The International Committee of the Red Cross said the abducted Chinese workers travelled on board one of its aircraft from South Kordofan, Sudan, to Nairobi, Kenya, where they were handed over to Chinese embassy officials.

“The ICRC assisted in this operation on humanitarian grounds, after all the parties concerned accepted its offer to serve as a neutral intermediary,” Christoph Luedi, the group’s head of delegation in Nairobi said in a statement. The Red Cross said it played no part in the negotiations that led to the release.

China expressed gratitude to Sudan, South Sudan and the Red Cross for their efforts, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement cited by Xinhua News Agency. It also said the workers were in sound physical condition and would rest in Nairobi before returning home.

An earlier report in the Washington Post looked at popular reaction to the kidnapping and to the Chinese government’s actions:

When China evacuated some 30,000 of its citizens from Libya early last year, official media fell into patriotic rapture.

[...] A year later, patriotic pride has turned to anger amid growing frustration over the fate of 29 Chinese nationals abducted by rebels in Sudan on Saturday. The Chinese, employees of a huge state-controlled engineering and construction company, Sinohydro, are being held by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, a ragtag militant outfit.

The drama in Sudan’s remote, oil-rich South Kordofan region — the latest in a string of attacks on Chinese working overseas — poses a delicate problem for the ruling Communist Party: how to manage the growing nationalism that it has done so much to promote. Party propaganda, pride at China’s recent achievements and a deep sense of grievance over China’s mistreatment at the hands of foreigners in the past have combined to stir demands for robust action.

“Nationalism is a double-edged sword,” said Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Peking University. Instead of accepting that China’s expanding economic presence abroad inevitably increases the risk of trouble, many people react with “exaggerated emotion” and increasingly “think that China must do something muscular” in response to a crisis. “This is the frustration of a rising power,” he added.

For more on this story see: “Workers In Sudan Not Yet Freed (Updated)” and “China Seeks Help on Kidnapped Workers” via CDT. Read more about China and Sudan.

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James Fallows opened fire at The Atlantic:

Let’s not even get into the logic of the ad — eg, the fact that China’s formula for creating jobs has involved more public spending and more public “guidance” of industry than America’s. Let’s skip to the bonus points for racial imagery in the ad, apart from the obvious.

1) The “Chinese” woman speaks in American-accented English, and I would bet she is actually an Asian-American. But the script has her make pidgin grammar errors, “Me likee!!”-style.

2) The ad’s words are about trade, budgets, and jobs, but its images are about — ‘Nam!! Of course some parts of southern China look the way this ad does, with rice paddies, palm trees, no big buildings, people wearing conical straw hats and bicycling along dike tops. But this is nothing like how the typical big-factory zone looks in China, or the huge cities that would exemplify Chinese wealth and the country’s rise — ie, the subjects of this ad. So why this rural setting? I think it’s because it offers a kind of visual dog-whistle, for those Americans who, either through experience or through Apocalypse Now-style imagery, associate smiling-but-deceptive Asians in a rice-paddy setting with previous American sorrow.

The accompanying website underlined the charges, hammering the point home with liberal use of takeaway-carton lettering. A brief post at Talking Points Memo noted that, in the page’s source code, images of the Asian woman are identified with the label “yellowgirl”: a possible reference to her shirt, but “probably just another level of the unfortunateness.” (See update below.)

Accusations soon arose that the Hoekstra campaign was deleting critical comments from its Facebook page. A spokesman, meanwhile, insisted that the ad was satirical, and that its use of broken English was intended to highlight China’s great achievements in language education. From Politico:

“You have a Chinese girl speaking English – I want to hit on the education system, essentially. The fact that a Chinese girl is speaking English is a testament to how they can compete with us, when an American boy of the same age speaking Mandarin is absolutely insane, or unthinkable right now,” Hoekstra spokesperson Paul Ciaramitaro told POLITICO. “It exhibits another way in which China is competing with us globally.”

America’s two million first-language Chinese speakers include a growing number who speak Mandarin, some of whom are presumably boys. In addition, there are some 60,000 elementary and secondary school students learning Chinese. These are not large figures compared with China’s 300 million English learners, but neither, perhaps, are they “absolutely insanely” or “unthinkably” small. Ciaramitaro continues:

“I think that China is our global competitor and the facts are what they are. They hold $1.1 trillion of our debt, their economy is booming, ours is not. It’s not a racial overtone to compare yourself to competitors on the global stage,” added Ciaramitaro. “I think the viewer of an ad is going to recognize satire. … I wouldn’t agree of the characterization [of the ad] as racial.”

