Beijing, China
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
BEIJING – By all rights, Beijing should be suffering the post-Olympic hangover anticipated by skeptics and cynics.
China’s exports-driven economy has taken a big hit from the global recession. Millions of college graduates are still unemployed. Newly built shiny commercial buildings stand unoccupied. And in recent weeks the Chinese government has stepped up its ongoing efforts to control the flow of information on the Internet.
If anything, however, the Chinese capital is enjoying a renaissance in the arts and culture – normally what would be the first casualty in a climate of recession and censorship. And it’s attracting a growing number of people from around the world who want to be part of the scene.
"Beijing has that combination of optimism, possibility, opportunity, as well as being an interesting city in its own right," said Aric Chen, a freelance writer, curator and design consultant who recently moved here from New York City.
The 34-year-old is juggling several international projects – a book on Brazil, an exhibition in Israel, and a biennale in South Korea – any of which could be launched from another base.
But in Beijing, he found that "there is still a hunger and openness for new things, so there’s room for people like me." Within China, he helps to oversee projects like the "100% Design Shanghai," a major industry fair that he hopes will help to elevate the discourse on design in the country and nurture homegrown designers and artists.
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By NBC News' Ed Flanagan
BEIJING – It’s not often that a confessed murderer is feted publicly for her heroism and bravery, but that is precisely what happened to Deng Yujiao in China’s blogosphere following her release from house arrest last week.
Deng, a 21-year-old waitress from Hubei Province who fatally stabbed a Communist Party official after he tried to force himself on her, became an Internet sensation in China after she was arrested on suspicion of voluntary manslaughter a month ago.
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| Chinafotopress / Getty Images Contributor |
| Deng Yujiao, in white shirt, leaves a local court on in Badong County, Hubei Province, on June 16 after being exempted from criminal charges. |
According to the police investigation, two local officials, Huang Dezhi and Deng Guida, were customers at the Fantasy City Bathhouse, a karaoke parlor in rural Badong County, on May 10th when they approached Deng and demanded "special services." (In China, bathhouses are often fronts for brothels.)
When she refused, Deng Guida (who was not related to Deng) allegedly threw a wad of money at her face and pushed her onto a nearby sofa. As they proceeded to attack her, she pulled out a fruit knife and repeatedly stabbed and killed Deng Guida.
Deng immediately turned herself in to authorities and police initially charged her with manslaughter.
However, details of the case soon leaked out on the Internet. Deng told her side of the story to a Chinese newspaper, and the county government went into overdrive to downplay allegations of similar acts of aggression by Deng Guida and Huang Dezhi.
Chinese bloggers and netizens reacted swiftly. They began to express their outrage over government excess and Ms. Deng’s helplessness in the face of unruly government officials.
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By NBC News' Bo Gu
BEIJING – Wow. People in Iran have the right to elect their own president? Candidates are allowed to participate in TV debates and give speeches to their supporters, just like in the United States? And they are allowed to publicly protest?
This comes as news to many in China who have long viewed Iran as an extremely conservative Muslim country where women have to cover their hair and bodies with scarves and robes. It’s mostly known here for leaders who openly challenge the United States and play cat-and-mouse over their stubborn nuclear power policies.
But people in Iran, usually seen as so mysterious and different from China, do enjoy many rights not endowed to Chinese citizens – such as voting and going out on the streets to express their discontent.
So it comes as a surprise to see that China’s mainstream media coverage of the post-election crisis in Iran has been fairly thorough. The protests and resulting bloodshed were reported all week in newspapers and on Web sites, with vivid videos and pictures.
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By NBC News' Adrienne Mong and Bo Gu
BEIJING – It’s a real measure of Hong Kong’s autonomy – enshrined in the "one country, two systems" principle contained in its constitutional document under Chinese sovereignty – that certain freedoms and rights not enjoyed in mainland China continue to flourish in the former British colony.
We notice it every time we visit. First, there’s the regular assembly of Falun Gong supporters near the Hong Kong Convention Center in Wanchai, right where busloads of mainland Chinese tourists spill out.
It’s always a curiosity to see how the tourists might react to seeing these folks. After all, the Falun Gong is a quasi-religious group banned in China, and authorities spare no effort in demonizing the organization among citizens.
Then, more recently, there are Zhao Ziyang’s memoirs, selling out across bookshops in Hong Kong, both in English and in Chinese. The former Communist Party chief was ousted in May 1989 during a power struggle that underpinned the student protests in Tiananmen Square
that year. Under house arrest until he died in 2005, Zhao secretly recorded 30 tapes detailing the inner workings of the Party, and they were recently published in a book format to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Of course, the book is not for sale on the Chinese mainland.
And then, of course, there is the Internet. In Hong Kong and unlike in China, we never need to log onto our NBC intranet in order to access certain websites. YouTube plays instantly. The Huffington Post loads easily. And we have yet to see the "error" message so often encountered on the mainland.
