Studies / Reports: August 2007 Archives
By Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley | THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 26, 2007
No country in history has emerged as a major industrial power without creating a legacy of environmental damage that can take decades and big dollops of public wealth to undo.
But just as the speed and scale of China's rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.
Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China's leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.
Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country's 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Beijing is frantically searching for a magic formula, a meteorological deus ex machina, to clear its skies for the 2008 Olympics.
Environmental woes that might be considered catastrophic in some countries can seem commonplace in China: industrial cities where people rarely see the sun; children killed or sickened by lead poisoning or other types of local pollution; a coastline so swamped by algal red tides that large sections of the ocean no longer sustain marine life.
China is choking on its own success. The economy is on a historic run, posting a succession of double-digit growth rates. But the growth derives, now more than at any time in the recent past, from a staggering expansion of heavy industry and urbanization that requires colossal inputs of energy, almost all from coal, the most readily available, and dirtiest, source.
"It is a very awkward situation for the country because our greatest achievement is also our biggest burden," says Wang Jinnan, one of China's leading environmental researchers. "There is pressure for change, but many people refuse to accept that we need a new approach so soon."
China's problem has become the world's problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China's coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo. Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research.
More pressing still, China has entered the most robust stage of its industrial revolution, even as much of the outside world has become preoccupied with global warming.
Experts once thought China might overtake the United States as the world's leading producer of greenhouse gases by 2010, possibly later. Now, the International Energy Agency has said China could become the emissions leader by the end of this year, and the Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency said China had already passed that level.
For the Communist Party, the political calculus is daunting. Reining in economic growth to alleviate pollution may seem logical, but the country's authoritarian system is addicted to fast growth. Delivering prosperity placates the public, provides spoils for well-connected officials and forestalls demands for political change. A major slowdown could incite social unrest, alienate business interests and threaten the party's rule.
But pollution poses its own threat. Officials blame fetid air and water for thousands of episodes of social unrest. Health care costs have climbed sharply. Severe water shortages could turn more farmland into desert. And the unconstrained expansion of energy-intensive industries creates greater dependence on imported oil and dirty coal, meaning that environmental problems get harder and more expensive to address the longer they are unresolved.
By RTTNews | nasdaq.com
August 23, 2007
A prominent California Republican congressman is helping to spearhead GOP efforts to urge President Bush to boycott the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing amid concerns that China has not improved its often-criticized human rights record.
Introduced by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., the nonbinding resolution calls for the U.S. government to take "immediate steps" to boycott the games unless the "Chinese regime stops engaging in serious human rights abuses against its citizens and stops supporting serious human rights abuses by the governments of Sudan, Burma and North Korea against their citizens."
Rohrabacher, a member of the House Committee on International Relations, said the Olympic Games represent the "noblest elements of humanity," while the communist Chinese government "represents the opposite."
"The Olympic torch is supposed to be a beacon of light shining upon mankind's higher aspirations in the world, and it's a travesty to have that torch hosted by a regime that is the world's worst human rights abuser," he said.
The resolution is co-sponsored by House Republicans Joseph Pitts of Pennsylvania, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan, John Doolittle of California, Dan Burton of Indiana, Frank Wolf of Virginia and Christopher Smith of New Jersey.
Rohrabacher said just as the United States turned a blind eye to Germany's Nazi regime by participating in the 1936 summer games in Berlin, the U.S. participating in the 2008 games would ignore China's ties to the Sudanese government, which has been complicit in the genocide in the Darfur region.
Following are highlights of Op-Ed Contributor Ross Terrill
*** as published in The New York Times on August 22, 2007
Please follow the link at the bottom to read the entire Editorial
IN China, language has long been a test of political orthodoxy. In Mao Zedong's era, to confuse evil "bourgeois" with virtuous "proletarian" was to face a prison cell. Write the Chinese character for a leader's name at a wrong angle and you were a class enemy. Now, as Beijing begins the final year of its preparations for the 2008 Olympic Games, a mistake with an English word is taboo.
Some lapses are harmless. "Don't Bother" as a privacy request on a hotel door, for example, or "Chop the Strange Fish" on a restaurant menu. Others could lead to minor trouble. "Please take advantage of the chambermaids," says a resort brochure.
The penalty for "Chinglish" is usually humiliation, not incarceration. Still, citizens are asked to snitch, Mao-era style, on people who shame China with their shaky English. An outfit called the Beijing Speaks Foreign Languages Program issues prefabricated foreign phrases to workers who cannot converse in any foreign tongue. The Olympics have become one more tool in the authoritarian state's box of tricks.
