Beijing 2008: September 2007 Archives
By David Barboza and Duff Wilson | The New York Times
28 September 2007
The chief executive of a leading Chinese pharmaceutical company used e-mail aliases, offshore bank accounts and a network of drug traffickers to illegally distribute millions of dollars worth of human growth hormone in the United States, federal officials said in a criminal complaint, provided to The New York Times on Wednesday.
A 62-page affidavit by a special agent of the Food and Drug Administration details an extraordinary level of personal involvement in the trafficking and sale of the powerful hormones by Jin Lei, the founder and chief executive of the GeneScience Pharmaceuticals Company, one of China's largest drug makers, based here in Changchun, in northern China.
The affidavit adds intriguing details and a rare look inside a major drug ring and the alleged role of a renowned businessman. It was unsealed Monday, but was not included in an online F.D.A. database until The Times requested and received a copy.
As early as 2004, according to investigators, Mr. Jin was smuggling Jintropin, a growth hormone he named after himself, to the United States.
American investigators claim that through the use of various aliases, including Jack Edwards, John and Luis, Mr. Jin made deals with middlemen and distributors outside China and also instructed them to wire money to banks in the United States, Panama and China.
GeneScience even sold an insurance program offering to resend any package seized by customs officials, the government says. Investigators also say some of the GeneScience Jintropin drug shipments were labeled as toys, glassware or hair treatment.
In January 2006, a person the F.D.A. has now identified as Mr. Jin using an alias wrote to an American customer, warning, "US custom is tighten control, you should stop email directly to gensci anymore and delete all your records."
A secretary who works for Mr. Jin, 42, said this week that he was not available for an interview, but colleagues and people who know him say they were surprised that the respected scientist and hard-charging entrepreneur would be caught up in a drug scandal.
"I contacted Jin Lei this morning. He's not sure about the whole thing and can't say anything to the media now," said Zhou Weiqun, board secretary of GeneScience's parent company, Changchun High Tech Group. "We're trying to figure out the situation. But we trust Jin Lei. He has done a lot for our company."
The charges against Mr. Jin and GeneScience were part of the largest crackdown in United States history on international trafficking in steroids and other illicit bodybuilding drugs.
On Monday, federal authorities said they had arrested 124 people and shut down dozens of crude drug-producing laboratories in a case the authorities called Operation Raw Deal.
Federal authorities did not release the names of athletes or others who might have been customers of the underground drug makers, but federal investigators said they had collected thousands of names and were combing through the database.
Officials from the F.D.A., Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration and several other federal agencies, said China was the primary supplier of the illegal drugs and that 37 Chinese companies, mostly chemical wholesalers, were involved in the illegal drug smuggling, much of it arranged over the Internet.
The revelations come at a difficult time for Chinese authorities. China is already facing mounting pressure to improve the safety and quality of its food, toys and other exports after a series of consumer product safety scandals this year.
With Beijing set to play host to the 2008 Olympic Games, China is also being asked to deliver a drug-free Olympics -- at a time when baseball, cycling and other sports have been damaged by doping scandals.
By Duff Wilson and Michael S. Schmidt | International Herald Tribune
25 September 2007
The federal authorities in the United States have announced the exposure of a sprawling underground distribution network for steroids, human growth hormone and other illicit bodybuilding drugs supplied by 37 companies in China.
The operation, disclosed on Monday, revealed a much wider, more diffuse commerce in performance-enhancing drugs than previously known, with a latticework of bathroom and basement manufacturers and distributors. That contrasted with the more centralized drug network from past years that tapped into established pharmaceutical pipelines.
A network of Internet-based chemical wholesalers, anonymous e-mail services and password-protected chat rooms fueled the trade, federal and state officials said. "There is no kingpin here," said Steve Robertson, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington. "We're going after individual distribution cells. There's no godfather of steroids."
The drug agency estimates that 99 percent of the illegal steroids originate with chemicals from China.
Most of the 124 who were arrested in the operation - including 50 over the past week - were charged with distributing chemicals bought in bulk from China, which as host of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing has been under pressure to deliver a drug-free Games.
By Robert J. Saiget - AFP - via (uncensored) Yahoo! News
September 25, 2007
China on Tuesday said that a meeting between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Dalai Lama had damaged ties between the two nations, and called for Berlin to quickly fix the problem.
