Studies / Reports: May 2007 Archives
By AFP | via (uncensored) yahoo!news
May 30, 2007
Cigarette-related deaths in China will more than double by 2020 unless the government introduces comprehensive measures to curtail smoking, the World Health Organisation said Wednesday.
Henk Bekedam, the WHO's representative in China, said smoking was "socially and economically devastating" for the country, which is the world's biggest producer of tobacco.
"The death toll from diseases associated with tobacco is about one million Chinese annually, a figure that is expected to increase to 2.2 million per year by 2020 if smoking rates remain unchanged," he said in a statement ahead of World No Tobacco Day on Thursday.
China is responsible for one third of the worlds cigarette manufacturing output and the government rakes in massive profits, as it runs a tobacco monopoly.
By Steven Edwards CanWest News Service | canada.com
May 30, 2007
China emerged Tuesday as the main obstacle to ratcheting up international pressure on Sudan over Darfur, brushing off new efforts by the United States and other Western countries to end the violence in the western Sudanese province.
Officials in Beijing spoke out against Washington's plan to tighten U.S. sanctions against the Arab-led government in Khartoum even before President George W. Bush unveiled it.
They also criticized a U.S. and British pledge to ask the United Nations Security Council to add to earlier global sanctions aimed at forcing Khartoum to allow UN peacekeeping troops to enter Darfur and join an overwhelmed African Union force.
China, which has extensive investments in Sudan's oil industry, said "pressure and sanctions" would not help resolve problems - but trade would.
Human rights groups have campaigned vigorously for increased pressure on Khartoum, which they and Western governments say is behind much of the killing, rape and displacement of black Dafuris.
But the Chinese position threatens to scuttle any new Security Council action because China is one of the body's permanent five veto-bearing members.
Bush said he is ordering new U.S. action because Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir continues to use the Sudanese military and government-aligned Arab militias to attack black Sudanese rebels and civilians in a battle for land in Darfur.
He added the Sudanese leader also blocked international peacemaking efforts despite promising to help end the violence, which Western officials say has resulted in more than 200,000 deaths over four years.
"I held off implementing these steps because the United Nations believed that President Bashir could meet his obligations to stop the killing," Bush said. "Unfortunately... President Bashir's actions over the past few weeks follow a long pattern of promising cooperation while finding new methods for obstruction."
The Sudanese government called the new U.S. sanctions "unfair and untimely," pointing out it has "agreed" to allow 3,000 UN troops to join the African force - although none of them have been deployed.
"These American measures come at a time when Sudan is actively discussing peace in Darfur," said Ali Sadiq, a foreign ministry spokesman in Khartoum.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon also said he'd prefer to give the Sudanese more time.
"As far as I am concerned, I have just begun consultations," he said.
Canada implemented the earlier UN sanctions, which target Sudanese officials believed to be driving the violence through travel bans and asset freezes.
The new U.S. measures bar 30 Sudanese government firms - most of them in the oil business - from the U.S. banking system. Another company suspected of shipping arms to Sudan is subject to the same exclusion, as are three new individuals, including a rebel leader.
Bush outlined U.S. proposals for a new UN resolution.
"It will impose an expanded embargo on arms sales to the government of Sudan. It will prohibit the Sudanese government from conducting any offensive military flights over Darfur. It will strengthen our ability to monitor and report any violations," he said.
The current resolution calls on Sudan to end military flights deemed "offensive," but banning them suggests enforcement measures would be taken.
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said Tuesday the 27-member bloc was "open to consider" both an increased sanctions package and a French proposal to create a "humanitarian corridor" into Darfur from neighbouring Chad.
Canada has called on the Security Council to fulfill the terms of the current resolution and, though not a Council member, is expected to back efforts for a new one when the matter is discussed Wednesday at a Group of Eight diplomatic meeting outside Berlin.
In Beijing, China's representative on African affairs, Liu Guijin, stopped short of threatening to use China's Security Council veto to short-circuit a new resolution.
"It's still too early to speak of," he said.
But he added that "expanding sanctions can only make the problem more difficult to resolve."
Canada did about $160 million worth of trade with Sudan in 2006, according to Statistics Canada, importing mainly precious stones, and exporting mainly grains and machinery. But while Canada's Talisman Energy Inc. withdrew its investments in the Sudanese oil patch in 2003, China has maintained its involvement -- leading to charges China's support for Sudan is a direct result of its quest for energy to feed its fast growing economy.
