Studies / Reports: October 2007 Archives

By Joseph Kahn | The New York Times
October 23, 2007

To judge by the reports in China's state-run news media, the Communist Party took a bold step toward democracy at the just completed 17th National Congress, which approved a new leadership team to run the country.

President Hu Jintao used the word democracy 61 times in his main address to the congress. The official Xinhua news agency reported that the party nominated 221 candidates to fill the 204 full seats on the Central Committee, meaning that 7.6 percent of those declared eligible did not get a seat. Xinhua called this a "competitive election."

In reality, of course, China's one-party system still owes more to Lenin than to Jefferson. It convenes congresses every five years to ratify leadership decisions on policy and personnel. The message is not change, but continuity.

After months of secretive negotiations, the nine members of the new Politburo Standing Committee, the country's top ruling group, were presented to the public for the first time on Monday morning. Their appointment was a fait accompli, and the stiff, scripted ceremony to introduce them, which lasted barely 10 minutes, resembled a Communist coronation.

The Communist Party has run China for 58 years. Despite the dynamic, even reckless expansion that has become the norm for the country's frothy economy, the party has become more entrenched, more predictable and more enamored of its rituals.

Decisions are made collectively by a small, often invisible elite. They tussle over the spoils of one-party rule. But they agree on the big issues facing the country. They want fast growth, a nonaligned foreign policy and political stability. If they are about to try something new, their secret is safe.

"China has a tyranny of the middle," said Frederick C. Teiwes, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of Sydney in Australia. "From the perspective of the leadership, things are going pretty well. They all want stability."

In his first five years as China's No. 1 leader, Mr. Hu argued repeatedly that the growth-above-all philosophy that began under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s had side effects. Too many workers and peasants had not benefited from the long economic boom. The party should redistribute more to the least well-off by providing better state-financed pensions, health care and education.

Mr. Hu has tried to rein in provincial authorities who pay lip service to central government directives while managing local affairs their own way. He pushed to recentralize some decision making, reduce wasteful state investment and slow the rampant expansion of polluting industries.

Some progress has been made. Agricultural taxes were eliminated. Tough directives to fight pollution and improve energy efficiency have been issued, if not fully put into use. Mr. Hu's theory of governance, labeled "scientific view of development," was enshrined in the party's constitution on Sunday.

Yet most of those changes are incremental, enacted only after the full leadership reached a consensus. Far from distancing himself from his predecessors, Mr. Hu has repeatedly pledged to follow the dictums of Mr. Deng and Jiang Zemin, presenting his own ideas as evolutionary.

And little in the proceedings of the congress foreshadowed a faster pace of change or a sharper break with tradition.

>> Read the complete report

By Joseph Kahn | The New York Times
October 14, 2007

Lake Tai, the center of China's ancient "land of fish and rice," succumbed this year to floods of industrial and agricultural waste.

Toxic cyanobacteria, commonly referred to as pond scum, turned the big lake fluorescent green. The stench of decay choked anyone who came within a mile of its shores. At least two million people who live amid the canals, rice paddies and chemical plants around the lake had to stop drinking or cooking with their main source of water.

The outbreak confirmed the claims of a crusading peasant, Wu Lihong, who protested for more than a decade that the region's thriving chemical industry, and its powerful friends in the local government, were destroying one of China's ecological treasures.

Mr. Wu, however, bore silent witness. Shortly before the algae crisis erupted in May, the authorities here in his hometown arrested him. In mid-August, with a fetid smell still wafting off the lake, a local court sentenced him to three years on an alchemy of charges that smacked of official retribution.

Pollution has reached epidemic proportions in China, in part because the ruling Communist Party still treats environmental advocates as bigger threats than the degradation of air, water and soil that prompts them to speak out.

Senior officials have tried to address environmental woes mostly through pulling the traditional levers of China's authoritarian system: issuing command quotas on energy efficiency and emissions reduction; punishing corrupt officials who shield polluters; planting billions of trees across the country to hold back deserts and absorb carbon dioxide.

But they do not dare to unleash individuals who want to make China cleaner. Grass-roots environmentalists arguably do more to expose abuses than any edict emanating from Beijing. But they face a political climate that varies from lukewarm tolerance to icy suppression.

Fixing the environment is, in other words, a political problem. Central party officials say they need people to report polluters and hold local governments to account. They granted legal status to private citizens' groups in 1994 and have allowed environmentalism to emerge as an incipient social force.

