Go to Villagebet.com.au for free horse racing tips - Click here now |
|
China |
Post Reply | Page <1 1920212223 66> |
Author | |
Tlazolteotl
Champion Joined: 02 Oct 2012 Location: Elephant Butte Status: Offline Points: 31448 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
I thought viagra would solve the midget, limp dick/exotic animal slaughter Chinese problem but sadly it has made no difference at all.
|
|
An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.
Simon Cameron |
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Shame they dont extend the same compassion to their countrymen, the Uighurs. Why dont they do that?
|
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
After 200 years, the West's era of dominance is coming to an end ... or notBrace for a shattering shock. Westerners will discover within a generation that the fleeting 200-year era of Euro-American dominance is over."The Asians are coming back and the chemistry of the 21st century will be completely different. You will have to make choices," said Kishore Mahbubani, the prophet of Eastern ascendancy and Singapore's former UN ambassador. The rules of the world order will be set in the East. International law will mutate. The financial institutions and global trading structure will be run by China and India. Westerners will have to adapt, nolens volens, to the Confucian-Hindu way of doing things. That at least is the argument. Doubters say the world has been waiting for the Asian century since Marco Polo. Something always seems to intrude. Usually autocracy. Professor Mahbubani's new book - Has the West Lost It? - asserts that the West has made a string of unforced errors since the end of the Cold War. "It is a paradox: the US has the best universities in the world, and the best think tanks, and yet has the worst strategic thinking," he said, speaking at the Ambrosetti forum on global affairs and finance at Lake Como.These blunders accelerated the shift in power already under way as developing Asia was going through an economic leap forward of red-hot intensity. Donald Trump has compounded the damage. Unlike most works of this genre, his book is not an indictment of everything the West stands for and every sin committed over a quarter millennium. Professor Mahbubani says Asia owes a huge debt of gratitude to Euro-American civilisation. "You shared with the world your beautiful advantages. You shared the gift of reasoning and we learnt from you. If the West had not succeeded, we would not have succeeded. We would still be in extreme poverty," he said. "We have seen more progress in 30 years than the last 3,000 years, and that is why there is so little anti-Western feeling today in Asia." It is a soothing assurance for the guilty liberal psyche, but not one always heard on the ultra-nationalist wing of the Chinese media. Professor Mahbubani says nothing so captured the mood of hubris at the end of the Cold War as Francis Fukuyama's End of History, with its eschatological presumption that Western liberal democracy was the final form of human government. "That book did serious brain damage to the West," he told me.I am not so sure. Mr Fukuyama, a Japanese-American as it happens, once admitted to me that his vaulting claim was a joke that got out of hand. But yes, it marked the times, and went to peoples' heads in Washington. Russia was badly mishandled on the assumption that it would glide naturally into the democratic camp once the heavy hand of Bolshevism was lifted. The twin effects of Nato and EU enlargement supposedly forced Russia into a corner. Professor Mahbubani pushes this too far, asserting that "Putin felt that he simply had no choice but to take back Crimea." Really? The competing aspirations of the Ukrainian people fall by the wayside in such a broad-brush treatment of great power interests. It is arguable the West should have bathed Yeltsin's Russia in a Marshall Plan rather than economic "shock therapy", though it is far from clear the country could usefully have absorbed the money under a deformed oligarchy and without the rule of law. The "who lost Russia?" debate presupposes that there was any workable formula, other than letting Putin assert his Tsarist sphere of influence. The second blunder was to overreact to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, invading a country that had nothing to do with the event - Iraq - and doing so illegally without a UN resolution. This consumed the strategic energy of the US for a decade, and ate into the credibility of Pax Americana. It happened to coincide with the moment when China joined the World Trade Organisation, bringing 800 million workers into the global labour pool, what he calls "the most consequential episode in human history". We all know now that this depressed global inflation and distorted the monetary regimes of central banks, causing them to let rip with dangerous asset bubbles. We know too that it let multinationals grow fat on "labour arbitrage", raising the Professorit share of GDP to extreme levels. It shifted a big chunk of income from labour to capital. Failure to grapple with these forces early on - that is to say, failure to look after globalisation's losers - has now led to an existential crisis for the Western democracies themselves. Here he again moves into suspect territory, since he cites Brexit and the election of Trump as the prime exhibits of the failed democratic model. This is to confuse matters. Parliamentary systems decay when the protest of the people is suppressed. In person, Mr Mahbubani is more sympathetic to Brexit. "I can understand the political reasons for it. The EU is legalistic and inflexible. Brexit wouldn't have happened if they had stuck to the 'ASEAN Minus' principle" (a form of brake, based on consensus). But I wish you could have done it without paying such a high