November 2009 Archives

By REUTERS | via (UNCENSORED) Yahoo! News
November 27, 2009

People in China living with HIV and AIDS face widespread discrimination and stigma, with even medical workers sometimes refusing to touch them, according to a U.N. survey released on Friday.

China's Health Ministry and UNAIDS estimate that the country has between 97,000 and 112,000 people infected with AIDS.

But more than 40 percent of people surveyed in a new UNAIDS report said they had been discriminated against because of their HIV status. More than one-tenth said they had been refused medical care at least once.

Chinese AIDS activist Yu Xuan, talking at a news conference to unveil the report, recounted the story of a friend who was refused an urgent operation because of her HIV status, and who ended up dying as a result.

"I don't want people to have the kind of experiences I have had," said Yu, who also has AIDS.

China has long faced a problem in tackling a disease which officials once refused to acknowledge, and where for many people taboos surrounding sex remain strong, limiting public or even private discussion.

Deputy Chinese Health Minister Huang Jeifu said the government would work harder to address issues related to AIDS stigma and ignorance, but admitted it would be difficult.

"The biggest obstacle is that there is not enough education or publicity about AIDS. Society does not know enough about the disease, and people think you can get it just from touch, talking, shaking hands or eating together," Huang said. "This is a huge problem."

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By SHARON LaFRANIERE | The New York Times
November 24, 2009

A lengthy prison sentence for a rights activist shows the determination of Chinese officials to suppress any vestige of dissent related to shoddy construction and unnecessary deaths in last year's devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, fellow activists said.

Huang Qi, 46, who helped parents press their grievances against the local government after their children died when their schools collapsed, was given a three-year prison term on Monday. He was convicted of illegal possession of state secrets, a common charge used to punish people who defy the authorities.

Mr. Huang's wife, Zeng Li, said in a telephone interview that her husband was found guilty of possession of "certain documents from a certain city." The documents and the city were not identified during a 10-minute court hearing in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, she said.

According to Ms. Zeng, the judge said that her husband must be severely punished because he had a prior conviction for inciting subversive activity. A prosecutor privately told her that her husband "has stepped on a lot of toes," she said.

She said her husband hoped to appeal the verdict. Mr. Huang is part of a loosely linked network of bereaved parents and activists who partly blame substandard shcool construction for the high toll from China's biggest natural disaster in decades.

By the government's estimate, about 90,000 people died in the earthquake, including 5,335 schoolchildren.

Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist in Beijing who has documented and publicized the deaths of schoolchildren, said Mr. Huang's punishment "is absolutely outrageous."

"They just want to put down any opposition," said the artist, who helped design Beijing's Olympic National Stadium, known as the Bird's Nest.

Although he has not faced as much pressure as Mr. Huang or other activists, Mr. Ai said he was also being harassed by government authorities. Last week, he said, government security officers visited his bank and told officials there that he had committed a serious crime, he said.

"I have asked myself many times, 'Should I do this?' " he said in a telephone interview. "The answer is clear. I have to act on my feelings."

Mr. Ai has tried to press the government to release a list of the dead children. Only in May, a year after the earthquake, did the authorities made public an estimate of how many died or were missing and presumed dead.

One 43-year-old mother lost her 14-year-old son when his high school in the city of Beichuan collapsed. "This is beyond my words," she said when asked about Mr. Huang's sentence. She gave her last name as Liu and requested that her first name not be used, for fear of repercussions.

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By SHARON LaFRANIERE | The New York Times
November 20, 2009

Like parents everywhere, mothers and fathers in Namibia, an impoverished southern African nation, worry about college costs and opportunities for their children. The Chinese government has stepped forward to help -- for a select and powerful few.

So far this year, the Beijing government has secretly awarded scholarships to study in China to the offspring of nine top officials, including to the daughter of Namibia's president, Hifikepunye Pohamba. Two young relatives of Namibia's former president and national patriarch, Sam Nujoma, also received grants.

The disclosure of the scholarships, first revealed by a feisty Namibian newspaper, has unleashed a wave of fury from the nation's civil society groups and youth organizations. In a country where five in six high school graduates do not go on to college, many find it unconscionable for well-paid government leaders to accept overseas university scholarships for their children.

"Only senior people in government knew about the scholarships," said Norman Tjombe, director of the nonprofit Legal Assistance Center. "No chance was given at all to the general public."

The controversy has reignited a simmering debate in Namibia over deals with the Chinese government, already under scrutiny by Namibian prosecutors. Inquiries there and in other developing countries in Africa and Asia have cast a fresh light on how China sometimes uses its treasure chest of foreign loans and aid to create elite alliances and ease the approval of no-bid contracts.

Even some within Namibia's governing Swapo party are asking whether China is trying to buy influence with their nation's political leadership to gain access to mineral resources or to win business for its well-connected companies.

