Studies / Reports: April 2006 Archives
By Ullrich Fichtner | | SPIEGEL online (Deutschland)
April 26, 2006
Each day, tens of thousands of communist Chinese peasants stream into Macau, the Las Vegas of Asia, to bet their entire lifesavings in the hope of a better future. But the monetary blessings of capitalism they dream of are at best elusive.
After spending five days in Macau and with only 230 yuan (€23) left in her purse, Chen Xi Mei decides she's had enough of the former Portuguese colony and Asian gambling Mecca. So she sets out for her dusty rural Chinese village, which is a 16-hour bus ride and one-hour walk away. The cloth-covered, wheeled suitcase she's pulling along as she makes her way to the border terminal for buses heading to Zhuhai contains a few articles of clothing, a mobile phone, paper tissues -- in short, everything she owns. Nothing remains of all the hard-earned money she had saved, and yet nothing has become of her dream of a better life.
Chen walks through Macau like someone crossing a fairground in broad daylight, past the Tsai Shen Casino, where peasants play baccarat 24-7 and past the dark temple of the Lisboa Casino, its portals crowned with light bulbs like some jester's cap. She sees the brand-new, shimmering, copper-clad Wynn Casino building, and she sees the mirrored, gold-colored walls of the Sands out by the docks for ferries to Hong Kong. The colorful imitation ruins on the beach, images of antiquity and the wealth of pharaohs -- all things anyone can have -- with a little luck, that is.
Her route takes her through streets lined with jewelers and pawn shops, where winners show off and losers go begging, where bleach-blonde Ukrainian women saunter from one pimp to the next and young girls from all over China take their new breasts, recently enlarged for 4,500 yuan (€450) a piece, for a walk.
The Epoch Times
April 26, 2006
Sky TV goes undercover
Sky TV aired a report last week that confirms important claims The Epoch Times has made in its own investigations into organ harvesting in China.
This report verifies that:
organs for transplantation are very plentiful in China;
they are available on demand;
the organs are supplied from prisoners;
the prisoners are killed after they are found to match a patient who is awaiting a donor organ.
Reporter Dominic Waghorn and at least one other staff member from Sky TV visited the Orient Organ Transplantation Center in Beijing with a hidden camera, posing as someone whose father needed a liver.
Waghorn begins his report by noting that in China, unlike the West, there is "a seemingly endless supply of livers…the reasons why are deeply sinister."
The nurse who welcomes him at the hospital cheerfully explains that their hospital can get organs "the fastest" because it has the " best connections." Waghorn explains the hospital publicly admits its links to China's paramilitary police.
Editorial - The New York Times
Sunday, April 23, 2006
It's hard to imagine how a meeting between the leaders of the world's two most powerful nations could seem insignificant. But that's what happened by the time the White House finished downgrading the protocol, lowering the expectations and erasing the substance for President Hu Jintao's visit.
It's not as if presidents of China came to the White House very often. (The last time was nine years ago.) And it's not as if there were no issues of immense importance. (Just take the world's dwindling fossil fuels and growing nuclear arsenals, then move on to trade and human rights.)
Surely Presidents Bush and Hu could have given the impression that they were talking over important matters. Instead all they appeared to do was agree to disagree and offer up a series of smiling photo ops in which there was no substance behind the smiles. Mr. Bush could not even manage to give Mr. Hu the state dinner he wanted, so the Chinese leader made his first stop in the other Washington and met with the head of Microsoft before the leader of the free world.
Any progress, no matter how small, on the really big issues like energy and nonproliferation would have required the two presidents to spend major political capital. But no capital spending plans were announced — perhaps because Mr. Bush does not have a lot to spend and Mr. Hu is not willing to dip into his own account. Or perhaps that might have gotten in the way of the choreography, which a Falun Gong protester managed to disrupt anyway.
By Jonathan Beale | BBC News
April 21, 2006
It seemed to be going so well. Chinese President Hu Jintao had arrived in the other Washington - State, not DC - happily adapting to his role as the leader of a new global power.
Even his reserve and awkwardness appeared to fade as he rubbed shoulders with the chairman and founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates. The world's new "big spender" with the world's richest man.
President Hu was warmly embraced by the staff of Boeing - buoyed by his promises to buy more of their planes. He even donned a baseball cap!
Was this a sign that these two great countries' mutual suspicions were melting away?
Even the White House had appeared to throw caution to the wind.
Okay, this was not the official state visit that the Chinese government had wanted, but when President Hu arrived in Washington DC he still received a 21-gun salute, a guard of honour and marching bands - all witnessed by every senior figure of the Bush administration.
Blacked out
But it then all unravelled. The Chinese may have been willing to overlook the foul-up as their National Anthem was introduced as that of "the Republic of China" - the other name for Taiwan - the part of China that has rebelled and broken away from the mainland and sought security from the United States.
But to have their president's speech interrupted by not just a protester, but one from the banned quasi-religious group Falun Gong, would have been difficult to swallow.
