Happy New Year,every one.在2009年最后的几分钟，来看看自己的网站，自从工作以后，几乎与网络隔绝了，没有打理自己的网站，更没有更新内容。
忙得没有了总结，没有了思考，没有了阅读，没有了与朋友们交流……这一切，希望在新的一年里能有一个改善，慢慢开始回归自己正常的生活。让自己能经常学习，思考，交流，生活不仅仅是工作，也许只有工作后才能理解。但是当工作了，却是想过想要的生活的时候却不能了。
新的一年，首先预祝自己新年快乐，其次要祝福所有的朋友们，祝大家在新的一年事业更上一层楼，生活更好美好，学业更进一步。从今天开始，自己一定要挤出时间，阅读，思考，交流，写作。
记得薛涌在其《北大批判》一书中有一节是“读与写是事业的关键”，这篇文章自己读了很多遍，每读一遍都有一种感触，自己确实是读的太少了，写得太少了，特别是写，这一点在大学四年里特别严重。就像他在文章里说的那样，经过大学四年的生活，我们几乎就没有写过什么东西，导致在毕业找工作时连简历都写不好，我真羡慕他有在国外练习读与写的那种经历。其实真是这样，任何东西，没有输入，就没有输出，同理没有输出，那就不会去寻求输入。在常理来看，大家认为的是只有读的多了，才会写出些东西。其实不然，当没有写的时候，没有输出时，一个人就不会去寻求输入，这样导致一个死循环，最后既没有输入，也没有输出。所有的一切都静止了，没有进步。
当读到刘未鹏的“暗时间”一文时，真是感觉自己很惭愧，大学四年确实是浪费了不少宝贵时间，如今工作了，还是浪费很多不必要的时间，导致自己整天没有时间，人活得像一个工具，除了工作还是工作，也许这是我曾经想要的生活，因为我一直想躲避一些东西，希望能通过工作，将自己很多不想的事情通通过滤掉。但如今才发现，很多事情确实是无法逃避的，从今天开始，要好好思考总结自己，总结自己的过去，做好自己的今天，展望自己的未来，重拾自己的理想，慢慢体味生活。
ISLAMABAD (Online) – Expressing concern over expansion of American embassy in the federal capital, Chinese Ambassador to Pakistan Luo Zhaohui has asked the US to expand the embassy keeping in view the security rules and regulation of Pakistan.
“China has concerns over expansion of US embassy in Islamabad and the United States should expand its embassy by materialising rules and regulations of Pakistan,” he said while addressing a news conference on Friday.
Responding to a question, he said China is against using the term ****** for Pakistan, as it is a sovereign state which should not be compared with Afghanistan where the US and allied forces are battling against insurgency.Answering to another question, the ambassador expressed satisfaction over security being given to the Chinese citizens in Pakistan saying, “We have no plan to deploy Chinese Army in our consulate.”
Commenting on relations between Pakistan and China, Luo Zhaohui referred to the collaboration with Pakistan in various fields and said his country would continue to assist its all weather friend to overcome the sugar and energy crises.
When asked about President Asif Ali Zardari’s visit to China after every 3 months, he said the visit of Pakistani President was aimed to boost working relationship between the two countries.
When President Asif Ali Zardari would travel to China at an official visit, full protocol would be provided to him, he said, adding Pakistan and China have people to contact.
Talking to a private TV channel on Thursday, Interior Minister Rehman Malik made it clear that US embassy has neither applied for grant of additional visa to more marines nor Pakistan permitted for the increased number of marines in the US embassy here. He said, “As for as marines are concerned, neither US has applied for any additional visas; nor we have given any permission to them and this was disinformation.”
The Minister said the news that US has hired 300 houses in capital has no realty and “it is totally wrong”.
To a question Rehman Malik said US, China and Turkey have applied for extra land for extension of their embassies.
“Pakistan is a sovereign country, who ever comes to Pakistan should have to obey the laws and regulations of this country.”
Talking to a private TV channel on Thursday, Interior Minister Rehman Malik made it clear that US embassy has neither applied for grant of additional visa to more marines nor Pakistan permitted for the increased number of marines in the US embassy here.
