"Why French Apples are Bananas in England?"

While doing my parcial project I came across exchange rates. I used to think they were very simple: The currency a country has was more valued in in contrast to others based on their buying power and their economic growth; the bigger coin you had, the better.

However, while doing China's research, I found out that China deliberately davaluated it's Renmimbi Yuan "to have a more competitive exportation power". This didn't made sense to me, but then all those Asian currencys came into the ecuation (Yen, Yuan, etc.) and I realized many asian countries had a very low exchange rate, even though many of them had a very large and stable economy, so why is that?

After some research I only found that currency did reflect the buying power of a country, and the currency devaluated with inflation, however, China's and Japan economies are quite strong and stable, so this doesn't make sense. I think something is missing, but the only thing that came across my mind is that these countries devaluated their currency to hold the peg to foreigner currency without taking out the balance, which means give the natonal currency the space needed by the natural raises and downs a currency naturally has.

"China Loosing it's Own Game"

China is the world's number one exporting country. Nevertheless, China reported for the first time in six years, a trade deficit. This means a negative balance of trade since China's imports exceeded exports, surprising many people around the world having China failing in it's "own game."

China is considering to keep the yuan stable, despite the United States is pressing China to reconsider it. However experts say this problem is transient and very rare. It is not a sign of recession. However, China's leaders want to be sure of the exports recovery before considering the removal of the anti-crisis policies, such as the freeze of the yuan's exchange rate against the dollar.

Even thought Chinese goods are very demanded, some countries have decreased the demand of some products because China has increased some prices, and decreased the prices of very demanded products. The question is, Is this the crisis blow to China? I think it is, since the world is buying less because of recession, but it looks like the government has taken the aproppiate measures in time and is being careful, meaning China will probably stand on it's feet soon.

Having Fun

In the weekend our China final project team got together to finish the work. In a strange way, we had a lot of fun (or at least I did).

We were discussing a lot of articles on China saying things like "did you know that...." and thing like that. We were all in my dining room table, each with a laptop searching for information and doing work.

Of course there were some persons that occasionally went to Facebook to stalk other or that did other homework’s, but we managed to do a lot of the work. Another fun thing is that I made my guest (we were at my house) feel like we were in a starbucks.

I prepared some chocolate muffins and cappuccinos so that we had more energy and we just started discussing a lot of thing while drinking.


We did have our little problems, but nothing we couldn´t resolve. We are a very good team and we know how to resolve conflicts without making them bigger.

What I mean with all this is, I had fun doing this homework, I like knowing about other places and this project gave me the opportunity and the will to do so. You make things better if you like doing them.

Looking for Love

China has 22% of the world´s population, which means that there is a lot of millions of people there right? And even though they are a lot they have problems finding love.







China has the one child policy so they prefer to have boys and if they know they are going to have girls they can have an abortion so as a result there is a wide gap between the number of girls and of boys.

Girls don´t look for looks, they look for someone who can support them economically, that means that they search for someone with a job. Hundreds of Chinese graduate but only a few get jobs so; many of them are old and still living with their parent, that’s when the parents come in.

There is this big event in which parents with boys have a blue ribbon around their wrist and if you have a daughter the ribbon is red. Then around you there are a lot of cards with information and a picture and parents just go to other person and ask about his or her kid to see if they could be happy if they married.

So this event wouldn´t have to happen if China wasn´t so bad with girls, they are important.Going to a place like that as if it was a market its really sad and I fear is going to get worse each year.

