Studies / Reports: November 2006 Archives
By Edward Cody | The Washington Post
November 24, 2006
ZHENGZHOU, China -- A tide of more than 30,000 students with polished résumés and high hopes surged into a job fair here so eager to meet with employers that they shattered four glass doors and splayed the side walls of an escalator in what became a near riot.
As the crowd of youths swelled out of control, students and security guards said, police tried to beat back the throng but to no avail. Pushing, screaming and climbing over one another, the students charged on, heading for the booths inside the Zhongyuan International Exhibition Center, where company recruiters waited with the keys to China's new economy.
"You didn't even need to walk in the main hall, because people were sweeping you along all the time," said Hou Shuangshuang, 23, an e-commerce major with long hair who was among the students who overflowed the job fair when it opened Sunday. "At some points, your feet couldn't even touch the ground."
Hou and her classmates from Zhengzhou University, along with students from other schools in this Henan province city about 500 miles south of Beijing, provided a dramatic example of rising anxiety over employment among millions of Chinese students. After years in which graduates were ensured of a good job in the fast-growing economy, the number of degree-holders has outstripped the number of jobs, and the guarantees have evaporated.
"I don't think we have a very bright future," said Yu Honghua, 23, another e-commerce major at Zhengzhou University who shoved her way into the fair. "I saw only one company that needed students who majored in e-commerce, and they just needed one person."
By BBC World News
November 20, 2006
A senior Chinese official has made a rare admission about the extent of the use of torture in getting convictions in China's courts
Wang Zhenchuan, Deputy Procurator General, said at least 30 wrong verdicts were handed down each year because torture had been used.
Mr Wang said the real number could be higher, according to state media.
Confidence in China's justice system has been seriously undermined by recent high-profile wrongful convictions.
A butcher executed for murder in 1989 was proved innocent when his alleged victim was found alive, while a man was freed after 11 years in jail when his wife, whom he was accused of killing, was also found alive.
Mr Wang's unusually frank comments appeared to be part of a campaign to tackle problems in the judicial system, and shore up public trust.
He said suspects' rights needed to be protected by stopping the use of illegal interrogations involving the use of torture.
He said illegal interrogation existed to "some extent" in local judicial practice.
"Nearly every wrongful verdict in recent years is involved in illegal interrogation," he said, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
Change of tack
China outlawed torture in 1996, but a UN special envoy on torture, Manfred Nowak, said last year it remained widespread.
Mr Nowak, who spent two weeks in the country, said torture methods included electric shock batons, cigarette burns, and submersion in pits of water or sewage.
China rarely admits publicly to weaknesses in its judicial system.
But correspondents say the recent high-profile mistakes appear to have prompted a change of thinking.
In January, Mr Wang said China was to begin recording police interviews in workplace-related crimes to stop confessions being extracted through torture.
And last month, China's parliament approved a law allowing only the country's top court to approve death sentences - a move designed to stop serious abuses in lower level courts.
By BusinessWeek (November 27, 2006 edition)
By Dexter Roberts and Pete Engardio
American importers have long answered criticism of conditions at their Chinese suppliers with labor rules and inspections. But many factories have just gotten better at concealing abuses
Tang Yinghong was caught in an impossible squeeze. For years, his employer, Ningbo Beifa Group, had prospered as a top supplier of pens, mechanical pencils, and highlighters to Wal-Mart Stores and other major retailers. But late last year, Tang learned that auditors from Wal-Mart, Beifa's biggest customer, were about to inspect labor conditions at the factory in the Chinese coastal city of Ningbo where he worked as an administrator. Wal-Mart had already on three occasions caught Beifa paying its 3,000 workers less than China's minimum wage and violating overtime rules, Tang says. Under the U.S. chain's labor rules, a fourth offense would end the relationship.
Help arrived suddenly in the form of an unexpected phone call from a man calling himself Lai Mingwei. The caller said he was with Shanghai Corporate Responsibility Management & Consulting Co., and for a $5,000 fee, he'd take care of Tang's Wal-Mart problem. "He promised us he could definitely get us a pass for the audit," Tang says.
Lai provided advice on how to create fake but authentic-looking records and suggested that Beifa hustle any workers with grievances out of the factory on the day of the audit, Tang recounts. The consultant also coached Beifa managers on what questions they could expect from Wal-Mart's inspectors, says Tang. After following much of Lai's advice, the Beifa factory in Ningbo passed the audit earlier this year, Tang says, even though the company didn't change any of its practices.
For more than a decade, major American retailers and name brands have answered accusations that they exploit "sweatshop" labor with elaborate codes of conduct and on-site monitoring. But in China many factories have just gotten better at concealing abuses. Internal industry documents reviewed by BusinessWeek reveal that numerous Chinese factories keep double sets of books to fool auditors and distribute scripts for employees to recite if they are questioned. And a new breed of Chinese consultant has sprung up to assist companies like Beifa in evading audits.
By REUTERS | The New York Times
November 14, 2006
BEIJING (Reuters) - Rampant Chinese counterfeiting is eroding American support for expanding bilateral trade, U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said on Tuesday, stressing that a complaint to the WTO had not been ruled out.
Gutierrez told business executives in Beijing that illegal copying of medicines and other kinds of intellectual property (IP) was a threat to consumers' health.
