Embarrassments Mount at China’s Forbidden City

BEIJING – For 600 years, the Forbidden City, with its vermilion walls, labyrinthine passageways and sloping tiled roofs, has stood in the heart of Beijing as the ultimate symbol of power, the inner sanctum from which authority emanates across a vast land.

It is the last place one would imagine as a base for the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party.

Yet, photographs have circulated on the Internet over the last few days that seem to hint at exactly that. On Friday, officials in charge of management of the Forbidden City handed two ceremonial banners to local police officers to congratulate them on nabbing a thief who had stolen curios from an exhibition at the ancient palace earlier this month. The slogan on one of the banners said: “To shake the great strength and prosperity of the motherland, and to safeguard the stability of the capital.”

The treasonous slogan instantly set the Chinese Internet aflutter, spreading as quickly as court gossip.

Barring the possibility of a secret revolutionary cabal inside the palace, the problem has to do with a common headache in Mandarin Chinese: homonyms. The pronunciation of the word for “shake” – han, with a falling tone – is exactly the same as that for “guard,” even though the written characters are different. In other words, the first phrase should have read to “to guard” rather than “to shake.”

Embarrassingly, no officials at the ceremony seemed to notice the gaffe. Ji Tianbin, vice-director of the Forbidden City, handed out the banner, and Fu Zhenghua, head of the Beijing police, was in attendance.

By Monday, photos of the ceremony had ignited derision across the Internet. Many Chinese mocked the bad grammar of the person had designed the banner, and Chinese news organizations demanded an explanation.

The management office issued a brief apology on its microblog on Monday: The banners had been designed by the security department, it said, and no official had examined them “due to a lack of time.”

It added that the security department had defended the mistake and had refused to apologize. Officials have “investigated the incident and criticized and educated the security department,” the managers said.

The statement appeared to be a more honest appraisal of the situation than the response that one official surnamed Liu had offered Legal Mirror, a Beijing newspaper. Mr. Liu said over the weekend that no mistakes had been made and that an “expert” had looked over the wording. His defense was mocked in tens of thousands of online postings.

The episode of the banner was only the latest in a series of humiliations this month that has afflicted the most hallowed edifice in all of China. The first was the incident that led to the Beijing police being thanked with the banners: On May 8, a thief stole rare handicrafts that were part of an exhibition of objects from a private museum in Hong Kong called Liangyicang. The stolen valuables dated to the early 20th century and included jewelry boxes. The heist took place despite the fact that at least 1,600 anti-theft alarms, 3,700 smoke detectors and 3,700 cameras monitor the Forbidden City after it closes to the public at 5 p.m., Legal Mirror reported. The police eventually arrested a suspect.

Even more scandalous is talk that a luxury private club has been established in the Jianfu Pavilion, a part of the Forbidden City that has been restored through monies from a preservation fund in Hong Kong. The club’s membership, supposedly limited to 500 people, costs one million renminbi each, or $154,000, according to a microblog posting last week by Rui Chenggang, an anchor for China Central Television. Officials at the Forbidden City quickly denied the existence of any such club, but Beijing News reported on Sunday that an opening ceremony had already been held.

Chang Lingxing, a spokesman for Forbidden City, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that the management office had hired a private company, the Beijing Forbidden City Culture Development Company, to organize lectures and salons. Instead, the company had started handing out “membership sign-up forms.” The management office has told the company to stop, according to a written statement.

One microblog post making the rounds succinctly sums up the three humiliations: “The Forbidden City: the commercial company sold memberships without the officials’ permission; the security department printed the banner without the officials’ approval; the thief stole the exhibits without the officials’ approval!"

But perhaps one should not underestimate the enduring nature of the building. Geremie R. Barme, the prominent Australian scholar of China, wrote this in his book on the history of the Forbidden City: “While its buildings were subject to decay and change, the China of secretive politics, rigid political codes and autocratic behavior continued to exert an influence far beyond the walls of the former palace.”

 

China’s Exports Perch on Uncertain Truck System

But there is a surprisingly weak link in the Made in China chain.

Moving those goods from the factory floor to one of China’s enormous seaports — often a drive of less than two hours — typically means relying on an independent trucking company. And as vital as trucking is to China’s mighty export machine, the government seems to be ignoring the drawbacks of what analysts say is an increasingly disorganized, inefficient and even costly way to transport factory goods to seaports.

