CNN reporter detained in Shanghai over Obama-Mao T-shirt

A worker dries shirts bearing an image of U.S. President Barack Obama’s face over that of China’s late Chairman Mao Zedong at a shirt printing factory located on the outskirts of Beijing October 30, 2009. CHINA/USA REUTERS/David Gray/Files

AFP | Nov 17, 2009

WASHINGTON — A CNN correspondent said Monday she was detained byChinese security guards in Shanghai for two hours for displaying a T-shirt on camera depicting US President Barack Obama as Mao Zedong.

Emily Chang, a Beijing-based correspondent for the US television network, said in a blog post on CNN.com that she hunted down the shirt after hearing they had been banned amid fears they “may offend the American president.”

The shirt shows Obama, who is making his first visit to China as president, in a Red Army uniform staring into the distance in a pose made famous by the former Chinese leader.

The front of the shirt says “Serve the People” in Chinese, Chang said. “Oba-Mao” is written on the back in English.

Chang said she held the shirt up to the camera while filming a story in a Shanghai market.

“Two security guards happened to pass by at the moment I announced to the camera: ‘This is the T-shirt everybody is talking about,’” she said.

“And that was it. They scrambled towards us and tried to pry the shirt out of my hands,” Chang said. “I didn’t give in.

“There was a bit of yelling and quite a scuffle,” she said, adding that CNN “had everything on tape.”

“We ended up being detained for two hours in the cold, maze of a market,” she said. “A crowd gathered round. More security and then police showed up.

“They wanted our press cards, our passports, but most of all, they wanted the shirt,” she said. “Finally, they let us go. Phew!”

Chang refused to surrender the offending shirt and joked that a number of jealous White House and CNN colleagues had tried to “bribe” her for it.

Obama in China: Not an opera, more of an awkward meeting with your banker

President Barack Obama (2nd R) attends a State Dinner Reception with China’s National People’s Congress Chairman Wu Bangguo (L) and Chinese President Hu Jintao (2nd L) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, November 17, 2009. REUTERS/Jim Young

seattletimes.nwsource.com | Nov 17, 2009

by Jon Talton

Top of the News: More than ever, expectations are low for President Obama’s trip to China. With China (and even the EU) pulling out of the great recession faster than America, and with China holding trillions in American debt, what is there to talk about?

Plenty, of course. And wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall if the president brings up China’s currency manipulation, intellectual property, protectionism — especially in sustainable energy — and its looming environmental crash. Instead, from reports I’ve read, he’s explaining to our Chinese lenders “in detail” how health care legislation would affect the budget deficit. That’s what happens when you’re the debtor. A new world order.

Better numbers from China don’t translate into a restart of the great American consumer engine. And Chinese policies help stifle American exports. West Coast ports are still suffering — although Seattle and Tacoma are not as vulnerable as the mega-port of LA-Long Beach. China and Asia are still buying Washington wheat. Still, Obama’s warning to Asia that it can’t count on American consumers as it has in the past may be the most important, and undercovered, aspect of this trip.

Chinese dissidents rounded up ahead of Obama visit

Obama arrives in Shanghai on Sunday and moves onto Beijing the next day for a four-day maiden presidential trip

AFP | Nov 14, 2009

BEIJING — China has detained several dissidents and campaigners ahead of US President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated first visit to the country, their relatives and close contacts told AFP Saturday.

Obama arrives in Shanghai on Sunday and moves onto Beijing the next day for a four-day maiden presidential trip during which he has been urged to raise human rights with the Asian giant’s top leadership.

But as the visit drew close, the head of an activist group for parents whose children were sickened by tainted milk in China had been detained, his wife told AFP.

“Zhao Lianhai was criminally detained for ‘provoking an incident’,” Li Xuemei said in a text, without giving further details.

According to activist group Human Rights in China, Zhao was handcuffed and taken away late Friday night by police officers who searched his house and took away computers, a video recorder, a camera and an address book.

When Zhao refused to go with them, as the summons did not state a cause, the police officers filled in “provoking an incident” in the summons, the group said. Police in Beijing would not comment on the case.

Zhao has campaigned relentlessly for parents whose children suffered from drinking milk tainted with the melamine chemical, which killed six children and sickened nearly 300,000 others in a scandal that erupted in September 2008.