He said, “As for as marines are concerned, neither US has applied for any additional visas; nor we have given any permission to them and this was disinformation.”
The Minister said the news that US has hired 300 houses in capital has no realty and “it is totally wrong”.
To a question Rehman Malik said US, China and Turkey have applied for extra land for extension of their embassies.
“Pakistan is a sovereign country, who ever comes to Pakistan should have to obey the laws and regulations of this country.”
To another question, Rehman Malik said, “Blackwater is not operating in Pakistan-we have our own system, rules and regulations-we will not allow any body to operate from here.”
A European business group has called on China to better define its ‘national interests’ following the detention of an Australian mining executive, amid concerns EU firms could face similar probes.
Shanda Interactive Entertainment, a Chinese technology company, is planning to spin off its video game unit and raise as much as $800 million in an initial public offering in the United States on Nasdaq. The unit, Shanda Games Limited, has produced popular Chinese video games like the World of Legend and Aion, a multiplayer online role-playing game. The filing comes a few months after the Chinese Internet portal Sohu.com unit took its own gaming unit,Changyou.com, public on Nasdaq.
LONDON, Sept 5 – G20 finance leaders pledged on Saturday to keep economic life-support packages in place until a recovery is firmly secured, but reached no deal on putting limits on bankers’ pay.
Finance ministers and central bankers meeting in London agreed fiscal and monetary policy would stay ”expansionary” until recovery from the worst financial crisis since World War II was certain, a draft of their joint statement seen by Reuters showed.
Key points from the draft communique
Economic stimulus measures::
“We reiterated the need for swift and full implementation of all commitments made at the Washington and London summits and have agreed on further steps to strengthen the financial system as set out in the accompanying declaration.”
Commodity prices:
Pledges to “work to address excessive commodity price volatility.”
Global imbalances:
“Work to achieve high stable growth which will require orderly rebalancing of global demand.”
Reform of International Monetary Fund:
”The voice and representation of emerging and developing economies, including the poorest, must be significantly increased”
Accompanying statement called “Declaration on Further Steps to Strengthen Financial Institutions” with 6 points:
1. Compensation
2. Systemically important firms
3. Prudential regulation
4. Non-cooperative jurisdictions
5. Implementation of international standards for actors outside the core bank system such as credit derivatives etc.
6. Convergence of international accounting standards
Statement says “More needs to be done” on:
- Increasing transparency
- “Global standards on pay structure, including on deferral, effective clawback, the relationship between fixed and variable remuneration, and guaranteed bonuses, to ensure compensation practices are aligned with long-term value creation and financial stability.”
“We also ask the FSB (Financial Stability Board) to explore possible limits/approaches on total variable remuneration.”
“G20 governments will also explore ways to address non-adherence with the FSB principles.”
The government in Xinjiang struggled to contain escalating unrest on Friday as thousands of people confronted police in Urumqi, the regional capital, accusing the government of incompetence in maintaining public safety.
Five people have been confirmed dead and 14 others injured and admitted to hospital after protests the day before, Zhang Hong, the city’s deputy mayor, said.
The protests, which grew in number and intensity for a third consecutive day, come at a sensitive time for Beijing as the Communist party seeks to reaffirm the legitimacy of its rule, with celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1.
Xinhua, the official news agency, reported from Urumqi that more than 1,000 demonstrators had confronted police near Communist party headquarters and that security forces had dispersed the crowds with teargas. According to AFP reports, protesters threw plastic bottles at police.
Witnesses said crowds were trying to break through police lines to storm districts where many ethnic Uighurs live.
An Urumqi-based businessman said police had closed all roads into the city.
The government in Xinjiang has been caught off guard by the anger it faces from its own people.
For decades its rulers brought in millions of people from China’s Han ethnic majority to colonise the ethnically diverse region in the country’s far west. They kept a wary eye on the Uighurs, the biggest local ethnic group, as the main security risk.
