Studies / Reports: September 2007 Archives
By Maureen Fan - The Washington Post | The Philadelphia Enquirer
September 30, 2007
MIANCHI, China - Twice a week, just after school lets out in this small county in Henan province, a 13-year-old girl with a short bob and wide smile holds her parents' hands and walks two blocks down the street into the harsh fluorescent light of an emergency medical station.
There, she pulls back the waistband of her pants while a nurse dabs disinfectant, prepares a syringe and gives the girl's right buttock a quick jab.
"It doesn't hurt," the girl said after a recent visit. "I'm used to it."
The girl, whose parents asked that her name not be used, has HIV, which they say she contracted through an unnecessary blood transfusion in 1995. Despite early symptoms suggesting she had the virus, doctors at the hospital that treated her said her problems were minor and unrelated to the transfusion. They gave her anti-inflammatory drugs and blister cream.
Not until March, when the family turned to another hospital in neighboring Shaanxi province, did doctors test the girl and determine she had HIV.
"At the time, I almost collapsed. I just didn't want to live," said the girl's mother, who asked to be identified only by her surname, Li.
The girl's case is hardly unique in China, where despite official pledges at the national level to care for people with the virus that causes AIDS, local hospital and government officials frequently express reluctance to do so.
Some fear having to compensate people who contracted the virus through blood transfusions, a common method of HIV transmission in China. Others fear that the publicity of AIDS cases will hamper local investment.
Communist Party leaders long treated AIDS as taboo. In recent years, however, China has won praise from the West for campaigns to raise awareness. In 2003, the government promised free HIV testing and counseling for all who wanted it, and free antiretroviral treatment for the poor. That year, Premier Wen Jiabao made headlines after being shown on state TV shaking hands with AIDS patients.
And yet hospitals like the one here in Mianchi County not only fail to offer to test for HIV, they deliberately misdiagnose and cover up the problem, according to experts.
There were 18,543 new cases of HIV reported in the first six months of this year, nearly as many as for all of last year, according to the official Xinhua news agency. China's estimate of 650,000 AIDS cases, among a population of 1.3 billion people, is extremely low, domestic and international AIDS groups say.
By David Barboza and Duff Wilson | The New York Times
28 September 2007
The chief executive of a leading Chinese pharmaceutical company used e-mail aliases, offshore bank accounts and a network of drug traffickers to illegally distribute millions of dollars worth of human growth hormone in the United States, federal officials said in a criminal complaint, provided to The New York Times on Wednesday.
A 62-page affidavit by a special agent of the Food and Drug Administration details an extraordinary level of personal involvement in the trafficking and sale of the powerful hormones by Jin Lei, the founder and chief executive of the GeneScience Pharmaceuticals Company, one of China's largest drug makers, based here in Changchun, in northern China.
The affidavit adds intriguing details and a rare look inside a major drug ring and the alleged role of a renowned businessman. It was unsealed Monday, but was not included in an online F.D.A. database until The Times requested and received a copy.
As early as 2004, according to investigators, Mr. Jin was smuggling Jintropin, a growth hormone he named after himself, to the United States.
American investigators claim that through the use of various aliases, including Jack Edwards, John and Luis, Mr. Jin made deals with middlemen and distributors outside China and also instructed them to wire money to banks in the United States, Panama and China.
GeneScience even sold an insurance program offering to resend any package seized by customs officials, the government says. Investigators also say some of the GeneScience Jintropin drug shipments were labeled as toys, glassware or hair treatment.
In January 2006, a person the F.D.A. has now identified as Mr. Jin using an alias wrote to an American customer, warning, "US custom is tighten control, you should stop email directly to gensci anymore and delete all your records."
A secretary who works for Mr. Jin, 42, said this week that he was not available for an interview, but colleagues and people who know him say they were surprised that the respected scientist and hard-charging entrepreneur would be caught up in a drug scandal.
"I contacted Jin Lei this morning. He's not sure about the whole thing and can't say anything to the media now," said Zhou Weiqun, board secretary of GeneScience's parent company, Changchun High Tech Group. "We're trying to figure out the situation. But we trust Jin Lei. He has done a lot for our company."
The charges against Mr. Jin and GeneScience were part of the largest crackdown in United States history on international trafficking in steroids and other illicit bodybuilding drugs.
On Monday, federal authorities said they had arrested 124 people and shut down dozens of crude drug-producing laboratories in a case the authorities called Operation Raw Deal.
Federal authorities did not release the names of athletes or others who might have been customers of the underground drug makers, but federal investigators said they had collected thousands of names and were combing through the database.
Officials from the F.D.A., Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration and several other federal agencies, said China was the primary supplier of the illegal drugs and that 37 Chinese companies, mostly chemical wholesalers, were involved in the illegal drug smuggling, much of it arranged over the Internet.
