Earlier this year, there was a ruckus when Beijing authorities ordered local restaurants to stop serving dog meat. No one wanted visitors to the Summer Olympics disgusted by the local menus.

Now, the uproar is over cat meat on the menu.

It began with a report early this week in the Southern Metropolis Daily that said as many as 1,500 cats a time were being shipped from Nanjing along the Yangtze River down to the Pearl River Delta to sate appetite for cat meat in southern China.

Here are excerpts from that report, translated courtesy of the Danwei website:

At 3:37 on December 10th, the K25 train arrived at Dongguan East Station. About 1,500 cats had been sent on the train from Nanjing. Eight men wearing camouflage got on the train and started to move off the cages crammed with cats. Every time a cage landed on the ground, cats screeched in pain.

The invoice showed that this shipment contained 1,500 cats, and included a sterilization certificate and an animal quarantine certificate issued by official veterinerians.

And this:

Following a man who bought some cats, the reporter arrived at a Cantonese food restaurant where cat is priced for 36 yuan per kilo. In the restaurant, customers ordered a dish called "braised cat," which cost 147 yuan. Describing the dish, the waitress said that cat meat has the medicinal property of "nourishing yin and boosting yang." The customers said that they wanted to try it because they were curious.

Cats are packed in cages (from Nalan Jingmeng's blog)The reporter traced the source of the cats to suburban counties of Nanjing, where some people make a living catching cats and selling them for about 10 to 20 yuan each to wholesalers. These cat thieves are called "cat fishermen." A fisherman can catch about 20 cats in one night. A Nanjing-based organization which is committed to helping stray cats confirmed to the newspaper that there are far fewer stray cats in the city this year than normal.

Click here for a Chinese language website with rather pathetic photos of cats in cages and wooden boxes.

The news article triggered a wave of sympathy for the cats, and on Thursday several dozen protesters gathered in Beijing outside the Guangdong provincial government offices.

The issue has now gotten coverage across the mainstream Chinese media. One source says as many as 10,000 cats a day face a wok-ey future in Guangdong.

You may recall that during the SARS crisis in 2003, some health experts say they virus may have initially incubated in civet cats sold in wet markets, then leapt to humans.

Item: Blog postings will be limited until the New Year. I'll be on vacation in Florida.

Recent headlines have focused on the factories that are locking up their gates in places like the Pearl River Delta and Zhejiang Province, leaving thousands of migrant workers out of work.

But it is not even the big manufacturing companies going bust that ought to be of concern, says one senior analyst. Rather, it’s the real estate developers.

“A toy factory can lay off 4,000 or 5,000 workers at most. But even a small developer can lay off 50,000 workers,” Jing Ulrich, the chairman of China equities for JP Morgan, said at a recent seminar that I attended at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing.

Anyone who has seen a major construction project under way in China’s big cities knows how construction companies throw workers at a project. At one point before construction companies finished erecting Terminal 3 at Beijing’s international airport, there were 50,000 workers just at that one site.

Even small developers have multiple projects ongoing at any given time. So if a developer goes belly up suddenly, a lot of workers get the boot.

According to an article in today’s China Daily, the property sector employs 77 million people.

The construction industry also has a huge knock-on effect elsewhere in the economy. Ulrich noted that 50 percent of China’s steel production goes to construction.

Ulrich says she things property sales have hit bottom and are picking up. But China’s government is still clearly worried. Today, it announced tax breaks for the real estate sector, including a move to let people sell their homes tax-free after only two years, a reduction from five years.

The most widely known foreigner in China is finally getting some recognition in his home country – Canada.

As most foreign residents of China can attest, just about every Chinese knows who Dashan is. Dashan, or “Big Mountain,” is the Chinese name of Mark Rowswell, a Canadian who has mastered Mandarin to an enviable degree.

Last week, Rowswell was one of dozens of Canadians to become members of the Order of Canada, the highest honor the nation bestows.