By Daniel Schearf | Voice of America
May 29, 2007
China has rejected U.S. plans for more sanctions against Sudan and has called for more patience to resolve the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region. China also defended its investments in Sudan as helping to bring about peace. Daniel Schearf reports from Beijing.
China's chief diplomat on African affairs, Liu Guijin, says new pressure or sanctions against Khartoum for its actions in Darfur would only complicate the conflict and make it more difficult to resolve.
President Bush has announced sanctions against Sudanese companies and officials to try to stop the killing in Darfur, which the United States has called genocide against ethnic minority groups.
The United States, along with Britain, is also considering drafting a U.N. resolution that would increase the number of Sudanese officials subject to sanctions and extend an arms embargo to all of Sudan instead of just Darfur.
Liu, who returned to Beijing last week after a five-day trip to Sudan and Darfur, questioned the need for new sanctions. He said the Sudanese government has recently shown signs of flexibility and is willing to hold talks with rebel groups.
"In this situation, why can't the international community give the peaceful resolution of Sudan's Darfur issue a little more time? Why can't they give the resolution a few more opportunities? Why can't they use a little more patience?" Liu asks.
Sudan has agreed to a U.N. plan to bring thousands of peacekeepers into Darfur to aid overwhelmed African Union forces already there. But, Khartoum has stalled on letting the peacekeepers in.
China is a major buyer of Khartoum's oil and it supplies arms to the country. Beijing has been accused of ignoring the bloodshed and protecting Khartoum against U.N. sanctions to maintain access to Sudan's oil.
Liu defended Beijing's investments in Sudan's oil industry. He said poverty and lack of resources were the major causes of conflict in Sudan and the Chinese investments would lead to peace.
"China and Sudan oil cooperation is beneficial in helping Sudan's economic development and is fundamentally beneficial in resolving Sudan's wars and conflicts," Liu says.
The Sudanese government has been accused of backing militias responsible for mass killings and rapes among ethnic-minority communities in Darfur.
The United Nations estimates 200,000 people have been killed and more than two million run out of their homes in the four years of conflict.
By RADIO FREE ASIA
May 26, 2008
HONG KONG—Thousands of villagers have clashed with police in recent days in the southwestern Chinese region of Guangxi over harsh measures they say are being used by local family planning officials keen to keep births down, villagers said.
An employee of Guangxi Family Planning Committee confirmed the riots. “There are indeed riots, but we are not authorized to make any public announcement,” the official told RFA’s Mandarin service. “It's hard to say who's to blame for what happened. The incidents are still under investigation.”
Tensions rose in Ziliang township, Rong county, after police raided households that had given birth to an additional child without permission, detaining elderly family members and confiscating all their possessions, villagers told RFA's Cantonese service.
Residents of Shabei village gathered outside the government buildings in Ziliang, sparking clashes with riot squads from the People's Armed Police sent in to control them. “Around 10 people were detained for disturbing public order, and at least 10 people were injured,” a villager surnamed Yuen said.
Yuen said the raid took place after a concerted attempt by villagers from Shabei, Wangmao, Shuiming, and Nabo to send representatives to Beijing to lodge an official complaint against their local family planning department. But he said all the villages were under guard by riot police, with police stopping people at all public transport stations, asking questions.
By Robert J. Saiget | AFP | Middle East Times
27 May 2007
Riots over China's controversial family planning policies have exposed an underside of criminal activities linked to how the radical population control strategy is implemented.
Baby trafficking in particular has emerged as a lucrative new business for those willing to exploit the profits that can be made in the southern region whose people are often desperately poor.
Nicholas Becquelin, the Hong Kong-based research director of Human Rights Watch, said the one-child policy was a key factor.
Under that policy, aimed at controlling the world's largest population of 1.3 billion, people who live in urban areas are generally allowed one child, while rural families can have two if the first is a girl.
But most couples want a boy to carry on the family line, and if successful the first time have no more children, while others use sex-selective abortions to get rid of unwanted daughters.
It has led to China now having nearly 40 million more men than women since it was introduced in the late 1970s.
Becquelin said the family planning restriction "is one of the main factors in trafficking because the gender imbalance at birth has led to a shortage of women."
