In a big meeting hall in Geneva earlier this week, China’s human rights record came under scrutiny before the U.N. Human Rights Council.

You can watch the video of the three-hour session if you like by clicking to this site. You can also read China’s statement about its human rights situation.

The headlines about the hearing came because of the concern of certain countries over matters like “black jails,” labor camps, persecution of minorities, secrecy in the application of the death penalty, and calls for China to establish a human rights commission independent of the government. Click here for the story I wrote.

In watching the hearing, though, it was equally as interesting to see the nations coming forth to congratulate China and laud its social policies, including its exuberant use of the death penalty.

The Egyptian envoy said "we understand the need of China to keep the death penalty and recognize that in China it is strictly controlled and applied with extreme caution.” He praised the fact that pregnant women and minors are not executed.

Iran congratulated China's "efforts to promote and protect human rights for all" but in referring to the internet added that "its negative impact can never be underestimated.” It encouraged China to tighten censorship to prohibit "defamation of religion" and “pornographic websites.”

Cuba praised China for being an "exceptional country," and urged it to enforce "strict compliance with law. . . to prevent people disguised as human rights activists from trying to destroy the state."  

Singapore said China’s sustained economic growth is little short of a miracle.

Pakistan suggested foreign countries butt out of China’s affairs: “China does not require external advice on securing the rights of its people.”

Sri Lanka said his country “rejects the malign criticisms of China made by the same quarters … who tore China into little pieces during the period of colonialism and … actually forced the habit of opium upon the Chinese people.”

The blaze that consumed the high-rise Mandarin Oriental hotel last night in the new CCTV complex has the internet abuzz. If you didn’t hear news about the fire, click here or here or here.

The hotel is part of the extraordinary new China Central Television complex that has inextricably changed the skyline of modern Beijing. The main building comprises two towers leaning in toward each other with a cantilevered cross-section. In an earlier story, I said it looked like two drunks embracing at the shoulders.

That building, which is not yet completed, has many nicknames. Among them: “short pants” and “twisted doughnut.” Thankfully, it did not catch fire.

The 44-story building that burned is next door, and looks like a shapely boot. Indeed, some people call it “the boot.” It was to house a Mandarin Oriental hotel and a cultural center for CCTV. The hotel was not yet officially open.

Beijing sounded like a war zone when the fire broke out because of all the fireworks and roman candles going off to mark the Lantern Festival, the last day of the Lunar New Year. Speculation that the fireworks set off the blaze is rampant.

Here are some internet remarks about the fire culled from various English and Chinese language blogs. From the always-interesting ChinaSmack blog:

“Allow people to use more firecrackers and there’ll be more fires around!!” – Batman

“It doesn’t make sense. How can fireworks set concrete, glass, and metal on fire like that? In order for fireworks to stick to, I’m assuming, a mostly concrete and glass building it’d have to be mixed with some kind of an adhesive.” – Name

“So many things happening…could it be yet another eventful year?” – Tianya website

“CCTV has money. The building could be rebuilt. No worries.” – anying_ay, 163.com

Thousands of people rushed to the scene of the blaze once they heard the news. At about 11:30 p.m., I was among hundreds milling about near the Kerry Center, across the Third Ring Road from the blaze. Among those who rushed there, then blogged and posted photos, was Pan Shiyi, the colorful entrepreneur behind the Soho office and apartment developments that are just a few blocks away. I’m sure the fire had him thinking about his fire insurance policies.

“In such a big city like Beijing, fireworks should not be allowed any more.” – Pan Shiyi.

Also from Tianya:

“I am curious about it. Why did not they apply high-tech fire extinction? Beijing should have complete and sound facilities. How did they handle with the Olympic but can not control a fire on a building?” – visitor2981472

“Oh my, such a big fire! It reminds me of 9/11 broadcast on TV.” – byzhouyang

One smarty pants made light of CCTV’s propensity to host extravaganza shows at Lunar New Year, suggesting that it was part of a show:

“It must be the most attractive program of CCTV in the new year.” – on 163.com with no name

In fact, the local media appeared to be instructed to give very muted coverage to the fire, the biggest blaze in China’s capital in many years.

The Beijing Morning News had only a tiny front-page headline with no photo. One main CCTV newscast had an anchor only read a brief news report this morning, with no footage.

An internet user on the Peking University message board said this:

"A bulletin board I often visit just received a notice: Regarding reports related to the CCTV fire, please use news agency reports. Do not publish photos and videos. Do not do deep reports. Place the reports in the domestic news area. Monitor comments closely, and do not let the blogs talkthis incident to the top." -- Asuka.

An interesting article appeared in the Singapore Straits Times newspaper over the weekend about the Bird’s Nest stadium, the iconic venue for the Summer Olympic Games.

It’s fallen into disuse, and apparently is looking not-so-shiny.

Here’s the top of the article, which I can’t link to because it is behind a pay wall which is available here (no longer behind a pay wall):

Beijing - Just six months after the breathtaking opening of the Beijing Olympics, the Bird's Nest stadium is looking a lot less glamorous.