The revelations come at a difficult time for Chinese authorities. China is already facing mounting pressure to improve the safety and quality of its food, toys and other exports after a series of consumer product safety scandals this year.
With Beijing set to play host to the 2008 Olympic Games, China is also being asked to deliver a drug-free Olympics -- at a time when baseball, cycling and other sports have been damaged by doping scandals.
By The Times of India
September 22, 2007
Will the India-US nuclear deal go through? China isn't taking any chances. Indeed, even as debate rages on within India, China is busy soaking up global uranium supplies.
If the agreement allows India to go in for unfettered nuclear trade, it is expected to push up prices of the already expensive metal. But, China is busy securing supplies of uranium, beefing up its systems, buying more plants. On Thursday, China asked the US to help it work out its nuclear power standards, which guide nuclear power actions and safety. Untroubled by considerations of kowtowing to the US, Chinese vice premier Zeng Peiyan said, "Introduction of US nuclear power standards into China will play an important role in China's nuclear power construction."
Having wrapped up a uranium supply deal with Australia a week ago, China is now setting its sights on pretty much all the big uranium suppliers. China's official target for nuclear power capacity is 40 GWe by 2020 and another 18 GWe in the following five-year plan at a cost of $50 billion. Quite unknown to CPM leader Prakash Karat, there is a global nuclear renaissance in the making.
Of course, the first place to scout for the mineral -- whose spot price was until recently $130 per lb -- would be Africa, which holds 18% of the world's deposits, a tad behind Australia, but more than Kazakhstan.
China has zeroed in on Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), South Africa, Namibia, Niger, Kazakhstan and Canada as it looks for fuel for existing and new reactors. China's tactics are familiar: for instance, it is paying for modernisation of DRC's infrastructure and recently signed an agreement to build a major highway, a railway, 31 hospitals, 145 health centres and two universities there.
By Mark Magnier | Los Angeles Times
September 18, 2007
Residents of Beijing's "petitioners' village," an area of cheap hotels and makeshift houses where the poor and downtrodden gather in search of justice, are bracing for the bulldozers.
Destruction of neighborhoods and forced relocation are common in the Chinese capital as traditional neighborhoods are rapidly torn apart by well-connected developers erecting gleaming towers. But this area has more political significance than your average neighborhood.
For several generations, it has been a repository of the pain and frustration felt by those who come to Beijing to appeal to national authorities to right perceived wrongs. Large white notices posted in recent days warn residents of the Fengtai district to vacate the area by noon Wednesday to make way for a new road and overpass complex leading to the nearby Southern Railway Station.
The plans have been in the works for a while. But some see secondary motives in the timing, including a desire to scatter the community of "troublemakers" in advance of next month's Communist Party Congress and to remove an eyesore before the 2008 Summer Olympics.
By Peter Ford - The Christian Science Monitor | via (uncensored) Yahoo! News
September 12, 2007
As China prepares to celebrate its emergence as a global power at next year's Olympic Games, a rash of recent American and international opinion polls suggest that the Asian giant faces an uphill battle to convince the world it is worthy of its new status.
And it is more than just a question of food or toys.
Beijing's task is made harder, say Chinese and foreign analysts, because the ruling Communist Party has so far failed to learn the new ropes of international public diplomacy.
Chinese officials are accustomed to traditional links with their diplomatic counterparts abroad. They have little experience coping with the single-issue advocacy groups that have sprung from civil society in the West to shape the international agenda and influence public opinion on questions ranging from climate change to Darfur.
"It is a great problem," says Shi Yinhong, a prominent foreign-affairs expert at Beijing's Renmin University. "China has no experience with this. We are weak at dealing with diverse nongovernmental entities. The government machine is not capable of dealing with such groups."
Nor has it proved very successful in dealing with the sort of novel challenge that this summer's food and toy safety scandals have posed to China's international image, according to the polls.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey in July found that 65 percent of Americans had very little or no confidence in Chinese food products. Zogby International reported last month that 72 percent of Americans did not believe Chinese claims that the US is exaggerating the risks.
But China's image problem is deeper than the issue of product safety. Even before the recent scandals broke, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that a downturn in Americans' attitudes toward China was mirrored in Europe and elsewhere.
Only 42 percent of Americans had a favorable attitude to China in May 2007, Pew found, down sharply from 52 percent at the same time last year. 49 percent of the British public was favorable, against 65 percent in 2006, while favorable French and German majorities in 2006 had shrunk to minorities this year.
Indeed, mistrust of China is one of the few international issues on which Europeans and Americans concur, according to a German Marshall Fund poll released last week: 54 percent of Americans and 48 percent of Europeans said they saw China as more of a threat to their jobs and economic security than an opportunity for new markets and investment.
