August 2011 Archives

By Joe McDonald - Associated Press AP | via FREE yahoo!news

August 28, 2011

A Communist Party leader has told China's Internet companies to tighten control over material online as Beijing cracks down on dissent and tries to block the rise of Middle East-style protests.

The party secretary for Beijing, Liu Qi, issued the warning following a visit this week to Sina Corp., which operates a popular microblogging site, according to the party-published newspaper Beijing Daily.

Internet companies should "strengthen management and firmly prevent the spread of fake and harmful information," Liu was quoted as saying after the visit Monday to Sina. He said companies should "resist fake and negative information."

Communist authorities encourage Internet use for education and business but are uneasy about its potential to spread dissent, especially after social networking and other websites played a key role in protests that brought down governments in Egypt and Tunisia.

Beijing is in the midst of one of its most sweeping crackdowns on dissent in years and has detained or questioned hundreds of activists, lawyers and others.

The government tries to block access to foreign websites deemed subversive and Chinese operators of websites where the public can post comments are required to watch the material and remove any that violates censorship rules.

The government's censorship rules prompted Google Inc. to close its China search engine last year. Mainland users can see Google's Chinese-language search site in Hong Kong but access is slower and the company's China market share has shrunk.

The report on Liu's warning gave no details of how Internet companies were expected to change their management.

Employees who answered the phone at Sina referred questions to a spokeswoman who did not answer her phone.

With Liu during the visit were Sina CEO Charles Chao and Kai-fu Lee, a former boss of Google's China unit who runs a technology investment company, according to the Beijing Daily.

Chao told Forbes magazine in March that Sina's microblogging site, Weibo, has at least 100 employees monitoring content 24 hours a day. The company said in May that the number of Weibo users had passed 140 million.

Also this week, the Beijing Internet Media Association, a government-sanctioned industry group, called on its 104 member companies to police Internet content, possibly prompted by Liu's order.

"Propaganda guidance to the public should be led toward a correct direction," the appeal said, according to the Beijing Daily. "Online news should be trustworthy and should not spread rumors or vulgar contents."

Liu, the party secretary, also visited the headquarters of Youku.com Inc., a video portal, and talked with CEO Victor Koo, the report said.

China has the world's biggest online population, with 485 million Internet users as of June 30, according to the government-sanctioned China National Internet Information Center.

Meanwhile, a major Chinese Internet commerce platform, Taobao, has told merchants that use its service to stop selling virtual private network and other software that allows Web surfers to avoid government filters.

Taobao, part of Alibaba Group, said it acted after finding VPNs were being used to visit foreign websites illegally. A company spokesman said Tuesday it took the action on its own without receiving government orders.

>> Original Source

By Radio FREE Asia

August 21, 2011

The U.S. vice president prods China to expand human rights in a speech to university students.

By Keith B. Richburg | The Washington Post

18 August 2011

China's new rich love luxury products -- imported French handbags, Italian sports cars -- and even more, they love to show off their bling.

That seems to be creating headaches for China's Communist rulers, who after three decades of exhorting their subjects to get rich are facing growing discontent over a widening income gap. Officials now talk about making sure wealth is more evenly distributed, and how to get the rich to tone it down.

As the global economy melts down, and China tries to accelerate its shift to a more consumer-led growth model, Beijing's leaders see luxury items as a lucrative revenue source. Many Chinese now buy luxury products in Hong Kong or abroad to avoid China's high taxes, so officials are debating a move to slash tariffs to encourage consumers to shop at home.

But government is loath to be seen as taking any new measures to support the sliver of the population that can afford that pricey new Hermes bag or latest Ferrari, and has delayed any decision on cutting tariffs, according to Chinese media reports and industry analysts.

"The government is facing a conflict," said Michael Ouyang, representative of the World Luxury Association in China. "They don't want to promote luxury because they are worried people who cannot afford it will see the advertisements. But they don't want to limit luxury products because it's good for the economy. So they're facing a dilemma."

It doesn't help the government's case when the rich keep showing off their bling.

Exhibit A might be a 20-year-old woman calling herself "Guo Meimei Baby."

Guo -- whose name "Meimei" means "Pretty, pretty" -- became a recent Internet sensation in China, and prompted a national scandal, when she posted photos of herself on her microblog posing with her collection of imported Hermes handbags and showing off her white Maserati sports car, called "little horse," and her (married) boyfriend's orange Lamborghini, called "little bull."