The paint is peeling and stains have appeared on its famous lattice design.

Accelerating the deterioration of the iconic National Stadium is the absence of a permanent tenant. It has not hosted a big event since the Paralympics last September and is in real danger of becoming a big white Chinese elephant.

'It's such a pity that it has been empty all these months,' said tourist Gao Qiuling, who was visiting from the northern Tianjin port city, as she toured the venue with her family last Friday.

Visitors like her, paying 50 yuan (S $11) each to enter the stadium, are the only ones warming the Nest these days.

The city's main football club Guo'an backed out of a deal to make the stadium its home because the rent was too high. That deprived it of an anchor tenant.

So far, only one date has been announced for this year. Puccini's opera Turandot, directed by Zhang Yimou, will be staged in the Nest on Aug 8.

While the United States is preoccupied with other parts of the world, China is paying ever more attention to Latin America, sending leaders to the region, opening banks and promising investment.

At this writing, two Chinese leaders are touring the Western Hemisphere. One of them is Vice President Xi Jinping, who is likely to succeed President Hu Jintao early next decade as China’s maximum leader.

Xi left this morning on a tour that will take him to Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil, all nations eager to enhance ties with China.

Elsewhere in the region, Vice Premier Hui Liangyu is paying official visits to Argentina, Ecuador, Barbados and Bahamas from Feb. 7 to 19.

Might seem like no big deal, you say? Well, recall that President Hu visited Latin America in November, stopping in to Cuba and Peru. And while Hu was rubbing elbows with most of the major Latin presidents at the APEC summit in Lima, China’s highest ranking military officer was elsewhere in South America on tour.

That officer, Xu Caihou, is vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, which controls the People’s Liberation Army. Only President Hu outranks Xu in the military hierarchy. On his trip in November, Xu toured military installations in Venezuela, Chile and Brazil and promised increased exchanges between the two regions.

For Washington to match this pace of high-level visits, it would have to send President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen and a fourth senior official, perhaps Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to Latin America within four months. I doubt will be seeing that.

The Chinese officials aren’t going empty handed either. Just take a look at the $7.3-million national stadium Chinese workers are erecting in the Bahamas, a quick boat ride from Miami. I’m sure Hui will tour the site later this week and receive multiple huzzahs from the Bahamians for this showpiece project.

Xi will be attending a big powwow of Mexican industrialists on Tuesday.

If one were looking for a specific gauge of China’s growing influence on the world stage in relation to the United States, one could do worse that just studying the Beijing-Washington-Latin America triangle.

Consider the trade numbers between China and Latin America and the Caribbean, for example.

Trade between the region and China jumped 13-fold since 1995, from $8.4 billion to $110 billion in 2007. China is now the region’s second biggest trading partner after the United States.

A concrete sign of China’s growing trade importance occurred just a couple of weeks ago.

On Jan. 12, China formally became a member of the Inter-American Development Bank, the leading hemispheric financing arm for long-term development projects. As Chinese Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong signed the forms for membership, China also threw in $350 million into bank coffers.

Now the Chinese flag flies along with the other 47 flags of the IDB’s member states.

Another sign of Chinese interest: Beijing has agreed to open branches of the China Development Bank in Mexico, Brazil and two other countries, a sign of intensified trade cooperation. My understanding is that this is a quasi-private bank.

The world has indeed grown smaller. If Latin America was once considered part of the U.S. backyard, it’s now also part of China’s backyard.

A nearly equal percentage of people around the world think positively of China and the United States. Negative opinion is also nearly the same.

That’s what the latest opinion tracking poll of the BBC shows. The results, available here, show that those polled holding a positive opinion of China and the United States is nearly the same – 39 and 40 percent, respectively. (This is among citizens of 20 large nations around the world.)

But the trend lines are different.

Positive opinions of China fell in the past year despite hosting the Summer Olympics. In 2008, 45 percent held a positive view of China, the poll says.

And the election of President Barack Obama gave only a small bump to the perception of the United States. The percentage of positive impressions climbed from 35 percent in 2008 to 40 percent now.

Negative opinions of China were at 40 percent, while for the U.S. they were 43 percent.

A press release on the poll quoted Globescan Chairman Doug Miller saying: "Our poll results suggest that China has much to learn about winning hearts and minds in the world. It seems that a successful Olympic Games has not been enough to offset other concerns that people have."

On perceptions of the U.S., it quoted Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, which also took part in the survey. Kull said people are hopeful about Obama but that “his election alone is not enough to turn the tide. People are still looking to see if there are significant changes in US policies."
 
The poll shows a nearly across the board increase in negative views of China in European countries, including France (70%, up from 46%), Italy (68%, up from 50%), Germany (69%, up from 59%), and Spain (54%, up from 32%), with corresponding drops in positive views. Other countries with rising negative views are Turkey, the Philippines, Egypt, and Australia. Those with strong positive views include Ghana, Nigeria and Central America. Chileans and Mexicans also lean positive, as do Indians and Russians.

