Buffet’s leson in charity for China – Can Buffet and Gates persuade China’s rich to give back?

By Huang Daohen

While China’s billionaires are busy investing their money to pave the way for their companies to become multinationals, American billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have announced that they will come to China next month to ask the country’s rich to donate at least half of their wealth, according to AFP.

Without a backdrop of philanthropist heritage in China, many doubt that Buffett and Gates’ trip for a more charitable China will have a positive effect.

Warren Buffet (left) and Bill Gates are due in China to press the wealthy to donate more. Daniel Glushoter/CFP Photo

The move comes after the release of a list of 40 rich donors who pledged to give more than half of their fortune to charity. In June, Buffett and Gates launched a project called “The Giving Pledge,” calling the wealthiest individuals and families in the US to give away the majority of their wealth.

Wealthy individuals – including CNN founder Ted Turner and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg – have signed the pledge, AFP said.
In a press briefing earlier this month, Buffett said he will meet with a large group of wealthy Chinese people. “That’s just to explain it to people in those countries and maybe give a little bit of our experience. And if they wish to take what we think is a good idea and run with it, we’ll be cheering,” AFP quoted Buffet as saying.

According to Forbes magazine, China has the second highest number of billionaires in the world, after the US. This year’s list included 117 Chinese, with 64 from mainland, 25 from Hong Kong and 18 from Taiwan.

However, due to cultural differences between China and the US, many doubt the two Americans will persuade anyone.

Award kept for controversial ‘corpse photo’

By Chu Meng

The controversial news photo “Holding onto a Corpse and Demanding Money,” which won China’s top news photography prize last week, has been deemed authentic by authorities despite claims to the contrary.

The photo, taken by Zhang Yi, shows a boatman holding a rope connected to the body of a drowned university student, who remains in the water. The caption originally claimed the boatman, Wang Shouhai, demanded 36,000 yuan in payment for bringing the body to shore.

The body belonged to one of the three college students in Jingzhou, Hubei Province who drowned while trying to save two children who had fallen into the Yangtze River on October 24, 2009.

The image attracted nationwide attention when it appeared in the Shanxi-based China Business Review, and Wang suffered beatings because of it. But when the picture was awarded the silver medal at the 23rd National Photographic Art Exhibition on August 5, Yangtze University press director Li Yuquan said the photographer fabricated the photo caption and misled the public.

Li wrote on his blog that Wang was actually gesturing to people on the bank to help him pull out the corpse.

Zhang, 25, who has since resigned from his newspaper, stands by his picture. On August 18, Zhang won the Golden Lens Award – China’s top prize for photojournalists – and this past Monday the Golden Lens Award organizing committee confirmed the photo’s accuracy.

Fight against disposable chopsticks rises again

For many, it's convenient to use disposable chopsticks while eating outside. CFP Photo

By Li Zhixin

China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOC), along with the National Development and Reform Committee (NDRC), Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) and four other ministries, released a notice in June requiring local governments to carry out stricter restrictions on companies that make disposable chopsticks.

The notice said “production, circulation and recycling of disposable chopsticks should be more strictly supervised.” The MOC and NDRC plan to establish a disposable chopsticks recycling program by setting up collection points at consumption areas.

The country is the manufacturing, consuming and exporting giant of disposable chopsticks.
“China produces more than 1 million 20-feet equivalent units of disposable chopsticks every year, and about 40 percent of the industry’s products are used domestically,” said Qian Xiaoyu, vice president of the Chinese Forest Product Industrial Association.

In the last 10 years, several local governments in Shaanxi, Zhejiang and Henan provinces have launched campaigns to reduce the usage of one-off chopsticks and to strengthen the recycling work, but the results have fallen short of their expectations. The ministry said Chinese people consume as many as 45 billion one-off chopsticks each year, equivalent to about 130 million chopsticks per day. Nearly half of them do not get recycled.

Qian said three pairs of recycled chopsticks can be processed to make one postcard or one piece of paper, but 35 percent of Chinese people don’t know how disposable chopsticks are recycled.

Disposable chopsticks are either made from wood or bamboo. Wooden chopsticks mainly come from Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces, while bamboo chopsticks are distributed from Jiangxi, Guangxi, Hunan and Zhejiang provinces.

Pure and pretty girls hard to find in China?

Zhang Yimou says he is upset about the demise of "pure" girls. CFP Photo

 

By Huang Daohen

There are more than 1.3 billion people in China, but movie director Zhang Yimou lamented recently that it was difficult to find a pure and simple-hearted girl in China today.

In order to find an actress to play Jing Qiu in his latest film, Romance Under the Hawthorne Tree, Zhang searched far and wide and interviewed more than 10,000 young women.

“If you look at pictures taken in the 1960s or 1970s, you will see an aura of purity around every man or woman in those pictures,” Zhang said at a press conference last week. “But that’s a bygone quality that you hardly see in any young faces today.”

Zhang joked that teens nowadays are uglier because beautiful women choose to marry ugly but rich old men.