Dashan is beloved among China. He first came to the attention of Chinese in late 1988 when he appeared on a New Year’s Gala program on CCTV because some that Wikipedia says might have been seen by 550 million people. He has since parlayed that into a business of emceeing TV shows, promoting products, teaching Chinese on state televisions and having his mug pasted in ads all over China (see photo for example).

It’s common to hear Chinese people say Dashan speaks better Chinese than a lot of natives. It’s also common to hear foreigners bash Dashan. It’s partly out of envy. But it’s also because some foreigners see Dashan as a bit of a dupe for Chinese causes, playing the “innocent” and allowing Chinese to feel a tad superior.

Regardless of one’s point of view, though, Dashan has incontrovertibly become a de facto goodwill ambassador to China. And Canada has given him his reward.

Item: It appears there is a glitch on Typepad preventing comments on postings. We're working to fix it.

China is a rapidly aging country. And it’s a common theme of this blog. By 2050, projections say that 31 percent of China’s population will be aged 60 and over. That means some 400 million people will be senior citizens then, more than the current U.S. and Canadian populations.

If you want to get a visual reference to how the demographic bulge is working its way through the population, click on this link to see a presentation that lasts less than 30 seconds. It will give you a quicker idea of the changes looming on the horizon for China.

I don’t often get a chance to revisit a topic that I first reported on a decade earlier on the other side of the globe. But it happened to me this week, and it was personally extraordinarily satisfying.

I wrote a profile of a 27-year-old Venezuelan symphony conductor (currently visiting Beijing) who is touted as the rising rock star of the classical music world.

The man is Gustavo Dudamel, and he is a delight to meet and watch perform. I went to performances both Thursday and Friday evenings by the Simon Bolivar Youth Symphony of Venezuela, which is at the apex of a nation-wide system of orchestras that have kept hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan kids off the streets and out of trouble. Dudamel is a product of the system.

He’s been hired recently to lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic, that after knock-out performances with the likes of the Berlin, Chicago and Israel philharmonics, and numerous others. Here’s the link to my article and the top few paragraphs:

 BEIJING — When he was six or seven years old, Gustavo Dudamel used to set up an imaginary symphony made up of toy figures, put Tchaikovsky on the family stereo, pump up the volume and swing an imaginary baton, conducting with childhood abandon.

"Those toy figures that I played with and dreamt about as a boy have now become flesh-and-blood musicians," the 27-year-old Dudamel recalled.

Through further alchemy, the frizzy-haired Dudamel has turned into one of the world's brightest up-and-coming symphony conductors, snatching the job of leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic, starting next year, and catching the attention of music critics far and wide who acclaim him as possibly a once-in-a-generation maestro.

It's been a dizzying ride for a modest Venezuelan who came out of nowhere. Jay Leno and David Letterman are calling, and everybody else wants a piece of him. His schedule is already booked well into the next decade. The press has dubbed the hoopla as "Duda-mania."

And here he is, traveling across Asia with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, and he couldn't be more joyous. That's because the orchestra was his ladder to success. Dudamel spent 22 years with the "musical miracle" system supporting the orchestra. Without the system, Dudamel knows he might be another trombonist pumping out salsa riffs with a band in Barquisimeto, his Venezuelan hometown, just as his father did.

The visit of Dudamel and the youth symphony has special resonance in China, a nation that prides itself as a rising musical power, where some 38 million students are believed to be studying piano and tens of millions practicing other instruments. China and Venezuela are linked by a bond — and perhaps a bit of a rivalry — over their musical gift. While China's musicians are renowned for technical proficiency, the Venezuelans are all passion.

"Could a country best known for corn, petroleum and revolutionary rhetoric dethrone the Middle Kingdom as classical music's heir apparent?" asked the Time Out Beijing magazine.

