Tonight marks the first of three of the Chinese Spectacular shows performing in Canberra, Australia.

The Chinese Spectacular continues to receive rave reviews from audiences around the world.

Please listen to one of the interviews done by SOH Reporter Ben Smith on some of the comments that audiences made.

(Recording)

The Divine Performing Arts Troupe aims to restore the genuine traditional Chinese culture, which had been wiped out and replaced by the Communist Party culture in Mainland China throughout its numerous political campaigns since 1949 when the CCP seized China, and traditional values and virtues have been lost.

To find out more about Divine Performing Arts, please visit: www.divineperformingarts.org or www.bestchineseshow.com for tickets and the event in your local area.

Thank you for joining us on Stages of the East.

China Vows to Smash Tibetan Protests

China today turned its back on appeals for dialogue with the Dalai Lama, vowing to smash anti-China forces in Tibet, where it said the death toll from recent unrest had risen to 19.

A day after Beijing launched a manhunt for monks and others it blamed for violence in Tibet, an editorial in the People’s Daily, mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist party, said opposition to Chinese rule in the Himalayan region must be wiped out.

“China must resolutely crush the conspiracy of sabotage and smash ‘Tibet independence forces’,” the newspaper said in the editorial, rejecting calls from US, European and Asian leaders for talks.

The commentary accused the Dalai Lama of masterminding protests in Tibet in the hope of undermining the August 8-24 Beijing Olympics and gaining Tibet independence from Beijing.

It said that “1.3 billion Chinese people, including the Tibetan people, would allow no person or force to undermine the stability of the region”.

The commentary rebuffed growing international calls for dialogue to end the crackdown on protests that began last week to mark the anniversary of a 1959 uprising against Beijing’s rule.

But Tibet’s government-in-exile today said talks between China and the Dalai Lama were crucial.

“Talks are more necessary than ever before,” Thubten Samphel, spokesman for the administration, told AFP. “China has always pursued this hard line and very forceful military solutions to the problems in Tibet, and these have never worked,” he said.

Earlier today, China said 18 “innocent” civilians and one police officer were killed in rioting in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, raising its official death toll from 13.

Tibet’s government-in-exile in the Indian hill town of Dharamshala has put the toll from a week of unrest across the Himalayan region and neighbouring provinces at 99.

Yesterday, leaders in Japan and Poland joined the United States and other countries in an international appeal for restraint and dialogue.

They were joined today by 30 prominent Chinese writers and intellectuals who signed a letter to their government urging talks with the Tibetan spiritual leader.

They also called on China to open Tibet up to foreign media and to allow a team of independent UN investigators to carry out a full investigation of “the evidence, the course of the incident (and) the number of casualties”.

The signatories, who included Liu Xiaobo, Teng Biao and Wang Qisheng, also said China should show evidence it says it possesses that proves the Dalai Lama was behind the uprising.

US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi has also demanded that China come clean on repression in Tibet.

“The situation in Tibet is a challenge to the conscience of the world,” said Pelosi, who was greeted in Dharamshala by thousands of flag-waving Tibetan exiles as she arrived for talks yesterday with Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader.

“What is happening, the world needs to know,” she said.

However, China has responded to the protests with a massive clampdown on the affected areas, and yesterday released a most-wanted list of 19 people caught on film taking part in the Lhasa riots, amid warnings by activist groups of harsh reprisals.

Outside China, street demonstrations against the crackdown in Tibet continued today in Tokyo, where 600 people took to the streets.

In London, hundreds of demonstrators paused outside the Chinese embassy to sing Tibetan songs and chant “Chinese out” and “Long live the Dalai Lama”.

The protests come less than five months before the Beijing Olympics, which is becoming a magnet for more protests over Tibet and other issues.

On Monday, the symbolic start to events leading up to the Games is scheduled to take place in Greece when the Olympic flame is lit.

The Olympic flame is to be lit in the presence of International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge, whose organisation has been criticised for its silence on the Tibet crackdown.

Greek police told AFP that “stringent security” would be applied to deter anti-China protests during the ceremony.

After a tour of Greece, the flame will travel to Beijing for an official send-off ceremony on March 31 for the torch relay on its journey across five continents.

It then returns to China in May for the start of a domestic leg that includes three days in Tibet in mid-June after a scheduled stop at the summit of Mount Everest.

Pro-Tibet groups have said they are planning protests along the international route of the relay and in China.

Beijing insists such protests run counter to the Olympic Charter, which opposes using the Games for political propaganda.

AFP

Join the SOH news team for a wrap up of the most crucial news from China for the week…

After the hostage incident in Xi’an China we heard the victims’ stories but not the translator’s version..the one person who heard and understood the words of the so called bomber.

Why didn’t the bomb explode as the man was shot?…..was he silenced at the risk of the translator and western hostage being harmed so the true version would never be told?