But since Wednesday it has been Han marching in the streets of Urumqi, the regional capital, calling for Wang Lequan, Xinjiang’s Communist party secretary, to step down.The protesters’ wrath was triggered by fear over reported syringe stabbing attacks which most attributed to the Uighurs . But the unfolding complaints about the government reflect much broader dissatisfaction across ethnic boundaries.“The central government may have put the economy first for the past 30 years but, in Xinjiang, stability has always been first and the economy is a distant second,” says a Han resident of Korla, a city in the region’s south. The 35-year-old resident asked not to be identified for fear of government retribution.“We shouldn’t be surprised that the Uighurs are making trouble. Even many Han are dissatisfied.”Many such complaints across all ethnic groups centre on Mr Wang.
Xinjiang is different from other Chinese provinces where local leaders rotate every few years. Mr Wang has held senior positions there since 1991 and headed the regional party committee for 15 years.
One of the most popular jokes among Xinjiang people is that while highway railings elsewhere need poles every three metres, Xinjiang needs one every metre “because Wang Lequan’s family produces them”.
While Mr Wang’s administration is determined to force rapid economic development, its approach has created a yawning income gap.
Until the mid-1990s, oil and gas exploration in Xinjiang was concentrated in the northern half of the region. But over the past decade PetroChina and other state-owned companies have begun to explore finds in the Taklamakan desert of southern Xinjiang.
In official propaganda, this benefits everyone. “Our strategy is to develop Xinjiang with large state-owned enterprises to make sure the development happens fast and on a large scale,” explains a documentary broadcast on Xinjiang television. “Thus we are creating new job opportunities, and we are raising incomes fast.”
But in reality most Uighurs are missing out because state-owned oil companies in Xinjiang prefer employing Han who speak Mandarin and are often more likely to bring technical skills than local Uighur farmers.
The wider public in Xinjiang shows discontent with rapid development as well. “They take our gas but they are giving nothing back,” is the most frequently heard complaint.
In general, tax revenues paid by a local branch of a central government-owned state enterprise should be split between the local and central governments.
But for the natural gas PetroChina sends through its pipelines, tax is paid at the other end, where it emerges in Shanghai.
That is where the subsidiary running the pipe-line is registered, according to a 2005 notice from the State Administration of Taxation.
Queries about PetroChina’s local tax payments were not answered by the Xinjiang government or the company.
In Xinjiang, natural gas is in short supply. In Aksu, midway between Urumqi and Kashgar, buses, taxis and private cars queue for half a kilometre in front of a natural gas station almost every day. Petrol and gas prices in the region are among the highest in all of China. And homes in most parts of Xinjiang, except for the biggest cities, burn coal or wood for heating because most of the region’s natural gas is sold to other provinces.
Xinjiang’s economy has been growing fast despite such bottlenecks. The region’s gross domestic product has been increasing at annual rates of 11-15 per cent over the past five years.
In Korla, where most oil companies set up their regional headquarters for Taklamakan exploration, gleaming black Porsche Cayennes and BMWs congregate on the sidewalks every night as oil engineers and other affluent migrants from other provinces enjoy the fruits of this boom.
Many feel left behind. A 35-year-old man complains that the rent he pays for the shop floor where he sells cheap accessories is more than 10 times the rent charged in a similar commercial area in Yiwu, a bustling coastal trading hub. “If this doesn’t get better soon, I’ll leave Xinjiang,” he says.
On the day of his high school graduation in 1979, Zhu Zhuanghong saw a bright future for himself. People’s Bank of China had just picked the 19-year-old from among hundreds at his school to start work as a prestigious “cadre” candidate – an employee, in the Leninist language of Chinese institutions, set for a career as a professional. “My teacher told me that as a cadre at the bank, the wind cannot blow you over and the rain cannot hit you,” Mr Zhu recalls.
He was wrong. Now 50, Mr Zhu has been buffeted by the wind and rain for more than a decade. In 1995, he lost his job at Industrial and Commercial Bank of China , the world’s largest bank by market capitalisation, which had been spun off in 1984 from the central bank that had given him his first job.
