Both parties have been in bed together so long, they have effectively merged into one party. America has been a one-party state for decades, where the Chinese Communist party has a conservative and progressive wing, the American Capitalist party has a republican and democrat wing.
Estimates by the World Bank show that China is expected to sustain their annual 8% growth rate for at least another 20 years. Their economy being late to take off, they can continue to take advantage of lessons learned in other economies.
Some pictures taken during the Spring Festival Holidays, first a visit to the “Dream of a Red Mansion” Temple Fair, and later a day at Beijing Happy Valley.
In the last weeks the Chinese Airforce leaked pictures of test flights of their new fifth generation stealth fighter plane. This came as a total shock to the Americans, who have recently began fasing out their comparable F-22 Raptor in favor of the smaller and lighter F-35 JSF, believing they were decades ahead of any serious competition.
This reminded me of a story I once heard about the difference between the American and Soviet space program. While preparing to go to space, the Americans realized that a normal pen wouldn’t work without gravity. To solve this problem, they invested millions of dollars to come up with a solution: the permanent marker. The Soviets on the other hand simply brought a pencil.
Here are some photo’s from our trip to Xiangtan, Hunan a while back, a wedding lunch back in Beijing and a visit to the park.
While walking through the store, I noticed the music they were playing was very nice. We found out it was the new album of Hao Yun (郝云), and moreover, he was coming for a promotion concert that same afternoon! We immediately bought the album to have it autographed later 
As anyone knows, DVDs are dirt-cheap in China (as they should be) While inspecting the back of the sleeve for the movie After Shock I noticed some incorrect information though… Can you spot it?
I have changed the photo’s plug-in which I use to display my Picasa photo’s in this blog to automatically proxy the request for visitors from China, who are not using a VPN. I have been a user of Picasa for a long time, but unfortunately at the moment it is blocked by the GFW (Great Firewall of China). For me …
That is efficiency in China: Sunday morning a train derailed due to a massive landslide claiming 19 casualties. 2000 rescue workers were dispatched. Sunday evening, the damage has been repaired and train service resumes. In The Netherlands it would take two to six weeks…