In July 2004, 54 people from Yulin city in Guangxi region were convicted of trafficking 117 girls between 2001 and 2003.
The case broke when police found 28 drugged and tied-up baby girls - none over three months old - in bags on board a bus bound for northern cities.
Two people from Yulin were sentenced to death over that case and more than 100 outside Guangxi were convicted, of whom at least one was executed, state press reports at the time said.
Hospitals, medical clinics, doctors, and nurses were all implicated.
Yulin's administration covers Bobai county, where at least seven townships erupted in riots in the last 10 days after heavy-handed government efforts to implement the one-child policy, locals and state press said.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | The New York Times
May 22, 2007
Thousands of farmers in southwest China rioted at a government office after authorities imposed heavy fines on families that had more children than allowed under the country's family planning policy, a newspaper and a villager said Monday.
Anti-riot police were called in after villagers set fires and smashed cars Saturday at the Shapo township government office in the Guangxi region, Hong Kong's Ming Pao Daily News said.
One person was injured as villagers and government officials hurled stones at each other, the newspaper reported. The demonstrators also knocked down a wall and damaged offices at the building, it said.
Lu Wenhua, a town resident, did not participate in Saturday's demonstration but said he had heard about the riot from other villagers. Lu, 23, said protesters were angry because the government had levied fines of more than $1,300 on families that had too many children.
''The fine is too heavy because the annual income of the villagers was only 1,000 yuan (about $130). It is too much for people to bear,'' he said in a telephone interview.
It wasn't immediately clear what sparked the riot, how long the fines had been imposed or how many families had been involved. A woman who answered the phone Monday at the Shapo township government said she had no comment and refused to give her name.
China's family planning policy -- implemented in the late 1970s -- limits most urban couples to one child and families in some rural areas to two in an attempt to control population growth and conserve natural resources.
Critics say China's family planning policy has led to forced abortions, sterilizations and a dangerously imbalanced sex ratio due to a traditional preference for male heirs, which has prompted families to abort female fetuses in hopes of getting boys.
By Rick Weiss - The Washington Post | San Jose Mercury News
May 20, 2007
WASHINGTON - Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical. Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics. Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria. Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.
These were among the 107 food imports from China the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.
For years, U.S. inspection records show, China has flooded the United States with foods unfit for human consumption. And for years, FDA inspectors have simply returned to Chinese importers the small portion of those products they caught - many of which turned up at U.S. borders again, making a second or third attempt at entry.
Now the confluence of two events - the highly publicized contamination of U.S. chicken, pork and fish with tainted Chinese pet food ingredients and this week's resumption of high-level economic and trade talks with China - has activists and members of Congress demanding the United States tell China it is fed up.
Dead pets and melamine-tainted food notwithstanding, change will prove difficult, policy experts say, in large part because U.S. companies have become so dependent on the Chinese economy that tighter rules on imports stand to harm the U.S. economy, too.
"So many U.S. companies are directly or indirectly involved in China now, the commercial interest of the United States these days has become to allow imports to come in as quickly and smoothly as possible," said Robert B. Cassidy, a former assistant U.S. trade representative for China and now director of international trade and services for Kelley Drye Collier Shannon, a Washington law firm.
`Kowtowing to China'
As a result, the United States finds itself "kowtowing to China," Cassidy said, even as that country keeps sending American consumers adulterated and mislabeled foods.
It's not just about cheap imports, added Carol Tucker Foreman, a former assistant secretary of agriculture now at the Consumer Federation of America.
"Our farmers and food processors have drooled for years to be able to sell their food to that massive market," Foreman said. "The Chinese counterfeit. They have a serious piracy problem. But we put up with it because we want to sell to them."
U.S. agricultural exports to China have grown to more than $5 billion a year - a fraction of last year's $232 billion U.S. trade deficit with China but a number that has enormous growth potential, given the Chinese economy's 10 percent growth rate and its billion-plus consumers.
Trading with the largely unregulated Chinese marketplace has its risks, of course, as evidenced by the many lawsuits that U.S. pet food companies now face from angry consumers who say their pets were poisoned by tainted Chinese ingredients. Until recently, however, many companies and even the federal government reckoned that, on average, those risks were worth taking.
But after the pet food scandal, some are recalculating.