FOX News’ Juan Williams suggested that the ad may have been a tactical error, with the controversy detracting from its intended message:

[Williams] sees the ad as a wasted opportunity for Hoekstra and not great publicity for the Republican party, “which is often accused of being insensitive toward immigrants.”

“Pete Hoekstra is a very bright guy, but what he is trying to get across here, his concerns about spending and debt, that’s now being obscured by charges of racism,” said Williams. “These charges of racism are resonating right now instead of his views on reigning in the national debt.”

While both Ciaramitaro and Hoekstra claimed that talk of race came from Democrats lacking a substantial response, criticism of the ad was refreshingly bipartisan. “Semi-defrocked senior GOP Political Consultant” Mike Murphy commented that it was “really, really dumb. I mean really“. While some Republicans attacked the ad’s tone or political wisdom, others accused Hoekstra of hypocrisy based on his own spending record. From The Associated Press:

GOP consultant Nick De Leeuw flat-out scolded the Holland Republican for the ad.

“Stabenow has got to go. But shame on Pete Hoekstra for that appalling new advertisement,” De Leeuw wrote on his Facebook page Sunday morning. “Racism and xenophobia aren’t any way to get things done ….”

“Saving America from the Washington, D.C., politicians who gave us this crippling debt and deficit crisis, Republican and Democrat alike, means Hoekstra and Stabenow should both get benched,” [Hoekstra's GOP Senate primary rival Gary] Glenn said in a release.

The Michigan Democrat Party has similarly focused on Hoekstra’s credentials as a crusader for low spending, playing up Republican and Tea Party accusations that he had supported big spending as a congressman and lobbyist.

As The Detroit Free Press’ Bob Campbell pointed out, the MDP has itself played the China card in the past, in a 2006 ad attacking GOP gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos for exporting jobs. The factories to which they were relocated were, again, curiously absent from the China on screen:

Hoekstra’s ad has so far attracted little attention on the other side of the Pacific, however. From Isaac Stone Fish at Foreign Policy:

… There is scant chatter of it on Sina Weibo or Tencent Weibo, the two most popular Twitter-like microblogging services. The NFL, lacking the popularity that Yao Ming brought to the NBA, is rarely watched in China anyway, and the ads this year that drew any attention were mostly car commercials.

Only a handful of Twitter users wrote about it in simplified Mandarin (the way Chinese is written in Mainland China, unlike the traditional characters which the Debbiespenditnow website inexplicably employs). One who did so is a software engineer working in the Netherlands who tweets under the name lihlii. “I don’t think it’s racist,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s about America losing jobs ….”

Those who did object to the ad generally did so in an American context. Michael Anti, a popular blogger who has lived in the U.S. as a Nieman Fellow, wrote on Twitter:

“I think the problem with the ad is that it’s racist, not anti-Chinese. As a Chinese I should be amused by this ad, because it seems more like Southeast Asia. But Chinese in America are easily enraged by that sort of prejudicial defamation of the image of a Chinese woman. Also, her English is not the Chinglish of a Mainland Chinese.”

Update: James Fallows noted that the “yellowgirl” reference in the site’s code has now been changed to “yellowshirtgirl”. On MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell took aim at “yellowshirtgirl” herself. From Mediaite:

“I want to know exactly what she was thinking,” he noted, and then turned back the Hoekstra, in effect accusing him of hiding behind her image and suggesting one thing is for him to expound ideas and another “for him to hire an actor to do his dirty work for him.”

“It can be stopped right now, tonight, by a pledge of simple decency that all member of the Screen Actors’ Guild can make,” he noted, putting his right hand up as to make a promise: “I will not play dirty politics… that means that you will not play a character in political ads.” After his attack on the actor in the video, however, he explained that many actors engage in such things because of money problems, recounting the story of an actor he once “talked out of playing Hitler’s daughter” by asking if, in the worst case scenario that that was the last part she ever played, she would want to be remembered by it. “I have done things that I’m not proud of,” he concluded, “but I have not done anything I am ashamed of.”

While the Hoekstra campaign insists that talk of race is a desperate evasion by Democrats, the ad’s argument has also received a sound thrashing. From Asia Society:

Yunfan Sun, Program Officer at the Center on U.S.-China Relations [pointed] out glaring flaws in Hoekstra’s polarizing “Pete Spend-it-Not” position.

“It is precisely the ‘Spend-it-Not’ mentality in the United States that has been sending jobs overseas, where cheaper labor and materials, as well as tax breaks, lead to increases in the bottom lines of big corporations,” Sun said. “And the fact that the U.S. government can’t or won’t spend on infrastructure is precisely why Chinese companies get to build things like new subway lines in New York City.”

