Doing business in China: December 2008 Archives
By Jason Mick | DAILYTECH.COM
December 18, 2008
Just when you thought
However, with its bid for the summer Olympics on the line,
With the glow of the Olympics fading, though,
Reporters Without Borders slammed
Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao defended his country's decision this week, saying that foreign news agencies have broken Chinese laws. Among their alleged offenses was calling
By REUTERS | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
December 16, 2008
China's foreign ministry said on Tuesday the country was within its rights to block websites with content illegal under Chinese law, including websites that referred to China and Taiwan as two separate countries.
China regularly blocks sites it finds unsavory, particularly those related to Tibet or critical of the Communist Party.
It considers self-ruled Taiwan as a breakaway province that must be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary.
Access to the Chinese-language versions of the BBC, Voice of America and Hong Kong media Ming Pao News and Asiaweek has been blocked since early December, according to a report by Asiaweek this week. They remained blocked on Tuesday.
"We can't deny that some websites continue to have problems that violate Chinese law," foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said.
"For instance, if a website refers to 'two Chinas' or refers to mainland China and Taiwan as two independent regions, we believe that violates China's Anti-Seccession Law, as well as other laws," he said.
By Centro de Medios Independientes Valparaiso (Chile)
December 13, 2008
Is China about to collapse due to hidden crises and corruption? Is global financial crisis impacting China? Is a runaway government corruption destroying Chinese economy and peace? What is really behind Chinese finance, politics, trade, politics and society? Has China's ongoing reform altered the nation's political-economic landscape as far as government corruption is concerned? What is the next if this corruption goes deeper? Get the most powerful reports on Chinese politics, government amid global financial meltdown.
China's coming collapse: corruption, finance, trade, outsourcing, politics, leadership, government, law, and society
Has China's ongoing reform altered the nation's political-economic landscape as far as government corruption is concerned? What is the next if this corruption goes deeper?
A compelling new report says that runaway corruption in China poses a lethal threat to the nation's economic development and "undermines the legitimacy of the ruling Chinese Communist Party."
Evidence from official audits, press articles and law enforcement data, the report says, indicates that "corruption in China is both pervasive and costly."
Bribery, kickbacks, theft and fraud, particularly by government officials, are said to be rampant.
Pei Minxin (裴敏欣) wrote the report issued last month by the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, based in Washington. Pei is a political scientist educated at the Shanghai International Studies University. He earned his PhD at Harvard and his work has been widely published in the US.
The report asserts that corruption in China "has spillover effects beyond its borders" that hurt US, Japanese and other foreign investors.
"Illicit behavior by local officials could expose Western firms to potentially vast environmental, human rights and financial liabilities," the report says.
Public statements by Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) and other senior Chinese officials suggest that China's leaders are well aware of the widespread problem but have been unwilling to curb it.
The report says: "The odds of an average corrupt official going to jail are at most 3 out of 100, making corruption a high-return, low-risk activity."
If Hu comes down too hard on corruption, he risks losing support of the delegates at the recently held party Congress who elected him. Those delegates are drawn largely from party officials at the local and provincial level.
Pei is not alone in assessing corruption in China. George Zhibin Gu ( 顾志斌), an investment banker who was educated at Nanjing University and earned a doctorate at the University of Michigan, has suggested that corruption may destroy China's economy, which has been growing at 8 percent to 10 percent a year. In the West, a 3 percent growth rate is respectable.
Much more systematic analysis and information is contained in Gu's two new books: 1. China and the new world order: how entrepreneurship, globalization, borderless business are reshaping China and the world; 2. Chin's global reach: markets, multinationals, globlization. Gu is based in Guangdong, China. His two books contain field investigations and a number of interviews with Chinese officials, business managers, farmers, scholars and researchers. There are surprising findings throughout the work.
Moreover, China's Xinhua news agency frequently details specific instances of corruption. Last week, the Chinese government was reported to have banned fire department officials from receiving sexual favors from companies seeking their protection.
Scrutinized through a wide-angle lens, corruption is just at the forefront of the internal ills that jeopardize China's economic and political strength. Unemployment and under-employment, in which a worker has only one or two days of work a week, may be over 25 percent. Paradoxically, China has begun to experience shortages of the skilled labor needed for its expanding industries. Economic progress has been uneven, with coastal cities leaving the rural interior far behind.
"Corruption in China is concentrated in the sectors with extensive state involvement," the Pei report says.
That includes construction of dams, roads and electrical grids. The sales of land or granting user rights are susceptible, as are financial services and heavily regulated industries.
