We hardly knew Hu he was
Alas, Hu Jintao, we barely knew ye. China’s king president delivered what will be his final work report to the National Party Congress that began Thursday and will culminate by Hu being replaced by that guy who everybody-says-but-no-one-wants-to-state-as-absolute-fact will take over. In an unexpected move, Hu read from his daily diary which he had been meticulously keeping for the past decade, insisting on reading every entry in its entirety. “At first, I didn’t know whether Wen and I would get along … we were all so young and naïve, and the country faced such big problems,” Hu purportedly read. He went on to describe his struggles with events such as the global financial crisis and the Sichuan earthquake, while at the same time intimately describing his battle to overcome self esteem issues. “I’ll never forget the first time Wen and Zhou Yongkang invited me to get s***faced on baijiu with them, I was so touched.” After eight or so hours of battling through a snoozing crowd, Hu turned to advice for the new leadership. Among his key points: The way to reform is reform-driven reform; leaders must prudently and soundly be judiciously harmonious; and his secret to making a kickass bowl of congee is potato chips. For Pekingologists, there were some subtle signals to pick up on. His three second pause to take a 28 milliliter gulp of his red tea indicated that Li Keqiang would indeed take over Wen Jiabao’s role as premier. He ended by describing the massive challenge ahead of rebalancing the Chinese economy while aiming to double GDP by 2020. Hu then shouted “good luck with that one” before running from the stage cackling, never to be seen again.
China strikes back against anti-theft measures
China’s automotive industry was thrown into a fluster this week when a woman who previously worked for General Motors in the US was accused of stealing and attempting to market trade secrets from her former company. The sector has since come together to form the China Automotive Industry Experts Against Blocking Trade Theft in the United States, or CATEABTTUS. The organization sternly warned journalists against confusing the acronym with Catbus, the freaky Japanese anime character. A spokesman for the organization said trade-secret theft was an important aspect of China’s growing economy, especially when Western companies couldn’t be persuaded to give away the technology for free. He went on to list several recent cases where individuals of Chinese descent had been denied the right to pass on the lucrative secrets to eager Chinese companies, among them the infamous DuPont and Motorola cases. When asked if there had been thievery in the opposite direction, that is, Western companies stealing trade secrets from Chinese firms, the spokesman scoffed: “Are you kidding? We don’t let foreign devils anywhere near important secrets. We hire them to impress uncultured CEOs in backwater provinces.” Experts said the last case concerning Western theft of Chinese ingenuity was lodged in 1289 against Marco Polo and his alleged pilfering of spaghetti technology.
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