China to legalise horse racing and betting

China to legalise horse racing and betting

By Richard Spencer in Beijing
Last Updated: 1:58am GMT 12/01/2008

The Chinese government is set to legalise horse racing, and even betting, as the ruling Communist Party loosens controls on practices it once banned as feudal, colonial and backward.

China to legalise horse racing and betting
Hong Kong race course where punters flock to watch the racing

The sprawling industrial city of Wuhan in central China, once a European “concession” or colonial settlement, will be the first to open a race-track next year.

Gambling, apart from a state sports lottery, has been banned on the mainland since the Communist takeover in 1949.

The decision is a response to a market-driven explosion in traditional popular culture, at least where it does not touch on politics.

The Orient Lucky Horse Group, the company granted the first licence to run races, said the venture would start small, with jockey clubs around the country invited to put forward 250 horses to compete.
advertisement

A spokesman said the State Sports General Administration had granted the licence from September – immediately after the Beijing Olympics – but that the first races would not be held until next year.

“The proposal for betting on horse racing is being reviewed and discussed,” a spokesman for the China Sports Lottery Administration Centre said.

“Betting” might not take the form regularly associated with racing elsewhere. Punters may have to pay to compete in an “intelligence competition” in which those who correctly identify the best horse in advance will be rewarded with prizes.

Racing was stopped after the civil war partly because of its colonial reputation. It was introduced by the British who dominated the foreign “concessions” in China in the 19th and early 20th century. Racing lived on in Hong Kong, where it remains both the focus of society life and of the only permitted form of gambling in the territory.

The Jockey Club is to help Wuhan develop a code of rules.

The government’s change of heart is most likely dictated by an acceptance of reality, with millions of mainland Chinese every year pouring into the other post-colonial enclave, Macau, where casinos are the main industry, and the realisation that it is better to find some way of profiting from the national love of gambling.

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright

The feng-shui revolution

The feng-shui revolution
After decades of official discouragement, the ancient practice of geomancy, or feng shui, is experiencing a remarkable renaissance among China’s affluent classes. Clifford Coonan reports
Published: 12 January 2008

As the agent showed us through the lavishly decorated villa, there was a gasp when the double-doors opened on to a spectacular swimming pool that looked out over the first tee of one of mainland China’s most famous golf courses. The agent waved her hand dismissively.

“It’s all going to be filled in and moved around the back,” she said. “Bad feng shui … The owner has been told to do it differently by his feng shui consultant.”

The ancient practice of geomancy, or feng shui, is technically illegal in fiercely secular China, where the ruling Communist Party considers it “superstition” and has forbidden people to practise it.

But the Chinese have believed in the practice – the idea that the land is a living, breathing thing filled with qi energy, and that individuals should live in harmony with the wind and water of our natural environment – for thousands of years, and the ideas of feng shui (which translates as “wind and water”) are so deeply rooted in their psyche that it has refused to die out.

Now rising affluence in the coastal and southern cities has brought a revival in the practice, as China’s new rich call in the feng shui practitioners to decide on the most auspicious placing of designer Danish furniture, Italian marble tiles, and Japanese topiary in their multimillion-pound villas and apartments – just like this villa adjoining the Jack Nicklaus signature golf course.

The villa with its inauspiciously placed swimming pool is in Shenzhen, the super wealthy enclave in the People’s Republic of China bordering Hong Kong, where feng shui has almost the status of a religion.

The feng shui practitioner was one of the many experts who are coming back across the border to ply their mystical trade, having been banished in 1949 when the Communists came to power.

For the Communists, there could be only one ideology in China, and that was the Marxist-Leninism espoused by Chairman Mao’s party. The new government was determined to eliminate the “four olds”: old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits.

But old habits do indeed die hard. The opening up of China in the past 30 years has seen a revival in traditional belief systems, such as the teachings of Confucius, Buddhism and other ancient philosophies.

So powerful is the revival that feng shui has even made it on to the secondary school curriculum in Xiamen, in the province of Fujian in the south. The teacher of the course, Xiong Yongliang, told the Beijing News how “traditional feng shui culture has its good features as well as its bad ones”. Apparently, the students find the feng shui course “interesting and practical”.

In private, of course, feng shui never really went away. But it is becoming much more open now. Families in the countryside will fight over a particularly auspicious piece of land, and the resulting feuds can last for generations. There are reports of buildings in mainland cities being knocked down because of bad feng shui readings.

Communism and traditional philosophies such as feng shui are officially at loggerheads, but there has always been a sneaking regard for the principles of feng shui among the top cadres.

A growing sense of pride in things traditionally Chinese has also pushed the revival in feng shui, particularly since the central principle espoused by President Hu Jintao’s leadership is the “harmonious society”.

The Chinese leadership has given new leeway to philosophies such as Buddhism and Confucianism because it is worried that the rush to become wealthy in modern China could leave people with a spiritual hole in their lives. Not something you would normally expect a Communist government with its strict materialist ideas to worry about, but this void can be filled by organisations such as the Falun Gong, which the party sees as a dangerous cult keen to destabilise the government. Hence the return to traditional values.