But local officials in China get ahead mainly by generating high rates of economic growth and ensuring social order. They have wide latitude to achieve those goals, including nearly complete control over the police and the courts in their domains. They have little enthusiasm for environmentalists who appeal over their heads to higher-ups in the capital.

Mr. Wu, a jaunty, 40-year-old former factory salesman, pioneered a style of intrepid, media-savvy environmental work that made Lake Tai, and the hundreds of chemical factories on its shores, the focus of intense regulatory scrutiny.

In 2005 he was declared an "Environmental Warrior" by the National People's Congress. His address book contained cellphone numbers for officials in Beijing and the provincial capital of Nanjing who outranked the party bosses where he lived.

But Mr. Wu was far from untouchable. He lost his job. His wife lost hers. The police summoned, detained and interrogated him. The local government and factory owners also tried for years to bring him into the fold with contracts, gifts and jobs. When party officials offered him a chance to profit handsomely from a pollution cleanup contract, a friend warned him not to accept. Mr. Wu, who needed the money, said yes.

>> Read the complete report

By Michael Weisskopf | TIME Magazine
October 13, 2007

Next summer's Olympics will showcase a China of glittering skyscrapers and overstuffed store shelves. But the government responsible for this economic miracle continues to imprison political activists, restrict religious freedom, tightly control the media and Internet, and protect its citizens only haphazardly from pollution and unsafe food and consumer products, a congressional panel reported Friday.

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China credited Communist Party leaders with increasing legal protections for those who abstain from unauthorized political and religious activities, but noted the safeguards are selectively enforced. "Against persons the Party deems to pose a threat to its supremacy, officials wield the legal system as a harsh and deliberately unpredictable weapon," the panel concluded in its annual report on the state of human rights and rule of law in China.

With the Games seen as a mark of its arrival, Beijing is under pressure from foreign activists to comply with international standards from the workplace to air quality. Friday?s report added leverage for human rights reforms because of the official U.S. imprimatur: the CECC consists of nine senators, nine House members and five senior Administration officials appointed by the President.

The commission veered from its central focus to such recent issues as food and product safety, which also affects foreign consumers of Chinese exports. The report praised Beijing for reforms, but complained of "inadequate and inconsistent implementation, corruption and a lack of regulatory incentives." Worse, the government discouraged consumer organizations and harassed people for reporting problems with consumer products. Likewise, environmental reforms have been hampered by uncooperative local authorities and official suppression of green activists and the free flow of information, the report said.

Human rights came in for the toughest criticism. Despite a 2005 pledge to "provide relief" for its political prisoners, Beijing continued to detain and imprison democracy activists as well as those attempting to organize workers in labor unions not approved by the government. Police routinely detain people for days without formal charge or more justification than to avoid protests or "social unrest," it said.

A database set up by the commission to monitor political and religious prisoners numbered 4,060 cases as of September.

The past year saw a tightening of the screws on religion, the report said, with Beijing continuing its "campaign of persecution" against the Falun Gong spiritual movement. Protestant church gatherings that didn't register with the government were shut down, and Catholics blocked from contact with the Vatican. Independent clergy were detained and coerced.

Tibetan Buddhists faced greater repression in recent months, said the report, as authorities continued to detain and imprison Tibetans for peaceful expression and nonviolent action -- at least 100 such cases were identified.

>> Read the complete article

By The Financial Times
October 12, 2007

After serving for decades as the world's favourite manufacturer of cheap goods, China is struggling to upgrade itself into an "innovation society." But innovation does not always lead to profits. In a country where low prices matter more to consumers than brands or quality, counterfeiting runs rampant and punishment for intellectual property piracy remains toothless.

Some enterprising counterfeiters in China refill brand-name perfume or liquor bottles. Others make extra, unauthorised batches of products at contract manufacturing facilities and sell them on the side. China has pledged to enforce its loose piracy laws more aggressively, and it is cracking down on counterfeiting ahead of the 2008 Olympics. But in a complaint filed with the World Trade Organization and joined by Japan, the EU, Mexico and Australia, the US claims China's inaction is costing its businesses billions of dollars each year.