"How is it that this favor just comes like manna from heaven?" said Elijan Ngurare, secretary general of Swapo's youth league, in a telephone interview. "Clearly there must be something that they are after."

To some international relations experts, the scholarship controversy illustrates a blind spot in China's aggressive strategy to cement diplomatic alliances, lock in natural resources and solicit trade and business on the African continent. In Namibia at least, Chinese government officials seem caught off guard by the public scrutiny exercised by a vibrant civil society.

The scholarship scandal was first revealed in Informante, a free tabloid in the Namibian capital, Windhoek, with a proud motto: "You conceal. We reveal." It has no counterpart in China, where even the most aggressive media outlets stop short of raising unfavorable questions about the dealings of top officials or their children.

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By Radio Free Asia
November 18, 2009

Chinese rights lawyers and petitioners were closely watched and prevented from meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama during his visit to Beijing.

Rights lawyers and activists in Beijing during U.S. President Barack Obama's visit were restricted from meeting with him to voice their concerns, they say.

Well-known Beijing rights lawyer Mo Shaoping said that Beijing police had been alerted when the U.S. embassy inquired about his willingness to meet with President Obama when he arrived in the capital.

"The American side contacted me about 20 days ago asking if I wanted to meet with him, and I agreed. But the meeting time was not finalized," Mo said.

"However, last Saturday the Beijing police asked me whether I wanted to meet [with Obama], and I said that the American side had spoken with me but this had not been finalized. I then asked the police: 'Do you want to block the meeting?' They answered 'No,'" he said.

And while other eminent rights lawyers were not directly contacted by American diplomats, many found themselves under tight police surveillance during Obama's visit.

One of the lawyers, Li Heping, said he had been followed for days ahead of Obama's arrival.

"Police have been following me for two or three days, and they stayed in front of my residence during the night. They explicitly told me that this was to prevent any possible meeting with Obama," Li said.

Another rights lawyer in Beijing, Li Fangping, met with the same problem.

"Police have been monitoring me since last Saturday, and now if I go out I have to ride in their car. They bar me from going to the places where President Obama might appear," he said.

Petitioners taken away

As Obama arrived in China, a group of overseas Chinese from the United States, Canada, Australia and Hong Kong came to Beijing to petition the central government over business losses related to China-based investment scams.

But Chinese police immediately restricted the groups upon their arrival in the capital.

A businessman from Hong Kong, who asked to remain anonymous, said "Police restricted our movement after we arrived. Friends from the United States and Canada suffered the same."

He added that Chinese officials from the Supreme Court on Tuesday promised to investigate the problems the group raised with local officials.

Chinese petitioners in Beijing were treated less humanely, despite Obama's presence in Beijing.

Petitioner Chen Qiyong said a group of petitioners that went to greet Obama were confronted by police.

"On Monday night, more than 90 of us went to the Diaoyutai State Guest House to welcome President Obama, but the police requested us to leave," Chen said.

"After our refusal, they took 42 of us away and sent us to the relief and rescue center near the railway station in southern Beijing."

Joint conference

Obama held a private meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao in the Great Hall of the People on Tuesday in Beijing, which yielded a joint statement promising the two nations would work toward building bilateral strategic trust, and promising to work together to tackle ongoing global challenges.

Following the meeting, China's state-run Xinhua News Agency posted online the full text of the speech President Obama made to college students in Shanghai as well as his speech at a press conference in Beijing.

Earlier reports said that the live feed and text of Obama's allusions to human rights had been omitted from coverage of the Shanghai event.

Following the private meeting, the two presidents met jointly with the press.

Hu spoke first at the press conference, emphasizing that "China and the United States share extensive common interests and a broad prospect for cooperation on a series of major issues important to mankind's peace, stability and development."

President Obama again described the protection of human rights as a universal value following a similar talk he gave during a town hall meeting with students in Shanghai a day earlier.

"I spoke to President Hu about America's bedrock beliefs that all men and women possess certain fundamental human rights. We do not believe these principles are unique to America, but rather they are universal rights and that they should be available to all peoples, to all ethnic and religious minorities," the U.S. president said.

Obama added that the United States and China "agreed to continue to move this discussion forward in a human rights dialogue that is scheduled for early next year."

He then called on Beijing to restart talks on Tibetan autonomy with envoys of the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

"While we recognize that Tibet is part of the People's Republic of China, the United States supports the early resumption of dialogue between the Chinese government and representatives of the Dalai Lama to resolve any concerns and differences that the two sides may have."

Obama also "applauded the steps that the People's Republic of China and Taiwan have already taken to relax tensions and build ties across the Taiwan Strait."

Obama and Hu did not take questions from the audience and left immediately after the press conference.

