Posts by Bob Munro
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i think that fascinating link of yours a few pages back touched on this, and the huge urban drift.
Some of the scales involved here make my head hurt. Bit like trying to imagine the distance to the nearest star and what's beyond that. Think I'll get down to what I can cope with like have we seen the end of the All Blacks as we have known them?
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Well there is no doubting that the current government is widely popular both inside and outside China with Chinese citizens despite western reservations
Funnily enough Gifford disputes this. It's a bit unfair on his wonderful book to summarise here but essentially he says corruption runs deep and in the rural areas still untouched by economic progress there are vast numbers of peasants now without the safety net that existed under Mao's communism. He sees the attempt at rapid economic expansion into these hinterlands partly as an attempt at survival by the present CPC.
He would probably agree with the sentiments of the Tibetan leader mentioned by Russell on page 4 of this thread thst political change is inevitable but it could be very messy indeed. He postulates the decade 2010-20 will be the one for some sort of political upheaval driven by all these pressures currently bubbling away.
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I haven’t read it but James Kynge's China Shakes the World is very highly regarded. He was interviewed by Chris Laidlaw about three weeks ago. Very interesting.
In his summary chapter at the end of China Road Gifford quotes James Kynge.
In his brilliant book, China Shakes The World, the former Beijing correspondent of the Financial Times James Kynge illustrates this point
(that we're all in this together)
by standing outside a Wal-Mart in Rockford Illinois, and asking the shoppers of middle America whether they feel like thanking the Chinese for all the cheap goods they can buy, and for the low interest rates they pay on their mortgages. Not surprisingly, he gets some funny looks. But his point and mine, is that, while China is certainly harming some areas of Western economies, it is also doing a lot of good to Western pockets in much less visible ways. So we have to make sure that, while we stand up to China in important areas, we do not damage our own interest in the process.
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Thanks Simon. I'll get it and report in. I must confess to having a rapid education on China largely through the stimulus of this forum and from people like you.
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Just on the last chapter of China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power by Rob Gifford, NPR's Beijing correspondent, published last year.
Russell's 'it's good, bad and ugly rolled into one' is put to the test on a road trip from Shanghai to the Kazakhstan border.
Really- really great read.Online - this report by two geographers puts the rise of capitalism in China
within the context of it's rise in the West. Not such a fun read. -
Serfs?
Toiling day and night in the underground comment mines...
...to the serious detriment of their health.
"Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.
To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style. "
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Regarding Chinese attempts at censorship.
Right now is climbing season in the Himalayas. The North (Tibet) side of Mount Everest is completely closed by the Chinese to allow an uninterrupted Olympic flame to the summit. The Chinese have also applied pressure, probably economic in the form of promises of aid to Nepal, so that climbers on the South (Nepal) side are restricted as well. Nepalese army personnel are in Everest base camp today to enforce this. Climbers cannot move beyond a certain point on the mountain until after the flame has cleared the Tibet side on May 10th. Communication devices with the outside world have been confiscated until that time as well.
This link is to the New Zealand based Adventure Consultants team and this one to the general Explorers Web site.
The Chinese leadership is obviously very worried that when the flame reaches the summit from the North it would be met by a save Tibet flag carried up from the South, but the shutting down of communications even at base camp on the South side (in another country) is pretty extreme censorship by Western standards.
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I'm really confused by this report in the Herald on Tuesday. Does this mean that Theatre and Film and American Studies programmes are saved but the staff positions aren’t?
It would now retain the American Studies programme, but with a reduction in staff, Film Studies academic staff would move to English, and Theatre Studies would be retained.
"The overall result will be reductions of 6.5 full-time equivalent (FTE) academic staff positions and 6.5 FTE general staff positions."
The University said it wanted to consult staff further about the number of schools and their names.
"This is the only aspect of the restructuring that will be subject to further consultation."
AUS said American Studies would now have a staff-to-student ratio of 1 to 45.3, 50 per cent higher than the highest student to staff ratio in an existing programme in the college. -
Are news bulletins the source of ADD?
Maybe they are in my case. Five years ago I got to fill out one of those viewing and listening diaries for a marketing company. The day was marked off in intervals of I think 15 minutes but it may have been five. It was pretty straightforward.
But not today. If I’m in front of the TV at news time now I’m usually grazing between One and TV3 and Prime, which is showing highlights of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, the British version. I start getting interested when the contestant is at about $4000 and usually stick with it to see how he/she does so miss that news segment. I never sit through ads, just flick off somewhere else and probably never sit there for a whole hour as it’s a busy time of the evening.
I’d have to fill the diary out in groups of seconds rather than minutes now. I don’t even know why I do watch when I do. I’m familiar with all the major news of the day through radio and the Internet by 6.00pm. If it’s something I’m really interested in I have probably read several international news outlets and commentary about the meaning of the event by experts (including the ones here) so the nightly bulletin is redundant in that respect.
On the other hand I often choose to watch the sport to actually see the winning strokes at the Masters or the way the tries happened even though I know the out come of the game. There is also something communal about watching events on the news, you feel you are experiencing the occasion with others. For example I’ll probably be in front of the box tonight for coverage of the Tongariro tragedy even though at 9.30am I’m already pretty well informed.
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Thanks Danielle. I guess it says a lot for the songwriter’s skill that they make such depressing places sound exotic. Has anyone done anything with Southland? I seem to remember the 'Invercargill March'.