>> Read the complete article

By David Lague | The New York Times
October 10, 2007

China has promoted at least four senior military officers with experience in planning for war over Taiwan ahead of a major political meeting next week at which the Communist Party has said it will adopt a new strategy to stop the self-governing island moving toward independence.

In a move that was quietly handled even by the standards of China's secretive military, Beijing last month elevated Gen. Chen Bingde of the army to chief of the general staff, a post where he will exercise day-to-day operational command of the country's 2.3 million-strong armed forces.

As General Chen was promoted through the senior ranks in the 1980s and 1990s, he held a series of command posts in the Nanjing Military Region opposite Taiwan, where China has concentrated its preparations for any conflict over the island, according to official biographies and military analysts.

General Chen's previous post was director general of the general armaments department, where he led the rapid modernization of Chinese military hardware and the country's high-profile space program.

Gen. Xu Qiliang, a veteran air force pilot who served in a number of operational and staff posts in the Nanjing military region, was appointed head of the air force last month, state news media reported.

And state news media reported last month that another senior air force officer with command experience in the Nanjing region, Gen. Ma Xiaotian, had been promoted to deputy chief of the general staff.

In the earlier stages of a wider reshuffle of top posts through China's seven military regions, Adm. Wu Shengli was appointed last year to head the navy.

Admiral Wu has also held critical appointments that give him a solid grounding in naval operations in the Taiwan Strait.

Experts say these appointments are not designed specifically to threaten Taiwan but are part of China's overall military development where a top priority is enforcing the mainland's claim of sovereignty over the island if necessary.

"It sends a message more broadly that Beijing is enhancing its military capability to deal with Taiwan in any future conflict," said Andrew Yang, secretary general of the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, a Taipei-based security policy institute. "There is more emphasis on the quality of the commanders."

>> Read the complete article 

By Jill Savitt | salon.com
October 04, 2007

Slick P.R. moves around the '08 Olympics can't hide the fact that China is still complicit in the Darfur genocide.

The Chinese government can be very persuasive when it wants to be. China persuaded the International Olympic Committee to award Beijing the 2008 Olympic Games -- marking the first time in more than 20 years that the Games will be held under an authoritarian government.

Now, China is attempting to persuade world leaders, the media and the public that Beijing has suddenly become a leader for peace in regard to Darfur. But there are many signs that China's recent efforts have been little more than a public relations campaign to spare the Olympic host from continued negative publicity about its complicity in the Darfur genocide.

For four long years, China was a major, if not the chief obstacle to international efforts to bring security to Darfur. Beijing blocked, vetoed or diluted resolutions at the U.N. Security Council that would have authorized a protection operation or sanctions on Khartoum for continued intransigence.

Suddenly this spring -- as China's role in Darfur was discussed publicly in light of the upcoming Olympics -- China took some new, high-profile steps to address Darfur. Beijing appointed a special envoy for the region. It announced that it would send 300 engineers to Darfur, and in a major turnaround China voted on July 31 for a U.N. resolution authorizing an African Union-United Nations "hybrid" force of up to 26,000 troops and police for Darfur.

Beijing insists -- in media interviews and in face-to-face meetings with Darfur advocates, including myself -- that its new and improved positions on Darfur have not come in response to pressure from activists pointing up the hypocrisy of simultaneously sponsoring a genocide in Africa and an Olympics at home. Beijing has said its position on Darfur is based on principle.

But if China's Darfur policy is indeed based on principle rather than public relations, there is far more it could do to help bring security to Darfur. It could begin by speaking honestly about the realities on the ground there. After a visit to Darfur in May, China's special envoy Liu Guijin said, "I didn't see a desperate scenario of people dying of hunger." Rather, Mr. Liu said the people of Darfur thanked him "for the Chinese government's help in building dams and providing water supply equipment."

Since then, in fact, the security situation in Darfur has gone from bad to worse. Humanitarian organizations are pulling out their personnel, and African Union forces were recently attacked and killed by a splinter group of rebels.

China could put a moratorium on oil ventures with Khartoum. Beijing contends that its purchase of oil from the regime in Khartoum -- more than $1 billion each year -- and its massive investment in infrastructure should be viewed as entirely separate from the violence and murder in Darfur. But it is oil revenues from China that continue to fuel the Sudanese regime's buying of planes and bombs, and its backing of hired killers, the Janjaweed.

