Vehicles carrying members of an exploration squad of the 26th Chinese Antarctica expedition team run back from Grove Mountains to China’s Zhongshan Station in Antarctica, Feb. 2, 2010.(Xinhua/Cui Jing)

Members of an exploration squad of the 26th Chinese Antarctica expedition team look back before they get on the vehicle to leave Grove Mountains, Antarctica, Feb. 2, 2010. (Xinhua/Cui Jing)

member of an exploration squad of the 26th Chinese Antarctica expedition team attaches a name list of the exploration squad on an emptied fuel barrel before they leave Grove Mountains, Antarctica, Feb. 2, 2010.(

Compared with the economic growth target China sets every year or in its Five-Year Plan, its green goals of pollution control or energy efficiency have long proved much harder to achieve during most of the past three decades.

However, while the Chinese economy managed to beat its growth target by expanding 8.7 percent in a very difficult year, the country realized its sulfur-dioxide reduction goal for the 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006-10) by the end of last year, one full year ahead of schedule.

It was part of a goal set for 2006 that the Chinese government laid out to cut emissions of major pollutants, sulfur dioxide and chemical oxygen demand (COD) by 10 percent by this year.

By the end of 2008, total emissions of sulfur dioxide and COD have already dropped by 8.95 percent and 6.6 percent, respectively, from 2005 levels. And now preliminary statistics indicate that emissions of sulfur dioxide, one of the major causes of air pollution, dropped 10.4 percent last year over that of 2008.

This is a happy surprise. It shows that economic growth and environmental protection can indeed advance together in China.

Many years of rapid economic expansion with heavy environmental costs have pointed questions at China’s pursuit of sustainable development and whether it is viable given its accelerated course of urbanization and industrialization.

The initial success in cutting a major pollutant may still be not enough to end all skepticism about the country’s green goals. But it does open up possibilities for the country to progress along a greener development path.

To reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide, China shut down more than 1,000 small coal mines in 2009. Such efforts should not only be strengthened but be expanded to help reduce other pollutants.

But what is more encouraging than the immediate efforts to further raise the target of pollution reduction for this year is the sober attitude of Chinese policymakers over the country’s still grave environmental situation.

At an executive meeting of the State Council held on Wednesday, top Chinese policymakers urged enterprises and governments at all levels to continue stepping up efforts in pollution and emissions control.

Rapid economic growth was once deemed as the most important thing for improving the living standards of Chinese people. Yet, as China’s per capita GDP (gross domestic product) keeps growing after breaching the threshold of $3,000, people’s demand for cleaner growth and better environment increases more than ever.

The country’s fight against pollution is far from over and should only be intensified as much as possible.

In most Western versions, Google is described as a guardian of Western values such as the freedom of speech and the right to know, while China’s censorship and monitoring of the Web is portrayed as a violation of those freedoms.

However, Zachary Karabell, columnist for Time.com, reveals another version of the story. In his article, he refuted two of Google’s excuses about its failure in China, and implied an ongoing shift of world economic balance.

On the first point, Google blamed business losses on China’s Internet monitoring policies. But Karabell indicates it is forceful competition that is pushing Google out of China’s market.

“Google has not been doing all that well in China, as many have noted in recent days, badly trailing the domestic Chinese search company Baidu,” Karabell commented on Time.com. Karabell said Yahoo and eBay also failed to take root in the soil of China’s information economy, he said. Yahoo was defeated by native-born Alibaba.com, and eBay was defeated by China’s Taobao, he wrote.

Karabell said that these companies have a distinct advantage over foreign competitors because their founders and senior managers are more familiar with the domestic political and civil environment, and the needs of native Internet users.

The second reason cited by Google for its concerns about China was its announcement that it was attacked by coordinated hackers originated from China. As Karabell said on Time.com, ‘Other countries also engage in cyber espionage, especially Israel and, of course, the US government itself, with the largest group of hackers in the world employed by the National Security Agency.’ But only in China does this creates much of a furor, he wrote.

Still, the author pointed out, Google denies that it may be to blame for the failure, and also might be concealing the shifting balance of economic power globally.

“China’s efforts to censor and monitor the Web represent a challenge to the uncontested hegemony of Western business and the dominance of Silicon Valley in the world of new technologies,” Karabell wrote.”

That’s why Google and its US boss are making a mountain out of a molehill in China. Their target might not be its monitoring policies, but China’s rising power in Internet technology and the economy.

Can we call it development or growth when a newly rebuilt school will be demolished to make room for the construction of a central business district?

To improve the condition of this old primary school, the local district government in the city of Fuzhou, East China’s Fujian province, invested 15 million yuan ($2.2 million). The new school now has more than 30 classrooms and other modern teaching facilities. Beside the building is a huge sports park. On Sept 9, 2008, a grand ceremony was held to inaugurate the use of the new building. The construction of the sports ground and other facilities were completed in September last year, when the local government made the decision that the school would soon be demolished.

