How cool. How ironic.

Pretty shocking, although I’ve heard it all before.

In China, one woman kills herself every four minutes. According to World Health Organisation statistics, China is the only country in the world where more women commit suicide than men.

Every year, 1.5 million women attempt to take their own lives, and a further 150,000 succeed in doing so. The problem is worse in rural areas, where the suicide rate is three times higher than in the cities. Xu Rong, head of the Suicide Prevention Project at the Beijing Cultural Development Centre for Rural Women, says one of the reasons is the ready availability of poisons in agricultural areas.

“It’s all too easy to get hold of pesticides,” she says. “Some women commit suicide impulsively. A husband and wife may have a bitter fight. When it’s over, the woman just grabs some poison and drinks it.”

…Xie Lihua, editor of China’s foremost women’s magazine, agrees that traditional values are a problem.

“If a woman goes to live with her husband’s family and they treat her well, or if she’s found someone who loves and respects her, she’ll be all right. If not, things will be very difficult for her. “This is because there’s a saying among men that goes: ‘marrying a woman is like buying a horse: I can ride you and beat you whenever I like’.”

Obviously there is a lot of history here. Anyone who’s read Chinese history books (or Wild Swans) knows this goes back ages and ages. The bottom line is that to many in the country, women are still seen as an ornament, something to display in the living room when it’s beautiful, and something to abuse and discard as it loses its lustre. They may not bind their feet anymore, but many women, especially in the countryside, still endure what amounts to nothing less than torture.

Via this superb discussion site.

In China It’s ******* vs. Netizens
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: June 20, 2006

To test the limits of the Internet in China, I started a couple of Chinese blogs – in which I huff and puff as outrageously as I can.

For a country that employs some 30,000 Internet censors, that turned out to be stunningly easy. In about 10 minutes, I started Ji Sidao’s blog – that’s my Chinese name – on two Chinese Web hosts, at no cost and without providing any identification.

Writing in Chinese, I began by denouncing the imprisonment of my Times colleague, Zhao Yan, by the Chinese authorities. I waited for it to be censored. Instead, it promptly appeared on my blog.

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This story is painful to read. It boils down to the same rotten thing, the willingness to make a buck at anyone’s expense, even if you ruin lives and dreams along the way.

College students in central China smashed offices and set fires in a riot sparked by administrative changes that made their diplomas less prestigious, students and school administrators said Monday.

Photos of the weekend riots posted on the Internet showed fires set in debris-strewn school courtyards and glass smashed in administrative offices, shops, cars and a bank. Students said police with water cannons had moved onto the campus of Shengda Economics, Trade and Management College in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province. It was unclear if there were any clashes.

There was no mention of the apparent riots in the country’s state-controlled media. Campus unrest is treated with extreme sensitivity in China, where 1989 student pro-democracy protests led to the bloody military crackdown in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Zhengzhou police and local government and education officials said they had no details of the weekend protests or could not comment without permission from Communist Party officials….

The Zhengzhou riots appeared to reflect the massive pressure Chinese students face in an increasingly competitive job market. Many families go into massive debt to send children to a university, and a huge expansion in higher education has led to white-hot competition for jobs, making a degree’s prestige ever more important.

Students said they entered Shengda, a private college, after recruiters promised they would get diplomas from the better-known Zhengzhou University, which Shengda is affiliated with.

However, while students graduating this year will receive Zhengzhou degrees, those graduating next year will only receive Shengda degrees, said students who e-mailed The Associated Press and posted comments on an online school bulletin board that was later shut down.

“We’ve been cheated out of three years,” said one posting, signed Yvonne, on the online education blog http://www.3ec.cn/. Parents, many of them poor farmers, apparently had been willing to pay Shengda’s relatively high $1,250 annual tuition because they believed their children would receive Zhengzhou University degrees.

There’s no depths to which some people won’t sink before the almighty RMB. As usual, it’s the little guys with no money or power who get screwed. If the students’ claims are even half-true, the recruiters should go to jail for a long time.

Maybe all the angst and hand-wrinigng over the alleged “China threat” was sparked by poorly translated Chinese reports. This academic article shows how this might be the case. Sample:

The analysts who produce the reports include information based on poorly translated documents and unreliable Chinese press accounts. They often fail to include information from more reliable Chinese open sources. Their selections of information often appear biased toward confirming the prevailing view of China.

