Beijing. China’s military warned on Saturday, its founding anniversary, of growing risks along its borders, including in the disputed waters of the South and East China Seas.

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Beijing. Poorly attended news conferences, a meager global social media footprint and lack of much obvious enthusiasm on the ground; Beijing looks like an improbable front-runner to win the right to host the 2022 Winter Olympics.

With Oslo dropping out of the race last year, citing worries over costs and the lack of popular support, Beijing, which hosted the 2008 Summer Games to wide acclaim, is left facing the Kazakh city of Almaty.

Almaty previously bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics, but did not make the final shortlist of three cities. Those Games were eventually awarded to Sochi in Russia.

Unlike in the weeks ahead of the 2001 decision to award the 2008 Olympics to China when Beijing buzzed with excitement, just weeks ahead of the July 31 decision on 2022 there is little sign of Olympic ardor, aside from a few posters in the subway.

Despite its sporting prowess at the Summer Games, China is not a winter sports power, and won only nine medals at the 2014 Sochi Games, ranking 12th overall. Summer Games are also generally considered a bigger event than the winter equivalent.

Even so, the government appears to be setting expectations low for the public reaction should Beijing win the decision.

In 2001, crowds thronged Tiananmen Square and city streets in an outpouring of joy, following a win seen by many Chinese as a sign that their country was finally getting the respect it deserved on the global stage as a rising power.

“I’ve really not thought about this. I’m in charge of news and publicity, so it should be something I’ve thought of. But I’ve not,” bid spokeswoman Wang Hui told reporters last week when asked if public celebrations, or watching the decision on big screens around the city, were being considered.

Whipping up popular and media interest in the immediate run-up to the decision has proved a tough task.

At that same news conference with Wang, only a handful of international media attended. Another briefing last month similarly featured few foreign reporters.

The official Twitter account for Beijing 2022 has 872 followers. Its Facebook page has just 502 “likes.”

Both sites are blocked in China, underscoring another challenge; whether Beijing will, or can, really unblock the Internet for the Games, as they have promised.

The government says more than 90 percent of the population supports the Winter Games, news that has drawn derision on Chinese social media sites.

“I strongly oppose this. It will all be man-made snow, it won’t be environmentally friendly and it is a waste of our taxpayers’ money,” wrote one user on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter.

The issue of human rights hangs over the bid, too. Tibetan groups have written to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) saying Beijing has no right to host the Games due to its poor rights record.

Last month Tibetan protesters shouting “No more bloody Games again” burst into a Chinese presentation to the IOC in Switzerland. The government condemned them and said the incident would not shake its resolve to host the Games.

Reuters

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Beijing. Police in southern China have detained 22 people after demonstrators forced their way into a high-speed rail station in a protest about land and housing issues, state news agency Xinhua has said.

Residents of Mazha village in Guangdong province entered the station platform just after 8 p.m. local time on Thursday, causing the train to depart 30 minutes late, Xinhua said late on Friday.

The protesters were quickly cleared away by police, who detained 22 for blocking the train and damaging public and private property, it said.

Xinhua cited residents as saying the protesters stormed the station “as a stunt to draw the attention of senior officials to issues with land, money, irrigation and housing in Mazha”.

“Large areas of land were sold cheaply, and many villagers were never properly compensated,” one villager told Xinhua.

The government has been trying to settle the dispute since September, but villagers have continued to stage protests, the report said.

About 90,000 “mass incidents” – a euphemism for protests – occur each year in China, triggered by corruption, pollution, illegal land grabs and other grievances.

In a separate incident on Saturday in downtown Beijing, about a dozen unidentified people were taken to hospital after apparently drinking pesticide and collapsing in a street in a shopping district, a state-run newspaper and reports on Chinese social media said.

Beijing newspaper The Mirror said the incident was quickly brought under control, although its cause was not immediately clear.

Beijing police declined to comment when contacted by telephone. Similar incidents have happened before in China, with protesters drinking pesticide or fertilizer in public areas in the hope of drawing attention to a grievance.

Reuters

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Hong Kong. The 2017 election for Hong Kong’s chief executive is the “ardent expectation” of the Chinese territory’s people and the only way for it to make progress on achieving democracy, a top China newspaper said on Saturday.

China has ruled the former British colony since 1997 through a “one country, two systems” formula which allows wide-ranging autonomy and freedoms not enjoyed on the mainland and specifies universal suffrage as an eventual goal.

But the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s largely rubber-stamp legislature, said last August it would screen candidates who want to run in the city’s 2017 election for a chief executive. Democracy activists said this rendered the notion of universal suffrage meaningless.

The NPC’s ruling lead to weeks of protests in Hong Kong last year, some of which turned violent. Beijing has said repeatedly that there is no room for negotiation.