So when Dudamel took the podium at the National Grand Theater, one of China's new architectural jewels, Chinese officials, diplomats and other music aficionados eagerly awaited a chance to witness a conductor wearing the mantle as the new Leonard Bernstein or Carlos Kleiber. Some had questions, wondering if Dudamel had been overhyped.

The performance was electric as Dudamel led his youth symphony through Ravel, Castellano and Tchaikovsky, ending with a trademark encore from West Side Story that had musicians leaping from their seats, twirling instruments in the air and shouting "Bravo!" (Check it out on YouTube.)

"He's everybody's hope for the next generation of conductors — blazing energy, connects with audiences, down to earth. He puts on a hell of a show, which classical music needs," said David Stabler, classical music critic for The Oregonian, a newspaper in Portland, Ore.

Now flash back a decade earlier. I had gotten wind of the “musical miracle” in Venezuela, oddly enough, through a publication of the Inter-American Development Bank. So I planned a trip to Caracas, and this is the top of the story I wrote then. It appeared on the front page of the Miami Herald on Sept. 28, 1998, and later led the CBS news show "60 Minutes" to do a story on the "miracle."

Venezuela's system of music education a model for the world

BYLINE: By Tim Johnson
LENGTH: 1101 words

CARACAS, Venezuela _ When conductor Jose Antonio Abreu first dreamed of a "musical miracle" for Venezuelan children 23 years ago, people had reason to scoff.

After all, only the sons and daughters of the wealthy got schooled in classical music. And the national symphony hired so many foreigners that rehearsals were conducted in English.

So it is a testament to Abreu's tenacity that Venezuela today has 55 children's orchestras, 112 youth orchestras and 28 professional symphonies. Venezuela's system of music education, in fact, is so good that the United Nations says it should be a model for the world. The Inter-American Development Bank in Washington recently granted a rare $ 8 million loan to the program.

In a country where so much has gone wrong, the system of youth orchestras is a source of unmitigated _ and well-earned _ national pride.

When the 165-member National Children's Symphony Orchestra concluded a presentation in Rome's Santa Cecilia Academy in May, concertgoers applauded for 20 minutes. When the youngsters arrived home, Venezuelans thronged to the airport to receive them. Amid the cheers, people sang the national anthem.

Even more notable than the quality of the young musicians, though, is the vast social nature of the state-run music program. In a country of limited opportunity for advancement, most of the 110,000 youngsters in the state-run orchestras come from lower middle-class or poor families.

Youngsters learn discipline and social harmony, and find an escape from the alcoholism and disintegration that often wracks family life, Abreu said. Child musicians introduce music to countless homes and bring pride to neighborhoods.

By U.S. standards, the musical training may seem arduous. Members of youth symphonies spend an average of three to four hours a day in rehearsal and individual instruction. But the accelerated pace draws no complaints here.

"My son is asthmatic, and sometimes he gets terrible headaches. But I can't keep him away from the orchestra," said Josefina Gonzalez, putting her arm around her 12-year-old, Alessandro, a viola player who smiled as wide as his bow. "Even if he has a fever, he says, 'I'll get better there."'

She recalled the exact date the orchestra loaned Alessandro his first viola _ Feb. 20, 1997. "This boy hugged the viola. He slept with it," she said.

Sorry I can’t provide a link to the full article. It seems to have been deleted from the digital world. Or at least I couldn’t find it.

Let me offer a quick word about “the egg – the new National Grand Theater – that is one of the stunning pieces of new architecture in Beijing. I had never been in the theater before this week. It’s striking from the outside. But it’s not till you go inside that you see the beauty of the structure. The Egg has several different sized theaters nestled inside and the interior space is soaring and majestic. The concert hall we were in was surprisingly intimate, and the acoustics magnificent. I highly recommend it.

One of the first things I did when I came to China in 2003 and perused the large bookshelves in our Beijing office was pull down a volume that captured my eye: The Man Who Stayed Behind.