China's less-than-stellar behavior as a food exporter is revealed in stomach-turning detail in FDA "refusal reports" filed by U.S. inspectors: Juices and fruits rejected as "filthy." Prunes tinted with chemical dyes not approved for human consumption. Frozen breaded shrimp preserved with nitrofuran, an antibacterial that can cause cancer. Swordfish rejected as "poisonous."
By Jonathan Watts | The Guardian
May 18, 2007
One of China's most prominent human rights activists has been blocked from travelling to the UK, just a day after the foreign secretary Margaret Beckett called on Beijing to allow more freedom of expression during her visit to the country.
Police detained Hu Jia, a pro-democracy campaigner and HIV-Aids activist, as he prepared to catch a flight to Europe via Hong Kong. Organisations in several European countries had invited him to speak about human rights violations in China.
Domestic security officials told him he was forbidden from leaving the country. He and his wife Zheng Jinyang were taken away for interrogation and told they were suspected of threatening state security.
In previous cases, dissidents accused of state security crimes have been arrested, charged and imprisoned.
"I will try again to change my flight. But now there are six police downstairs," Mr Hu said by telephone from his home. "The government has stopped us from going so that we would not disclose negative information about China ahead of the Olympics ... but this kind of action itself shows the dark side of the government."
Mr Hu said police asked him about critical comments he made to the media during a visit to Hong Kong earlier this year. On that trip, he showed a video of his house arrest and expressed support for other Chinese activists in jail or under house arrest.
In recent years, the public security bureau has kept him under close scrutiny. In 2006, he was kept under house arrest for 168 days and abducted for interrogation for 41 days.
He has remained defiant. Three years ago, he was detained as he attempted to lay a wreath on Tiananmen square in memory of the victims of the 1989 massacre. In Henan province, he helped to expose the blood-selling scandal that left tens - possibly hundreds - of thousands of villagers with HIV/Aids.
He is an unabashed admirer of the Dalai Lama, who Beijing accuses of "splittism". Last year, he joined a hunger-strike relay by Chinese rights activists that was the first nationally coordinated protest since 1989.
His detention came hours after Margaret Beckett gave a speech to communist cadres in Beijing in which she called for more freedom of information.
"Any healthy economy needs journalists and individuals who are free to point out problems without fear of reprisal," Ms Beckett said.
Amnesty International said Mr Hu had been stopped because he planned to speak out about human rights violations ahead of the Olympics, which the authorities fear would tarnish China's reputation.
"This is the latest example in a growing pattern of arbitrary detention and growing surveillance of human rights activists in the run up to the Olympics. China should lift the restrictions on Hu Jia and Zheng Jinyang immediately so they can continue with their peaceful human rights activities," said spokesman Mark Allison.
http://www.guardian.co.uk
By Benjamin Kang Lim | REUTERS | via (uncensored) yahoo!news
May 18, 2007
China barred a prominent AIDS and environmental activist and his wife from leaving the country on Friday, accusing them of endangering national security, the pair said.
Both have been placed under house arrest.
Plainclothes police took Hu Jia, 33, away from his Beijing home for questioning hours before he and his wife and fellow AIDS campaigner Zeng Jinyan were to board a plane bound for Hong Kong en route to nine European countries, Zeng said.
The activist was released after about five hours of questioning and told that he and his wife were suspected of "endangering national security" and barred from leaving the country, Hu said, adding that they would be under house arrest for an indefinite period.
"The authorities are worried what we say during our European tour would ignite international opposition to Beijing hosting the Olympics," Hu told Reuters. The city is hosting the 2008 Summer Games.
Hu's activism has set him on a collision course with the Communist Party, which has stepped up curbs on NGOs, the media, the Internet, lawyers, academics and civil rights campaigners to maintain its grip on power.
In Shanghai, a court on Friday jailed three hemophiliacs who say they contracted AIDS through tainted blood transfusions. The three were jailed for up to a year after they clashed with police while petitioning for better treatment, their lawyer said.
Zeng, 22, who is three months' pregnant, was recently named by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people. Hu said he was questioned about whom he and his wife met, what they did and said when they visited Hong Kong in February and March this year.
"It's laughable. They see freedom of expression as endangering national security," Hu said.
Hu said he was also interrogated about a 20-minute film he and his wife made which showed the couple under surveillance by plainclothes police.
