Economist, June 22, 2013

choi

(1) Aircraft-makers | Singin’ in the Rain; Demand for civil aircraft is booming. Who will supply it?
http://www.economist.com/news/bu ... pply-it-singin-rain

Quote:

"According to Boeing’s annual forecast, published this month, more than 35,000 new aircraft—worth perhaps $4.8 trillion—will be needed over the next 20 years. Almost 25,000 of them will be single-aisle planes, and almost 13,000 of them will be used in Asia. This is a market that Western manufacturers—two in particular—now dominate

"But for once it was not just 'the usual pingpong between Boeing and Airbus,' as French television put it. * * * Closest of all is Bombardier of Canada. Pierre Beaudoin, its boss, promises that its new CSeries, aimed at the 100- to 150-seat market, will make its maiden flight this month, give or take a week, and that deliveries will start in 2014. * * * Embraer, the Brazilian firm that is Bombardier’s biggest rival in the market for smaller “regional” jets, confirmed at the show that it would revamp its E-Jet * * * It [E-Jet] does not intend—yet—to compete against Airbus and Boeing, but it will overlap with the smaller version of Bombardier’s CSeries. And it will also use Pratt & Whitney’s new engine [lie CSeries]. [Russia has MC-21 and smaller Superjet, and China, C919.]

My comment:
(a) Paris–Le Bourget Airport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris%E2%80%93Le_Bourget_Airport
(located at Le Bourget [a commune])
(b) Both Bombardier CSeries and Embraer E-Jet Family are single-aisle narrow-body, twin-engine, medium-range
(c) For the afore-mentioned regional jets, only Superjet is already in the market--the others are in the pipeline.
(d) Carolyn King and Jon Ostrower, Bombardier Pushes Back Target for CSeries First Flight by A Month; Now sees first flight for new jet by the end of July. Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2013
(e) Frederic Tomesco, Bombardier Lags 67% Behind Order Goal on Delayed CSeries. Bloomberg, Mar 6, 2013
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/20 ... elayed-cseries.html
(f) In 1980s, Taiwanese (especially the government) brainstormed to leap forward economically, contemplating automobile, airplane among other industries. We found our calling in electronics. In retrospect, we are lucky not to get into airplane making. Look at the struggles of Bombardier, not to mention Japan’s Mitsubishi.

choi

(2) Schumpeter | The Emerging-Brand Battle; Western brands are coming under siege from developing-country ones.
http://www.economist.com/news/bu ... erging-brand-battle
(book review on Nirmalya Kumar and Jan-Benedict Steenkamp, Brand Breakout; How emerging market brands will go global. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013_

Quote:

"Fortune magazine’s 2012 list of the largest 500 companies by sales revenue included 73 Chinese firms, more than from any other country except the United States, with 132. Yet Interbrand’s 2012 list of the 100 'best global brands' included not one Chinese firm.

(But emerging markets are striving and improving.) "Pearl River of China has become the world’s biggest piano-maker and now rivals Yamaha (itself once an emerging-market challenger) on quality. Haier, having become the world’s biggest white-goods maker, is now out-innovating Western rivals with ideas like a TV powered wirelessly, with no trailing cables. (Its European slogan is 'Haier and higher.')

"A fourth path is to buy Western brands off the shelf, as Tata Motors of India did with Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), and more recently Bright Food of China did with Weetabix. Bright can now use its huge distribution system back home to get Weetabix cereals on China’s breakfast tables while using Weetabix’s distribution system in the West to sell Bright products such as Maling canned meat.


My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest.
(b) Bright Food  光明食品（集团）有限公司
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_Food
(Founded 2006; Headquarters  Shanghai; In May 2012 Bright Food agreed to acquire a 60 per cent stake in the British breakfast cereals manufacturer Weetabix Limited in a £1.2 billion deal)

choi

(3) The Sino-Japanese war | The Start of History; How the struggle against Japan’s brutal occupation shaped modern China.
http://www.economist.com/news/bo ... china-start-history
(book review on Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945; The struggle for survival. Allen Lane (UK), 2013; Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally; China’s World War II, 1937-45. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt US), 2013)

Quote:

"in many ways the war helped to create modern China. It was the anvil on which the new nation was forged.

"China is the forgotten ally of the second world war. For more than four years, until Pearl Harbour, the Chinese fought the Japanese almost alone. France capitulated in 1940, but China did not. Its government retreated inland, up the Yangzi river to Chongqing (Chungking)—a moment that would later be described as China’s Dunkirk. From there it fought on—sometimes ineptly, often bravely—until victory in 1945.

