Made in (The People's Republic of) China: 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.

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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.

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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.

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