Welcome to ChinaWatch, WMB’s digest of news from the country with the world’s second largest economy. Click the links for more info. The Great Firewall
As Arab governments from Bahrain to Yemen and the clerical rulers in Iran alike wrestle with how to get a grip on the Internet's role in spreading unrest, the Communist Party in Beijing has steadily applied one of the world's most sophisticated censorship programs.
Instead of shutting down the Internet completely, as Egypt briefly did in an unsuccessful bid to save former President Hosni Mubarak's regime, China carefully picks and chooses what material is allowed to filter through.
And while troops in Bahrain opened fire on crowds of demonstrators, China so far has been successful in keeping dissidents from gathering momentum, in part by crushing their ability to post manifestos or form groups online.
While the Internet hasn't carried the momentum of those uprisings nor has it addressed the myriad of complex underlying factors, it's thought to have galvanized groups of key protest organizers.
But Beijing so far hasn't had to roll back or reconsider Internet access issues, because in China, they didn't exist to begin with.
Widely known as the Great Firewall, the restrictive measures emanating from Beijing keep a majority of China's estimated 457 million Web users from accessing anything online that the government considers politically sensitive.
The targeted sites - such as Facebook and Twitter - have been used to organize or report on recent standoffs between troops and protesters in Bahrain and Egypt.
The result is a parallel system in which the bare news of events such as those now roiling the Arab world can be reported while any analysis that might draw parallels to domestic issues in China is omitted. Or, as has been the case recently, it can be accompanied with dire warnings about the dangers of turmoil.
Cash Crops Grow
Fueled by a growing middle class with an appetite for meat, and now, the money to pay for it, China became the top importer of U.S. agriculture goods in 2010, surpassing all other nations for the first time in history.
What’s more, the change in top players — China imported $17.5 billion while Canada imported $16.9 billion — occurred during a year of record exports.
The United States sold $115.8 billion in agricultural products worldwide last year.
That’s good news for Iowa farmers who have seen demand and prices rising for both corn and soybeans in the past decade. As of late last week, corn was trading at $7 a bushel and soybeans at $14 a bushel.
And unlike so many tennis shoes, shower curtains and washing machines, the means of producing soybeans and corn can’t really be exported.
“Our top soil is just freakishly good,” says David Swenson, an economist at Iowa State University.
“There are very few places in the rest of the world that can grow crops in such abundance. There are some parts in South America like Brazil and parts of Paraguay, but it’s really the Midwest that is so productive,” he says.
What the Chinese are buying the most is U.S. soybeans. In 2000, China was 19 percent of the U.S. export market; in 2010 it was 58 percent.
“Basically, China is just driving the demand. It can come in and literally move the market,” says Grant Kimberly, director of market development for the Iowa Soybean Association.
“Their economy is growing at 8 to 10 percent a year, so when you multiply that by 1.2 billion people, well, it’s like nothing we’ve ever experienced before.”
ChinaWatch
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