China has announced a ban on radio and TV adverts which encourage extravagant gift-giving, saying they promote incorrect values, state media report.

The move is part of a government campaign to crack down on corruption and extravagance.

Expensive watches, gold coins and liquor are among the items affected

Marketplace China Correspondent Rob Schmitz brings us stories from the people who make their livings on Changle Road, the Street of Eternal Happiness, in central Shanghai. Together, they will tell the story of China’s ongoing economic transformation.

I really like this episode on the so-called sandwich generation. The Simon and Garfunkel overlay is darn good radio production.

The Nixon episode is also compelling.

Suspicions between the People’s Republic and its neighbours bedevil its boundaries to the east, south and west.
3 minutes. Great!

Guizhou is China’s poorest province, and this is one of Guizhou’s poorest regions.

About a 150m Chinese still subsist on less than a dollar and a half a day.

Most of them, like Lu Jikuan are stuck in China’s villages, far from the opportunities in its giant cities and coastal provinces.

China’s ruling Communist Party is about to hold an important congress and usher in sweeping leadership changes which could have a profound impact on the country’s future direction.
With China now the world’s second largest economy and an increasingly important global player, the changes will be closely watched around the world.

What are the main issues at this year’s meeting?

The vast majority of the Chinese population regard themselves as belonging to the same race, a stark contrast to the multiracial composition of other populous countries. What effect does this have on how China views the world?

More than nine out of 10 Chinese people think of themselves as belonging to just one race, the Han. This is remarkable. It is quite different from the world’s other most populous nations: India, United States, Indonesia and Brazil. All recognise themselves to be, in varying degrees, multiracial and multicultural.

Why is this? The BBC answers

Ethnic minorities in China

Of the 55 recognised ethnic minority groups, the 10 largest are:

• Zhuang (16.9 million)
• Hui (10.59 million)
• Manchu (10.39 million)
• Uyghur (10.07 million)
• Miao (9.43 million)
• Yi (8.7 million)
• Tujia (8.35 million)
• Tibetan (6.28 million)
• Mongol (5.98 million)
• Buyei (2.87 million)

Source: 2010 China census

A decade after an explosion of unrest in China’s north-east, a remarkable recovery is under way

The outgoing party chief, Jiang Zemin, was trying to promote a new catchphrase for the party called the “three represents”, including the notion that the party represented “the fundamental interests of the majority”. The workers who took to the streets in the spring of 2002, in the cities of Daqing, Fushun and Liaoyang were in effect saying that the party did not represent them and had indeed failed them.

Within a year of taking over from Mr Jiang, Hu Jintao launched a campaign to “revive the north-east”. It was an ambitious project for a region that had few of the advantages of the fast-growing Yangzi and Pearl River deltas, with their better-developed private sectors and ready access to investment and know-how from abroad, especially Hong Kong and Taiwan. Of the north-east’s GDP, two-thirds was being produced by state-owned firms
Much work remains to be done, from the reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to boosting social-security provisions. But a decade on, as Mr Hu and the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, prepare to step down, the party is likely to tout the north-east’s revival as one of its successes.

After a generation of migration, barriers to social mobility remain…

THE greatest wave of voluntary migration in human history transformed China’s cities, and the global economy, in a single generation. It has also created a huge task for those cities, by raising the expectations of the next generation of migrants from the countryside, and of second-generation migrant children. They have grown up in cities in which neither the jobs nor the education offered them have improved much.

This matters because the next generation of migrants has already arrived in staggering numbers. Shanghai’s migrant population almost trebled between 2000 and 2010, to 9m of the municipality’s 23m people. Nearly 60% of Shanghai’s 7.5m or so 20-to-34-year-olds are migrants.

44% of young migrants worked in manufacturing and another 10% in construction.

Nearly half worried about the monotony of their work and despaired of their career prospects. Only 8.6% reported being “comfortable” at work. One worker told researchers: “We have become robots, and I don’t want to be a robot who only works with machines.”

One obstacle to a better job is their parents. In China’s system of household registration (known as hukou)…They are fated to grow up on a separate path from children of Shanghainese parents. Migrant children are eligible to attend local primary and middle schools, but barred from Shanghai’s high schools. For years reformers have called for changes in the hukou system.

ON HIS visit to America this week China’s vice-president, Xi Jinping, serenely played the role his aides had scripted for him as the country’s leader-in-waiting, charming his hosts but revealing little. At home, however, the the Communist Party’s plans for a sweeping shuffle of its hierarchy later this year were beginning to appear less orderly...

There remains little doubt that Mr Xi will take over from Hu Jintao as party chief at a five-yearly congress to be held sometime in the autumn. But the prospects of another aspirant to top office, Bo Xilai (pictured above), have been overshadowed.

Applebaum wonders: Can a country that trades so heavily on rumors and gossip ever really be stable?

