First of all thanks for your understanding way of writing.
Many Chinese have been getting angry on forums lately and say a lot of bad things,
which gives a negative image of China and doesn't help China, who is already in trouble
(Coca Cola and sport companies wonder if they should really be associated to the games)

2nd, if you are not affiliated in any ways with the chinese governement,
be very careful because you may get into trouble if the content
of this site goes little polemic, even if your originzl intention is
to defend China. That happened to an environmentalist who tried to help
fight the pollution from manufacturing companies and is now in Jail.

3rd,
Occidental Media are mostly private companies.
This means information is their prime material.
So what you describe as biased information, is a way of exposing the information to make it look "HOT", which is a very negative point here in Europe because
it gives people a wrong idea. Wrong but not necessarily false, and people KNOW that medias can't be trusted, so they don't hesitate to change their mind or protest the medias view (Iraq for ex..)

However, the governement doesn't have much influence on it,
it can only censor for a while, not decide of who says what in the west.

4th thing.
In China, during the cultural revolution, all the books were burned,
all the teachers who had a different view were killed or tortured,
all the history was written again with a point of view that was acceptable by Mao.
This means 5 generations of propaganda at school.
As a Chinese, how can you tell the difference between what's right and what's wrong ?
Who wrote the history books in China ?

Even Hu Jintao doesn't exaclty know what happenned before the cultural revolution,
because he went to school at a period when propaganda was very active.

So basically an historical information given by a chinese citizen
is not considered reliable because the basic source of this very information is 100% biased.

Only independant Historians and non mainland china professionals are qualified to
give information on chinese history before the cultural revolution.

So sentences like "Mao helped defeat the japanese" or "Tibet has always been a part of China"
are not acceptable. You should say:

"According to Chinese history books, Tibet has always been a part of china".

Taiwan and HK may have heard a different story...

I don't mean to be negative - i'm just warning you to be as cautious as possible.
Cite your sources, and when you have an information, mention where it is from.
If you don't do that, anything you say can be considered biased and your legitimacy will be
immediately be lost.

Finally, i love china and know it well,
i hope your site will help people understand what is china
in 2008. Most occidental people don't know China much at all,
they only know Tian An Men Massacre, Hong Kong Kung Fu Movies
and cantonese food.

I have just been sent a glimpse of Chinese "culture" in the form of a foto recently smuggled out of Tibet - it shows a back room of the Lao La Sa Zhou Fang restaurant in Lhasa where the chef prepares and a Chinese national subsequently eats an aborted Tibetan fetus - the foto is not a fake as it was taken at great personal risk by one of the kitchen staff appalled by what he witnessed and then sent to the USA via India.

To JBM,

Thanks you very much for your comment and suggestions. As far as history goes, my view is we should focus on the current reality first. While how it came to this point is not completely irrelavent, what it is now is what we need to face and solve. Based on that view I myself rarely use history as an argument.

One can obviously learn valuable lessons from history, though.

To Tenzing Teshi:

There are ugly and cruel things, some of them are completely rumors, some of them are half rumor half truth. The government is also stronlgy against those guly things and try to use all tools available to bring those to justice. The state run media constantly send reporters around the country to try to expose those, in an attempt to blow local official's cover up.

Having problems doesn't mean the government is evil. On the contrary, it means the government faces a greater challenge.

Well anyway, one thing i'm sure:

China is giving a very bad image and doesn't understand what the world expects from
a country so huge.

Excuses and reasons are not enough, what China needs to do is
become more active not only in economy, but take resonsability in the
world's problems, such as environment. The reaction from abroad show
that China deceived.

China could be a leader, but they are not ready to face responsibilities yet.
The Olympics show that China is not ready yet to be a pat of the superpowers.

Superpower involves politics, military, diplomacy, science, education, society,
international leadership.

Right now, India fits this definition pretty well.
India is going to surpass China, because India has a strategy.
They focus on develloping economics sectors without letting to much foreig investment
taking control and without sacrificing its local culture.
Difficut, long strategy, but in the end India will emerge as a respectable country and
a very influencial and respected superpower.

Chin doesn't have a strategy and has never had one.
The Chinese strategy is "let's see what happens".
China is very far from being the superpower it claims.
Their devloppment strategy is " alittle bit of this, a little bit of that"

It's just a big country. National pride, but nothing to be pride of.

What i say is hard to admit for the chinese, but China is not doing good.
They're just chasing Rainbows.