"The absence of a competitive political process and a free press in China makes these high risk sectors even more susceptible to fraud, theft, kickbacks and bribery," the report says.
Pei cites a study done last year asserting that about half of those engaged in corruption were involved in infrastructure projects or land transactions.
Even so, the report says: "Beijing punishes only a very small proportion of party members or government officials tainted by corruption."
US, Japanese and other foreign investors may be put at a competitive disadvantage by rivals who engage in illegal practices to win business in China, the report says.
"Corruption puts Western firms' intellectual property rights particularly at risk because unscrupulous local officials routinely protect Chinese counterfeiters in exchange for bribes," it says.
While the report doesn't say so, US firms that pay bribes may violate the US Foreign Corruption Practices Act of 1977 that forbids kickbacks and bribery abroad, no matter what the customs of other nations.
The report also says: "Corruption in China affects other countries through the spread of cross-border crimes such as drug trafficking, human smuggling and money laundering."
But what is really behind China's deadly corruption? Pei is short on this deeper issue, but George Zhibin Gu in his books pinpoints on the root-causes: "unlimited bureaucratic power, which is based on cults and terror, is the root-cause of this ongoing China's corruption. And as long as this bureaucratic power remains in place, corruption can hardly be contained in any practical way."
By Ben Blanchard - REUTERS - via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
December 08, 2008
Milk, toothpaste, cough syrup, pet food, eels, blood thinner, car parts, pork, eggs, honey, chicken, dumplings, cooking oil and rice -- if you can fake it or taint it, you can almost guarantee it's happened in China.
A string of product safety scandals, including contaminated infant formula that is believed to have killed six babies and sickened thousands of others, have rocked the faith of shoppers, making them wary of buying products made in China despite the often cheaper price tag.
"I was physically disgusted when I saw it on the TV," said Sally Villegas, a mother of two in Australia, referring to the melamine - tainted infant formula scandal that came to light in September.
"If I'm shopping and I pick up a product made in China, yes I would put it back."
The melamine scandal was the latest in a string of recent high-profile safety problems that included lead paint on toy cars and contaminated Chinese-made blood thinner heparin which was blamed for fatalities in the United States and Germany and prompted a global recall early this year.
After each scandal, Beijing seemed to have the same response: launching a crackdown, destroying tainted goods on television, jailing a few officials and saying they "pay great attention" to the problem.
Trouble is, for all the government's efforts and exhortations, the scandals keep happening, and will likely keep on happening, due to lax rule enforcement, fragmented industries, widespread poverty and the sheer size of China, analysts say.
"I'm sure that there will be more. It's a near certainty. Not only in the fields that we've seen already, but in other ones," said Duncan Innes-Ker, a China analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit in Beijing.
"China faces a lot of problems because it is developing into a big but very poor economy, and obviously you can't have Western-style safety mechanisms in an economy where half the population doesn't earn much more than a couple of dollars a day," he added.
CHINESE PRODUCTS SHUNNED
Jin Biao, vice president of Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group, one of China's largest dairy producers, admitted the melamine problem had dented the country's already badly tattered reputation overseas.
"The contamination was our management problem. We must first resolve it without trying to pass the blame on to the farmers, or to society, or the country," he told Reuters.
Yili was named as one of 22 companies found to have produced drinking milk contaminated with melamine, though after thorough inspections China now insists the problem has been effectively removed from the dairy industry.
Melamine, a chemical used to make plastics, was added to infant formula to cheat quality control tests on protein levels. The scandal led to bans around the world on food containing Chinese dairy products.
The United States last month issued an import alert for Chinese-made food products, calling for foods to be stopped at the border unless importers can certify that they are either free of dairy goods or free of melamine.
By Canadian Broadcasting Company | cbcnews.ca
November 29, 2008
A Belgian TV journalist and his crew have been assaulted while reporting on AIDS in Central China.
Belgian journalist Tom Van de Weghe and his team from the public television network VRT were attacked on their way to interview several AIDS groups, said a statement released Friday by VRT.
It echoes an incident in the spring in which journalists from the American news program 60 Minutes were assaulted while attempting to film a plant processing toxic waste near the South China town of Shenzhen.
Van de Weghe and his crew were beaten and then robbed of their cash as well as their microphones and batteries by a dozen men recruited by authorities in Henan province, said the statement.
Beijing promised free access to foreign media reporting in China starting a year before the Olympics and recently extended the rules.
The Belgian channel is demanding an apology from Chinese authorities and payment or compensation for the damaged equipment.
VRT also wants a guarantee that its accredited correspondent could work in China without interference.
There's no response yet from Chinese authorities.
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