The initial outrage was over suspicion that she was linked to China's largest, government-run charity. But many here said the "Guo Meimei scandal," as the story became known, exposed a common, and unflattering, aspect of China's headlong rush to get rich: a tendency of China's new super-rich to show off how much money they have.

"People like showing off their wealth," said Yang Xu, who runs a shop called Vogue 2 that specializes in second-hand designer handbags. "The consumption of luxury products has grown too fast. It's beyond anybody's imagination."

In his shop, for example, Hermes bags have become more popular than the Louis Vuitton brands, for a simple reason: They are more expensive.

China's rise in the world market

At a time when Europe and the United States are still struggling with stagnant economies, China has emerged as the premier long-term market for luxury products. Chinese bought $12 billion in luxury goods last year, according to the Ministry of Commerce and industry statistics. China will account for 20 percent of all worldwide luxury sales by 2015, according to McKinsey and Company management consulting firm.

Bentley has sold more cars in China this year than in the United Kingdom, with China now accounting for 25 percent of its sales. Mercedes-Benz in July opened a new design studio in Beijing.

According to the World Luxury Association, the market for luxury products in China grew 20 percent last year and shows no sign of slowing. "In China, purchasing power just keeps getting stronger," Ouyang said. "We are the only country where luxury product consumption is growing year by year."

Experts say the phenomenon of showing off wealth is a complex one, rooted in China's long struggles with poverty and famine, and a sense that expensive possessions confer a higher social status.

"Showing off wealth shows that China's economic development has not been long, and Chinese society's psychology of consumption is still not mature," said Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology. "In China, wealth is the only criteria to measure social status. People hope to show they have a higher social status by wearing luxurious brands."

Many of those who show off tend to be the newly rich, and they are often young -- the children of wealthy parents, the so-called "rich second generation," or young women with wealthy boyfriends or suitors. "They want other people to look up to them," Ouyang said of the Guo Meimei phenomenon. "They want people to know that other people love them and take care of them."

"The deeper reason for this showing-off phenomenon in China is that luxury products help your personal confidence," Ouyang said. "If you wear designer clothes, or carry a designer shopping bag, people will give you more respect. A bartender will give you excellent service. ... If you go shopping or to have lunch, an Hermes bag is like your ID card -- it's a really important ID card."

Wealth and vanity, taken too far

On popular microblogging sites, many in China are openly questioning whether the country's new creed of amassing wealth has gone too far.

For example, a professor at the prestigious Peking University was widely criticized recently after he used his personal microblog to tell his former students not to come visit him if they had failed to make at least $6 million by the time they turned 40.

Also, a millionaire in Shanxi province caused a stir, and became the subject of a video that went viral, after a guard at a Qing Dynasty tomb site told him that the underground tombs were closed to the public. The millionaire began throwing cash at the guard's feet, demanding to go inside and claiming he had enough money to buy the ancient tombs.

But not all luxury consumers here are into showing it off. Zhang Yan, a 30-year-old shop assistant at a shopping mall, has several designer bags and is a particular fan of Louis Vuitton. But when she goes to work, she carries a simple Coach bag, mainly because it is more low-key.

"Some of my workmates can't afford it," Zhang said, "So I don't want to show my Louis Vuitton or something to them."

Even Guo seems to have conceded she perhaps went too far.

In heer first television interview since she caused a stir, Guo, seated with her mother, told a Chinese television host that when she came to Beijing to study acting at the film academy, she became afflicted by "vanity."

A nervous-looking Guo also admitted that only two of her Hermes handbags were real.

Researcher Liu Liu in Beijing contributed to this report.

>> Original Report

By Sharon LaFraniere | The New York Times

August 16, 2011

China announced a two-month "strike hard" security campaign on Tuesday in the troubled western region of Xinjiang, with 24-hour police patrols of crowded areas, identity checks, street searches, increased criminal investigations and accelerated trials.

The latest mobilization of the region's security apparatus follows a five-week spate of violence that has resulted in at least three dozen deaths. Tensions between ethnic Uighur and Han populations keep parts of Xinjiang on perennial tenterhooks, and the authorities carry out at least one regionwide "high pressure" security campaign a year, said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong.