"The film exposed human rights abuses by police with Chinese characteristics," Hu said, adding that house arrest was "illegal detention and a crime."
Hu has been a thorn in the government's side and was put under house arrest for 214 days last year.
During that time, Hu followed closely the trials of human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng and blind civil rights campaigner Chen Guangcheng and tipped off foreign reporters about the latest developments.
In a rare display of official tolerance, Gao was given a suspended three-year jail sentence for subversion last December.
Chen, known as a self-taught "barefoot lawyer" for providing legal advice to peasants, was jailed for four years and three months last year after exposing forced late-term abortions and other coercive birth control measures in his home province.
Hu also championed the cause of fellow AIDS activist Gao Yaojie, who was barred from leaving for the United States to receive an award until U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton and Chinese President Hu Jintao intervened.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman's office, reached by telephone, had no immediate comment on Hu's house arrest.
By David Barboza | The New York Times
18 May 2007
SHANGHAI, May 17 — Weeks after tainted Chinese pet food ingredients killed and sickened thousands of dogs and cats in the United States, this country is facing growing international pressure to prove that its food exports are safe to eat.
But simmering beneath the surface is a thornier problem that worries Chinese officials: how to assure the world that this is not a nation of counterfeits and that “Made in China” means well made.
Already, the contamination has produced one of the largest pet food recalls in American history, heightening global fears about the quality and safety of China’s agricultural products. And evidence has also shown that China exported fake drug ingredients, threatening to undermine the credibility of another booming export.
“This isn’t an international crisis yet, but if they don’t do something about it quickly, it will be,” said David Zweig, a China specialist who teaches at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “The question is whether it spills over and ‘Made in China’ becomes known as ‘Buyer Beware.’ ”
With contamination known to have spread to feed for livestock and fish, some of America’s biggest food companies, like Kraft Foods, are lobbying the United States government to press China to improve its food safety measures.
Kraft, Kellogg and other food companies have said they are reviewing their food safety procedures and upgrading equipment. These executives worry that another scare involving China could set off a consumer backlash against Chinese or foreign imports and reverse a trend that has made large food makers increasingly dependent on processed ingredients from developing countries.
Experts also say doubts about the quality of China’s food shipments and worries about its fake drugs could affect other exports if buyers begin to find safety problems or other product flaws.
Indeed, the frequency of recalls of Chinese imports has risen in recent years, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
For instance, two weeks ago, Wal-Mart Stores announced a nationwide recall of baby bibs made in China after some of those bibs tested positive for high levels of lead.
By Zachary Coile | The San Francisco Chronicle
May 17, 2007
China's carefully planned coming-out party as a world superpower at the 2008 Summer Olympics could be clouded by Beijing's close ties with the Sudanese government and its failure to halt the genocide in Darfur.
Congress is increasing the pressure on the Chinese government to end arms shipments to the region and use its leverage as Sudan's top investor and trading partner to resolve a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and left millions more displaced.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced resolutions Wednesday urging China to pressure the regime in Khartoum to allow peacekeeping troops into Darfur and comply with U.N. resolutions. If the killing of civilians continues, the measures call on China to join other nations in supporting sanctions against Sudan.
"It's very important that we ask China, finally, to join the world community and acknowledge that genocide is taking place," said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, a co-sponsor of the House resolution, who has visited the region three times and urged a tougher response. "With the Olympics coming, China is now in the international spotlight. ... They need to, in many ways, stop supporting the genocide that is taking place in Darfur."
While Chinese President Hu Jintao has called for "a dialogue" to end the conflict in Darfur, China's investments have provided a lifeline that has kept the Sudanese regime afloat.
China buys more than 400,000 barrels of oil a day from Sudan -- more than 70 percent of the country's exports -- and helped build an oil pipeline. China has also reportedly canceled $100 million in debt owed by the Khartoum government and offered $20 million in no-interest loans to erect a new presidential palace.
China also has used its veto at the U.N. Security Council to block efforts to impose sanctions on Sudan. An Amnesty International report said China and Russia were supplying weapons to the Arab militias, backed by President Omar el-Bashir's government, which have carried out the attacks in Darfur.
China's close ties with Sudan present a major public relations problem for Beijing. With the Olympic Games little more than a year away, some activists are urging a boycott of the Games if China doesn't help end the bloodshed.
