Japan's Win, China's Blunder

Tokyo wins the bid to host the 2020 Olympic Games, but China doesn't seem happy...

We are pleased to see Tokyo was awarded the 2020 Olympic Games, as it gives a huge morale boost to the Japanese who have been depressed by the ongoing leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

The latest is that radiation readings there have spiked to its highest yet at 2,200 millisieverts, according to the Nuclear Regulation Authority. That reading so high in fact that an unprotected person can die within hours.

Meanwhile, water from the contaminated tanks is leaking into the ocean and heading towards the west coast of the United States and Canada. By the time the radiation arrives there in about 10 to 14 days, it is believed the amounts will be low that it won't affect the water supply, but still...

And so Tokyo's winning bid was a much needed psychological boost for Japan, and hopefully this will motivate the country to get things back on track.

However, we have to wonder about the motivations of Chinese state media because Xinhua News Agency wrongly reported that Istanbul won the Olympic bid, while state television ran a headline during a live broadcast saying "Tokyo eliminated".

While both reports were later withdrawn, it was too late to tell China's largest news portals, sina.com and sohu.com of the blunder.

The mistake happened when Xinhua mistook a vote by the International Olympic Committee on whether either Istanbul or Madrid should advance to the next round as the final vote in which Istanbul won.

"Xinhua's blooper, which mistakes Tokyo with Istanbul, is killing newspapers across the nation," moaned Li Wanyin, deputy editor of Changsha Evening News on Sina Weibo.

He claimed the newspaper had already printed the false result and had to urgently retract hundreds of thousands of copies in the early morning and suffered a "severe loss".

"As a news provider, Xinhua owes its clients an explanation and a self-reflection," he added. He later took down this microblog post without an explanation.

Usually state media is the last to report "breaking news", so jumping the gun is amusing.

Nevertheless it's not the only time it's done this.

The latest hilarious blunder was when state media mistook The Onion as a credible news source and reported North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as last year's "Sexiest Man Alive". More recently state media thought spaceship designs on the sci-fi show Battlestar Galactica were aircraft carrier plans.

We are wondering though if China was secretly hoping Tokyo wouldn't win because of its long standing campaign against the Japanese for its wartime atrocities that Japan has never apologized for.

There are young people in China who continue to refuse to buy Japanese cars or eat Japanese food because of how their parents and grandparents were treated. It's an effective campaign, but is it really constructive?

This time though, Japan gets the last laugh... for now...

Security Paradox

A cartoon about the July incident in which Alpais Lam Wai-sze swore at police

In an ironic twist, the teacher who swore at the police is now asking them for protection.

Alpais Lam Wai-sze went to the Tai Po police station yesterday accompanied by her lawyer because she has received a threatening letter with a box cutter blade attached to it.

She said she would write a letter to Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying and police commissioner Andy Tsang Wai-hung requesting police protection.

The handwritten letter in simplified Chinese was signed "underground Communist Party member". Dated August 6, the letter criticized Lam for supporting the Falun Gong and threatened to kill her. "We have to kill you... You should call the police, you must call the police," it said.

The letter writer claimed to be part of the Patriotic Youths Association, with "tens of millions of supporters". The author also accused Lam of being "an anti-Communist element" who taught students to oppose the doctrine.

"I was quite scared as any woman would be in a situation like this, but I did what any citizen would do and sought police help," Lam said outside the Tai Po police station where she filed the report. Her lawyer, lawmaker Andrew Cheng Kar-foo said this was the third death threat she had reported to police since July.

Lam is currently on sick leave from Pui Ling School of the Precious Blood in Fanling. "I hope this is the last time I have to report a letter like this," she said. "I still think Hong Kong is a place with the rule of law and I trust the police will help me get to the bottom of this."

The teacher made headlines in July when she swore a police because she was upset at how they handled an anti-Falun Gong group that was obstructing a Falun Gong group.

There was a huge debate over whether a teacher should be swearing, and the police themselves, including former colleagues banded in a protest against her.

Since then the chief executive has called for the education minister to write a report about Lam's incident, which many fear echoes the Cultural Revolution.

There was nothing illegal about what Lam did -- she happened to be filmed in a video that was put online without her consent. She was not on duty as a teacher at the time, but an ordinary citizen who was voicing her opinion; nor is it an offense to shout obscenities at the police.

Which is why we've now come to this ironic twist where the police have to protect the very person they don't care much for because she's receiving death threats.

However we do believe the authorities will do their duty. For their first clue is that the author of the threatening letter is from the mainland...

Picture of the Day: Hanging Around

This bug was hanging outside my window... any ideas of who he is?

This morning I woke up glad to see no cloudy skies, but also there was something on my window.

I thought the bug was inside, as I usually leave my windows open and sometimes the odd insect flies in.

But this guy was hanging outside the window on the 49th floor.

Tapping on the glass didn't affect him at all and neither did he budge.

A quick look through Google images suggests it could be a citrus bug... can anyone else positively identify it?

I don't know how long he hung out for, but by the time I came back at dinner time he was gone...

John Tsang, Man of the People (Not)

Does Hong Kong's Financial Secretary know who are the middle class?

Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah was ridiculed back in February when he claimed that middle class people like to drink coffee and watch French movies. He also proclaimed he was part of this socio-economic group.

A recent survey by the Bauhinia Foundation Research Centre has shown that high incomes, owning property and having other assets, such as savings or bonds are the top indicators of being middle class.

Some 45.5 percent of interviewees say people who earn HK$30,000 to HK$60,000 ($3,868-$7,736) a month are considered middle class, while 25 percent thought the median income of the middle class was about HK$22,000.

"The survey is aimed at helping us understand what the public thinks of the middle class," said Donald Li Kwok-tung, chairman of the Bauhinia Research Foundation. "The study will be useful in forming policies targeting [their needs]" and was not aimed at defining the term," he said.

The foundation commissioned Chinese University's Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies to conduct the survey of 1,005 people in July. Other results included 56.7 percent saying people who owned properties worth HK$2 million to HK$8 million were middle class, while 63.7 percent thought those with assets of HK$500,000 to HK$6 million excluding properties made the cut.

While these results seem reasonable, surveying 1,000 is barely a drop in the bucket for a city of over 7 million people. And we wonder who was interviewed and what their salaries are.

Nevertheless, Alvin Lee Chi-wing, district councillor and chairman of Voice of the Middle Class noted the threshold for defining middle class had risen and joining it was getting harder. He said that it was much easier to rise in status in the 1980s and 1990s. But now most top-level jobs are occupied by older people.

"It's not possible now. It would be very hard [for young people today], unless their parents helped out in some way -- perhaps by funding their deposit for a flat," he said.

As for Tsang, he has no right to claim he is in this category, Lee says. "Personal preferences and behaviour should not be counted as any indicator of being middle class. [Tsang's] salary alone would lift him way above the middle class," Lee said.