The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos pointed out other problems:

For all the xenophobia and mistakes, the thing that might really worry a voter is that a man can get this far in the U.S. political system without a basic grip on the mechanics of his government. “You borrow more and more,” the N.P.S.A. [Nondescript Presumably Scary Asian] says. But that is false, says the U.S. Treasury. Chinese holdings of U.S. treasury bonds, in fact, declined from November of 2010 to November 2011. “China has not been a major buyer of U.S. treasury notes on the margin for a couple of years now,” Victor Shih, an expert on Chinese economics and politics at Northwestern University, told me.

When Hoekstra’s point collides with fact, he calls in the help of a large font: he describes China as “the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities”—which is true—but then describes China’s holdings as increasing from 9.6 per cent in 2002 to twenty-six per cent in 2010. A voter might blanch at the idea of a foreign country holding over a quarter of U.S. Treasury debt, except that it’s not true. The twenty-six per cent is China’s holdings among foreign holders, not overall debt, and “the overall share of treasury held by foreign entities declined in the past couple of years,” Shih told me. (“One thing that Americans have to realize is that China may be a net lender internationally, but the Chinese government and state-owned enterprises borrow a huge amount of money domestically,” Shih added. “The racist caricature of those thrifty Chinese who take advantage of debt-loving Americans is widely off the mark because China is one of the most indebted countries in the world.”)

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As expected, cost pressures dragged fourth-quarter China restaurant margins down to 15.8 percent from 18.2 percent a year earlier.

Yum wants to bring margins up to around 20 percent for all of 2012 and plans to use higher prices to offset inflation in food prices, labor costs and other items.

Yum also plans to bolster growth by adding another 600 restaurants in China, where its brands include KFC, Pizza Hut, East Dawning and Little Sheep. The additions would bring Yum’s restaurant count to about 5,100.

While Yum’s operations in China and other developing countries have made it a top pick for international investors, the company’s U.S. division has underperformed.

Despite the growth of fast food’s popularity and an increase in consumer spending on things like KFC and Coca-Cola, there are also fears about China’s slowing housing market, which may lead to mixed messages on China’s economy. CNN Money reports:

Coca-Cola (KO, Fortune 500) said Tuesday morning that its profits topped estimates, helped by a 10% jump in volume in China. Emerging markets are a key focus for Coke as the beverage market matures in the U.S.

However, even if the emerging middle class in China is acquiring more of a taste for some of the top Uncle Sam brands, that may not mean that the Chinese economy overall is impervious to potential pain.

One of the biggest concerns facing China is whether or not its real estate market is a bubble along the lines of what happened in the United States in those naughty Aughties. And there is some evidence that the Chinese housing market is cooling … perhaps faster than the government there would like.

On the one hand, you might be able to spin the housing weakness in China as a good thing. It may mean that China’s central bank, which was aggressively raising interest rates and reserve requirements for banks over the past few years to fight inflation, succeeded in killing any asset bubbles.

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“This approval represents a significant milestone in the continued expansion of Citi’s business in China, a priority market for Citi,” said Stephen Bird, chief executive officer for Citi Asia Pacific.

Until now, Hong Kong’s Bank of East Asia was the only ‘foreign’ bank to offer credit cards in China.

Citi has offered ‘co-branded’ credit cards with Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (SPDB) since 2003.

Citibank has branches in 13 Chinese cities.

Citibank has already established a strong position in China with their consumer and corporate banking options. With the popularity of credit cards on the rise, there is speculation that China’s recent approval may signal an opening in the banking market. Business Week adds:

The announcement yesterday came as the WTO, acting on a U.S. complaint, probes the legality of China’s refusal to let foreign companies issue their own bank cards denominated in its currency, or to permit companies such as Visa Inc., American Express Co., MasterCard Inc., Discover Financial Services and First Data Corp. to process card transactions in China.

“It’s perhaps not a coincidence that this is coming at this point when this case is going on,” said Fredrik Erixon, director of the Brussels-based European Centre for International Political Economy. “But I think it’s more connected to changes on the ground in China, in its policy on competition in banking in China, where we see a cautiously gradual opening.”

Credit cards are becoming more popular among China’s 1.3 billion people as rising incomes stoke consumer spending. Chinese banks issued 268 million credit cards as of Sept. 30, up 20 percent from a year earlier, according to the central bank.

