The three were detained in northwestern Shaanxi province on Dec. 2, before tainted goods reached stores, the official Xinhua news agency said.
It named the three as Liu Ping, general manager of Shaanxi Jinqiao Diary Company, and two of the firm’s employees and said they were detained for “the suspected crime of producing and selling toxic food.”

The report, citing police, said they sold 5.25 tonnes of melamine-laced milk powder to Nanning Yueqian Food Additive Company, based in the southern region of Guangxi.

The powder was seized on Nov. 18, so did not make its way into the market, Xinhua added.

By Shane Dingman. Read the full article.

We’ve had industrial revolutions in the west and more recently in China and South Asia; budding revolutions in “superjumbo” aircraft and plug-in electric cars; and Seinfeld episodes that can be downloaded onto cellphones worldwide.

Yet we remain trapped in some previous century in that most basic of necessities; keeping the world population fed. Remarkably, the facts today point to yet another global food shortage just a few years after the food crisis of 2007-08, which ended only when the Great Recession curbed a debilitating upward spiral in prices of basic staples like rice, corn and wheat worldwide. As the world economy recovers, the prospect of another global food crisis looms large.

The determining factors in famine are mostly man-made. They include civil war and political instability in many, if not most undernourished regions. Protectionism in affluent nations that removes the incentive for developing-world farmers to enhance crop yields in the hope of earning export revenue. A sharp decline in affluent-world donations of agricultural assistance to underfed countries. A growing scourge of crop failure related to global warming. And a ferocious debate between advocates of natural farming methods and those arguing for a new agricultural revolution based on genetically modified (GM) crops.

By David Olive. Read more about this story.

Mr Obama landed in Shanghai yesterday to start his four-day visit during which he will try to balance his efforts to underline strong Sino-US ties with the need to emphasise Washington’s global role in the face of growing Chinese economic muscle.

International efforts to fight climate change, the need to co-ordinate action on global trouble spots such as North Korea and Iran, and concern over the value of the Chinese currency will all feature on the agenda.

The Nobel Peace laureate will also address human rights issues such as freedom of worship, although the American leader will avoid confrontation in the lead-in to his China visit, probably the most strategically important stopping point on his nine-day Asian jaunt. Saving face is important here.

On issues such as Tibet, he will have to deal with an at-times unsophisticated approach. A government spokesman said Mr Obama should be especially sympathetic to China’s opposition to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan independence, because he is a black president who lauded Abraham Lincoln for helping abolish slavery.

“He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln’s major significance for that movement,” said foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang.

“Lincoln played an incomparable role in protecting the national unity and territorial integrity of the United States,” he said.

Tibet is sure to be a knotty issue over the talks. Beijing calls the Dalai Lama a dangerous “splittist”, encouraging Tibetan independence, a charge he denies, saying he merely wants more autonomy for the region.

by The Irish Times. Read more on this story.

He is one of hundreds of young entrepreneurs seeking overnight fortunes in Shenzhen Inc. — the Wild West of the mobile-phone industry. Phones made and designed by these Chinese vendors will account for about a third of the 1.1 billion cell phones that will be sold around the world this year.

Three decades ago, Shenzhen was China’s first city to experience market-oriented economic reform, unleashing anything-goes capitalism that has spread throughout the nominally capitalist country. And while China’s mobile-phone industry has spread beyond Shenzhen, the southern region remains a center of the mobile-phone ecosystem that inspires dreams of instant success.

“It is China’s version of the Gold Rush,” said Shanghai-based Ken Qing Wang, general manager of the China operations of Silicon Valley-based Telegent Systems, which supplies analog TV chips to the mobile-phone industry. “A lot of wealth has been generated.”

Tsoi, who at 33 is already wealthy and founder of Chinaking International Development, has his eyes set on even loftier heights. “There are lots of billionaires in their twenties here,” he said. Waving a pink cell phone, Tsoi proclaimed he intends to join the billionaires club after a successful initial public offering “in a couple of months.”

Such gunslinger hubris is what goes for street talk in Shenzhen, which supplies cell phones primarily for the developing world but also covets the developed world. Whether mobile-phone makers like Tsoi can ever compete with such innovative thoroughbreds as Apple and Research In Motion is questionable. But companies like Chinaking have shown they can make money in developing nations. For now, they are happy to focus on the next billion mobile phone consumers — the world’s urban poor and rural residents who often are out of the reach of giant international brands. Those lowly markets, though, are expected to represent 60 percent of global mobile-phone sales by 2013, according to researcher Informa Telecoms & Media.

By John Boudreau. Read the entire article.

