Beijing 2008: May 2008 Archives
By Andrew Jacobs | The New York Times
May 28, 2008
DUJIANGYAN, China -- Bereaved parents whose children were crushed to death in their classrooms during the earthquake in Sichuan Province have turned mourning ceremonies into protests in recent days, forcing officials to address growing political repercussions over shoddy construction of public schools.
Parents of the estimated 10,000 children who lost their lives in the quake have grown so enraged about collapsed schools that they have overcome their usual caution about confronting Communist Party officials. Many say they are especially upset that some schools for poor students crumbled into rubble even though government offices and more elite schools not far away survived the May 12 quake largely intact.
On Tuesday, an informal gathering of parents at Juyuan Middle School in Dujiangyan to commemorate their children gave way to unbridled fury. One of the fathers in attendance, a quarry worker named Liu Lifu, grabbed the microphone and began calling for justice. His 15-year-old daughter, Liu Li, was killed along with her entire class during a biology lesson.
"We demand that the government severely punish the killers who caused the collapse of the school building," he shouted. "Please, everyone sign the petition so we can find out the truth."
The crowd grew more agitated. Some parents said local officials had known for years that the school was unsafe but refused to take action. Others recalled that two hours passed before rescue workers showed up; even then, they stopped working at 10 p.m. on the night of the earthquake and did not resume the search until 9 a.m. the next day.
Although there is no official casualty count, only 13 of the school's 900 students came out alive, parents said. "The people responsible for this should be brought here and have a bullet put in their head," said Luo Guanmin, a farmer who was cradling a photo of his 16-year-old daughter, Luo Dan.
Sharp confrontations between protesters and officials began over the weekend in several towns in northern Sichuan. Hundreds of parents whose children died at the Fuxin No. 2 Primary School in the city of Mianzhu staged an impromptu rally on Saturday. They surrounded an official who tried to assure them that their complaints were being taken seriously, screaming and yelling in her face until she fainted.
The next day, the Communist Party's top official in Mianzhu came out to talk with the parents and to try to stop them from marching to Chengdu, the provincial capital, where they sought to prevail on higher-level authorities to investigate. The local party boss, Jiang Guohua, dropped to his knees and pleaded with them to abandon the protest, but the parents shouted in his face and continued their march.
Later, as the crowd surged into the hundreds, some parents clashed with the police, leaving several bleeding and trembling with emotion.
The protests threaten to undermine the government's attempts to promote its response to the quake as effective and to highlight heroic rescue efforts by the People's Liberation Army, which has dispatched 150,000 soldiers to the region. Censors have blocked detailed reporting of the schools controversy by the state-run media, but a photo of Mr. Jiang kneeling before protesters has become a sensation on some Web forums, bringing national attention to the incident.
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By Heather Timmons and Hari Kumar | The New York Times
May 21, 2008
The Chinese government is refusing to issue visas to Hindus trying to make the traditional summer pilgrimage to what they hold to be the home of Lord Shiva in Tibet, forcing thousands to delay or cancel the trip.
Starting in June, Hindus from Nepal and India embark on a multiweek journey to the 22,000-foot Mount Kailash in the Himalayas and nearby Lake Mapam Yutso, known in India as Lake Mansarovar. The trip, a once-in-a-lifetime event for most who make it, includes treacherous off-road drives and several days of arduous trekking, and is believed to bring the traveler closer to the divine.
This year, though, the Chinese government is refusing to grant any visas for travel to the Tibetan sites from Nepal, tour operators in Nepal say. India's Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that the Chinese government had cited unspecified "domestic reasons."
At the same time, Beijing has retracted permission previously granted to Indian pilgrims who were planning to make the trip in early June. The Olympic torch is scheduled to go through Tibet's capital, Lhasa, on June 20.
"I was planning for the last 10 years for this trip," said Rajendra Goyal, 48, a Mumbai-based hardware trader whose trip has been canceled. Mr. Goyal said he was on a rigorous diet and exercise schedule for the last two months to make sure he was fit for the mountain hiking involved.
"A pilgrim is a pilgrim, not an activist or a politician," he said. "I am going there for religious faith, not to do any violence."
Tour operators and pilgrims said they believed that the cancellations were a result of the turmoil and demonstrations in Tibet that started in March. "This could be because of protests in Tibet; in fact, that is the main reason," said Ripu Mardan, the information manager of Eco Trek International, a Katmandu-based tour operator. Eco Trek normally sends several hundred pilgrims a year to Mount Kailash and Lake Mapam Yutso.
Tour operators estimate that 5,000 to 6,000 pilgrims travel to the home of Lord Shiva, one of the six deities in Hinduism, from Nepal each year.
"This is our holiest of holy sites," said Gopal Vijay Ditya Singh, 62, a professor of electrical engineering in Lucknow, India, who had paid $5,000 to go with his wife. "How can they stop us from going there?"
