Doing business in China: August 2010 Archives

By Scott McDonald - AP | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
August 28, 2010

China's monster traffic jam has reared its head again, with trucks and cars backed up for up to 18 miles (30 kilometers) Saturday on a highway north of Beijing, although that is a third the size of what it was.

The traffic jam came four days after the break-up of an even bigger one -- stretching to 60 miles (100 kilometers) at one point.

State media said the latest jam on the Beijing-Tibet highway was caused by an accident and road maintenance.

The worst of the jam started in Zhangjiakou, a city about 90 miles (150 kilometers) northwest of Beijing, and stretched into Inner Mongolia in northern China, with traffic creeping along in fits and starts.

A woman who answered the phone at the Beijing traffic management office said drivers should not take the highway. "The traffic flow is very slow," said the woman, who refused to give her name.

Traffic jams are part of daily life in China's major cities, with vehicles moving at a crawl in parts of Beijing for most of the day.

In the last traffic jam on the Beijing-Tibet highway, which started Aug. 14 and lasted about 10 days, state media said some drivers were stuck for five days with drivers on the worst-hit stretches passing the time sitting in the shade of their immobilized trucks, playing cards, sleeping on the asphalt or bargaining with price-gouging food vendors.

A bottle of water was selling for 10 yuan ($1.50), 10 times the normal price, Chinese media reports said.

The main reason traffic has increased on the partially four-lane highway is the opening of coal mines in the northwest, vital for the booming economy, which this month surpassed Japan's in size and is now second only to America's.

Officials eased the first jam by directing truckers to take a 180-mile-long (300-kilometer-long) detour, the China Daily said.

It quoted one truck driver, Lu Yong, who was stuck in both jams, as saying he should have prepared some food this time. "Who knows when the traffic will move again?" said the 37-year-old, who was stranded for two nights in the last jam at almost the same location.

A woman at the Inner Mongolian traffic management office said it may take several days to ease the latest jam. "Please do not drive on this expressway," said the official, who also would not give her name.

>> Original Source

By Matthew Little and Jason Loftus | The Epoch Times
August 18, 2010

The office of Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon has called on the Chinese embassy in Ottawa to return a Canadian journalist's passport, which he said was withheld when he refused to provide details about his personal life in Canada.

Zhang Zhaopei applied for a visa to visit China from the Chinese consulate in Toronto on Friday, submitting his Canadian passport as part of the process. But when he went to pick up his visa, he was given a blank sheet of paper and told to list extensive personal information about his work, family, and personal history.

Mr. Zhang refused, saying he would abandon his visa application. But Zhang says he was told he still wouldn't get his Canadian passport back if he didn't provide the requested details.

"I never thought they can do this thing," said Zhang, a reporter for New Tang Dynasty Television and a Falun Gong practitioner.

On Wednesday, a spokesperson for Minister Cannon said Canada had asked for the passport to be returned.

"We are aware that the individual in question had requested a visa on Friday to travel to China and that his passport has not been returned," spokesperson Melissa Lantsman told The Epoch Times.

"A Canadian passport is the property of the government of Canada. We have made a formal request to the Chinese embassy that the passport be returned into our possession."

Ms. Lantsman said her office had read Mr. Zhang's story earlier this week in The Epoch Times and that the coverage had brought "much needed attention" to his case.

Zhang was attempting to return to China to visit his family who he has been unable to see in nine years.

Zhang had tried to return to China from Singapore in 2002 and 2004, only to be sent packing once he landed in Beijing and Shanghai, respectively. At that time, he was told it was because he practiced Falun Gong, a traditional Chinese meditation practice that became the target of persecution in China in 1999 and has since put up a spirited defence of human rights.

Mr. Zhang immigrated to Canada in 2005 and is now a citizen. He said he wasn't surprised he was denied a visa this time around, though having his passport withheld did come as a shock.

New Tang Dynasty Television has encountered interference from the Chinese authorities in the past. The regime previously pressured a European satellite carrier to drop the station's signal into China and has also attempted to exclude NTDTV from a press event inside Canada's Parliament Hill earlier this year.

NTDTV and The Epoch Times made headlines in the lead-up to the G-20 this June when a press conference with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Chinese leader Hu Jintao failed to take place due to the regime's insistence that both media outlets be prohibited from attending, a request the Parliamentary Press Gallery refused to accommodate.

Zhang said the information the consulate requested would have made it easier for the consulate to interfere and monitor his daily activities--something he didn't want to facilitate.

"I think they just want to control everything of myself, including my work and everything ... They want to control everything," he said.

Zhang told the consulate worker handling his case that if they didn't return his passport, he would contact the police. A supervisor there told him to go ahead, he said.

>> Complete Report and Related Articles

By David Barboza | The New York Times
13 August 2010

In an apparent bid to extend its control over the Internet and cash in on the rapid growth of mobile devices, China plans to create a government-controlled search engine.

