[TinyRedLeaf]

Originally Posted by LynnieS

I'm expecting 2011 to be the start of the bust cycle for China, though. There is a lot of money going into that country now for it to drop this year.

Thinking of shorting China? Think again

By Thomas L. Friedman

READING The Herald Tribune over breakfast in Hong Kong harbour last week, my eyes went to the front-page story about how Mr James Chanos — reportedly one of America’s most successful short-sellers, the man who bet that Enron was a fraud and made a fortune when that proved true and its stock collapsed — is now warning that China is "Dubai times 1,000 or worse" and looking for ways to short that country's economy before its bubbles burst.

China's markets may be full of bubbles ripe for a short-seller, and if Mr Chanos can find a way to make money shorting them, God bless him. But after visiting Hong Kong and Taiwan this past week and talking to many people who work and invest their own money in China, I'd offer him two notes of caution.

First, a simple rule of investing that has always served me well: Never short a country with US$2 trillion in foreign-currency reserves.

Second, it is easy to look at China today and see its enormous problems and things that it is not getting right... In the last few days, though, China's central bank has started edging up interest rates and raising the proportion of deposits that banks must set aside as reserves — precisely to head off inflation and take some air out of any asset bubble.

Brains and bridges
And that’s the point. I am reluctant to sell China short, not because I think it has no problems or corruption or bubbles, but because I think it has...a political class focused on addressing its real problems, as well as a mountain of savings with which to do so (unlike in the United States).

...Ten years ago, China had a lot bridges and roads to nowhere. Well, many of them are now connected. It is also on a crash programme of building subways in major cities and high-speed trains to connect them. China also now has 400 million Internet users, and 200 million of them have broadband... America has about 80 million broadband users.

Now take all this infrastructure and mix it together with 27 million students in technical colleges and universities — the most in the world. With just the normal distribution of brains, that's going to bring a lot of brainpower to the market or, as Mr Bill Gates once said to me: "In China, when you're one-in-a-million, there are 1,300 other people just like you."

Equally important, more and more Chinese students educated abroad are returning home to work and start new businesses. I had lunch with a group of professors at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who told me that this year they will be offering some 50 full scholarships for graduate students in science and technology. Major US universities are sharply cutting back.

Vast hinterland
...Finally, as Mr Liu Chao-shiuan, Taiwan's former prime minister, pointed out to me: When Taiwan moved up the value chain from low-end, labour-intensive manufacturing to higher, value-added work, its factories moved to China or Vietnam. It lost them.

In China, low-end manufacturing moves from coastal China to the less-developed western part of the country and becomes an engine for development there. In Taiwan, factories go up and out. In China, they go east to west. "China knows it has problems," said Mr Liu. "But this is the first time it has a chance to actually solve them."

Taiwanese entrepreneurs now have more than 70,000 factories in China. They know the place. So I asked several Taiwanese businessmen whether they would short China. They vigorously shook their heads no, as if I'd asked if they'd go one on one with LeBron James.

But, hey, some people said the same about Enron. Still, I'd rather bet against the euro. Shorting China today? Well, good luck with that, Mr Chanos. Let us know how it works out for you.

- THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Originally Posted by LynnieS

The legal age of marriage for guys in Japan is already 18, so this change just makes both equal.

I was just cracking a facile joke. In any case, legal age of consent to marriage isn't the same as legal age of consent to sex.

Originally Posted by Autumn Demon

My understanding of it is currently wives must take the surname of their husband and children must take the surname of their father. Opposite of "restricting" surname options, the new law would allow children to take the surname of their mother (and for wives to keep their surname name).

No, it's a "restriction" in the sense that all children of a couple must share the same surname, even if their parents don't. This is apparently one of the various aspects of the Bill that Justice Minister Keiko Chiba had to let go because of pro-family opposition.

Originally Posted by SeijiSensei

Is this a law in search of a problem? What surnames do the children of Japanese parents with different surnames use now? If Shinohara-san and Ikezawa-san marry, would their children have surnames like Hamada?

Hyphenated surnames became popular in the States as women entered the professional ranks and married later. Is this law designed to rule out the equivalent of hyphenated names? Is there even an equivalent in a language based on graphical characters?

I think LynnieS has already explained the "law in search of a problem" part pretty well, since the Bill's primary impact would appear to be on Japan's inheritance laws.

But I like the story, small and seemingly innocuous though it is, because of all the various sociological insights and questions it poses:

1) The very fact that a Cabinet minister saw the need for a law to allow women to keep their maiden surnames after marriage illuminates the extent to which the status of women in Japan has changed relative to men.

2) The fact that Japan is debating how children should be named suggests profound demographic shifts in the country, especially in terms of the stability of marriages. More likely than not, divorced couples have become an established norm, just as in many developed countries, along with the associated effects this would have on children.

3) That this demographic trend is occurring in a country with a long, Confucian-inspired, tradition in family values ought to raise concern for other similar countries in East Asia. The West has come to accept failed marriages as a norm — this is not yet the case for many East Asian countries.

4) Finally, the story says interesting things about how the Japanese would identify themselves in the future. Things have become more complicated as the traditions that their society has lived by for centuries dissolve in the face of diverse sociological changes. The story may also have particular resonance for Singaporeans, as my country has just passed a law this week allowing children of a mixed-race marriage to take on a double-barrelled race.

Most Singaporeans are likely to appreciate the change even though they recognise it to be a mere paper formality. It says a lot about the increasing diversity of ethnicity in a country swamped by a massive influx of immigrants in recent years, and about its people's increasing open-mindedness about how ethnicity — and, hence, personal identity — should be defined.


So, it's a simple story, yes, but as the saying goes: "Journalism is the first rough draft of history." It's the little things like these that future historians would one day be poring over in some dusty archive.