Original reporting by Shenhua, Xin Yu, Qiao Long, Fang Yuan and Ding Xiao for RFA's Mandarin service. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated by Ping Chen. Written for the Web in English by Joshua Lipes. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

>> Original source

By Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist | The New York Times
November 16, 2009

International travel by world leaders is mainly about making symbolic gestures. Nobody expects President Obama to come back from China with major new agreements, on economic policy or anything else.

But let's hope that when the cameras aren't rolling Mr. Obama and his hosts engage in some frank talk about currency policy. For the problem of international trade imbalances is about to get substantially worse. And there's a potentially ugly confrontation looming unless China mends its ways.

Some background: Most of the world's major currencies "float" against one another. That is, their relative values move up or down depending on market forces. That doesn't necessarily mean that governments pursue pure hands-off policies: countries sometimes limit capital outflows when there's a run on their currency (as Iceland did last year) or take steps to discourage hot-money inflows when they fear that speculators love their economies not wisely but too well (which is what Brazil is doing right now). But these days most nations try to keep the value of their currency in line with long-term economic fundamentals.

China is the great exception. Despite huge trade surpluses and the desire of many investors to buy into this fast-growing economy -- forces that should have strengthened the renminbi, China's currency -- Chinese authorities have kept that currency persistently weak. They've done this mainly by trading renminbi for dollars, which they have accumulated in vast quantities.

And in recent months China has carried out what amounts to a beggar-thy-neighbor devaluation, keeping the yuan-dollar exchange rate fixed even as the dollar has fallen sharply against other major currencies. This has given Chinese exporters a growing competitive advantage over their rivals, especially producers in other developing countries.

What makes China's currency policy especially problematic is the depressed state of the world economy. Cheap money and fiscal stimulus seem to have averted a second Great Depression. But policy makers haven't been able to generate enough spending, public or private, to make progress against mass unemployment. And China's weak-currency policy exacerbates the problem, in effect siphoning much-needed demand away from the rest of the world into the pockets of artificially competitive Chinese exporters.

But why do I say that this problem is about to get much worse? Because for the past year the true scale of the China problem has been masked by temporary factors. Looking forward, we can expect to see both China's trade surplus and America's trade deficit surge.

That, at any rate, is the argument made in a new paper by Richard Baldwin and Daria Taglioni of the Graduate Institute, Geneva. As they note, trade imbalances, both China's surplus and America's deficit, have recently been much smaller than they were a few years ago. But, they argue, "these global imbalance improvements are mostly illusory -- the transitory side effect of the greatest trade collapse the world has ever seen."

Indeed, the 2008-9 plunge in world trade was one for the record books. What it mainly reflected was the fact that modern trade is dominated by sales of durable manufactured goods -- and in the face of severe financial crisis and its attendant uncertainty, both consumers and corporations postponed purchases of anything that wasn't needed immediately. How did this reduce the U.S. trade deficit? Imports of goods like automobiles collapsed; so did some U.S. exports; but because we came into the crisis importing much more than we exported, the net effect was a smaller trade gap.

But with the financial crisis abating, this process is going into reverse. Last week's U.S. trade report showed a sharp increase in the trade deficit between August and September. And there will be many more reports along those lines.

So picture this: month after month of headlines juxtaposing soaring U.S. trade deficits and Chinese trade surpluses with the suffering of unemployed American workers. If I were the Chinese government, I'd be really worried about that prospect.

Unfortunately, the Chinese don't seem to get it: rather than face up to the need to change their currency policy, they've taken to lecturing the United States, telling us to raise interest rates and curb fiscal deficits -- that is, to make our unemployment problem even worse.

And I'm not sure the Obama administration gets it, either. The administration's statements on Chinese currency policy seem pro forma, lacking any sense of urgency.

That needs to change. I don't begrudge Mr. Obama the banquets and the photo ops; they're part of his job. But behind the scenes he better be warning the Chinese that they're playing a dangerous game.

>> Original source

By ALEXA OLESEN, Associated Press Writer | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
November 12, 2009

Kidnapping people on their way to lodge complaints with China's central government has evolved into a lucrative cottage industry that mainland police refuse to acknowledge or crack down on, a human rights group said Thursday.

The report by New York-based Human Rights Watch on China's "black jails" is based mainly on interviews with 38 people who said they were nabbed by thugs while trying to bring grievances to the central government. They reported being held for days or months in makeshift detention centers, deprived of food and sleep, beaten and threatened. Police allegedly aided the captors or refused to intervene in several cases, it said.

China's Ministry of Public Security refused to look at the 53-page online report in English and requested a summary in Chinese. In response to a summary prepared by The Associated Press, a spokeswoman said the ministry was not responsible for any alleged violations and could not verify secret jails exist in China. She refused to give her name in line with ministry policy.

Black jails emerged in China about six years ago after police were barred from randomly detaining vagrants. The jails, usually makeshift lockups in hostels, apartment buildings, or abandoned factories, have been well-documented by human rights groups, lawyers, and the international media.