It was by Sidney Rittenberg, an American who came to China in the mid-1940s and stayed behind, as it were, following the Maoist Revolution. Rittenberg spent some three decades in China, becoming a senior cadre in the government’s propaganda arm. He was thrown in prison twice, for a total of 16 years, and eventually rehabilitated.  

Rittenberg left China in the late 1970s for Washington State but remains deeply involved in the country. He’s a consultant for Western companies and is as often in China as back in the States.

After decades, he re-evaluated his once-blind loyalty to the Communist Party and now is a sympathetic, but usually clear-eyed, supporter of China’s evolution. He paid a dear price for his faith in China. And that he remains so supportive after a decade in virtual solitary confinement is a sign that he is a true Friend of China. He’s earned his right to say what he thinks. Many Chinese older than 45 probably still remember Li Dunbai, as Rittenberg was called, the only American citizen allowed to join China's Communist Party. 

I thought about Sidney recently, who I know only casually. The co-author of his book, Amanda Bennett, was a former senior editor with this newspaper company, and the first time we talked it was about her.

I was in Yan’an in Shaanxi Province, gateway to China’s great northwest, preparing a story about the millions of Chinese who still live in caves. You can see one of the caves in the photo at top. I recalled that Sidney had lived in a cave there at Mao’s side during the revolution. So I emailed him and asked for his thoughts.

Typically, he wrote back at length. I’m excerpting part of his email because it is such an interesting first-hand reflection not only about caves but about the way Chinese treat their own history:

"Well, Tim, I lived in caves for about six months in 1945/46, including 5 months in the loess caves of Yanan -- and I thought it was a great way to live, for the following reasons:

(1) "Cool in summer, warm in winter," as everybody up there says. (xia liang dong nuan) My cave was very easy to heat -- just a little square stone charcoal brazier (we didn't think about carbon monoxide!!) with a few sticks of charcoal glowing would warm the place during the day. When you went to sleep, on your ltitle cot, you'd bank the fire by raking the ashes over the embers and then puff them back to glowing in the morning. All night, it would "take the chill off the air."

(2) I never encountered insects in the cave. The floor was pounded hard, as you describe, in what people called "native cement". There were no windows, of course, only the paper-latticed window and door at the front end of the cave. Life in the cave was quite clean. After boring a new cave out of the hillside, they would leave it unoccupied for the first year to let it dry out, so that by the time someone moved in it was both clean and dry.

(3) The circulation of clean air happened in our caves because, dug into the hills behind the dwelling caves, was an air-raid tunnel that circumnavigated the hill and that got a constant  supply of fresh air from vertical vents from the roof of the tunnel to the hillside.

This generally took the form of a strong draught.

 Each cave had a little door at the rear that afforded access to the tunnel. If you "cracked" the door a little, instead of keeping it tight closed, you got a strong constant stream of fresh air. Some tunnels had only a muslin curtain in the rear instead of a door, so they got the breeze 24/7. (Mao comments in one of his "Rectification" lectures on the wind blowing out of the air-raid tunnel.) ...
.
Here's the big secret, Tim -- something that I didn't find out until I flew back to Yanan for the first time in 1983. The "mountains" in which we lived were not mountains at all -- there were no mountains. Millennia of Gobi dust has piled up to form a high platform atop the high plateau, and millennia of rainfall has plowed deep ravines into the plateau -- the so-called mountains were actually the slopes of the canyons and gulches, while the tops of the "mountains" were actually the flat tops of the plateau! The good land was mainly in the ravines, beside the seasonal rivers, the poor land was at the top.

I must say, I don't like the fancy new cave homes with tile floors etc that people are now shown. Not only that -- Yanan is now a grungy commercial city of two million, and the historic sites are shoved behind and under the shadow of everything else. They should have made the whole district a museum park, and put their commercial center outside of that. Not only that -- the two caves where Mao lived are labeled all wrong, the historical incidents they mentioned and even the times during which he lived there are wrong. And the one building standing when I got to Yanan in 1946 -- the Party Meeting Hall has been totally redesigned and rebuilt, in spite of which they swear that it remains unchanged. I asked the local officials if they thought Chairman Mao really danced every Saturday night on the highly slanted floor that is there now -- they've made it look like a science lecture hall.

