Made in (The People's Republic of) China: June 2009 Archives

By David Barboza | The New York Times
June 23, 2009

Liu Pan, a 17-year-old factory worker, was crushed to death last April when the machine he was operating malfunctioned.

Somehow Mr. Liu became stuck in the machine, his sister Liu Yan recalled during a tearful interview in a village near the factory.

"When we got his body, his whole head was crushed," Ms. Liu said. "We couldn't even see his eyes."

Investigating the accident, inspectors found a series of labor and safety violations at the factory, Yiuwah Stationery, which supplies cards, gift boxes and other paper goods to Disney, the British supermarket chain Tesco and other companies.

The investigators also discovered that Mr. Liu was hired illegally, at 15, below the legal age limit here. Disney has called the situation at the factory "unacceptable."

In a statement issued Wednesday, Disney said it had instructed its vendors and licensees to "cease new orders of any Disney-branded products in the Yiuwah factory" until conditions were improved.

A spokesman for Tesco said that company was also working to improve conditions at the factory.

While the accident at the Yiuwah factory was particularly tragic, working conditions elsewhere are worsening. A year and a half after a landmark labor law took effect in China, experts say conditions have actually deteriorated in southern China's export-oriented factories, which produce many of America's less expensive retail goods.

With China's exports reeling and unemployment rising because of the global slowdown, there is growing evidence that factories are ignoring or evading the new law, and that the government is reluctant to enforce it.

Government critics say authorities fear that a crackdown on violators could lead to mass layoffs and even social unrest.

"The economic downturn has given regulators the perfect excuse to ignore the law," says Zhang Zhiru, director of the Shenzhen Chunfeng Labor Dispute Service, a nonprofit group that supports workers. "I don't see any fundamental change."

But workers are fighting back. Earlier this month, the government said Chinese courts were trying to cope with a soaring number of labor disputes, apparently from workers emboldened by the promise of the new contract labor law.

The number of labor disputes in China doubled to 693,000 in 2008, the first year the law was in effect, and are rising sharply this year, the government says.

The law requires that all employees have a written contract that complies with minimum wage and safety requirements. It also strengthens the monopoly state-run labor union and makes it more difficult for companies to use temporary workers or to dismiss employees.

Western companies that outsource to China say they have stepped up their monitoring of supplier factories to ensure they comply with the law. But they acknowledge that ensuring compliance is challenging in China.

A spokesman for the local Dongguan government here said that they were strictly enforcing the new law. But in interviews, some factory owners acknowledged that they were seeking ways to get around it, complaining that the law's regulations were too costly and cumbersome.

Lawyers say some local governments have issued their own competing rules or interpretations of the law that weaken it, to aid factory owners.

"Many local governments want to develop their own versions of the law," says Liu Cheng, a professor of law at Shanghai Normal University and one of the law's authors.

China's huge and complicated labor market has long thrived on cheap labor and lax regulation. In recent years, labor rights advocates say they have seen incremental gains for workers. But they say there are growing signs of labor abuse. They point to a string of recent cases, like one several weeks ago in which police in southern China's Anhui province said they had freed 30 mentally handicapped workers from what they called "slave conditions" in a brick kiln.

On the same day, police said a fire in the dormitory of an illegal factory in southern Guangdong province killed 13 female workers and seriously injured four others.

A few weeks earlier, 7,000 workers went on strike at a factory that supplies some of the world's biggest technology companies, saying they were being cheated on overtime wages and fed unsanitary food.

Experts say cheating workers on wages, forcing them to log up to 200 hours of overtime a month and denying them health benefits is commonplace in China.

Many factories are violating not just the new contract labor law, but also a 1994 law, which covered a broader set of labor and wage practices, they said.

"The employment contract in many factories here is a mere scrap of paper," says Liu Kaiming, director of the Institute of Contemporary Observation, a labor rights group in Shenzhen. "Here is a common trick: The factory signs contracts with 1,000 workers but actually they've hired 2,000. The factory reports to the government saying they have 100 percent of their workers registered."

Heather White, a consultant who has inspected factories in China for Tommy Hilfiger, Polo Ralph Lauren and other big companies, says many exporters evade the law by subcontracting to so-called shadow factories, which operate under illegal conditions.

"The market is penalizing anyone who complies with the law," she says, meaning their products are more expensive. "And so many companies are subcontracting" to shadow factories.

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By Dylan Bushell-Embling | BusinessWeek
June 15, 2009

The controversial new software blocks political and religious websites and is "far more intrusive" than other content control software, say OpenNet researchers

China's new Green Dam filtering program blocks far more content than pornography, despite the MIIT's claims, that it is to protect youth from obscene content, the OpenNet initiative said.

Instead the program filters political and religious content, and is "far more intrusive" than any other content control software the initiative has reviewed, OpenNet researchers said.

"[Green Dam is] a substandard software product that interferes with the performance of personal computers in an unpredictable way, killing browsers and applications without warning while opening up users to numerous serious security vulnerabilities," the researchers said.

The program actively monitors computer behavior, terminating a wide range of programs if sensitive keywords are entered, said OpenNet, which is a joint project between Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and other universities to monitor government internet surveillance.

For example, entering falundafa.org into browsers or even word processors such as Notepad results in these programs being closed automatically.