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Yet behind the attack on Chinglish lies an Orwellian impulse to remake the truth. Banished from Beijing for the Olympics will be not only fractured English, but disabled people, Falun Gong practitioners, dark-skinned villagers newly arrived in the city, AIDS activists and other "troublemakers" who smudge the canvas of socialist harmony.
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Likewise, in 2001, arguing before the world to get the Olympic Games, the vice president of Beijing's bid committee said, "By allowing Beijing to host the Games, you will help the development of human rights." Yet the opposite danger looms: Games preparation has spurred repression.
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Alas, few Americans visiting Beijing next August will realize that the drinking water from the faucets of their five-star hotels is unavailable to 99 percent of the city's residents. In fact, this city's water is not safe to drink; the water for the athletes and tourists will be piped in from neighboring Hebei Province.
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For years, the party hopes, it will be able to flaunt photographs of Tibetan farmers cheering at a Chinese gold medal in table tennis, videos of Muslims in Xinjiang Province fainting with joy as the women's high jump goes to China by half an inch over Japan, and documentaries in which Beijing taxi drivers speak in perfect English to tourists from New York.
***Ross Terrill, an associate in research at Harvard's Fairbank Center, is the author of "The New Chinese Empire: And What it Means for the United States."
by CNN
August 20, 2007
Distressed family members shouted and scuffled with guards after a third day without word on 172 miners trapped in a flooded mine in eastern China, where rescue crews began pumping water Sunday.
Paramilitary police and emergency crews plugged a breach in a dike that burst Friday after heavy rains, flooding the Huayuan Mining mine, officials and state media said. As industrial pumps began siphoning water that stood 65 feet deep in the shaft, experts analyzed accident data to try to locate the missing miners, a provincial official said.
"There's some hope, and we will expend one hundred percent, a thousand percent of effort to carry out the search and rescue," Zhang Dekuan, spokesman for the government of Shandong province, where the mine is located, told reporters.
In contrast to the blanket coverage in the U.S. of rescue efforts for six miners in Utah, accounts in China's wholly state-owned media have been terse. Reports Sunday focused on the successful mending of the breach, but said little about the trapped miners -- a sign that the government remains nervous about public anger over perceived mistreatment.
Despite Zhang's media briefing in a local hotel, no officials or mining company executives emerged from Huayuan's sprawling, gated compound to talk to the miners' waiting, anxious relatives. No list of the missing had been issued, they said.
"They are treating these people like they are things to be sacrificed," said Li Chunmei, whose 42-year-old brother was believed to be trapped in the 600-yard shaft. "You would think an official could come and tell us what's going on, whether there are any signs of life, are they dead or alive."
Dozens of relatives -- sobbing mothers and children among them -- shouted "Why don't you come out!" at officials who stood with police and security guards behind the gate. At one point, the crowd surged, bending the aluminum gate and setting off a fracas of shoving. Later, a middle-aged woman broke through only to be wrestled away by two guards in camouflage.
By BBC News
August 17, 2007
Some spectators attending the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing face serious health problems due to air pollution, a leading health expert has warned.
Dr Michal Krzyzanowski of the World Health Organisation told the BBC that those with a history of cardiovascular problems should take particular care.
He also said the city's poor air quality could trigger asthma attacks.
The warning came as Beijing began a four-day test scheme to take 1.3m vehicles off the city's roads.
During the test period, cars with registration plates ending in odd and even numbers will each be banned from the roads for two day.
Any driver caught contravening the restrictions will be fined 100 yuan ($13, £6.50) by 6,500 police officers.
If the strategy works, it will be used next August to reduce air pollution and traffic during the Olympics.
Officials expect the ban to cut vehicle emissions by 40%, although correspondents said thick smog continued to hang over the city on Friday.
Beijing's residents, who are being told to take public transport rather than their cars during the test period, appear to be supporting the pilot project.
'Highly polluted'
But despite the plans to cut emissions, Dr Krzyzanowski said the WHO still feared for the welfare of those planning to attend the games next year.
"All of the cities are pretty highly polluted by European standards, but even by the standards of Asia, Chinese cities are pretty highly polluted," he told BBC Sport.
>> Read the complete article
By Keith Bradsher | The New York Times
August 12, 2007
SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 9 — At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.
Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.
Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.
Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights.
The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency.
Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing better controls on an increasingly mobile population, including the nearly 10 million peasants who move to big cities each year. But they could also help the Communist Party retain power by maintaining tight controls on an increasingly prosperous population at a time when street protests are becoming more common.
“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology.
Incorporated in Florida, China Public Security has raised much of the money to develop its technology from two investment funds in Plano, Tex., Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Three investment banks — Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach, Calif.; Oppenheimer & Company in New York; and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong — helped raise the money.
