Korean Female Cheerleaders

South Korean Cho Soojin was recently interviewed by The Beijinger, an English-language city/lifestyle magazine published in the Chinese capital.

Cho first came to Beijing to learn Chinese and ended up teaching cheerleading dance moves to China's top cheerleaders preparing for the Beijing Olympics.

Cho reportedly established herself after her squad of dancers "turned heads at the 2002 World Cup."

The use of Chinese elements in their dances and costumes was said to have attracted a lot of positive attention, and her Soojin Dance Studio was later designated the official cheerleading training center.

When asked how she got into coaching cheerleading in China, Cho said she really liked Chinese culture.

Of more interest, she said - "I am an extrovert, but in South Korea women are not allowed to behave like this ... I feel more comfortable in China."

Hmm, not allowed to behave like what? Like cheerleaders? Not allowed to prance around and show off their nifty dance moves? Then what about those countless public performances (pictured) which I have seen in Seoul involving girls wearing mini-skirts and doing exactly just that?

Korea amazes me. Koreans more so.

Maybe Cho was actually saying that while the Korean public loves watching these performances, they consider girls who undertake such performances unbecoming?

Kim Jong-Il

My Korean studies professors might be appalled if they know that I have been reading The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding North Korea, Dr. C. Kenneth Quinones and Joseph Tragert (Alpha 2003).

But the book - certainly easy to read - does contain interesting (though probably unverified, if not suspected) snippets of information about the Hermit Kingdom.

Such as the author's speculation that Kim Jong-Il probably wore large, dark sunglasses because of "eye problems."

"Kim is a diabetic and probably has cataracts. He wore sunglasses to protect his eyes from bright sunshine. But he may have had the cataracts removed during his 2001 trip to Moscow. Ever since that trip, which took him across Siberia by train, he has appeared less frequently wearing sunglasses," the authors wrote.

Kim's father Kim Il Sung was described as a smart investor whose Taesong Investment company, a firm registered in the United Kingdom, deals in stocks on the London Exchange, and trades precious metals, especially in gold, in Europe's markets. The Kim family is said to maintain large secret accounts in Swiss banks.

Even though Kim is reportedly famous for giving away Rolex watches and luxury cars to trusted generals and officials, "he apparently does not relish such status symbols."

Bush-ism

This entry probably has no place in this East Asian blog. But I simply cannot resist.

Am currently reading Frank Bruni's Ambling Into History - The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush (Harper Collins, 2002), a book I paid 50 cents for at the used book section of the Rockville Library in Maryland.

The book gives a private glimpse of Bush behind the scenes, "a portrait that is sometimes intimate, sometimes skeptical, but always human."

But most hilarious were the bloopers, or in Bruni's words "a bumper crop of bloopers" made by Bush.

"Potential missile launches" became "potential menshul losses".

"Tactical nuclear weapons" morphed into "tacular nucular weapons."

He sympathized with the difficulties that some Americans faced in trying "to put food on your family." He believed that the country should pursue free-trade policies that knocked down not just tariffs and barriers but also "bariffs and terriers."

As Bruni noted, "the spaniels and retrievers could only wonder if they would be next."

Bush called the Greeks "Grecians" and the people in Kosovo "Kosovians."

He said "vile" instead of "vital" when he spoke about hemisphere.

When he described his approach to the economy as an effort to "make the pie higher", a "theoretically sensible strategy if he was thinking in terms of meringues or souffles" quipped Bruni.

During a visit to an elementary school that was celebrating "Perseverance Month", Bush kept saying "preservation", eliciting the remark that a presidential candidate quickly learns: "You've got to preserve", mused Bruni, who added "but only if he plans to take homemade jams and jellies with him on the road."

And instead of saying "subliminal" Bush uttered "subliminable."

Bush also reportedly said this - "People are going to resist the flows of capital the likes of which we've never seen before, which is going to create tension - will create a sense of uncertainty on the one hand, but uncertainty on the other." Hmm.

And in a speech at Reagan International Airport which had finally reopened two weeks after the September 11th attacks, Bush said that "ticket counters and airplanes will fly out of Reagan airport."

China's Benign Involvement in Africa

Still on China's involvement in Africa, and still a pro-China view, but something which we are not hearing enough of.

In an article by He Wenping titled Untainted Picture of China's Africa Policy (China Daily, 5 August 2008), the author noted that despite "overzealous hyping by the western media about China's cooperation model of infrastructure in exchange for resources," only 7 per cent of China' s investment in Africa infrastructure is connected to the excavation (a careful choice of word to avoid "exploitation"?) of natural resources.

He added that China's involvement in Africa is totally different from the "brutal and bloody ways" in which the "Western colonists (had) plundered African resources in the distant past".

Rather, China cooperated with Africa in resource development, following the principle of "reciprocity, mutual benefit, and joint development." Such an approach is aimed at helping African countries "turn their disadvantage in natural resources into competitiveness and pushing African countries and regions toward sustainable development."

As evidence, He (He, incidentally, is a she) cited the example of Sudan where by the end of 2003, China had invested a total of $2.7 billion, laying 1,560 km of oil pipelines, as well as building an oil refinery with an annual production capacity of 2.6 million tons of crude oil and a number of gas stations.

These projects reportedly turned Sudan from oil importer into an oil exporter, and gave the country an "oil industy setup complete with prospecting, production, refining, transportation and sale operations."

But turning to Nigeria, which does not have the benefit of "joint development" with China, it is a country that exports crude oil while still "relying on imported gasoline more than 50 years after Royal Shell started extracting oil there, because it has yet to possess a complete oil industry with both extracting and processing capabilities."