Trucking’s tenuous status has been underscored by recent protests and demonstrations by drivers. Last week, in an unusually bold display of public anger, 2,000 truckers went on strike in Shanghai to complain about the rising cost of fuel and unfair government transportation fees. Some protestors hurled rocks, tried to overturn police cars and smashed the windshields of truck drivers who refused to join the strike.

The Shanghai municipal government eventually ended the three-day strike by arresting protestors and threatening strike organizers, while also promising to lower some fees that trucking companies must pay to use the roads and seaport.

But the challenges that trucking pose to China’s $1.5 trillion a year in exports are still in place — and could become even greater, now that huge factories have begun relocating to poorer, inland regions to save on labor costs.

“Our concern is that as these factories move away from the coast, the service standards won’t keep pace,” said Ken Glenn, an executive at APL, a transportation services company. “Rail and barge are even less developed.”

Within China, thousands of small trucking companies, many of them family-owned, compete by promising low-cost delivery. Then they overload their 18-wheelers in dangerous ways, pay bribes to ward off highway inspectors and hope to eke out tiny profits.

Now, though, with global oil prices sending the cost of fuel soaring, many truckers say they are heading toward bankruptcy.

“We’re paying a lot more money for fuel than we did three years ago, but what we get paid for freight has stayed the same,” said Qi Zhenwei, a truck owner stationed at a dusty trucking depot near one of Shanghai’s busiest ports. “How am I supposed to survive?”

Mark Millar, a China logistics expert at M Power Associates in Hong Kong, sees Chinese trucking as “a seriously fragmented and brutally competitive industry.”

“Most of the drivers are owner-operators, and in order to make money, they carry more cargo than the truck is supposed to hold,” Mr. Millar said. “This is obviously not a healthy model.”

Not all trucking in China is such a seat-of-the-pants affair. Some global companies transport goods by truck in sealed shipping containers from factory to dock, sometimes accompanied by security escorts.

But more often, goods destined for export are delivered to seaports by small trucking companies — usually hired by logistics firms that bargain to get the lowest possible shipping price. To scrape by, many of the small trucking firms violate the law, pay bribes to avoid heavy fines and transportation restrictions, and even force drivers to sleep in the trucks overnight, sometimes in insecure parking lots.

These rigors might seem to contradict the heavy investment in infrastructure and expressways that China has made?to make its transportation network more efficient.

But many of this country’s modern roadways are expensive toll roads. And the government has placed tough regulations on many aspects of the transportation industry, which analysts say have burdened companies with heavy taxes, insurance and government fees. As a result, transporting goods by truck in China is relatively more expensive than doing so in the United States.

 

New Census Finds China’s Population Growth Has Slowed

BEIJING — China’s population grew more urbanized, educated and older as the growth of the world’s most populous nation slowed to a pace half that of the previous decade, results of the 2010 census released on Thursday indicated.

The census also documented a vast internal migration, concluding that more than 261 million citizens — nearly one in five — were living in places other than where China’s household registration process had indicated that they did. Most of those are probably migrant laborers who have swelled big cities in search of higher-paying jobs so as to send money back to families that remain in rural areas.

The government said China’s population was 1.34 billion, an increase of 73.9 million, or 5.8 percent, from the last tally in 2000. That was below the 1.4 billion that United Nations demographers were predicting when the head count was conducted last November, and the slowest rate of growth in nearly half a century, demographers said.

The average household size shrank by 10 percent, to 3.1 people, and the urban population surged by more than 45 percent, leaving urban and rural Chinese nearly equal in number, the census indicated.

Wang Feng, head of the Center for Public Policy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said the data show that China “has completely turned a page in its demographic history.”

“It is now a post-transitional population, with very low fertility, quite low mortality, and is being increasingly urbanized,” he said in an e-mail on Thursday. “Such a highly mobile society produces a tremendous dynamism for the Chinese economy and society, and at the same time poses great challenges for the government’s political control.”

Mr. Wang also said that documentation of a rapidly aging society raised new questions about China’s population-control policies, which since 1980 have limited many families to a single child. But President Hu Jintao struck a cautious note in a speech on Tuesday, the state news service Xinhua reported, telling a bureau of the Communist Party’s Central Committee that China should “stick to and improve its current family planning policy and maintain a low birthrate.”

For a country dead set on joining the ranks of the globe’s most advanced nations, the huge count yielded both promising and disturbing results.