The HRW report sheds new light on the economics of the jails and why they evade crackdowns despite violating Chinese and international law.

It blames a civil service evaluation system that uses a point system to penalize officials if too many people from their jurisdiction complain to the central government and rewards those who are able to minimize grievances. Because bonuses and promotions are linked to evaluations, it's become economical for officials to pay people to intercept, detain and intimidate petitioners, it said.

The report cites an alleged internal government directive given to authorities in Shimen, a county in south China's Hunan province, in 2007 that says officials get two points if they bring petitioners back from Beijing or the provincial capital of Changsha, while those who fail to do so are to have half a point deducted.

Officials typically pay black jails between 150 yuan ($22) to 300 yuan ($44) per day to hold petitioners until they can be picked up and returned home, it said, and estimated that Beijing's black jails detain up to 10,000 people per year, though that number includes some people who are detained on multiple occasions.

Police in Beijing and other cities are aware of the jails but ignore them because they keep potentially troublesome petitioners away from cities, Human Rights Watch said. In some cases, police have also "directly assisted black jail operators," it said.

"It's completely illegal but the national authorities have done nothing to stop it so far," said Andrew Nathan, an expert on Chinese human rights issues who was not involved with the report.

"At the same time, though, this informal system cuts against the ability of the central authorities to learn about what's going wrong at the local level," he said. "In the long run it would be smarter for Beijing to let the petitioners exercise what are after all their legal rights."

>> Original source

By NBS News' Ed Flanagan | via MSNBC
09 November 2009

Twenty years after the toppling of the Berlin Wall, another "wall" is facing intense public scrutiny in China.

The so-called Great Firewall of China, the online filtering and surveillance program run by the communist government's Ministry of Public Security, is alive and well and censoring freedom of expression for millions of Chinese.  

But over the past few months, Chinese discontent with the Great Firewall has bubbled over with increasing frequency and fervor.

Chinese netizen's ire was recently sparked by the Green Dam censoring software that was proposed last summer and the blocking of popular social media pages like Facebook and Twitter during the Uighur riots in Xinjiang in July. 

The censorship during the Uighur riots caused such consternation online, it sparked one bitter Chinese Twitter user to mournfully tweet that day, "Today, two '140s' were killed in China - 140 people in Xinjiang and 140 character micro-blogging service Twitter."

It is perhaps fitting then that the Great Firewall should find its opposition in another online medium: Twitter.

The Berlin Twitter wallThe most recent incident occurred late in October when organizers for the Culture Project Berlin, a non-profit organization in Germany that promotes art and culture, created an online "Berlin Twitter Wall" where German tweeters were encouraged to share their memories of the tumultuous times surrounding the fall of wall 20 years ago.  

However, when organizers also asked tweeters to write about, "which walls still have to come down to make our world a better place," the global response was sudden and overwhelming.

The site was soon flooded by over a thousand comments from China complaining about the infamous Great Firewall. Chinese netizens, who circumvented the government's usual blocking of Twitter by using proxy servers, had suddenly transformed the online memorial site into a protest against 21st century forms of censorship.

Chinese censors were relatively slow to respond to the swift outpouring of anger, taking a couple days before finally blocking the website hosting the Berlin Twitter Wall. By then though, the damage had been done. Prior to the blocking, Carsten Hein, a director of the project estimated around 1,500 of the around 3,300 comments posted on the page were in Chinese.

Showing the resourcefulness and the doggedness of China's netizens, even after the site was blocked, posters in China were still visiting the website and leaving messages on the Twitter wall.

One user wrote, "Mr. Hu Jintao, Tear Down the Great Firewall!" putting a twist on President Ronald Reagan's famous words to his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 imploring him to "Tear down this wall!"

Another poster, appealed to President Barack Obama to take action during his visit to China later this month writing: "Mr. Obama please ask Mr. Hu to tear down the GFW, insure Chinese people use Internet free."

>> Original source

UPI - United Press International
November 05, 2009

Four months after riots in China's Uighur Autonomous Region, residents there are still cut off from the World Wide Web.

The government has not said when Internet access will be available again in the region and its principal city, Urumqi, China Daily, a government newspaper, reported.

The national government cut off access less than 24 hours after the July 5 riot, which left at least 197 people dead and hundreds jailed. Officials said separatist groups based outside China had used Facebook, Twitter and other sites to orchestrate the violence.

Local business owners, like Li Nan, who runs an online dried-fruit business, say the shutdown has been a major headache.

"To carry on my business, I had no choice but to set up a new office in Dunhuang, which is the closest town to Urumqi in Gansu province and has added to my costs. No Internet means no income for me," Li said. "Dunhuang has become a holy place for businessmen like me, although it takes 14 hours to get here from Urumqi by train."

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