Grapevine - 3. page

On October 10, 2013, Chinaweekly.cn published an article on the prevalence of the bribery phenomena among Chinese officials. When a university professor and a deputy Party secretary of the Changsha Municipal People’s Congress were attending a seminar in Germany, the university professor said to the Party secretary, “According to German standards, we are all criminals.” The deputy Party secretary eventually quit his job because he realized that, just based on China’s own policies which the Chinese Communist Party Central Commission for Discipline Inspection had established, many Chinese have committed the crime of bribery.

China’s political system causes all officials from the bottom to the top to be trapped into either giving or taking bribes.  It is a hidden rule in China that bribery must be used to initiate projects and to obtain funds. The article concluded that, in order to prevent officials from committing crimes because of their jobs, China must first discipline the officials from the top so as to block any loopholes in the system.

Source: Chinaweekly.cn, October 10, 2013
http://www.chinaweekly.cn/bencandy.php?fid=63&id=6871

On September 29, 2013, People’s Daily published an article on how expensive properties are in the Beijing Central Business District (CBD). The original article was from Beijing Youth Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Youth League committee in Beijing. According to the article, Beijing CBD property is as expensive as real estate in the Tokyo Shinjuku CBD and in the City of London. However, the average income of Beijing residents is only 1/5 of the income of people living in Tokyo and London.  If an ordinary young man wanted to buy an 80-square-meter apartment in the Beijing CBD, he would have to work at least 40 years without eating or drinking anything.

Source: People’s Daily, September 29, 2013
http://house.people.com.cn/n/2013/0929/c194441-23069638.html

On July 21, 2013, China Review News published an article, which was originally from http://www.xinmin.cn/, on China’s “ghost towns.” According to the article, a ghost town is an empty town in China where the local government has built a lot of new apartments and commercial buildings at great cost. There are 12 large ghost towns in China, four of which are in Inner Mongolia.

In 2009, China’s real estate investments accounted for 10 percent of China’s GDP. In contrast, in the United States, real estate investment does not exceed 6 percent of its GDP. The writer believes that some housing bubbles have already burst.

Source: China Review News, July 21, 2013
http://www.zhgpl.com/doc/1026/4/0/4/102640407.html?coluid=53&kindid=0&docid=102640407&mdate=0721073650

On June 29, 2013, Voice of America published an article on why Chinese netizens were so cheerful when a university president announced he would resign from his post as the president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications due to illness. The president was Fang Binxing, China’s best-known Internet censorship engineer, nicknamed the “Father of China’s Great Firewall.” The “Great Firewall” allows China’s regime to censor websites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, and anything that the Chinese authorities do not approve. When Fang sent his greetings on a Weibo (Chinese microblog) account, Chinese netizens responded with 250,000 “Go Away” messages. In 2012, when Fang spoke at Wuhan University, students threw eggs and shoes at him.

Fang’s resignation announcement sparked a new round of mocking. Some netizens even posted a sarcastic couplet poem to Fang: “Thousands of People Point Fingers at You When You Are Alive; One Excremental Name Will Follow You after You Pass Away.” The title of the poem was “A Life Journey Not Taken in Vain.”

Source: Voice of America, June 29, 2013
http://www.voachinese.com/content/beijing-principal-20130629/1691720.html  

An article, originally published by a Hong Kong monthly magazine QianShao, is being spread widely on the Internet. The article speculates that former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang might be the targeted “big tiger” in Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign. China’s State media reported that Zhou’s crony, former secretary Guo Yongxiang, is being investigated. 

Students and parents besieged proctors at a high school in Zhongxiang City, Hubei Province on June 8, 2013, because of tightened anti-cheating measures on the College Entrance Exam. The parents were protesting unjust treatment on the national college entrance exam, “Why is it that official’s children are allowed to cheat, but our children cannot cheat?” The proctors confiscated cell phones, set up wireless jammers that blocked cell phone and other signals, and frisked the students. Some male teachers were said to have "groped the girls’ chests.” The strict regulations angered many students and parents, who stormed the school after the exam ended. Several hundred students and their parents surrounded the school in protest, beating teachers, smashing the principal’s car, and ripping the school’s doors off their hinges. After the exam, a student’s parent beat the proctor who had confiscated that student’s cell phone.

Fraud on the College Entrance Examination is rampant in Zhongxiang and many places in China. Many of the local school officials, teachers, parents, and students are all involved in the fraud. Therefore, proctors from other cities were sent to Zhongxiang this year to tighten measures against cheating.

Source: China Gate, The Epoch Times, Education News, June 10 and June 19, 2013
http://www.wenxuecity.com/news/2013/06/19/2465348.html 
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/100661-college-entrance-exam-becomes-battleground-in-china/
http://www.educationnews.org/international-uk/anti-cheating-measures-on-college-entrance-exam-spark-riot-in-china/

On May 13, 2013, Beijing News published an article titled, “Ten Listed State-Owned Enterprises Spent over 2.9 Billion Yuan (U.S. $471,835,800.00) on Hospitality in order to Maintain Good Public Relations.”

In the 2012 annual reports, 1,720 listed companies disclosed a total of 13.3 billion yuan in "Business Hospitality Expenses." The ten companies that spent the most on hospitality expenses were all state-owned enterprises. The hospitality expenses were spent on “eating and drinking.” Since companies are not required to disclose their “Business Hospitality Expenses,” China’s big state-owned enterprises: “China National Petroleum, China Petrochemical, Construction and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China,” have not disclosed any of this data.

Source: Beijing News, May 13, 203
http://www.bjnews.com.cn/finance/2013/05/13/263318.html

Dai Xu, the Director of the Marine Security and Cooperation Research Institute and an Air Force Colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, asserted that the H7N9 virus is part of a U.S. conspiracy against China and Chinese authorities should simply ignore it. Dai posted his bird flu comment on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like site, late Saturday night on April 6, 2013. Dai said, “As for the recent bird flu fad, China’s top government departments must not deal with it extensively. Otherwise, it will be just like SARS in 2003! At that time, the U.S. was fighting Iraq and feared China might take advantage of the situation, so it deployed a bio-psychological weapon against China. The country was thrown into turmoil, just as the U.S. had hoped. Now, the U.S. is trying the same old trick. China should learn a lesson from the past and respond calmly.”

An earlier version of the post was subsequently deleted, but multiple other users preserved it in screenshots. It ended on a different note: “A few may die, but that’s not even one-thousandth of the deaths from car accidents in China.”

Source: BBC Chinese and The Wall Street Journal, April 7 and April http://www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/simp/china/2013/04/130407_china_bird_flu_conspiracy.shtml  
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/04/08/new-bird-flu-is-a-u-s-conspiracy-chinese-military-official-says/