Studies / Reports: April 2007 Archives
By Maureen Fan | The Washington Post
April 30, 2007
Olympics an Excuse for Arrests, Amnesty Says
The 2008 Olympic Games have become a catalyst for more repression in China, not less, according to an Amnesty International report released today and aimed at pressuring the Beijing government a year before the start of the world's premier sporting event.
The 22-page report says China's illegal detention and imprisonment of activists and other measures have overshadowed some modest reforms, including how the Chinese legal system reviews death penalty cases and the loosening of some restrictions on the foreign press. The report marks the latest effort by human rights organizations and individuals to try to use the Olympics, and the international spotlight they place on China, to push for broader reforms.
To win its first-ever Olympics bid, China promised in 2001 to improve human rights, increase environmental protections and address the city's traffic problems. The Games are expected to attract 500,000 visitors, including thousands of journalists, giving China a chance to showcase itself before a huge international audience.
In recent weeks, however, various groups have begun arguing that China has not done enough.
Last Wednesday, four American tourists were detained after unfurling a banner at a base camp on Mount Everest that read, "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008," a play on the Beijing Olympics motto.
By Evan Mantyk | The Epoch Times (New York)
April 28, 2009
Chinese-Consulate-linked student group attempts to disrupt
NEW YORK—An International human rights lawyer brought his shocking investigative report into allegations of organ harvesting to Columbia University on April 20. The lawyer, David Matas, detailed 31 pieces of evidence proving that adherents of the persecuted spiritual practice Falun Gong are having their organs forcibly removed in state-controlled hospitals in Communist China. The forum was titled, "China's New Genocide."
Those in attendance included medical doctors, community members, as well as university professors and students, including foreign students from a Chinese student club—said to be under the direction of the Chinese Consulate of New York City—who mobilized to disrupt the forum.
Matas's report features recorded interviews with doctors in China, people who have traveled to China for transplants, and the wife of a surgeon who harvested organs from Falun Gong adherents. The report has stirred up the international community, leading some to seriously question the integrity of China's rulers and the appropriateness of its holding the 2008 Olympics, scheduled for Beijing.
"I think that people who turn a blind eye to human rights violations in China are hurting China not helping China," said Matas, who worked with a former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific David Kilgour to compile the independent report. The Chinese Communist regime has recently admitted to the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners, likely in an attempt to shift media attention away from the harvesting of Falun Gong adherents' organs, which it denies.
The Communist regime's only reply to Matas' investigation amounted to a tacit acknowledgement of its claims. Matas said the "reply" consisted of a denunciation of Falun Gong and harped on a clerical error it spotted, listing two Chinese cities in the wrong provinces.
Matas said the report hits on deeper ethical issues plaguing China. "Aside from getting the harvesting to stop against Falun Gong practitioners, all three of these should be addressed: the persecution of Falun Gong should stop, the precautions that are not put in place should be put in place [to stop organ harvesting], and prisoners of no matter what source should not be the source of organs."
At the forum, Dr. Charles Lee, a medical doctor and Falun Gong adherent from California, shared his experience of being tortured and brainwashed with communist propaganda while a prisoner of conscience in China for three years.
Lee said, "We are not talking about China as a whole. We are talking about the Chinese Communist regime, who has been persecuting Chinese people for 56 years."
The forum was co-sponsored by Columbia University's Amnesty International chapter and the Falun Dafa Club.
Students Attempt to 'Refute'
Two dozen or so members from the Columbia University Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CUCSSA) attended the forum apparently in an attempt to disrupt and "refute" it.
CUCSSA students held signs bearing communist slogans and hate speech typically used by state-controlled media in Mainland China.
University police were dispatched to the forum after the CUCSSA email was intercepted and university officials alerted to their plans. Police sought to ensure that the students from the CUCSSA didn't interfere with the event, according to a statement from Columbia University.
Two students were forced to leave the forum after disruptively waving offensive signs and interrupting forum speakers.
One event attendee, a Columbia graduate student, remarked afterwards that the CUCSSA group made a "display of obstinance, narrow-mindedness, rigidness, and a lack of independent and critical thinking... and denial." She attributed the group's conduct to "early trauma from years of brainwashing imbedded in the culture [of Communist China] and its political history."