In Beijing, television screens showing the BBC and CNN went to black as the cameras focused on Wang Wenyi shouting out "President Hu, your days are numbered".
President Bush apologised to his Chinese guest for this unfortunate incident - but it showed the gulf that remains between these two countries.
The Falun Gong protester was only reflecting a wider disgust in Washington over China's human rights record.
By Joseph Kahn | The New York Times
April 21, 2006
WASHINGTON, April 21 — The Chinese president, Hu Jintao, wound up a four-day visit to the United States on Friday with a foreign policy address at Yale that offered an upbeat vision of Chinese-American ties, as the two sides tried to shake off the lingering effects of protocol blunders during the White House reception for Mr. Hu.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington sent a delegation to the White House on Friday to demand a detailed explanation of how an adherent of the Falun Gong spiritual sect, which is banned in China, managed to infiltrate the welcome ceremony for Mr. Hu on the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday and heckle Mr. Hu for several minutes before being escorted away.
While Mr. Hu appeared unfazed by the disruption and continued with his planned events Thursday and Friday, some analysts said the security breach might end up heightening the distrust between the nations that the visit had been intended to dispel.
"I'm worried that this could end up being the legacy of the trip," said Bates Gill, a China specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "Whether it is perceived as a simple mistake or an intentional slight, it will underscore a pervasive sense of distrust."
The reception for Mr. Hu was further marred when a White House announcer confused the official name of China with that of its archrival, Taiwan, while introducing China's national anthem. Separately, photographs show that as the event ended, President Bush first steered Mr. Hu to leave the podium and then, realizing he had done so prematurely, grabbed the Chinese leader by the arm and pulled him back into the proper position.
The protocol problems may have had more resonance than the nature of the small slights would suggest because Mr. Hu's visit did not achieve any significant breakthroughs and the Chinese always emphasize careful staging of major political events.
By Jill McGivering | BBC News
April 19, 2006
Top British transplant surgeons have accused China of harvesting the organs of thousands of executed prisoners a year to sell for transplants.
The British Transplantation Society condemned the practice as unacceptable and a breach of human rights, in a statement released on Wednesday.
The move comes less than a week after Chinese officials publicly denied the practice.
In March, China said it would ban the sale of human organs from July.
'Selection'
The British Transplantation Society says an accumulating weight of evidence suggests the organs of thousands of executed prisoners in China are being removed for transplants without consent.
Professor Stephen Wigmore, who chairs the society's ethics committee, told the BBC that the speed of matching donors and patients, sometimes as little as a week, implied prisoners were being selected before execution.
Chinese officials deny the allegations.
Just last week a Chinese health official said publicly that organs from executed prisoners were sometimes used, but only with prior permission and in a very few cases.
But widespread allegations have persisted for several years - including from international human rights groups.
【大纪元4月13日讯】我们注意到，在大纪元新闻网3月9日曝光中国沈阳苏家屯活体摘除法轮功学员器官事件后，4月12日世界主要的几个大通讯社都发出了一条新闻，内容涉及中国国务院新闻办公室4月11日举行的记者会，中国辽宁省沈阳市苏家屯区政府官员和苏家屯血栓中心医院的官员，否认当地关押大量的法轮功学员，以及否认曾经有过活体摘取法轮功学员内脏器官牟利的事情发生。
这几位官员指责大纪元造谣，诬衊当地政府部门和医院，甚至表示可能起诉大纪元时报。所以我们对这个事情做出一个公开的澄清。
在这里，我们想首先强调的一点是，我们，无论是作为记者或者是作为一个普通的人类来说，我们都并不希望我们所报导的事情是真实发生的，我们有时甚至希望整个事件根本就是一个误会，并不存在。但不幸的是，我们越是进行深入的调查，我们越确信这个事件是真实的，这也是我们大纪元全体工作人员感到悲哀的地方。
In a press conference yesterday in Beijing, Zhang Yuqin, the deputy director of the Liaoning Thrombosis Treatment Center, claimed that his hospital is considering suing The Epoch Times. Tipped off by three brave individuals who risked their lives in order to tell the truth, we have reported the harvesting of the organs from thousands of living Falun Gong practitioners at his hospital and associated hospitals in the Sujiatun district of Shenyang City, Liaoning Province.
Subsequent investigations have corroborated the statements of these witnesses.
We first reported this horror on March 9. More than a month later the Chinese Communist regime chose to respond. Why the wait? We have reports from Sujiatun that the time was spent executing or shipping out the Falun Gong practitioners still held there and creating a cover-up.
If the media travel to Sujiatun, they will find a Potemkin Village, ready for inspection.
The Chinese Health Ministry lied about SARS. The Chinese Communist regime still claims no one was killed in the Tiananmen Square massacre. Now the Chinese regime has decided to lie about the organ harvesting factories it has set up around China.
