The controversy regarding the age of Chinese gymnasts at the Olympics continues.

China’s deputy sports minister has attributed the confusion about the age of one of its gold medalist gymnasts to a paperwork mistake during a team transfer.

At last year’s China’s Cities Games, Chinese officials decided to move He Kexin, who won two gold medals during the Beijing Games, from a local team to the national team. China’s deputy sports minister Cui Dalin said Sunday that it was during this transfer that a “misunderstanding appeared” about her age.

“Last year at the all-city competition, He Kexin moved from one team to another and during the process of registering during the move, there appeared this age discrepancy,” Cui said during a news conference.

“So it was the appearance of a mistake in the process of transferring teams that the misunderstanding appeared. However, I can right here accurately say that the ages of the members of our gymnastics delegation entirely conform to the requirements for participation in the Beijing Olympic Games.”

It was at last year’s China’s Cities Games that the Chinese government’s news agency, Xinhua, identified He as one of “10 big new stars” who made a splash at the event and gave her age as 13 in a Nov. 3, 2007 report.

Does anyone really believe this? Does anyone believe China wouldn’t cheat? They’ve never hidden their obsession with winning gold medals.

Posted by Gerardo Orlando as Culture, Sports at 9:10 pm

The big controversy this week in women’s gymnastics revolves around the ages of Chinese gymnasts. Many observers have charged that the gymnasts are clearly under the age minimum of 16 years old during the calendar year of the Olympics.

I watched the events where the Chinese women won the gold. They were magnificant, though it was absolutely clear that several team members were not 16.

Now, the AP has uncovered news stories in China about several China team members suggesting that they were under the age minimum. This is not a surprise. China is obsessed with winning Olympic gold. Any news of China cheating is not a surprise.

Posted by Gerardo Orlando as Culture, Domestic Politics, Sports at 4:49 pm

China kicked off the 2008 Olympic games with a spectacular opening ceremony.

Posted by Gerardo Orlando as Culture, Sports at 3:17 pm

China’s aging population is having a dramatic impact on family relations.

Posted by Gerardo Orlando as Culture, Domestic Politics at 5:29 pm

China is facing a potential crisis of too many single men.

On a smoggy morning in Lanzhou, a gritty industrial city in China’s Gansu province, crowds of young men gather outside a half-built construction site. Dressed in torn jeans and dirty shirts and carrying thermoses of tea, they push toward the exterior fence, jostling for the attention of a site manager who hands out short-term jobs. Most of the men are unmarried and have no families. Finding no work, they drift away from the site and, by midday, congregate at a riverside park, where they trade tea for large bottles of beer, which they gulp down. Many of them soon stumble in circles.

Lanzhou exemplifies a more insidious, possibly more dangerous threat to China’s development than financial imbalances, environmental disasters or unemployment: The People’s Republic has too many men. Today, roughly 120 boys are born in China for every 100 girls, perhaps the worst gender imbalance in modern human history. Within 15 years, the country may have 30 million men who cannot find wives. That could mean serious trouble.

For centuries, patrilineal Chinese households have preferred male children because men are viewed as better able to support rural families, and boys inherited the land. Some Chinese gender experts, such as Liu Bohong of the All-China Women’s Federation, also argue that there is deep-seated male chauvinism in Chinese culture that leads to a preference for boys.

Infanticide often resulted, which sometimes created gender imbalances. But after taking power in 1949, the Communist Party largely stamped out infanticide, and by the early 1980s, China had a relatively normal ratio of male and female babies.

Posted by Gerardo Orlando as Culture, Labor at 10:22 pm

It’s not nearly as high as the Chinese government wants it to be. The Chinese are naturally conservative with their spending habits, and that could hamper future growth.

Posted by Gerardo Orlando as Culture, Economy, Labor, Manufacturing at 10:32 pm

According to Forbes, the online community in China is exploding, growing to No. 2 behind the United States.

A fast-expanding online population, estimated to hit 136 million by the end of 2006, has been the engine behind China’s explosive growth in the Internet industry despite the government’s water-tight control of the content that can be made public online.

This growth in the nation’s Internet population–now the world’s second largest behind the U.S.–has driven a 47% surge in total online spending, to 276.8 billion yuan ($35.5 billion), according to a comprehensive annual survey released by the Beijing-based Internet Society of China, a national industry business association.

Posted by Gerardo Orlando as Culture, Economy at 10:37 am

Life in prison - that the sentence for a 28-year-old operator of porn sites in China.

Posted by Gerardo Orlando as Censorship, Culture, Domestic Politics, Human Rights at 5:13 pm

The Chinese don’t drink much wine, but many predict that will begin to change as more Chinese get exposed to affordable wines. Surprisingly, the first wines they try might be made in China. Smart money is betting that China can become a producer of high-quality wines.

Posted by Gerardo Orlando as Culture, Trade at 5:58 pm

As the building boom heats up in cities like Shanghai, resentment is building against foreign influences over the new architecture:

Most of the area’s narrow rows of traditional shop-houses and dimly lit tea houses have been torn down to make room for luxurious glass-fronted malls. The few traditional structures that remain have been revamped to house avant-garde fashion boutiques, designer bistros, and chic martini bars.

The district’s new look is the work of Hong Kong developer Vincent Lo and American architect Ben Wood — a protégé of architect Benjamin Thompson, who revitalized Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Wood said he wanted to bequeath Shanghai “a great European-style public space where people could go enjoy themselves.”

But Xintiandi and other Western-designed projects in Shanghai are causing much resentment among some Chinese architects, who say new buildings in the booming city should be more reflective of China’s culture, history, and modern reality. The new glass and steel towers rising over the city, they say, are alienating local people and turning this historic city into a soulless shell.

Some Chinese architects say they are so upset with the post-modern skyline framing Chinese cities that they have launched a “New Culture Movement” that rallies around the slogan, “Chinese houses created by Chinese.”

“A building is an integral part of cultural origin [and] to show our due respect and passion for Chinese culture, we are advocating designs that are in tune with our lifestyle and adaptable to China’s realities,” Chen Shimin, chief executive of the China Real Estate Design League and an initiator of the movement, said at its launch this April.

As China continues to grow, expect more expressions of these sentiments.

Posted by Gerardo Orlando as Culture, Economy at 2:47 pm