The CUCSSA group was likely put to task by the Chinese Consulate of New York City. The club's advisory board is composed of two high-ranking members from the consulate, Mr. Fanglin Ai and Mr. Da Yao, and the club's website boasts that its constitution was reviewed by the consulate.
A spokesman for the consulate, Mr. Wenqi Gao, said he had not heard of the forum and would not answer any questions regarding Mr. Fanglin Ai or Mr. Da Yao, and hung up the phone when directly asked if he knew who they were. He also refused to acknowledge that Falun Gong practitioners are being persecuted in China, something that is regarded as fact by many international human rights organizations, the United Nations, the U.S. government, and several thousand eye-witnesses who have sought to document such abuses.
Speakers at the forum each devoted some of their time to addressing CUCSSA students and their apparent misunderstandings on events in China.
Matas pointed out that the student club's actions reflect the "demonization of Falun Gong by the Chinese Communist Party" and how "easy it is, under such social conditions, for the Chinese Communist Party to harvest organs from Falun Gong practitioners."
By Radio Free Asia | www.rfa.org
April 25, 2007
KATHMANDU, April 25, 2007—Chinese authorities have detained four U.S. citizens who staged a protest at the Chinese Everest base camp against Beijing's plans to bring the Olympic torch through the region.
On arriving at the base camp, the activists from the U.S.-based Students for a Free Tibet group unfurled a banner which read "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008," Kirsten Westby from Boulder, Colorado told RFA's Tibetan service by telephone from a holding cell.
"We had everything on video and we wore shirts with a message to the International Olympic Committee that said, 'No torch through Tibet,'" Westby said. The video was later made available on YouTube.
Four detained on Everest
The protesters were identified by a statement on the group's Web site as Tenzin Dorje, the first known exiled Tibetan to return to the region to protest, Kirsten Westby, Mac Sutherlin, and videographer Shannon Service.
They were detained by base camp authorities shortly after staging a brief ceremony in which they lit an Olympic torch and sang the Tibetan National Anthem, members of the group said.
"It's five of us involved in the action and four of us at this point in time have been detained," Westby said by mobile phone from inside what appeared to be a police cell.
"We are sitting at Everest base camp in a small building with bars on the windows. We were detained by the authorities here at the base camp. One of the members of our team who has been detained is a journalist videographer."
By The Associated Press | The New York Times
April 26, 2007
The flood of pirated movies and other goods from China is growing despite increased enforcement, two U.S. business groups said Thursday, appealing to Beijing for tougher action.
Beijing's anti-piracy activity ''is either not enough or not of the right kind,'' the American Chamber of Commerce in China and the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai said in a report released on International Intellectual Property Day.
Forty percent of companies surveyed said the volume of counterfeiting of their products in China increased, while only 4 percent saw a decline, said the report, an annual review of Chinese business conditions.
Chinese product piracy has worsened tensions with Washington, which filed a World Trade Organization complaint this month accusing Beijing of violating trade commitments by failing to protect copyrights, patents and other intellectual property rights.
Beijing should ''continue raising deterrents to IPR infringement,'' the report said. It said the risk of fines and seizures now is so small that Chinese pirates can treat it as a cost of doing business.
By Reuters | via CNN
April 23, 2007
BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- Chinese President Hu Jintao on Monday launched a campaign to rid the country's sprawling Internet of "unhealthy" content and make it a springboard for Communist Party doctrine, state television reported.
With Hu presiding, the Communist Party Politburo -- its 24-member inner council -- discussed cleaning up the Internet, state television reported. The meeting promised to place the often unruly medium more firmly under propaganda controls.
"Development and administration of Internet culture must stick to the direction of socialist advanced culture, adhere to correct propaganda guidance," said a summary of the meeting read on the news broadcast.
"Internet cultural units must conscientiously take on the responsibility of encouraging development of a system of core socialist values."
The meeting was far from the first time China has sought to rein in the Internet. In January, Hu made a similar call to "purify" it, and there have been many such calls before.
