News stories by Antoaneta Bezlova, page 2

Fifteen years after dynamite blasts first shattered the peace of China’s breathtaking Three Gorges, the Three Gorges Dam—the pride of China’s engineering progress—is nearing completion. But the cannonade of criticism bombarding the world’s largest and costliest dam in history is far from over.

This year’s Frankfurt Book Fair may have been more of an embarrassment than prestige for its guest of honour — China — but the country’s cultural mandarins still believe that the future of cultural ideas belongs to the Middle Kingdom and that the global financial crisis will play a role in helping them achieve that.

Feng Danya studied foreign languages. She had hoped to be part of a growing local company and grow with them, she says. But her timing was wrong. She graduated in the summer of uncertainty for the global economy and many Chinese start-ups.

The symbolism of Beijing dispatching its second top leader for celebrations with the reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong-il almost at the same time as Washington was deciding to break a tradition by refusing the Dalai Lama a meeting with the U.S. President last week has not been lost on observers here — keen to glimpse ever more signs of China's rise.

As the United States talks about rebalancing global growth, China sees a covert agenda of trade protectionism. And while Beijing seems to agree that there is a price to pay for its new ascent as a global power, it bristles at suggestions that it needs to let its export powerhouse fade from prominence by allowing its currency, the yuan, to appreciate faster.

Showing off China’s new wealth and national might on the anniversary of the birth of the People’s Republic, the country’s leaders attributed its rise as a rejuvenated world power to the 60 years of communist rule. But behind the shock-and-awe military parade displaying their vaunted confidence hovered uncertainty and anxiety about the future.

When it comes to pageantry, China’s communist leaders leave little to chance. This October, which marks 60 decades of their rule over the Middle Kingdom, mass events and grand spectacles would have needed little choreography to elicit a joyous mood.

Although pledging to break away from its highly polluting economic path, China has managed to stick to its guns and not compromise on what it believes is its national agenda.

Despite fresh international criticism of Beijing’s backing for an unpopular regime as the Burmese junta, China sees its alliance with the country’s military as a matter of simple economic expediency and is determined to forge ahead with controversial joint dual oil and gas pipelines that will ensure greater energy security for its robust economy.

Chinese communist party’s monopoly on power in the restive western region of Xinjiang is now contested not just by the disgruntled Turkic-speaking Uyghur ethnic group but also by the Han Chinese, who up till now had shown support of Beijing’s policies and rallied to defend its interests.