The new venture would compete with Baidu.com, a private company that runs China's dominant search engine. Baidu's market has grown since Google retreated from the mainland earlier this year.

The state-owned China Mobile -- the world's biggest cellphone carrier -- and Xinhua, China's official state-run news agency, signed an agreement on Thursday to create a joint venture called the Search Engine New Media International Communications Company.

China already has the world's largest number of Internet users, more than 420 million, and also the largest number of mobile phone subscribers, with more than 800 million.

Private start-up companies play a big role on the Web in China, but the government maintains tight control over Internet companies and censors content that it deems dangerous or sensitive.

Now, though, analysts say that Beijing is pushing state-run companies to take a more active role online. China Central Television, the nation's dominant broadcaster, is trying to develop an online video site. Xinhua News Agency is trying to build a global platform of news providers using television and the Internet.

At the announcement of the joint venture in Beijing on Thursday, Zhou Xisheng, vice president of Xinhua, said the new company would build a leading search engine platform. But he also said the move was "part of the country's broader efforts to safeguard its information security and push forward the robust, healthy and orderly development of China's new media industry."

Representatives of Baidu could not be reached for comment.

For years, Baidu has dominated Internet searches in China, holding a sizable lead over Google, which entered the market late. Earlier this year, Google pulled its search engine out of Beijing after complaining about censorship and online attacks that appeared to be coming from hackers within China.

Google now operates its Chinese-language search engine from Hong Kong; it is accessible from China but some results are censored by the government.

Most of China's other big, private Internet companies are involved in online games and entertainment. But on Monday, Alibaba.com, one of the country's biggest e-commerce sites, said the company and a fund co-founded by its chairman would acquire a 16 percent stake in the search engine Sogou, which is owned by the Chinese portal Sohu.com.

Yahoo, the United States portal, holds a 40 percent stake in the Alibaba Group.

>> Original Report

By Radio Free Asia
August 05, 2010

People previously allowed free movement are now having problems leaving China

Chinese lawyers, academics, and rights activists say that authorities are increasingly targeting them through immigration controls, with a growing number of people prevented from leaving the country in recent months to attend overseas events.

Earlier this week, authorities in the southeastern province of Fujian prevented Beijing-based writer Mo Zhixu from leaving the country, on grounds that he posed a "danger to state security."

"They told me very clearly that it might harm national security if I were to leave the country," Mo said from his Beijing home after being refused permission to board a flight for Hokkaido in Japan at an airport in the southeastern city of Xiamen.

"I had an inkling that something like this might happen because of [my involvement in] Charter '08," said Mo, referring to his signing of a document in December 2008 which called for sweeping political reforms in China.

Mo said he had been a vocal supporter of jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, who helped to draft the Charter. Liu is currently serving an 11-year jail term for subversion.

Mo said he also took part in a discussion forum last year on the June 4, 1989 military crackdown on the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

"They want to put on the pressure now," Mo said, noting that other Charter signatories and fellow activists had received similar treatment. "I thought that it might happen to me, as well."

"But I also thought that mostly I write commentaries, and I haven't actually done very much ... but in end they didn't let me go," he said.

Security concerns cited

Mo said he was prevented from leaving China under Section 1, Clause 8, of the Entry and Exit Management Law of the People's Republic of China, which states that a person whom the Chinese government believes to be threat to national security may be prevented from leaving the country.

However, the authorities did not confiscate his passport, Mo said.

Guo Yushan, director of the nongovernment Transition Institute, said he had been prevented from leaving China in July to attend a conference of nongovernment organizations (NGOs) run by the European Union.

"I have been prevented from leaving for two events," Guo said. "One was on my way to Poland, where I would have been the only Chinese person."

"At the other one, in Brussels, I knew that quite a few of us were going. [AIDS activist] Wan Yanhai went to that one."

Guo, whose group researches free-market economics, said officials gave no reason for the refusal to let him leave, and didn't retain his passport, either.

And in May, Beijing-based rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong was refused permission to leave China as he attempted to go through immigration controls at Beijing's international airport, on his way to attend an event in the United States.

A growing trend?

Jiang was detained in a small room and held while officials checked with their superiors, and then told him he wouldn't be allowed to leave, citing the same clause of China's immigration law that was applied in the case of Mo Zhixu.

"I'm not sure exactly about the timing, but we have discovered that a large group of people who had never run into problems before were being told they couldn't leave," Jiang said.

"[These are] all people who are fairly active in the public domain, and these measures are being used against them."

Fan Yafeng, former law professor at the prestigious China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), said he sees the measures as part of a growing trend in national security enforcement.

He said ordinary citizens, rights activists, lawyers, and academics had been subjected to such controls recently, and that there is no way to appeal against the decisions, nor to pursue complaints against the officials responsible.