A statement on Xinjiang's Web site said that the latest campaign was aimed at "destroying a number of violent terrorist groups and ensuring the region's stability."

Mr. Bequelin said such initiatives typically meant an intensified police presence and mandatory weekend political indoctrination classes for some Uighurs, including teachers. Xinjiang has experienced "nonstop campaigns against terrorism, separatism and religious extremism since the mid-'90s," he added, saying that "a vicious cycle of repression" was partly to blame for social unrest.

This month, the local authorities in Xinjiang's historic city of Kashgar charged that the leader of one assault had trained in Pakistan, a sign that China is increasingly concerned about whether Pakistan is a haven for Uighur extremists. Pakistan has pledged full cooperation with China in fighting terrorism.

>> Original Source

Letter to the Editor of The New York Times

August 14, 2011

Re "Officials in China Seized Infants for Black Market, Parents Say" (front page, Aug. 5):

In 2003, on a brutally hot day in rural China, we were handed a strangely stoic baby girl. Our third daughter, she was adopted by us through China's international adoption program with the United States.

Like all families at that time, we believed her to be a legally adoptable child, abandoned by her birth family at the gate of the orphanage because of China's one-child policy and cultural tradition favoring male heirs.

Blissfully happy to be adopting, I must say that the facts behind your article were not even on our radar screen in 2003. But they most certainly are now.

So tell me, President Hu Jintao, how do you tell a child who has already spent years working to let go of grief over her birth family that her past may not be as it was portrayed?

That she was not a child, a person, a creature deserving of a better life, but may merely have been a cog in one of China's many industries, the industry of baby-selling?

Oh, and did you really think that this day would not come to pass? That your own countrymen would not one day rise up and say, "What have you done with our children?"

J. D. SAMUEL
Lexington, Ky., Aug. 7, 2011

>> Original Source

By Radio Free Asia

August 10, 2011

Unregulated industries contaminate local water sources, sickening thousands.

By Andrew Jacobs | The New York Times

August 07, 2011

His name is on the lips of the ruddy-cheeked monks, the anxious hotel owners and the intrepid tourists who make their way to this isolated and starkly beautiful town in the mountains of Gansu Province: will he come to Xiahe, as unverified reports suggest, and how long will he stay?

"He" is China's handpicked Panchen Lama, the second-most important religious figure in Tibetan Buddhism, and despite his formidable rank, his presence is not universally welcomed by the faithful in and around the white-wall Labrang Monastery that sprawls into a cavernous valley here.

In recent weeks, as word has spread that he might be coming to study at the monastery, emotions have spiked, as have the numbers of police officers, both uniformed and in plain clothes, hoping to head off trouble in a place where ethnic Tibetans have been unafraid to express their enmity toward Chinese rule.

"Nobody wants him to come, and yet still he will come," said one 26-year-old monk. "We feel powerless."

The main problem is that this Panchen Lama, 21, is one of two young men with claims to the title. The one chosen by Communist Party officials in 1995, named Gyaltsen Norbu at birth, is often referred to by local residents as the "Chinese Panchen Lama." The other is Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, who would now be 22, a herder's son who was anointed that same year by the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader.

Most Tibetans are still loyal to the memory of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, even if he has been missing since Chinese authorities swept him and his family into "protective custody" more than 16 years ago.

"We just hope he is still alive," said Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan essayist and blogger who noted that Gedhun Choekyi Nyima's visage, frozen as a 5-year-old, hangs in many homes and temples. "We are waiting for him."

As Gyaltsen Norbu moves from adolescence to adulthood, Chinese authorities are facing a quandary over how to burnish his bona fides: his standing will continue to suffer if he remains apart from Tibetan monks and the faithful, but officials risk inflaming passions by foisting him on a community that remains deeply suspicious.

In recent years, the Communist Party has tried other means to raise his profile. They named him vice president of the state-run Buddhist association and appointed him to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body that meets annually in Beijing.

But so far most of his public statements have left Tibetans unimpressed. In one typically stolid remark last March, he said, "We live in a society governed by law, while the religious practices fall into the category of social activity; therefore, only by administration according to law can we ensure a stable and harmonious development of religious affairs."