Hum...I understand you care about the environment...and expect a whole lot more from the Chinese government. It's nothing about national pride or execuse. Being poor is being poor, it’s certainly not something to be proud of. While it does not execuse anything, it does give you an idea of how much they can afford and what you can expect --- in another word, what is a realistic goal and what is not. All I can tell you is when you ask somebody who makes $90 a year (the official poverty line in China, there are about 20 million of them) whether they want food or clean air, they are going to choose food, and you want to force them to spare $200 (which is greater than their whole income) for waste water management?

Indian's per capital is less than half of China's. There is no doubt that Indian has a lot of advantages over China, one being their uncontrolled population growth --- some says that's a resource and some say that's a time bomb. China has a lot of advantages on other issues, one being the strong administrative power I pointed out in my posts, again, some says that is disastrous. While I don’t want to judge who has a strategy and who doesn’t because it’s all about how much you gain and how much you lose, I would say it’s too early to predict Indian will surpass China in the near future.

It’s understandable that you want the earth to be as green as possible, so am I. But I would feel rather shameful about the idea of getting a little greener with the cost of hundred of millions poor Chinese’s livelihood. Besides, Chinese government is not sitting there doing nothing, they’ve put forth laws, spare resources, guiding a transformation of the economy structures, and has gone as far as putting environmental goals as one of the benchmark of government officials, but first it takes time, second it must be balanced along with a host of other issues. People live first, then live better. It never works the other way around.

I never say China is doing great and I always believe China can do better. The million dollar question is how? You ask an environmental people they tell you environment is above everything, otherwise the earth will explode before you get food into your mouth; You ask a human rights activist they say democracy first, regardless whether it’s possible to even hold a peaceful vote or not; You ask a trade organization they say get rid of all tariffs, let the money flow and you will be soon swimming in it; You ask big corporations they say open up your market and everything will turn bright the second day; Your ask our own HongHong government they say abolish tax, make it a free economy and it will grow like hell.

What would you do when you hear all these different voices? Doing nothing? Horrible. Doing everything asked? I wish you could. So it’s always a compromise somewhere in between.

Who talked about the poor ?

I was talking about the rich in China.
What do they do to help environpment ?
Investing in industry ?
Pay taxes to protect the environment ?

Rich people in China are very Rich whil the poor are very poor.
That's unfair.

That's a definition of capitalism

They pay tax and provide jobs for the poor. Unfair, just like poor, is another problem China faces. But pretty much everything has to start from the money. If you looked at China's tax revenue, you will see an annual increase of about 20%, where would you think that money come from?

When the government gets all the money, they set aside some for environment, set aside some for education, set aside some for defense, pretty much all the same boring budget stuff you would expect, and they redirect a lot of them to the poor region in the form of infrastructure investment. The key is everything has to be balanced. If you tax them too much, these factory moves to Vietnam and Indonesia and leave all the poor in the cold. If you tax them too little, the workers doesn’t get paid enough and get too upset and burn the factory down and again these factory moves away. If you spend too much on the environment by cutting a big pie out of education then less people get educated and when these dumb people grow up they might set the earth on fire before the sun does. If your infrastructure sucks cell phone doesn’t work those business owner also leave. With a country of that size and dramatic difference between different regions, everything has to be in a very delicate balance.

The government has been doing a lot of things: putting out laws so that heavy polluters pay more tax; change administrative procedures so that better urban planning can be implemented; raising the minimum wage standard so that labor intensive factories would feel more pressures to find something else more “constructive” to do; and gradually appreciate the yuan in order to slowly adjust an export oriented economy to focus more on domestic demand. What they are doing doesn’t appear enough from every front --- environmental standard too low; minimum wage too low; infrastructures not good enough, yuan is still tightly controlled even though it has appreciated quite some against the dollar. But that’s the balance --- if you stretch too much to one side, the other side collapses. And if that happens, hundreds of millions Chinese would suffer.

Trust me, China no longer point a gun at you head and ask you put out your money. They learn from the west and try to use all the economical leverages to guide you. Where they are different is, they put out their leverages quicker than the west due to their strong administrative power and the priorities and extends of the leverages can be very different than the west due to their unique circumstance. But all the leverages still have to fall into a basic framework of sense, natural and government laws. They learned that no too long ago, while they still make stupid mistakes now and then and they still have a lot of problems to get the law enforced, but more and more officials and citizens are getting the point and it definitely sounds better and so far has been working better than a gun.

China doesn’t have enough rich people. If you looked at the richest people in the world, you will see fews are Chinese, and most Chinese in the list are from Hong Kong. Neither China has a solid middle class. What they do have is a large amount of poor people. There are 20 millions below $90/year, when you look up, you get another 30 millions between $90 and $125. That’s close to the population of France with a yearly income below $125, and you still get tens of millions from $125 to $200 and so on. Not only they present a huge problem and challenge for the government, their lives are also lives and should be equally respected.