This is while self-appointed expat China experts are making doom-and-gloom, Panarin-esq predictions that China will suffer fatal crisis or fall from revolution, from range of issues: unemployment, to porn sweep, to an essay few have read.
Please allow me to add one more possibility – PETA will take China down (Pamala Anderson will let y`all know when to get out of Dodge).
If you’ve been reading the Chinese press this week, you might have come across two strikingly unharmonious pieces of information.
I am speaking of the treatment of the Shanghai Tower news by China Daily (ht Shanghaiist). In the space of 3 days from 11/28 to 12/01 China Daily has changed its tune radically in two articles about the construction of the new tower, which started last Saturday.
The first article is pretty neutral. It announces the beginning of the works, and has Shanghai CCP’s Lin Xu declare that spending on infrastructure will “help companies to weather the crisis“.
The second article, an unsigned editorial, is ripe with criticism of about every possible aspect of the project. Including some juicy ones: “symbolizes that blind worship and race for skyscrapers has reached a new high” and “The money could still be spent better elsewhere on so many priorities“.
What is going on here? Who forced this article into Beijing’s China Daily, the largest English language newspaper in China? It is a quickly written and poorly edited/translated article, someone obviously overrode the usual procedures of the newspaper to get this text to press ASAP. Someone you wouldn’t dare to edit or reject.
Two different ways of seeing the world
I was in Europe for the last time the week of the “Meltdown Monday”, the one when the Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. Quite scary, but the news didn’t seem so surprising for anyone. Ever since the beginning of the year most people had seen the crisis coming. On the Spanish beaches, there were less tourists to be seen this summer, and the variable rate mortgages were getting stiffer for all. The governments that were not in electoral campaign had profusely announced what was to come.
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