Here is a Sydney Morning Herald view on the event.

Desperate deeds by underdogs hung out to dry by corrupt bureaucracy

Hamish McDonald Asia-Pacific Editor March 8, 2008

IT WILL be scant comfort for the 10 Australian travel agents taken hostage by a desperate man in China this week that the location was the same as another famous kidnapping, the “Xian Incident” of 1936, when the Nationalist generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was seized by a rival warlord.

Xia Tao, the kidnapper this week, was no big player or involved in any political campaign – just one of the despairing individuals being pushed to the wall in the relentless competition for survival in a China that is now less socialist in practice than most Western countries.

His protest, which resulted in him being shot dead at a highway toll booth by a police sniper, was over traffic fines. Laid off by one of Xian’s aerospace factories, he had put his money into an informal taxi but was being bled dry by police fines.

It was just one of 100,000 incidents of social protest and conflict that China’s Public Security Bureau list as occurring every year, and this is probably an understatement. This incident would not have been widely reported at all if foreigners had not been involved.

The grievances are manifold, but are often to do with unpaid wages for the millions working as migrant labour in urban construction sites and factories, or land and housing forcibly acquired by developers with the help of local Communist Party officials and police.

The flawed legal system offers little redress. Plaintiffs appear before judges appointed by the local party hierarchy, who have in-house political committees giving them instructions on verdicts. There is usually only one level of appeal, to a provincial court where judges and their political advisers are part of the same patronage networks as local officials. There is the distant hope of taking the grievance further.

One avenue is to petition a complaints office run by the State Council (the cabinet of the state apparatus) and the central party machinery, located in a rundown district on the south side of Beijing. The other is to try to attract the interest of the Supreme People’s Court, also in Beijing.

But to get to Beijing, petitioners have to run the gauntlet of their local police, who watch out for them on trains and buses to the capital, and if necessary pursue them into Beijing and kidnap them back to their home town before their potentially embarrassing complaint can be registered.

Even so, the volume of petitioners making it to provincial capitals and to Beijing became a flood as China’s rapid growth caused massive human disruption, with petitions and visits of complaint rising from 4.8 million in 1995 to 12.7 million in 2005.

In September last year, Chris Buckley, an Australian reporter working for Reuters, exposed one appalling official response: Nanyang city officials in Henan province were running a private prison in Beijing for their own city’s petitioners and any that police from other places might pay to have detained.

In October, Beijing officials moved in to demolish the “petitioners’ village” on the southern edge of the city, which held a rotating population of about 4000 people visiting the complaints office nearby.

This is the “harmonious society” that the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, says he is trying to build, and the peaceful city that the Communist Party will be showing off to the world at the Olympics in August.

Some petitioners maintain an almost saintly courtesy and naive hope that the system will work in their favour, a reflection of the traditional Chinese villager’s view that if only the Emperor knew what his wicked local mandarins were doing …

How sad that information is fed constantly, in all media located in China, to further the power of the elite few.

I am hoping that many more Chinese see through the bombardment of false information and seek other opinions. It is also the responsibility of world leaders to speak up when possible and deny recognition of falsehoods, especially when facts tell another story.

Bad Air Days as Olympic Hosts Fiddle the Figures
(Comment seen in the Sydney Morning Herald)

“THERE are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The words of British statesman Benjamin Disraeli are irresistible when it comes to the topic of whether Beijing is fulfilling its pledge to improve the capital’s notoriously bad air before this year’s Olympics.

Last month the Herald reported that an American environmental expert, Steven Andrews, had cast doubt on Beijing’s claims of a significant improvement in the number of “blue-sky” days, from just 100 in 1998 to 246 last year, due to government initiatives such as closing polluting factories and replacing buses and taxis with more energy-efficient models.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Mr Andrews said the only reason Beijing had achieved such results was because it moved the goalposts: measuring the air quality from less polluted parts of the city while dropping data from heavily polluted areas and lowering the standards for a blue-sky day.

Beijing has 27 monitoring stations but uses data from only some of them to calculate its air pollution index. A blue-sky day is when the index is 100 or less (on a scale of 1 to 500).

Since 2001, Mr Andrews has noted that a disproportionate number of borderline blue-sky days are being interpreted as making the standard. In 2001, about half of these borderline days – when the city’s index was between 96 and 105 – ended up recorded as blue-sky days. By 2006, 98 per cent of borderline days were deemed “blue sky”.

Then, a few weeks ago, Mr Andrews was astonished to find that Beijing’s response to his criticism that it was manipulating the data to show improvements was to “manipulate the data even more”.

From January 1, the Beijing Environment Protection Bureau has been using three new monitoring stations in less congested parts of outer Beijing. These stations, Huairou, Changping and Shunyi, have a track record of producing clean-air results.