Attitudes about China in the United States remain stable, with a slight majority (52%) holding a negative view.
 
For their part, Chinese have become much more negative about the United States, with negative feelings tallied among 58 percent this year, a sharp rise from the 46 percent last year.
 
Only one thing to say about all these statistics: They’ll surely be different next year.

This Xinhua story gives a sense of just how fast some of the glaciers are receding.

It says that along the east side of the Tanggula Mountain Pass, glaciers are pulling back at a rate of a quarter kilometer a year (265 meters, to be precise).

Tanggula Pass, by the way, is the high point on the new $4 billion train route that connects Beijing with Lhasa. It is at about 16,640 feet, or 5,072 meters, in altitude, making it the highest railway in the world.

To read more about glaciers melting in the Himalayas, considered the world’s third ice cap after the two poles because of the amount of water locked in their in reserve, read my story from June 2007 here.

As you probably know, a protester hurled a shoe at Premier Wen Jiabao as he gave a talk at Cambridge University. Coming a few weeks after an Iraqi hurled a shoe at former President George W. Bush, the new incident certainly seems to herald a trend in political dissent.

Unsolicited advice for world leaders: Practice your ducking skills.

The German-sounding student in the audience shouted things like, “How can the university prostitute itself with this dictator here?” and “How can you listen to these lies?” Fellow students shouted “shame!” and “Get out!”

According to the Times Online website, Wen said moments after the German-sounding protester was ushered out of the auditorium: “This despicable behavior cannot stand in the way of friendship between China and the UK.”

Problem is, shoe-throwing has now become a way to get instant world headlines

Actress Bette Davis once famously said, “getting old is not for sissies.”

In North Korea, that is especially true. Word comes that the Pyongyang regime is putting barbed wire up around old people’s homes to keep the elderly from wandering around begging for food.

The following is from a newsletter put out by Open News for North Korea, an exile radio station based in Seoul. Click here for a story I once wrote that explains a bit about the radio station. 

Since December, the North Korean People’s Safety Agency has been constructing a barbed wire fence round its senior citizen’s homes. A well-informed source confirms that the fences will be about 2 meters, although the heights will vary according to each home. The source also confirms that senior citizens in the homes, who live in inferior conditions, are currently escaping and wandering throughout the country, begging to survive. This has happened so frequently that it creates social problems and warrants drastic measures. Presently, the homes are not only lacking in food supplies for the seniors, they also cannot provide enough heating in the winter. Thus, seniors are leaving the homes and entering North Korean society only to encounter contempt and disdain while wandering the streets.

Barbie is coming to Shanghai in a big way.

U.S. toy manufacturer Mattel is getting ready to open an eight-story Barbie store, the largest in the world, in Shanghai.

The store will open early in March to coincide with Barbie’s 50th anniversary (Does she have wrinkles yet?). Barbies have only been on sale in China for eight years. And the dolls, known here as “ba-bi-wa-wa,” are not that widely known yet.

Click here for a CCTV English language news clip of the store. And here for a Time magazine article about it. The following is an excerpt from Time:

To get a sense of just how far Mattel is deviating from script requires a trip to the retail district in downtown Shanghai. There, on March 6, the company plans to open a 38,000-sq.-ft. (3,500 sq m) House of Barbie — the first of its kind in the world. This is nothing like the Main Street toy shop of yesterday. To enter the eight-story showpiece space, customers pass through a pink neon-lit tube, where the prerecorded sound of giggling girls grows progressively — some might say demonically — louder. After registering for a Barbie passport, visitors can get their hair and nails done at a spa and shop for makeup, accessories and even couture. Vera Wang is on board; she designed a $15,000 human-sized Barbie wedding dress to be sold exclusively at the Shanghai store. In a sleek design center, girls can use computers to sketch out their own Barbie fashions, and on another floor they can model them by walking a runway in Barbie clothing. At night, one of the store's two restaurants becomes a hip bar, complete with karaoke, a DJ and pink martinis. Says Hayes Zhou, food-and-beverage manager at Barbie Shanghai: "Barbies want to talk to Kens. You have to have a place for that."

With adult clothing, pricey collector's dolls and a pickup bar, the store sends a clear signal that Mattel intends to seduce an older demographic. This isn't as crazy as it may seem. In Asia, the Barbie brand is not deeply entrenched, so grown-ups are less likely to automatically dismiss it as kids' stuff. Besides, Asians don't necessarily put away childish things as they age. Collecting toys such as Hello Kitty merchandise well into adulthood is common. "Asian culture loves cute," says Richard Dickson, general manager of the Barbie brand. "They're much more comfortable with character art as part of fashion.”

The idea that Mattel thinks it can sell Barbies to older women has echo in this CCTV story:

Gene Murtha, vice president of Int'l Business Development, Mattel Inc., said, "What we found in China that was different than any place else was that there are other generations that respond to it as well. So there are essentially four generations that are compressed in that never had the chance to experience Barbie as they grew up."