By Jake Hooker | The New YHork Times
May 09, 2007
BEIJING, May 8 — China’s drug regulation agency has confirmed that the company linked to counterfeit medicine that caused at least 100 deaths in Panama was not licensed to be engaged in the pharmaceutical business, the Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.
Jiang Yu, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said the agency, the State Food and Drug Administration, conducted an investigation last year in response to a request by officials at the United States Food and Drug Administration.
Ms. Jiang’s comments, made in a regular Tuesday briefing, were prompted by an article on Sunday in The New York Times that described how cough medicine in Panama was tainted with a poisonous industrial solvent, diethylene glycol, that was traced to a factory in eastern China.
The article reported that the solvent — which passed through brokers in China, Spain and Panama — was falsely identified as glycerin, a sweet-tasting syrup that is a common ingredient in medicine.
The Foreign Ministry said neither the chemical company that made the toxic syrup, the Taixing Glycerine Factory, nor the Chinese state-owned trading firm that exported it, CNSC Fortune Way, fell under the regulatory supervision of China’s drug administration.
Ms. Jiang emphasized that Chinese drug manufacturers must follow strict rules in the purchase of raw pharmaceutical ingredients and solvents in medicine. But her comments stopped short of fully addressing the role played by the chemical factory in the deaths in Panama.
By Voice of America - A trusted source of news and information since 1942
By Luis Ramirez - Reporting from Beijing
May 07, 2007
Health experts say tobacco consumption is hitting alarming rates in China. World health officials estimate that one-third of the male population under the age of 29 is likely to die from tobacco-related illnesses. But officials in the communist government have said the country - the world's largest producer and consumer of tobacco products - cannot afford to stop smoking. VOA's Luis Ramirez has more from Beijing.
A bride at a wedding in Beijing goes from table to table, offering cigarettes to her guests - a long-standing tradition.
Smoking is an integral part of Chinese social life, and refusing a cigarette can be seen as impolite.
Unlike their parents, who grew up in an era when cigarettes were expensive and rationed, younger adults have money to buy them and hundreds of brands to choose from. Smoking rates, especially among young people, are rising.
Wei Peng is a 23-year-old university student in Beijing who has been chain smoking since he was 16.
"When I first started to smoke, I did it out of curiosity. Then, it made me feel like I was growing up, and made me feel like a man. It gradually became a habit."
Wei is among the millions of young male smokers at risk of dying of tobacco-related diseases, which the World Health Organization warns are likely to kill a third of all Chinese men now under the age of 29.
While most developed and many developing countries are trying to phase out smoking, critics say China is slow to curb its use. They say few in the country ever learn of tobacco's dangers.
Doctor Xiao Dan with the Beijing Institute of Respiratory Medicine works at Beijing's Chaoyang Hospital to help smokers quit. She says many patients diagnosed with lung cancer are surprised to learn about its link to smoking.
"Many of them know that smoking is not good, but they do not know exactly how bad it could be for their health. They do not know how smoking affects their health and their lives. They have no understanding."
In China, anti-tobacco efforts compete with economic interests. It is a tough dilemma because the same government that would have to enforce curbs on tobacco use also is the country's biggest tobacco producer. The communist government draws billions of dollars in revenues from cigarette sales among China's 350 million smokers.
State-owned cigarette companies like the giant Hongta Group, in southwestern China's Yunnan province, generate thousands of jobs. Hongta has branched out to numerous ventures across China, and its money has paid for highways, hotels, and even a massive state-of-the art sports center in the provincial capital of Kunming.
Communist Party leaders have openly said the country cannot afford to stop smoking. The deputy chief of the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration told parliament in March that curbs on smoking could destabilize the country.
Some in China are working to change that thinking.
Two experts in health economics, Mao Zhengzhong and Hu Teh-wei did a study that showed curbing tobacco use by raising cigarette taxes would not lead to lost revenue or instability. Mao, a professor at West China University of Medical Sciences, says the government will need more convincing.
"We have to offer them more proof that to allay their concerns about falling revenues if taxes on tobacco go up."
Hu, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says the country's leaders are not paying attention to the human costs of smoking in the long-term - which currently costs China five billion dollars a year.
"One is the expenditures, the medical expenditures that increase because of smoking. The other is because of premature death, or lost productivity," Hu says.
