP) called China “a newcomer to the charity business.” The article quotes him: “‘China’s real development has only happened in the past 10 years,’ [Li] said, adding the United States had 100 years of experience in philanthropy.” Li apparently made this speech just as he was being named a Goodwill Ambassador of the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose Chinese affiliate has operated for over 105 years.
Despite the New York Times’ dismissal of the importance of situating contemporary Chinese philanthropy within China’s own tradition (“Academics grumble…about efforts to impose Western philanthropic values on Chinese tradition,” writes journalist Michael Wines), Buffet’s and Gate’s “crusade for converts” might well be viewed as another instance of US finger-wagging or even cultural imperialism by China’s nationalistic citizenry. China’s nouveau riche are no more in need of shaming to part with their newfound wealth than any other nouveau riche around the globe. I agree with Harvey Dzodin’s view that Gates and Buffett would be better off inviting Chinese tax officials to dinner (Global Times), and discussing with them tax incentives to encourage Chinese giving. Through that tactic, the American team might encourage the kind of state-private cooperation in charitable work that worked so well in pre-Maoist China. In light of the recent revelation of Bono’s well known ONE Foundation’s misadventures, Bill and Warren’s excellent adventure might not seem so excellent after allThe fixing marked the fourth straight record high for the Chinese unit against the greenback, beating Tuesday's 6.7378. The string of new highs comes as the United States has increased pressure on Beijing in the last week to allow the yuan to rise faster.
The yuan finished at 6.7463 against the U.S. dollar on the over-the-counter (OTC) market Tuesday, higher than Monday's close of 6.7618.
The yuan has seen increased volatility in the trading days since the PBOC's June 19 pledge to increase exchange rate flexibility. The yuan has risen by 1.48% since that pledge was made.
Based on today's parity, the yuan is up 1.52% from a year earlier against the dollar, according to Market News International calculations.
The yuan fell 0.06% in 2009 as the government continued to hold the Chinese unit virtually pegged to the U.S. dollar, despite growing international criticism about its exchange rate policy. It fell 0.48% in August and has risen 1.49% so far this year.
Last year marked the first that the yuan has fallen against the dollar since being depegged in 2005. The paltry move against the dollar last year compares with the 7.05% rise in 2008 and the 6.86% jump seen in 2007.
Today's fixing brings the yuan's gains against the greenback to 23.06% since currency reforms were announced on July 21, 2005, including that day's one-off 2.1% revaluation.
The yuan was set weaker against the euro and the yen today.
The PBOC set the yuan parity against the euro at 8.7499 today, down from the 8.6561 fixing the previous trading day. The yuan is up 12.47% y/y against the euro based on today's fixing.
The yuan depreciated 1.41% against the euro last year, a dramatic shift from its 10.43% jump in 2008.
The yuan was also fixed at 8.0941 to the Japanese yen, down from the previous session's 8.0833. The yuan is down 7.92% y/y against the yen based on today's fixing.
The Chinese currency rose 2.53% against the Japanese yen in 2009, a turnaround from 2008's 15.32% depreciation.
The People's Bank of China started setting a daily central parity rate on Jan. 4, 2007.
On July 21, 2005, China freed the yuan from its longstanding peg to the dollar in favor of a managed float with reference to a basket of currencies.
On May 21, 2007, the PBOC widened the daily fluctuation band for the yuan-dollar exchange rate to 0.5% from 0.3% on either side of the central parity rate.
Just past sundown on the last Thursday in August, Sophie Rosen, a 12-year-old American expatriate, strode to the front of the Ohel Moshe Synagogue in Shanghai, and became the first bat mitzvah in the venerable building's 83-year history. She wore a purple qipao buttoned to the top of her neck, and a canny smile that she shared, first, with Shanghai's rabbi, an orthodox member of Chabad, then her mother and father, reform and conservative Jews, respectively, and then the assembled congregation, mostly non-Jewish, with a large Chinese contingent. "Me?" She said in a local Starbucks on the day before the event. "I'm just a normal Jewish girl, anywhere."
Normal is new for Shanghai's fluid population of perhaps 2,000 expatriate Jews. For most of their staggered 200-year history, dating back to mid-19th century Sephardic Jewish traders, they were either exceptional aristocrats -- members of a small community of wealthy traders -- or they were refugees, first from the Czarist Russia, and later from Nazi Germany, Austria, and Poland. But in recent years, as a polyglot population of expatriates has migrated into China's commercial epicenter, a comfortable new Jewish equilibrium has taken hold. "Seventy years ago Jews came here to survive," Rabbi Shalom Greenberg, an affable native of Israel, announced from the pulpit. "Now they come here to prosper."