Free-Tibet activist expelled by Beijing gets hero's welcome on return to Canada
By Nicholas Keung | The Toronto Star
August 10, 2007
A weary Lhadon Tethong received a hero's welcome from her family and supporters as the human rights activist arrived in Toronto last night - less than two days after being detained by China for calling for freedom for Tibet.
With tousled hair and wearing a backpack, the 31-year-old woman was embraced by her father Tsewang Choegyal, brother Losel and cousin Cindy Rees as a dozen Tibetan-Canadians chanted her name and waved red, yellow and blue Tibetan flags.
"It feels great to be back," sighed Tethong as people threw beige and yellow Tibetan scarves on her neck.
"I was worried about my personal safety," she said. "It's hard not to be freaked out. Whenever I felt afraid and nervous, especially in the night, I would just think about what protection I thought I did have.
"Compared to ... Tibetans and Chinese dissidents - (who have) no protection, no foreign passports or foreign press to come to their aid - what I was doing really felt small compared to that."
Tethong, executive director of the New York-based Students for a Free Tibet, was among three Canadians detained after a group of activists hoisted a banner saying "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet, 2008" on the Great Wall Tuesday, as the one-year countdown began for the Beijing Olympics.
Tethong was detained Wednesday and deported for blogging and posting photos online about what her group called China's "propaganda campaign" in the year leading up to the Games.
Fellow Canadians Melanie Raoul, 25, and Sam Price, 32 - who were among six activists who raised the banner - arrived home in Vancouver earlier yesterday to hugs from their parents and supporters.
"She has been an activist since she was small," said Tethong's father, a Tibetan who met his Canadian wife, Judy, in India before they settled in Victoria, B.C., in 1975. "It's a relief to see her home, safe and sound. We're all proud of her."
Chinese Communist troops moved into Tibet in 1951. Tibetans regard China's presence as an occupation.
Tethong, a graduate of Dalhousie University, said the world has to seize the opportunity to bring China's rights records to the forefront.
"China is under the gun right now," she told reporters at the airport. "They wanted this (Olympic pride), but they didn't want what it means to be a free and open society, which is to allow dissent and to allow protest."
By Associated Press | via (uncensored) yahoo!news
09 August 2007
China deported a group of activists who hung a banner on the Great Wall calling for Tibetan independence ahead of celebrations marking one year until the Beijing Olympics, an activist group said Thursday.
The six members of Students for a Free Tibet arrived in Hong Kong on Wednesday following their two-day detention by Chinese authorities, said Kate Woznow, the group's campaign director. They were not physically mistreated during that time but were exhausted from repeated questioning, she said.
Three Americans were part of the group: Leslie Kaup of St. Paul, Minn., Nupur Modi of Oakland, Calif., and Duane Martinez of Sausalito, Calif.
On Tuesday, the group scaled down part of the Great Wall to unfurl a huge banner reading "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008."
Also deported to Hong Kong was Lhadon Tethong, the activist group's executive director, who had been in Beijing blogging about "China's Olympics-related propaganda," the group said in a statement. A British colleague was detained and deported as well.
"Even though she knew there was a likelihood she was going to be detained, it still seemed that what she was doing -- blogging -- isn't illegal. In most countries it wouldn't cause anyone to bat an eye," Woznow said in a telephone interview from Hong Kong.
By Jim Yardley | The New York Times
August 08, 2007
Human rights groups on Tuesday accused China of failing to improve its record on civil liberties, and of harassing lawyers, dissidents and journalists, despite official promises to make human rights a centerpiece of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
Meanwhile, a group of Chinese scholars, journalists and lawyers wrote an open letter to President Hu Jintao and other national leaders calling for the release of political prisoners, including jailed Chinese reporters and inmates convicted on religious grounds. The group wrote that China's Olympic slogan, "One World, One Dream" should instead be "One World, One Dream, and Universal Human Rights."
The criticism came from groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and journalism advocacy organizations, and foreshadowed how China's human rights record is likely to come under growing scrutiny as the Olympics approach.
The timing is hardly a coincidence. Wednesday is the start of the one-year countdown to the Olympic opening ceremony, and a public relations battle has erupted between Beijing officials, who are planning a major celebration, and advocacy groups that want to use the milestone to attract attention to their causes.
"Unless the Chinese authorities take urgent measures to stop human rights violations over the coming year, they risk tarnishing the image of China and the legacy of the Beijing Olympics," said Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International.
Amnesty International said several political advocates in Beijing were under threat of close surveillance or house arrest. At the same time, authorities are persecuting Chinese journalists, the group said. And the police are sweeping up vagrants and other Beijing residents under a controversial policy that allows officers to detain people for up to four years without trial, it said.
