Economist, Jan 28, 2012 (cover date)

choi

(1) Table of contents says, "Our new weekly section on China starts on page 43."

There is no need to read the rest of (2) or (3).
(2) China and the Paradox of Prosperity; For China's rise to continue, the country needs to move away from the model that has served it so well.

Paragraph 1: "IN THIS issue we launch a weekly section devoted to China. It is the first time since we began our detailed coverage of the United States in 1942 that we have singled out a country inthis way. The principal reason is that China is now an economic superpower and is fast becoming a military force capable of unsettling America. But our interest in China lies also in its politics: it is governed by a system that is out of step with global norms. In ways that were never true of post-war Japan and may never be true of India, China will both fascinate and agitate the rest of the world for a long time to come.

(3) Unrest in China | A Dangerous Year; Economist conditions and social media are making protests more common in China--at a delicate time for the country's rulers.

Quote:

(a) "IN AN industrial zone near Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in south-west China, a sign colourfully proclaims the sprawl of factories to be a “delightful, harmonious and happy district”. Angry steelworkers must have winced as they marched past the slogan in their thousands in early January, demanding higher wages. Their three-day strike was unusually large for an enterprise owned by the central government. But, as China’s economy begins to grow more sedately, more such unrest is looming.

"China’s state-controlled media kept quiet about the protest that began on January 4th in Qingbaijiang District, a 40-minute drive north-east of Chengdu on an expressway that crosses a patchwork of vegetable fields and bamboo thickets. But news of the strike quickly broke on the internet. Photographs circulated on microblogs of a large crowd of workers from Pangang Group Chengdu Steel and Vanadium being kept away from a slip road to the expressway by a phalanx of police. Word spread that police had tried to disperse the workers with tear gas.

(b) "In the Pearl River Delta, which produces about a third of China’s exports, there are plenty of signs of malaise. Outside a Taiwanese-owned factory in Dongguan, a dozen or so police officers wearing helmets and carrying clubs watch a small group of angry workers complain that the owner has run away. The factory (which makes massage seats) is unable to pay its debts. They are afraid that, this time, after the lunar new year break they will have no jobs to come back to. A plainclothes policeman tries to silence them. Then a uniformed officer moves in with a video camera, and most of the workers retreat, keeping a prudent silence.

"Others in the delta have been less reticent. In November thousands of employees at a Taiwanese shoe factory in Dongguan took to the streets in protest against salary cuts and sackings, purportedly caused by declining orders. Protesters overturned cars and clashed with police. Photographs of bloodied workers circulated on the internet. There have been further protests in recent weeks.

(c) "A well-known economist, Wu Jinglian, picked up a phrase of Mr Zhang[ Musheng]’s in an essay in Caijing, a Beijing magazine, in which he attacked the notion of a 'China model' and called for political reform. The phrase of Mr Zhang’s that made an impression was one describing China as 'playing pass the parcel with a time bomb.'


(4) Yunnan’s tobacco boom | Poisonous Gift; In China’s south-west, a smoker’s paradise.
http://www.economist.com/node/21543594

Quote:

"IN 1643 Fang Yizhi, a Chinese scholar, wrote that smoking tobacco for too long would “blacken the lungs” and lead to death. The then-emperor, Chongzhen, didn’t bother with warning labels. He outlawed growing and smoking the leaf. Violators were to be beheaded. (As it happens, a year later, the Ming dynasty and Chongzhen were both dead, neither from blackened lungs.)

"Hongta, or Red Pagoda, is China’s largest cigarette-maker by retail sales, and the fifth-largest in the world, selling more than 270 billion cigarettes a year. If Hongta is the Philip Morris of China, then Yuxi is its Richmond, Virginia

"It was a Western imperialist firm, British American Tobacco, that created China’s modern tobacco industry in the early 20th century, but Mao nationalised the industry after seizing power in 1949.

Note:
(a) Quotation 1 tells us that tobaco was present in China in the Ming dynasty.
(b) Richmond, Virginia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond,_Virginia
("In the 1610s, colonist John Rolfe began to grow a sweeter variety of tobacco at Henricus, and it became a lucrative commodity in the tidewater region" of Virginia)

I am clueless about why Economist chooses Richmond as a comparison.
(c) British American Tobacco
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_American_Tobacco
(headquartered in London; The company was formed in 1902, when the United Kingdom's Imperial Tobacco Company [founded 1901] and the American Tobacco Company [founded 1890] of the USA agreed to form a joint venture, the British-American Tobacco Company Ltd)

(5) Yunnan's caffeine rush | For All the Coffee in China; Leaves versus beans.

Quote:

"In 2007 this city in southern Yunnan province changed its name from Communist-era Simao back to its historical name of Pu’er, in order to capitalise on the tea leaves that it made famous. Now Pu’er is once again overhauling its identity. Farmers here endured the collapse in 2008 of a bubble in the price of Pu’er tea, possibly manipulated by officials and speculators. They are now rapidly sowing more coffee seeds, with the encouragement of the local government. Some growers are clearing forested hillsides, something they once did to plant tea. Pu’er today has 28,000 hectares (70,000 acres) of coffee, twice as much as in 2009, and that is projected to grow by half again by 2015. (By comparison, the city has 220,000 hectares of tea of all kinds, roughly the same as three years ago.)

"The economic impetus is clear. A family with a hectare of coffee can earn more than $10,000 a year, triple the amount for tea, and five times more than for maize or rice * * * Now Yunnan accounts for almost all the coffee grown in China.

Mote: Not for all the tea in China. The Phrase Finder, undated.
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanin ... e-tea-in-china.html