price," he said.There is a parallel of sorts with Singapore's traumatic exit from the Malaysian Federation in 1965, when the enclave seemed threatened with loss of its rubber trade and its core market, and risked an internal uprising by irredentist Malays. The pessimists said it would be reduced to a "tropical slum", at risk even of losing its fresh water life-line from the mainland. Sound familiar?The idea that a small island city-state of two million people with no hinterland could survive in what was then a difficult and troubled region - the 'Balkans of Asia' - seemed manifestly absurd," he said. Professor Mahbubani said the first four years were hellish. Nobody expected the wirtschaftswunder that followed. "There was one key word that all our leaders used: sacrifice. No British leader has dared use that word in 2018," he said. Perhaps they should. Behind the Professoressor's world view is a tendency to impute bad motives to America, and an equally strong tendency to give the benefit of doubt to China, all within a framework of extrapolated GDP growth curves. He takes it as a given that president Xi Jinping is pursuing "rational good governance", guided by a Confucian ethic. Xi's chutzpah at Davos last year - where he claimed to be the Fidei Defensor of the globalist multilateral faith, as America abdicates - is taken at face value.What is actually happening is that Xi is carrying out a ferocious repression against the Uighurs in Xinjiang, where a million people languish in internment camps. The Chinese navy is militarising international waters in the South China Sea. It has ignored a tribunal ruling in favour of the Philippines under the Law of the Sea. It picks and chooses when to respect the global rule book. Xi's regime has become an autocratic surveillance state, and here it runs headlong into the "impossible dilemma". Events have yet to show that a closed regime without free exchange of ideas can break out of the "middle income trap" and reach the elite league of advanced economies. China may yet defy this soft law of political economy, but the air is already getting thinner. The low-hanging fruit of catch-up growth has been picked. Beijing has kept the game going with fresh bursts of credit creation, yielding less growth each time. The workforce is contracting. The demographic crunch will deepen each year from now on, running into the 2020s and 2030s. Michael Auslin has already leapt ahead to the counter-case in his book - The End of the Asian Century - arguing that China's miracle is essentially over and the window is closing. "Western observers assumed in the Eighties that Japan would continue to grow forever; a similar assumption still dominates discussions of China," he says. "We are on the cusp of a change in the global zeitgeist, from celebrating a strong and growing Asia to worrying about a weak and dangerous Asia," he concludes. Two drastically different forecasts: take your pick. Telegraph, London y Ambrose Evans-Pritchard |
|
Tlazolteotl
Champion Joined: 02 Oct 2012 Location: Elephant Butte Status: Offline Points: 31448 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
India will rule in the end.
|
|
An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.
Simon Cameron |
|
Whale
Champion Joined: 01 Jun 2009 Location: St Kilda Beach Status: Offline Points: 38719 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Hope not I hate curries. The only food that looks worse going in than coming out
|
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Assorted Thoughts, Live from the Northeast CorridorAs my Northeast Regional train rattles towards our nation’s capital, I thought I’d share a few odds and ends. Over at The New Republic, Isaac Stone Fish, a senior fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.–China Relations, has published an engrossing account of what he describes as “an epidemic of self-censorship at U.S. universities on the subject of China, one that limits debate and funnels students and academics away from topics likely to offend the Chinese Communist Party.” Fish’s reporting is well worth your time. One of the more interesting aspects of the story concerns the role of Chinese foreign students as a lucrative revenue source. “Beijing’s ability to direct Chinese students to cash-strapped universities — or take them away — gives universities a powerful incentive to act carefully.” Though I’ve often heard this subject discussed by academics in private conversations, complete with talk of corruption and the systematic manipulation of academic standards, it almost never comes up in the press. Fish deserves a great deal of credit for his willingness to cover this difficult subject, as do those who agreed to talk to him. His reporting brought to mind the important work of John Garnaut, a journalist who has played a leading role in drawing attention to the pervasiveness of the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in Australia’s intellectual and political life.www.nationalreview.com/corner/chinese-censorship-safe-assets-state-pension-crises/ |
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
you know what pt, regardless of what you and i think, there is a lot of "chatter' about china.
they are not a small target anymore. as a previous article posted here said, has Xi gone too early? |
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
“You don’t want to go out on a limb,” said a professor at Claremont McKenna. Sounding “too strident” risks “the ire of the Chinese government.”
|
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
A tennis player anyone?
|
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
i can see a meme; Xi throwing down a globe of the earth, like a petulent tennis player does with a tennis racket
|
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
pt why are you so sneaky.