So it was with great dismay that last Monday, while we were still in Hong Kong, we learned about China’s latest efforts to shore up its Great Firewall.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
BEIJING – Spectacularly sunny and clear skies in Beijing the past two days – and generally most of this year so far – have made residents here (or at least this one resident) appreciative of the Chinese government’s efforts to address climate change.
A news report on Wednesday revealed China’s plans to produce a fifth of its energy needs from renewable sources, including solar and wind power, by the year 2020.
China’s National Development and Reform Commission – which was the source for the news report – also said Wednesday that it plans to promote the use of 120 million compact energy-saving fluorescent light bulbs with the use of subsidies. That measure alone would help save 6.2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6.2 million tons, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.
It’s just one of a series of steps the Chinese leadership has taken to address climate change.
But the U.S. says China’s still not doing enough.
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By George Lewis, NBC News Correspondent
I was thinking, on my last visit to China, how much has changed since I first went there in 1989 to cover the events surrounding the student “democracy movement” in Tiananmen Square. Today, you can stroll through high-end malls in Beijing in a neighborhood that looks like Beverly Hills’s Rodeo Drive on steroids.
You can sip a latte at the Starbucks near the U.S. Embassy and watch young Chinese standing in long lines to do the same. But if you take out your laptop and try to surf the Web there, you’ll find that all the sites that might carry any mention of what went on in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago are off-limits.
Some things in China have changed and some things haven’t.
Many Chinese are enjoying a level of prosperity that previous generations never could have imagined. Young university students are very focused on “making it” in this new China. The idea of taking to the streets to protest for a greater measure of democracy simply isn’t on their “to do” lists.< CONTINUED >>
By NBC News Ed Flanagan
While the announcement that General Motors is selling its Hummer line to a Chinese manufacturer brought a collective sigh of relief that another major U.S. brand would be spared from collapse, here in China the first ever purchase of a U.S. auto brand by a Chinese company raised a number of questions.
Chiefly, who is this mysterious buyer, Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co.? And what does it want with a brand largely derided as a symbol of GM’s financial troubles and the failed scheme of pushing fuel-inefficient cars in a time of increasingly green consciousness?
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
YANJI, Jilin Province, China –
"Huang yian ham ni da!"
"An nyung ha se yo!"
"Kam sah ham ni da!"
The cries that surrounded us as we walked onto the plane seemed standard fare – "welcome," "hello," and "thank you."
Except they were in Korean, and we were very much in China, boarding an Air China flight that would take us from Beijing to Yanji, a town in the country’s far northeastern province of Jilin.
Yanji is the capital of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and, as home to over 850,000 ethnic Koreans, is sometimes referred to as the Third Korea.
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| With its bilingual signs, the border town of Yanji looks as much Korean as it does Chinese. |
In odd little ways, however, the area reminds me of China's other autonomous regions, like Xinjiang and Tibet, on the country's western frontier.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
BEIJING – Twenty years ago, a handful of university students from some of China’s most elite institutions shot to stardom when they led a series of mass demonstrations in Beijing calling for greater freedoms and economic reforms that challenged the supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party.
For some of us who remember clearly the events of those days, the names roll off the tongue – student leaders like Wang Dan, Wu’er Kaixi, Chai Ling, and labor organizer Han Dongfang – even today, 20 years after the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests.
Many of the bright lights of 1989 wound up in exile and in the intervening years have prospered in the West, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. But dozens of other organizers who came under the glare of the spotlight but didn’t flee the country were rounded up and imprisoned.
One of them was Peng Rong, a native of Hunan Province, who was pursuing a graduate degree in biology at Beijing University when he became involved in the protests. As a result of his activism, he was imprisoned for two years and expelled from the university.
"We were all idealists," he said one recent sunny afternoon in northeastern Beijing. "We were taught to be idealists by the party." But the Communist Party, the students believed in 1989, had fallen short of its goals of pursuing freedom, equality, and fraternity.
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By Eric Baculinao, NBC News Beijing bureau chief
BEIJING - It was hardly conceivable that the sports of rock n’ roll dancing and Frisbee could help drive Taiwan closer to China, but that’s exactly what happened with the recent visit to China of a leading stalwart of Taiwan’s pro-independence movement.
Chen Chu, mayor of Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second largest city, took a big political gamble by flying to Beijing to seek help in selling her hometown’s World Games, an alternative to the Olympics, that has seen disappointing sales. That a prominent figure of the pro-independence and anti-China opposition party had no choice but to seek Beijing’s help bespeaks of the startling reversal of the political wind across the once-turbulent Taiwan Strait.
And, in turn, the dramatic shift from the threat of war to the outbreak of peace, due in large part to the growing economic dependence of Taiwan on China, is fueling speculation that the two former rivals are headed towards greater integration and reunification.
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