The reason for this dramatic decline in fortunes is hidden in a manila folder in an office drawer somewhere in Beijing: Mr Zhu’s renshi danganor “employee file”. While China has long since replaced its communist economy with a kind of raw capitalism and is fast ascending to the rank of superpower, its relationship with its own citizens remains partly stuck in its totalitarian past. The state continues to keep a secret dossier on every working citizen, which helps it retain its absolute power over the individual.
The fate that Mr Zhu and an estimated hundreds of thousands of others – although there are no reliable records on exactly how many – have suffered under this system serves as a reminder of the limits of Beijing’s market reforms.
According to Mr Zhu, back in 1994 – following an argument with his supervisor at ICBC – crucial documentation proving his cadre status, higher than that of his “worker” colleagues, disappeared from his employee file, making him unemployable for other institutions and stripping him of part of the pension benefits he had earned.
After suing ICBC without result, Mr Zhu is now going after its shareholders in a Kafka-esque fight to uncover the truth about his own past and salvage what remains of his future.
For each of China’s 700m employees – except farmers, historically excluded – there is a file, started while they are high school students. The file is transferred to their employers, where it is open to superiors but closed to the employees themselves – which means, in effect, the state’s invisible hand can make or break anyone’s fate.
“The file system holds some functions that are covered by the social security number in the United States, but its real meaning is that it gives the state an instrument of control over the individual,” says Chen Tan, a professor of public policy at Central South university in Changsha.
The file is a leftover from before the market reforms that began 30 years ago, when all employers were state-owned “units”, and every individual was tied to one. The unit was in charge of every area of its employees’ lives – including cradle-to-grave care, political thinking and even marriages and births. The state no longer rules all aspects of life but the file system maintains power over individuals in case it is needed. That also leaves the door open to abuse.
Employee files are frequently filled with false information, and often used by superiors to punish staff they do not like or by state institutions to stop individuals taking politically sensitive ac tion, says Prof Chen, who has had access to thousands of such files for his research on the system.
Li Subin, a lawyer from Henan province, faced such abuse. In 2005, he moved to the capital and started work for Yitong, a law firm. But the Henan government refused to transfer his file to Beijing after a dispute between Mr Li and the authorities – whereupon the municipal government argued it could not renew his licence. Beijing authorities closed Yitong for six months, saying it was illegally employing Mr Li. Yitong was already a thorn in the government’s side as it had taken on politically sensitive cases.
Mr Li turned to courts in both Henan and Beijing, but neither solved his problem. In Henan, where he sued the local justice department, judges told him the file transfer was a problem with the Beijing justice department and refused to become involved. In Beijing, where he tried to drag both departments into court, his complaint was rejected. “All that is only possible because the file system exists,” complains Mr Li. “It makes us hostages, it restricts us as if we were slaves chained to the land.”
But files are not only abused as instruments in power struggles or vendettas. They can also become a commercial good, highlighting the problems of a society where everything can be for sale. Several graduates in the central town of Wubu in 2006 have discovered in the past three years that their files have disappeared, erasing bright prospects and condemning them to a future as day labourers or freelance salespeople.
The vanished files all belonged to students with exceptional grades, raising suspicions of identity theft. Officials in other provinces have been found to have sold files to wealthy families whose offspring wanted to improve their career chances. The common feature in such cases is that the victim is usually the last to find out there is a problem and frequently fails to discover what happened.
For Mr Zhu, everything went fine for the first 15 years at People’s Bank of China. The year 1979 was a hopeful one for China, and the 1980s were even better. The country was finally leaving the nightmare of the cultural revolution behind and initiating experiments in market economy.
Mr Zhu rose rapidly through the ranks. First he worked in gold and silver appraisal, and was made head of the Communist party youth league in that department. He began writing on finance in state media and, by 1991, he was working in ICBC headquarters in Beijing. In the course of this ascent, he says, he found himself in trouble with more than one supervisor over his ambitions. Following clashes with a boss whose authority he challenged, he says, he was told in 1994 seek a new employer. After two years of fighting to stay, he began writing for a state magazine. Five years in, he was fired from this position too.
His search for a new post took him to China International Intellectech Corporation, a state-owned human resources company. This is where the skies fell down on him. “They told me that even the documentation of how I entered the bank in 1979 wasn’t there [in my file],” says Mr Zhu. “I felt like my brain was imploding. Forget about the cadre status – without the proper documents, I was nothing, not even a worker. I would have no social security, my past 22-year working life would be erased.”
Mr Zhu convinced an official at ICBC to issue a note confirming the relevant material was lost and, on that basis, CIIC took him on – with the proviso that he must pay his own social security contributions because, according to CIIC, he lacked clear status as either a cadre or a worker.
In 2007, when he left CIIC, his file was transferred to the state human resources agency. When the agency found the note from the ICBC official, Mr Zhu was told it was not valid and he would have to find the original document proving when and how he entered the bank almost 30 years ago. He found a copy at the local archives office but it carried a stamp marking him as a “worker” – entitling him to lower social security benefits and making him ineligible for jobs he would want. Forms recording his cadre status, which he recalled filling in, were missing as well.
Mr Zhu has concluded that someone must be held responsible for the fact that he lost part of his pension. In February, he took ICBC to court, asking it to restore his cadre status and reimburse him for his Rmb22,133.61 ($3,000, £2,000, €2,300) in social security contributions. He lost, appealed and lost again. ICBC does not contest that items might be missing from his file but argues that it is not responsible because his employment at the bank ended 15 years ago. In court, its representatives said Mr Zhu should go after his other employers.
Next he petitioned all state departments that could possibly be responsible, all the way up to the state council’s legal department – to no avail. “Now all that’s left to do is go after ICBC’s shareholders,” he says. Last month Mr Zhu, who now survives by writing and broadcasting on finance, wrote to investors, including the ministry of finance and Goldman Sachs, but received no answer. The legal system, he believes, offers one more avenue: arbitration. His quest has made him a nervous wreck and this final step is unlikely to yield success.
Without full access to his own file, he still cannot prove what exactly brought his life crashing down around him, let alone where and when – which shows why the system is in dire need of reform, experts say. “The main problem is the secrecy,” says Prof Chen. But he is not optimistic that Beijing will allow more transparency any time soon. “There is just too much vested interest involved and there is the sense that the state must not cede this last key instrument of control over its people.”
China could soon make its presence felt in the French power sector as its sovereign wealth fund said it had studied investments in both Areva, the state-owned nuclear group, and its energy equipment division.
The China Investment Corporation has paid a visit to Areva executives in recent weeks to seek out information on “the business and its performance”, according to one person close to the company.
CIC has also asked for information on Areva T&D, the transmission and distribution division that was put on the block this summer. The unit, valued at between €3bn ($4.3bn) and €4bn, is one of the world’s leading suppliers of high and medium voltage power equipment and the CIC could be interested in taking a sizeable stake alongside another investor.
CIC’s interest in Areva, disclosed in the French daily Les Échos on Friday, follows the government’s decision earlier this year to sell at least 15 per cent of the group’s equity to industrial or strategic partners.
Paris has been talking to sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East and Asia about selling stakes under 5 per cent in Areva. The move, first reported in the Financial Times, is an effort by Paris to cement the group’s position in key emerging nuclear markets.
Areva’s Japanese partner, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, is also widely expected to take a stake.
However, a final decision on the opening of Areva’s share capital to outsiders is unlikely to be taken before the question of the T&D sale is resolved. Areva has been forced to put the business up for sale by its government shareholder in an effort to raise the €12bn it needs for future expansion and reduce the pressure for a capital increase.
Some 30 potential bidders have asked for the sale documents, including a second Chinese group, the low-voltage equipment maker, Chint Group of Wenzhou.
If Chint decides to bid by the September 18 deadline, it will find itself again in a battle with the French group Schneider Electric, which has joined Alstom of France to bid. In April, Schneider was ordered to pay Chint $23m to settle a patent lawsuit – at the time the largest recorded settlement in an intellectual property case in China.
Toshiba of Japan has also requested the sales memorandum and said that it is “watching with interest because the sale would change the dynamics of the industry”.
Toshiba would struggle to finance a bid. Despite a Y500bn ($5.37bn) capital raising in June, Toshiba’s equity amounts to only 20 per cent of total assets, its credit rating from Standard & Poor’s is BBB, and it must fund investment in both its semiconductor and nuclear power plant divisions.
Areva may also be reluctant to sell to one of its main rivals. Other interested parties include GE of the US and financial groups, including Axa Private Equity.
There is a rich vein to mine when searching for patterns and precedents that might help explain gyrations in western markets. Those searching for plausible parallels for this year’s bounce have travelled back as far as the Panic of 1907.
History, alas, is not much help when it comes to making sense of market movements in one of the world’s most ancient civilisations. China’s stock exchange – launched by communist rulers as a grudging experiment in the early 1990s – is a mere teenager, and often acts like one. It is a confused creature, prone to hormonal highs and lows, and occasionally frustrated by parental (read government) supervision that is too permissive one month, too strict the next.
China had a stock market before “liberation”, as the Chinese Communist party likes to call its triumph in 1949, but don’t look to that chaotic era for comparisons to explain the 20 per cent fall in Shanghai’s Composite index in the fortnight to August 19, after more than doubling over the previous nine months.
In a perhaps apocryphal comment, Zhu Rongji, the acerbic former Chinese premier, supposedly groused that in the good old days – roaring Shanghai circa the 1920s and 1930s – investors who lost everything would jump off rooftops, but now they protest outside government offices.
The party’s fear of investors at the gates is instructive. For China’s rulers, a plunging stock market is about as welcome as soaring inflation or unemployment. With 700,000 accounts being opened by new investors every week this summer, it would not be hard to organise a protest rally or two.
Fears of social instability aside, longer-term policy priorities also underlie the Chinese government’s desire to see the slide arrested.
As Jing Ulrich, chairman of China equities and commodities at JPMorgan, writes in a research note, market stability is important for goals including the first Shanghai listings of offshore Chinese companies (so-called “red chips”).
There is also a raft of initial public offerings to keep afloat. After a 10-month drought, China opened the floodgates this summer. Shanghai is top of this year’s issuance table, with $9.2bn in new offerings according to Dealogic.
As a result, league table-conscious bankers at brand-name western banks have had to surrender pride of place to China International Capital Corp, the mainland investment house and world’s leading bookrunner in 2009.
Market-management tools at the Chinese government’s disposal include liquidity adjustments by the central bank, more mutual fund launches and, when Beijing really needs a sledgehammer, a reduction in stamp duty.
They have been used before. In July 2005, a four-year 55 per cent slide was arrested just as the Shanghai Composite was poised to breach the psychologically important 1,000-point barrier.
Even by China’s standards, the resulting bounce was ridiculous. The index breached 6,000 in October 2007, then fell 72 per cent in just over a year.
These booms and busts have borne little rational relation to China’s underlying economic performance in the past decade. And with overseas participation restricted to carefully controlled quotas, the Shanghai stock market remains an overwhelmingly domestic affair. All of which begs the question – why should anyone else care about the Shanghai market’s increasingly violent ups and downs?
Yet care we do. Its shock daily falls this month have been reflexively cited for sympathetic movements in markets across the globe.
The argument for caring assumes that the Chinese investing public has, against all previous evidence, developed a mature insight into the workings of the broader macroeconomy.
After first-half bank lending exceeded the official full-year target, and then fell 77 per cent month on month in July, investors have supposedly taken fright at the implications for future economic growth.
Such a scenario would indeed be worth the rest of the world worrying about, especially with regard to the potential impact on global commodity prices.
Assuming that China’s juvenile market is growing up, and has reacted rationally to what has become a less rosy economic outlook, it could bode well for investors betting that this month’s fall heralds a correction rather than a crash.
Before this month’s market fall began in earnest, Vincent Chan and Peggy Chan at Credit Suisse noted that a retreat was overdue with China stocks trading at 22.5 times forward earnings compared with their long-term average of 17.64 times.
Fraser Howie at CLSA says: “All the market had in August is a reminder that the Chinese economy is not as strong as people think. It’s just a bit of a wake-up call.”
Source:FT