you play the west for idiots. you just game us. why do you do it. and then you absolutely deny it. Chinese video surveillance network used by the Australian governmentBy Dylan Welch and Kyle Taylor from ABC Investigation hey've been used to identify ethnic minorities and political dissidents in China, and were last month banned by the US due to concerns they were creating a "surveillance network" among federal agencies. Now it appears a pair of Chinese video surveillance companies have become entrenched in Australia's government as well.One camera was used to monitor security threats at a sensitive Australian military base. Another hangs outside the front entrance of the Canberra office complex that houses the Australian government's top lawyers, two federal departments focussed on national security and an Australian intelligence agency. And then there are the hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras in houses, on street corners, in local council offices, at schools and universities, on buses, in shopping centres and thousands of other public spaces across Australia. Almost all of the cameras are made by two Chinese owned companies, Hikvision and Dahua. Both face long-standing accusations of spying on behalf of the Chinese Government. "Having these sorts of cameras in secure facilities just doesn't make any sense," Fergus Hanson, head of the International Cyber Policy Centre at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said. "It's a real dereliction of duty to have them in military bases. "But even on the street you've got the potential to inadvertently contribute towards Chinese espionage activity by providing real time information about the situation on the ground, all over the world, and in collective terms, quite an important data feed to China." Last month Hikvision and Dahua were banned from US government use via an amendment to a defence spending bill. "Video surveillance and security equipment sold by Chinese companies exposes the US government to significant vulnerabilities, and my amendment will ensure that China cannot create a video surveillance network within federal agencies," the architect of the amendment, Republican congresswoman Vicky Hartzler, said. Cameras a 'key part of Chinese espionage platformHikvision and Dahua are, respectively, the largest and the second-largest video surveillance companies in the world.Hikvision grew out of China's military surveillance wing and the Government retains a 42 per cent stake in the company. It is making huge strides in the fields of facial and gait recognition software via advances in artificial intelligence. "There are some worrying examples of how the Chinese are using facial recognition and image recognition software and surveillance within their state to suppress religious minorities, to surveil their population, to keep control of their population," UNSW artificial intelligence expert, Professor Toby Walsh said. Hikvision was criticised in May this year when it released a promotional video showing its video surveillance of a well-known tourist area in Shandong province called Mount Tai. The video includes images showing Hikvision's cameras classifying people as "ethnic minorities". Hikvision and Dahua also form the backbone of a $US1 billion ($1.4 billion) surveillance system in China's restive north-western province of Xinjiang. Through one of the greatest densities of security cameras on Earth, the ethnically Han Chinese Government in Beijing has created an ever-present security state that monitors the province's population of Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority. The fear is that behaviour may be repeated overseas. "China's made it very clear that their ambition is to seek economic and military dominance through the use of technology like AI [artificial intelligence]," Professor Walsh said.
|
|
Passing Through
Champion Joined: 09 Jan 2013 Location: At home Status: Offline Points: 79532 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Is this a surprise to you Isaac?
Where have you been hiding?
|
|
|
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Inside the 'shadowy world' of China's fake science research black marketWhen the cancer research journal Tumor Biology retracted 107 papers last year, a dubious new world record was set — and the world's scientists took notice.Largely because all 107 papers were penned by Chinese researchers. "The fact they were all from one journal was eye opening", Ivan Oransky, who co-founded Retraction Watch, a publication that investigates scientific misconduct, said. But it wasn't a first for the journal, now published by Sage. In 2016, it retracted 25 papers because of similar doubts over their integrity. The incidents expose a deeper, darker problem for science globally. A growing black market is peddling fake research papers, fake peer reviews, and even entirely fake research results to anyone who will pay. "Organised crime in certain countries has realised there is a lot of money to be made here," medically-trained Dr Oransky said. "This really is a shadowy world." China's noble quest for a Nobel PrizeUnder President Xi Jinping, China has ambitions to become a global leader in science and technology and is making big investments in that effort. A decade ago, the country launched the Thousand Talents Program to attract world-class scientists to China, setting its sights on winning Nobel Prizes. "The biggest telescopes in the world now are being built in China," David Cyranoski, a Shanghai-based correspondent with Nature, said."Quantum computing, gene editing ... the future of artificial intelligence is something that they're very keen on. "They want to be comprehensive, from basic to applied." The pressure on Chinese scientists to publish their work in prestigious, English-language journals is now immense. This has created new