Toxic ponds near Beijing

A roundup of top China news from April 21, 2017. Get this daily digest delivered to your inbox by signing up atย supchina.com/subscribe.


Twenty giant ponds of poisonous sludge

Caixinย reportsย that the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has โ€œconfirmed that there were nearly 20 giant ponds where untreated wastewater had been dumped for yearsโ€ in an area about 40 miles (60 kilometers) south of Beijing. The existence of the ponds โ€” โ€œcovering an area of 300,000 square meters in total, or the size of 42 soccer pitchesโ€ โ€” was first publicized by an environmental NGO, the Chongqing Liangjiang Voluntary Service Centerย (link in Chinese), on its verified WeChat account. Caixinย says its WeChat account was โ€œblocked as of Thursday by chat service operator Tencent Holdings,โ€ but the MEP has taken up the cause, confirming โ€œon Wednesday that its investigation team had found three toxic wastewater dumps in a rural town in the Jinghai District in Tianjin and two ponds containing acidic industrial wastewater in rural Dacheng County, in Langfang, in neighboring Hebei Province.โ€ The MEP said that local authorities had known about some of the wastewater dumping sites since 2013, and that cleanup work had already โ€œbeen completed on 15 ponds by the end of 2016.โ€

Reutersย reportsย that a MEP official, speaking at a press conference on Friday, said that the ministry was โ€œextremely open to all kinds of NGOs, the public and the media helping to provide oversight, so we can improve our environment.โ€ He also said that it was โ€œunclear how many similar pits China has.โ€

In other environmental news, Reutersย notesย that a campaign aimed at โ€œnormalizing complianceโ€ in 28 cities in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region began this month. The MEP says that โ€œ4,077 firms had already been investigated as part of the campaign, and 2,808 firms were found to have violated environmental rules.โ€

Count your days

We have been covering news about exiled tycoon Guo Wengui ้ƒญๆ–‡่ดต since January. His allegations of high level corruption in China โ€” more than two years after stories of his own corrupt activities were published in China โ€” have been met with further counter-accusations in the form of an Interpol โ€œred noticeโ€ย for him requested by the Chinese government, and a video confession of a manย claiming to be disgraced top spy Ma Jian ้ฉฌๅปบ, who makes his own accusations against Guo.

The latest battle in the war of words across the Pacific is an articleย by Caixinย magazine, whose editor Guo has previously accused โ€” on Twitter โ€” of improper collaboration with the Chinese government. Caixin says that it has seen โ€œa report to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspectionโ€ which shows evidence of Guoโ€™s involvement in various corrupt schemes. When one of the men involved in those schemes was detained by police, Caixinย says that Guo warned him by saying โ€œYou dare to report me, count your days.โ€

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In case you missed it earlier this week, the veteran China journalist and author has become a regular contributor to The China Project. His first piece for us was published earlier this week: Accomplishing what they could not at home: The bond between American and Chinese women. There are links to other articles, podcasts, and videos we published this week on our website and apps below.

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โ€”Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief


The Caixin-Sinica Business Brief, episode 2

The second installment of The China Projectโ€™s new weekly show with Chinaโ€™s leading business and financial news source. Please send any feedback to sinica@thechinaproject.com.ย 

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The China Project brings you a guide to the hottest items on the menuย in Shanghai.

Viral video Friday

From a strange new parking technique to basketball yoga: Watch Jia Guoโ€™s one-minute compilationย of the videos that lit up Chinaโ€™s internet over the past week.


This week on The China Project:

This weekโ€™s news roundups are:


This issue of the The China Projectย newsletter was produced by Sky Canaves, Lucas Niewenhuis, Jia Guo, and Jiayun Feng. More China stories worth your time are curated below, with the most important ones at the top of each section.


BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY:

A payments war between WeChat and Alipay

Tech in Asia wroteย today on โ€œHow WeChat Pay became Alipayโ€™s largest rival,โ€ arguing that the โ€œstickyโ€ social experience of WeChat โ€” the app that mobile users in China spend 35 percent of their screen time using โ€” allowed its โ€œred packetโ€ (็บขๅŒ… hรณngbฤo) feature to spread rapidly. Though Alipay, owned by Alibaba, still maintains a majority market share (54.7 percent) in mobile payments by providing a โ€œrobust array of financial services,โ€ the โ€œred packetโ€ feature to send small cash gifts to friends on WeChat has given WeChat Pay a user base much larger than Alipayโ€™s.

Both companies are now fiercely competing in the online-to-offline (O2O) market, which includes food delivery services and ride hailing. And while it is difficult to predict who will win out in the quickly changing and booming online payment market, Alipay and WeChat are being seen as examples of models of innovation in a new reportย from the Better Than Cash Alliance. The report, written by a United Nationsโ€“affiliated team, notes that โ€œin poor communities, digital payments are proving to be an effective way to open up new economic opportunities and markets for individuals and small businesses.โ€



POLITICS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS:

The symbolism of Xi Jinpingโ€™s choice of district

There are no open elections to national-level political positions in China, so the news earlier this week that President Xi Jinping had wonย a seat as a delegate to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) was unremarkable on the surface. But today, the Wall Street Journalย has a pieceย exploring the meaning behind Xiโ€™s unusual choice of district to โ€œrunโ€ from: the poor, southwestern province of Guizhou, where he has neither lived nor held office in his life. One former top political science professor tells the Journal that Xi is โ€œsharing a platformโ€ with Chen Miner ้™ˆๆ•ๅฐ”, the Guizhou Party chief whose poverty alleviation focus dovetails with Xiโ€™s rhetoric. Furthermore, it may signal that Chen is likely to gain a seat in the powerful 25-member Politburo when the new CPC National Congress votes this fall.



SOCIETY AND CULTURE:

Does Dolce & Gabbanaโ€™s ad campaign feature an โ€˜underdeveloped Chinaโ€™?

Italian fashion brand Dolce & Gabbana (D&G) has pulled an online advertisement campaign that was shot in Beijing and sparked accusations of only showing the dilapidated side of modern China. In the collection of photos, several models wearing high-end fashion gowns pose themselves in Beijingโ€™s centuries-old hutongsย (hรบtรฒng ่ƒกๅŒ) and famous tourist attractions such as Tiananmen Square, next to ordinary people such as tourists as well as taxi and pedicab drivers.

The marketing campaign is part of the brandโ€™s attempt to localize itself to cater to Chinese consumers. D&G has launched similar campaigns in Hong Kongย and Japan, in which models were seen against relatively fancier backgrounds with skyscrapers and flashing neon billboards.

The campaign triggered a huge debate in Chinese social media on whether D&G intentionally stereotyped China by choosing outdated street views as background instead of advanced modern areas such as the financial district in the city. Many of the comments on the Chinese social media platform Weibo labeled the photo collection as โ€œoffensive.โ€ One internet user wrote, โ€œIt almost looks like North Korea! This is definitely not what China looks like now!โ€ A photographer on Weibo comparedย (in Chinese) the D&G campaign with a photo collection featuring a Chinese theme that was produced by Vogueย in 1993, saying, โ€œD&G uses hashtag #DGLovesChinaย to promote their campaign, but I donโ€™t sense any love in their photos.โ€

Others called the critical remarks too sensitive: โ€œI guess everyone Chinese should examine themselves before going out. What they wear and where they are going. Are you being a drag on Chinaโ€™s image? If yes, you are not qualified to be Chinese. Meanwhile, we should learn from North Korea to designate a specific area for foreigners to take photos,โ€ a Weibo user ridiculedย (in Chinese) people from the opposite camp. There are more discussion on this topic on this Weibo threadย (in Chinese).


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