But a monitoring station just south of Tiananmen Square in the centre of Beijing, which reported blue skies on only about 3.5 out of 10 days last year, has been removed from the network.

Not only is Beijing failing to meet its own air-quality benchmarks, those standards fail to meet international standards. In most cities the level of particulates and ozone cause the most health problems. Beijing calculates its air quality using particulates alone.

After three weeks of declining to comment, the bureau, which is responsible for delivering a target of 256 blue-sky days this year, acknowledged it had changed monitoring stations, but denied there was any intent to deceive.

It said it was normal to change stations to reflect the city’s growth and while they did not measure ozone they had implemented strict controls to reduce its impact on health.

While reading The Australian this week, again I queried why so few support Taiwan?

Aren’t there troops from around the world in Iraq, Afghanistan and East Timor in the name of democracy?

Taiwan Upsets China Over Kosovo

Rowan Callick, China correspondent

TAIWAN has rushed to be among the first countries to recognise Kosovo, irritating China and hoping to pick up a rare diplomatic coup in Europe, where its only other partner is the Vatican.

China, like other countries with fractious potential breakaway areas – including Tibet, and Xinjiang in the northwest – is trenchantly opposed to Kosovo’s declaration of independence.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said: “China is deeply worried about its severe and negative impact on peace and stability of the Balkan region and the goal of establishing a multi-ethnic society in Kosovo.”

China’s position on Taiwan recognising Kosovo is “quite clear to everybody”, he said.

“Taiwan is a part of China and has no right or eligibility to give so-called recognition.”

Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry said: “Despite a multitude of barriers, the people of Kosovo have insisted on an ideal that they believe in, which is to peacefully pursue independence, without being threatened or scared away.

“Self-determination is a right recognised by the United Nations. In no way should the independence of one nation be denied by another.”

Su Tseng-chang, a vice-presidential candidate for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party at Taiwan’s presidential election on March 22, and a former prime minister, said Taiwan was better equipped for independence, and had more justification, than Kosovo.

“Taiwan, the hard-built ship of democracy with a polished deck, should never be sailed into another country’s harbour,” he said.

Taiwan’s governing DPP, trailing in the polls, is eager to engage China on such issues and to drag Beijing in to a war of words that it believes would gain it votes.

So far, Beijing has carefully avoided exciting voter opposition in Taiwan, where its preferred candidate, Ma Ying-jeou, the leader of the Kuomintang (KMT, or Nationalist) party, is well positioned to win power – following a landslide KMT victory at parliamentary elections last month.

Kosovo has presented China with a tough challenge, which it cannot comfortably avoid.

Listen in for a summary of the headlines from China you won’t hear anywhere else.

On the second reading, it seemed a company trying to register it’s rights, to its trademark title, had been forced to spend a lot of money defending that title.

Would you agree that the present business environment in China is encouraging for overseas companies?

from The Australian

Sotheby’s Keeps Chinese Name
Rowan Callick, China correspondent

SOTHEBY’S feared that in China, its famous trademark was going, going, almost gone.

A Chinese company, based in the mountainous southwestern province of Sichuan, better known as the home of the panda, had brazenly appropriated the auction house’s Chinese name – Sufubi – and was using it for its own sales business.

This week, Sotheby’s won a rare victory for a foreign firm against a local company in a Chinese court, the Beijing Number 2 Intermediate Court, winning the exclusive use of the name Sufubi.

Sotheby’s has developed a substantial operation in China, including the sale of some of the hottest contemporary artists, whose works often reap millions of dollars.

The Beijing court ordered the Sichuan Sufubi Auction Company, which now has to change its name, to pay Sotheby’s $16,000 compensation and to publish an apology in the Guangming Daily newspaper.

The company said after its victory: “In addition, the court recognised the Chinese version of the Sotheby’s mark as an unregistered well-known trademark and a famous trade name.”

The win gives hope to other foreign companies that have found their names and their intellectual property appropriated while they have struggled – or failed to overcome bureaucratic and other hurdles – to have their names, brands or products registered and protected.

Australia’s second largest firm of architects, Woodhead International, has had to face a similar challenge in China.

Its former Chinese principal began to use for himself the firm’s Chinese name WuHeGuoJi, which was then swiftly registered by this rival local group while Woodhead’s formal application for registration languished.

Sotheby’s had earlier, in Hong Kong, won an easier victory – within the common law jurisdiction there – against a group of three Hong Kong-based companies that had been using the name Sufubi to promote their own less-than-prestigious auction of Chinese art.

Kevin Ching, Sotheby’s Asia chief executive, said then about his intention to pursue the Sichuan firm: “We will be arguing that Sotheby’s is an internationally famous trademark. This kind of imitation threatens our reputation.”

Despite losing the hearing in Beijing this week, the Sichuan company said it would appeal to the Higher People’s Court.