opportunities for China's thriving black market. Companies offering standard editing and translation services to scientists have, in some cases, become a source of serious fraud. "People can ask them to produce a paper of a certain kind, and they will produce the figures, the data, everything, and give it to you. "You see this kind of very large-scale fraud going on in China." Professor Cong Cao, a leading scholar in innovation studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, said the market for these kind of services is large. "In China, for a scientist to be promoted, they have to have a certain number of papers," he said. Chinese graduate students and medical clinicians now also face the same strict requirements. Some universities also pay huge cash rewards — over $US40,000 — if a scientist succeeds in publishing in a high-profile journal like Science or Nature. Many see these financial incentives as part of the problem, especially in a country where average academic salaries are very low. "The incentives are all misaligned," Dr Oransky said. Professor Cao said the aim was to encourage scientists to be innovative. "[But] there are some unintended consequences of this kind of policy," he said. A growing marketplace for fake scienceIn China's shadowy scientific marketplace, scientists can even pay to have their name included on scientific papers they didn't work on. "A company will sell authorship and say, 'if you want to be the first author or the corresponding author you have to pay this much, and if you're going to be somewhere in the middle you can pay this much'," Mr Cyranoski said. The order in which authors' names appear on a scientific paper reflects their role in the research — and can have a significant impact on a scientist's career progression and status. When a scientific journal retracts a paper it's a sign that something is wrong with the study. "It's a statement by the journal that this result, this finding, this conclusion is not reliable anymore. Do not rely on this," Dr Oransky said. Not all retractions point to scientific misconduct. Sometimes a scientist might discover an unintended mistake in their own work and ask to have the paper pulled from publication. This is considered good practice, because it prevents other scientists wasting time with the study's results or being led down rabbit holes in their own research. But retractions are on the rise, and Dr Oransky says around two thirds of cases point to something more nefarious. "Either falsification, which means you made things look better than they were; fabrication, which means you made it up; or plagiarism." Fake peer reviewersScience is driven by peer review — a process via which research is critiqued by peers in a related field, before it is published in a scientific journalJournal editors rely on peer review to help them interrogate the veracity and accuracy of research. But peer review is now facing its own integrity crisis. More than 600 papers have been retracted since 2012 for fake peer review, according to Dr Oransky. "Arguably many more than that," he said."I think we're being naive and trusting the process too much. It's a human endeavour, it's only one filter. "But with fake peer review, it's actually a whole other level of malfeasance." The papers retracted by Tumor Biology were suspected to have exploited fake peer reviews. This is when a scientist, or a company representing them, submits a paper to a journal and recommends to the journal editor possible reviewers they think are qualified to assess the work. But the email addresses they provide for those reviewers are fake. "The addresses take them back to the company or to the individual who is trying to publish the paper," Mr Cyranoski said. "And, of course, then they just give the paper rave reviews." Dr Oransky and his colleagues at Retraction Watch have managed to speak to scientists who employ this deceit. One was a South Korean scientist. "He ended up having to retract 28 papers. And he blamed it on the people that he had hoodwinked. "He actually said, 'well, if those editors have been paying attention, they would have seen the problem'." Fake peer reviews do suggest a gross failure by journal editorial teams to source their own independent and trusted reviewers, but even prestigious publications have fallen prey to such scams. "Science really prides itself on self-correction," Dr Oransky said. "It is important for public trust to know that when something is published we have reason to believe that it represents reality as best as a scientist can. "A lot of this research is funded by our tax dollars ... and it is in the service of humanity." A Government crackdownScientific misconduct is a growing global concern, and there is a risk of singling out China as the only hotspot. But the Chinese Government knows it has a serious problem. "It's a challenge for the international scientific community to figure out whether a piece of research coming out of China is genuine or fake," Professor Cao said. |
|
Passing Through
Champion Joined: 09 Jan 2013 Location: At home Status: Offline Points: 79532 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Thanks for posting here and alerting us to today's existential threat from China Isaac, I was getting dizzy chasing your stuff all over the forum and I would hate to miss a post.
|
|
|
|
Whale
Champion Joined: 01 Jun 2009 Location: St Kilda Beach Status: Offline Points: 38719 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Isaac lives by this motto :
|
|
Whale
Champion Joined: 01 Jun 2009 Location: St Kilda Beach Status: Offline Points: 38719 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
|
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
china gets plenty of views.
i ilke to think im performing a public sevice caught up with the front bar yet whale? you might find that funny bone.....
