Progressive educator Wang Zheng’s appointment as headmaster of Peking University High School has brought with it a spate of renovations to the campus. We’re constructing an International Division building—a four-storey building that will have a library, a coffeehouse, a kitchen, a media centre, a theatre, state-of-the-art laboratories, and fitness facilities.

It’s an ambitious and expensive project, and each time I meet with the architects the project seems to grow more ambitious and expensive. (They’re now suggesting oil paintings and chandeliers for the library, and SMART boards for every classroom.)

So you’d think the man who actually signs the cheques would be worried about the spiralling costs. But I was told that there are also plans to build a new gymnasium, a new soccer field, an indoor climbing wall, indoor tennis and squash courts.

It’s tempting at times like this to liken China to a guardian that has to keep answering the door to frustrated neighbours armed with a new complaint about its unruly teenager. The next visitor to China’s front door will be Stephen Bosworth, the US envoy to North Korea.

Bosworth’s trip, which is also taking in meetings with South Korean and Japanese officials, is aimed at crafting a response to North Korea’s unveiling of a new plant for enriching uranium, a facility that gives the country another option for producing highly-enriched uranium bomb fuel.

According to a report released by Siegfried Hecker of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, who visited the Yongbyon nuclear complex earlier this month, the facility is much further advanced than most analysts had expected.

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Well, not exactly by the look of it. But China still seems likely to (kind of) get what it wanted after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo.

Obviously the government’s first choice would have been for Liu not to have been named the winner at all, and it certainly did its best to try to make sure it didn’t happen. But with diplomatic arm twisting having failed to head off the result (and it’s hard not to think it wouldn’t actually have had the opposite effect), China has been vigorously lobbying other countries not to send representatives.

And now, it seems, parts of the ceremony will have to be dropped. According to Nobel rules, the expected 10 million kronor (about $1.7 million) award can only be collected by the winner or a close family member. However, China has Liu’s wife under some sort of house arrest, while his brothers appear to have been prevented from leaving the country to collect the award on his behalf. Norwegian Nobel Committee Secretary Geir Lundestad has reportedly said no other relatives have announced that they will be going to Oslo for the December 10 ceremony, meaning that the Nobel diploma and medal probably won't be handed out then.

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Following is a guest entry by Diplomat columnist Richard Weitz looking at co-operation between China and Russia on their counter-drug trafficking efforts.

I recently had the chance to speak with Viсtor P. Ivanov, director of the Russian Federal Drug Control Service, while he was in Washington for the most recent meeting of the Counter Narcotics Working Group of the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission. Ivanov had some interesting things to say about recent co-operation between Russia and China on tackling drug trafficking, a problem Hu Jintao in June equated to the ‘three evil forces’ of terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism that have traditionally preoccupied the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation.

The Commission promotes bilateral governmental cooperation on law enforcement, drug treatment and prevention, intelligence sharing and money laundering linked to drug trafficking activities. The working group is co-chaired by Ivanov and Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy Gil Kerlikowske.But Russia has also worked with China and Central Asian governments within the SCO to combat Asian drugs trafficking.

SCO member governments include China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, as well as four formally designated observer countries—India, Iran, Mongolia, and Pakistan. In the annual SCO leadership summit in June, Hu joined the leaders of Russia and other Central Asian governments in making clear Beijing’s alarm about the Afghan narcotics problem.

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Last Friday, the Beijing education committee summoned representatives from Beijing’s 10 leading public high schools to discuss study abroad students. Among those invited were People’s University High School, Tsinghua University High, Peking University High, Beijing Number Four, and the Experimental School, all of which already have a sizable contingent of students in the Ivy League and alumni networks in the United States. 

As the director of Peking University High’s study abroad programme, I attended on our school’s behalf. During the meeting, the education committee ordered all schools to better prepare students for studying abroad, to maintain contact with them once they’re in the United States, and to instill patriotism in them so they’ll return to help develop the motherland.

For me, the meeting marked a sudden change in government attitude towards the study abroad phenomenon. What was interesting was not what was said—it was that anything was said at all. 

Barack Obama might have been happy sprinkling pledges of US support for permanent UN Security Council membership around like confetti during his latest Asia trip, but India is also doing its own bit of lobbying to try to make it happen.

After telling India that he supported seeing the country elevated to ‘its rightful place in the world’ during his three-day visit there last weekend, Obama followed up by telling Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan on the sidelines of the APEC summit that Japan is a model for the kind of country that should have a place on the UNSC.

The truth is, of course, that if India is to have any hope of seeing reform of the Council (something that anyway remains a distant prospect, with the current membership in no hurry to back a dilution of their own powers) it will also need the support of permanent member China.

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There was an interesting take in the Wall Street Journal at the end of last week on the developing narrative of an increasingly assertive China alarming its neighbours—it also seems to be alarming its own citizens.

According to David Zweig, director of the Center on Environment, Energy and Resource Policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, many Chinese analysts are perplexed by what they perceive as a ‘significant shift’ in the way China’s government and military are engaging with the world.

He writes: ‘These academics are deeply concerned. Even usually nationalistic, pro-government friends are hesitant to defend current policy. And they also struggle to explain why all this is happening. Is China feeling its oats? Or is it bravado that masks feelings of insecurity?

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There’d been speculation that it had happened for a couple of weeks now, and yesterday it was officially confirmed—China now has the world’s fastest supercomputer.

According to TOP500, an annual list of the world’s fastest computers, China’s Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin overtook the US Department of Energy’s Cray XT5 ‘Jaguar’ system. The Tianhe-1A can reportedly undertake 2.57 quadrillion calculations per second, significantly more than the 1.75 petaflop/s achieved by Jaguar.

According to Jack Dongarra, a professor at the University of Tennessee's department of electrical engineering, the Chinese breakthrough should be seen as a ‘wake-up call’ to the United States and others. Speaking to CNET, Dongarra said if the US hopes to respond to having been dethroned, it should try thinking of supercomputers as race cars.

‘In order to run the race car, you need a driver. You need to effectively use the machine. And we need to invest in various levels within the supercomputer ecology,’ he reportedly said. ‘The ecology is made up of the hardware, the operating system, the compiler, the applications, the numerical libraries, and so on. And you have to maintain an investment across that whole software stack in order to effectively use the hardware. And that's an aspect that sometimes we forget about. It's underfunded.’

Does the new Chinese lead matter? Writing in The Atlantic, Alex Madrigal said supercomputers allow countries ‘to push the scientific edge’. Writing before the official announcement, he said: ‘There are a wide variety of fields that depend on the astounding simulation capabilities of today's supercomputers…But it's worth noting that in the United States, these high-performance machines are primarily used to simulate nuclear weapons. It wouldn't be surprising if the Chinese computers are given that task, too.’

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Well, economic growth and the 'Yokohama Vision' might have been the key official themes of APEC, but as it was bilateral issues that dominated much of the media's interest, it's probably fitting I wrap-up my APEC coverage with mention of Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan's closing press conference, which I've just come back from.

Kan covered at some length the key points that APEC leaders had agreed on before skipping quickly through a list of his bilateral meetings with Barack Obama, Hu Jintao and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, among others. Inevitably, however, questioners brought him back to the issue that has to some extent overshadowed the summit, namely the territorial disputes with China and Russia.
 

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The APEC summit is wrapping up today, with the leaders issuing their statement on the 'The Yokohama Vision - Bogor and Beyond.' Bogor refers to the city in Indonesia where APEC leaders gathered in 1994 to announce 'their shared commitment to achieve free and open trade and investment by 2010 for industrialized economies and by 2020 for developing economies.'

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