And the practice does have some high-profile proponents. Chairman Mao Zedong studied feng shui and was interested in the ideas, but was instrumental in banishing practitioners because there were so many fraudsters and charlatans doing the rounds. Pilgrims to the Great Helmsman’s birthplace in Shaoshan often study the arrangement of his family home, which is considered to be very auspicious.

Just as with the followers of Confucianism and other philosophies, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was hard on feng shui practitioners – they were jailed and beaten and their books were burnt.

The end of that particular ideological reign of terror signalled a softening in the line taken on feng shui, even though it is still formally disapproved of by the powers-that-be.

Last year, several Communist Party cadres sought consultations with feng shui masters about how to ward off evil spirits, and one official in Zhejiang province moved his ancestors’ tombs thousands of miles to the Tianshan Mountain in Xinjiang to improve his family’s prospects.

The practice of feng shui is becoming so open that many practitioners have established consultancy firms, offering advice on everything from career, marriage and health to getting out of debt and making the right investments.

In China’s biggest city, Shanghai, which shares much of its heritage with Hong Kong, there are more than 1,000 practitioners. “Feng shui is widely applied in interior decorating and real estate, so it has attracted many estate agents and entrepreneurs,” said Wang Xiaohe, who manages a feng shui consultancy in the city. Many entrepreneurs will consult on the future of their businesses, while estate agents are more likely to consult on the position of furniture and the environment of their projects.

The cost of a feng shui assessment is about £2 per square metre for property advice and £20 per half hour for other services. Getting advice on how to name your company can cost up to £120, though costs are negotiable.

Mainland China still trails Hong Kong. Many of the practitioners forced to leave after the revolution in 1949 headed for the former crown colony. Hong Kong has good feng shui because it is surrounded by high mountains and good qi accumulates in the harbour.

Nina Wang, one of Hong Kong’s most colourful billionaires and once Asia’s richest woman, died last year and left her £6bn estate to her feng shui consultant, prompting a legal battle with her family.

Feng shui is crucial in building projects in Hong Kong – a perfectly serviceable walkway in the downtown Central district was torn down soon after construction, reportedly because the angle at which it traversed the road was bad for qi.

Hong Kong’s City University was the first in the world to include a feng shui module in its Master of Building and Engineering degree.

When the architect Norman Foster created the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headquarters in 1984, the builders employed geomancers during the construction to make sure the feng shui was up to scratch, which some say is why the escalators in the lobby are at such odd angles, to keep in with the building’s qi.

The nearby Bank of China headquarters was hated while it was being built because it didn’t get the geomancers on board. The building, designed by the Chinese-American architect I M Pei, had a lot going against it – it was shaped like a knife, and its triangular mirrors and aspects were believed to reflect bad energy on to neighbouring buildings.

When Walt Disney was building Disneyland Hong Kong, the company consulted feng shui experts and shifted the entrance to the park by 12 degrees to ensure maximum prosperity.

Feng shui tries to ensure a good flow of energy, or qi and buildings and other structures need to face certain directions depending on their surroundings.

Derived from the ancient philosophical and divination manual The Book of Change, feng shui requires careful balancing of the five elements: fire, earth, metal, water and wood. It’s become very popular with designers in Britain and elsewhere in the West, because the principles of spiritual harmony often equate rem-arkably well with sound design principles.

Feng shui is used in relationship management too. Geomancers tell couples to avoid using triangles in a bedroom as it could invite a third party into the relationship. They also say keep mirrors out of the bedroom, especially not facing the bed, as they lead to quarrels and make a husband more likely to cheat.

Depending on the orientation of a room, a practitioner will decide where a pregnant woman should sleep to ensure she gives birth to a child of above-average intelligence.

The earliest written records of feng shui come from the Han dynasty, around AD25, but it is believed to have been part of Chinese thinking for about 5,000 years, after probably originating in India a millennium before. There was a widespread belief that the universal abstract energy or “life force” in the land had the power to decide whether a dynasty prospered or fell.

This energy is qi, or dragon’s breath, and for geomancers it is the force that governs the world and decides whether we attract fortune or disaster.

The right energy on the land surrounding the capital meant the city would prosper, but if the feng shui was bad, the dynasty was doomed and the land was headed for catastrophe.

As the northern capital, Beijing was built along strict cosmological principles informed by feng shui and its position is clearly an auspicious one, nestling at the foot of the Western Hills.

The early geomancers worked at finding auspicious burial sites for the emperors, but by the time of the Qin dynasty (AD265-420), ordinary people were also employing geomancers to choose places to build their houses and their burial grounds.

The ultimate goal is to balance yin and yang, the harmonising factors in the universe and there are a few basic guidelines – if your garden has too many hills, a geomancer might ask you to put in a pond to break it up. If the wind is too strong, or the current too powerful, it can drive away the qi.

Most of the villa at the sprawling golf course near Shenzhen had been built along strict feng shui principles, as are many of the new villa developments springing up.

The plush new residential buildings will have skylights, ponds stocked with fish, rockeries and auspiciously aligned entrance gates to allow the energy to really get to work.

Above all, it will be good feng shui to put the swimming pool in the right place first time round.