|
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Passing Through
Champion Joined: 09 Jan 2013 Location: At home Status: Offline Points: 79532 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Thank you for your service Isaac. I would like to present you with the COALition govts official medal of service. I had a spare one
|
|
|
|
Whale
Champion Joined: 01 Jun 2009 Location: St Kilda Beach Status: Offline Points: 38719 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Nah, still trying to perfect my cut and paste skills so I can post pages of boring,unread
|
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
China coal imports stay robust despite lower domestic prices, weaker currencyShanghaiCOAL imports by China held near the highest level in four years, underscoring buoyant demand in the world's largest user even as lower domestic prices and a weaker currency hurt the appeal of overseas supplies. Foreign purchases fell just 1.1 per cent in August to the equivalent of 925,161 tonnes a day, compared with 935,806 the previous month, the highest since January 2014, according to Bloomberg calculations based on customs data released on Saturday. Shipments gained 14.7 per cent to 204 million tonnes in the first eight months of the year while slumping domestic coal prices and the currency's longest run of monthly declines since 1994 would have made overseas cargoes more expensive, the strong imports suggest that concern over faltering demand in the summer months might have been overblown.Daily thermal coal use by China's major power generators averaged 769,000 tonnes in July to August, typically a peak demand season, slightly above the levels last yearCoal demand in China remained robust last month at the height of summer," Zeng Hao, an analyst at Shanxi Fenwei Energy Information Services Co, said before the data. Demand for imports could see some support from government inspections of coal mines, which would crimp domestic output. China embarked on a month-long inspection of local coal mines on Aug 20, a move that's already helped futures on the Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange rebound from a low of 573.4 yuan a tonne in early August to 629.4 yuan last Friday. Natural gas imports rose last month amid the country's drive towards using more of the cleaner-burning fuel. Shipments including overland and seaborne supplies were 7.77 million tonnes compared with 7.38 million tonnes in July and 5.66 million a year earlier, customs data showed. Imports during the first eight months were 34.8 per cent higher at 57.18 million tonnes. MON, SEP 10, 2018 - 5:50 AM |
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
World coal consumption, top 10 countries, 2017The chart shows the top 10 coal consuming countries and coal consumption in the rest of the world in 2017. Global coal consumption amounted to 3731.5 Mtoe; China is the main coal consumer (1892.6 Mtoe, 51%), followed by India (424 Mtoe, 11%) and the USA (332.1 Mtoe, 9%). |
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
china are following western culture very closelyChina's 'sissy pants phenomenon': Beijing fears negative impact of 'sickly culture' on teenagersBy Jack Kilbride and Bang Xiao PHOTO: Zhang Yangzi says he spends around a third of his monthly wage on his appearance. (Supplied: Zhang Yangzi) Applying foundation, nose contouring and filling in eyebrows are standard practice for many women getting ready to head out. Key points:
But for many men in China and in other parts of Asia, using cosmetics is part of their routine too. "I basically wear makeup every time I go out, and buying clothes also makes me happy," Zhang Yangzi, a 22-year-old teacher from Shanghai, told the ABC. He said he spends about a third of his monthly income on his appearance, mainly on clothing and cosmetics.
Mr Zhang is part of a growing trend in China, where men are displaying a softer form of masculinity, sparked by the rise of effeminate male celebrities in Chinese media and popular culture. Statistics from research firm Euromonitor show the market for male grooming products is rapidly expanding in China, with a 44 per cent sales increase (in real terms) of male grooming products from 2011 to 2016. Julia Illera, research consultant at Euromonitor International, anticipated global sales of male beauty products would continue to rise over the next five years, particularly in the Asia Pacific market. "When looking at regions, Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing region in men's grooming globally," Ms Illera told the ABC. "Contrary to other regions, where sales of men's grooming is driven by shaving and deodorants, in Asia-Pacific, men's skincare is the largest and fastest-growing category." 'Sissy pants' boys part of a 'sickly culture': state mediaDespite the growing popularity of effeminate males in Chinese youth culture, the portrayal of masculinity in Chinese media has received a strong pushback from powerful players in Beijing. PHOTO: Hit Chinese show Meteor Garden is one series that features popular effeminate male actors. (Twitter: @MeteorGardn2018) Last week, Chinese state media Xinhua published an editorial slamming the portrayal of men in Chinese media, claiming the popularity of the "sickly aesthetics" in effeminate celebrities was having an adverse impact on teenagers. Xinhua said that "sissy pants" or "little fresh meats" — who they describe as effeminate young men who use makeup, are slender and wear androgynous clothing — were hurting China's national image. "In an open and diverse society, aesthetics can be varied, and people can enjoy what they do," Xinhua's editorial said. "However, everything should have a limit … in this case, it's no longer a matter of aesthetics, but it is an enthusiasm for ugliness and vulgarity.