"This not only grossly interferes with the internal affairs of China, it hurts the feelings of the Chinese people and seriously undermines China-Germany relations," foreign ministry spokesman Jiang Yu said when asked about Sunday's meeting.
"We request that Germany... take concrete and effective measures to eliminate the negative impact made by this mistaken move so as not to bring any unnecessary damage to China-Germany relations."
Defying harsh warnings from China, Merkel held a historic meeting with the Tibetan spiritual leader in Berlin on Sunday, during which she gave support to the Dalai Lama's quest for greater cultural autonomy for his homeland.
In an apparent response, China cancelled two top-level bilateral meetings, one a standing breakfast between the countries' foreign ministers on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly in New York.
By Mark Magnier | Los Angeles Times
September 18, 2007
Residents of Beijing's "petitioners' village," an area of cheap hotels and makeshift houses where the poor and downtrodden gather in search of justice, are bracing for the bulldozers.
Destruction of neighborhoods and forced relocation are common in the Chinese capital as traditional neighborhoods are rapidly torn apart by well-connected developers erecting gleaming towers. But this area has more political significance than your average neighborhood.
For several generations, it has been a repository of the pain and frustration felt by those who come to Beijing to appeal to national authorities to right perceived wrongs. Large white notices posted in recent days warn residents of the Fengtai district to vacate the area by noon Wednesday to make way for a new road and overpass complex leading to the nearby Southern Railway Station.
The plans have been in the works for a while. But some see secondary motives in the timing, including a desire to scatter the community of "troublemakers" in advance of next month's Communist Party Congress and to remove an eyesore before the 2008 Summer Olympics.
By Radio Free Asia
September 14, 2007
Chinese authorities in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa have detained six Tibetans after they lodged an appeal against the relocation of their trading stalls to make way for a new pedestrian walkway.
"The Lhasa municipal government detained six Tibetans on Sept. 13 for appealing against the official order of relocation of their shops near the Tibetan Medical Center in Lhasa," a caller from Lhasa told RFA's Tibetan service.
"All the traders selling their merchandise on stalls in front of the Tibetan Medicine Center...in the Central Cathedral area were ordered to move their shops to the third level of a new business complex in the Bakhor area."
A group of traders had staged a sit-in at the Lhasa municipal government offices in protest, saying that business wouldn't be nearly as good in the new location.
Petition to government
The traders had originally been given carts by the government and had gradually bought them as part of a poverty alleviation scheme.
"We want to request that the Lhasa municipal government allow us to continue in the same place," one Tibetan trader said.
"If we move to the other building on the third floor of the new complex, there will be no business. We rely on these small businesses for our livelihood. and if we are relocated, our business will suffer," he said.
"China's Communist Party is all--powerful, and many dare not raise their voice. We are actually bringing our concerns about our daily livelihood to the authorities and we are not talking of politics. But many Tibetans dare not speak up for fear of reprisals."
"The fact is that all good business locations in Lhasa area are going to Chinese and the Tibetans are losing them," he added.
An official who answered the phone at the Lhasa municipal government confirmed the dispute had taken place, but declined to give further details.
By Peter Ford - The Christian Science Monitor | via (uncensored) Yahoo! News
September 12, 2007
As China prepares to celebrate its emergence as a global power at next year's Olympic Games, a rash of recent American and international opinion polls suggest that the Asian giant faces an uphill battle to convince the world it is worthy of its new status.
And it is more than just a question of food or toys.
Beijing's task is made harder, say Chinese and foreign analysts, because the ruling Communist Party has so far failed to learn the new ropes of international public diplomacy.
Chinese officials are accustomed to traditional links with their diplomatic counterparts abroad. They have little experience coping with the single-issue advocacy groups that have sprung from civil society in the West to shape the international agenda and influence public opinion on questions ranging from climate change to Darfur.
"It is a great problem," says Shi Yinhong, a prominent foreign-affairs expert at Beijing's Renmin University. "China has no experience with this. We are weak at dealing with diverse nongovernmental entities. The government machine is not capable of dealing with such groups."
Nor has it proved very successful in dealing with the sort of novel challenge that this summer's food and toy safety scandals have posed to China's international image, according to the polls.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey in July found that 65 percent of Americans had very little or no confidence in Chinese food products. Zogby International reported last month that 72 percent of Americans did not believe Chinese claims that the US is exaggerating the risks.
But China's image problem is deeper than the issue of product safety. Even before the recent scandals broke, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that a downturn in Americans' attitudes toward China was mirrored in Europe and elsewhere.
