Studies / Reports: January 2007 Archives
By Howard W. French | The New York Times
31 January 2007
SHANGHAI, Jan. 30 - Lan Chengzhang sat in a car outside the office of a mining company while a colleague ventured inside to make inquiries.
It was his first month of work with the newspaper, and he had decided to take on what anyone in the area knew could be a most dangerous subject, the illegal coal mines that proliferate in the sooty hill country of Shanxi Province.
Within minutes, a band of men armed with lengths of pipe and other crude weapons set upon him, beating him so badly that within a few hours he succumbed to his injuries. Though severely beaten, his colleague from the China Trade News survived to tell the tale.
Attacks against journalists are not uncommon in China, even if deaths are rare. But in ways that few could have expected, the killing on Jan. 11 of this untested reporter for an obscure publication has become a watershed event, with reporters and editors around the country seeing in the murky contours of the case a cautionary tale for their booming but deeply troubled profession.
That Mr. Lan’s death has become a national event was helped in no small measure by China’s leader, Hu Jintao, who in an unusual statement a few days afterward demanded that justice be done.
But it also highlighted the culture of corruption that many journalists acknowledge pervades the industry, particularly the practice among some reporters of demanding money from subjects to avoid damaging articles.
Mr. Hu, who has spoken often of the need for the government to strengthen its control over the news media, has been seen as anything but a friend of journalists. Given that, many here said, and after several days of intense commentary about the killing in the international news media and on Chinese blogs and Web sites, Mr. Hu may have been moved to protect his country’s image.
“Hu Jintao is very much concerned about China’s international image,” said Zhan Jiang, dean of journalism at the Youth Politics Institute in Beijing. “Since this incident has been widely reported both at home and overseas, he had to do something.”
Inside the Chinese news media, introspection over the killing of Mr. Lan, 35, has been unusually forthright, mixing criticism of the government with harsh self-examination. Beijing is condemned for limiting the scope of honest, aggressive journalism, and the journalists themselves are condemned, indeed by themselves, for giving in to corruption as a professional way of life.
“This kind of control and degeneration are inseparable,” said Zhang Ping, a veteran reporter at Southern Metropolis magazine. “The control dims the hopes one has for a career in journalism, and many reporters, like people at Xinhua, don’t have any honorable feelings from being a journalist. They get no rewards the normal way and discover that in China only lie-telling can bring you income.” Xinhua is the main government news agency.
By Agence France Presse | via (uncensored) yahoo.com
January 30, 2007
As Microsoft kicked off the global launch of its long-awaited Windows Vista, the software giant's new operating system also hit the streets of China -- in pirated form.
In an electronic market in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, scores of sellers were offering the brand new software for as little as 10 yuan (1.3 US dollars), along with Microsoft Office, anti-virus software and others.
The sellers said Tuesday Vista was available even several weeks before its launch, although they would not say how they got hold of the version.
Described as the "official version of the new generation operating system" on its cover, the pirated copy offered an identification code at the back of the disk for downloading the software.
Microsoft could not be immediately reached for comment.
Vista, an operating system that took five years and six billion dollars to develop, hit the shops in 70 countries around the world Tuesday.
Counterfeiting remains widespread in China despite government efforts to control the problem following pressure from trade partners, particularly the United States and the European Union.
Everything from pirated books to CDs, DVDs, software, clothes, shoes and medicine can be found in most Chinese cities.
By Steven Schwankert | infoworld.com
26 January 2007
The semi-annual report from the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) is almost always a cause for exuberance. There are millions more Internet users in China! Yippee! Hooray! Now if we could just sell one (or one more) of something to every one of those 137 million users, we'll be rich beyond our wildest dreams!
Unfortunately, anyone who reads the 122-page report (in Chinese, available here ) will realize that the news, especially for those looking to cash in on Chinese Internet growth, is not particularly good.
The raw numbers make China the world's second-largest Internet market, although that's been true for a while now. An overzealous China Daily, the country's official English-language newspaper, claimed Thursday that China would surpass the United States by 2010 , even though current growth rates of about 23 percent per year does not support that. In fact, Internet growth has slowed slightly since its peak in 2001 and 2002.
That China's current Internet population represents just over 10 percent of its total population shows that there is still significant room for growth. But to date, Internet penetration has failed to extend far beyond China's most developed areas. Beijing and Shanghai alone account for over 50 percent of the total number of users; add in wealthy Guangdong province, which surrounds Hong Kong, and the number hovers around 75 percent.
By contrast, the Xizang Autonomous Region -- the official name for Tibet -- ranked last for Internet use, with only 160,000 Internet users, 0.1 percent of China's total.