Qi Zhiyong, a dissident who lost a leg during the crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests, said he had also been detained for trying to organise a human rights seminar on November 9 in a Beijing park.

In a text sent to AFP, Qi said he and fellow organisers had planned for the seminar to last until the end of Obama’s visit.

He had also applied to police to protest the US President’s visit, “to press him to pay attention to human rights in China, people’s livelihoods and the relatives of jailed people, as he comes only to talk about climate change.”

Qi said he was being held in the Beijing suburbs and had been charged with unlawful assembly and disturbing the social order.

He added that Li Jinping, who every year tries to organise commemorations of deposed former leader Zhao Ziyang, who opposed the use of force to quell the 1989 protests, had also been detained.

Yang Qiuyu, a housing rights activist, and more than 30 other petitioners had also been taken away, Qi said.

Profligate spender Obama goes to pay respects to his Beijing bankers

Liu Mingjie (C) and a customer discuss Liu’s bag and t-shirt ‘Oba Mao’designs in which he superimposed the face of US President Barack Obama over that of China’s late revolutionary leader Mao Zedong for sale at his shop in the tourist Houhai district of Beijing on September 23, 2009. The entrepreneur who goes by the English name Stefan is a former engineer who worked for Germany’s Siemens AG and US-based Cisco Systems before starting his business three years ago, according to state media, introduced the Oba Mao design bags and t-shirts, including coin purses, earlier this summer and says the shirts have been selling well. Getty Images

China’s Role as U.S. Lender Alters Dynamics for Obama

NY Times | Nov 15, 2009

by Helene Cooper, Michael Wines and David E. Sanger.

When President Obama visits China for the first time on Sunday, he will, in many ways, be assuming the role of profligate spender coming to pay his respects to his banker.

That stark fact — China is the largest foreign lender to the United States — has changed the core of the relationship between the United States and the only country with a reasonable chance of challenging its status as the world’s sole superpower.

The result: unlike his immediate predecessors, who publicly pushed and prodded China to follow the Western model and become more open politically and economically, Mr. Obama will be spending less time exhorting Beijing and more time reassuring it.

In a July meeting, Chinese officials asked their American counterparts detailed questions about the health care legislation making its way through Congress. The president’s budget director, Peter R. Orszag, answered most of their questions. But the Chinese were not particularly interested in the public option or universal care for all Americans.

“They wanted to know, in painstaking detail, how the health care plan would affect the deficit,” one participant in the conversation recalled. Chinese officials expect that they will help finance whatever Congress and the White House settle on, mostly through buying Treasury debt, and like any banker, they wanted evidence that the United States had a plan to pay them back.

It is a long way from the days when President George W. Bush hectored China about currency manipulation, or when President Bill Clinton exhorted the Chinese to improve human rights.

Mr. Obama has struck a mollifying note with China. He pointedly singled out the emerging dynamic at play between the United States and China during a wide-ranging speech in Tokyo on Saturday that was meant to outline a new American relationship with Asia.

“The United States does not seek to contain China,” Mr. Obama said. “On the contrary, the rise of a strong, prosperous China can be a source of strength for the community of nations.”

He alluded to human rights but did not get specific. “We will not agree on every issue,” he said, “and the United States will never waver in speaking up for the fundamental values that we hold dear — and that includes respect for the religion and cultures of all people.”

White House officials have been working for months to make sure that Mr. Obama’s three-day visit to Shanghai and Beijing conveys a conciliatory image. For instance, in June, the White House told the Dalai Lama that while Mr. Obama would meet him at some point, he would not do so in October, when the Tibetan spiritual leader visited Washington, because it was too close to Mr. Obama’s visit to China.

Greeting the Dalai Lama, whom China condemns as a separatist, weeks before Mr. Obama’s first presidential trip to the country could alienate Beijing, administration officials said. Every president since George H. W. Bush in 1991 has met the Dalai Lama when he visited Washington, usually in private encounters at the White House, although in 2007 George W. Bush became the first president to welcome him publicly, bestowing the Congressional Gold Medal on him at the Capitol. Mr. Obama met the Dalai Lama as a senator.

Similarly, while he was campaigning for the presidency, Mr. Obama several times accused China of manipulating its currency, an allegation that the current Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, repeated during his confirmation hearings. But in April, the Treasury Department retreated from that criticism, issuing a report that said China was not manipulating its currency to increase its exports.