Citibank said in a statement from Shanghai that the Chinese government’s consent followed preliminary regulatory approval in January 2012 for the lender to set up a joint-venture securities firm in China with Orient Securities Co. Ltd. Citi Orient Securities Co. Ltd. will be involved in investment banking in the Chinese domestic market, including securities underwriting and sponsoring and any other business as approved by China Securities Regulatory Commission.

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Lin, a former Harvard star who went undrafted out of college, gives up 14 inches and roughly a hundred pounds to Yao, the former No. 1 draft pick and recently retired center of the NBA’s Houston Rockets. He’s also an American by birth, the California-raised son of Taiwanese immigrants.

But none of that appeared to matter to China’s basketball fans after the second-year player exploded for a career-high 25 points in leading the New York Knicks to a victory over the New Jersey Nets on Saturday then went on to top that effort with 28 points in a win over the Utah Jazz on Monday.

Video clips of Lin’s performances have circulated widely on China’s popular Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo, where the 23-year-old’s Chinese name, Lin Shuhao, ranked among the top 10 most searched terms Monday.

Images of the 6-foot-3-inch guard outperforming NBA veterans, including All-Star point guard Deron Williams, have garnered him global acclaim, including on Twitter, where the hashtag #linsanity has been trending. But he seems to made a particularly big splash with Chinese viewers, some of whom had begun to lose interest in the NBA following Yao’s retirement in July last year.

ESPN spoke with Lin following his latest scoring outburst, a contribution which gave the New York Knicks a two-game “Lin-ning Streak”:

Because, as improbable as it sounds, Jeremy Lin’s fingerprints were all over both victories.

That’s the same Jeremy Lin who was cut by two teams in the preseason.

It’s the same Jeremy Lin who played a grand total of 16 minutes in his first two weeks with the Knicks.

And it’s the same Jeremy Lin who spent six days in the D-League two weeks ago.

“I definitely couldn’t have imagined this,” Lin said after scoring a career-high 28 points and handing out eight assists in his first NBA start, a 99-88 win over the Jazz.

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Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, appointed Greg Foran as president and chief executive officer of its China unit, more than three months after his predecessor Ed Chan left the company.

Foran, currently senior vice president for Wal-Mart International, will assume his new roles effective March 1, the company said in an e-mailed statement today. He will move to China, pending work visa approval, Wal-Mart said.

…

Foran joined Wal-Mart in October and previously headed the food and liquor business at Sydney-based Woolworths Ltd., Australia’s biggest retailer.

One analyst questioned the choice in an interview with Reuters, given that Foran is a relative newcomer to the China market:

“The new appointee seems to have comparatively less China on-the-ground experience,” said James Roy, senior analyst at China Market Research Group based in Shanghai.

“I think for a lot of American companies and a lot of foreign companies, they need people from inside who know the company culture well, and it is important to have a balance between that and the operating environment in China,” he said.

“Whether it is local Chinese or not, it should be somebody who understands the market.”

See also CDT coverage of Wal-Mart’s China expansion through the eyes of Orville Schell, who heads the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations.

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The Chinese, he said, want lively, louder environments where they can shop for Louis Vuitton and Gucci bags and eat in large groups, while European visitors prefer a more tranquil, quiet, back-to-nature kind of experience. “When too many Chinese, Indians, and Russians come and we cater to them by opening shopping centers or set up large group tables, we see a clash with what the Europeans want. The Europeans leave and look for other quieter hotels, or different locations altogether. For instance, we have seen more Europeans leaving Phuket and going to Khao Lak and Krabi and other more peaceful areas.”

In other words, he was worried that he would lose his original core customer base by expanding it because the wants and expectations of Chinese are so different from other groups. Sharp differences in consumer wants and needs is a dilemma that everyone in the travel and leisure sector will have to handle – Chinese, Indians, and Russians are becoming the high-spenders, but how will that affect your current customer base?

Will wealthy European women want to buy Louis Vuitton handbags if they see so many middle class Chinese tourists carrying them? Can a hotel be both lively and peaceful? Can you cater to all groups and, and if so how, or is it better to focus on one group? The complexity of managing such an environment will be taxing.

As Rein points out, hospitality giant Intercontinental Group has managed the different needs of its European and Chinese customers by announcing plans last October to roll out a new China brand of mainland hotels.

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Zhang, speaking with McCain on a panel at the high-level Munich security conference, dismissed his comments about a looming Chinese Arab Spring as “no more than fantasy” and condemned foreign interference in Chinese internal affairs.

McCain, who ran for president against Barack Obama in 2008, told Zhang in front of an audience of ministers, diplomats and security officials: “It is a matter of concern when Tibetans are burning themselves to death because of the continued repression of the Tibetan people in your country.”