But the announcement indicated that Hu wants ever tighter controls as he braces for a series of political hurdles and seeks to govern a generation of young Chinese for whom Mao Zedong's socialist revolution is a hazy history lesson.
"Consolidate the guiding status of Marxism in the ideological sphere," the party meeting urged, calling for more Marxist education on the Internet.
By Lu Jianhui | The Epoch Times
April 22, 2007
HONG KONG—Retired doctor Gao Yaojie of Henan Province, who is named as China's first civil AIDS spokesperson, has been put under house arrest again when she returned to Henan from the U.S. after receiving an award a report states. She sighs mournfully about herself. She believes that death is a relief and she wants to die on the same day that her husband passed away.
The current issue of Asia Weekly published an interview with Dr. Gao that revealed she was placed under house arrest again after she traveled to the U.S. to receive the "Global Women Leaders Award" and returned home to Zhengzhou City. Even her visitors are monitored and have to register.
Dr. Gao said, "I am now being monitored and have become blind, deaf and dumb. The authorities' actions are an outrage. Once I die, they will be relieved. However, I want to let everyone know that my death is due to those corrupt officials."
Dr. Gao took out a cell phone she had been using for years; the message "unregistered SIM card" appeared on it. An hour ago she received a phone call from her younger sister in the U.S. who told Dr. Gao that she had made at least ten phone calls to Dr. Gao's home, but no one answered. Dr. Gao was always at home, but her phone did not ring.
The report said, "It was only then that Gao realized she was being monitored by the Henan local government again and they were trying to block her from having contact with the outside world."
Once before, the Henan authorities sent ten policemen to surround her home. They cut off her phone lines to stop her contact with outsiders in order to prevent her from going to the U.S. to accept the award.
Dr. Gao went to accept her award on February 26.
When she returned to Zhengzhou her phone could be used at first, but soon after it was cut off. Dr. Gao said, "I am not so optimistic regarding the problem of AIDS in China; I don't know what it will be like in the future. I have put my life into it."
The report didn't explain how they were able to conduct the interview with Dr. Gao during her house arrest.
By REUTERS | The New York Times
April 18, 2007
LONDON (Reuters) - China will overtake the United States as the world's biggest emitter of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) either this year or next, the International Energy Agency said on Wednesday.
The estimate is much firmer than the IEA's previous forecast, last November, that on current trends China would overtake the United States before 2010.
``Either this year or next year,'' IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol told Reuters, in answer to the question of when China would overtake the United States.
The IEA is energy adviser to 26 rich nations and Birol is a key author of the Paris-based agency's annual World Energy Outlook report.
China is set to become the world's top carbon emitter just as serious talks start to extend the U.N.-sponsored Kyoto Protocol on global warming beyond 2012, potentially heaping pressure on Beijing to take more action on climate change.
A copy of a so-far unpublished Chinese government global warming report, seen by Reuters, rejects binding caps on carbon emissions until the country's modernization, by the middle of this century, opting instead to brake emissions growth.
By David Barboza | The New York Times
12 April 2007
XUZHOU, China, April 10 — Behind an unmarked gate in this booming city well north of Shanghai lies a large building at the heart of an investigation over tainted pet food that has killed at least 16 cats and dogs in the United States, sickened 12,000 and prompted a nationwide recall.
This is the property of the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company, a small agricultural products business that investigators have identified as the source of contaminated wheat gluten that was shipped to a major pet food supplier in the United States.
Some American regulators suspect there was deliberate mixing of substances. They are looking into the possibility that melamine, the chemical linked to the pets’ deaths, was mixed into the wheat gluten in China as a way to bolster the protein content, according to a person who was briefed on the investigation.
Though American and Chinese regulators are searching for answers, local residents and workers are unwittingly providing clues about how the pet food supply may have become contaminated.
The case is also exposing some of the enormous challenges confronting the global marketplace as China becomes a worldwide supplier of agricultural products.
There are strong indications that Xuzhou Anying, a company with a main office that seems to consist of just two rooms and an adjoining warehouse here, possessed substantial supplies of melamine and even sought to buy quantities of it over the Internet.