This case is typical of the visionless urban planning and waste of resources by some local governments.This primary school has a history of more than 100 years but its building was too old and likely to fall apart at any time. Deputies from the local people’s congress appealed to the local government time and again for its renovation. Finally, the local district government made the decision and allocated 15 million yuan. The old building was demolished and a new one was erected.

is the fact that renovation of the building had been approved by the urban planning department of the city government, which should have known well about the overall planning of the city. The construction of a central business district is a massive project involving billions of yuan and should have been included in the city’s five- or 10-year plan.

If that were the case, dereliction of duty would likely have been involved on the decision to renovate the school. There might have been corruption behind it. A school built with an investment of 15 million yuan being demolished in less than two years will easily cover up any dirty deal.

If anything, any government department or leader should never be allowed to get away with such irresponsible decisions that waste taxpayers’ money. The local government needs to explain how the decision was made to renovate the school and how the plan was made to build the central business district.

It would be a crime for local authorities to deliberately approve the school renovation with the knowledge that another construction project would be built on the same location.

As being stipulated by regulations on the disclosure of government information, important information concerning the well-being of residents must be made known to the public. It is a huge undertaking to demolish a school for students and residents living in the vicinity.

Residents have the right to be informed of what will disrupt their normal lives. And their voices should be heard on the fate of the school. Why can’t the school be kept within the central business district?

A thorough investigation is needed. And so is a plausible explanation from city authorities. If the school has to be demolished, someone must be held accountable for wasting taxpayers’ money.

The Internet originated on American soil. In 1969, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Defense Department established the world’s first testing packet-switched network (PSN) to connect four universities on US soil. The world saw a remarkable expansion of the scale and number of Internet users from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. In September 1989, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was founded with a grant from the US Department of Commence to administer the Internet terminal server. Over the past 40 years, the US has been dominating the world Internet as the core technique holder with an inherent advantage of being the cradle of the Internet.

There are 13 terminal servers in the world to keep the Internet running, with a master server and nine of the 12 secondary servers stationed in the US. In terms of technique, the network of a country will disappear from the world Internet if its domain name registry is blocked or deleted from the terminal server. This kind of conduct is not legally binding with the law of any country except ICANN. In April 2004, Libya was unseen on the Internet for three days after the collapse of the domain name registry of the country “LY” caused by a domain administration dispute.

Concerns about the US monopoly of the domain name server (DNS) system grew among other nations as much as their reliance on the Internet for issues ranging from politics and the economy to defense and the general society. Years ago, there was a proposal that the Internet be administered by the United Nations or under international cooperation. The European Union insisted that the World Wide Web is an international resource that should be jointly managed by all nations. Some developing countries pointed out that at the early stage of Internet development, developed countries seized large amounts of domain names, leaving a limited few for them, and demanded a share with the US over Internet administration. American officials opposed the suggestion.

The US Defense Strategy Review in March 2005 stated that Internet space should have the same priority as continental, marine, aerial and outer space jurisdictions for the US to maintain a decisive superiority. A statement from Washington on June 30, 2005, made it clear that the US government would maintain its control over the DNS indefinitely; stating that a transfer of its management to UN or international cooperative models would impede the free flow of information, lead to easy manipulation of the Internet and make global supervision more difficult.

In an attempt to thwart the World Summit on the Information Society held in Tunis in November 2005, then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote to then European Union president and British foreign minister that her government in Washington backed Internet administration and coordination by ICANN (an alleged NGO which is actually a quasi-government organization with the US Department of Commerce). Rice said management by private corporations would guarantee the safety and stability of the Internet, while the alternative choice of an inter-government mechanism would be an obstacle to Internet development. At the same time, the US Congress passed a bill by a vote of 423 to zero urging a manifesto by the White House that American control over Internet is inviolable. US Rep. John Taylor Doolittle, a Republican from California, said the United States invented the Internet and described it as a gift to the world based on American taxpayers’ money. He said he opposed any move to transfer the country’s control to the UN.

The control of the Internet plays a strategic role for US. Using the internet, the US can intercept information via the net, export US values and opinions, support a “Color Revolution”, feed the opposition powers and rebels against anti-US governments, interfere with other countries’ internal affairs and make proactive attacks on enemy’s communication and directing networks. James-Adams, a famous military forecaster, wrote in his book, The Next World War, these words: “The computer is the weapon for the future war and there is no virtual front line, as the traditional battle and the byte will take the bullet’s role to grab control of the air.”