Only 42 percent of Americans had a favorable attitude to China in May 2007, Pew found, down sharply from 52 percent at the same time last year. 49 percent of the British public was favorable, against 65 percent in 2006, while favorable French and German majorities in 2006 had shrunk to minorities this year.
Indeed, mistrust of China is one of the few international issues on which Europeans and Americans concur, according to a German Marshall Fund poll released last week: 54 percent of Americans and 48 percent of Europeans said they saw China as more of a threat to their jobs and economic security than an opportunity for new markets and investment.
By Feng Changle | The Epoch Times
September 07, 2007
With the Chinese Communist Party's Seventeenth Congress around the corner, another wave of Internet traffic controls are sweeping across the nation.
Ministry of Information Industry Blocks Websites Nationwide
On August 27, 2007, Miao Wei from China Telecom declared, "To respond to the Ministry of Information Industry's project "to purify and improve the Internet environment and to combat Internet pornography," China Telecom has blocked 8,808 illegal web addresses, cut off 265 virtual hosts without IDC (Internet Data Center) permits, and 9,593 unregistered websites.
Additionally, Yu Xijian from China Netcom (CNC) said it has blocked 587 websites which were unregistered from the IDC (Internet Data Center) or the ISP (Internet Service Provider), and 112 websites without IDC/ISP permits.
The action actually started in April. The Qiushi Journal, a publication of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), claimed, "On the Internet, noise of various ideologies, phony information and stirred emotions are propagated. It adds variety to our nation's ideology. However, our task is to defend ourselves from our enemies' plots to westernize and divide us, which becomes more important. The current situation is very difficult."
According to the CCP's Qiushi Journal, by the end of 2006, there were 137 million Internet users in China (population 1.3 billion) and 80 percent of them were under 35.
"The Current Situation Is Very Difficult"
Recently, some mainland BBS members forwarded the reporter notices from their BBS website administrators, it states, "The situation has been very tough. Due to the coming CCP Seventeenth Party's Congress, the intensity of Internet surveillance and control has reached a record high. About 90 percent of the internal forums and websites of the Public Safety system have been cleared. I must remind everyone again: the current situation is very tough! The most sensitive topics are those that
-involve the Party, state, government, governmental departments and units;
-involve Japan, Darfur in Sudan, issues in Tibet and Xinjiang;
-involve appealing crowds, parades, demonstrations and livelihood issues; and
-involve overseas Falun Gong, the rightists, exiles from Tibet and Xinjiang.
The administrators asked everyone to "report and delete such postings immediately!"
Some Internet surfers think that the Internet provides a special environment for freedom of speech and that is what attracts numerous users. Freedom of speech is the lifeline of the Internet. The government has a hard time adapting to it and is always suspicious, causing conflicts between the current political system and opinions online.
by Dakshana Bascaramurty | The Charlatan
September 05, 2007
Lhadon Tethong was deported from China due to her political and social views of Tibet and China relations
Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet (SFT), visited China for the first time after years of protests and campaigns against what she views as an invasion of a free people and state.
She blogged her way through Beijing with her colleague Paul Golding, documenting her views on beijingwideopen.org and China's "illegal occupation of Tibet," she says. She strategically timed her travels to take place exactly one year before the 2008 Olympic Games.
Though not a member of the group that unfurled a 450-square foot banner over the Great Wall of China that read: 'One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008', Tethong says her blog entries led to her deportation.
Arrested on Aug. 8 and detained in a downtown Beijing police station, she was questioned for six hours by the metropolitan and plain-clothes police.
"[They] were interested in what we were doing, why were in China [and if] were we trying to recruit for our cause," she says.
Tethong was detained for less than 12 hours before being deported to Hong Kong.
"In the end, I was deported from China because I was, [according to the police], undermining the stability of the Chinese government," she says.
Tethong grew up hearing about Tibetan issues and its standing on the international stage, especially from her Tibetan father.
Yet it was only at a Free Tibet concert in San Francisco in 1996, that she became actively involved in the cause.
That same year, the history student at Nova Scotia's King's College started a chapter of the organization in Halifax.
After graduating Tethong worked at the Toronto Stock Exchange. But she packed her bags and left Toronto after applying and receiving the program co-ordinator post at the SFT's New York City location.
As one of three staff members, Tethong says she was in charge of many things including seminars, public speaking and campaigns.