By Aaron Pan | Bloomberg News
May 11, 2008
Africans living in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou are being forced to leave the country because of new visa policies, the South China Morning Post reported, citing an unidentified spokesman for the community.
Nearly half of the 10,000 Africans in the city have already been forced to leave because their visa-renewal applications have been denied and at least 100 people are stranded in Macau without enough money to return home, the newspaper reported.
African nationals in the city have been running small businesses on flexible, six-month ``F'' visas and are now being given only tourist visas of up to 15 days, the Morning Post said.
The General Committee of African People in Guangzhou has sent a letter to 10 African embassies in Beijing asking them to press the Chinese government on the issue, the newspaper added.
By David Barboza | The New York Times
May 10, 2008
The mud and brick schoolhouses in the lush mountain villages of this remote part of southwestern China are dark and barebones in the best of times. These days, they also lack students.
Residents say children as young as 12 have been recruited by child labor rings, equipped with fake identification cards, and transported hundreds of miles across the country to booming coastal cities, where they work 12-hour shifts to produce much of the world's toys, clothes and electronics.
"Last year I had 30 students. This year there are only 14. All the others went outside to find work," said Ji Ke Xiaoming, 35, a primary school teacher whose students in Erwu Village are mostly ages 12 to 14. "You know, we are very poor. Some families can't even afford a bag of salt."
China is now investigating whether hundreds, perhaps thousands, of poor children of the Yi ethnic minority group in Liangshan were lured or even kidnapped to work in factories that are increasingly desperate for the kind of cheap labor that powered China to prosperity over the past two decades.
Labor recruiters -- government investigators and some local residents portray them as con men -- have connected two radically different parts of China's turbulent society. They have brought together ethnic minorities untouched by economic development in their mountainous isolation, and factory owners in the prime export manufacturing zones of southern Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong.
Exporters have struggled to adjust to soaring inflation, a fast-rising currency and, with some irony, stricter enforcement of labor laws that make it harder to hire regular workers on a seasonal basis. Using child workers from a remote region, many of whom cannot even speak Mandarin, the country's main national dialect, have provided a temporary, albeit illegal, solution.
A scandal involving Liangshan's children first came to light late last month, when Southern Metropolis, a state-run newspaper, reported that as many as 1,000 school-age workers from the area were employed in manufacturing zones near Hong Kong.
The report was deeply embarrassing for Beijing, which is preparing to host the Olympics and coping with international criticism of its handling of riots in Tibet. Last week, the authorities in Liangshan said they had detained several people for recruiting children and illegally ferrying them off to factories.
And officials in Dongguan, one of the manufacturing zones where the children worked, said that they had "rescued" more than 160 young people from factories. The legal minimum working age in China is 16.
Now, officials have begun to play down the scandal, saying there is little evidence of widespread violations of child labor laws. A two-day government sweep involving more than 3,000 factories around Dongguan, which was conducted after the initial raids, turned up only 6 to 10 children, officials said.
But residents of Liangshan say abject poverty, drug abuse and a lack of jobs have forced many children to head for factories. Sometimes it is with their parents' permission. Other times, children disappear, on their own or with job recruiters, and then call home from a factory dormitory, hundreds of miles away.
By JOE McDONALD, Associated Press Writer | San Francisco Chronicle
May 10, 2008
China faces mounting appeals to prod cyclone-ravaged Myanmar to allow access to foreign aid workers but is giving no sign it will use its influence over its ally, insisting instead that the world respect the military junta's sovereignty.
The disaster is a reminder of China's close ties with dictatorships such as Zimbabwe, Sudan and Myanmar -- also called Burma -- at a time when Beijing wants to use the Summer Olympics to polish its global image.
Human Rights Watch appealed Saturday to China to help persuade Myanmar -- or force it, if necessary -- to drop restrictions on assistance.
"China and Burma's other friends should lead international efforts, including at the U.N. Security Council, to persuade or compel Burma to accept the international aid that cyclone survivors so badly need," the group's Asia director, Brad Adams, said in a statement.
By Ben Blanchard - REUTERS | via (UNCENSORED) Yahoo! News
May 08, 2008
China will not guarantee it won't censor the Internet over this summer's Beijing Olympics, nor can it guarantee to stamp out piracy of Olympic-branded goods, officials said on Thursday.
Wang Wei, executive vice president of the Beijing Olympic organizers, had promised media would have "complete freedom" to report over the event, but rights groups have regularly criticized China's commitment to that pledge.
China maintains a tight grip over the Internet, whose use is exploding in the world's most populous nation, preventing access to sites it considers anti-government, such as those of the banned spiritual group Falun Gong or Tibet independence groups.
