miamizsun wrote: 
I was aware that, as with Stalin in the USSR, Mao's collectivization of agriculture was a total disaster with starvation being rampant.

Mao: Greatest Mass Murderer in World History?

Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years'

By Arifa Akbar, Arts Correspondent

Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history - which has until now remained hidden - has international resonance. "It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century.... It was like Pol Pot's genocide multiplied 20 times over," he said

100-km Chinese traffic jam enters Day 9

This may be posted in another thread already.  It's probably old news to some folks, but...

 Servo wrote:
Depends where in China. In the South yes, still true, in the North, not anymore.
The average heigth has increased twice as fast as in the US in the past decades.
Treasury bonds effect?

I was going to post this in the Obama thread, but decided not to jack it. However, since it's copied into my browser already, I'm putting it here.
*********************************************************************************************************************************************** http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/China_water_crisis
http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Lake_Baikal

 1+1 =?

  

 ytrav24 wrote: 
Shorter.

Thanks for the reminder!
Happy New Year

Kung Hei Fat Choi!

Welcome Year of Earth Ox

2009

Skype Messages Monitored In China
"Human-rights activists have discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives Internet text conversations sent by customers of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay. Researchers say the system monitors a list of politically charged words that includes words related to the religious group Falun Gong, Taiwan independence, the Chinese Communist Party and also words like democracy, earthquake and milk powder. The encrypted list of words inside the Tom-Skype software blocks the transmission of these words and records personal information about the customers who send the messages. Researchers say their discovery contradicts a public statement made by Skype executives in 2006 that 'full end-to-end security is preserved and there is no compromise of people's privacy.' The Chinese government is not alone in its Internet surveillance efforts. In 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency was monitoring large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of an eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11 attacks. 'This is the worst nightmares of the conspiracy theorists around surveillance coming true,' says Ronald J. Deibert, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. 'It's "X-Files" without the aliens.'"