Original reporting in Cantonese by Hai Nan and in Mandarin by Ding Xiao. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

>> Original Source

by Radio Free Asia
03 August 2010

A Chinese propaganda event in a religious space offends Uyghurs

Members of the Uyghur ethnic minority in northwest China have expressed anger and concern about controls over imams after a local Communist Party committee held a meeting in a place of worship.

The Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) Peyziwat County Committee held the meeting at the Second Village Mosque in Xinjiang's Kashgar prefecture on July 24, according to the official Tianshan Net website.

"To hold communist activities in a mosque is a kind of ridicule to our religion and our humanity," said Abdurahman Kasim, a religious scholar from the county.

At the meeting, 35 imams attended a speech contest organized by the Unity and Friendship Department.

The topic of the speech contest was "Love the Country, Promote the Homeland."

Local people contacted religious figures to express their anger over the issue.

"So far, within a week I have received at least 100 calls from the public, all of them complaining about the issue. I understand that they cannot express their opinions to officials because of the political situation in our homeland," Abdurahman Kasim said.

"We did not say anything to the government about the issue, because we know what the cost of expression on this topic would be, especially these days. But officials should know that our silence does not mean we agree," he added.

A staff member from the Unity and Friendship Department of the CCP's Peyziwat Committee confirmed that the meeting was held in a mosque but refused comment on the issue.

Influence on imams

The meeting reflects the central government's strong concern for controlling religious leadership among Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority in China with their home in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

One of the 19 participants in the speech contest, Abdurehimjan, a 41-year-old imam from a mosque in nearby Canbaz village, said, "I heard that people are blaming me as a traitor, but it is no secret to anyone what the rules for imams are in society now."

"We have to listen to officials, we have to obey regulations, we have to do many things against our will.  It's not only me--all the imams are paid by government to do that," he said.

Since 2006, the government has paid monthly salaries of 80, 120, or 230 yuan (U.S. $12, $18, or $34) per month to imams throughout the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, according to an official in Karamay city in charge of religious affairs.

In exchange, the government is asking imams to seek common ground between socialism and Islam and to guide the public to obey state regulations, he said.

"Patriotic education does not contradict Islam or our policy," an official from the CCP's Kashgar Prefectural Committee surnamed Zhang said.

"Stability is the main demand of our society, and unity is a major desire for the all the people who belong to various ethnic groups in the region," he added.

"Also, there was nothing wrong in terms of the location of the meeting, because we discussed it with imams before holding it there and they had agreed to allow it in the mosque."

Another staff member of the Unity and Friendship Department of Kashgar Prefecture, a Uyghur who did not wish to give his name, disagreed.

"I thought it was wrong that the activity was held in the mosque. We should respect some sensitive principles of religion, otherwise [some] activities will cause unexpected results that our government does not want to see," the staff member said.

"I think some local officials are just hoping to receive praise from higher-level authorities and they are neglecting the feelings of the local people."

Reactions overseas

Uyghur communities in the U.S. and Turkey have called for religious freedom in Xinjiang and said they are outraged by the lack of respect shown by the CCP towards places of worship.

President of the exiled World Uyghur Congress Rebiya Kadeer said she was shocked by the pictures of the meeting held in a mosque.

"At first, I could not believe my eyes. Actually I did not want to believe it was a mosque, but unfortunately it was," she said.

According to Kadeer, the central government's level of control over imams has increased over the last three decades, from watching over activities from the outside of mosques in the 1980s, to appointing and directing imams and arranging mosque activities in the 1990s.

"This is unique problem that Uyghurs are encountering. If they protest a problem, they will be punished. If they do not protest, China steps up attacks on their other rights," Rebiya Kadeer said.

In Turkey, religious activist Abdukadir Asim said, "It is a common principle among all religions that the privacy of the place of worship is fundamental. It is a strange and abhorrent event that communist propaganda was conducted in a mosque. I don't believe it has ever happened before, anywhere else in the world."

He also criticized general secretary of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Ekmelledin Ihsanoglu, who visited China last month but neglected to draw attention to the issue of religious freedoms in Xinjiang.

"The action of holding a communist activity in a mosque ridicules not only Uyghurs but also the whole Islamic world. The international community should speak out about this event."

Kashgar is known among Uyghurs as the most religious place in Xinjiang. Kashgarians converted to Islam in the 10th century, 400 to 500 years earlier than Uyghurs in nearby cities.

Peyziwat is one of the largest counties in the prefecture, with 330,000 residents.

In June, authorities in Kashgar detained 30 women who had formed a Quran study group.

Authorities frequently require religious groups to submit texts for examination before they may be used for worship.

Regional regulations forbid mosque attendance for those under 18 years old.

Original reporting and translation by Shohret Hoshur for RFA's Uyghur service. Written in English by Rachel Vandenbrink.

>> Original Source