Looking for ways to spend

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

THE Ensen Care old-age home, which is soon to open, knows its target market. A mah-jong table takes pride of place in its recreation room. Space has been made outside for tai chi practice in the morning and line dancing, much loved by Chinese pensioners, at dusk. Photos in glass cabinets depict the imagined lives of its prospective residents: grainy pictures of youths in Red Guard uniforms next to studio portraits with grandchildren in more prosperous later years.

Few homes for Chinese senior citizens have the pedigree of Ensen Care, a subsidiary of Legend Holdings, owner of Lenovo, one of the world’s biggest computer manufacturers. The old-age home in Changzhou, a city of 4.7m west of Shanghai, is a pilot project designed to demonstrate what can be achieved when private investors provide public services. In exchange for a subsidised parcel of land, Ensen is building a hospital and a community centre, which it will transfer to the municipal authorities. The hope is that this model of public-private partnership (PPP) will help local governments bring projects to fruition without adding to their already sizeable debts.

If that is the idea, the...Continue reading

Animal spirits

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

The Huangpu: hardly loach heaven

EVERY Saturday morning hundreds of devotees gather by Shanghai’s Huangpu river to liberate fish. Over three hours some 2,000 loach are tipped into the murky waters to the sound of chants.

This is fang sheng, or “animal release”, an East Asian Buddhist ritual in which captive creatures are freed. The point is to demonstrate compassion and earn merit. The practice is ancient, though along with everything else, it was condemned as so much superstition under Mao Zedong. Today fang sheng is making a comeback, especially among the young and well-off. Officials estimate around 200m fish, snakes, turtles, birds and even ants are released each year—though no one really has a clue.

Fang sheng associations can rake in around 1m yuan ($157,000) in annual donations. For some monks it has become a racket. The greatest price, however, is paid by the animals themselves and the ecosystems from which they come and into which they go.

A vast and mainly illegal wildlife trade caters to the demand for animals. Figures...Continue reading

Unnatural aristocrats

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

CLOSELY tracking the Shanghai Composite Index in its downward slide in August was the reputation of China’s government for consistency, competence and even common sense. Worse, its hapless response to the bursting of a stockmarket bubble, which its own propaganda had helped to inflate, was only one of a number of bungles. It mismanaged a modest devaluation of its currency, the yuan. And a catastrophic explosion in the northern port city of Tianjin revealed appalling lapses in the enforcement of regulations. All governments make mistakes. But China’s bases its legitimacy on its performance rather than a popular mandate. Now foreigners and citizens alike are asking whether the Chinese authorities have lost the plot.

Despite the rash of bad news, the Chinese Communist Party can still boast more than three decades of success in fostering spectacular economic growth and in raising China’s global standing. A few rough weeks do not give the lie to “the China model”—in which authoritarian one-party rule is said to be justified because it produces the social order and wise leadership that beget economic growth. Supporters of this idea like to point to...Continue reading

Parade’s end

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

AFTER weeks of market mayhem, it must have made a nice change for Xi Jinping, China’s president, to be reviewing ranks of smartly-dressed people who move in perfect synchronicity and do exactly what he tells them. Vast military parades may have gone out of fashion elsewhere, but Asian countries still like to strut their stuff. After displays of hardware and prowess in India, Pakistan, Russia and Taiwan this year, China held the most vainglorious march-past yet under clear blue skies (especially seeded for the purpose) in Tiananmen Square on September 3rd.

The event marked Victory Day, which was invented as a holiday only in 2014 to mark the end of the People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, as the years leading up to and during the second world war are known in China. It was China’s first large-scale military parade since 2009, the first to celebrate anything other than the Communist Party’s rule and the first involving foreign troops. But Mr Xi (pictured above) did not have to hold it. Such parades had always been reserved for the decennial anniversaries of the founding of the People’s Republic on October 1st 1949. This one came...Continue reading

Tanks a lot

Otmane El Rhazi from China.

Greetings, now go home

EVERY city suffers some inconvenience for the sake of pageantry. The authorities in Beijing show little restraint in inflicting it. Residents are used to coping with road closures, car-use bans and the suspension of subway and bus services before large events. But aggravation related to the staging of a military parade through the city centre on September 3rd—the first in six years—went much further. Occupants of buildings overlooking the procession were told not to open windows or take photos, much less line the streets. Some hospitals stopped admitting new patients for the day, lest the movement of the sick disrupt that of the thousands of troops. Offices along the main route were told to shut for most of August. Flights to Beijing were subject to delays for an entire month while military aircraft trained for their flypast.

The biggest disruption resulted from efforts to ensure that Beijing’s ever-present smog gave way to what state media call yuebing lan, or “parade blue” skies. Outdoor barbecues (a popular Beijing cuisine) were shut down. Road transport fell by...Continue reading