China’s Coal Mines Kill 3,786 in 2007

China’s Coal Mines Kill 3,786 in 2007

The Associated Press
Saturday, January 12, 2008; 11:19 AM

BEIJING — Accidents in China’s notoriously dangerous coal mines killed nearly 3,800 people last year, state media reported Saturday _ a toll that is a marked improvement from previous years, but still leaves China’s mines the world’s deadliest.

A total of 3,786 were killed in mining accidents in 2007 _ 20 percent lower than the 2006 toll, indicating the effectiveness of a safety campaign to shut small, illegal mining operations and reduce gas explosions, the Xinhua News Agency quoted the head of China’s government safety watchdog as saying.

Coal is the lifeblood of China’s booming, energy-hungry economy. The mining industry’s safety, which has never been good, has often suffered as mine owners push to dig up more coal to take advantage of higher prices.

Chinese mines produced 2.5 billion tons of coal last year, Xinhua said, nearly 8 percent more than in 2006.

The government safety push, begun two years ago, has reduced the death toll, yet the results mask great disparities among various coal mines.

Li Yizhong, director of the State Administration of Workplace Safety, said Saturday at a national meeting that large state-owned mines have safety records on par with mines in India and Poland, while those of small mines are 10 times worse.

“We must sufficiently recognize the specific, complex safety problems in our country’s coal mines,” Xinhua quoted Li as saying. “We must not be blindly optimistic and remain sober-minded.”

Despite intense pressure on mine owners and the shutdown of smaller mines, China suffered one of its worst accidents in nearly 60 years of communist rule last year _ an August flood that drowned 172 miners in a Shandong coal mine.
© 2008 The Associated Press

RFA: 国际奥委会的责任及欧盟与中国的贸易（魏京生）

RFA: 国际奥委会的责任及欧盟与中国的贸易（魏京生）

RFA: 2007中国事故死亡人数超过10万1千人

RFA: 2007中国事故死亡人数超过10万1千人

Congress uses Olympics to focus on China

By FOSTER KLUG, Associated Press WriterSat Jan 12, 7:26 AM ET

The world will be watching China closely as it gears up to host the Olympics this year. So will U.S. lawmakers, who hope to use the attention generated by the summer games to highlight their complaints about China’s government.

Lawmakers, in hearings and in legislation, will scrutinize what some see as unfair Chinese economic policies, its secretive military buildup and its human rights abuses. China already has been targeted by presidential candidates.

“The Chinese want this `Show’ — with a capital `S’ — to showcase their government to the world,” Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., said in an interview. Congress, he said, should use that as leverage to “bring maximum scrutiny and light to their egregious human rights abuses.”

Smith champions legislation that would stop U.S. technology companies from aiding countries that restrict Internet access. American Internet companies have been denounced for turning a blind eye to abuse in China so they can crack that lucrative market.

The Bush administration’s criticism of China is usually muted. Lawmakers, however, are more vocal in asserting that China has failed to live up to its responsibilities as an emerging superpower.

With the presidential campaign heating up, “2008 promises to be a trying year” for U.S.-China ties, wrote Brad Glosserman and Bonnie Glaser, analysts with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “There will be a temptation to make China a foreign policy issue or a scapegoat for problems in economic and security policy.”

U.S. manufacturers say Beijing’s low valuation of the yuan, its currency, makes Chinese goods cheaper in the United States and American products more expensive in China. Lawmakers are considering bills that would punish China for what they contend are predatory trade practices.

Lawmakers also worry about China’s rapid military spending and the country’s apparent secretiveness about its military aims. The House Armed Services Committee will hold hearings this year with top U.S. commanders in the Pacific, where China will be a major topic.

Last year, Washington criticized China’s test of an anti-satellite weapon as a provocative militarization of space. The two countries also sparred after China barred the USS Kitty Hawk from entering Hong Kong for a port call.

But it is Taiwan that could cause the most friction. Taiwan split from China in 1949, although Beijing continues to see the island as part of its territory. China has pledged to keep the island from independence by force if necessary.

Reps. Scott Garrett, R-N.J., and Tom Tancredo, R-Col., are among sponsors of a resolution that would voice Congress’ support for Taiwan’s membership in the United Nations, which both China and the Bush administration oppose as a provocation. A referendum, scheduled to be held with Taiwan’s presidential election in March, asks voters if they would support the island’s application to join the United Nations under the name Taiwan, rather than under its long-standing official title, Republic of China.

The Olympics, said Mac Zimmerman, Tancredo’s chief of staff, provide “a good opportunity for Taiwan and its friends in Congress to raise the profile of the Taiwan issue.”

Ralph Cossa, president of the Pacific Forum CSIS think tank, noted worry that congressional support for Taiwan’s U.N. membership could encourage Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian to do something that China would see as a push for independence. Chen is trying to carve out a non-Chinese identity for the island.

“Hopefully, they won’t do too much,” Cossa said of Congress, “because nothing makes things worse than congressional efforts to make them better.”

RFA: 律师媒体访胡佳家人受阻 北京违反奥运多项承诺

RFA: 律师媒体访胡佳家人受阻 北京违反奥运多项承诺