Beijing, China
By NBC News' Bo Gu
NANJING, China – In the middle of Yuhuatai Martyr Memorial Park in Nanjing, southeast China’s ancient capital, is a small building called the "Jiangsu National State Security Education Museum."
The sign in front of the gate is likely to trigger the curiosity of any passerby – but especially foreigners. It warns would-be visitors: "This exhibition service is available to Chinese citizens ONLY."
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| Bo Gu/ NBC News |
| The entrance to China's spy museum warns that "This exhibition service is available ONLY to PRC citizens." |
As a Chinese citizen, I was permitted to enter, so I did.
The museum’s exhibition halls display the history of China’s security techniques and spy equipment dating back to the 1920s, when China’s Communist Party came into being and began its battle against the Chinese National Party led by Chiang Kai-shek.
One of the largest exhibits focuses on the decades-long spy war between mainland China and Taiwan – both before and after Chiang Kai-shek lost the battle for China and fled to the island with his followers in 1949.
The exhibition rooms are full of large photos of Communist Party spies who successful concealed themselves as Nationalist Party members and infiltrated their ranks. One of the most prominent photos was of Shen Anna, a Communist spy who managed to disguise herself as a stenographer and sat in on many of the Nationalist’s high-level meetings.
The museum features a large display of Cold War era spy tools that are reminiscent of early James Bond movies. The exhibit includes tiny pistols disguised as lipsticks, a calculator with a radio microphone hidden inside and a camera sewn inside a suit pocket so it could secretly take pictures of important documents.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
BEIJING – For most of August, it’s been hard to imagine China leading the charge down a low-carbon path.
On my Blackberry, headlines about how the country is seeking to ramp up development of alternative energies such as wind and solar power and rolling out electric vehicles have been competing all summer with relentless Tweets from BeijingAir telling us the obvious: That air quality in the Chinese capital is "unhealthy" or "hazardous."
(BeijingAir is a Twitter feed published by the U.S. embassy in Beijing, which monitors the air in the central downtown area, on an hourly basis, using U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards.)
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| BeijingAir publishes hourly tweets on the capital's air quality. |
Last weekend’s weather was so foul (BeijingAir: "very unhealthy") that I stayed indoors, engrossed in reading a political thriller that pits the U.S. against China over climate change.
"Ultimatum," a novel that came out earlier this year, is set in the year 2032, when a newly elected American president discovers that the effects of global warming will be far more catastrophic than anyone realized.
With huge swathes of America’s coastline – as well as those of every other continent – destined to go under water, forcibly relocating hundreds of millions of people, the U.S. realizes any viable solution requires a coordinated effort with the world’s biggest emitter, China. And so begins a secret, high-stakes diplomatic game of cat and mouse…
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By NBC News' Ed Flanagan
BEIJING – In the past few years, China's Internet vigilantes have mobilized to root out, expose and shame people they perceive to be exhibiting corrupt or immoral behavior.
Marked for their unfettered zeal, the literal translation of the Chinese term for this ad hoc group of sleuthing online activists is: "human flesh search engine."
Nevertheless, while the stature of this group of online watchmen continues to grow, a new Chinese movie may force the Internet phenomenon out of the online sphere and into the country's public dialogue.
"Invisible Killer," produced and co-written by Xie Xiaodong, is the first movie to broach the subject of Internet vigilantism and dramatize the pitfalls of having a mobilized and motivated online mob administering its own brand of justice.
In the film, the main character, Gao Fei, is accused online of seducing a married woman. In response, his online "judges" mete out justice by digging up and posting personal information about him on the Internet. Branding him a "fugitive" online, the cyber assault on Gao’s character turns even nastier when his home is attacked and a manhunt sponsored by a Web site to locate and interview him turns violent.
Swift Success
The events portrayed in "Invisible Killer" may be fiction, but the story line is not far from reality.
China’s online vigilantes have been active for several years, but their first big breakthrough came in 2006. At the time, the Chinese media and what were seen as "amateur sleuths" began a national manhunt to discover the identity of a Hangzhou woman who appeared in gruesome videos crushing cats under sharp stiletto heels.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
BEIJING – A debate over whether eating organic foods provides any nutritional benefit was sparked late last month after an independent study in the U.K. found that there were no significant nutritional differences between organic and conventionally produced food.
But, in China, a growing appreciation for organic food isn’t simply because of the perceived nutritional benefits; consumers have turned to organic food as a means of ensuring some measure of health and safety.
After all, this is a country where the challenges of maintaining food safety are regularly in the newspaper headlines – the melamine milk scandal in 2008; tainted cough syrup that killed more than 100 people in Panama in 2006; and pet food containing adulterated wheat gluten, which was blamed for thousands of animal deaths in the U.S. in 2007. Not to mention the myriad reports of food being tampered in local Chinese markets.
This year the Chinese government has taken numerous steps in an attempt to improve food safety. Chief among these is the country’s first food safety law, which went into effect on June 1, enacting tough penalties against producers of tainted food and consolidating oversight in one cabinet-level agency. And more recently, officials established a database keeping track of food manufacturers who have issued recalls in the past.
Still, consumers in Beijing are taking matters into their own hands. In fact, just as it has in the U.S. and other western countries, community supported agriculture – buying locally grown produce directly from farmers – has begun to grow in popularity in the capital.
A Taiwan-born New Yorker, Lejen Chen, explains to NBC News why she set up the Green Cow Organic Farm, a little oasis on the outskirts of Beijing.
By NBC News' Ed Flanagan
BEIJING – As Americans struggle to dig themselves out of debt and soldier on through recession, one U.S- based organization is asking them to loan their spare dollars not to the needy at home, but to those residing in the United States’ largest foreign creditor: China.