The share of Chinese who were educated rose sharply. University graduates are now about 8.9 out of 100 citizens, an increase of about 2.5 times, and rates of those who have graduated from high school and vocational schools also rose, though not as much.

Yu Xie, a professor of sociology, statistics and population studies at the University of Michigan, said the increase in the number of college-educated Chinese would “place China in a better position in international competition for economic growth.”

“Future economic growth will not only come from manufacturing but from services and high technology,” he said, which will require better-educated workers. “China is already prepared for a post-industrial transition.”

But the figures also revealed less promising trends. They confirmed a yawning gender gap, with 118 male newborns for every 100 females, a disparity researchers blame partly on family planning policies that they say have encouraged abortions of female fetuses.

The population aged markedly: the share of Chinese under age 15 dropped 6.3 percent, while that of those over 60 rose by 2.93 percent. That presages a shrinking labor market, which economists predict will increase pressure for higher wages and divert a gusher of government money into pensions, medical care and other services for the elderly.

The growing proportion of older people can be explained partly by China’s low fertility rate in recent decades, with fewer births to offset the aged. Cai Yong, a demographer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said the number of children under 15 was even lower than expected, pointing to a fertility rate of about 1.4 children per woman.

That is significantly below the government’s estimated fertility rate of 1.8, and should put pressure on China’s leaders to loosen family planning policies, he said.

Ma Jianting, the director of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, said at a news conference on Thursday that the slowed rate of population growth showed that the one-child policy had “eased the pressure on resources and the environment and laid a relatively good foundation for steady and rapid economic and social development.”

But he suggested that the population’s rapid aging was a matter of potential concern. “We also need to pay close attention to the new changes of our population structure, adhering to the family planning policy while cautiously and gradually improving the policy to promote more balanced population growth in the country,” the state-run Xinhua news agency quoted him as saying.

 

Study Emphasizes Importance of China’s Transition to Electric Cars

 

Seventy percent of Beijing’s carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions come from transportation sources. China’s oil consumption is expected to rise to 11.6 million barrels per day by 2020, from 7.6 million in 2007. Half its oil currently is imported.

“This was recognizance,” said Shomik Mehndiratta, lead transport specialist at the World Bank. “Usually, we focus our urban transport work on walking, cycling, public transportation and land development to minimize auto travel, and we leave technology completely out of it. But all the analysis suggests that 50 percent of global carbon reductions in transportation will come from technology.”

Any financial support from the World Bank would be dwarfed by the Chinese government’s commitment to spend $15 billion on building and selling electric cars in the next five years.

“The money is not the key here,” said Oliver Hazimeh, head of the global e-mobility practice and a partner at PRTM. “The bigger notion of this report is helping China figuring out what else needs to be addressed in the overall ecosystem to make E.V.’s work. It is a technical, business-modeling, policy-setting support role more than a financial one.”

As dire as the need to go electric is for China, the challenges in making the transition to electric vehicles are even more monumental, according to the PRTM study, and similar to the situation in the United States. The first several hundred plug-in cars started rolling on to American roadways earlier this year, but availability of vehicles is just the beginning.

The long list of challenges in China (and the United States) includes uncertainty about how much car charging infrastructure is needed; lack of standards for how and where vehicles will be charged; and the need for industries that have traditionally not worked together — utilities and auto companies, for example — to forge partnerships.

Then there’s the elephant in the room: how to gain consumer acceptance for battery-powered cars when their driving range is shorter than gas or diesel vehicles but their costs are significantly higher. Helping China to reach massive scale of electric car production is expected to bring down those costs in the next five to 10 years.

According to Mr. Hazimeh, in both China and the United States different regions and constituents are each developing their own standards for vehicle and battery production, charging infrastructure and related business models.

“In China, you can’t just go in as we do in the U.S., and say here’s the money for parts solutions without looking at connecting the elements,” he said.

The study recommends roughly $50 million in loans for pilot projects, from building charging infrastructure and related information networks to evaluating the commercial feasibility of re-using E.V. batteries in secondary markets.

The consequences extend beyond national borders, as China is now the world’s largest auto market and is expected to become the world’s largest producer of electric car batteries and drive systems. The Chinese automotive market is expected to grow to 30 million vehicles per year by 2030, from 12.9 million vehicles in 2009.

“The next stage is to take the lessons learned, and put it into a more coordinated aligned roadmap,” Mr. Hazimeh said. “Otherwise, you face a fragmentation of solutions.”

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