Great Wall Marathon

2010 Great Wall Marathon Participants
Click on picture for large version

May 19th, 2012. Come Run With Us.


The Great Wall Marathon® is a tough, beautiful and definitely extraordinary experience. The 5164 steps of the Great Wall will put your physique to the test, and the breathtaking surroundings of Tianjin Province will compete with your tired muscles for attention.

Level 4: Highest alert over flooding

China Evacuates over 500,000 because of flooding.

Chinese media said that as of Thursday evening, floods caused by the most recent four days of rain had resulted in 19 deaths and left seven missing in Anhui, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan and Guizhou provinces and Chongqing municipality.

China raised its disaster alert to the highest level 4, and the government is describing the floods in some areas, such as eastern Zhejiang province's Qianting River area, as the worst since 1955.

Don Eads doing a radio talk show on Binhai Network.

Are China's leaders Insecure?

Anger that had grown for days after the death in police custody of Ran Jianxin, a local People’s Congress deputy, exploded last Thursday. Relatives said Mr. Ran was beaten to death, and they released photographs of his body. Mr. Ran was widely believed to be fighting official corruption, which residents said had run unchecked for years.

The party celebrates its 90th birthday on July 1, outwardly confident that it deserves to rule for “the next 90 years,” as Li Zhongjie, deputy head of the Party History Research Center, told Beijing News.

Inwardly, however, it is haunted by a sense that it is not truly loved, said Kerry Brown, one of six overseas academics who attended three days of meetings last week with officials of the major party organs.

“They don’t have the hearts of 99 percent of the population, and they are worried about that,” said Mr. Brown, head of the Asia Program at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.

Kissinger and Huntsman use China-US Relations Forum for different Ends

Kissinger and Huntsman exchanged ideas on issues ranging from the situation in the South China Sea to China's economic evolution, and China-US military exchanges to different strategic mindsets rooted in US' chess-playing and China's fondness for weiqi, or GO.

We will set up a GO tournament at the next 21st Century China Symposium.

China's Economy to Pass US by 2021

According to Yao Yang (China Daily)

"Is China poised to surpass the United States as the world's largest economy? The International Monetary Fund recently predicted that the size of China's economy will overtake that of the US in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) by 2016.

Even more radically, Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute of International Economics argues that China actually surpassed the US in terms of PPP in 2010."

Siberia Supplies Raw Materials for Beijing

Siberian Wasteland

Quite astonishing that on the Russian side of Siberia there are roughly 6 million people left, but on the Chinese side, the population is blossoming. What gives?

RAW MATERIALS

Reuters: Mirnaya was once a thriving garrison town with a movie theater, a kindergarten and a park. The Soviet army maintained a base here to keep an eye on neighboring China. Then the Soviet Union collapsed and the military left. To survive, those who stayed behind gradually dismantled and sold off what was left, piece by piece. First they removed the windows from the prefabricated buildings where the officers had once lived and sold them in Chita. Then they ripped radiators and pipes from the walls and sold them to scrap dealers, who then sold the metal in China. The buildings now stand like skeletons in the steppes,

Water is the MOST Serious Issue in Dragonland

Early morning in Beijing

Pollution vs. Economic Meltdown in 21st Century China.

So far the pollution is winning. The air is unbreatheable and the water undrinkable, not even suitable for farming as over half of the rivers are severely polluted too. Even the rain is polluted. It is past time the Chinese government fixes this or no one will be able to live there. Many expats I know have recently decided the price of success is not worth dying over, and they have been exiting 21st Century China in droves.