``Another victim of widespread IP theft in China is American support for expanding our trade relationship,'' he said, adding that protectionist forces in the United States were pressing the issue.
``They point to the lack of robust IP protection in China as a top reason why we should put protectionist policies in place.''
By Radio Free Asia
November 09, 2006
HONG KONG—Hundreds of riot police in southern China used clubs and tear gas to disperse villagers surrounding a brand-new granary during its ribbon-cutting ceremony, ending an 18-hour standoff and injuring several people, witnesses say.
“They fired hundreds of rounds of tear gas and put up a two-km blockade,” one witness told RFA’s Mandarin service. “The police walked over the villagers who were sitting on the ground, including the elderly.”
“They also used police dogs—more than a dozen German shepherds...The elderly villagers were just sitting on the ground. But the police did not treat them as humans. They just stampeded over them.”
“One villager sustained a head injury from beating. Another was clubbed by police in the chest. I am burned around the armpit by shells from tear-gas canisters. Three of my fingers are also burned. Around 11:00 a.m., the riot police took the guest merchants away.”
Up to 1,000 police were described as moving in at around 10:00 a.m. local time Thursday, Nov. 9, around the granary, which was built on what had been farmland in Sanzhou village, Guangdong province.
By Radio Free Asia
08 November 2006
HONG KONG—Thousands of angry villagers have surrounded a granary in southern China, holding hostage several hundred guests at the building’s opening ceremony and demanding payment for land they say they were forced to sell at below-market rates, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports.
In the afternoon of Nov. 8, village sources told RFA’s Mandarin service, officials from various levels of government and more than 100 overseas Chinese from Thailand, Germany, England, and Hong Kong attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the just-completed granary built on what had been farmland in Sanzhou village, in Guangdong province.
At around 4:00 p.m., thousands of Sanzhou villagers surrounded the granary to prevent attending officials and guests from leaving. Early Thursday local time, Nov. 9, approximately 300 people remained trapped in the granary’s administrative building, the sources said.
At 1:00 a.m. local time, some 4,000 villagers remained at the scene, witnesses said.
By Tim Johnson - McClatchy Newspapers |The Seattle Times
November 07, 2006
BEIJING — If popping up on the list of China's richest tycoons is a jinx, as some attest, then Huang Guangyu may be in for more tough days.
Forbes Magazine on Thursday anointed Huang, 37, the head of a home-appliance retailing empire, as China's richest man, with a net worth of $2.3 billion.
But it didn't bode well. First, China's premier financial magazine said Huang and his brother were under a criminal probe on suspicion of obtaining loans fraudulently. Then the Hong Kong stock market briefly halted trading in shares of his company, GoMe Appliances.
By Thursday afternoon, a spokesman for GoMe Appliances, He Yangqing, was denying the probe and pooh-poohing Huang's No. 1 spot on the wealth ranking.
"We have no comment on the Forbes list. We are focusing on improving our business rather than on how people rank us," He said.
Huang was ranked No. 4 last year, and his wealth has almost doubled in the past 12 months. As a result, his mounting troubles surprise few Chinese. This week's spate of ill fortune only underscores how Chinese view tycoons with fascination and derision.
They marvel at the savvy of new entrepreneurs in China's go-go economy, but they also wonder whether the wealth was earned legitimately. A number of high-flying tycoons sit in jail on fraud and tax-evasion charges.
Other entrepreneurs beg to stay off the list, wary of tax collectors. The rich list has been dubbed the "pig killing list" in vernacular Chinese, meaning that any pig fat enough to get on it is ready for the slaughterhouse.
By Howard W. French | The New York Times
November 03, 2006
BAODENG, China — If having children is a mark of wealth, Gao Shenmu and Wang Xiuying, a farming couple in their 70s, surely rank as rich.
They raised six children in this rolling, fertile countryside before China imposed its single-child policy. What’s more, as the cities of the distant east flourished and boomed, three of their four sons migrated along with millions of others, landing jobs and joining the cash economy.
But for just that reason, their very Chinese dream of security in old age, built on the next generation’s obligation to them, has badly foundered.
The sons moved, but they left their own two young children behind to be cared for. They rarely visit and collectively send just $30 or $40 a year home. Mr. Gao and Ms. Wang make do at harvest time, spending two weeks in backbreaking labor that once took them less than a week to perform.
The couple’s experience is increasingly commonplace. The chief of their hamlet put its predicament this way: “Knock on 10 doors, and 9 of them will be opened by old people.”
And across much of the Chinese countryside the situation is the same, with villages emptied of their working-age populations, leaving behind small children and grandparents.
China is a rapidly aging society, but in villages like this, more than anything else the abrupt shift toward a preponderance of old people is driven by migration. Since the era of economic reforms got under way a little more than a quarter century ago, hundreds of millions of people have been on the march, most of them peasants looking for better economic opportunities in the urbanized east.
And as China’s economy has developed, old customs — like the ironclad obligation to venerate and care for the elderly — with roots in 2,500-year-old Confucian doctrine, are breaking down.
“The reality of China today is that the needs of the elderly cannot be taken care of by the social system,” said Zhai Yuhe, a member of the Heilongjiang Provincial People’s Congress. “Most of them must rely on younger people, but today’s young people pay attention to their own children, and not to their elders.”
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