The editorial stressed that "what a society's pop culture should embrace, reject and spread is really critical to the future of the country." The editorial, with its use of strong derogatory terms like "sissy pants", received a mixed reaction on Chinese social media. "It would be a country's tragedy if the whole society accepted this sissy culture and teenagers started following it. Supporting cultural diversity does not mean that this culture should become part of the mainstream," wrote one Weibo user, DRA Spider. "It is up to the individual to decide who they want to be. Even if a boy likes to wear makeup and speak softly, it doesn't mean he has no sense of responsibility," posted another user, LiRoFi. The comments also received strong opposition from another state media, People's Daily — which is often referred to as the China Communist Party mouthpiece — which denounced Xinhua's use of derogatory terms like "sissy pants". "A valuation based on gender characteristics, which equates male quality with appearance, is a simplistic approach," said People's Daily. They added that masculinity came from within, citing "courage and responsibility" and the "behaviour of abiding by the law" as more important factors of masculinity. Soft masculinity 'threatens China's genes'PHOTO: Dr Yu says President Xi Jinping is an example of the stronger masculinity Beijing wants to display. (AP: Li Gang) Mr Zhang said comments from the Xinhua editors were extremely offensive to young males in China. "The most infuriating thing is that it was actually published by the state media," Mr Zhang said.
Associate professor at RMIT University and an expert on China's digital media and popular culture, Dr Haiqing Yu, said that while male beauty was still rejected by older generations in other countries, in China there were more political undertones to the issue. Dr Yu said Xinhua's position suggested many in positions of power were not at ease with an effeminate male image as it did not reflect China's "desire to lead, not just to follow". "China is increasingly flexing its military and economic muscles everywhere to show the rise of China as a really powerful masculine figure, represented by the Chinese President for example," Dr Yu told the ABC.
"They are even weaving this narrative that this is one of the strategies of western countries … to destroy the Chinese nation by destroying the younger generations, but I think this is just nonsense." The rise of the 'little fresh meat'According to Dr Yu, the modern rise of the "little fresh meat" in China flows from youth culture trends in Japan and South Korea, particularly K-Pop, J-Pop, anime and manga. "You look at the K-pop stars, those teenage boys, they all look similar and they all wear makeup — it's them who have popularised the male cosmetics industry," Dr Yu said. < width="100%" border="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen="" allowtransparency="" ="https://www.youtube.com//pBuZEGYXA6E?iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&showinfo=0&rel=0&origin=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.abc.net.au&list=&start=0&enablejsapi=1" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; border-width: 0px; border-style: initial; display: block; : ; height: 393.75px;"> YOUTUBE: K-Pop groups like BTS have popularised male beauty across the Asian market.In Korea, the boys are known as "flower men" and in Japan they are referred to as Bishōnen "It used to be the Hollywood figures that the Chinese youth aspired to be, but now it is the Asian pop figures, and that inter-regional cultural flow impacts on how young male figures are portrayed, represented and shaped in the popular culture of China," Dr Yu said. Ms Illera said the "high exposure to social media and powerful celebrity influence" in the Asia-Pacific region drove the sales of male skincare products. "Skincare regimens in Asia-Pacific are largely being driven by look-conscious consumers and characterised by gender blurriness, with unisex products such as cosmetics, including lip tints, BB/CC creams and mascara in high demand," Ms Illera said. "Young males perceive South Korean celebrities as new role models for styling … and actively copy their style to look and feel special." She added that high levels of social media use and exposure to global grooming styles had led to the dismantling of "boundaries between male and female beauty." PHOTO: Actor Lawrence Wong says the effeminate male look is probably just a trend. (Supplied: Lawrence Wong) Speaking to ABC's The World, Lawrence Wong, star of China's immensely popular drama series The Story of Yanxi Palace, said the popularity of the effeminate image was something that he saw while working across Asia in recent years.
"It is probably just a phase, a trend. Trends come, trends pass." Dr Yu added that the marketing push from western brands like L'Oreal and Nivea and Asian-based products like South Korea's Laneige has been key to the wider adoption of male beauty in China. "China's market is huge, particularly the male one," she said.
PHOTO: Laneige features a range of creams, moisturisers and concealers for the male market. (Reuters: Bobby Yip) Ms Illera said this was part of a worldwide trend in the industry, with brands starting to target products to the male market. "Some brands are using male beauty bloggers such as L'Oreal featuring Gary Thompson, whilst brands like Covergirl cosmetics have introduced their first male spokesperson using makeup artist James Charles," she said. Chinese youth want greater self-expressionDr Yu also pointed to the wider desire for self-expression in Chinese youth culture, particularly the push for greater gender equality and a fight for LGBT rights, as a factor in the development of the male image. Beijing has been strict against LGBT content in the media, controversially censoring Ireland's gay love song during the Eurovision 2018 broadcast and attempting to censor LGBT content on social media sites. "More visibility of LGBT people from the screen to social media has played a role in disrupting traditional gender roles," Dr Yu said.