For now, a small notice on the cigarette label is one of the few warnings that Chinese smokers get about tobacco. It says smoking too much is bad for health.
But China is taking some steps toward curbing smoking. The government has ratified the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which prohibits tobacco advertising, requires large warnings on cigarette packs, and bans smoking in many public places.
The WHO representative in China, Dr. Henk Bekedam, calls ratification an important step.
"That's very encouraging, but it's just like with all the laws. A law on its own is not enough. It's, at the end of the day, about changing behavior," Dr. Bekedam says.
Smoking related illnesses kill more than one million Chinese each year and experts say, without a change in national behavior, that number could more than double by 2020.
By WALT BOGDANICH and JAKE HOOKER | The New York Times
06 May 2007
The kidneys fail first. Then the central nervous system begins to misfire. Paralysis spreads, making breathing difficult, then often impossible without assistance. In the end, most victims die.
Many of them are children, poisoned at the hands of their unsuspecting parents.
The syrupy poison, diethylene glycol, is an indispensable part of the modern world, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze.
It is also a killer. And the deaths, if not intentional, are often no accident.
Over the years, the poison has been loaded into all varieties of medicine — cough syrup, fever medication, injectable drugs — a result of counterfeiters who profit by substituting the sweet-tasting solvent for a safe, more expensive syrup, usually glycerin, commonly used in drugs, food, toothpaste and other products.
Toxic syrup has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world in the past two decades. Researchers estimate that thousands have died. In many cases, the precise origin of the poison has never been determined. But records and interviews show that in three of the last four cases it was made in China, a major source of counterfeit drugs.
Panama is the most recent victim. Last year, government officials there unwittingly mixed diethylene glycol into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine — with devastating results. Families have reported 365 deaths from the poison, 100 of which have been confirmed so far. With the onset of the rainy season, investigators are racing to exhume as many potential victims as possible before bodies decompose even more.
Panama’s death toll leads directly to Chinese companies that made and exported the poison as 99.5 percent pure glycerin.
Forty-six barrels of the toxic syrup arrived via a poison pipeline stretching halfway around the world. Through shipping records and interviews with government officials, The New York Times traced this pipeline from the Panamanian port of Colón, back through trading companies in Barcelona, Spain, and Beijing, to its beginning near the Yangtze Delta in a place local people call “chemical country.”
The counterfeit glycerin passed through three trading companies on three continents, yet not one of them tested the syrup to confirm what was on the label. Along the way, a certificate falsely attesting to the purity of the shipment was repeatedly altered, eliminating the name of the manufacturer and previous owner. As a result, traders bought the syrup without knowing where it came from, or who made it. With this information, the traders might have discovered — as The Times did — that the manufacturer was not certified to make pharmaceutical ingredients.
An examination of the two poisoning cases last year — in Panama and earlier in China — shows how China’s safety regulations have lagged behind its growing role as low-cost supplier to the world. It also demonstrates how a poorly policed chain of traders in country after country allows counterfeit medicine to contaminate the global market.
By Ching-Ching Ni | The Los Angeles Times
May 06, 2007
The many who don't make it big often end up jobless, even crippled
BEIJING — Guo Ping was just 9 when she started training as a marathon runner. By the time she was 16, she had gone pro, getting up at 4 in the morning and sometimes running 40 miles a day on feet so swollen she could barely squeeze them into her shoes.
Although she harbored Olympic-sized dreams, the coal miner's daughter thought she also had a good backup plan. If she couldn't become the best of the best, she could always retire from sports and get a government job as a police officer.
That promise by her coach, she says, helped her endure a brutal training regime in which she and other runners had no contact with the outside world and no one to protect them from the coach, who beat them with a whip or baton, or knocked them off their feet with the bumper of his car if he thought they were slacking off.
But four years after she retired at 26 with nothing but an elementary school education and a body crippled by sports injuries, the former marathon champion says she has been duped.
Not only is there no job waiting for her, but Guo and her teammates charge that their coach pocketed their government-paid wages and refuses to give them back.
"We trusted him because we were young and he was our coach," Guo said. "He told us he'll save the money for us and we can have it all back later and not a penny will be missing."
Guo and two other former teammates at the Railway Ministry league are taking their coach, Wang Dexian, to court. Wang denies misappropriating their money and has said his beatings weren't severe.