He is a researcher with the Institute of West Asian and African Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

China's Involvement in Africa

An interesting view, for me at least, about China's growing (and often maligned) role in Africa from Bill Durodie, an associate fellow at The Royal Institute of International Affairs titled China's Helpful Role in the New World Order (China Daily, 23 July 2008).

Durodie argued that China's increasing influence in Africa is "all too often discussed without regard to the new situation there. Africa is an opportunity and Chinese investment there is a consequence of this, not the cause."

After all, countries that have been growing at 5-6 per cent a year for a decade need new roads, power stations and manufactured goods.

Durodie noted that Chinese trade and investment merely mirrors western patterns of activity but on a smaller scale, and in only a handful of African countries.

"Notably, the Swiss and the Belgians operate significant concerns in the Congo too, and the Chinese stake in the copper industry there is one-third the size of that owned by the US giant - Freeport," Durodie wrote.

But clearly, China's involvement in Africa is upsetting not just western governments, but also western NGOs. Because for years, the latter had sought "to teach their domestic audiences that all that is required in Africa is small-scale and sustainable development."

"Oxfam continues to encourage people to buy Africans a goat, some feed, condoms, a toilet, even dung as a fertilizer for Christmas. And of course, all of this comes with a great deal of moral hectoring about aid and the need for population control."

Hence, little surprise that the Chinese, with their no strings attached investment policies have been so welcomed on the continent. Chinese loans come with few demands, benchmark conditions, requirements for risk audits and environmental impact assessments.

Durodie further argued that China's presence in Sudan is a sign of its weakness, rather than its strength. After all, other oil-producing parts of Africa, such as Nigeria, had already been carved up by the US and the EU. Hence, China has been left with markets thought of as too small by western investors.

He also pointed out that China's influence has been beneficial in western terms, as it has brought pressure on the Khartoum government to end the conflict. Beijing has supported UN intervention in Darfur and contributed several hundred engineers to the UN African Union Mission to Darfur.

Of course, as Durodie acknowledged, China's influence on the continent will not be entirely benign.

"There will be problems and elements of exploitation there. But it is a sign of the Western imagination's inability to view Africans as capable of dealing with their own problems and the West's obsession with viewing China as malign - that things are presented the way they are."

Too Many Public Servants in China?

Kjeld Erik Brodsgaard said it is not true that there are too many public officials in China. Indeed, he argued that internationally speaking, China has comparatively fewer public employees.

State-salaried people in China constitute 5.1 per cent of the total population and 8.6 of total employment. This is lower than Denmark's 14.9 and 29.9 per cents respectively.

Interestingly, among the developed countries, Korea has one of the lowest percentages of public sector employment as a percentage of total employment - 11.2 per cent in 2004.

Brodsgarrd noted that the impression of having too many public officials was mainly conveyed in speeches by government officials and scholarly publications.

He wrote: "Not only is the Chinese bureaucracy small, it is also plagued by a lack of qualified personnel. To be true, in recent years, the education and professional quality of government personnel has risen considerably, but there are still many problems such as the widespread misuse of academic degrees and titles. "

These include changing technical school and post-secondary school diplomas into college degrees or even doctoral degrees, and equating courses taken at Party Schools to professional diplomas or university degrees.

But clearly, authorities are aware of the problems, and have often stressed the need to build a contingent of qualified personnel so as to improve the state and the party's governing capacity.

After all, as Brodsgarrd pointed out, the Chinese leadership (pictured) has "learned its lesson from the collapse of the Soviet Union and they know that improving the quality of public officials and strengthening the capacity of governing institutions is a sine qua non for continued party rule."

More on Chinese Civil Servants

Still on Kjeld Erik Brodsgaard's article. He noted that civil servants are classified according to the nature of their work, level of responsibility and qualification, ability and political integrity, working experience and the degree of complexity/difficulty involved in the position.

Based on such qualifications, civil servants are divided into 15 grades. And corresponding to this hierarchy is a four-component wage system : position salary, grade salary, basic salary and seniority salary.

According to this system, in 2003 the president of China (pictured) earned a salary of 3,186 yuan per month. This sum composed of position salary (1,750 yuan), grade salary (1,166 yuan), basic salary (230 yuan) and seniority salary (40 yuan).

"Basic salary and seniority salary is the same for everyone in the civil service; only position salary and grade salary vary. There have been some adjustments to the salaries of civil servants recently, but the basic system remains unchanged," Brodsgaard wrote.

He added that a civil servant without higher education will not be able to go beyond division level or become a top leader without having reached the division (chu, 处) level before the age of 40 and the department (ju，局) level before the age of 45. This, according to Brodsgaard, has resulted in a much better educated and younger bureaucracy than during Mao Zedong's and Deng Xiaoping's times.

Chinese Civil Servants

Just who are the Chinese civil servants?

In an article titled Managing China's Civil Servants by Kjeld Erik Brodsgaard (Interpreting China's Development, Ed. Wang Gungwu and John Wong, World Scientific Publishing, 2007), there are 64 million Chinese on the public payroll.

But only 6.37 million of these can be categorised as civil servants.

According to the Civil Servant Law which took effect in 2006, all public servants should be recruited through just, open and fair examinations. Officials should also take the blame and quit their posts "if their mistakes or negligence cause major losses or serious social repercussions." They are also required to stay out of cases involving their relatives.

"Civil servants are normally considered as cadres, but not all cadres are civil servants. In fact there are 42 million cadres in China, and only those working in administrative state organs are civil servants. This means that public employees working in shiye danwei (事业单位) such as schools, hospitals, cultural institutions, social service, etc cannot be regarded as civil servants," Brodsgaard wrote.

Civil servants are not necessarily party members. However, it is difficult to go any further than the level of division head (chuzhang，处长) without a party membership.

"It is almost impossible to be appointed to the "real leadership position" without being a party member, although there are an increasing number of non-party members in vice positions."