Studies / Reports: August 2006 Archives
By Dennis Overbye : The New York Times
August 22, 2006
BEIJING — The first time he was purged, Xu Liangying was 37, an up-and-coming physicist, philosopher and historian and a veteran of the Communist underground. He had to divorce his wife, leave his sons and go live on his mother’s farm in the country.
Three decades later, only a heart attack saved him from imprisonment or worse during the massacre that ended the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.
During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards stole the Einstein translations that Dr. Xu had labored over during his farm exile. Armed guards once surrounded his apartment to keep him away from Secretary of State Warren Christopher.
For seven decades, Xu Liangying has been Albert Einstein’s man in China, intertwining revolution and physics to speak up for political freedom and the value of scientific curiosity in a land where the rulers have often had a different agenda. His Einstein translations, retrieved and published, helped inspire a rebirth of interest in Einstein and in science in China.
Chinese leaders say today that science is the key to the country’s modernization and growth, but Dr. Xu finds no pleasure in that.
“They are just using it to serve themselves,” he said recently.
His phone, he says, is still bugged.
Today, at 86, his hair is white, and history, in the form of scholars, human rights activists and journalists, comes to him, in his book-lined apartment overlooking the university district in Beijing.
By REUTERS | The New York Times
12 August 2006
China indefinitely postponed an auction that would have allowed foreign hunting organizations to bid for licenses to hunt wild animals of 14 different species after a public backlash, the state news media reported. The government-sanctioned auction was to have been held tomorrow. The permits were based on types and numbers of the animals, from $200 for a wolf to as much as $40,000 for a wild yak. The whole idea had infuriated China’s Internet users, The official New China News Agency reported. “The response from the public is beyond our expectation,” it quoted Wang Wei, an official of the State Forestry Association, the auction’s organizer, as saying.
By Howard W. French | The New York Times
10 August 2006
SHANGHAI, Aug. 9 — It was late last month, the boy said, his voice still tinged with emotion, when he and his father were forced to march their two German shepherds to a public square and hang them from a tree.
The boy, Xia Shaoli, was not alone in his pain. Officials in Mouding County in southwestern Yunnan Province had ordered the mass extermination of dogs, pets as well as strays, after three people died in a rabies outbreak. And as a crowd gathered around a large tree in the village of Xiajiashan, owners complied one after another with commands to string their dogs up.
According to official figures, 54,429 dogs were killed during the Yunnan campaign. Reports in the Chinese news media say that some people out walking their dogs had the animals seized by gangs of vigilantes, who clubbed the dogs to death on the spot.
The events in Yunnan have been quickly followed by rabies scares in other parts of China. On Wednesday, the Chinese news media reported the killings of 280 dogs in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai, and 13 in the city of Fuzhou in southern Fujian Province.
Earlier this week, a cluster of 16 villages in the southwestern part of Shandong Province declared a rabies alert, and county officials have drafted a dog extermination plan that would call for the killing of any dog found within a three-mile radius of any known rabies case.
There are half a million dogs in the city of Jining, which encompasses the 16 villages, the official New China News Agency says. Officials there said their extermination plan was scheduled to begin later this month. There have also been reports of smaller extermination schemes in other parts of the country, notably in Sichuan Province.
As remarkable as the killings themselves, however, has been the response. With its rising prosperity, China is developing a pet-owning culture, with dogs standing out as a particular favorite. As word of the killings has spread here, pet owners have begun to mobilize — speaking out online and circulating petitions — to try to stop the killings.
BBC World News
August 09, 2006
China is to auction licences for foreigners to hunt wild animals, including endangered species, according to local media.
The auction will offer the right to hunt yaks, wolves and other wild animals in five western provinces.
The price of a licence will depend on the type and number of animals to be hunted, the Beijing Youth Daily said.
The auctioneers told the BBC that the sale, the first of its kind in China, would go ahead on Sunday.
A licence to hunt a wolf could go for about $200 (£105), while permission to shoot a yak could be as much as $40,000 (£21,000), the daily said.
Shooting an argali, a large wild sheep, will cost about $10,000 (£5,000) while a blue sheep will cost $2,500 (£1,300), the paper said..
By Audra Ang - The Associated Press | Arkansas Democrat Gazette
August 6, 2006
Tanya Davis fled Jizhou No. 1 Middle School one winter morning in March before the sun rose over the surrounding cotton fields covered with stubble from last fall’s crop.
In the nine months Davis and her boyfriend had taught English at the school in rural north China, they had endured extra work hours, unpaid salaries and frigid temperatures without heating and, on many days, electricity.
Hearts pounding and worried their employer would find a pretext to stop them from leaving, the couple lugged their backpacks, suitcase, books and guitar past a sleeping guard and into a taxi.
As they drove away, “the sense of relief was immense,” said Davis, a petite, soft-spoken 23-year-old from Wales. “I felt like we had crossed our last hurdle and everything was going to be OK.”
It’s a new twist on globalization: For decades, Chinese made their way to the West, often illegally, to end up doing dangerous, low-paying jobs in sweatshop conditions. Now some foreigners drawn by China’s growth and hunger for English lessons are landing in the schoolhouse version of the sweatshop.
CBS News
August 01, 2006
(AP) The slaughter of a reported 50,000 dogs in an anti-rabies crackdown in southwestern China sparked unusually pointed criticism in state media on Tuesday, along with calls for a boycott of Chinese products from activist group People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Health experts, meanwhile, said the brutal policy underscores deep weaknesses in China's health care system, which sees more than 2,000 human deaths from rabies each year.
The five-day massacre in Yunnan province's Mouding county that ended Sunday spared only military guard dogs and police canine units, state media reported.
Dogs being walked were taken from their owners and beaten to death on the spot, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported. Led by the county police chief, other killing teams entered villages at night creating noise to get dogs barking, then homed in on their prey, the reports said.
Owners were offered 5 yuan (63 U.S. cents; 49 euro cents) per animal to kill their own dogs before the teams were sent in, they said.
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