Chinese Internet users were previously viewed as a self-selecting, more highly educated and affluent group than their non-wired comrades. That doesn't seem to be the case. The simple majority (52.4 percent) of Internet users are aged 24 and under. While this group, in many Western countries, especially the United States, disposes of much of its disposable income and therefore is a highly desirable demographic, that's not the case in China.
As for Internet users being a viable market, 57 percent of users surveyed stated their monthly income was 1,500 renminbi ($193) or less (over 61 percent if you include users who said they had no income). That sounds to me like high school kids, college students, or young people in their first job. And if they're living in Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangdong province, that meager income isn't going to take them very far. If two-thirds of all Chinese Internet users are connecting via broadband, usually ADSL (asynchronous digital subscriber line), then 100 renminbi or so is going towards Internet access every month.
Only 5 percent of respondents said their income was 5,000 renminbi or more per month, usually a level associated with having reasonable disposable income. Five percent of 137 million [m] is still almost 7 million people, but it negates the idea that Chinese Internet user are, as a group, worth targeting.
Who stands to profit from Chinese Internet growth? As usual, the answer is Chinese companies, in this case Internet service providers such as China Network Communications Group Corp., and established Chinese Internet players such as Sohu.com Inc., who can push their customers towards value-added and mobile phone-based fee services. Still feeling exuberant about China's Internet market?
http://www.infoworld.com
By Edward Cody | Washington Post Foreign Service
25 January 2007
SHENZHEN, China -- At 9 p.m. in a dark Shenzhen parking lot, Bai Xiuyu handed over a plain brown envelope containing 15,000 Chinese yuan, the equivalent of nearly $2,000, in what was supposed to be a discreet blackmail payment to a local reporter.
Hidden in Bai's car, Gou Hua, Shenzhen bureau chief for the Southern Metropolitan Daily, watched the scene unfold and recorded the transaction with his cellphone camera. His interest was more than journalistic; the reporter receiving the payoff was Zhou Yu, a 29-year-old newcomer to Gou's own bureau.
To his consternation, what Gou saw the evening of Sept. 21 was another instance of the blackmail journalism metastasizing through China's news media. Bai's money was supposed to buy silence on alleged wrongdoing at her health clinic in this southern Chinese city. But more generally, journalists and officials say, Chinese reporters are demanding such hush money with increasing regularity from businesses and government agencies in exchange for the withholding of unfavorable news.
"It's very, very frequent," said Ma Yunlong, an editor whose newspaper exposed an instance of extravagant extortion in central Henan province in 2005. Ma said the case involved 480 reporters and others pretending to be reporters who asked for "shut-up fees" to keep news of a mine flood out of the public eye.
In many ways, blackmail journalism grew naturally out of a system in which Communist Party censors control the news rigorously, barring reports that could be seen as unfavorable to the party or contrary to the government's political goals. If the ruling party distorts the news for political reasons, blackmailing reporters have concluded, why wouldn't they do it themselves for financial reasons?
In addition, local party officials, long used to manipulating information, have been complicit in the payoff system when it suits their needs. In the everybody-does-it atmosphere, even non-reporters have found ways to get in on the take by posing as journalists.
After the August 2005 mine disaster, for instance, reporters and their friends in Henan province dispatched a flurry of cellphone messages as soon as they heard the news -- not because they were eager to report on it, but because they knew local officials would be eager to hush it up.
By the time Fan Youfeng of the Henan Business News arrived at the mine, in a village in Jiliao county, local officials said they had already given money to so many reporters and phony reporters that the coffers were dry. But still more people showed up, Fan wrote, and the officials sought more cash, pressing the mine owners to chip in.
By Howard W. French | The New York Times
January 25, 2007
SHANGHAI, Jan. 24 — It seemed like an ordinary day earlier this month at the Jianying Hope School for migrant children here, with fidgety students settling down in their modest classrooms as their teachers prepared for the day’s lessons.
Then the police officers arrived. At least 100 of them, according to witnesses, along with even larger numbers of security agents and local officials, who quickly filled the school’s courtyard and cordoned off the site. The private elementary school, the teachers and their 2,000 students were informed, was being closed.
“They just showed up and closed the school while we were teaching,” said one teacher, who asked that her name not be used for fear of official retribution. “Children were crying, teachers were crying and people were very scared. You know in China that the police are the most frightening thing.”
The school closing has been widely criticized — even on the Web site of the state-run People’s Daily. Yet, for all the professed shock, the heavy-handed operation was just one of scores of closings in China’s big eastern cities recently as national and local authorities wrestle with a mandate that they provide a public education for the children of migrant workers, who until recently were barred from public schools in their parents’ adopted cities.