While American officials said privately that they remained frustrated that China’s currency policies lowered the cost of Chinese goods and made American products more expensive in foreign markets, they said that they were relieved that China was fighting the global recession with an enormous fiscal stimulus program to spur domestic growth, and added that now was not the time to antagonize Beijing.

China is not viewed as a trouble spot for the United States. But this administration, like its predecessor, has had difficulty grappling with a rising power that seems eager to avoid direct clashes with the United States but affects its interests in many areas, including currency policy, nuclear proliferation, climate change and military spending.

In that regard, two members of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy team said that the United States’ interactions with the Chinese had been far too narrow in past years, focusing on counterterrorism and North Korea. Too little was done, they said, to address China’s energy and environmental policies, or its expansion of influence in Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa, where China has invested heavily and used billions of dollars in aid to advance its political influence.

One hint of the Obama administration’s new approach came in a speech this fall by James B. Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, who has deep roots in China policy. He argued that China needed to adopt a policy of “strategic reassurance” to the rest of the world, a phrase that appeared intended to be the successor to the framework of the Bush era, when China was urged to embrace a role as a “responsible stakeholder.”

“Strategic reassurance rests on a core, if tacit, bargain,” Mr. Steinberg said. “Just as we and our allies must make clear that we are prepared to welcome China’s ‘arrival,’ ” he argued, the Chinese “must reassure the rest of the world that its development and growing global role will not come at the expense of security and well-being of others.”

The Chinese reaction has been mixed, at best. The official China Daily newspaper ran a column just before Mr. Obama’s arrival suggesting that the United States needed to provide some assurance of its own — to “respect China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” code words for entirely backing away from the issues of how China deals with Taiwan and Tibet.

In the United States, the phrase “strategic reassurance” has been attacked by conservative commentators, who argue that any reassurance that the United States provides to China would be an acknowledgment of a decline in American power.

In an op-ed article in The Washington Post, the analysts Robert Kagan and Dan Blumenthal argued that the policy had echoes of Europe “ceding the Western Hemisphere to American hegemony” a century ago. “Lingering behind this concept is an assumption of America’s inevitable decline,” they wrote. White House officials shot back, insisting that it is China that needs to do the reassurance, not the United States.

In China, Mr. Obama will meet with local political leaders and will host an American-style town hall meeting with students in Shanghai. He will then spend two days in Beijing meeting with President Hu Jintao.

It seems unlikely that Mr. Obama will get the same celebrity-type reception in Beijing that he received in Cairo, Ghana, Paris and London. China seems mostly immune to the Obama fever that swept other parts of the world, and the Chinese are growing more confident that their country has the wherewithal to compete with the United States on the world stage, analysts say.

“Obama is still a positive guy, and all over the world most people think he’s more energetic, more sincere, than Bush, more a reformist,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor and an expert on United States-China relations at People’s University in Beijing. “But in China, Obama’s popularity is less than in Europe, than Japan or Southeast Asia.” In China, he said, “there is no worship of Obama.”

For instance, during the Bush and Clinton years, China might release a few political dissidents on the eve of a visit by the president as a good-will gesture. This time, American officials say, they do not expect any similar gestures, although they say that Mr. Obama will raise human rights issues privately with Mr. Hu.

“This time China will agree to have a human rights dialogue with the U.S. on some cases,” Mr. Shi said, but “the arguments have changed compared to the past. Now we say, ‘We are a different country, we have our own system, our own culture.’ ”

Obama: Communist China’s rising role on world stage no cause for alarm, nothing to worry about

Tourists are reflected in the window of a shop displaying shirts and pouches bearing an image U.S. President Barack Obama’s face imprinted over that of China’s late leader Mao Zedong, in the popular tourist area of Houhai in central Beijing September 21, 2009. Obama, who will visit Shanghai and Beijing for the first time on Nov. 15-18, spent much of his childhood in Hawaii, five time zones away from Washington, D.C. ; and beginning in 1967, when he was six years old, he lived in Jakarta for four years. Although U.S. President Barack Obama has never set foot there, China cast a long shadow in the Pacific region where he grew up. Picture taken September 21, 2009. To match Special Report CHINA/USA. Reuters Pictures

The Observer | Nov 15, 2009

by Tania Branigan

Barack Obama introduced himself as America’s “first Pacific president” as he launched his four-nation tour of the region, vowing to deepen ties with Asia and arguing that China’s rise should be welcomed rather than feared.

