30 anos de milagre económico

The China Business Review

Em revista 30 anos de reforma na China. Ver em especial a primeira missão comercial americana à “Nova China”: America's First Trade Mission to "the New China"

Monges do templo de Shaolin rendem-se à economia de mercado

Numa iniciativa arrojada, considerando que tem origem num mítico templo budista, os monges de Shaolin tomaram em mãos a gestão de quatro templos de Kunming, na província de Yunnan, por um período de 20 anos, aproveitando as vantagens da economia de mercado.

“O avançado sistema de gestão de Shaolin deve alargar-se a mais templos da China para ajudar a promover o budismo zen”, afirmou Shi Yongxin, o abade chefe do mosteiro. Yongxin, que foi estudante de gestão, é também conhecido como “Shaolin CEO”.

Fundado em 477, o templo situa-se em Song Shan, umas das cinco montanhas sagradas do Taoísmo, na província de Henan, a cerca de 600 quilómetros de Pequim. Shaolin significa “floresta jovem”, um nome cuja origem está relacionada com um incêndio que destruiu a floresta à volta do templo, a qual foi replantada mais tarde.

O templo de Shaolin, famoso berço do kung fu, faz parte do imaginário de muitos portugueses. A série “Os Jovens Heróis de Shaolin”, na versão original "Ying hung chut siu nin", estreou-se nos anos 80 em Portugal e conta a história de três amigos que se tentam tornar mestres de kung fu, ao mesmo tempo que lutam contra o opressor regime Ching.

Fonte: Jornal Público

Taschen: China, Portrait of a Country

World, meet China
The People’s Republic seen by 88 Chinese photographers

This book brings together a vast selection of images by Chinese photographers since 1949, giving readers a visual journey across the great People's Republic; edited by esteemed photojournalist Liu Heung Shing, longtime Associated Press correspondent and Time magazine contributor.

In post-Mao China, late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping urged his one billion countrymen to "seek truth from facts." Taking its cue from Deng's overture, China today is the leading economic story of the 21st century. The process by which China navigated the path from periphery to a central position in world affairs dominates the debate about Asia and China's relationship to the western world. Pulitzer-winning photojournalist Liu Heung Shing charts the visual history of sixty years of the People's Republic (1949 to 2008), and along the way aims to illustrate its humanistic course.

Via work by 88 Chinese photographers, this collection of images shows how the Chinese people have blossomed in spite of enduring previous decades of extraordinary hardship. When China opened the curtain at the summer Olympics in 2008 and the world’s focus fell upon Beijing, these photographs served to map out the remarkable road the Chinese had traveled to rejoin the rest of the world. To help place the images in context, also included is a chronology listing all the major political events in China.


Taschen

China commits to winning IT-based warfare

The Chinese president has vowed to accelerate the pace of military modernisation in a speech made to mark the 17th Communist Party of China Congress on 15 October in Beijing.
In the speech, which was published on the Chinese government's website on 16 October, Hu Jintao said: "We must implement the military strategy for the new period, accelerate the revolution in military affairs with Chinese characteristics, ensure military preparedness and enhance the military's capability to respond to various security threats and accomplish diverse military tasks."
He added: "Bearing in mind the overall strategic interests of national security and development, we must take both economic development and national defence into consideration and make our country prosperous and our armed forces powerful."
Hu, who is also chairman of China's Central Military Commission, stated that in order to "win IT-based warfare", China will "accelerate the composite development of mechanisation and computerisation, carry out military training under IT-based conditions, intensify our efforts to train a new type of high-calibre military personnel in large numbers and change the mode of generating combat capabilities".
The reference to winning IT-based warfare is a key part of the Chinese government's most recent defence White Paper, issued in December 2006, which stated that the country was committed to military modernisation over three eras, leading to the development of what Beijing calls 'informationised' armed forces, or what the West refers to as network-centric forces.
The White Paper states: "China pursues a three-step development strategy in modernising its national defence and armed forces, in accordance with the state's overall plan to realise modernisation. The first step is to lay a solid foundation by 2010, the second is to make major progress around 2020 and the third is to basically reach the strategic goal of building informationised armed forces and being capable of winning informationised wars by the mid-21st century."

Jon Grevatt Jane's Industry Reporter