"China has always been very cautious when it comes to the Internet," Technology Minister Wan Gang told a news conference as the Olympic torch was being paraded atop Mount Everest.
"I've not got any clear information about which sites will be shut or screened. But to protect the youth there are controls on some unhealthy websites.
"We will guarantee as much as possible" that sites will not be blocked over the Olympics, he added. "Every country limits access to some websites. Even in developed countries not every site can be accessed."
As part of China's plan to hold a "high-tech Olympics," broadband wireless Internet services will be widely available, according to a handbook issued at the same news conference, to ensure "convenience for journalists (and) promptness of news."
Last week, the United States said again it was concerned about Internet controls in China.
By The Epoch Times
May 04, 2008
After the French protest at the Beijing Olympic Torch relay, official Chinese media have been highly critical of France. Since then, a retaliatory boycott on French goods has been advocated, resulting in a Chinese protest and boycott of the France-invested retailer Carrefour. Yet the escalating boycott has begun to unintentionally hurt Chinese suppliers of Carrefour as well.
On April 24, a food supplier in Beijing received a fax from Carrefour requesting a goods return. "If the boycott continues, we will certainly suffer greater loss in the future," said the helpless supplier who mentioned that other food suppliers also received goods return notice from Carrefour.
A Beijing supplier was told to go to Carrefour and process 70 boxes of returned goods, or their order would be null and void. "Seventy boxes equates to about a 10 day sales amount in Carrefour," explained the supplier.
According to a China Business Journal report, from the over 100 Carrefour outlets, 95 percent of the goods come from over 1,000 local suppliers in China. Based on Carrefour's unconditional goods return contract, the loss from returned goods will eventually be borne by the suppliers.
"The protests in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Suzhou are relatively restrained," said a Carrefour manager, whose name was withheld by request, "The protests outside our stores in Hefei, Xuzhou, Kunming, Changsha, Wuhan, and Qingdao are very intense." Carrefour stores in Wuhan and Hefei have had to suspend operations due to the protests.
"Because of the boycott, our total sales declined almost 20 percent in the past few days. We are gradually receiving goods return notices from various Carrefour stores," said the manager.
Yang, a General Manager from the Shanghai Chengxie Logistics Distribution Ltd. is very concerned as his company supplies between 70 to 80 percent of the goods for Carrefour Shanghai. In his opinion, many goods have to wait two months before one can see the true impact of the goods return on them.
Yang said that for Carrefour, the incident is merely a sales loss in the short term, and subsequently a partial profit loss. But the real victims are the over 1,000 Chinese suppliers, he said.
Yang explained that Carrefour normally operates on a three-month accounting cycle and returns goods unsold in two months. "Now the goods return rate for Carrefour is about eight percent," said Yang. "If the rate reaches over 20 percent after one or two months, it will hurt the suppliers greatly, especially the food suppliers."
A fresh produce supplier verified that with fewer Carrefour customers, the fresh produce may be affected the most. "Our product sales will decrease at least 30 percent on the whole, and the returned products that cannot be sold will all be borne by the suppliers."
By Agence France Presse | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
May 01, 2008
US actress and activist Mia Farrow accused China on Friday of "underwriting the atrocities in Darfur" as she tried to put pressure on Beijing to end years of bloodshed in the Sudanese region.
Farrow, speaking in Hong Kong as the Olympic torch relay was borne through the southern Chinese city, is using the high profile of this summer's Beijing Games to highlight China's support of the Sudanese government.
"It isn't a pretty way to say this, but China is underwriting the atrocities in Darfur through the oil revenues which now top 4 billion US dollars a year," she told AFP in an interview.
"Some 70 percent of that money has been used to attack the population of Darfur."
By SAM HANANEL, Associated Press Writer | via uncensored Yahoo! News
May 01, 2008
A U.S. senator accused the Chinese government on Thursday of ordering U.S.-owned hotels in China to install Internet filters that can spy on international visitors coming to see the summer Olympic games.
Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, made the charge at a Capitol Hill news conference where he and other lawmakers denounced China's record of human rights abuses and urged President Bush not to attend the Olympic's opening ceremonies in Beijing.
"This is wrong, it's against international conventions, it's certainly against the Olympic spirit," Brownback said. "The Chinese government should remove that request and that order."
Brownback said he has seen the language of memos received by at least two U.S.-owned hotels. He declined to name them, and said he obtained the information from two "reliable but confidential sources" in the hope that public pressure would persuade the Chinese government to back off the demand.
The filters could enable the government to monitor Web sites viewed by hotel guests and restrict Internet information coming in and out of China, Brownback said.
The senator called China "the foremost enabler of human rights abuses around the world" and said the Chinese government is turning the summer games into "an Olympics of oppression."
A call Thursday to the Chinese embassy in Washington was not immediately returned.
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