According to that article,

In a little-noticed mid-summer announcement, the Asian Development Bank presented official survey results indicating China's economy is smaller and poorer than established estimates say. The announcement cited the first authoritative measure of China's size using purchasing power parity methods. The results tell us that when the World Bank announces its expected PPP data revisions later this year, China's economy will turn out to be 40 per cent smaller than previously stated.

This more accurate picture of China clarifies why Beijing concentrates so heavily on domestic priorities such as growth, public investment, pollution control and poverty reduction. The number of people in China living below the World Bank's dollar-a-day poverty line is 300m - three times larger than currently estimated.

However, according to David Dollar, World Bank director of Development Policy, the conclusion in that last sentence is wrong:

The new PPPs reveal that prices are about 40 percent higher than had been assumed under the old PPP, which was an academic guestimate.  Some researchers immediately applied the new PPP conversion factor for GDP to household data and came up with hugely higher estimates of the $1 per day poverty rate for China.  However, the World Bank does not use the GDP conversion factor in measuring poverty.  The research department of the bank will produce a conversion factor for poverty analysis that takes account of two important things:

    (1) the basket actually consumed by the poor is different from the GDP basket; and

    (2) the poor almost exclusively live in rural areas where prices are lower.

This work is still underway but the research department has given us a range for their new estimates.  Their old estimate of $1 per day poverty rate was 10% in 2004; the new estimate will be in the range of 13-17%.

[Bold in the original, italics mine]

New PPPs reveal China has had more poverty reduction than we thought

In other words, the  dollar-a-day poverty line is not 300 million, as claimed in the FT article, but 170-220 million.

Moreover, according to Dollar, the new PPP figures mean that there has been more poverty reduction than previously thought:

The reason for this is that the better price data will also be applied to earlier estimates of poverty (all of which are based on constant Chinese yuan data).  The World Bank estimate of $1 per day poverty in China at the beginning of reform will be raised to somewhere in the range of 71-77%.  The old estimate was 64%.  So, we used to think that 54% of China's huge population had been lifted out of poverty during economic reform.  The improved estimate will be around 59%.

[italics mine]

Finally, some of David Dollar's comments from his travels in Gansu province, China's second poorest:

• Traveling around rural areas, one can see that China is still a relatively poor country, with the second largest number of $1 per day poor after India.  At the same time, there has been tremendous progress.  At the beginning of reform, we now know that China was substantially poorer than Sub-Saharan Africa.

• It is natural to be struck by the glaring disparity between rural Gansu and coastal cities such as Shanghai, with their skyscrapers and neon. But when I travel I always like to ask people, in my mediocre Chinese, how their lives have changed in the past decade. It is hard to find anyone whose life is not far better than before.

• In a village close to Lanzhou airport we met Dongxiang people who had voluntarily resettled out of their poor county to irrigated land in the Hexi corridor. <...> I asked the old man if he ever regretted moving. Without two seconds hesitation, he said: "Not once. The old village had poor transportation, no school, poor crops. Now we have good transportation, school for the kids, more income."

• My casual impressions of Gansu accord with the improved poverty estimates - which show still significant poverty but huge progress since the beginning of reform.

[italics mine]

If all you see is some noble ideal and individuals striving for excellence, your eyesight is curiously selective.

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

Whatever the opinions how political or commercial or blatantly ritualistic the Olympics have become, whatever the political alignment people want to affiliate themselves to voice their protest, whatever one feels about China's lacking progressiveness or equality or environmental policies - stay the fuck away from involving the athletes, in whatever shape, form, motivation, or action. It should not be their concern that China was chosen by the IOC. That's not what sport should be about. Full stop.

The core of evil is a lack of empathy

Also, this is often what sports is all about, but is this what the olympics are about ? In France, in many sports (and due to the reduction in national quotas in many sports) the decision as to who gets to participate is often subject to in-federation political fighting rather than actual performance...

The concept that socialisation has to be linked to business relationships is a great victory for business relationships, not for socialisation...

Olympic Flame - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

...fire was also present at many of the sanctuaries in Olympia, Greece. A fire permanently burned on the altar of Hestia in Olympia, Greece. During the Olympic Games, which honored Zeus, additional fires were lit at his temple and that of his wife, Hera. The modern Olympic flame is ignited at the site where the temple of Hera used to stand.

...The Olympic Flame from the ancient games was reintroduced during the 1928 Olympic Games when an employee of the Electric Utility of Amsterdam called Gerhard Herlitz lit for the first time the flame of the Olympic Games in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In 1928, the flame burnt in the Marathon Tower of the Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam.

The modern convention of moving the Olympic Flame via a relay system from Olympia to the Olympic venue began with the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany.

The relay, captured in Leni Riefenstahl's film, "Olympia", was part of the Nazi propaganda machine's attempt to add myth and mystique to Adolf Hitler's regime. Hitler saw the link with the ancient Games as the perfect way to illustrate his belief that classical Greece was an Aryan forerunner of the modern German Reich.^[2]

Especially after their stunts in Greece.

Please go back to our discussion of this on the day.

According to your first judgement, this was all about the Western media using the Olympics to get themselves into the news. Your second was that it was all about Tibet.

It was neither. There were Tibetan protests elsewhere, but the three RSF guys made no reference to Tibet. They unfurled a banner reading "Boycott the country that tramples on human rights", and two RSF flags that can be seen here. Their declaration on human rights and particularly, freedom of the press and Internet in China can be read here. It contains only passing references to Tibet. Unsurprisingly, because there is far more to be said on these subjects than just Tibet.

Comparing Sarko's influence on the French press (though everyone here knows what I think of it) to the Party's lockdown in China lacks, to put it mildly. a sense of scale and perspective.

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

Helen equates criticism of Western intervention on the Balkans with claiming that "it's all the West's fault",

that was your argument as I remember.

keep to the Fen Causeway

The lack of accord is striking, yes.

Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden

We're also dealing with history here. Hundreds of thousands or perhaps a million Tibetans murdered over the last century. So in this latest repression/rebellion/reprisal event, many people will remember the past and hold that against China.

If you strip that context away however, much of the vehemence of the protests seems overblown. The UK for instance is contributing to a war in Iraq, and meanwhile we're talking about Chinese repression in Tibet that is so small-scale by comparison. That's why some of the reactions to the protests have been so knee-jerk.

That the PRC has, beyond its border, been acting less awfully than the US has is not an endorsement.

Is an Europe-crossing semi-religious event partly invented by the Nazis ahead of a multinational commercial event in our number one source of cheap labour really not at home?

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.