By Jim Yardley | The New York Times
April 14, 2006
GUOJIATUO, China — He Qingzhi's teenage daughter, Yuan, and her two friends lived on the same street near the Yangtze River, attended the same middle school and were crushed to death in the same traffic accident late last year. After that, the symmetry ended: under Chinese law, Yuan's life was worth less than the others'.
Mr. He, 38, who has lived in this town in central China for 15 years, was told that his neighbors were entitled to roughly three times more compensation from the accident because they were registered urban residents while he was only a migrant worker.
"I was shocked," said Mr. He, as he sorted through legal papers in his apartment recently while his wife sobbed in the next room. "The girls are about the same age. They all went to the same school. Why is our life so cheap?"
Outraged, Mr. He and his lawyer are considering a lawsuit, saying that the decision was discriminatory and that the family was entitled to full compensation under the Chinese Constitution. The problem with that argument is the Chinese Constitution. More Chinese citizens like Mr. He are claiming legal rights and often citing the Constitution, but it is actually a flimsy tool for protecting individual rights.
By The Associated Press | The New York Times
April 13, 2006
BEIJING (AP) -- Thousands of villagers clashed with police in southern China over government plans to tear down sluice gates built for irrigation, leaving one woman dead and several people injured, newspapers and witnesses said Thursday.
About 4,000 villagers gathered Wednesday to stop police from demolishing the pair of gates in Bomei, a village in Guangdong province, and were dispersed with tear gas and water cannons, according to Hong Kong's Ming Pao Daily.
The newspaper and Radio Free Asia, a U.S.-funded broadcaster, said a woman in her 30s was killed. Radio Free Asia said she was hit in the head by a tear gas canister. Ming Pao said at least 10 other people were injured.
The South China Morning Post newspaper said the villagers were armed with ''homemade weapons including petrol bombs'' and fought to keep more than 1,000 police officers from the gates.
An official in Xilu, the town which oversees Bomei, said he was ''unclear'' about the situation and hung up. Telephone calls to government offices in Bomei and to the provincial government were not answered.
By Jim Yardley | The New York Times
April 10, 2006
CHONGQING, China, April 7 — One of the many unexpected things about the small graveyard here where Xi Qingsheng buried his mother during the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution is that it still exists.
The rusted front gate, locked for many years, opens into a walled cemetery that amounts to a time capsule from an era the Communist Party wants to forget. Revolutionary slogans, long since discredited, are etched onto huge, ornate tombstones, including the large concrete marker that Mr. Xi built for his mother when he was a teenager.
"It is my obligation to speak about this history," said Mr. Xi, now 54. "It is the Communist Party's crime. Of course, they don't want to talk about it. No one wants to talk about shameful things."
The Epoch Times
April 8, 2006
In an "Urgent Announcement" a special investigative group reports an alarming increase in the number of organ transplants being done in transplant centers throughout China. Published on the Clearwisdom website by the Integrated Committee to Investigate the Secret Sujiatun Concentration Camp, the announcement concludes that the Chinese communist regime is killing detainees in Sujiatun and other concentration camps in an effort to hide the evidence of mass murder and live organ harvesting.
The Integrated Committee's investigation has learned that hospitals and transplant centers in Heilongjiang, Hunan, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Yunnan, Anhui, Shan'xi and Xinjiang are operating overtime to perform transplant operations. This surge in activity is said to be due to the release of information over the past three weeks about the slaughter that has gone on at Sujiatun and other concentration camps in China at least since 2001.
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By Joseph Kahn | The New York Times
April 5, 2006
BEIJING, April 5 — Chinese leaders, eager to improve relations with the United States ahead of the maiden visit there by President Hu Jintao this month, have dispatched a large delegation of business and economic officials to display China's buying power and to cool protectionist sentiment in Congress, Chinese officials said Wednesday.
The buying mission, the largest by China since re-establishing diplomatic relations with the United States in 1979, reflects Beijing's view that it may be easier to try to lower economic tensions than to satisfy some other American demands, like doing more to help curtail nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea and reducing human rights abuses at home.
More than 100 business executives joined Wu Yi, China's vice prime minister and economic troubleshooter, on an American tour that began Tuesday in Hawaii and is scheduled to cover 13 states. The trip is expected to result in multibillion-dollar orders for Boeing aircraft, auto parts, computer software, telecommunications equipment, grain, cotton and other products, Chinese officials and the state news media said.
China has practiced such checkbook diplomacy before, notably during the prolonged fight to win American support for its entry into the World Trade Organization in the late 1990's.
By Stephen Gregory - The Epoch Times
April 5, 2006
Whenever Wanqing Huang walks down the streets of New York City, he sees posters for Bodies: The Exhibition and wonders about his younger brother, Xiong Huang.
Wanqing last spoke to Xiong on April 19, 2003. Xiong was in Shanghai, where he felt the police had identified him. He knew he had to go immediately or be arrested, and planned on leaving the next day. He would call Wanqing once he arrived at a new place. Wanqing never received that call.
Wanqing has searched for his brother ever since.
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