Kicking off his visit in Tokyo, he also sought to thaw the chill in relations with his hosts, America’s closest allies in the region. The new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has vowed to make Japan less dependent on the US, but the two men agreed to put off the issue of resolving the future of US forces in Japan.

However, police in China are reported to have detained dozens of dissidents in a crackdown ahead of Obama’s arrival there today. Human rights campaigners said that at least 30 activists who were expected to apply for the right to hold protests directed at the Chinese government during the US president’s visit were arrested.

Reformers worry that Obama will play down China’s poor human rights record in order to maintain good relations on issues such as the economy. “We get the impression Obama doesn’t want to talk about human rights on this trip, but it is precisely because of his visit here that these people are being rounded up and detained right now,” Ai Weiwei, a Beijing-based artist and social commentator, told the Financial Times.

Speaking yesterday during the first stop on his nine-day Asian tour, Obama told an audience of 1,500 in the Japanese capital: “I want every American to know that we have a stake in the future of this region, because what happens here has a direct effect on our lives at home.”

American officials have portrayed the trip as an opportunity to develop relationships and make progress on non-proliferation, climate change and the economy, and are playing down expectations of any agreements.

As in his previous foreign affairs speeches, Obama emphasised his personal ties in the region – referring to his birth in Hawaii, time in Indonesia and boyhood travels in Asia – and the administration’s break with unilateralism.

“We welcome China’s efforts to play a greater role on the world stage – a role in which their growing economy is joined by growing responsibility,” he said. “Power does not need to be a zero-sum game and nations need not fear the success of another.”

He held out a hand to North Korea again, calling for it to denuclearise; and to Burma, if it undertakes democratic reform and frees political prisoners, including opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Burma’s prime minister will be present at the president’s meeting with Association of South-east Asian Nations (Asean) leaders in Singapore.

Obama also announced that the US will sign up to a trans-Pacific free trade agreement. That may help to deflect accusations of protectionism, which are likely to be aired throughout his tour. He stressed the need for “balanced” growth and said Asian countries should not be dependent on exports to the US.

The economic crisis has underlined the interdependence of “Chimerica” in particular and the trade imbalance that has left China with vast US dollar holdings. Washington wants the Chinese currency, the yuan, to appreciate further; Beijing will repeat its concerns that US debt could endanger its dollar holdings.

But Obama’s Chinese visit is about more than money. The world’s two largest carbon emitters are meeting just weeks away from the Copenhagen climate-change conference.

China’s influence on North Korea and Iran are central to Obama’s non-proliferation agenda. Its handling of Afghanistan and Pakistan will also be high up in discussions.

Obama’s China policy is essentially his predecessor’s; the relationship is increasingly amicable. But some fear attempts to broaden it could mean less meaningful engagement.

“Bush’s approach was: you are rising in the international system and need to take on more responsibility,” said Victor Cha, director of Asian affairs in the National Security Council under George Bush and now at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. “Obama is heaping on all these very, very high expectations – on issues like climate change and currency – and I think they are expectations that China cannot possibly meet.”

China sees itself as a vulnerable developing country as well as a rising power. And shared anxieties – such as those over proliferation – do not equal identical interests. “China’s own interests in those hot spots [North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan] make it deeply conflicted about playing a larger role on the world stage,” said Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt of the International Crisis Group. “While the United States frames China in terms of its growing responsibilities as a major power, China continues to think primarily in terms of its own interests.”

To some observers, the administration is also too keen to please Beijing, wasting leverage rather than smoothing the path to greater gains.

Obama’s decision not to meet the Dalai Lama last month – aides say he will do so in future – “doesn’t send a signal that the US wants to work with China; it sends a signal they have basically got us,” said Cha.

Chinese official: Communist Lincolns freed Tibetan slaves

A Chinese official bizarrely claimed that Barack Obama should understand China’s opposition to Tibetan independence because he is a black president who understands Abraham Lincoln’s role in emancipating African Americans.

Obama should understand Chinese rule in Tibet ‘because he is black’, official says

Telegraph | Nov 12, 2009

By Malcolm Moore in Shanghai

China insists that the Communist party liberated Tibetans from feudal serfdom under the Dalai Lama in 1959.

