Studies / Reports: September 2006 Archives
By BBC News
September 28, 2006
China has denied a BBC report that organs taken from executed prisoners are sold for transplant.
Foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said such organs could be transplanted but the use was "very cautious".
Mr Qin said: "The sales of organs are prohibited, [donating organs] must have the consent of the donor himself."
The undercover BBC report said one hospital confirmed it could provide a liver for £50,000 ($94,400), and it could come from an executed prisoner.
AFP news agency quoted Mr Qin as telling reporters that death-row prisoners had to provide written consent.
The donation must also be approved by provincial health officials and the provincial high court, he said.
"Concerned health administrative departments deal with those operations in strict accordance with the law," Mr Qin said.
'Present to society'
The undercover investigation by the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes said that organs from death row inmates were being sold to foreigners who needed transplants.
He visited No 1 Central Hospital in Tianjin, ostensibly seeking a liver for his sick father.
Officials there told him that a matching liver could be available in three weeks.
One official said that the prisoners volunteered to give their organs as a "present to society".
He said there was currently an organ surplus because of an increase in executions ahead of the 1 October National Day.
China executes more prisoners than any other country in the world. In 2005, at least 1,770 people were executed, although true figures were believed to be much higher, a report by human rights group Amnesty International said.
In April 2006, top British transplant surgeons condemned the death-row transplant practice as unacceptable and a breach of human rights.
But the No 1 Central Hospital carried out 600 liver transplants last year, our correspondent says, and the organ transplant industry has become big business.
By Joseph Kahn | The New York Times
26 September 2006
BEIJING, Sept. 25 — As the storm clouds of a national anticorruption campaign loomed on the horizon last spring, Chen Liangyu, the Communist Party boss of Shanghai and one of China’s most powerful officials, summoned reporters from the main state news agency to his office for a rare interview.
Mr. Chen told the reporters that, as chief of China’s wealthy East Coast commercial center, he felt obliged above all “to carry out the orders of the party center,” a public pledge of obeisance to President Hu Jintao.
That vow of fidelity came too late to rescue Mr. Chen. As an heir of the influential Shanghai-centered political machine built by Jiang Zemin, China’s former top leader, Mr. Chen never won the trust of Mr. Hu, whose own power has grown steadily more formidable, party officials said.
On Sunday, security forces put Mr. Chen, 59, under a form of house arrest. The state news media reported Monday that he had lost his political posts, including his membership in the ruling Politburo, and that he might face criminal charges.
Such purges, common in Mao’s time, rarely occur in today’s China, which prizes political stability above all and does not generally let factional infighting spill into the public realm. Mr. Chen is the first member of the Politburo to be forced from power since 1995.
By BBC World News
September 5, 2006
Zambian commentators have condemned China, after its ambassador got involved in the campaign for this month's presidential election.
Political Analyst Michael Banda said Ambassador Li Baodong's comments were "shocking and unacceptable".
Mr Li had said Chinese investors were "scared" to go to Zambia in case opposition leader Michael Sata won.
Mr Sata has said foreign companies, including Chinese, mistreat workers and has also met Taiwanese businessmen.
China regards Taiwan as a renegade province and cuts diplomatic ties with any country which recognises Taiwan's independence.
By Jim Yardley | The New York Times
04 September 2006
URAD QIANQI, China — Dark as soy sauce, perfumed with a chemical stench, the liquid waste from two paper mills overwhelmed the tiny village of Sugai. Villagers tried to construct a makeshift dike, but the toxic water swept it away. Fifty-seven homes sank into a black, polluted lake.
The April 10 industrial spill, described by five residents of the village in Inner Mongolia, was a small-scale environmental disaster in a country with too many of them. But Sugai should have been different. The two mills had already been sued in a major case, fined and ordered to upgrade their pollution equipment after a serious spill into the Yellow River in 2004.
The official response to that spill, praised by the state-run news media, seemed to showcase a new, tougher approach toward pollution — until the later spill at Sugai revealed that local officials had never carried out the cleanup orders. Now, the destruction of Sugai is a lesson in the difficulty of enforcing environmental rules in China.
By REUTERS | via (uncensored) YAHOO
04 September 2006
China has banned director Lou Ye from making movies for the next five years after he submitted "Summer Palace" to the Cannes Film Festival without official approval, state media reported on Monday.
Lou thumbed his nose at the film bureau by submitting his movie, a romance set against the backdrop of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests that also features explicit sex scenes, without first clearing the screening with China's censors.
"A senior official with SARFT (the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television) confirmed the punishment to Xinhua on Monday but refused to discuss the case further," the official state news agency reported.
Calls from Reuters to the film bureau at SARFT went unanswered and an official at the administration's general office declined to comment.
by Radio Free Asia
August 30, 2006
Chinese women are committing suicide at an alarming rate, especially in rural areas left out of the country's economic boom. But experts say economic success is also taking its toll in the form of growing numbers of suicides among the urban middle classes.
Recent studies of depression and suicide in China have revealed a unique social pattern: China is the only country in which the suicide rate for females is higher than for males.
"I believe that the high suicide rate among Chinese women has to do with the low status of women throughout Chinese society," counselling psychologist Zhan Chuhua told a recent Investigative Report series on mental health.
Women face major hurdles
"Often Chinese women lack resources to support them, so that when they run into problems, especially in their marriages, it is easy for them to become victims," said Zhan, who has worked on the Kangning Mental Health Hotline in the southern city of Guangzhou for many years.
"In the workplace too, it is far more difficult for women than it is for men. For example, if a working woman gets pregnant, she will find it very difficult. And the likelihood of being on the receiving end of harassment is much higher for a woman. So all of this adds to the difficulties in the life of a Chinese woman, so that's probably why the suicide rate is higher," he added.
By Joseph Kahn | The New York Times
September 1, 2006
When high school students in Shanghai crack their history textbooks this fall they may be in for a surprise. The new standard world history text drops wars, dynasties and Communist revolutions in favor of colorful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and globalization.
Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once — in a chapter on etiquette.
Nearly overnight the country’s most prosperous schools have shelved the Marxist template that had dominated standard history texts since the 1950’s. The changes passed high-level scrutiny, the authors say, and are part of a broader effort to promote a more stable, less violent view of Chinese history that serves today’s economic and political goals.
Supporters say the overhaul enlivens mandatory history courses for junior and senior high school students and better prepares them for life in the real world. The old textbooks, not unlike the ruling Communist Party, changed relatively little in the last quarter-century of market-oriented economic reforms. They were glaringly out of sync with realities students face outside the classroom. But critics say the textbooks trade one political agenda for another.
They do not so much rewrite history as diminish it. The one-party state, having largely abandoned its official ideology, prefers people to think more about the future than the past.
The new text focuses on ideas and buzzwords that dominate the state-run media and official discourse: economic growth, innovation, foreign trade, political stability, respect for diverse cultures and social harmony.
J. P. Morgan, Bill Gates, the New York Stock Exchange, the space shuttle and Japan’s bullet train are all highlighted. There is a lesson on how neckties became fashionable.
The French and Bolshevik Revolutions, once seen as turning points in world history, now get far less attention. Mao, the Long March, colonial oppression of China and the Rape of Nanjing are taught only in a compressed history curriculum in junior high.
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