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist, active in sculpture, installation, architecture, curating, photography, film, and social, political and cultural criticism. Ai collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron as the artistic consultant on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics. As a political activist, he has been highly and openly critical of the Chinese Government’s stance on democracy and human rights. He has investigated government corruption and cover-ups, in particular the Sichuan schools corruption scandal following the collapse of so-called “tofu-skin schools” in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.In 2011, following his arrest at Beijing airport on 3 April, he was held for over two months without any official charges being filed; officials alluded to their allegations of “economic crimes” (tax evasion).
18 minutes

Economic conditions and social media are making protests more common in China—at a delicate time for the country’s rulers (Economist)

Although people join the party more for career reasons these days than for ideological ones, it still officially forbids religious belief among its members. In practice, this has for some years been a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. But signs are now growing that the party is about to become tougher on believers within its ranks.

And behind it might be Mr Chang’s notion of Christianity as a Trojan horse.

EACH year in early March, Beijing welcomes not only the sense of spring’s imminent arrival, but also the thousands of out-of-town delegates who descend on the capital for the once-yearly full session of the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s version of a national legislature. It is a time of year when the weather in Beijing might yet go any which way. But not the NPC session, which is a closely scripted and tightly controlled event featuring much pageantry and precious little drama.

The orderly proceedings and the pre-arranged outcomes are predictable. So too are the frequent invocations of the term “rubber-stamp” to describe the NPC, as well as heated complaints about that term from Chinese officials and other supporters of the system.

Like many western media outlets, The Economist has been a frequent “rubber-stamper” in its coverage of the NPC over the years. So too have many Chinese-language media, for that matter, including some of China’s own outlets.

Yet many in China take the term as an insult, feeling that it belittles the institutions and procedures by which the nation makes its laws.

When will the foreign media finally stop using the term “rubber-stamp” to describe China’s parliament?

The answer to that question should be obvious: when it finally rejects something put before it.

Among the matters the nearly 3,000 legislative delegates get to vote on are the approval of new laws, “work reports” delivered by senior officials, and new appointees to top government posts. Unanimous votes were once common. Multiple Chinese reports have noted with interest the first occasion on which a delegate cast a “no” vote, in 1988.

In 1992, the NPC caused something of a stir when only 1,767 delegates, two-thirds of the total, voted to approve the massive and massively controversial Three Gorges Dam project. There were 177 votes against, 644 votes to abstain, and 25 delegates who failed to vote at all.

In other cases where reports or candidates are approved by less than 75%, it is seen as a clear rebuke to the leadership.

None of this is to say that the NPC is entirely irrelevant.  Its full-time professional staff has grown in size and professionalism. In the course of drafting legislation, it has taken great strides in reaching out to social stakeholders and soliciting their input. Often it even pushes back against the Communist party leadership by insisting on substantial revisions to draft laws before moving them along.

In these ways, the NPC plays a meaningful and increasingly important role in China’s governance. And there are some political scientists, Chinese and foreign alike, who reckon that China’s system may evolve in ways that give the legislature genuine independence and substantial power in decades to come.
Indeed, many people will use terms like “rubber-stamp” and “coronation” to describe these conventions, in Charlotte, North Carolina and Tampa, Florida. Nobody will get angry about it. And why should they? After all, there is another, even more powerful force in Washington that provides actual checks and balances to the political power of the executive branch. That one bears the mark of another well-worn stamp: Gridlock.

WHO knew China was tribal? The diversification of Chinese society has seen a flowering of a new vocabulary. Perhaps most fascinating has been the division of people into tribes (zu in Mandarin). The travails of the yi zu, or ant tribe, have been well-chronicled—recent graduates from outside the main cities who move to urban areas, live cheaply and work hard, often in low-paid jobs. Perhaps less well-known are the ken lao zu, the bite-the-old tribe, those between 25 and 35 who are underemployed or out of work, still at home and sponging off mum and dad.

Many of the tribes, inevitably, are made up of people looking for love. There is the jia wan zu, the marry-the-bowl tribe. These are young women searching for that most stable of husbands, the one who holds a government job (still known as the iron rice bowl). The shan hun zu, or lightning-marriage tribe, marry fast and sometimes divorce faster. They should not be confused with the yin hun zu, the hidden-marriage tribe. These are women in their 20s who hide the fact that they are married, knowing they will not be hired or promoted if there is even the whiff of the possible need for maternity leave—socialist gender-equality does not offer much protection in the Wild East of modern China. And if you can only afford a postage stamp of an apartment, you’re probably a member of the wo ju zu, the snail-house tribe.

You can belong to more than one tribe. Most members of the ant tribe also belong to the ben ben zu, the rush-rush tribe, to which, in fact, most urban Chinese belong. All that rushing around can create a lot of pent-up anger, giving rise to the nie nie zu, the crush-crush tribe, so named because they go into supermarkets and take out their frustration by standing in the aisles crushing packets of instant noodles (yes, really).

Many tribal members are also slaves (nu in Mandarin). There are the fang nu (mortgage slaves) and hun nu (marriage slaves, who are also, by definition, mortgage slaves) and all Chinese parents are of course haizi nu (slaves to the only child).

Perhaps the group China needs most as it tries to stimulate its domestic consumer economy is the yue guang zu, or moonlight tribe, so named because the Chinese characters for “moonlight” sound the same as the phrase “spend all your monthly salary”. Their parents saved every yuan, but life for these youngsters is just spend, spend, spend. Now, that’s patriotic consumption.