In a front page commentary, the ruling Communist Party’s official People’s Daily said that the election was an “important mission” under Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law.

“Universal suffrage in accordance with the law for (choosing) the chief executive is the ardent expectation of mainstream public opinion in Hong Kong,” the newspaper said.

This is also the consistent position of the central Chinese and Hong Kong governments, it added.

“Only if all Hong Kong residents strictly comply with the constitution and rules of the Basic Law, have a rational discussion on the basis of the Basic Law and the NPC’s decision and agree to differ, can there certainly be historic progress on Hong Kong’s democratic development,” the paper said.

China’s parliament chief said last month that the ruling on screening candidates who want to be chosen as Hong Kong’s top official in 2017 was the correct one, in a further signal Beijing has no intention of backing down.

Frustration in Hong Kong with mainland tourists crowding into shopping centers has also sparked protests in malls across the territory.

Reuters

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Beijing. Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Saturday that turmoil at home or abroad were not in the country’s interests as its bitter past has shown, pledging that Beijing will never stray from its proclaimed path of peaceful development.

Xi has jangled regional nerves with a more muscular approach to diplomacy since assuming the presidency two years ago, ramping up development of advanced weapons and being more assertive in territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas.

Speaking at a high-level forum in Boao, on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, Xi said that China was ready to sign more friendship treaties with its neighbors and proposed holding dialogue among Asian civilizations.

“What China most needs a harmonious and stable domestic environment and peaceful and tranquil international environment,” Xi said, to an audience including leaders of countries like Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Nepal.

“Any turmoil or war does not accord with the basic interests of the Chinese people,” he added.

“China has in the past 100 years or more suffered turmoil and war, and the Chinese people will never impose upon other countries or people the tragic history our own people have experienced,” Xi said.

“Looking broadly at history, any country trying to use force to achieve its own development goals will in the end only fail,” he added. “I’m willing to use this opportunity to repeat that on the path ahead, China will unswervingly develop peacefully.”

Xi, who also used last year’s APEC summit in Beijing to strike a more conciliatory diplomatic note, did not make any direct reference to the East or South China Sea spats.

This week China expressed serious concern after the Philippines said it would resume repair and reconstruction works on disputed islands in the South China Sea, though Chinais itself building on the islands it claims.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo, speaking after Xi, said he supported finding peaceful solutions to issues within the region.

“Tension between countries in Asia is a dangerous game, which does not benefit any nation,” he said through a translator.

Widodo said in an interview with a major Japanese newspaper shortly before arriving in China that one of China’s main claims to the majority of the South China Sea had no legal basis in international law, but that Jakarta wanted to remain an “honest broker” in one of Asia’s most thorny disputes.

Reuters

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Beijing. Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama is becoming less influential, both abroad and in Tibet, but his suggestion he will not reincarnate is still a “betrayal” of the religion and the country, a top Chinese official said on Wednesday.

China says the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile in India after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, is a violent separatist. The Buddhist monk denies espousing violence and says he only wants genuine autonomy for Tibet.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate is these days being received by fewer and fewer foreign leaders, because of the anger it draws from China, the world’s second-largest economy.

Zhu Weiqun, chairman of the ethnic and religious affairs committee of the top advisory body to China’s parliament, said such meetings would cause these people “who don’t know right from wrong” to “lose status” in the eyes of Chinese people.

“At the same time, the international media is less and less interested in the Dalai Lama,” Zhu, known for his hard-line stance on Tibet, told reporters on the sidelines of parliament’s annual session.

Even in Tibet, he is exerting less influence, as demonstrated by the decline in the number of people immolating themselves, Zhu added.

Dozens of Tibetans have set themselves ablaze to protest Chinese rule over the past six years. The Dalai Lama has always denied encouraging the immolations.

“I think that Tibet’s development … has made the situation in Tibet better and better, and this is the basic reason for the fall in the Dalai Lama’s international standing,” he said.

Zhu also accused the Dalai Lama of betraying, and being disrespectful toward, the Tibetan religion and the country by saying there might be no more reincarnations.

Tibetan Buddhism holds that the soul of a senior lama is reincarnated in the body of a child on his death. China says the tradition must continue and it must approve the next Dalai Lama, though he has suggested the title could end when he dies.

“One minute he will reincarnate as a foreigner … the next as a woman. If you gave him a jar of honey, he’ll happily tell you that in his next life he’ll be a bee,” added Zhu, who was heavily involved in the past in Beijing’s failed efforts to talk to the Dalai Lama’s representatives.

Tibet’s Chinese-appointed governor this week accused the Dalai Lama of blasphemy for doubting reincarnation, drawing a stinging rebuke from the Tibetan prime minister in exile.

Reuters

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