Indeed, the closing of the Jianying school, far from an effort to deprive the children of an education, was the logical, if rough-edged, consequence of the new measure.
Under complex rules governing social mobility that are a legacy of Maoist times, the laborers from rural China — who have streamed to the country’s rich eastern cities by the millions to build their towering skylines, clean and cook for others and do all kinds of work that more prosperous city dwellers shun — face widespread discrimination.
By Agence France Presse | via (uncensored) Yahoo
January 20, 2007
Newspapers around the world have expressed concern after China shot down a satellite, urging new efforts to prevent an arms race in space.
The London Times said the action, reported by US officials but not confirmed by China, was an eerie reminder of the Cold War stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union.
"In a power play reminiscent of the Cold War, it has unilaterally kicked aside a well-established international policy of voluntary restraint," The Times editorial said.
"Instead of gloating, Beijing should move rapidly to repair the damage, first by providing full details of the test. It should then rejoin the consensus against testing in space."
By Barry Petersen | CBS News
16 January 2007
This Letter from Asia comes from Beijing. Here's a fact of dubious distinction about China: One in three cigarettes smoked in the world is smoked here. This is not a country of smoke-free zones, or in most cases, of even smoke-free parts of restaurants.
Imagine the frustration of people like Dr. Henk Bekedam of the World Health Organization. He's fighting for good health. "If anyone lit a cigarette behind you in a bar or restaurant and you look over your shoulder and try to indicate 'Please, why are you doing this? I'm enjoying my meal!" No effect," says Dr. Bekedam.
While China happily lights up, the rest of the world is snuffing out. In America, places like California and New York City have laws so smoking is no longer allowed in restaurants or bars, and it doesn't stop here. Jump across the Atlantic to a fast growing number of European countries banning smoking in public places - even France, home to the smoky Paris bistro.
What blocks such moves in China is an insidious alliance between smokers and the government, which monopolizes cigarette production and makes millions on taxes . In some provincial areas, the money coming from cigarette taxes make up half the local government revenue.
By REUTERS | The New York Times
January 17, 2007
China's movie censor will not approve Golden Globe-honored film ``The Departed'' for domestic cinematic release due to its mention of a Chinese plan to buy military equipment, government sources said on Wednesday.
Martin Scorsese was named best film director at the Golden Globes on Monday for ``The Departed,'' a crime thriller many think might earn him first Oscar either for best directing or for best film.
``There is no chance 'The Departed' will be shown in mainland cinemas because the U.S. side declined to change a plot line describing how Beijing wanted to buy advanced military computer hardware,'' said onesource.
``That part of the plot is definitely unnecessary,'' added the source, who asked not to be identified as he does not have permission to speak to the foreign media.
``The regulators just cannot understand why the movie wanted to involve China. They can talk about Iran or Iraq or whatever, but there's no reason to get China in,'' added the source, who is close to the country's movie regulator.
Another government source, who also asked for anonymity, confirmed the decision.
By Mitchell Landsberg | Los Angeles Times
28 December 2006
Each year millions of new degree holders vie for few openings. Some blame official policy.
BEIJING — For the better part of a 20-hour journey, Yu Meng had slept as the train jostled and rolled across the north of China.
A broad-faced, cheerful 26-year-old graduate student in chemistry, she had come from remote Gansu province to attend a job fair in the capital. Now, still bundled in a knee-length brown parka, a clutch of resumes in her hand, she was trying to elbow her way to the front of a recruiting booth — one of hundreds sprawled across the vast interior of the capital's China International Exhibition Center.
Around her swirled thousands of other recent and upcoming college graduates from all over China, all competing for a limited pool of jobs. It was a graduate's nightmare that mirrored a national problem: too many people, too few jobs.
Figures vary, but the size of China's higher education system appears to have at least quadrupled in the last decade as the nation has pushed relentlessly toward building a modern economy. Next spring, Chinese colleges and universities expect a record 4.95 million graduates, up 820,000 from this year.
More than a million of them will wind up jobless, according to estimates. The glut is leading students and colleges to what might be considered acts of desperation.
In Guangzhou recently, 286 graduates and post-graduates competed for 11 positions as street cleaners, according to the official New China News Agency. The city hired one candidate with a PhD, four with master's degrees and six with bachelor's degrees.
"Given the already grave employment situation in the country … the employment pressure on university graduates will be obvious," Wang Xuming, a spokesman for the Ministry of Education, said at a recent news conference.
All of which is causing an air of concern among students.
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