But the case is an embarrassment to the host of the 2008 Summer Olympics and a reminder of the communist machinery that once mass-produced athletes and now can't afford to take care of them after retirement.
By Neue Zuercher Zeitung (Switzerland) - NZZonline
May 05, 2007
The Swiss section of Amnesty International has launched a campaign for better respect for human rights in China, ahead of next year's Olympic Games in Beijing.
At a congress on Saturday in Locarno in southern Switzerland, Amnesty started collecting signatures for a petition to be handed in to the Chinese embassy in Bern six months before the event.
The campaign, which runs under the slogan: "Human Rights on the Podium", has four demands: the abolition of the death penalty, the abolition of re-education camps, the lifting of internet censorship and a halt to reprisals against defenders of human rights.
"The Chinese committee that bid for the event promised that the Olympic Games in Beijing would contribute to the development of human rights," campaign coordinator Christine Heller told a news conference in Locarno.
She added that nothing concrete had yet come from the promises made.
According to Amnesty, hundreds of thousands of people are detained in so-called re-education centres.
"Cleaning up"
It says the Chinese authorities have been "cleaning up" Beijing for months. The homeless, beggars and street hawkers are being detained and can face up to three years in re-education camps without being charged.
"Four years ago I still believed that the internet would bring democracy to China," commented 52-year-old philosophy professor and Chinese government critic Cai Chongguo, who fled the country in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square massacre and now lives in Paris.
By CNN World News | cnn.com
May 2, 2007
U.S. Congress members rebuked China on a range of issues, criticizing Beijing's test of an anti-satellite weapon, its military buildup, its policy of forced abortion, its support of ruthless regimes, and its repatriation of North Korean refugees in violation of international law.
At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing Tuesday, lawmakers repeatedly expressed concern over China's suitability to host the 2008 Olympic Games.
"If ever there was a time for China to get its house in order, this is it," said committee chairman Tom Lantos, a Democrat.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican and long a strident critic of China, noted that the United States has played a significant role giving China the wherewithal to become a military power because of China's robust U.S.-bound exports.
"We have built up a Frankenstein that now threatens us," Rohrabacher said.
In a similar vein, Rep. Ileana Ros Lehtinen, a Republican, noted that China is planning a 17.8 percent increase in its military budget for the next financial year.
"Who's the target?" she asked.
Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte testified that the motives behind China's military buildup are unclear and are a matter of concern to both United States and China's neighbors.
By David Barboza and Alexei Barrionuevo | The New York Times
April 30, 2007
ZHANGQIU, China, April 28 — As American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein.
For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.
“Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed,” said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. “I don’t know if there’s a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ‘don’t do it,’ so everyone’s doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren’t they? If there’s no accident, there won’t be any regulation.”
Melamine is at the center of a recall of 60 million packages of pet food, after the chemical was found in wheat gluten linked this month to the deaths of at least 16 pets in the United States.
No one knows exactly how melamine (which is not believed to be particularly toxic) became so fatal in pet food, but its presence in any form of American food is illegal.
The link to China has set off concerns among critics of the Food and Drug Administration that ingredients in pet food as well as human food, which are increasingly coming from abroad, are not being adequately screened.
“They have fewer people inspecting product at the ports than ever before,” says Caroline Smith DeWaal, the director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington. “Until China gets programs in place to verify the safety of their products, they need to be inspected by U.S. inspectors. This open-door policy on food ingredients is an open invitation for an attack on the food supply, either intentional or unintentional.”
Now, with evidence mounting that the tainted wheat gluten came from China, American regulators have been granted permission to visit the region to conduct inspections of food treatment facilities.
The Food and Drug Administration has already banned imports of wheat gluten from China after it received more than 14,000 reports of pets believed to have been sickened by packaged food. And last week, the agency opened a criminal investigation in the case and searched the offices of at least one pet food supplier.
The Department of Agriculture has also stepped in. On Thursday, the agency ordered more than 6,000 hogs to be quarantined or slaughtered after some of the pet food ingredients laced with melamine were accidentally sent to hog farms in eight states, including California.
Scientists are now trying to determine whether melamine could be harmful to humans.
The pet food case is also putting China’s agricultural exports under greater scrutiny because the country has had a terrible food safety record.
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