PHOTO: Mr Zhang is an example of the "sissy pants" boys criticised by Xinhua. (Supplied: Zhang Yangzi) But despite the attempts to control the image of young Chinese males, Mr Wong said there is more than enough space in the Chinese market for many portrayals of masculinity. "China is a huge country, with all sorts of people. Different people appeal to different audiences, I think the market is big enough for all types of male artists, younger ones, older ones," Mr Wong said. Mr Zhang said the Government should stop trying to manipulate the image of its citizens. "Everyone has the right to wear makeup or not to do so," Mr Zhang said. "You have the right to do anything, but you really have no right to impose your value on others." |
|
Passing Through
Champion Joined: 09 Jan 2013 Location: At home Status: Offline Points: 79532 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Dont miss Foreign Correspondent tonight on ABC Isaac.
|
|
|
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
okey dokey
|
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
your mob excel themselves!
Leave no dark cornerChina is building a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4 billion citizens. For some, “social credit” will bring privileges — for others, punishment. By China correspondent Matthew Carney hat may sound like a dystopian vision of the future is already happening in China. And it’s making and breaking lives. The Communist Party calls it “social credit” and says it will be fully operational by 2020. Within years, an official Party outline claims, it will “allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step”.Social credit is like a personal scorecard for each of China’s 1.4 billion citizens. In one pilot program already in place, each citizen has been assigned a score out of 800. In other programs it’s 900. Those, like Dandan, with top “citizen scores” get VIP treatment at hotels and airports, cheap loans and a fast track to the best universities and jobs.
Those at the bottom can be locked out of society and banned from travel, or barred from getting credit or government jobs. The system will be enforced by the latest in high-tech surveillance systems as China pushes to become the world leader in artificial intelligence. Surveillance cameras will be equipped with facial recognition, body scanning and geo-tracking to cast a constant gaze over every citizen.Smartphone apps will also be used to collect data and monitor online behaviour on a day-to-day basis. Then, big data from more traditional sources like government records, including educational and medical, state security assessments and financial records, will be fed into individual scores. Trial social credit systems are now in various stages of development in at least a dozen cities across China. Several companies are working with the state to nationalise the system, co-ordinate and configure the technology, and finalise the algorithms that will determine the national citizen score. It’s probably the largest social engineering project ever attempted, a way to control and coerce more than a billion people. If successful, it will be the world’s first digital dictatorship.Dandan doesn’t object to the prospect of life under the state’s all-seeing surveillance network. The 36-year-old knows social credit is not a perfect system but believes it’s the best way to manage a complex country with the world’s biggest population. “I think people in every country want a stable and safe society,” she says. “If, as our government says, every corner of public space is installed with cameras, I’ll feel safe.” She’s also likely to benefit from the system. Dandan’s financial behaviour will be an important measure for the national social credit score. Under an existing financial credit scheme called Sesame Credit, Dandan has a very high score of 770 out of 800 — she is very much the loyal Chinese citizen.Thanks to her rating, Dandan is already able to partake in many of the rewards of China’s rapid development. An app on her phone gives access to special privileges like renting a car, hotel room or a house without a deposit.
But social credit will be affected by more than just internet browsing and shopping decisions. Who your friends and family are will affect your score. If your best friend or your dad says something negative about the government, you’ll lose points too. Who you date and ultimately partner with will also affect social credit.Dandan married for love but she chose the right husband — Xiaojing Zhang is likely to have an even higher score than her. He’s a civil servant in the justice department, a loyal cadre to the party. “We need a social credit system,” says Xiaojing. “In the Chinese nation, we hope we can help each other, love each other, and help everyone become prosperous. “As President Xi said, we will be rich and democratic, cultural, harmonious and beautiful. “It is Xi’s hope for the country’s future. It is also the hope of the whole Chinese nation.”China has long been a surveillance state, so the citizenry is accustomed to the government taking a determining role in personal affairs. For many in China, privacy doesn’t have the same premium as it does in the West. The Chinese place a higher value on community good versus individual rights, so most feel that, if social credit will bring a safer, more secure, more stable society, then bring it on. But most don’t seem to comprehend the all-encompassing control social credit is likely to have, and there’s been no public debate about implementing the system inside China. In private, there’s been some disquiet in the educated middle classes about the citizen score being the only criterion for character assessment. But that’s not going to stop the rollout. The Party is using the system to win back some of the control it lost when China opened up to the world in the 1980s and rapid development followed. It’s a way to silence dissent and ensure the Party’s absolute dominance. Already, about 10 million people have been punished in the trial areas of social credit. Liu Hu is just one of them.Hu lost his social credit when he was charged with a speech crime and now finds himself locked out of society due to his low score. In 2015, Hu lost a defamation case after he accused an official of extortion. He was made to publish an apology and pay a fine but when the court demanded an additional fee, he refused. Last year, the 43-year-old found himself blacklisted as “dishonest” under a pilot social credit scheme. “There are a lot of people who are on the blacklist wrongly, but they can’t get off it,” says Hu.http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/china-social-credit-a-model-citizen-in-a-digital-dictatorship/10200278 |
|
Gay3
Moderator Group Joined: 19 Feb 2007 Location: Miners Rest Status: Offline Points: 52023 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
Mind boggling I much preferred when AI was only short for artificial insemination
|
|
Wisdom has been chasing me but I've always outrun it!