Wokai ("I Start" in Chinese), is a small Oakland, Calif.- based microfinance organization that is working to provide micro loans to an estimated 200 million Chinese who live on less than $1 a day.
Founded two years ago by 25-year-olds, Casey Wilson and Courtney McColgan, Wokai is the convergence of the pair’s shared interest in economic development and China. The pair, who met in a Chinese language program at Beijing’s Tsinghua University in 2006, created a microfinance program to help provide assistance to some of China’s estimated 228 million people who have no access to basic financial services.
Wilson and McColgan created a Web site that they’ve coined "Facebook for Farmers" – it features many of the core characteristics of Web 2.0: social networking, blogging and interactive media.
Functioning similarly to the one of the more established microfinance sites, Kiva.org, Wokai’s online system of peer-to-peer loans allows potential lenders to scan the profiles of pre-screened rural Chinese borrowers and decide for themselves who they want to loan money to.
The loans are small – the average loans is around $300 – and are mostly used by farmers to invest in simple business improvements such as adding additional livestock or buying new products for dry goods stores.
To attract loans and help develop the organization, Wokai has enlisted an army of young volunteers both in the United States and China. They have assisted in everything from website development to working directly with field partners in China to screen potential borrowers. Meanwhile, member chapters in San Francisco, Seattle and New York help drive awareness and donations through localized fund raising events.
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With a GDP growth rate of 7.1 percent, China’s economy is still growing despite the global recession. Chinese economist Shen Minghao discusses how the economy continues to move forward.
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
FENGXIAN, China – I had to suppress a smile.
A physician from Vancouver, Duncan Etches, was carrying a book entitled "Mathematical Astronomy Morsels" and was in the process of recounting his decision to join a UCLA Extension/Far Horizons tour to see the total solar eclipse in China.
"We were going to join a tour off the Ryuku Islands in Japan," he said. "But they had some bird-watching sites as part of it. And we thought, two weeks with bird watchers? They’re kind of fanatic."
Etches was so determined to catch this once-in-a-lifetime sighting that he had traveled all the way from Canada to Fengxian, a beach resort on the outskirts of downtown Shanghai to experience it.
But while Etches might be a total solar eclipse virgin, some of his fellow travelers were not.
"I went to see my first total solar eclipse in 1977," said Dr. E.C. Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. He was leading the tour that included Etches and roughly a dozen other people.
"This eclipse is the longest period of totality for a total solar eclipse in this century," enthused Krupp. "So if you want to see all the phenomena occur during the totality, the longer the totality, the better, and… I’m not going to live to see an eclipse longer than six minutes."
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By Eric Baculinao, NBC News Beijing Bureau Chief
BEIJING –Months of speculation that America might snub China over a global showcase event came to an end Friday with the formal groundbreaking ceremony for the U.S.A. Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo site.
Dubbed the Olympics of global business and technology, the World Expo is set to open in Shanghai in May 2010, offering another platform to show off China’s global expansion.
But as the U.S. missed one building deadline after another due to financial difficulties, fears were growing that the most important guest would be a no-show – which would have dealt a serious blow to Chinese pride and prestige.
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| AFP - Getty Images |
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U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, center, with other officials during the ground-breaking ceremony for the USA Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo site in Shanghai on Friday. |
Enticing America
The Shanghai Expo – which reportedly has a budget bigger than the Beijing Olympic Games –will attract some 70 million visitors over a six-month period. It will feature the economic, technological and cultural achievements of over 200 countries and international organizations, with China, and the city of Shanghai, on center stage.
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By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
URUMQI, China – Riot-torn Urumqi is hosting a beauty contest. The streets are still swamped by riot police, the city tense and littered with the debris of the worst unrest in decades, but the contestants for the 35th Miss International Beauty Pageant have come to town.
I bumped into them at dinner on Friday. In all honesty, you couldn't miss them, since very few other people were staying at my hotel, which is a few minutes away from where nearly 200 people died just a week ago.
They paraded along the buffet line as if already on the catwalk. I picked my way along with contestants from Turkmenistan and Vietnam dressed in their finest and minimalist evening wear.
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| Ian Williams / NBC News |
| The remains a Han Chinese car dealership after ethnic riots in Urumqi, China. |
The "Stans" – the former Soviet Republics – were well represented, and there were women also representing Siberia and numerous Chinese cities and regions. Prominent among the latter was a Miss Xinjiang China. One of the tallest in the contest, she wore the shortest skirt, and looked nothing like the embattled and angry Uighur woman who'd been confronting the riot police.
I asked contestants from France and Germany what it was like to be in a beauty contest in a riot-torn city.
They didn't appear to know Urumqi is a riot-torn city.
The finals are later this month, and I guess they are not likely to be quizzed too deeply on local affairs. In the meantime, according to a poster in the lobby, they will be highlighting the "beauty of Xinjiang."
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By NBC News' Bo Gu
URUMQI, Xinjiang – As we drove through the empty streets of Urumqi, I was immediately reminded of the unrest in the Tibetan capital Lhasa last year – but with one key difference.
Here, in the remote capital of China’s northwestern Xinjiang province, there were few pedestrians, truckloads of armed police, smashed windows, and lots of scared people – just like in Lhasa in March 2008 when 22 people were killed, according to official numbers.
In Urumqi, officials have said that 156 people were killed and more than 1,100 injured as a result of the violent ethnic riots between the Uighurs and Han Chinese on Sunday.
But what separates Urumqi from Lhasa is the deep sense of hate between this region’s two majority ethnic groups: the Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs and the Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in China as a whole.
"I’d like to kill some Uighurs too! They’ve killed so many innocent Hans!" said one Han passerby when were filming in a downtown street.
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