The government bureaucrats who oversee Tibetan affairs have come to the conclusion, one rooted in history, that only a significant stint in a prominent monastery can bolster the Panchen Lama's religious credentials, according to scholars and local religious figures.

"The Tibetans respect good Buddhist practice and accomplishment," Hu Shisheng, a researcher at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, said in a telephone interview from Lhasa, Tibet's capital.

The government's struggle to legitimize the Panchen Lama among Tibetans foreshadows the deeper struggle Beijing will face upon the death of the Dalai Lama, when it has said it will name a successor. The Dalai Lama, 76, is still revered on the Tibetan plateau despite years of fierce propaganda that brands him as a troublemaking separatist, even as he insists that he is interested only in genuine autonomy for Tibetans.

Although officially atheist, the Communist Party asserts that only it has the authority to pick top spiritual leaders, who, according to Tibetan theology, are reincarnated from deceased religious figures.

A previous attempt to improve the Panchen Lama's religious standing in 1998 did not end well. After officials sought to pair the boy with the abbot of Kumbum, a revered monastery in Qinghai Province, the abbot, Arjia Rinpoche, fled China and sought asylum in the United States. "It was a very difficult decision, but I did not want to be seen as a collaborator with the Chinese government," Arjia Rinpoche said by telephone from Indiana, where he now lives.

>> Read Complete Report Here

By Martin Patience | BBC Word News

August 03, 2011

Juggling their iPhones with spades, a group of young professionals are getting their hands dirty - digging vegetables.

During the week, they are teachers, PR consultants, and computer programmers. But at the weekend, these city slickers return to the soil.

"We're worried about food safety," says He Liying, explaining why they grow vegetables.

They toil under the summer sun - not always efficiently - at a co-operative farm called Little Donkey on the outskirts of Beijing. It has about 700 fee-paying members.

It is one of dozens of farms which have cropped up across the country catering for China's middle classes, which are increasingly concerned about food safety.

From glow-in-the dark meat to dye injected into buns to make them look like a more expensive variety, there has been a rash of scandals in recent months.

But the most bizarre case was that of the exploding melons.

Jiang Yan Shi was one of the farmers affected by the problem.

It was apparently caused by the overuse of a growth accelerant.

But Mr Jiang insists it was something to do with his seeds.

"I was walking in my field when I heard this sound: 'Pah Pah,'" he says, explaining what happened. "All the different pieces flew in different directions."

In total, Mr Jiang says 600 melons were destroyed - a quarter of his crop.

'Boiling with hatred'

Whether it is exploding melons or pigs pumped full of steroids to produce lean meat, many in China simply do not trust what is put on their dinner tables.

This worries the authorities, anxious that people will lose trust in a government if it cannot ensure the safety of what they eat.

Melamine-tainted baby formula killed at least six children and 300,000 others fell ill.

Wang Gang is still living with the consequences. His son - Zi Yuan - developed kidney stones after being fed the baby formula.

Mr Wang continues to worry about his Zi Yuan's health. He wants justice for his son.

"I think the government needs to bear responsibility," he says, standing in his kitchen surrounded by papers and packets of baby formula which he has kept for three years.

"Our court case keeps getting delayed. I'm boiling with hatred over this but I'm trying to control myself."

The Chinese authorities have enacted stricter policies to ensure food safety.

It includes a directive from the Supreme Court calling for the death penalty for cases in which people die as a result of poor food safety.

But regulations are often flouted in China. And with food price inflation rising, some producers will continue to cut corners in order to fatten up the bottom-line.

After a hard day's work, the group of young professionals at the Beijing co-operative farm retired to an upmarket apartment.

They cooked a meal using the fresh produce they had harvested.

"It definitely tastes better when you grow it yourself," says one of them.

But they are the lucky few, who have the time - and the money - to produce their own food.

Many others have little choice in what they eat.

>> Original Source

By Sharon LaFraniere | The New York Times

01 August 2011

After days of growing public fury over last month's high-speed train crash and the government's reaction, Chinese authorities have enacted a virtual news blackout on the disaster except for positive stories or information officially released by the government.

The sudden order from the Communist Party's publicity department, handed down late Friday, forced newspaper editors to frantically tear up pages of their Saturday editions, replacing investigative articles and commentaries about the accident that killed 40 people in eastern China with cartoons or unrelated features. Major Internet portals removed links to news reports or videos related to the crash near Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province, in which 192 people were also hurt.

