February 3:
Five Chinese provinces will each invest more than RMB 10 billion ($1.46 billion) this year to upgrade their local power grids, according to a report by Russia’s Interfax News Agency citing Chinese state media. Northern China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region plans to invest about $1.46 billion in both 2009 and 2010, Liaoning Province will invest about $2.92 billion, and Fujian, Gansu and Guizhou provinces will each invest $1.75 billion, $1.46 billion and $1.52 billion, respectively, on power grid upgrades in 2009. The provinces will bankroll these upgrades with funds from the central government's economic stimulus package. In all the Chinese government plans to invest roughly $118 billion on upgrading the country's power grids in 2009.
[Editor’s Note: Despite China’s long term investment in power grids the ongoing economic slowdown will cause the country’s power demand to shrink over the first half of the year, the China Electricity Council (CEC) said on February 4. "Power demand in China closely follows the economic expansion rate. The second quarter could be a dark time for the power industry," Xue Jing, director of the CEC's statistics department, said in comments carried by Interfax.]
In the first reported military standoff between China and India since their 1962 war, an Indian attack submarine stalked Chinese warships sent to fight piracy in waters off Somalia. The two sides engaged in a tense standoff for at least half an hour, the Qingdao Chenbao reports. The incident took place on January 15 near the Bab Al-Mandab Strait, at the western end of the Gulf of Aden. The Chinese destroyers picked up an unidentified 70-metre-long submarine armed with 20 torpedoes on their sonar. The Indian submarine tried to evade the warships by diving deeper, but the Chinese employed an anti-submarine helicopter to help track it. The submarine, which had been trailing the Chinese ships since they had entered the Indian Ocean on the way to Somalia, was eventually cornered and forced it to surface. The two targets of Indian interest were China’s destroyers, the Wuhan and Haikou, which are among Beijing’s most advanced warships. It is likely the Indian submarine was collecting intelligence, including electronic signals and sonar data from the warships; information that would be crucial in naval conflicts.
February 5:
Since early January, China’s government has closed more than 1,500 websites containing sex, violence or "vulgarity," the International Herald Tribune reports. Numerous other sites, including Google, have removed pages that might offend censors. One reason for the crackdown is the sleuthing work of China’s 70 million internet bloggers. Bullog, an important blogger site, was closed for posting information about Charter 08, an online petition calling for democratic reforms.
In December, a photograph of Zhou Jiugeng, a Nanjing official, was posted and bloggers noticed the $15,000 Swiss watch on his wrist. Zhou was fired for living a lavish lifestyle. Two weeks earlier, an official in Shenzhen resigned for abusing an 11-year-old girl in a restaurant restroom after an online video showed him waving off the girl's family as he taunted them with his rank. And two top officials lost their jobs after a blogger found a bag of incriminating receipts on a Shanghai subway and exposed a publicly financed Wenzhou government delegation junket to Las Vegas, Niagara Falls and Vancouver. Beijing has also employed untold thousands of paid commentators who pose as ordinary Web users to counter criticism of the government.
The worst drought in half a century has struck China’s wheat-growing areas in eight provinces - Hebei, Shanxi, Anhui, Jiangsu, Henan, Shandong, Shaanxi and Gansu. Parched fields across northern China have left nearly four million people without proper drinking water. "The duration, scope and impact of the drought are rare," said Zheng Guoguang, chief of the China Meteorological Administration. Not a drop of rain has fallen on Beijing for more than 100 days, the longest dry spell for 38 years and the Government has declared a state of emergency. Henan and Anhui, the severest-hit regions, will see their wheat harvest cut by 20 percent, London’s Times reports.
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