If melamine was intentionally blended into the wheat gluten, the findings could become a vast setback for agricultural trade between the United States and China, a country known for lax food-safety regulations.
Stephen Sundlof, director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine at the Food and Drug Administration, said at a news conference last week that the agency had found unusually high concentrations of melamine in some batches of wheat gluten, as much as 6.6 percent.
Xuzhou Anying, though, has tried to distance itself from the pet food recall in the United States, saying it does not manufacture or export wheat gluten and acts only as a middleman trading in agricultural goods and chemicals.
In a telephone interview last week, the company’s manager, Mao Lijun, said he had no idea how wheat gluten with his company’s label ended up in the United States or how melamine, a chemical commonly used to make plastics, fertilizer and fire retardant, was mixed into a product that was eventually shipped there.
Mixing melamine and wheat gluten is an unlikely practice here, according to local industry participants. Nonetheless, the company’s wheat gluten, tainted with melamine, ended up in millions of packages sent to the United States and Canada, leading to one of the biggest pet food recalls ever.
ChemNutra, the Las Vegas-based company that acknowledges it imported the wheat gluten from Xuzhou for sale to pet food producers in North America, says Xuzhou Anying provided chemical analyses that showed no impurities or contamination in the packages of wheat gluten.
Though some American scientists still question whether melamine is toxic enough to kill pets, the chemical is not approved for use in human or pet food in the United States. The F.D.A. says it may have led to kidney failure in some animals.
The question that regulators, agriculture experts, and food producers and distributors may now be asking is whether other substances added to food imports can broadly contaminate the American food supply. The F.D.A. has said none of the contaminated wheat gluten leaked into human food.
Here in Xuzhou, a metropolitan region of about 1.6 million, Mr. Mao turned away visitors to his office, declaring that he had nothing more to say on the matter.
But there are indications that Xu- zhou Anying has manufacturing facilities in this area and also had access to melamine, which is sometimes used as a fertilizer in Asia. For instance, in recent months Xuzhou Anying has posted several requests on Web trading sites seeking to purchase large quantities of melamine.
In a March 29 posting on a site operated by Sohu.net, a big Chinese company, officials of Xuzhou Anying wrote, “Our company buys large quantities of melamine scrap all year around.” There were also postings on several other trading sites like ChemAbc.net.
By Alexa Olesen | Associated Press | via (uncensored) yahoo!news
06 April 2007
China has denied responsibility for several pet deaths in the United States which U.S. authorities blame on a batch of chemically contaminated wheat gluten from China, state media reported.
But differing statements on whether China has even exported wheat gluten to the U.S. revealed confusion that points to serious problems in the regulation of China's exports and its dismal record on food safety.
"China has nothing to do with the pet poisoning in the United States," said a report in the official newspaper of China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, which monitors the export of food, animals and farm products.
The China Inspection and Quarantine Times said in a report on its Web site dated Tuesday that as of March 29, 2007, China had "never exported wheat or wheat gluten to ... the United States."
This contradicted comments by two employees at the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co., this week who said the company had shipped wheat gluten to the United States.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has identified Xuzhou Anying as the supplier of the tainted gluten.
On Thursday, the Chinese company accused of selling chemical-tainted wheat gluten linked to the pet food deaths said that most of its sales were domestic, raising the possibility that people or animals in China might have been exposed to the chemical.
China has had problems with domestic food safety. In October, more than 200 students and teachers had food poisoning at a school in southern China. There have been at least eight other such incidents in the past year.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week blocked wheat gluten imports from the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. in the eastern Chinese city of Xuzhou, saying they contained melamine, a chemical found in plastics and pesticides.
Anying produces and exports more than 10,000 tons of wheat gluten a year, according to its Web site, but only 873 tons were linked to tainted U.S. pet food, raising the possibility that more of the contaminated product could still be on the market in China, or abroad.
Li Cui, director of Anying's foreign exports, told The Associated Press on Thursday the United States is the company's only overseas market for wheat gluten, although it wasn't clear if the company had more than one customer in the U.S.
Li, Mao and other employees on Friday answered their phones but immediately hung up without comment.
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