Society

If China is trying to give its manufacturers a leg up by restricting exports of rare earth metals, it may find the advantage temporary.

With prices spiking following the latest in a series of annual export quota reductions by Beijing earlier this summer, miners have been scrambling to develop deposits of the essential industrial minerals worldwide. Now Japan’s Nikkei business daily reports that Japanese manufacturers have developed technologies to make automotive and home appliance motors without rare earth metals. Hitachi has come up with a motor that uses a ferrite magnet made of the cheaper and more common ferric oxide. Meanwhile the chemicals conglomerate Teijin and Tohoku University have co-developed technology to make a powerful magnet using a new composite made of iron and nitrogen. (To read the story, you’ll need a subscription to the Nikkei, which can be obtained here.)

Here's some reassuring news to send us into the September-October holiday season. In the wake of the Henan Airlines crash in Yichun a fortnight ago that killed 42 people, an investigation by the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) has revealed that more than 200 commercial pilots in China faked their resumes in 2008-2009. Even more disturbingly, more than half of the pilots with fake qualifications worked for Shenzhen Airlines, which holds a 51 percent share in Henan Airlines.

The State Stamp Bureau of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has issued a new postage stamp to mark the DPRK's National Pavilion Day at the 2010 Shanghai Expo, state media reported on Saturday.

The stamp bears the emblem of the Expo and its theme "Better City, Better Life" written in Korean, Chinese and English, the Korean Central News Agency said.

In the center of the stamps is the DPRK Pavilion's emblem with a picture of Chollima, a symbolic bronze statue of the DPRK.

The Shanghai Expo is the first world expo the DPRK has ever participated in. A total of 43 artists from the Pyongyang Art Group have arrived in China and they will give a performance on Sept. 6, the DPRK Pavilion Day.

The most popular recurring foreign talking point on China’s surging economy in the era of the global financial crisis is something like, “Maybe they have got something figured out over there in Beijing that we don’t.” That is, maybe authoritarian state-led capitalism isn’t all that bad.

Well, I can agree that state capitalism is certainly not bad for the winners, China’s state-owned enterprises. But what about the losers? I am thinking now of some people you might not normally have sympathy for, China’s rich (or once-rich) private entrepreneurs. Over the years I have encountered peasant oil barons, coal mine bosses, private airline chiefs and real estate developers who have all learned to rue the defects of state capitalism. Their stories differ widely but most have the same ending: profitable assets ended up in the hands of the government, and private risk-takers lost.