Recently in Made in (The People's Republic of) China Category
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 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 BBC World News
April 28, 2008
Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say.
The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.
But then some of them saw TV images of protesters holding the emblem and they alerted the authorities, according to Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper.
Tibet independence
The factory owner reportedly told police the emblems had been ordered from outside China, and he did not know that they stood for an independent Tibet.
Workers who had grown suspicious checked the meaning of the flag by going online.
Thousands of flags had already been packed for shipping.
Police believe that some may already have been sent overseas, and could appear in Hong Kong during the Olympic torch relay there this week.
By Andrew Jacobs | The New York Times
24 August 2008
In little more than 100 days, China will open its arms to a deluge of foreigners, many of whom will be pleasantly surprised to find a dizzying array of designer boutiques and painfully hip martini bars that divert expatriates and middle-class Chinese in this once dowdy capital.
But even as Beijing is promising to welcome 1.5 million visitors to the Olympic Games, public security officials are tightening controls over daily life and introducing visa restrictions that are causing anxiety among the 250,000 foreigners who have settled here in recent years.
The visa rules, which were introduced last week with little explanation, restrict many visitors to 30-day stays, replacing flexible, multiple-entry visas that had allowed people to remain for up to a year. The new rules make it harder for foreigners to live and work in Beijing without applying for residency permits, which can be difficult to obtain. The restrictions are also complicating the lives of businesspeople in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore used to crossing the border with ease.
"I can't begin to explain how serious this is going to be," said Richard Vuylsteke, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. "A barrier like this is going to have a real ripple effect on business."
The government wants to present a blemish-free image of Beijing for the Olympics. Police officers have cleared away street beggars and closed down shops selling pirated DVDs, while also forcing some migrant workers to go back to the countryside.
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Because the government has not issued formal guidelines about the new visa rules, rumors and uncertainty have been rife, and travel agents say that a handful of tourists have been denied visas without evident rationale.
Cloris Yip, the manager of Smiley Travel in Hong Kong, cited the example of two tourists, a Swiss and a German; the Swiss citizen received a 30-day visa while his German companion was given one for five days. The men, she said, canceled their trip.
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