Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

Here in my time zone, we have just a few more hours left of Blog Action Day 2008, where bloggers all over the world commit to covering one specific topic. This year, that topic is POVERTY.

I wanted to examine the cross-section between poverty and environmentalism. And I won’t just focus on China because I believe this issue is widespread and relevant to many countries.

Between 1990 and 2002 more than 174 million people escaped poverty in China, about 1.2 million per month. With an estimated $23 billion in Chinese exports in 2005 (out of a total of $713 billion in manufacturing exports), Wal-Mart might well be single-handedly responsible for bringing about 38,000 people out of poverty in China each month, about 460,000 per year.

Hey all, just an announcement that Hao Hao Report has jumped on the Facebook bandwagon and now has its very own Facebook App.

The fairly straight-forward app simply displays the four top stories from the front page here at Hao Hao Report. Main links go directly to the original story's page, while a small link under the submissions description leads to the Hao Hao page for voting and commenting.

This is still very much in the testing phases, but as everyone LOVES to put "beta" after their Web projects (somewhat indefinitely, it seems), here ya are.

What effect does China have on prices in the West, and by extension Western interest rates and Western perceived purchasing power?

Lower CPI means lower interest rates over the past decade. Yet this article highlights than cost savings now mean higher inflation in the future as Chinese wages and the Renminbi appreciate faster than of countries where production was switched from.

Can China move up the Value Chain fast enough to offset this?

Fitness is largely an urban, middle-class craze. Most Chinese still rely on farming for a living, and hard, physical exercise is not their idea of recreation, nor was it for urban Chinese just escaping Mao-era poverty 20 years ago

China has begun to put its development of large aircraft into overdrive.

This post goes into the following questions:

How did IPR begin? When did it develop in China and what was unique about IPR in China? What is the current situation today for IPR?

A nice summary of the travels of a British reporter and the amazing changes he saw among the local people in some of the poorer regions of China.

China Daily today provides some additional information about the new MEP’s authority and initial priorities. If China is willing to enforce its laws on its own, great. But if China wants to see wider spread enforcement, then its time to empower plaintiff’s attorneys.