The report described the detentions as part of a citywide "cleanup" operation to prepare for the Olympics.
Chinese Olympic officials have said that advocacy organizations should not exploit the Games to further their own agendas, but the government also appeared to be growing accustomed to criticism from a range of groups. On Monday, Jiang Xiaoyu, an executive vice president for the Beijing Olympic Committee, said that "we are mentally prepared that such voices will become louder in the future."
Last week, Human Rights Watch released a broad critique of China's record on civil liberties, accusing authorities of clamping down more tightly on dissent and blaming Olympic preparations for exacerbating longstanding problems like evictions and abuses of labor rights.
On Tuesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists called for the release of 29 domestic reporters imprisoned in China, as well as greater press freedom for foreign and Chinese journalists.
Under a regulation enacted Jan. 1, accredited foreign journalists may travel freely throughout China and conduct interviews without official permission. But a recent survey of Beijing-based foreign correspondents found that harassment and numerous obstacles still existed.
On Monday, the police in Beijing briefly detained several foreign journalists who were covering a protest by the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. The group had displayed a banner outside the local Olympic headquarters that depicted Olympic rings made of handcuffs.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | The New York Times
August 4, 2007
China is cracking down on cable television operators who offer unauthorized foreign satellite broadcasts -- the communist government's latest bid to maintain its monopoly on information, a newspaper reported Saturday.
China's TV regulator last month ordered local authorities to root out operators that provide Chinese homes with foreign channels, which are officially restricted to tourist hotels and compounds where foreigners work and live, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper reported.
Summaries of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television's order said it was aimed at strengthening regulation, maintaining government information controls and ''blocking the intellectual and cultural infiltration of enemy forces.''
Penalties were not stipulated, although the report said violators would have to reapply for the right to receive all satellite broadcasts.
The highest profile victim of the crackdown could be Hong Kong's Phoenix satellite news channel, hugely popular among China's urban middle class and received in millions of homes across the country despite the restrictions.
The report said the crackdown was intended to both silence voices other than official media and protect the monopolies of local stations that have lost viewers to channels such as Phoenix.
The joint venture with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. offers a wider range of news and views, although it largely hews to the official Chinese government standpoint and avoids sensitive political and social issues.
By Chris Buckley | REUTERS | via (uncensored) yahoo!news
August 3, 2007
Parents around the world may have been shocked this week when 1.5 million Chinese-made Fisher-Price toys were recalled because of excessive lead content, but for mums and dads in China lead poisoning is just a fact of life.
Mattel Inc.'s worldwide recall of dozens of products is the latest in a deluge of safety scares that have rattled international consumer confidence in Chinese-made goods.
High levels of lead from toys, water pipes and industry can cause behavioral problems and slow learning among children.
But if Beijing was worried about Chinese children being affected, that was not reflected in state-run media on Friday, which were silent about Mattel's recall.
And it was business as usual in the toy section of Beijing's Tianyi department store.
"I do not worry so much, if the toy looks fun for my child, it is okay. My child is already so big, he is not going to put the toy in his mouth," said a Mrs. Zhang, who was buying toys for her four-year-old son.
Indeed, for many parents, lead competes with many other toxins in the heavily polluted country as a source of anxiety.
"There are just too many things to worry about," said Li Huijing, mother of a five-year-old girl. "There are some things I just try not to think about. I try to pay more for good toys."
HOUSE PAINT, OLD PIPES
China has responded to rising consumer expectations by setting stricter standards for lead in toys, most recently introducing new labeling rules. But imposing those standards on the country's vast and fragmented toy sector is difficult.
China makes 75 percent of the world's toys, according to the national chamber of light industry, and many of the thousands of producers are small and resistant to regulation.
They make cheap plastic, metal and wooden toys that -- if regular news reports are a guide -- often have a lead content well above government-set limits.
A 2005 report in a Beijing newspaper cited estimates that 60 percent of Chinese-made toys used paint with lead above internationally accepted limits.
The China Toy Association would not answer questions about the problem.
By Mindy Fetterman, Greg Farrell and Laura Petrecca | USA Today
August 3, 2007
First it was Thomas the Tank Engine trains. Then Easy-Bake Ovens. And now Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster and Dora the Explorer.
All are beloved children's characters that were licensed to toy manufacturers who contracted with companies in China to make the toys. And all have had those toys recalled. Millions of them. Just since June.
The latest is Mattel (MAT), which announced Thursday that it was recalling 1.5 million toys made in China for the company's Fisher-Price division.
Those toys feature the Sesame Street characters — the big yellow one; the little red one; the hairy blue one — and Nickelodeon's adventuresome bilingual cartoon girl.
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