If Beijing intended the disappearance of high-profile artist Ai Weiwei as a warning to the country’s critics, a growing number are refusing to heed it.

Zhao Lianhai, the milk-melamine activist who is out of jail on probation, was the latest to add his name to a swelling list of activists, academics and artists outwardly opposing the outspoken Mr. Ai’s recent detention.

On April 5, two days after Mr. Ai was apprehended at a Beijing airport, Mr. Zhao posted a video online criticizing the government’s treatment of the artist and other activists recently detained, saying that without “the most basic standards of law, we all live in an environment of fear.” (See the video with an English-language transcript from the China Media Project here.) The next day, a message appeared on his Twitter feed [http://twitter.com/zhaolianhai] saying that people were knocking at his door, followed a few hours later by a message saying he had been taken in for questioning by the police. “I told them that if they wanted to set up the crackdown, then come on.” he wrote. “You can start with me.”

Mr. Zhao told the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong-based newspaper, that authorities said they would put him back in prison if he continued talking publicly about Mr. Ai. He responded, he told the paper, by saying he would go on hunger strike.

“I repeatedly told them the situation would only get worse, or even spin out of control if they didn’t change their attitude,” he said, according to the SCMP.

Mr. Zhao was released on medical parole in December after being sentenced two and a half years in prison last year for inciting social disorder. He had been publicly protesting the country’s food regulation system after his infant son fell ill from drinking milk contaminated with melamine in 2008 while also organizing parents of some of the roughly 300,000 children who were were similarly sickened. According to a separate report by the SCMP, he had gone on hunger strike prior to his release and was force-fed through the nose by prison personnel.

Mr. Zhao isn’t the only Chinese activist coming out in support of Ai at a time when Chinese authorities are particularly sensitive to political dissent. A letter published in The Guardian on Friday calling for Mr. Ai’s immediate release included signatures from several Chinese artists and activists including prominent Beijing-based photographers Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang, better known as the Gao Brothers, and filmmaker Ai Xiaoming, a professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou.

Besides signing the letter, Ms. Ai (no relation to the Ai Weiwei) also posted an essay online, “Today, everybody can become Ai Weiwei” (flagged and translated by Global Voices [http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/04/07/china-everybody-can-become-ai-weiwei/] in which she argued that the artist couldn’t be silenced because he’d built an audience “possibly in the hundreds of thousands.”

” In this audience which Ai Weiwei has left behind, there are countless more people who will continue and seek to realize his ideals,” she wrote. “In this sense, Ai Weiwei wins by default.”

Support for Mr. Ai has also reached beyond political reform activists. Several members of the central government’s Chinese Academy of Social Sciences have questioned Mr. Ai’s detention in recent days, including Yu Jianrong, a widely respected sociologist.

While it’s clear Mr. Ai’s predicament hasn’t silenced the government’s critics, far less certain is what consequences their willingness to speak will have for them down the road.

– Brian Spegele, follow him on Twitter @bspegele

Annual inflows of foreign direct investment rose to nearly $108 billion in 2008.

In 2009, the global economic downturn reduced foreign demand for Chinese exports for the first time in many years.

China is also the second largest trading nation in the world and the largest exporter and second largest importer of goods.
The PRC government’s decision to permit China to be used by multinational corporations as an export platform has made the country a major competitor to other Asian export-led economies, such as South Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia.

Available energy is insufficient to run at fully installed industrial capacity, and the transport system is inadequate to move sufficient quantities of such critical items as coal.

The disparities between the two sectors have combined to form an economic-cultural-social gap between the rural and urban areas, which is a major division in Chinese society.

The technological level and quality standards of its industry as a whole are still fairly low, notwithstanding a marked change since 2000, spurred in part by foreign investment.

China’s increasing integration with the international economy and its growing efforts to use market forces to govern the domestic allocation of goods have exacerbated this problem.

Globally, foreign investment decreased by almost 40 percent last year amid the financial downturn and is expected to show only marginal growth this year.

But “this is just a beginning.

China reiterated the nation’s goals for the next decade – increasing market share of pure-electric and plug-in electric autos, building world-competitive auto makers and parts manufacturers in the energy-efficient auto sector as well as raising fuel-efficiency to world levels.

China’s challenge in the early 21st century will be to balance its highly centralized political system with an increasingly decentralized economic system.

Since the late 1970s, China has decollectivized agriculture, yielding tremendous gains in production.

In terms of cash crops, China ranks first in cotton and tobacco and is an important producer of oilseeds, silk, tea, ramie, jute, hemp, sugarcane, and sugar beets.

Sheep, cattle, and goats are the most common types of livestock.

Offshore exploration has become important to meeting domestic needs; massive deposits off the coasts are believed to exceed all the world’s known oil reserves.

China is among the world’s four top producers of antimony, magnesium, tin, tungsten, and zinc, and ranks second (after the United States) in the production of salt, sixth in gold, and eighth in lead ore.

The largest completed project, Gezhouba Dam, on the Chang (Yangtze) River, opened in 1981; the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest engineering project, on the lower Chang, is scheduled for completion in 2009.
Beginning in the late 1970s, changes in economic policy, including decentralization of control and the creation of special economic zones to attract foreign investment, led to considerable industrial growth, especially in light industries that produce consumer goods.

In the northeast (Manchuria) are large cities and rail centers, notably Shenyang (Mukden), Harbin, and Changchun.

Read more:
Artists, Activists Still Talking After Ai Detained