The Internet Revolution

This news report had caught my attention because it's new topic that I would like to talk about. As time goes by, technology had evolved to become part of our daily private lives. We should consider that this is a new type of "revolution" that will change how we interact in the world completely, including some aspects of our government. I'm talking about the impact of the Internet of course. We can't live an hour without it, we are much attached to it. Some people feel like an "addiction" to the internet by pages like Facebook, Twitter, etc. A friend told me they are even some groups to leave the addiction, something like Alcoholics Anonymous. Leaving the personal effect on us aside, the Internet not only affects how we as humans communicate and "stay in touch" but also, some experts says it will affect whole industries, even the government. We have seen this type of issues before with the Internet. I remember we discuss in class about how the freedom of speech is being violated by governments like China by banning the site of Google and YouTube. They are forgetting the main ideas of great thinkers who fought to defend their beliefs, and now we are taking steps back. I know that China is kind of a mixed country that is moving with big steps in the economic area but is decreasing in the political area. According to the article, the internet revolution will be very slow but painful. This means that industries will reborn from their ashes to adapt to the new challenging world. The government can take advantage of this tool in a positive or negative way. The positive way is that the people will be more informed on what's going around them to have a better judgment and make right decisions. It can also be a place where online cooperation is held and the people's opinion is heard well. Of course, everything has a positive and a negative side. The article says that some people think that this tool in the wrong hands can be a dangerous tracker of persons. With all that is going on, people uploading photos and personal information, this can also affect us. The Internet will change the world undoubtedly, but is up to us what we share and what we don't. This tool can be very useful to us if we want to, we just need to be careful and don't just go with the flow that every site is safe. It has already started, so adapting is the solution to it.

Busy Children

I was doing some more research on China because that’s the country I am doing the Final Project on. Then, I decided to look about children in China since it is a very controversial topic in this country. I found an article about Chinese children that states they spend too much hours in school and have no free time to play unlike normal children around the world. The article said that children may even go to school more hours than their parents go to work. Parents try to keep children busy at all times so they can focus on their careers and time for themselves. This is a very interesting phenomenon because it is directly related to culture. Parents are so worried about making their children competitive and prepared for being the best they forget children are supposed to have time to play and discover the world around them. Chinese children grow up with a lot of pressure from their parents who are always pushing them to be better. Being pushed by your parents is good as long as it does not affect self perception and your quality of life. It is good to be competitive and it is good to be educated but your overall well being is unquestionably first.

If most children grow up stress, which is happening, they can cause a major change in China’s future. The way I see it, people used to struggle and suffer because they could only have one child. Today, they may not even want to deal with this responsibility. A cultural change is definitely going on right now. This change in the way parenthood is seen can affect thousands of children who are growing up feeling unloved and without time to play. Growing up like this is not only unhealthy for the child. These children from today are going to be the political, economical and social leaders from China in a few decades. Adults should consider this when treating their children. They should raise them properly so they can contribute with China’s development in the future. If China is full with unhappy and traumatized people, its economy and social situation may suffer changes. We cannot be sure how much these changes with affect this country that has struggled so much to be one of the most powerful countries now a day. I am using the case of China because it is the country I am researching about but I am sure there are sadly other countries were children are being underappreciated.
We should focus on children today to have a better world tomorrow.

A big Chain

While navigating through internet to find economic issues of The Independent Republic of China, I found out that we aren't the only ones with water scarcity issues, it seemed that China too was suffering with water scarcity. Water scarcity is a big problem in a country, but this time scarcity didn't take my attention, but the issue with rice.

You see, rice is an important factor for China's country, without water China can't reproduce rice, and without rice China can't feed its whole population. Of course, it is a great issue, but not only that, it is a GREAT GLOBAL ISSUE. I later found out that China's rice is exported to many parts around the world and that China's rice problem concerns all of us since its rice supplies the half of the world's rice.

It really is a big chain, if China stops reproducing rice, then eveybody around the world will have serious hunger problems.

Who would've thought that a country's problem would be another one's too.

China´s economy

So for the final project we chose China, well, I chose China because the other members of my team weren’t in class. I was really nervous because I didn’t knew if the country I chose will like them and of top of that we have to be ambassadors so if you don’t like the country your work will not be as good as with a country you do like.

When I told them what we did at class and the country I chose I was relived to hear that they liked the country. I chose that country because news about it are going out very recently so we have updated information and is interesting because they have a different political and economical system so it is always entertaining to learn something new.

In the homework of searching about their economy we were at one of the team member’s house with laptops searching for information, so if someone found and interesting article she will discuss it and then we saved the page to take information later. So we were all the time discussing things. In one part we laughed a lot because it said something like Chinamerica is heading for divorce, and one said, that is from a tabloid right? We worked hard but we had fun.

The most interesting part for me was when I learned more about the US dollars that China has. I though that China was really powerful for having that money and that US was having more respect for China because of that but I learned that it wasn’t convenient for China to change the money to any other currency or do other things because it will cause inflation. So overall I liked the research.