The government's decision to muzzle the media followed a remarkable outpouring of online criticism of the government over the July 23 accident. For many in China, the train wreck has crystallized concerns about whether the government is sacrificing people's lives and safety in pursuit of breakneck development and is cloaking its failures in secrecy or propaganda. 

As it did in other recent scandals over health or safety, like the collapse of poorly built schools in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the government has moved aggressively to shut down an outcry that, if left unchecked, might spiral into social unrest beyond its control.

Tens of millions of Chinese have posted messages on the Chinese equivalents of Twitter questioning why the two high-speed trains crashed, whether the  rescue effort was bungled and why images from the site showed wrecked train cars being buried in pits even  before investigators began their work. After initially playing down the event, the state-run media also began to challenge why the accident occurred and how the government had handled it. 

While the government censors have no easy way to control the rising tide of microblog posts, they curtailed discussion of the issue in the traditional news media.

Outraged by the order to silence themselves,  dozens of journalists insisted in online messages that given the many troubling questions that remain,  it was almost impossible to swallow the directives. The government has placed huge  importance on the construction of high-speed rail, mounting the world's largest public works project. 

"Tonight, hundreds of papers are replacing their pages; thousands of reporters are having their stories retracted; tens of thousands of ghosts cannot rest in peace; hundreds of millions of truths are being covered up," the editor of Southern Metropolis Daily, a newspaper based in Guangzhou, wrote Friday. "This country is being humiliated by numerous evil hands." His post, on the site Sina Weibo, was later deleted.

"My story will not go to print today and looks like I will have to write something else," wrote another journalist. "I'd rather leave the page blank with one word -- 'speechless.' "

It was a rare display of unity among Chinese journalists. All are under the thumb of propaganda authorities, but some work for state-owned publications while others work for privately owned media outlets that are typically more daring.

One prominent weekly, the Beijing-based Economic Observer, ignored the directive, rolling out nine pages of coverage of the accident in its Saturday edition. The report described the Railway Ministry as a runaway operation; reconstructed the events in Wenzhou from the viewpoint of dozens of survivors; and examined the failure of the official, state-operated media to report the accident when it occurred.

One of the Economic Observer's journalists said the pages were already printed when the orders came.

But many others paid heed: editors said the 21st Century Business Herald and China Business Journal each tore up eight pages of articles while The Beijing Times jettisoned four pages. One discarded article, based on the account of the wife of one victim, was titled: "There was no miracle for them." The headline was a pointed reference to a case that has been relentlessly trumpeted by officials and the state-run press -- the rescue of a toddler 21 hours after the crash, after rescuers had given up all hope and been told to quit.

"There were three calls," one editor in Beijing said. "The first came around 9 p.m., ordering us to 'cool down' coverage of the Wenzhou accident as much as possible." An hour later, the newspaper was instructed "to print only Xinhua's wire and not to print anything we had gotten ourselves. No comments, no analysis," the editor said, referring to the official news agency. A third call at midnight ordered the accident coverage off the front page.

The authorities even postponed the publication of an article prepared by Xinhua, according to one editor who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions. That report focused on the Railway Ministry's failure to answer a series of questions about the crash.

On its Web site, the Hong Kong Journalists Association protested, noting that only Thursday, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, speaking at a news conference in Wenzhou, had insisted that the "investigation into the accident should be open, transparent and monitored by the public."

After initially playing down the accident, the state-run news media had grown more assertive in recent days. They were invigorated in part by the so-called netizens who all week staged an end run around the mainstream press with 140-character updates on China's Twitter equivalents.

But some may have paid a price: the producer of one news program on CCTV, China's state-owned television network, was reportedly reprimanded after one hard-hitting segment two days after the accident. A colleague said rumors the producer was fired were false, but declined to describe the repercussions.

In that segment, the host of the program asked: "If nobody can be safe, do we still want this speed? Can we drink a glass of milk that's safe? Can we stay in an apartment that will not collapse?"

"China, please slow down," the host said. "If you're too fast, you may leave the souls of your people behind."

By Radio FREE Asia

July 29, 2011

Beijing fails again to force acceptance of their choice of a senior Tibetan Buddhist figure.