Media Shorts

Lots of fun stuff on Taiwan and China out there today -- let me whet your appetite with some excerpts from a few good ones.

Editorial that ran in the Khaleej Times on Canada-China Relations

The call for a boycott has been endorsed by a coalition in Washington called the Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting. “The call for boycott of the Olympics addresses the Communist government in Beijing not the Chinese people,” a spokesman, Torsten Trey said in a letter published in the Ottawa Citizen. A few US lawmakers have also got in on the act.

The Chinese mission in Ottawa has reacted with predictable angst to the call for a boycott, on the lines of a similar western shunning of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. An embassy spokesman saw it as an attempt to “politicise” the games, adding for good measure that, “To exploit the chance of the Beijing Olympic Games to engage in anti-China activity is not only shameful but also doomed to fail.”

Linked practically everywhere is Lester Thurow's latest demonstration that China's growth rates are a fraud, just like a similar one a decade ago, and for the same reason: electricity/growth discontinuities. Here's the Taipei Times version:

Using those numbers as a guide, if we consider China's actual electrical use, which is relatively easy to measure, and do a little math, we come up with this estimate: The GDP in China has been growing somewhere between 4.5 percent (using the average for a rapidly growing country) to 6 percent a year (using the highest rate for Japan), not at the 10 percent rate claimed in official statistics.

The official statistic for China's overall growth rate is best regarded as an approximate growth rate of the economy of its cities.

Wonder what the numbers for India would say? Maybe next time around the Chinese will remember to adjust their electricity consumption figures.

A commentator for the Taipei Times also had a review of the Ma verdict. A sham, of course, but lots of fun details:

The verdict described in great detail the history and evolution of the allowance. It even referred to public funds during the Song dynasty, as if the Taipei mayoral allowance originated from it. As it says, from 1952 until 1973, all the receipts had to be verified and written off. From 1973 until last year, only half of them had to be. Since the scandal broke this year, all the receipts must once again be inspected.

The ruling explains at great length that the allowance is a substantial subsidy for government heads. But it also says that since 1952, no matter what the verification rules were, the allowance had to be spent on public causes. The allowance was not established as a subsidy for government heads, but to assist them with their public expenses. As to the manner of inspection of receipts, the only difference was how strictly the oversight was managed, not whether it took place.

But a large portion of the verdict is dedicated to defending Ma. It is a one-sided exoneration, and a most strangely written judgment. It says that officials have the right to use half of the subsidy as they like without receipts. When officials produce the receipts, in fact they have already completed the verification process because the accounting and auditing departments won't determine the use of the funds out of respect for governmental authority.

[Taiwan]