China looking to take Japan's place

China has, in the past years, become a global level market. They have the possibility of making big commercial exchanges with other countries and selling their products with an almost sure purchaser.
As China progresses, its economic possibilities also increase. It has shown growth of 10% during a three-month period.
It is believed, specially by the Chinese government, that if China continues developing with that speed, it can get to take the place that Japan currently holds as the second economic world power.

I really consider this as an interesting and important topic. I'm really impressed about the power China has gained during the last years. I think that the most important thing we can get from this, is having another market functioning and competing with the rest.
Some of us may feel fear about China gaining so much power. I don't think we should be afraid of this; as economy varies so much, it may be possible that our whole economic perspective changes during a couple of years.
As I already mentioned it, I think that the most important thing we can get from the current Chinese power it's that we have another great supplier of goods we can have exchange with.

China and the Human Rights

I think this picture is very funny because IT IS TRUE. China is one of the countries that executes as a punishment for criminals, as well as in many other countries. However, China is the leader country in death penalty.

In China, people in the death row do not have the right to a fair trial, which attempts against human dignity and rights. Moreover people in jail, live in inhuman conditions.

Chinese laws punish about 70 crimes with death penalty and some of these crimes are non-violent crimes, such as crimes that have to do with selling or consuming drugs.

Amnesty International thinks that the crimes punished with the capital punishment must be reduced and people in the death row should be allowed to have a fair trial and good lawyers and to receive visits from their families. In my opinion, China should not kill criminals. Killing is not the solution. And we can notice that; since the beginning of times, governments have killed criminals in order to punish them and make the others see what would happen to them if they commit the same crime. But, does that stop them? I firmly believe it does not. People keep commiting the same crimes over and over again, they seem to do not fear death. Death penalty has not reduced the number of criminals. I think that criminals would suffer more in they stay in jail for the rest of their lives than if they are executed immediately.

China blocks GOOGLE

I knew that in China they blocked some pages that contain inapropiate graphics or information according to the laws of regulation in China, but I would have never imagine that they would block an entire server like Google which is very popular across the world. They suposely did that because Google did not have good filters in its information and that children could easily acess to non proper material ( porn). In the other side Google says that they have good filters and that they were working in some improvements on them.

I think that China is more concerned about the information Google gives of this country than what Chinesse goverment declares; or China is just being smart because that way companies and nations that want to keep negotiating with China will have to follow its regulations in order to be able to stay in the Chinesse stock market.

Who is Going Greener?

A couple of days ago, I found an article about China being the leader at developing green tech. The article mentions that Asian countries are the ones developing this type of energy quicker. Countries like China, Korean and Japan have invested a lot of money in different types of clean energy, like wind turbines, solar energy, etc. I thought that the United States was ahead of every other country. But the fact is that it is not anymore. The article explained that the USA has focused its investments in recovering from the economic crisis. Since Asia was not affected by this crisis, countries like China focus their money on making these types of energy grow.

I think this has a lot to do with the class because we can see another way the economic crisis affected certain countries. Green technology is the technology of the future. In the next years, we will be needing technology that not only satisfies our needs but also that helps us save our planet. This was mentioned by a report of Breakthrough Institute. This really called my attention because the Breakthrough Institute is a think tank in Oakland. It was nice to find a term learned in class applied in the outside world.

I think it is really interesting how economy shapes everything in a country, for instance its technology. The United States has always being very competitive at being the first at developing something. For example, the arms race, the space race and now the green race. I think they have made a race out of it because it is urgent to find ways of not harming our planet anymore. The sooner, the better. We do not know how much time we have left before it is too late.

Mexico is trying its best to go green. Unfortunately, our economy and our culture are the ones stopping this movement. Economy is a matter where neither of us can do much. On the other hand, we can change our culture. Obviously it is not going to be easy, but we still have to do our best. If we care for our planet, it is up to us to make the rest of the people conscious. At school, we have the student group Greenology. As a member of this group, I have the responsibility of inviting the rest of the students to care about our world.

Everyone is trying to do their best to help the Earth out. But how do we know that what we are doing is enough? The truth is that we cannot be sure that our actions will work; but at least we can try. Asian countries may be the ones finding the solution to our problem. Whatever they discover or invent will benefit humanity and everything that lives on Earth.