The Chinese economy may be racing into the 21st century, but the political system remains another beast altogether.
The dense, 35 page-long speech delivered by Wen Jiabao, the premier, to the National People’s Congress on Monday was full of both paeans to past Communist leaders and the power of the capitalist marketplace, with nods along the way to both the benefits of Chinese tradition and the need to catch up to the west.
Observer’s man in Beijing was particularly taken by what Wen said was the party’s “conclusion”, reached after much “practical” experience.
“We must free our minds, follow a realistic and practical approach, keep pace with the times, work hard with a pioneering and innovative spirit, unswervingly take the road of Chinese socialism, adhere to the reform and opening-up policy, pursue development according to scientific principles, maintain social harmony and ensure peaceful development.”
Only then, he said, could China achieve its objective of modernisation.
Translated, we think that means pretty much anything goes, policy-wise, as long as the Communist party retains full control of the political system.
Excellent timing
You have to admire Rick Sherlund’s sense of timing. Or perhaps admire isn’t the right word – maybe envy is.
Sherlund was a young analyst at Goldman Sachs in 1986 when a software company from Seattle called Microsoft first sold its shares to the public. Sherlund was able to make a very nice career for himself recommending that investors buy shares of Microsoft.
Not that it was always easy. Sherlund followed the battles for dominance in the technology industry – Apple’s battle with the personal computer giants, the rise of Lotus, the emergence of Oracle and, of course, Microsoft – at Goldman for the next 25 years, and it was not always clear who would come out the winner. (More recently, he has covered another hot new company, Google.)
He was named a Goldman partner in 1994. Goldman went public itself in 1999, which worked out well financially for Sherlund.
Now Sherlund is moving into another hot sector – hedge funds. He worked his last day at Goldman last week and is to become a managing director at Galleon Group, a $6.5bn hedge fund. Sherlund will manage – what else? – a portfolio of technology stocks.
Eye on the kite
As if taking money and knowing the route weren’t enough to cope with, bus drivers in north-east England are adding a new skill – bird-spotting.
A local bus operator, Go North East, has launched a “red kite” bus service to run through Gateshead’s Derwent Valley, where the once locally extinct species has been successfully reintroduced in recent years.
Drivers have been sent for “kite awareness training” so they can point out the birds to passengers and impart information about them as the bus trundles from Newcastle to Consett. In case the passengers are not familiar with the birds of prey – which have a 5ft wing span and a distinctive forked tail – the buses have been repainted with pictures of the kites on their sides and fitted with the latest emissions technology.
Red kites used to be common birds but were all but wiped out in the 19th century when they were regarded as a threat to livestock.
Efforts to re-establish colonies of the birds have done well in Wales, and it is rare not to see some on a drive along the M40 motorway around Stokenchurch, south England.
The Northern Kites Project brought the birds to the region in 2004, and is the first to have introduced the species so close to a large urban area.
Last year red kite chicks hatched in the area for the first time in nearly 200 years – an event Keith Bowey, the project’s manager, could not resist calling a “feather in the region’s cap”.
No secrets
As the long march towards the campaign for the 2008 US presidential elections begins, it is already looking like YouTube is going to have a major impact on how the campaigns are waged.
Not very long ago, the memory of a comment made at an obscure weekend conference could have been papered over by the time people picked up their Monday morning papers.
But that is not the case now, as Ann Coulter, a poison-tongued conservative columnist and author, has learnt.
On Friday, Coulter called John Edwards, a candidate for the Democratic party’s nomination, a “faggot” at the Conservative Political Action conference in Washington.
Newspapers carried the story of Coulter’s use of the term during the weekend. But a video clip of Coulter’s speech was among the most popular on YouTube on Monday.
Edwards, however, was able to take advantage of Coulter’s remark – which was denounced by all the Republican candidates.
He posted a video of Coulter’s comments, using it to ask supporters to raise $100,000 in “Coulter Cash” for his campaign to “fight back against the politics of bigotry”.
Patrick Walker, Google’s head of video partnerships, described the power of this phenomenon at a conference on Monday.
Walker described the ability of a “billion people able to access such clips as this and Saddam’s hanging” – the most popular in YouTube’s history – as a “videocracy”.
Wrong document
Observer got its US history wrong last week in an item about Wales. It said that Thomas Jefferson, though a fluent Welsh speaker, chose to write the US constitution in English.
As some readers pointed out, Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, not the US constitution. James Madison was the chief author of the constitution.
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