Qin Gang, the foreign ministry spokesman, said that since Mr Obama is a “black president”, the issue of slavery should resonate with him.

“He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln’s major significance for that movement,” said Mr Qin. “Lincoln played an incomparable role in protecting the national unity and territorial integrity of the United States.”

China’s stance was like Lincoln’s, said Mr Qin.

“Thus on this issue we hope that President Obama, more than any other foreign leader, can better, more deeply grasp China’s stance on protecting national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” he added.

The comments from the foreign ministry came a few days before the American president is due to tour Shanghai and Beijing.

Mr Obama left America for his trip to Asia last night looking to deflect attention from falling popularity at home. A national Gallup opinion poll showed that if asked to vote in a congressional ballot today 48 per cent would choose Republican and 44 per cent Democrat.

The Chinese government is angling for Mr Obama to endorse China’s rule in Tibet publicly, and senior advisers to Mr Obama have admitted that the topic will be on the agenda during talks with Hu Jintao, the Chinese president.

Mr Obama avoided meeting the Dalai Lama when the exiled spiritual leader was in Washington in October, amid rumours that he was keen to avoid upsetting China. However, the Dalai Lama has said that they may meet after Mr Obama’s trip to China.

Pro-Tibetan independence groups immediately condemned the Foreign ministry for “failing a history test”.

Stephanie Brigden, the director of Free Tibet, said: “It is an insult for the unelected and authoritarian Chinese government to suggest that an instinctive democrat such as Abraham Lincoln would have sided with China in seeking to deny the Tibetan people their fundamental right to determine their own future.

“By trying to be clever, and attempting to liken its occupation of Tibet with Lincoln’s fight to abolish slavery while preserving the Union, China has merely underlined its inability to recognise what true freedom looks like.”

_________

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China criticized for routinely detaining and beating petitioners in secret jails

China criticized over alleged ‘black jails’

CNN | Nov 12, 2009

BEIJING, China (CNN) — Chinese authorities should abolish secret jails used to unlawfully detain citizens who travel to the capital and other major cities to file complaints, Human Rights Watch says.

For the past six years, citizens have been held without communication in so-called black jails, often located in state-owned hotels, nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals, according to a new report from the human rights group.

Most of the detainees are from rural areas and travel to major cities to submit grievances at petitions and appeals offices, which address cases without going to court, Human Rights Watch said.

Government officials and security forces often beat, abuse, threaten and intimidate the detainees to ensure that their complaints do not draw attention, according to the report.

“The existence of black jails in the heart of Beijing makes a mockery of the Chinese government’s rhetoric on improving human rights and respecting the rule of law,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director of Human Rights Watch.

“The government should move swiftly to close these facilities, investigate those running them and provide assistance to those abused in them.”

China has repeatedly denied the existence of secret jails, and the ministry of foreign affairs reiterated that stance Thursday.

“I’m not sure what evidence the report of Human Rights Watch is based on,” the office said in a statement. “However, I can tell you that there is no such black jails in China.”

The judicial system will deal with relevant cases, the ministry said.

“If there is any suggestion or complaint from Chinese people toward our government, they can appeal to relevant departments through normal and legal channels, and their legitimate rights will be protected.”

But the rights group said the jails are becoming more popular because officials are penalized if too many grievances come from their jurisdictions. Areas with fewer complaints are rewarded, it said.

In the report, titled, “An Alleyway in Hell,” the group said it had interviewed 38 people who have been detained in the facilities.

The detainees include people under 18, which violates China’s commitments to children’s rights, Human Rights Watch said.

A 15-year-old told the group she was seized in Beijing while petitioning on behalf of her crippled father, who was subjected to beatings at his nursing home.

“To visit these kinds of abuses on citizens, who have already been failed repeatedly by the legal system, is the height of hypocrisy,” Richardson said.

The New York-based organization urged the U.S. president to address human rights issues during his trip to Asia, which starts Thursday and will include a stop in China.

“President Barack Obama has spoken forcefully about the importance of defending human rights globally,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. ” … The test now is whether he will do so in a country where the government remains profoundly hostile to these concepts.”

Former UK ambassador: CIA sent people to be ‘raped with broken bottles’

Raw Story | Nov 4, 2009

By Daniel Tencer

The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”

Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is “endemic” to the country’s justice system.

Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a “totalitarian” state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.

Suspects in Uzbekistan’s gulags “were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they’d been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes.”