A cemetery of Red Guards in the city of Chongqing was designated a historical site under local government protection last month. It is the only historical site of its kind in the country and will not only serve as a reminder of the terrible 10 years of the “cultural revolution” (1966 -76), it will mark a milestone in our perception of cultural heritage.

The most disastrous and fierce armed conflicts between different political factions in the early years of the “cultural revolution” took place in this southwestern city. The People’s Liberation Army was involved, and heavy arms such as tanks and warships were used. Hundreds of students and workers were killed.

There used to be 24 graveyards that accommodated the tombs of slaughtered Red Guards. This cemetery, which has survived continuous urban renovations over the past three decades, holds more than 400 buried Red Guards.

Controversy and debate has arisen over whether the graveyard should have been preserved. Those who were persecuted during the “cultural revolution” loathe Red Guards and have proposed that their graveyards be levelled. Some consider the “cultural revolution” as humiliating for Chinese and maintain that any trace of it should be deleted.

But some experts and scholars believe that it deserves to be kept as a site of historical interest to remind later generations of the unprecedented upheaval.

Well-known novelist Ba Jin once proposed that a museum about the “cultural revolution” be established to inform later generations of what happened. The Chongqing graveyard will to a large extent serve the same purpose as a site of cultural heritage under local government protection.

There are many objects that carry the weight of various political movements or important events over past decades. They should be protected as cultural relics. The signboards of the People’s Communes and those of Revolutionary Committees are some examples. Some sites of important events should also be preserved as sites of historical interest either under local government or State protection.

In the rush of urban renovation in the past three decades, only sites of historical interest in ancient dynasties have survived. Quite a number of buildings with important historical significance were demolished to make room for real estate developments simply because they were not old enough.

Structures from different times form a timeline of memory. Demolition of important buildings will cut short that line and make the memory of that place incomplete.

To be frank, it is a shame for that graveyard to be named a site of historical significance more than three decades after the “cultural revolution” ended in 1976.

The message is that more efforts are needed to raise people’s awareness of cultural heritage protection, that of government leaders in particular, so that structures that are or will be historical reminders for later generations will not be destroyed because of thoughtless decisions by governments.

A world economy can’t afford to be enmeshed in trade protectionism measures, whether it is bogged down in a financial recession or showing signs of recovery.

While the World Bank warned last week that the global economic recovery is fragile, the United States government announced it will be investigating charges that Chinese companies are selling oil-well drill pipes in the US at unfairly low prices.

The United Steelworkers union and a group of companies from Texas and Illinois have asked for anti-dumping tariffs ranging from 429-496 percent on Chinese exports. These high tariffs, if approved, are based on unfounded guesses that Chinese producers sell their products at prices up to 80 percent lower than normal market prices, according to industrial experts.

While trade disputes are normal in this highly competitive global market, what may upset Chinese businesses is not the potential legal cost to defend their interests, but the wild speculations on their prices. Chinese companies don’t sell for the sake of sales, but profits. The possibilities are slim that they still can make a profit if they sell at prices much lower than competitors of other countries.

It is the first US probe of its kind this year against Chinese products. But the US already has 82 anti-dumping duty orders in place against Chinese goods and another 12 countervailing duty orders.

Moreover, several cases that began in 2009 will be working their way to a conclusion in the coming months, including a record case involving imports of $2.74 billion of Chinese-made steel tubing and casing used in oil and natural gas production.

Although the drill pipe case has not been finalized, China and the world should be on alert against signs of rising trade protectionism that could disrupt the global economic recovery.

Calling for caution is not an exaggeration. In 1930, the US Congress approved the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which allowed the country to impose extremely high tariffs on more than 20,000 imported products. Historians have agreed that it triggered the ensuing global trade wars, which almost paralyzed trade worldwide and contributed to the global economic downturn in the 1930s.

Last year, the US passed the “buy American” provision in its economic stimulus plan, signaling that it cares more about its own economic well-being than anything else, including global trade.

The large number of trade protectionist measures it has raised against other countries, including China, is simply a continuation of that egocentric philosophy.

Admittedly, the US government is under great pressure from domestic industrial interests. Economists have found that when unemployment rates rise, it is more than likely that the US will resort to protectionist measures to aid its domestic industries and protect jobs.

Between 2005 and 2007, for example, the US congress introduced 45 separate pieces of anti-China trade legislations. None of them were passed, largely because the US unemployment rate averaged as low as 4.7 percent during that period, said Stephen Roach, chief economist of Morgan Stanley. Now that rate has doubled.

But such unfair measures, while they may temporarily benefit US industries, damage the order of global trade and may even stymie the global economic recovery.

Cutting paper tigers is an old Chinese skill.

Try it, with our easy ‘snip and snarl’ guide.

Host: Linda Kennedy

Filming: Christie Lee & Lou Yi

Video editor: Christie Lee