|
|
Isaac soloman
Champion Joined: 13 Oct 2015 Status: Offline Points: 6085 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
this is how you manage the muslims, chinese style.....
China’s religious detention camps revealedTHE UN calls them detention camps. China tells us they’re simply re-educating religious believers in Communist Party ways. But these pictures tell their own story. Jamie Seidel News Corp Australia NetworkSEPTEMBER 12, 201812:19PMPRESIDENT Xi doesn’t want anything to contradict the authority of his Communist Party. So he’s set about purging China of all possible dissenting voices. Be it social or traditional media, trade organisations — or religion — it must subject itself to Party control. In the case of the 11 million ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang province, that produces a multitude of problems. They’re not ethnic Chinese. They speak Turkic. They are mostly Muslim. Put simply, they’re not Chinese enough for Beijing. So it has clamped down hard in an effort to ‘Sinicize’ their entire culture. It wants ‘enhanced’ patriotism towards the Party. Exactly how it has set about doing so has exploded into internationial uproar in recent months. The UN human rights committee warned last month that China has put up to one million Uighurs into “arbitrary detention” or “re-education centres”.Beijing’s response was mixed. On the one hand it denied the claim outright. On the other, it defended such drastic measures as an effort to “salvage” a region on “the verge of massive turmoil”. State media has previously confirmed it has imposed stringent surveillance regimen and relocated hundreds of thousands of the Uighur population. < id="google_ads__/5129dm.newsews//world_5" title="3rd party ad " name="google_ads__/5129dm.newsews//world_5" width="4" height="4" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" border="0" -integralas-id-26d1cf0c-9599-ffb3-4051-4f2ce6411133="" -load-complete="true" style="-sizing: border-; border-width: 0px; border-style: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: bottom;"> BACKGROUND: China’s ‘patriotic’ crackdown on religion and academia Now, religious liberty and human rights group Bitter Winter has released photographs of what it says is the true nature of Beijing’s ‘training’ camps in Xinjiang. And they feature guard towers, tall concrete walls, and barbed wire. The camp at the centre of the new photographs is pronounced by Beijing to be a ‘vocational training centre’.It’s in Xinjiang’s Akto county. It’s a 6000 sqm slab in a light industrial park. It’s said to have been operational for just over a year. What makes this different from your average vocational training centre, a Bitter Winter blog says, is the permanent presence of armed guards at its gates. The concrete and barbed-wire walls reach some 4m high. And a red roofed watchtower overlooks the internal courtyard. RELATED: Chinese officials storm Christian church in Beijing The human rights group claims the facility contains 5000 Chinese citizens within its walls. “Most of these are Muslims of various ethnicities such as Uyghurs, Kyrgyzes, and Tajiks,” the blog reads.The detainees are taken in for offences such as believing in God, forwarding religious content on messaging apps, expressing discontent with the CCP and so on. While at the camps, they are forced to study Communist Party policies and Mandarin. They are also forced to praise socialism and the Communist Party.” It says all of the dormitories and hallways have CCTV cameras. All security personnel carry electric batons and handheld radios. The military guards are always armed. Bitter Winter says it’s not the only detention facility at the industrial park. It says another, which has not been photographed, holds 7000 Chinese citizens in a 20,000 sqm area. A third is being built in the district, purportedly capable of holding 10,000 detainees. www.news.com.au/world/chinas-religious-detention-camps-revealed/news-story/19bd71edb1d0277f95830d7d9735a914 |
|
Passing Through
Champion Joined: 09 Jan 2013 Location: At home Status: Offline Points: 79532 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
As a model citizen for whom being naughty is not paying attention during prayer group, I have nothing to fear from surveillance Isaac. Maybe you have stuff to hide?
|
|
|
|
Post Reply | Page <1 1920212223 66> |
Tweet |
Forum Jump | Forum Permissions You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot create polls in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum |