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RONDONÓPOLIS, Brazil — For more than 2,000 years, the Chinese have turned soybeans into tofu, a staple of the country’s diet.

But as its economy grows, so does China’s appetite for pork, poultry and beef, which require higher volumes of soybeans as animal feed. Plagued by scarce water supplies, China is turning to a new trading partner 15,000 miles away — Brazil — to supply more protein-packed beans essential to a richer diet.

China’s global scramble for natural resources is leading to a transformation of agricultural trading around the world. In China, vanishing cropland and diminishing water supplies are hampering the country’s ability to feed itself, and the increasing use of farmland in the United States to produce biofuels is pushing China to seek more of its staples from South America, where land is still cheap and plentiful.

“China is out there beating the bushes,” said Robert L. Thompson, a professor at the University of Illinois who is a former director of agricultural and rural development at the World Bank. The goal, he said, is “to ensure they have access to long-term contracts for minerals and energy and food.”

Once, the biggest bilateral food trade flowed between the United States, the world’s largest food exporter, and Japan. But countries with vast arable land available for expansion, particularly Brazil, are now racing to meet demand in China, whose population of 1.3 billion is 10 times that of Japan’s.

Farmers in the United States have started planting far more corn for ethanol at the expense of other crops, including soybeans. But after the United States grain embargo by President Richard M. Nixon in the early 1970s helped spawn Brazil’s soybean industry, American farmers are not giving up their leading role in the grain trade easily.

With a far superior system for transporting crops to global markets, American farmers still enjoy many advantages over their new competitors from Brazil and elsewhere in the developing world. Infrastructure and financing constraints in Brazil will keep the competition to feed China in flux for years to come.

But the longer-term trends are apparent. At the heart of the shift is the global competition for land to grow crops. Brazil, which farms about 175 million acres, has room to double its available cropland to equal the scale of the United States, analysts say, even without clearing any more of the Amazon rainforest.

“All of a sudden you have a global market for land, a competition between several different products for the same amount of land,” said Sergio Barroso, president for the Brazil operations of Cargill, the biggest grain trader in the world. Brazil’s soybean industry is losing acres to sugar cane for ethanol production in some areas, he said, and is competing with corn, cotton and cattle.

“If you put it all together between feed and food,” Mr. Barroso said, “it is going to be a tremendous challenge.”

Expectations ran high three years ago when Hu Jintao, the president of China, visited South America and toasted a strategic partnership with his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, predicting trade between the countries would double to $20 billion. China pledged $10 billion in investments.

To some extent, Brazilians have been disappointed in the follow-up. The Chinese have struggled with red tape in Brazil and hesitated while waiting for Brazilian rules to activate public-private investments. “Very little has happened,” said Pedro de Camargo Neto, a former official in the agriculture ministry in Brazil who is now an agribusiness consultant.

But China has continued its buying spree in Brazil. The soybean trade between the countries has exploded. Last year Brazil sent nearly 11 million tons of beans to China, a 50 percent increase from the previous year and nearly double the amount shipped in 2004. Early indications are that Brazil has produced yet another record crop, and analysts expect that China will devour most of it.

While the United States remains the largest producer of soybeans, last year Brazil became the biggest exporter. This year the United States will regain the crown, but its soybean exports are expected to fall by 23 percent by 2009-10, according to the Agriculture Department.

For all the gains here, though, the surge in exports to China has created unease among many in Brazilian agriculture, who worry the tightening relationship will accelerate a development model in which Brazil is too reliant on sales of raw natural resources rather than higher-value products. And after enjoying a trade surplus with China, Brazil slipped into a deficit in the most recent quarter as the Chinese stepped up shipments of manufactured goods.

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BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- China will build 12 highways by 2010 linking its remote northwest to Central Asia, state media reported, targeting a key source for energy and commodities to fuel its rapid economic growth.

The longest will stretch 1,680 km (1.045 miles) from Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang region, to Istanbul, Xinhua news agency reported late on Thursday quoting the local transport administration.

The planned highways would connect China with Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Pakistan.

The report did not say where the funding would come from. And it was not clear if this was part of a rail and highway plan discussed in a ministerial meeting in October.

Xinjiang shares a border with eight countries to the north and west of China.

阿走

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6520317.stm
Demolition ends China house row
Wu Ping's house destroyed

House demolition
The home of a Chinese family who defied property developers in a high-profile campaign has finally been demolished.

The family of Wu Ping gave up defending their Chongqing house after reportedly reaching a deal with the authorities.

The "nail house" - so called because it refused to be hammered down - had been isolated in a huge construction pit after other households agreed to move.

The dispute became a cause celebre for ordinary Chinese people who have tried to fight property developers.

But the struggle came to an end on Tuesday, when a few dozen people looked on as the two-storey brick building was broken up by an earth mover.

A night watchman at the building site told AFP news agency: "The stubborn nail has been removed."

Mrs Wu, when told the house had been demolished, reportedly said: "Oh well."

New law

Her husband, Yang Wu, stayed in the house until the demolition, hanging out banners reading: "The legal private property of citizens cannot be violated."

The house was the last standing on a huge construction site

Enlarge Image

The family had insisted on staying in their home, because they were not satisfied with the compensation the authorities were offering.

Mrs Wu said earlier that she had been offered an apartment in a planned new complex, or a cash settlement, but she turned both down.

According to state news agency Xinhua, the couple have now agreed to move into another apartment elsewhere in Chongqing.

Accusations of illegal land grabs and corruption have dogged China's fast-paced building expansion, and the family's resistance has been portrayed as heroic by state media.

China's parliament last week passed a landmark law to boost protection of property rights for individuals.

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TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- Taiwanese presidential front runner Ma Ying-jeou pleaded not guilty Tuesday at his corruption trial in Taipei, saying that his use of a special municipal fund was in keeping with government standards.

Ma, of the main opposition Nationalists, remains the favorite to take over from President Chen Shui-bian of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party in the March 2008 presidential poll -- despite the charges against him.

Before entering his plea, the handsome, 56-year-old Harvard-educated lawyer told the court he had done nothing wrong in diverting 11 million New Taiwan dollars ($333,000) of public money into his private account while serving as mayor of Taipei between 1998 and 2006.

He said the practice of using discretionary municipal funds without providing detailed accounting had been approved by government auditors for more than 20 years.

If convicted on the charges, Ma could face up to seven years in prison.

Ma has professed his innocence since February, when his indictment was first announced. His backers say diverting money from municipal funds is an accepted practice throughout Taiwan.

They say common uses for diverted funds include providing holiday bonuses for municipal workers and underwriting special municipal events.

On Sunday Ma said his campaign would still go forward even if he is convicted in Taipei District Court.

"If they seek to use the case to cause me trouble or even knock me down, they won't reach their goal," he told reporters.

Ma's trial opened in the shadow of an announcement by Nationalist kingpin Wang Jin-pyng that Wang would not contest the party's presidential primary because of alleged bias in the process.
"The primary would never be a fair competition as the rules of the game were specially made for a particular candidate from the outset," Wang said Monday, echoing the spirit of earlier comments in which he had cast doubts on the fitness of an indicted figure to lead the party's presidential ticket.

The angry tone of Wang's comments suggested he may be open to mounting an independent bid for the presidency -- a development that would play into the hands of the DPP by splitting the Nationalist vote.

Both the Nationalists and the DPP are expected to announce their presidential candidates in May.

The DPP incumbent Chen is in the third year of his second four-year term, and is constitutionally barred from succeeding himself.

Four DPP candidates -- party chairman Yu Shyi-kun, Premier Su Tseng-chang, Vice President Annette Lu and former Premier Frank Hsieh -- are vying for the DPP presidential nomination.

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BEIJING, China (AP) -- The number of people in China who can't read has shot up to 116 million, wiping out years of hard-won gains against illiteracy as rural poor leave the farm and school for work in the city, state media said Monday.
Over the last five years, China's illiterate population grew by 30 million, the China Daily newspaper reported. According to census data, 87 million adults in China were illiterate in 2000.
Literacy in China is defined as someone who can read and write 1,500 Chinese characters -- a fraction of the 7,000 to 10,000 characters required for college graduates.
Most Chinese were illiterate at the beginning of the 20th century, but the simplification of Chinese characters and education campaigns launched by the Communists helped steadily raise literacy levels among adults, hitting about 90 percent in 2000, according to the United Nations.
The paper quoted an education ministry official as saying the main reason for the backsliding was that many young rural poor were dropping out of school in order to find work in the cities.
Migrant workers in China's urban centers do not have access to public education, health care and other basic social services.
"The situation is worrying," the paper quoted Gao Xuegui, a Ministry of Education official who focuses on illiteracy, as saying. "Illiteracy is not only a matter of education, but also has a great social impact."
Gao said another reason for the backsliding was a lack of adequate funding, and the fact that earlier successes in fighting illiteracy lead some local governments to abandon their literacy programs.
The paper said China's illiterate population in 2000 accounted for 11.3 percent of the world's total, but reached 15.01 percent in 2005.

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“You could say we overbuilt,” said Xiwai’s co-founder, Xu Ziwang. Boyish in his khakis and navy blazer, Xu, who is 50, has energy to match the wealth he earned as one of Goldman Sachs’s first mainland Chinese partners. He has devoted both his zeal and money to establishing the school with Lin Min, Xiwai’s headmaster, plowing proceeds from local real estate development into the enterprise. Theirs is a project with roots in a past that could hardly have seemed more remote on the balmy fall day the two of them proudly showed me around the one-year-old campus. Friends from their teenage years on a farm during the Cultural Revolution, Xu and Lin were sent from school to the countryside when they were about the age of the oldest Xiwai students who greeted us cheerfully on the paved pathways. The two men were among the many millions who, feverishly studying when they weren’t busy at their appointed labors, swarmed to take the college-entrance exam in the first sittings in 1977 and 1978; they ended up among the few who scored high enough to secure a scarce college spot. Thirty years later, both had studied and worked abroad (Xu in the United States, Lin in Slovenia, England and New Zealand), and back home, Xu had played a big role in privatization deals. Here they stood on what had been mud, eagerly sharing their vision of a pedagogical and curricular renaissance that would produce a generation “better than us.”

What a fortunate cohort today’s kids were, both men said: young people growing up in a booming country that had plenty of problems but also a growing middle class and expanding horizons. By 2006, China had vastly exceeded its higher-education enrollment goal; 22 percent of the college-age population — compared with roughly 40 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States — were receiving some form of postsecondary schooling. Yet Xu and Lin also joined in the widespread worry that Chinese youths, spared the real-life challenges their elders were forced to cope with, faced very different constraints. Hunkered down, doing endless exam-haunted schoolwork, they were constantly hovered over by their parents. In 1998, years before the McKinsey report of a talent shortage, Xu heard the wake-up call when he initiated Chinese recruiting for Goldman Sachs.

He picked three graduates from China’s top universities and was impressed that they all scored 100 percent on the exam following the associate training stint in New York — only to be disappointed a year later, when their performance reviews were in the bottom quartiles. “There’s a price,” he concluded, “for 12 years of prep for an exam, and that’s to always think there’s a narrow, right answer. If you give precise instructions, they do well. If you define a task broadly, they get lost and ask for help.” If he and Lin had their way, independent students eager to use their imaginations would be the dominant breed on their campus. They were counting on a rising tide of “broad-minded” parents eager to provide their children with the less-straitjacketed education — a creative mix of the best of East and West — that Xiwai preached and aimed to find teachers able to impart. But as we toured a campus plastered with exhortations to be “global citizens” and to “Smile, Embrace, Communicate, Cooperate, Negotiate,” Xu was also blunt: there are lots of obstacles, not the least of them the gaokao that exerts such sway. “The dilemma is, everybody realized it is the problem, but nobody knows what to do.”

Chinese routinely say they wish the exam weren’t such a monolithic force, and various provinces have lately been allowed to offer their own versions. Yet bigger changes — like Fudan University’s use last year of broader criteria and a totally different test to admit some 300 students — stir concern. In a country so huge — and in a culture so steeped in cronyism — the fear is that no other process could work as fairly. Meanwhile, the success of China’s educational expansion hasn’t eased gaokao panic, and in fact has made the secondary-school exam a newly fraught hurdle. The unforseen pressures have unfolded this way: As the number of college graduates has outpaced the growth in desirable high-level jobs, generally located in China’s developed eastern region, one result has been a surge of unemployment among degree holders who resist settling for less. Along with that has come a rise in qualifications for lower-level jobs that once didn’t require a college diploma.

The situation has left students still desperately chasing elite-university credentials. A degree from the most prestigious Chinese schools, especially those given extra money in the quest for “world class” status (with Fudan and Jiao Tong universities in Shanghai, Peking and Tsinghua in Beijing at the pinnacle) — or from the University of Hong Kong or, more distinctive yet, from a college abroad — is the best shot at success in a job market where a big gap looms between top jobs and the level below. The college race has led in turn to an intensified struggle to get into the best high schools. They boast records of strong gaokao scorers and prestige university placements — yet high schools in general haven’t multiplied at the rate that colleges have. Xu wasn’t alone in sighing over these strains in the system and at the same time in seeing signs of hope: real change was bound to come.

III. The Experiment

When Meijie next had time to talk, it was in early June of last year, and she was swept up in arrangements for her education summit meeting in August. Among other things she and her fellow Harvard organizers would do when they were in Shanghai (where some Chinese university students would help out, too) was handle the late batch of Hsylc applications from seniors in China’s 10th-to-12th-grade high-school system. Meijie had extended the deadline for those applicants so they wouldn’t have to squeeze in work on the essays — one in English and one in Chinese — at the height of gaokao cramming. Answering Hsylc’s more creative questions would be a nice break for them, she told me at one point with a laugh and a shake of her cropped hair, and she wasn’t entirely kidding. Here was a college freshman who had barely closed her own blue books and was eagerly preparing to stage a $200,000 event (financed primarily by the Goldman Sachs Foundation, thanks to guidance from Xu). Lightening burdens, that “quality education” goal, was not exactly on any of these students’ agendas; juggling competing aspirations was more like it.

From the start, as Shanghai pioneered quality-education experiments during Meijie’s primary-school years in the early 1990s, she has been the rare student who navigated, undaunted, between China’s established educational ways and the emerging opportunities and expectations. Her upbringing reflects the deep-seated zeal for schooling that fuels but also complicates reform efforts. Almost the first thing Meijie told me about her mother (a former opera singer from a musical, Westernized family) and her father (a middle-school teacher of Chinese from a more traditional background) is that “they’re very typical Chinese parents.” By that she meant “they really focus on my education and cultivation.”

In China, a child’s schooling is a family endeavor worthy of great sacrifice, in money and time. Over dinner in Shanghai, a melodiously voluble Mrs. Tang confirmed that “when Meijie was very young we controlled her a lot, watched her very closely and guided her carefully. Luckily she was very cooperative and followed our instruction.” Effort rather than ability is considered the key to achievement — and among the most important expressions of filial piety is studying diligently (a word I heard a lot). “If there is no dark and dogged will, there will be no shining accomplishment; if there is no dull and determined effort, there will be no brilliant achievement” goes an old saying, invoked as soon as school starts — a far cry from the Western progressive interest in encouraging curiosity and play in the early years. Meijie told me her mother had her memorize her primary-school textbooks (much thinner than ours). Like many children, she was also sent to lessons in music, art and calligraphy. This kind of broader training is a legacy of the Confucian focus on self-perfection, and it is in step with the Maoist notion of “all-round development”; the emphasis is on practice and mastery, where American parents, busy enrolling their young kids in arty extras, are likely to stress self-expression and creativity.

For the reformist vision of more individualized, active learning, this ingrained educational drive has been something of a mixed blessing. It is a great core to build on: “quality education” advocates are emphatic that they have no intention of jettisoning a strong Asian heritage of discipline and humble, family-oriented commitment to self-cultivation. At the same time, the traditional emphasis on arduously conformist, adult-driven, hypercompetitive academic performance — well suited though it is to a standard class size of 40 or 50 — can get in the way of liberating individual initiative and easing pressures.

In her compulsory-education years, Meijie had plenty of old-style schooling — sitting in rows, being rigorously trained in the basics by revered teachers, and excelling. This was the well-entrenched approach observed by the developmental psychologists Harold W. Stevenson and James W. Stigler in the 1980s and praised in their frequently cited 1992 book “The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn From Japanese and Chinese Education.” But she received new-style broadening, too. Seeing he had an eager reader, Meijie’s father began buying her books — she remembers the series of 115 Western classics he got a deal on one summer — in the belief that if she learned one thing from each, they were worth having. Meanwhile, in primary school, Meijie lucked into an early example of just the kind of extracurricular, community-oriented pursuit championed by Vice Premier Li. Thanks to an arrangement between her school and a Shanghai TV station, the 9-year-old Meijie was one of several top third graders tapped to produce a weekly kids’ news segment, which meant skipping class to work on the clips. She ended up doing it single-handedly for three years; her classmates’ parents pulled their children out, worried about school demands and exams.

Meijie moved on to middle school in the late 1990s just as “keypoint” schools, which accept the best students and are better financed, were banned from using the term in the interests of greater egalitarianism (though they remain as sought-after as ever). A lottery was instituted in Shanghai to spread the stellar students around. When Meijie landed in a merely ordinary school, her parents were distraught — and then upset when she flunked a computer-skills test. (She failed to hit “save.”) But soon they backed off, Mrs. Tang explained, to “let her develop herself because we saw how good she is.” Indeed, Meijie proceeded to reap benefits beyond Vice Premier Li’s dreams. “You have time to live your own life,” she told me, remembering the more laid-back atmosphere of her nonselect school, “and you have your freedom to think about a lot.” Among other things, she thought about Web design, partly to prove she was no computer dunce, but mainly because she was an unusually informed girl. Thirteen-year-old Meijie, former journalist, followed the news and was struck that in the midst of the Internet boom, “China is too quiet and behind” in appealing to teens. She saw a niche and focused on building one of the first popular youth sites in China. She was then recruited to help work on kids.eastday.com, a government-endorsed site with comprehensive information and services for younger teenagers.

Up to this point, which brought her to the turn of the millennium, Meijie’s experience was a preview of how less hierarchical, more flexible educational innovations might free an extroverted, quite extraordinary student — even as it also shed light on the persistent power exerted by stringent school expectations and demanding parents. By 2001, the pace of curricular change began to pick up, with private schools often in the lead, trumpeting mottoes like “We must put students in the center of learning and focus on cultivation of creativity.” At Xiwai, where I sat in on a first-grade class of merely 29, there was a smart board and desks arranged, Western-style, in clusters. A lively young teacher had the kids chanting cheerfully (and perfectly) in unison, old style, but also scrambling to find partners with whom to practice their Chinese characters; the room buzzed with collaborative work, as Xiwai’s administrators proudly pointed out.

Another day, over tea and then lunch in a cafe at East China Normal University, I met Cui Yunhuo, a young professor there who has been active in the nationwide curriculum review and implementation process. He gave an upbeat account of the progress he has seen in grades one through nine in a mere five years — though he also lamented the lack of good assessment methods. There is a wider variety of new textbooks to choose from, he explained, reporting that color had been added and outdated and often dense passages removed. Teachers are “more at an international level,” Cui said and gave me a booklet heavy on proclamations about the new importance placed on “encouraging students to inquire” and helping them “learn to learn.” More hands-on, project-based learning and cooperative endeavors are required. Time must also be allotted for “comprehensive practical activities and school-based curriculum,” which include optional courses designed by individual schools to appeal to students’ interests — a hortatory agenda hard to evaluate. At a so-called demonstration middle and high school I visited in Beijing, the vice principal extolled an environmental-studies project, which sent students to visit a waste-water recycling factory. They returned with ideas that they were eager to apply to the new campus under construction on Beijing’s outskirts. Student-run clubs are now de rigueur. There are also new curbs on competition. The middle-school entrance exam has been officially abolished. Shanghai eliminated midterms in the early primary-school grades, and weekend and vacation review classes are widely discouraged.

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I. The Student

“Definitely wake me up around 9!!! I have an important presentation . . . wake me up at that time please. . . . Thanks!! Meijie.”

The e-mail message, sent to me at 3:55 a.m. under the subject line “yeah!” was my enthusiastic welcome to Harvard from a freshman named Tang Meijie. That was last May, nine months after she arrived on campus from mainland China. Except for the ungodly hour at which the message was dashed off, you wouldn’t have guessed that its author had come to Cambridge trailing accomplishments and expectations that were impressive even by Harvard standards. Nor was there obvious evidence of a student superstar in the tousled figure in a sweatshirt and khakis who appeared at the Greenhouse Café in the Science Center at around 10 a.m. Greeting me with a reflexive bow, as she had at our first meeting a couple of months earlier, Meijie apologized for taking a few minutes to finish up the talk she had been assigned to give that morning in one of her courses.

Her topic gave her away. What Meijie was editing between bites of a bacon cheeseburger and sips of coffee was a short presentation for an expository-writing class called Success Stories. The questions addressed in the course, which focused on “what philosopher William James once called ‘our national disease,’ the pursuit of success,” have become newly urgent ones in Meijie’s own country. “What is ‘success’?” the course introduction asked. “Is it a measure of one’s financial worth? Moral perfection? Popularity? How do families, schools and popular culture invite us to think about success? And how are we encouraged to think about failure?” At Harvard, she and her classmates were discussing those issues as they read, among other things, “The Great Gatsby” and David Brooks on America’s résumé-rich “organization kids” and watched movies. In China, a nation on a mission to become a 21st-century incubator of “world class” talent, Meijie is the movie. As she progressed through her classes in the cutting-edge city of Shanghai, spent a year abroad at a private high school in Washington, D.C., and came to Harvard, she became a celebrated embodiment of China’s efforts to create a new sort of student — a student trying to expand her country’s sometimes constricting vision of success.

Downstairs in the computer room of the Science Center, Meijie showed me the thousands of Chinese citations that come up when you Google her name. “That’s very crazy,” she said with a laugh, a girl all too familiar with the Chinese ardor for anything associated with the name Harvard. Getting in “early action” in December 2004 set off a media frenzy at home, where it’s still relatively rare for students to enroll as undergraduates at elite American schools, and study abroad promises to provide a crucial edge in a jammed job market. A packet of press coverage her parents gave me — Meijie rolled her eyes at the trove — portrayed her as every Chinese parent’s dream child. Child magazine accompanied photos of Meijie and her parents with counsel on how to “raise a great child.” The winner of no fewer than 76 prizes at the “city level” or above, as one article marveled, she was a model that top Chinese students themselves were dying to emulate. “What Does Her Success Tell Us?” read a headline on an article in The Shanghai Students’ Post. “Meijie Knocked at the Door of Harvard. Do You Want to Copy?” asked The Morning News Express in bold Chinese characters. For months, she was besieged by journalists begging to profile her; publishers, she recalls, clamored to sign her up to write her life story and companies asked her to advertise their products. A director of Goldman Sachs’s China division wanted her on the board of the private school he recently helped found, which was then under construction in an erstwhile rice field outside Shanghai.

But what was truly exceptional about Meijie was how she responded to the adulation. The fervent worship back home made Meijie uncomfortable and anxious to clarify what she wasn’t. “Don’t call me ‘Harvard Girl,’ ” she told one of many magazine interviewers. She was referring to a student six years ahead of her, Liu Yiting, whose arrival at Harvard in 1999 made her a huge celebrity in China when her parents published a book, “Harvard Girl,” describing the meticulous regimen that produced their star. It quickly sold almost a million and a half copies and inspired numerous how-to-groom-your-child-to-get-into-college-abroad knockoffs. For all her triumphs, Meijie wasn’t obsessed with being at the head of the class and didn’t want the well-programmed-paragon treatment. She excelled in assorted subjects, but her school reported that her overall ranking wasn’t in the top 10 percent. Her parents had stood by, a little stunned, as their intrepid daughter won distinction in an unusual way, by accomplishing all kinds of things outside of the classroom.

Amid the hoopla, Meijie insisted that the last thing Chinese students (or parents) needed was to be encouraged in their blind reverence for an academic brand name, much less be told there was some new formula to follow and competitive frenzy to join. That was just the kind of pressure they had too much of already. It was everywhere in a culture with a long tradition of rigidly hierarchical talent selection, dating back to the imperial civil-service-exam system more than a thousand years ago — and still there in a school system driven by a daunting national college-entrance exam. The Chinese call it the gaokao, a three-day ordeal for which the preparation is arduous — and on which a single point difference can spell radically different life options. The cramming ethos, which sets in before high school, was what Meijie had tried hard not to let erode her curiosity. In her experience, America had come to stand for a less pressured and more appealing approach to schooling. “There is something in the American educational system that helps America hold its position in the world,” she told me. “Many people will think it’s a cliché, but there is something huge about it, although there are a lot of flaws — like bad public schools and other stuff. But there’s something really good, and it’s very different from my educational system.”

Once at Harvard, in the fall of 2005, Meijie figured out what she wanted to do. She would try to make liberal education’s ideal of well-rounded self-fulfillment “more real in China.” She plunged into conceiving a summer exchange program run by and for students. Meijie named it the Harvard Summit for Young Leaders in China, or Hsylc — pronounced “H-silk,” evoking the historic trading route. In August 2006, on the campus of that now-completed private school outside Shanghai whose board she had joined, a cosmopolitan array of Harvard undergraduates would offer a dose of the more freewheeling American campus and classroom experience. Meijie and an inner circle of organizers (similarly on-the-go Harvard women, all of Chinese descent, some reared in the U.S.) envisaged nine days of small-group discussions on wide-ranging issues outside of math and science. Hsylc would also offer extracurricular excitement and social discovery — chances for students to try new things and connect with one another, rather than compete for prizes. The participants that Meijie had in mind were several hundred promising Chinese high-schoolers, to be chosen in an un-Chinese way. She and a selection committee would pick them on the basis not of their G.P.A.’s but of their extracurricular activities and their essays in response to the kinds of open-ended prompts they never encountered at school. On her list was a question that might be a banality in the U.S. but was a heresy at home: “If you could do one thing to change the world, what would it be?”

Meijie’s answer to that question — help shake up Chinese education — puts her in step with the latest wave of a 30-year-old government effort to overhaul China’s schools and universities to keep pace with “socialist modernization.” After the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when schools were closed and cadres of students assaulted “enemies of the state,” Deng Xiaoping resumed the National College Entrance Exam in 1977, marking the start of a radical expansion of the education system. A developing economy demanded it; the implications for politics were less clear, and after Tiananmen Square, there was a brief slowdown. The continued growth since then has been a success in many respects; educational attainments and college attendance have surged. Yet in the process, some prominent government officials have grown concerned that too many students have become the sort of stressed-out, test-acing drone who fails to acquire the skills — creativity, flexibility, initiative, leadership — said to be necessary in the global marketplace. “Students are buried in an endless flood of homework and sit for one mock entrance exam after another, leaving them with heads swimming and eyes blurred,” lamented former Vice Premier Li Lanqing in a book describing his efforts to address the problem. They arrive at college exhausted and emerge from it unenlightened — just when the country urgently needs a talented elite of innovators, the word of the hour. A recent report from the McKinsey consulting firm, “China’s Looming Talent Shortage,” pinpointed the alarming consequences of the country’s so-called “stuffed duck” tradition of dry and outdated knowledge transfer: graduates lacking “the cultural fit,” language skills and practical experience with teamwork and projects that multinational employers in a global era are looking for.

Even as American educators seek to emulate Asian pedagogy — a test-centered ethos and a rigorous focus on math, science and engineering — Chinese educators are trying to blend a Western emphasis on critical thinking, versatility and leadership into their own traditions. To put it another way, in the peremptorily utopian style typical of official Chinese directives (as well as of educationese the world over), the nation’s schools must strive “to build citizens’ character in an all-round way, gear their efforts to each and every student, give full scope to students’ ideological, moral, cultural and scientific potentials and raise their labor skills and physical and psychological aptitudes, achieve vibrant student development and run themselves with distinction.” Meijie’s rise to star student reflects a much-publicized government call to promote “suzhi jiaoyu” — generally translated as “quality education,” and also sometimes as “character education” or “all-round character education.” Her story also raises important questions about the state’s effort, which has been more generously backed by rhetoric than by money. The goal of change is to liberate students to pursue more fulfilling paths in a country where jobs are no longer assigned; it is also to produce the sort of flexibly skilled work force that best fits an international knowledge economy. But can personal desires and national demands be reconciled? Will the most promising students of the new era be as overburdened and regimented as before? As new opportunities have begun to emerge, so have tensions. If Meijie’s own trajectory and her Hsylc brainchild are any guide, the force most likely to spur on deep-seated educational ferment in China may well turn out to be students themselves — still struggling with stress, yet doing so in an era of greater personal independence and international openness. Overachievers of the world unite!

II. The Expansion

Brave Shanghai’s traffic and head southwest for 40 minutes to the well-groomed grounds of Xiwai International School, the site of last year’s Hsylc conference, and you see the broad contours of what has been happening in Chinese education. In an area that is projected to become Shanghai’s biggest satellite city, new construction is everywhere and up-to-date school campuses are being built. While American leaders have been debating how best to demand more accountability from a decentralized education system, the Chinese government has decided to loosen its administrative and financial control. The process dates back 20 years now, to the Decision on the Reform of the Education System, issued in 1985 (the year Meijie was born). The push was on to consolidate the Soviet-style hyperspecialized universities into more comprehensive institutions; with the Compulsory Education Law of 1986, mandating nine years of education for all, a major expansion was also under way. In the early 1990s, the government urged an easing of exam pressures and took the step of encouraging “social forces” to establish private schools alongside the public system.
Parents whose own schooling was curtailed by the Cultural Revolution have been avid to realize their educational ambitions — the Confucian key to social and moral advancement — in the paths they chart for their “little emperors,” the singletons mandated by the one-child policy of the past quarter of a century. The pace of growth and school privatization surged in the course of the 1990s. The goal was to send 15 percent of the college-age population on to the postsecondary level — that figure being the standard definition of “mass higher education” — by 2010. Meanwhile, extra financing went to a group of top universities in a quest to make them “world class.” And in the new millennium, rice paddies are still making way for state-of-the-art school facilities. A nonprofit, private school, Xiwai could be mistaken for a medium-size college. Its spacious brick classroom buildings and dorms (capacity 3,500 students, from pre-K to 12th grade) flank a lovely courtyard with a fountain in the middle. At one end stand an imposing library and a dining facility, and across the way is a large arts-and-sports complex.

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IRUMA, Japan (Reuters) -- Japan trucked its first ballistic missile interceptors to an air force base north of Tokyo on Friday in an effort to beef up its defenses against its unpredictable neighbor North Korea.
The deployment of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) launchers, capable of shooting down incoming missiles in the final stage of flight as they near their target, was sparked by Pyongyang's firing of a ballistic missile in 1998 that flew over Japan.
But Tokyo rushed the equipment into service a year ahead of schedule after North Korea unnerved the region last year by firing more missiles and testing a nuclear device.
"We consider it very meaningful to deploy the air defense missiles close to metropolitan Tokyo, which is the center of business and political activities," Kazumasa Echizen, the Iruma air base public-information chief, said in a statement. "We will continue our efforts to be ready for any possible emergencies."
About 50 demonstrators shouted and waved banners as a line of green trucks carried the equipment through the gates of the base, about 40 km (25 miles) from central Tokyo, before dawn on Friday.
"Bringing PAC-3s to places like Iruma makes them the focus of interception strategy and therefore at risk of becoming the target of attack by other countries," an activist group said in a statement condemning the deployment as a "military performance".

Closer to Tokyo

The relatively short range of PAC-3 interceptors -- about 20 km (12 miles) -- means they are likely to be deployed closer to the center of the capital to protect financial and government hubs. More interceptors are set to be deployed at bases around the country over the next few years.
The United States has already deployed its own PAC-3s at a base on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, and has deployed ship-based Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) missile interceptors at Yokosuka, west of Tokyo.
The new interceptors are the first to be controlled by the Japanese government, which has been pushed into a tighter defense relationship with the United States as regional tensions rise.
Tokyo's close involvement in U.S. defense strategy in Asia, while not as controversial as Washington's planned shield in eastern Europe, stretches the boundaries of Japan's pacifist constitution. Russia reacted angrily to U.S. plans to place parts of such a shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Japan limits military activities strictly to self-defense, meaning it is unable to shoot down a missile which is not headed for its own territory. The restriction annoys some officials in the United States.
Tokyo plans to equip one of its own warships with SM-3 interceptors, intended to shoot down ballistic missiles in the mid-phase of flight while outside the earth's atmosphere, by the end of this year.
It will attempt to bring down a dummy missile using its own ship-based SM-3 interceptors in a test later this year, Lieutenant-General Henry Obering, director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, told the House Armed Services Committee this week, in the first such test by a U.S. ally.
Japan's spending on missile defense is set to increase by 30.5 percent to 182.6 billion yen ($1.55 billion) in the financial year that starts next month.
Friday's deployment came after a setback for Japanese intelligence this week, when one of the set of four satellites it launched to monitor North Korea broke down. It is not scheduled to be replaced until 2011.

fussfun

for the chinese goverment a single common life is  not so much worthy of attention

fussfun

In a one-party state, made up of more than a billion people, there is an awful lot to hide.

On any given day in China there may be 200 different protests. Most take place in the countryside, where many feel left behind by China's economic boom. But the Chinese state works hard to make sure that these demonstrations are kept well out of sight. This week, though, there was an exception. People in the town of Zhushan, near the city of Yongzhou, in central China's Hunan province, burned buses in a protest against a rise in bus fares. Riot police were sent in to take control. A camera crew managed to film and broadcast pictures of the aftermath. We wanted to go and have a look for ourselves.  

Security presence
Until last year, there was a clear procedure to follow. We would have needed permission from the local authorities to travel to Zhushan. Once we got there, local officials would have had to accompany us to every interview. But, in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the Communist Party has decided to relax its rules.

In theory, foreign journalists no longer need to seek permission from the local authorities in order to visit. So, I flew with my colleagues to Hunan and we drove straight into the town of Zhushan. Along the main road, shops and market stalls were open. All evidence of the recent protests had been swept away. But as we drove on, we saw riot police standing in formation in the grounds of the police station. The station's gates were left open. A few blocks away, we saw soldiers in green camouflage uniform. A handful were standing over a pot preparing to cook a leg of pork. We approached a few local people who were happy to talk to us. They told us that problems began after the Chinese New Year in February when a single bus company took control of all local routes. They say the company took advantage of its monopoly to double its fares. One regular passenger told us that fares rose from between five to seven yuan (65-90 US cents) to 15 yuan ($1.90).

Violent clashes
What angered people in Zhushan was the belief that their local officials were colluding with the bus company to raise prices - for a share of the takings. So, last Friday, parents of secondary school students started to protest against the fare rises.

The protests gained momentum. Four days later, reports say that around 20,000 people took part in demonstrations. Protestors set fire to a number of buses. At this point riot police moved in to impose order. "I was scared," said one woman, who did not want to be identified. "My whole body trembled. I ran away holding my baby. I heard they attacked a pregnant woman. Also they dragged a man off his motorbike to beat him. They didn't care whether or not you were a protester."  

Reporter's arrest
Still, the protesters made their point. The bus company was forced to abandon its fare rise. But it came at a cost. It is reported that dozens of people were injured and that one student was killed, although the Chinese authorities denied there were any deaths.

We tried to check the report of the student's death. One woman insisted that he had not been killed, but his legs had been broken. No-one could give us his name. Before we could find out any more, several dozen soldiers approached us and told us to stop what we were doing. They told us the town was under military control and we did not have permission to stay. They called for the local police. The police decided we should answer questions in the upstairs bedroom of a hotel off the main road. So we climbed the stairs, sat on the bed and handed over our documents. Half a dozen officers watched over us. Several had video cameras with them - so our interrogation turned into a kind of photo shoot. The officers took it in turn to film us as well as each page of our passports. Then, two senior officers came in. The room went quiet. "You need a certificate of permission to be in this town," said one of them as he sifted through the passports. Then he paused and looked up to make his point. "Do you have such a certificate?" "No, we don't," I replied. "This is not Britain or the United States," he warned. "This is China." We told him of the new decree that allowed foreign journalists to travel anywhere in China without permission. "That's only for Olympics-related stories," he said. Then he paused again. "And I don't think you are here for the Olympics." He looked down at the passports once more. Outside, it was beginning to get dark. In the hallway, officers discussed the idea of watching us overnight. We prepared for a long stay. But then, they told us we could go. We were escorted to our car. Slightly bizarrely, the police officers stood by the side of the road and waved us off. They had made their point - this was their town. And we had broken their rules. We left Zhushan. We never did get to find out the name of the teenage boy who may or may not have been killed in the protests.

[ 本帖最后由 fussfun 于 2007-3-30 10:16 编辑 ]