With just a single auto-update implementing a few changes to the code, Green Dam could be used to monitor personal communications and browsing behavior, the researchers said. Green Dam already creates log files, but these are stored locally.

OpenNet also called the plan to mandate the use of a particular software product a "questionable policy decision," despite China's decision to make the installation of the program voluntary.

Meanwhile, US software publisher Solid Oak Software is seeking an injunction preventing US companies from shipping software bundled with Green Dam, alleging part of the program was stolen from its CyberSitter filtering program.

Solid Oak has found pieces of its proprietary code in Green Dam, as well as a copy of instructions for updating the software, the company told Reuters.

The Chinese company behind the filtering software--Jinhui Computer Systems--denied any wrongdoing.

>> Original source 

By Andrew Jacobs | The New York Times
June 11, 2009

China is facing a storm of protest at home and abroad over new regulations requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include software that can filter out pornography and other "vulgar" content from the Internet.

Industry executives, free-speech advocates and ordinary computer users have reacted angrily to the new mandate, which gives manufacturers until July 1 to preinstall the software on millions of new machines. The government presented the regulations to PC makers on May 19, but they were not released publicly until Monday.

"Mandatory installation of filtering software is simply acting blindly," said an editorial in the Wuhan Evening News.

Computer makers in the United States say it will be impossible to fulfill the requirement by the end of the month and have asked the Chinese government to reconsider the directive. They say it raises thorny questions about censorship and whether manufacturers will be liable if the software -- designed by a company with ties to China's military and public security agencies -- conflicts with operating systems or causes computers to crash.

"To be honest, nobody really knows what this software is capable of," said one executive at an American computer maker.

So far, the government has not shown any signs of backing down. On Tuesday, state-owned media and officials defended the new software, known as "Green Dam," and said suggestions it could be turned into government-operated spyware were exaggerated.

"If you have children or are expecting a child you could understand the concerns of parents over unhealthy online content," Qin Gang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said at a regular news conference Tuesday.

Bloggers, dissidents and even normally cautious state media outlets have greeted the announcement with skepticism, questioning the software's reliability and wondering whether it could be used to censor nonsexual content. Some criticized the government's decision to spend 41 million yuan, or $6 million, on a program that was not solicited through an open bidding process.

China vigorously restricts Internet content, regularly blocking Web pages devoted to Tibetan independence, human rights issues and other politically sensitive subjects. An anti-vulgarity campaign this year has shut down thousands of pornographic sites.

"How do you prevent this from becoming a backdoor for the misuse of power?" asked an editorial on the Web site of Caijing magazine. "Up until now, officials have not answered these questions. The government can urge parents to take responsibility through a variety of mechanisms, but it can't become an omnipotent Big Parent."

Green Dam's designers say the program, which uses image recognition technology and text filtering to block material, is not capable of acting as spyware. Most important, they say the program can be disabled or erased by computer owners who don't want to use it.

The Beijing News devoted a full page to Green Dam and found its performance less than stellar. For example, an innocent math question that included the word "balls" was filtered out, as were apparently harmless photographs with yellow backgrounds.

Writing on Green Dam's own Web site, one teacher said sexually explicit images slipped through and another complained that it would not let her view pictures of pigs. "Pitiful little pig!" she wrote. "I was curious, so I looked up some photos of naked African women. Oh, they were not censored!"

In an editorial he wrote for the Oriental Morning Post, Wang Lin, an associate professor at Hainan University Law School, said the government should have consulted computer users and allowed other software companies to submit comparable programs. "They've made a decision affecting tens of millions of people without regard to their opinions," he said in an interview. "It's like you buying a car and the government telling you where you can drive."

Executives at computer makers, who last year sold about 40 million PC's in China, would agree with such sentiments, although none were willing to speak on the record for fear of angering a government they hope will change its mind.

Manufacturers and software designers have been working behind the scenes to convince officials to reconsider the directive, which was drawn up without industry input and without advance notice.

On Tuesday, a coalition of U.S. trade associations issued a statement that gently made their case.

"We believe there should be an open and healthy dialogue on how parental control software can be offered in the market in ways that ensure privacy, system reliability, freedom of expression, the free flow of information, security and user choice," read the statement, which was signed by groups including the Software & Information Industry Association and the Information Technology Industry Council, whose members include Lenovo, Dell, Apple and Hewlett-Packard.

By Wednesday, industry officials said a dialogue had begun and the American computer executive, speaking anonymously, said he had hopes that the rules might be eased.

Still, he said one possible compromise -- allowing PC manufacturers to simply drop a Green Dam disc into the box of every new computer -- would not be ideal. Preliminary tests by software technicians at a number of companies, he said, have revealed significant software tics that could affect a computer's operating system or other programs.

Bloggers, many of whom face occasional government censorship, have been especially incensed by the new rules. Wang Xiaofeng, a popular blogger, said a friend who downloaded the software was unable to view his satirical writings. He said he is especially bothered by the way Green Dam has been introduced to, or rather, foisted on, the public.

"It's like a bully forcing people to do what they want," he said in a telephone interview.

Still, he said he wasn't overly concerned the software would have a lasting impact on Internet freedom. The government is continually trying to ramp up Web restrictions, and each time, those restrictions are circumvented by the wily and the persistent. "People will always find a way to break through these firewalls," he said. "It's just a shame the government has to keep spending taxpayer money to build them."

Xiyun Yang contributed research.

>> Original source