Other directors have come across the same problem. Wang Quanan said he was once in a pinch because he couldn’t find an actress to star in his new film, Bailuyuan.

Wang eventually chose Li Meng, a Beijing college student, after looking at as many as 3,000 young women across the country.

Zhang eventually settled on Zhou Dongyu, 17, a high school student from Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province.

Zhang and Wang’s lamentations aroused a heated debate. Many say young people today are too open and their casual attitudes toward sex have made finding a “pure” actress “mission impossible.”

Radio exercises result in controversy

By Zhao Hongyi

Participants do synchronized physical exercises during a campaign to promote the daily workout at the Imperial Ancestral Temple Monday. IC Photo

On August 8, the second anniversary of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Beijing Municipal Federation of Workers’ Unions appealed for 4 million municipal government officials and workers to resume their “public gymnastics exercises” dropped in 2007 in the lead-up to the Olympics.

The federation appealed together with the Municipal Bureau of Sports and Municipal Bureau of Public Health. The resumption of the exercises began the following day.

The rhythm for these eight-minute public exercises will be broadcast every day at 10 am and 3 pm on 102.5 FM, the Beijing sports radio frequency.

The notice issued by the three municipal government agencies say the exercises must be implemented for state employees but are optional for employees of private and foreign enterprises.

The worker’s union purchased CDs and posters and invited teachers from Beijing Sports University to demonstrate moves involved in these exercises.

Commercial match fails locals

Lionel Messi's napping during a press conference is said to be "rude." Photo by Huang Liang

By Huang Daohen

Public napping, a lack of star players and poor match quality disappointed Beijing soccer fans who went to the Bird’s Nest to see last Sunday night’s friendly match between Barcelona and Beijing’s Guo’an.

The Spanish champion finished its Asia tour with a 3-0 win over Guo’an. Argentine superstar Lionel Messi kept his promise and played the entire first half, much more than his 17 minutes in Seoul last week.

Nevertheless, local fans complained that the event was marred by its exorbitant price of admission.

“Not many of my friends wanted to watch the game live,” said Chen Jun, a local soccer fan.

Chen said he didn’t have much confidence in the quality of such a commercialized game. Ticket prices ranged from 280 yuan to 2,880 yuan.

Recent years have seen more low-quality commercial matches as famous clubs look at China as a moneymaking opportunity. In 2003, Real Madrid played four matches in China and reportedly netted about $13.3 million.

The Italian team Sampdoria became the first club to visit China when it came in 1994 and lost 4-2 to the Chinese national team.

Guangzhou and Hong Kong support Cantonese

Locals in Guangzhou are worried that their dialect will be banned. Xinhua/AFP Photo

By Zhang Dongya

Hundreds of people gathered in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, over the last two weekends to protest the local government’s popularizing of Mandarin while holding back Cantonese. Two hundred people also assembled in Hong Kong on Sunday to show their support.

In June, the Guangzhou municipal committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) released a survey on its website about testing local TV broadcasters in Mandarin.

Local people worried the dialect would be banned, while local media reporting the incident used provocative phrases like “Cantonese renounced.”

The local committee of the CPPCC told the local Yangcheng Evening News that they wanted to increase the amount of Mandarin used on local broadcasts, not ban Cantonese. But later, a committee member suggested using Mandarin in major programs on Guangzhou TV for the sake of domestic and overseas visitors for the Asian Games in Guangzhou this November.

Hong Kong citizens, who take Cantonese as their mother tongue, organized an assembly last Sunday to show solidarity with their Cantonese-speaking brethren in Guangdong. About 200 people gathered in Southorn Playground in Wanzai Port, then marched to the Hong Kong Secretariat building. They worry that the “ban” in Guangdong might affect the dialect’s survival.

According to the June survey in Guangdong, only 20 percent of respondents support the local government’s suggestion.

Cantonese, which originated in Guangxi Zhuang Automonous Region, is widespread in Guangdong Province, eastern Guangxi, Hong Kong and Macau. The dialect is used in Hong Kong and Macau as the official spoken language of the government and in schools. Some on the Chinese mainland are fond of the dialect due to the popularity of Cantonese pop songs and films. Statistics show 70 million people around the world speak Cantonese.

Man fined 46,000 for failure to return lost diamond ring

By Chu Meng

The Beijing Second Intermediate Court on Monday fined Zhang Peng (pseudonym) 46,000 yuan for failing to return a diamond engagement ring he found on the street.

Zhang stumbled upon the ring in a parking lot in Beijing last July. He said he threw it away thinking it was a fake.

However, the person who had lost it, Wang Shuang (pseudonym), tracked down Zhang through the police. A camera in the parking lot showed Wang had indeed lost a diamond ring in the parking lot. It also showed Zhang passing by, bending to pick up the ring and walking off with it.

Wang took Zhang to court in order to get his ring back. The court’s final ruling was that Zhang did not take care of the lost property, so he should compensate Wang the price shown on the original shopping receipt