China could suspend arms sales to the Sudanese regime, and demand that all other nations follow suit. Human rights reports document that weapons sold by China to Khartoum have been used against the innocent people of Darfur. This fact is all the more troubling given that by selling arms to the regime, China is recouping some of the money it spends in Khartoum buying oil.

China could publicly urge the regime to disarm the Janjaweed and cease aerial bombing campaigns. It could also criticize the Sudanese regime's harassment of the world's largest humanitarian operation -- and cry foul when humanitarian workers are ousted, as happened recently to the director of CARE in Sudan.

While China has widely touted its U.N. vote for the "hybrid" force, it has of course been silent about the central role Beijing's diplomats played in weakening the resolution -- by stripping provisions that would have applied sanctions and provided a mandate to disarm threatening combatants.

China was persuasive enough to convince the international committee that it is worthy of being an Olympic host. Now it must act like one, and live up to the grand slogan it has chosen for the '08 games -- "One World, One Dream" -- especially when the stakes are so much greater than athletes winning medals.

By AlertNet | Reuters Foundation
October 05, 2007 

Beijing police have detained two relatives of a jailed housing rights activist, and prison officials are also mistreating an ethnic Mongolian political prisoner, according to human rights groups.

Ye Mingjun and Ye Guoqiang, son and brother of Ye Guozhu, sentenced for organising protests against forced evictions for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, are being held incommunicado, Amnesty International said in a statement.

Police came for Mingjun at his house on Sept. 29, and later told his family he was being held for "inciting subversion of state power", Amnesty said.

The police had detained Guoqiang earlier in the day for protesting forced evictions, also for the Olympics, in a southern part of Beijing, the group added.

"They are held incommunicado, putting them at high risk of torture or other ill-treatment," said Amnesty, which has previously warned Guozhu has been beaten and tortured with electric shocks in jail.

The government has been cracking down on dissent ahead of a key Communist Party meeting that opens on Oct. 15.

>> Read the complete report 

By David Barboza | The New York Times
October 03, 2007

A prominent human rights lawyer in Beijing says he was abducted, beaten and threatened over the weekend by a gang of men who demanded that he and his family leave the city.

The lawyer, Li Heping, has gained renown here for his defense of environmental activists, imprisoned lawyers and church leaders, and has also considered representing a member of Falun Gong, the banned religious sect.

Human rights groups say Chinese lawyers, activists and dissidents are often subjected to harassment, beatings or threats of long jail terms for pressing claims that seem to challenge the government and the nation's legal system.

In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Mr. Li said his abductors did not say why they were beating him.

"I don't know why they did it," Mr. Li said. "They just told me to leave Beijing. They didn't tell me why they did it."

The abduction of Mr. Li, 37, was first reported by Radio Free Asia, a nonprofit group in Washington that broadcasts news to Asian countries in local languages, and that often reports on human rights cases and minority causes in China.

Mr. Li's ordeal began Saturday, on the eve of a national holiday week observing the 58th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China and as Shanghai was preparing to play host to the 2007 Special Olympics.

Radio Free Asia officials say they received a tip about the kidnapping that day and then contacted Mr. Li.

In the telephone interview on Tuesday night, Mr. Li said he was followed after leaving his office late Saturday by a group of men who eventually grabbed him, put a bag over his head and drove him to a location where they beat him in a basement, sometimes tormenting him with a high-powered electric rod.

Later, he said, the abductors drove him to another location in the suburbs of Beijing, where they left him and told him that he and his family ought to leave Beijing immediately.

Mr. Li said he later visited a hospital because he was suffering from hearing loss and swelling in his face.

Doctors told him he may have suffered serious head injuries, he said. Mr. Li also said he reported the incident to the police.

After being released by his abductors, Mr. Li said he returned home to discover that some of his personal belongings were missing, including legal files and his license to practice law.

In a statement released to a human rights group, Mr. Li said: "As a lawyer, I had the chance to experience electric punishment and torture. I was rolling on the ground and they continued laughing and beating me. This torture lasted about four or five hours."

Human Rights in China, an organization based in New York, issued a statement by its executive director, Sharon Hom, saying, "As the international community increases its scrutiny of China in the lead-up to the Olympics, it is appalling that this kind of attack on lawyers continue."

The statement went on, "These attacks raise serious concerns about the will and ability of the Chinese government to protect lawyers' personal safety and right to practice law, which are essential elements of a system of rule of law."