My comment:
(a) A different title in US makes sense. China (Republic of China) was more of a US ally than of a UK ally in World War II.
(b) Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, Oxford University (St Cross College).
http://www.orinst.ox.ac.uk/staff/ea/chinese/rmitter.html
(c) "AS JAPANESE troops advanced on the Chinese capital of Nanjing in 1937, Zhou Fohai, a senior official in the Chinese government, wrote in his diary of the panic and fear consuming the city."

Zhou Fohai  周佛海
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_Fohai
(1897-1948)

(d) "Christopher Isherwood and WH Auden, both English writers, arrived [in China] from the Spanish civil war in 1938. * * * Isherwood’s diary exudes a pride shared by European progressives in the struggle against fascism: 'Today Auden and I agreed that we would rather be in Hankow at this moment than anywhere else on earth.'"
(i) Christopher Isherwood
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Isherwood
(1904-1986; "Auden and Isherwood traveled to China in 1938 to gather material for their book on the Sino-Japanese War called Journey to a War (1939). In 1939, Auden and Isherwood set sail for the United States on temporary visas, a controversial move, later regarded by some as a flight from danger on the eve of war in Europe")
(ii) WH Auden
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Auden
(Wystan Hugh Auden; 1907-1973; "In 1937, after observing the Spanish Civil War he wrote a politically engaged pamphlet poem Spain (1937); he later discarded it from his collected works. Journey to a War (1939) a travel book in prose and verse, was written with Isherwood after their visit to the Sino-Japanese War")

The quotations are the only mentions of China's excursion for both men in the Wiki pages.
(iii) Hankou  漢口
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hankou
(pinyin: Hànkǒu; Wade–Giles: Hankow; Hankou was captured by the Japanese invaders in 1938 (Battle of Wuhan))

(e) "We all know about Iwo Jima, but who in the West has heard of the defence of Taierzhuang, when Chinese soldiers defeated superior Japanese troops in hand-to-hand combat? Yet its memory will continue to help shape Asian history."

Textbooks in Taiwan talks up Taierzhuang 台兒莊大捷. But we though it was KMT's boast; nobody knew where it was in China.

Tai'erzhuang District
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai%27erzhuang_District

(f) "few have heard of Xiong Xianyu, an army commander who kept a diary of blowing up Yellow River levees to stop the Japanese advance."

Certainly few if any in Taiwan have heard of 熊先煜.
(g) "But while 'battered, punch-drunk' China never surrendered, its old system of governance was destroyed."

punch-drunk
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/punch-drunk
(h) Chinese often can not understand why Taiwanese are pro-Japan. First and foremost, Taiwan fought on the Japan's side. President Lee Teng-hui's older brother, and many others, died in the fighting and are memorialized in Yasukuni Shrine. Secondly Mainlanders who came with Chiang Kai-shek kept to themselves their personal experiences in China.

choi

(4) Life in Gaza | Secret Worlds; Stories of ordinary people in a grimly extraordinary place.
http://www.economist.com/news/bo ... place-secret-worlds
(book review on Louisa Waugh, Meet Me in Gaza; Uncommon stories of the life inside the Strip. Westbourne Press (UK), 2013)

Note:
(a) “The coin [Gaza Strip] became smaller and more crowded after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, when Gaza’s population trebled but the land shrank by a third.”
(i) Gaza Strip
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip
(The Gaza Strip acquired its current northern and eastern boundaries at the cessation of fighting in the 1948 war, confirmed by the Israel-Egypt Armistice Agreement on Feb 24, 1949)
(ii) 1949 Armistice Agreements
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1949_Armistice_Agreements

Please check out the map: There had been a big chunk of land at Gaza Strip’s 5 o’clock direction, which was in the 1947
United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uni ... _Plan_for_Palestine
(The Plan was accepted by the Jewish Agency on behalf of the Jewish community, but rejected by Arab governments and the Arab community as a whole; the 1948 war broke out; The partition plan was not implemented)
(b) “Her largely middle-class friends made the most of it, grateful that they were not in immediate peril. Joblessness, boredom and isolation were hard to tolerate but, hey ho, let’s all have lunch.”

hey ho (exclamation): “an exclamation of weariness, disappointment, surprise, or happiness”
http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/hey-ho

The term is found in the British English part, but not American English one, of Collinsdictionary.com.