We went to the local supermarket, where there is an entire section loaded with candies and pastries of every imaginable kind. I asked the young guide there (21 years old, born and grew up in Yanan) if she knew what was the only desert Yanan children had in the old days. She didn't, so I told her, it was something called "Lenin Biscuits" (liening binggan), which was simply the millet that stuck to the bottom of the pot and that got scraped off after the meal and handed out to the kids.  She addressed me politely, all during the visit last March, as "revolutionary grand-father," but there was absolutely no discernible interest in their own history.

One could interpret it as an act of generosity. Mr. Li, our driver, had spent the morning showing us around Yan’an, in northern Shaanxi province, kindly taking us from one cave home to another as I did reporting for an article on the 20 million Chinese who still live in cave dwellings.

As I asked for a receipt for the half-day’s work, he first asked if I would accept receipts that were from a long-distance bus company.

Fine, I said, accustomed to accepting whatever kind of receipt offered to me. He handed me a fistful, saying, “I’ll give you about 400 yuan worth. You can then turn in the receipts to your company and collect extra!”

He said this with good humor, with a knowing wink that suggested this would be especially useful to me. I was only giving him 150 yuan for his services. “I know that you can’t collect for everything you spend, so sometimes you have to collect extra for other things,” he said, letting out a small chuckle.

This is a common occurrence in China. Taxi drivers and others hand over a pile of receipts, often with little correlation to the amount spent or even to the type of transaction undertaken.  In fact, buying and selling receipts is a business in China. At some subway stations in Beijing, vendors sell used receipts to people for submitting on expenses or cheating tax authorities.

As a foreigner accustomed to straight dealing on expenses, this is one of the curiosities of China that is impossible to combat. If one seeks legitimate receipts for everything, one is stymied repeatedly. As readers of this blog know, I have encountered taxi cabs at certain airports around the country that refuse to give me a lift if I insist on using the meter. Instead, they set their own fee, coughing up all manner of bizarre receipts to cover the need for receipts by traveling business people.

It is pervasive petty corruption. But at times it also seems like an act of rebellion by ordinary people. China’s government can be arbitrary and capricious, and so can Chinese companies when it comes to expenses incurred by employees. Better to be prepared with a stack of possible receipts to turn in then get stuck for legitimate expenses that one can’t be turned in.

So I grabbed Mr. Li’s phony long-distance bus receipts, scrawled “150 yuan” on them as a reminder, and sped away comfortable that I had some sort of proof of an expense incurred.

Macau is down on its luck as a gambling mecca, but casino tycoon Stanley Ho still has plenty of cash to splash around.

I missed this when it first came out but Ho a few days ago plunked down $200,000 for a 2.2 pound Italian white truffle and had an Italian chef accompany it on a first-class air ticket from Italy to Macau. That's Ho ho-ho-hoing on the videoscreen above after winning the truffle auction.

The truffle was the biggest found in Italy this year.

Stanley outbid a bunch of Dubai sheikhs for the truffle at an auction that was a televised link-up between Scottish chef Gordon Ramsay’s London restaurant Murano, the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi, the Exedra Hotel in Rome and the Gran Lisboa Hotel in Macau, which Ho’s company owns.

Stanley’s plans for his little trifle are unknown but presumably he’ll have shavings of it on a memorable plate of pasta. I hope he enjoys it. He paid a lotta patacas for it. Patacas are what Macau people call their currency.

While he savors that delectable forest tidbit, his fellow casino tycoons are choking on their food.

Last month, the Las Vegas Sands Corp., one of the biggest investors in Macau's development, mothballed the half-built 6,400-room Macau Venetian resort, leaving 11,000 construction workers out of a job and casting a shadow over the gambling Mecca’s future.