The Marketing officer will also tackle how to stay healthy and still enjoy Chinese food by planning ahead, choosing wisely and watching how much you eat. Choosing traditional food dishes that are high in fiber, vitamins and minerals, and low in fat. Choosing beans, peas, tofu, bean sprouts and dark green vegetables such as Chinese broccoli, choy sum, watercress, Chinese chives, Chinese yard-long beans and amaranth also known as Chinese spinach.

Also pointed out other Chinese vegetables that are rich in iron like Chinese mushroom, seaweed and black fungus. Go for the mung beans (green gram beans), yellow bean and black bean dishes for soup or desserts with artificial sweetener. Sweet potatoes are also high in fiber and very nutritious . Whole wheat and rye bread and cornbread are good sources of fiber and are good for everyone.

As the sponsor, Choy Sum will support Carter Sinclair Org’s mission to prevent the onset of diabetes within La Quinta community and help those who are already living with the disease. Support will emphasize importance
of diabetes information from the CarterSinclair Org, including information about making better food choices.

“Food plays an important role in the prevention and management of diabetes,” said Mary Scott, MS, RD, a certified diabetes educator and nutritionist at La Quinta “Many of the behaviors needed to prevent type 2 diabetes and diabetes-related complications – behaviors such as meal planning
and physical activity – are shaped by an individual’s culture and values.

Most people over the age of 20 have diabetes and are at raised risk for severe complications such as heart attack, stroke, kidney disease, blindness, and amputations. Cartersinclair Org wishes people to know that it is possible to enjoy Chinese food that is both delicious and good for everybody by making simple changes to ingredients and cooking
methods.

By Carter Sinclair Org. Read more.

Artwork by well known artists Haiyan, Chen Weiming, Tom Block, Yan Yukun, Bob Hieronimus, and Daxiong told the story of the CCP, as well as serving as an inspiration to all of us.

Wei Jingsheng, 59, is much more at home with words than with art. As one of China’s most renowned dissidents, Wei was incarcerated by the Chinese regime for nearly 18 years for advocating democracy, before he was finally released and exiled to the U.S. in 1997. His 1978 essay “The Fifth Modernization—Democracy” challenged the Communist Party’s new leadership’s stance that progress could be made without democracy.

Organized by the Wei Jingsheng Foundation and open on October 1 and 2, this art exhibit in the nation’s capital is a way for the proponents of human rights and democracy to observe the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China by condemning the crimes perpetrated by the CCP over the past 60 years. The major co-sponsors of the exhibit are the “Tear Down This Wall” Foundation, the Human Rights Painting Project of Amnesty International, and the Asia Democracy Alliance. Several other groups, including The Epoch Times, also supported the exhibit.

The concept behind the art exhibit and news conference, which were followed by a seminar the next day, was to include not only the Han Chinese ,who have suffered under 60 years of tyranny, but the minority groups who have also been victimized by the CCP since it took power by force in 1949. The Tibetans, Uyghurs, Inner Mongolians, Burmese, and Vietnamese were represented at the news conference and by the art depicted. (Dr. Quan Nguyen, representing Vietnam, was invited but was ill and could not attend.)

The largest piece in the exhibit was a sculpture of the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4, 1989 by Chen Weiming. It is 28 feet long. The description says, “…The army opened fire on the protesters and killed thousands of innocent people. Chang An Road, the widest road in the world, was covered with lifeless bodies of these youthful lives.”

By Gary Feuerberg. Read the entire story.

U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates just warned China’s growing military power “threatens our freedom of movement and narrows our strategic options.”

Translation: the U.S. Seventh Fleet can no longer operate with impunity off China’s coast. True enough. China is reasserting its historic sovereignty and will push U.S. power back into the Pacific.

I first went to China in 1975 during the madness of the Cultural Revolution. Over the ensuing three decades, I saw China transformed from a giant, dimly-lit prison camp into today’s booming nation, which just surpassed Japan to become the world’s second largest economy.

This is the most remarkable event I have seen in my life.

Much of the credit goes to China’s late leader, Deng Xiaoping, one of the 20th century’s greatest men.

He ended Marxist dogma, releasing the energy of his long-suffering people whose nation had been raped by western imperialism, then ravaged by brutal civil wars. Until 1800, China was a leading world power.

But a ghost will haunt this celebration: the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong. What to make of him?

I have long struggled to understand Mao and felt conflicting emotions. Was he modern history’s greatest revolutionary and earth-shaker, or a demented mass murderer who nearly destroyed China?

Chaos

Great times produce great men. Mao rose from the chaos of 1920s China to lead the new-found Communist Party. He fought Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, an assortment of powerful regional warlords, and, later, the Japanese invaders.

