Quote:Thousands of officials have fled China over the past 30 years with some 50 billion dollars in public funds, state media said Monday, as the government scrambles to stem the tide of corruption.

As many as 4,000 officials have disappeared, using criminal gangs, mainly in the United States and Australia, to launder their ill-gotten gains, buy real estate and set up false identities, the Global Times said.



A joint task force involving 15 Chinese ministries has been set up to choke off graft in government ranks, the paper said.



In 2009, authorities investigated 103 cases involving the outbound travel of more than 300 officials, the paper said, citing a party official tasked with disciplinary issues.



In one case, the disappearance to France in 2008 of Yang Xianghong, a top Communist Party official in Wenzhou city, led to the arrest of his wife, who was charged with trying to launder 20 million yuan (2.9 million dollars), it said.

Quote:BEIJING (AFP) – More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without spouses in 2020, state media reported on Monday, citing a study that blamed sex-specific abortions as a major factor.

The study, by the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, named the gender imbalance among newborns as the most serious demographic problem for the country's population of 1.3 billion, the Global Times said.

"Sex-specific abortions remained extremely commonplace, especially in rural areas," where the cultural preference for boys over girls is strongest, the study said, while noting the reasons for the gender imbalance were "complex."

Quote:Jan. 12 (PTI): Over 20 Indians have been detained in the Shenzhen region of China for alleged diamond smuggling.



The detentions were made on Friday, and the Chinese authorities are moving to press charges of diamond smuggling against them, sources said.



The Indian embassy in Beijing has taken up the matter with the Chinese government. Indian officials have been granted access tomorrow to the 21 detained.



According to Chinese media reports, 50 people, including 33 foreigners, who were allegedly part of a smuggling ring have been arrested.



The ring procured diamonds in Hong Kong and hired Indians and local carriers to smuggle them into Shenzhen before distributing them among factories, a media report said.

Quote:Sumir Kaul

First Published : 17 Jan 2010



NEW DELHI: Army officials in Leh were a part of a meeting convened by the Jammu and Kashmir government that agreed that China was encroaching into the land with "specific design" to grab a particular area to extend its control till Indus river.



"As per all maps and evidences, the Dokbug pasture (in Northeast of Leh) land undisputedly belongs to India and China is moving with specific design to grab this area to extend its control till Indus (river)," according to an official report.



During the meeting chaired by Commissioner (Leh) A K Sahu and attended by Brigadier General Staff of 14 Corps Brig Sarat Chand and Colonel Indraj Singh, it was also agreed that all agencies must take "coordinated and effective measure to destroy the Chinese design and save our territory."



Army Chief General Deepak Kapoor, however, has recently dismissed the allegation that Indian land had shrunk along the Line of Actual Control.



The Army Chief had raised this issue during a Unified Command meeting earlier this week in Jammu and Kashmir as well but state Chief Secretary S S Kapoor made it clear to him that the state establishment did not agree with the Army's perception.



Other state officials present at the meeting said there was evidence suggesting that the Indian land had shrunk with China in the Himalayan town.



Originating in the Tibetan plateau in the vicinity of Lake Mansarovar in Tibet Autonomous Region, the river runs a course through the Ladakh district of Jammu and Kashmir, then enters Northern Areas (Gilgit-Baltistan)and later merges with the Arabian Sea near the port city of Karachi in Sindh.



The total length of the river is 3,180 kilometres (1,976 miles) and it is Pakistan's longest river.



The Dokbug area is the same place where "Rebos" (nomads) take their cattle during this period for grazing. In December 2008 and early last year, the nomads were driven out from the area by People's Liberation Army of China.



"The meeting decided that no such things would be allowed to happen in future and the morale of the nomads would be boosted through appropriate interventions from our side," the report said.



The meeting, which was attended by officials from the Jammu and Kashmir government, Ministry of Home Affairs and Army, "also felt the need for strengthening the patrolling."



Last year, Chinese troops had entered nearly 1.5 km into the Indian territory on July 31 near Mount Gya, recognised as International border by India and China, and painted boulders and rocks with "China" and "Chin9" in red spray paint.



The 22,420 ft Mount Gya, also known as "fair princess of snow" by Army, is located at the tri-junction of Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir, Spiti in Himachal Pradesh, and Tibet. Its boundary was marked during the British era and regarded as International border by the two countries.



Before this, Chinese helicopters had violated Indian air space on June 21 along the Line of Actual Control in Chumar region and also heli-dropped some expired food.



PTI

Quote:The Indian economy is not immune to risks. The government has to contend with a yawning budget deficit, and last year's weak monsoon rains will likely undercut agricultural production and soften rural consumer spending. But rapid growth is expected to continue. The World Bank forecasts India's economy will surge 7.6% in calendar 2010 and 8% in 2011, not far behind the 9% rate it predicts for China for each of those years. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, when speaking about his country's more plodding pace of economic policymaking, has said that "slow and steady will win the race." The Great Recession appears to have proved him right.

Quote:"India maintained robust growth without Beijing's hefty stimulus in part because it is less exposed to the international economy. China's exports represented 35% of GDP compared to only 24% for India in 2008. Thus India was afforded more protection from the worst effects of the financial crisis in the West, while China's government needed to be much more active to replace lost exports to the U.S. More significantly, though, India's domestic economy provides greater cushion from external shocks than China's. Private domestic consumption accounts for 57% of GDP in India compared to only 35% in China. India's confident consumer didn't let the economy down. Passenger car sales in India in December jumped 40% from a year earlier. "What we see (in India) is a fundamental domestic demand story that doesn't stall in the time of a global downturn," says Asianomics' Walker." Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1957281,00.html#ixzz0dvH51mEt

Quote:The government toughened regulations for foreign workers last year after discovering that about 40,000 Chinese building power plants used business visas instead of employment visas, skirting taxes and taking jobs from locals. The crackdown restricted employment visas to skilled people in senior jobs and limited foreigners to 1 percent of a project’s workforce.



Building Power Plants



India is attracting foreign workers facing jobless rates of 9.7 percent in the U.S. and 10 percent in the 16-nation euro region. India doesn’t regularly release unemployment data.

Little attention was paid to visas in the past decade as the government sought investments from abroad. The number of registered foreign nationals more than doubled to 351,999 in 2007 from 137,474 the year before, according to the latest data from the Ministry of Home Affairs Web site.



Three power plants being built by billionaire Anil Ambani’s Reliance Power Ltd. placed orders with Shanghai Electric Group Co. Lanco Infratech Ltd. awarded a contract for its 1,015- megawatt plant to Deyang, China-based Dongfang Electric Corp.

“It has come to the notice of the government that a large number of foreign nationals, including Chinese, were coming for execution of projects/contracts in India on Business Visas instead of the Employment Visas,” Harish Rawat, junior minister for labor, said Dec. 16 in a written response to lawmakers.



Foreign workers without employment visas aren’t paying taxes, said Amitabh Singh, a partner at Ernst & Young Pvt. in New Delhi.