By Bruce Einhorn and Xiang Ji | Business Week
September 10, 2007
Chinese search engines make it easy to steal Net tunes
Eric Zhu is just the sort of customer that Western music labels want to reach in China. The 28-year-old Beijing resident is a sales director for a local company and enjoys listening to Western pop, from the Backstreet Boys to the Spice Girls, on his MP3 player. Zhu doesn't pay for his tunes, though. Like millions of other young Chinese, he downloads them for free using Baidu.com (BIDU), the country's biggest search engine. Baidu makes it so easy--just hit the MP3 tab on the home page, type in the name of the song, and click. What's more, Zhu doesn't believe he and his friends are doing anything wrong. "I think it's a problem with the law, not with us users," he says.
China, home to a thriving commerce in counterfeit software and bootlegged films, has also become the world capital of pirated music. Almost 100% of music downloaded from the Net is stolen, according to Leong May See, Asia director for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, an umbrella group that includes Sony BMG Music, Universal Music, and Warner Music. It doesn't help that two of the country's most popular search engines, Baidu.com and Yahoo China (YHOO), help users find and download songs quickly, and, Leong alleges, illegally. The two provide "deep search" services that allow listeners to download free MP3s from the databases of other sites without ever having to go to those sites themselves. "We have huge problems in China," says Leong.
It's not just the international music in- dustry that has a beef with China's search engines. Google China (GOOG) is struggling to compete against Baidu, which has an edge thanks to its music downloads. Local startups trying to build businesses around selling music online also gripe about Baidu and Yahoo China. "Baidu is at the root of the problem of illegal music downloading," says Wu Duanping, chief executive of online music seller Zhejiang Flyasia Electronics Business Co., based in Hangzhou. Baidu and Yahoo China declined to comment.
by Dakshana Bascaramurty | The Charlatan
September 05, 2007
Lhadon Tethong was deported from China due to her political and social views of Tibet and China relations
Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet (SFT), visited China for the first time after years of protests and campaigns against what she views as an invasion of a free people and state.
She blogged her way through Beijing with her colleague Paul Golding, documenting her views on beijingwideopen.org and China's "illegal occupation of Tibet," she says. She strategically timed her travels to take place exactly one year before the 2008 Olympic Games.
Though not a member of the group that unfurled a 450-square foot banner over the Great Wall of China that read: 'One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008', Tethong says her blog entries led to her deportation.
Arrested on Aug. 8 and detained in a downtown Beijing police station, she was questioned for six hours by the metropolitan and plain-clothes police.
"[They] were interested in what we were doing, why were in China [and if] were we trying to recruit for our cause," she says.
Tethong was detained for less than 12 hours before being deported to Hong Kong.
"In the end, I was deported from China because I was, [according to the police], undermining the stability of the Chinese government," she says.
Tethong grew up hearing about Tibetan issues and its standing on the international stage, especially from her Tibetan father.
Yet it was only at a Free Tibet concert in San Francisco in 1996, that she became actively involved in the cause.
That same year, the history student at Nova Scotia's King's College started a chapter of the organization in Halifax.
After graduating Tethong worked at the Toronto Stock Exchange. But she packed her bags and left Toronto after applying and receiving the program co-ordinator post at the SFT's New York City location.
As one of three staff members, Tethong says she was in charge of many things including seminars, public speaking and campaigns.
Now, with four years as executive director under her belt, the organization has chapters in countries worldwide, including Australia, Cameroon and the Czech Republic.
While Tethong has dealt first-hand with how information on freedom for Tibetans is heavily restricted by Chinese authorities, she uses the Internet as an activist tool.
"It's illegal to discuss the issue [of Tibet] if you are over there [in China]," she says while waiting in an airport for a flight to Canada after her tumultuous trip.
She says this interview and story would have been impossible to complete if she were back in the communist state.
By Agence France-Presse
September 02, 2007
The head of the Taiwan-based Shin Kong Mitsukoshi department store chain's Beijing operation has been barred from leaving China over a management dispute, a report here said Saturday.
Steven Wu, general manager of Shin Kong Mitsukoshi's Beijing New Life Square, was escorted by Chinese police out off an airplane when he was planning to return to Taiwan last Sunday, the United Daily News said.
The paper said Wu has been barred by Chinese authorities from leaving Beijing.
It said Shin Kong Mitsukoshi, which invested 12 billion Taiwan dollars (363 million US) in the store, is trying to resolve a dispute over management issues with its mainland partner, Beijing Hualian Group.
The report cited sources as saying that the dispute erupted when Beijing Hualian Group suspected problems involving construction payments and doubted the Taiwanese company's management rights during a board meeting last week.
Beijing Hualian Group, which hopes that Shin Kong Mitsukoshi will "only be an investor," assigned some 200 security guards to "take over" the store launched in April and verbally fired all Taiwanese executives, it said.
Shin Kong Mitsukoshi, Taiwan's largest retailer, is appealing to relevant Chinese authorities over the dispute.
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