China suffered some 15-20 million dead from 1928-1949.

Mao was an accomplished poet, writer and historian, a profound thinker, and a superb military strategist. His works on guerrilla war are on my desk. Mao crushed the U.S.-backed Nationalist’s 4.3-million strong armies in numerous titanic battles.

Mao gave the Communists political and strategic direction. Below him were a group of outstanding generals — the “Ten Marshals” — among them Zhu De, Lin Piao, Peng Dehui, Chen Yi and Nie Rongzhen — who crushed Chiang Kai-shek’s armies.

The Great Helmsman united fractured, war-torn China for the first time in centuries, restoring its pride and self-confidence after a century of humiliation. Mao thwarted Soviets and U.S. efforts to turn China into a client state, and built up China’s military power.

But Mao’s crackpot economic notions, notably the infamous 1958 Great Leap Forward, created famines that killed 20-36 million Chinese peasants. “Red Emperor” Mao was prodigal with his people’s lives, cared little for them, and was indifferent to their suffering.

Mao horrified even brutal Soviet leaders by saying he was prepared to lose half his people in a nuclear war.

When the party resisted Mao, he tried to destroy it by unleashing the Great Cultural Revolution that plunged China into chaos and civil war. China’s brilliant, much under-rated premier, Zhou Enlai, curbed some of Mao’s worst excess and rescued China by engineering Deng Xiaoping into power.

Gang of Four

Deng crushed far-left Maoists known as the Gang of Four, and restored order. His sweeping economic reforms revitalized China, unleashing its latent economic power. But Deng’s great achievements — and this week’s huge birthday party in Beijing — would not have been possible without Mao’s unification of China and imposition of an all-powerful one-party state.

So, as with many Chinese, I’m uncertain how to qualify Mao. Like Stalin — once called “half man, half beast” — Mao appealed as much as he repelled.

Most Chinese now regard Mao as their nation’s beloved, respected father — but who went dangerously senile before his death in 1976. Old men’s egos can be very dangerous.

I suspect as time goes by, Mao’s misdeeds will fade away and the glowing image of the Great Helmsman will continue to hang over the gate of the Beijing’s Forbidden City.

By Eric MargolisA

The following is not a full transcript; for full story, listen to audio.

BBC World Service correspondent Mukul Devichand traveled to Shanghai to explore the profound impact of new European foods to Chinese society, and found that the culinary market there is already crowded:

At a Chinese radio station, on-air personalities tout the virtues of pairing the proper wines with the proper cheese, eating pasta and enjoying a good cigar.

British, French and Portuguese foodies are pushing gastronomy and fine dining to a remarkable new class of Chinese citizens.

The problem is, parmesan, cheddar and brie are pretty alien to the Chinese palate. Despite over 3000 years of Chinese fine dining, it’s only from the 20th century that dairy products were really consumed in China — many there remain lactose intolerant.

The solution for European marketers is to educate Chinese consumers.

At a wine seminar, a young French woman explained what drew her to China, “Even though we are in the middle of an economic crisis, we see an increase every single week, of Europeans landing here with their suitcases and a dream, and they want to make it. Of course the hope of making money is also part of it, but I would say that creating jobs in my own country, in my own region and creating jobs for my family’s neighbors is a big part of it.”

By BBC World Service. Hear the radio clip on the Cheese for Chinese.

The detention of the employee from the Shanghai Shen-Mei Beverage and Food Company, a bottling plant partly owned by Coca-Cola, was reported over the weekend by China’s state-run news media, which said the employee took about $1.5 million in bribes.

A spokesman for Coca-Cola, Kenth Kaerhoeg, confirmed on Sunday that a female middle manager at the plant was detained by Shanghai police this year and then dismissed by the bottling company.

Mr. Kaerhoeg declined to give further details about the case, but he said Coca-Cola was cooperating with the investigation.

Calls to Shen-Mei, in which Coca-Cola has a minority stake, went unanswered on Sunday and Shanghai police officials could not be reached for comment.

The detention is the second prominent bribery case this year involving a global company operating in China.

In July, four Shanghai-based employees of the British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto, including an Australian citizen, were detained and later formally charged with corruption and bribery.

That case emerged after tense iron ore negotiations between Rio Tinto and Chinese steel makers and after Rio Tinto scrapped a deal with a big Chinese company, leading some analysts to speculate that it was partly politically motivated.

Rio Tinto has strongly denied its Shanghai employees were involved in bribery or corruption. Chinese officials have insisted the case is not politically motivated.

By David Barboza. Read more about the details.