“I have said on many occasion and I will say again the Arab Spring is coming to China as well.”

Zhang responded by calling McCain’s claim “more than a fantasy,” and expressed China’s resentment of any lecturing on how to govern within its borders. While the two reportedly shook hands at the end of the panel, reports in China’s state media painted a less rosy picture of the exchange. From Shanghaiist:

The two apparently shook hands at the end of the meeting as McCain told Zhang, “I hope you didn’t interpret my remarks as anything other than the advocacy that I and others hold for every nation in the world, including yours.”

Back home, a report by People’s Daily described the confrontation as being “full of gunpowder smell”, and McCain as “aggressive”, notes the South China Morning Post.

“China has implemented different policies from those implemented in the West Asian and North African nations. China is different from those nations because the policies and governance of the country have the overwhelming support of the people,” the paper quoted Zhang as saying.

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The regulators asked the planes to circle around Pudong and Hongqiao international airports about 1am on January 16 after being informed that some pieces of the probe might be dropping to the city, said the East China Regional Administration under Civil Aviation Administration of China.

Two of the 17 planes warned that their fuel was low and were allowed to land ahead of other planes after the alert was lifted, the administration said.

The probe was launched from Kazakhstan in November, and was supposed to collect mineral samples from Phobos, one of the two Martian moons. It broke down before leaving Earth orbit, however, and fell into the Pacific on January 16th.

Shanghai Daily does not mention that Phobos-Grunt had a hitchhiker aboard: China’s own Yinghuo-1 (“Firefly”), the country’s first interplanetary mission. The two were scheduled to separate after an eleven-month voyage to Martian orbit, with the Russian probe then proceeding to Phobos.

Der Spiegel recently revealed that a German satellite “just barely” missed Beijing last October, falling instead into the Bay of Bengal.

The consequences could have been grave. Rosat weighed 2.5 tons. Normally, some 20 to 40 percent of a satellite reaches the Earth’s surface when it falls out of orbit. “But with Rosat, we knew it would be around 60 percent because it was made out of particularly heavy and durable parts,” said Klinkrad.

Parts of the satellite would likely have torn deep craters into the city, may have destroyed buildings and almost certainly would have resulted in human casualties. German-Chinese relations would likely have suffered as well.

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If confirmed, the latest cases would bring the total self-immolations over the past year to 19, an unprecedented wave of self-inflicted violence among the tiny ethnic minority in China, according to scholars. They were also apparently the first by lay people, rather than current or former members of the clergy, suggesting that self-immolation may be gaining popularity as a form of dissent.

The incidents took place Friday in a remote village in Seda County, once a center of Buddhist teaching, but reports did not surface until the weekend because the government has cut Internet and telephone connections to the area, said Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan poet in Beijing.

She said that one of the three men had died and that the other two, believed to be about 30 and 60 years old, were severely injured.

The local party secretary for Seda County disputed the latest reports in a Global Times article published Monday:

“Everything is all right here, although we still have no Internet access,” said Wang, who said there had been rumors saying some Tibetans were going to set themselves on fire, but “it has not happened.”

Zhang Yang, from the publicity department of the Party committee of Sichuan Province, told the Global Times that he has not heard of any self-immolation incidents over this weekend.

Despite claims in official state media that recent unrest between Tibetans and local authorities in Sichuan is no cause for concern, Beijing has put officials on alert ahead of this month’s Tibetan New Year festival. From The Telegraph:

“Officials must put all their efforts into maintaining a stable, unified social situation in our region. They must have a clear head and fully recognise the extreme importance and urgency of the job of maintaining stability,” a Communist Party notice said in the state-run Tibet Daily newspaper.

“Government departments must unstintingly carry out all measures designed to maintain stability, ” the notice ordered.

The diktat did not detail what measures should be deployed to quell any further unrest.

But with the fifth anniversary of the large-scale March 2008 Tibet uprising also looming, the message to strike hard and stamp out any signs of mass revolt was clear.

Meanwhile, the elected leader of Tibet’s government in exile told the Financial Times on Monday that he is worried about a forceful crackdown by the Chinese government:

“The military build-up is increasing rapidly. We have seen pictures of hundreds of convoys filled with paramilitary forces with automatic machine guns moving towards various parts of Tibetan areas,” Lobsang Sangay, the prime minister of the Tibetan government in exile, told the Financial Times on Monday, referring to images sent by sources in the Tibetan region.

“We are really worried that with such a military security build-up and so many guns in the hands of Chinese police and military personnel, we fear the Chinese government is preparing for something very drastic and unforeseen and tragic.”

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