Now, with four years as executive director under her belt, the organization has chapters in countries worldwide, including Australia, Cameroon and the Czech Republic.
While Tethong has dealt first-hand with how information on freedom for Tibetans is heavily restricted by Chinese authorities, she uses the Internet as an activist tool.
"It's illegal to discuss the issue [of Tibet] if you are over there [in China]," she says while waiting in an airport for a flight to Canada after her tumultuous trip.
She says this interview and story would have been impossible to complete if she were back in the communist state.
By Steven Schwankert, IDG News Service | via (uncensored) Yahoo! News
September 06, 2007
Wikipedia's English site is blocked again in China, after over two months of being accessible, continuing a saga of on-again, off-again availability.
Users in Shanghai and Beijing confirmed Wednesday and Thursday that they were no longer able to visit the site. Wikipedia's own account states that the block resumed on August 31, although some users in China said the site has only been unavailable starting this week.
China regularly blocks access to Web sites that it finds objectionable, including those dealing with politically sensitive subjects such as the Falun Gong religious cult and independence for Taiwan and Tibet, along with some pornographic sites. The Chinese government does not announce or comment on when a site is blocked or made available.
Because the version of events or political views expressed on Wikipedia are not necessarily in line with those of the Chinese government, the government may be blocking access to the site.
The current blocking may be related to the upcoming Communist Party Congress, which begins Oct. 15 in Beijing. Held once every five years, the meeting is the Chinese government's most important political gathering, used to create five-year plans, which are the bedrock of China's centrally-planned economy. It is also often used to reshuffle government positions or for leaders to consolidate their power.
While Wikipedia's English site is occasionally available, its Chinese-language sites are almost permanently blocked, although access is sometimes permitted for one or two days at a time.
By Radio Free Asia
September 04, 2007
Christianity is gaining new converts in Chinese cities and towns, especially among the newly emerging and assertive professional class, and the trend is causing the ruling Communist Party some concern, experts say.
A prominent example of this phenomenon is rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who has been detained, kept under surveillance and sentenced to a jail term after he represented the underdogs in sensitive political cases. Gao is also a committed Christian, whose Beijing-based church has been raided by police on more than one occasion.
Gao's commitment to using the nascent Chinese legal system to fight unpopular civil rights cases--such as representing villagers who wish to indict local officials for graft, or representing members of the banned Falun Gong movement--are underpinned by his strong emphasis on morality and compassion, and bound up with the lawyer's Christian identity.
"The people who are taking the lead now in proposing not just political change in China, but moral change, are the Christian intellectuals--the lawyers, the professors, the writers," author David Aikman recently told an audience at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.
Religion connected to rebellion
China's leadership, which always keeps a weather eye on the nation's history, appears to remember only too keenly that many anti-government movements--the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) against the highly corrupt Qing Dynasty, for example--have been inspired by religious teachings.
Such movements typically emerge at times of stark social division, which in today's China is evidenced by the thousands of protests and demonstrations across the country in any given year, frequently with land-rights disputes and allegations of official corruption at their core.
Thousands of petitioners try to get into the capital, Beijing, every year, to lodge complaints against official wrongdoing. Almost none win redress in return for years of queuing, form-filling, and further abuse from officials who object to their complaints.
August 31, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom voices its strong concern over the People's Republic of China's new regulations requiring government approval of "Living Buddhas," which goes into effect on Saturday, Sept. 1. The regulations are clearly designed to undermine the influence of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetans' preeminent spiritual leader, and constitute continuing state violation of internationally guaranteed religious freedom rights in China.
The measures elaborate on Article 27 of China's National Regulations on Religious Affairs issued in March 2005. The new regulations instruct all reincarnate Tibetan lamas to "respect and protect the principles of unification of the state" and declare that no "foreign organization or individual" shall "interfere" in the process of recognizing or enthroning Living Buddhas. In cases where reincarnate lamas have "a relatively large impact," "a great impact," or "a particularly great impact," the regulations state, it is necessary to obtain approval from the provincial or regional governments, the national State Administration of Religious Affairs, or from the State Council, the highest government body in China.
"The Chinese government's policy of suppressing religious freedom in Tibet, including its denial of the right of Tibetan Buddhists to select their own religious leaders, again demonstrates Beijing's violation of international covenants recognizing the basic right of religious communities to choose their religious leaders and teachers," said Commission Chair Michael Cromartie. "China continues to pursue unacceptable policies repressing Tibetan Buddhists."
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