Just a couple of days ago, another casino operator, Melco Crown, which is partly owned by Ho’s son, began offering unpaid leave to its employees.

Some of the hard times in Macau come from new policies in Beijing, which is putting the kibosh on the ability of mainlanders to visit Macau, the only legal venue for casinos in China. Mainland Chinese travelers to Hong Kong can no longer visit Macau using the same visa. Since Oct. 1, residents of neighboring Guangdong province have only been allowed one visit to the city every three months.

The Max Planck Institute is one of the world’s leading science and technology research groups, and boy does the Germany-based group ever have egg on its face.

It turns out that the latest issue of its flagship journal has China as its focus. The journal’s cover bears what the editors thought were Chinese characters for an elegant classic poem.

But the Chinese characters are really an ad from early in the last century for some sort of strip club offering girls.

According to this blog at the University of Pennsylvania, here’s a rough translation of the “poem”:

With high salaries, we have cordially invited for an extended series of matinées

KK and Jiamei as directors, who will personally lead jade-like girls in the spring of youth,

Beauties from the north who have a distinguished air of elegance and allure,

Young housewives having figures that will turn you on;

Their enchanting and coquettish performance will begin within the next few days.

When the cover brought howls of both laughter and indignation from Chinese natives, the Institute immediately issued the following apology and explanation:

Dear Colleagues,

The cover of the most recent German-language edition of MaxPlanckForschung (3/2008) depicts a Chinese text which had been chosen by our editorial office in order to symbolically illustrate the magazine's focus on "China". Unfortunately, it has now transpired that this text contains inappropriate content of a suggestive nature.

Prior to publication, the editorial office had consulted a German sinologist for a translation of the relevant text. The sinologist concluded that the text in question depicted classical Chinese characters in a non-controversial context. To our sincere regret, however, it has now emerged that the text contains deeper levels of meaning, which are not immediately accessible to a non-native speaker.

By publishing this text we did in no way intend to cause any offence or embarrassment to our Chinese readers. The editors of MaxPlanckResearch sincerely regret this unfortunate error and would like to offer an unreserved apology to all of their Chinese readers for any upset or distress they may have caused.

The cover title has already been substituted in the online edition, and the English version of MaxPlanckForschung (MaxPlanckResearch, 4/2008) will be published with a different title.

We would ask you to forward this information to all Chinese scientists at your Institute. Please find attached the new version of the title. Perhaps you can distribute this print-out within your institute.

One person posting on the UPenn blog had the following comment:

This is astonishing. The fact that the Max Planck Institute treats Chinese as decoration rather than a language speaks volumes. "Well, we had some guy take a look at it and he said it looked pretty traditional…" Give me a break. Would they have published an "English issue" with a cover reading "GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS! Hot housewives for fun and frolic!!"? Was it really impossible for them to find someone who could actually read Chinese?

China is among the curious guests invited to next week’s Bali Democracy Forum to spread the gospel of representative government.

But it won’t feel alone. Also going are envoys from Burma, Uzbekistan, Kuwait, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia.

I’m sure they’ll all have plenty to say at the Dec. 10-11 forum, including why their countries simply aren’t ready for democracy.

The forum is the idea of Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who then pulled in Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as co-chair.

Indonesia is feeling a tad defensive about the odd guest list, even if its own record on democracy over the past decade has been pretty stellar.

“This is not a forum among democracies, this is a forum about democracies,” said Umar Hadi, director of public diplomacy in Indonesia's Foreign Ministry.

Indonesia’s public diplomacy chief, Andri Hadi, said the forum would let envoys discuss issues of common concern such as regular and genuine elections, multiparty systems in pluralistic and tolerant societies, effective parliaments, independent judiciaries, rule of law, protection and promotion of human rights, good governance, and creating an active and vibrant media.

Great topics. But you gotta wonder: Why invite governments that do their best to prevent all these conditions from happening?