Passengers flying Shandong airlines were forced to push their own plane off the tarmac:

“Anyone who has ever used budget airlines know only too well how uncomfortable it can be: long queues, cramped seats and every tiny extra costs you.

But at least they are never told to get out and help push their plane.

That is exactly what happened to a group of passengers in China who were asked to get out and push after their plane broke down shortly after landing.

The Chinese Shandong airlines flight CRJ7 arrived safely at Zhengzhou from Guilin, but broke down before it could taxi to the passenger terminal…”

A seasoned reporter remembers the old Macau, and sees it now:
“I first visited Macau 30 years ago to report on criminal gangs called triads, then responsible for much of the city’s violent crime and loan-sharking. Brightly painted shops that once served as brothels ran the length of Rua da Felicidade in the old port district. Around the corner, on Travessa do Ópio, stood an abandoned factory that had processed opium for China. A mansion built by British merchants early in the 19th century was still standing, as was the grotto where in 1556 Portuguese poet Luis de Camões is said to have begun Os Lusiadas, an epic tale of Vasco da Gama’s explorations of the East.

In 1978, residents described the place as “sleepy”; its only exports were fish and firecrackers. Four years earlier, Portugal had walked away from its territories in Angola, Mozambique and East Timor and by 1978, was trying to extricate itself from Macau as well. Secret negotiations concluded in 1979 with an agreement stipulating that Macau was a Chinese territory “under Portuguese administration”—meaning that Portugal relinquished the sovereignty it seized after the Opium War in the 1840s but would run the city for 20 more years. The Portuguese civil servants, army officers and clergy then living there seemed content to take long lunches and allow their enclave to drift.

The police, who wore trench coats and rolled their own cigarettes, allowed me to tag along on what was described as a major triad sweep…”

James Fallows writes about an ambitious project to modernize China’s westernmost areas:

“The villagers’ fundamental problem was their isolation. The Internet could solve that! Lin’s branch of Inventec could give more computers and software to the school. It could work with the local government to bring in a broadband line and set up a computer center that everyone in the village could use. The students could take courses far beyond the range offered by their impoverished school. They could communicate with people they had not known all their lives. The local farmers could use the Internet to learn about the weather and market conditions. Local craftsmen could offer items for sale to distant customers. Working-age people could look for good factory jobs elsewhere. ‘The shackles that had bound their spirits had been taken off,’ Lin wrote after he had, within a few weeks of his first visit (things happen fast in China), established the computer center, declared Yellow Sheep River an ‘Internet village,’ and created the Yellow Sheep River Web site…”

Kurt Anderson sees promise in China’s bold new architecture:

“Just as many of New York City’s most iconic landmarks rose in breathtakingly brief succession a century ago, Beijing has been re-inventing itself since 2001 with a rush of showstopping buildings by internationally renowned architects: Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron’s National Stadium, Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid complex, Rem Koolhaas’s China Central Television headquarters, and Norman Foster’s Terminal 3. On the eve of a controversial Olympics, Kurt Andersen sees China’s true promise in a more enduring spectacle of daring commissions, bravura engineering, and creatively humanistic design…”

American economists compare China’s path with Japan’s:

“BEIJING (Reuters) - Now the Olympics are over, a new game is under way: telling China’s economic future by reading the tea leaves of Japan’s past.

Teasing out economic parallels is a favorite academic pastime, but it can be just as treacherous as extrapolating prevailing trends into the indefinite future. In the 1960s the Philippines was the second-richest economy in Asia after Japan. Now it is bringing up the rear.

Still, looking at Japan provides some useful pointers as the world ponders how long China can keep up the growth of nearly 10 percent a year that it has enjoyed since it embarked on market-oriented economic reforms in 1978.”

A radical but thorough approach to China’s transition into capitalism, seeking comparisons in history and theory:

“Modern China is undergoing a relentless process of transformation, from the forests of construction cranes in its coastal cities to the gargantuan infrastructure projects in its interior. Its economic trajectory has been equally dramatic: China is now ranked 4th in the world by GDP, rising from 11th in 1990. A range of developments testify to its rapid progress along the path to a capitalist economy: the commodification of land and labour, emergence of private firms, formation of finance capital, among many others. Yet China scholars have been curiously reluctant to apply the classic Marxist idea of a transition to capitalism—and its corollary, primitive accumulation—to the Chinese case. Instead, they quite loosely use terms such as globalization, marketization, post-socialism, reform era and market socialism, seemingly unaware of how closely the transformations under way in China compare with the development of capitalism in Europe and North America—not to mention many other ‘late developers’ in Asia and Latin America.”

A GE ad for its theme “Healthcare Re-imagined,” showing a brief love story set in rural China. The lyrics to the song, according to one commenter, are:

Children on the swings,
Children on the swings,
Children on the swings in summertime.
I want to say something but it won’t come out of my mouth.
The time in summer sneaking away,
Please let me stay in your heart for a little while.

How America’s third richest man, Sheldon Adelson, got in on the ground floor of Macao gaming:

“In May, 2004, the first gamblers entered the Sands Macao. Its construction costs were two hundred and sixty-five million dollars, and Adelson made back his initial investment in a year. In December, 2004, Adelson took Las Vegas Sands public (according to Forbes, he owns sixty-nine per cent of the stock) and became a multibillionaire, overnight. The following year, Macao drew 10.5 million mainland Chinese visitors, a hundred and forty-seven per cent more than three years earlier—reflecting an easing of travel restrictions and an increase in the number of newly wealthy Chinese. By the end of 2006, Macao had become the top gambling center in the world, with gaming revenues exceeding $6.9 billion, a quarter of a billion dollars more than those on the Las Vegas Strip. In 2007, revenues climbed to $10.3 billion. That year, Adelson opened the $2.4-billion Venetian Macao—with canals and stripe-shirted gondoliers, as well as an extensive shopping mall and a five-hundred-and-forty-six-thousand-square-foot casino, which is the largest in the world. Since the Sands Macao opened, his personal wealth has multiplied more than fourteen times, and, according to the Times, in the two years after his company went public he earned roughly a million dollars an hour.”

PRI’s Mary Kay Magistad reports from Shenzhen on the largest migration in the history of the world — China’s rapid urbanization — which has turned former fishing villages like Shenzhen into mega-cities.

A sneak-peek of PBS’s Frontline documentary “Young & Restless in China”