Chinese analysts read these reports, as well as the recommendations of U.S. military planners on how to respond to the threats from China they describe. Those Chinese analysts then write their own reports and publish them in Chinese military journals that are in turn read by U.S. analysts. Like compound interest on a savings account, the consequences of erroneous intelligence grow larger over time. Small mistakes can mushroom into major misperceptions that become increasingly difficult to correct. The end result is increased suspicions among both parties that the other side is not genuinely interested in a cooperative approach to the security problems that divide them.

Could bad translation really be to blame for creating the impression of China as a military threat to America? The article offers some good examples that really made me wonder.

Go read it. The story (beneath Joel’s lengthy background information) is so…so…so China.

I’ve recently been reading optimistic articles about the increasing stability of China’s banking system, and I actually was ready to credit China with successfully gaining control of a life-threatening problem. After reading this new article on Chinese bankers, I may have to re-evaluate my re-evaluation.

They may have been small- time bankers from a provincial Chinese city, but they traveled like high rollers.

On Oct. 2, 2001, three junior Bank of China managers from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong boarded a private jet in Vancouver for a flight to Las Vegas. One of the bankers, Xu Chaofan, was in a generous mood. He tipped the flight operator more than $1,200, according to evidence that Bank of China later presented in a Hong Kong court. The bank testified that Xu then lost $2,368,400 on the tables at the Caesar’s Palace and Paris casinos.

For a man on a modest salary, this should have been a heavy financial blow. At the time, Xu and his colleagues, Yu Zhendong and Xu Guojun, were earning about $925 a month.

However, court records in Hong Kong and the United States suggest that this was but a minor setback for the three bankers. They are accused of conspiring to embezzle at least $485 million from Bank of China’s branch at Kaiping, a small city in the booming Pearl River Delta, before fleeing overseas. Yu has been convicted in the United States and repatriated to China, where he is serving a 12-year prison sentence.

The sheer scale of the Kaiping scandal highlights China’s challenge in cleaning up a banking system riddled with corruption and mismanagement.

“The internal controls in China’s banking system are really, really poor,” said Liao Ran, the program coordinator for South Asia and greater China at Transparency International, an independent anti-corruption organization based in Berlin. “Kaiping is not the only case. There have been many others.”

Read on to get a feel for how vast and how deep the problem is, and how there’s no quick fix in sight. Luckily, as the article points out, foreign banks will be coming to China this year, part of the country’s agreement to enter the WTO. If I had money in a Chinese bank, I’d be transferring it to a foreign bank as fast as I could. (Don’t get me started on banking in China…)

Class War Politics
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 19, 2006

In case you haven’t noticed, modern American politics is marked by vicious partisanship, with the great bulk of the viciousness coming from the right. It’s clear that the Republican plan for the 2006 election is, once again, to question Democrats’ patriotism.

But do Republican leaders truly believe that they are serious about fighting terrorism, while Democrats aren’t? When the speaker of the House declares that “we in this Congress must show the same steely resolve as those men and women on United Flight 93,” is that really the way he sees himself? (Dennis Hastert, Man of Steel!) Of course not.

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Anybody ever read Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle?

On the Killing Floor
By BOB HERBERT
Published: June 19, 2006

Sometimes the spotlight works. Last week I wrote the first of what I thought would be a series of columns on the plight of workers at the mammoth Smithfield Packing Company plant in Tar Heel, N.C., the largest pork processing facility in the world.

Life inside the Smithfield plant can border on the otherworldly. To get a sense of what conditions are like on the killing floor, where 32,000 hogs are slaughtered each day, listen to the comments of a former Smithfield worker, Edward Morrison, whose job required him to flip 200- and 300-pound hog carcasses, hour after hour:

“Going to work on the kill floor was like walking into the pit of hell. They have these fire chambers, big fires going, and this fierce boiling water solution. That’s all part of the process that the carcasses have to go through after they’re killed. It’s so hot in there. And it’s dark and noisy, with the supervisors screaming, and that de-hair machine is so loud. Some people can’t take it.

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A very grim outlook. Best point: China has all the hardware, but the software’s still missing.

China’s ‘Justice’ System
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: June 18, 2006

With President Bush on the ropes, the most important person in the world right now may well be President Hu Jintao, as he presides over 1.3 billion people and the rise of China.

But while China is one of the great successes on the world scene, Mr. Hu increasingly looks like a loser.

He has disappointed many Chinese intellectuals and Communist Party officials with his Brezhnevian approach to political reform. Former President Jiang Zemin and former Prime Minister Zhu Rongji are among the party officials who are said by insiders to be unhappy with Mr. Hu’s reign.

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