“I was absolutely stunned — it changed my whole world view in an instant — to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn’t do the torture ourselves,” Murray said.

UK/USA made use of Uzbek torture

Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region.

Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan’s natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.

“The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,” Murray noted.

Murray said part of the motive in hyping up the threat of Islamic terrorism in Uzbekistan through forced confessions was to ensure the country remained on-side in the war on terror, so that the pipeline could be built.

“There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, it’s about oil, it’s not about democracy.”

The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is slated to be completed in 2014, with $7.6 billion in funding from the Asian Development Bank.

Murray was dismissed from his position as ambassador in 2004, following his first public allegations that the British government relied on torture in Uzbekistan for intelligence.

The following videos were posted to YouTube by the Real News Network on Oct. 26 and Nov. 4, 2009.

Artificial Snow in Beijing Delays Hundreds of Flights

Epoch Times | Nov 3, 2009

By Aifang He & Gu Qing’er

Chinese scientists tinkering with the weather caused millions of tons of snow to fall on Beijing over the weekend, delaying 523 flights from the capital and infuriating passengers.

The Beijing Weather Modification Office (BWMO) induced the first snow of the season, a month earlier than usual, after firing 186 silver iodide capsules into the clouds, according to Weather China.

They fired the capsules at 8:00 p.m. on Oct. 31, and by 11:25 a.m. the following morning Beijing was covered in snow.

Chinese meteorologists say the earliest snowfall normally occurs around Nov. 29, according to statistics developed over 50 years as reported by state-run media.

“We won’t miss any opportunity to use artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from an ongoing drought,” the Weather Modification Bureau chief Zhang Qiang said to Student News Daily.

The snowfall inconvenienced more than 10,000 airline passengers and delayed 523 flights at the Beijing Capital International Airport.

Former Google Vice-President Li Kaifu waited 17 hours in the boarding area for a Taipei flight, according to the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolitan Daily. He blogged about the experience on Sina.com: “I thought bringing two notebook batteries to fly from Beijing to Taipei would be enough; I didn’t think I’d be waiting 11 hours. Now I can only use twitter on my cell phone. People on the plane were full of complaints; some people were so hungry they were going to faint, I just took it as a chance to lose weight. I’d not eaten for nine hours or drunk water for three, and there was nothing for it. The air conditioning was terrible. The grumbling staff didn’t have any strength left to get angry.”

Other passengers were loaded onto planes that wouldn’t take off for hours.

Because the oxygen supply on the planes was short, some passengers fainted and had to be carried out. Later, many began demanding they be let off, some trying to force their way out of the cabins in an attempt to return to the terminal. Jin, who flew from Beijing to Shanghai, said passengers on his plane were extremely agitated, quarrelling angrily with airline staff.

Others complained about the inefficient coordination between the airlines and the Beijing Weather Modification Office.

‘India, China will create New World Order’

Former governor of Reserve Bank YV Reddy delivering the Justice Konda Madhava Reddy memorial lecture on `Global Financial Crisis & Asia’ in Hyderabad.

Express News Service | Oct 31, 2009

HYDERABAD: Indicating that the US will no longer be the leader of world economy, former Rerve Bank of India governor Y Venugopal Reddy has predicted that India and China will dominate the scene. Delivering the Justice Konda Madhava Reddy Memorial Lecture on `Global Financial Crisis and Asia’ at AV College here today, he said return to normalcy at the end of the recession need not mean return of the old world economic order.

“Asian economy suffered less and is recovering faster than the rest of the world as both India and China managed to strike macro-economic balance.

India scored over other countries with efficient balancing between savings and investments due to its conservative nature,’’ he said and accused developed countries like the US for consuming more than they could save while other countries starved. “India can take measures to manage the crisis by defining the parameters of a new order through a process of rebalancing and withdrawl of certain extraordinary measures that can strike a financial balance. It is in a better position to wrest significant gains from globalisation than many other developing countries.’’ He suggested that India voice its concerns along with other developing countries to modify the international trading arrangements for the benefit of developing countries apart from identifying and strengthening itself.

Former Supreme Court judge Justice P Venkatrami Reddi, AP High Court Chief Justice Anil R Dave and AP State Human Rights Commission Chairman P Subhashan Reddy were among the dignitaries who attended the annual event organised by the Justice Konda Madhava Reddy Foundation.