Studies / Reports: November 2007 Archives
By Thom Shanker | The New York Times
28 November 2007
Two senior American admirals expressed concern on Tuesday over decisions this month by China to refuse access to the port of Hong Kong for three American warships, including two seeking fuel and sheltered waters ahead of a major storm.
The officers, Adm. Gary Roughead, the chief of naval operations, and Adm. Timothy J. Keating, commander of American forces in the Pacific, said neither the Chinese government nor its military had offered explanations.
Two minesweepers, the Patriot and the Guardian, were sailing in international waters this month when a serious Pacific Ocean storm threatened. The two vessels, relatively small, asked for permission to enter Hong Kong's harbor for fuel and safety. The request was denied.
The admirals said China's refusal to lend assistance to the minesweepers was a worrisome repudiation of historical principles calling on all nations to assist ships in danger at sea.
"As someone who has been going to sea all my life, if there is one tenet that we observe, it's when somebody is in need, you provide -- and you sort it out later," Admiral Roughead said during a morning round table with Pentagon correspondents.
The two minesweepers were refueled by an American tanker and suffered no damage from the storm, Admiral Roughead said.
In a second incident just days later, the Kitty Hawk, an American aircraft carrier based in Japan, was already en route to Hong Kong for a Thanksgiving holiday visit scheduled for last Wednesday through Saturday when the Chinese withdrew their previous permission for the port call. China later approved the visit, but it was too late for the Kitty Hawk to turn around and return.
Hundreds of family members of the crew aboard the Kitty Hawk and vessels in its strike group had already flown to Hong Kong for the visit when the Chinese canceled entry "at the last minute," according to the Navy.
During a video news conference from his headquarters in Hawaii, Admiral Keating said he found the Chinese decisions "perplexing, troublesome."
"It is not, in our view, conduct that is indicative of a country that understands its obligations of a responsible nation," Admiral Keating said. "There is little strategic benefit to it."
But Admiral Keating also stressed the importance of maintaining a military-to-military dialogue to avoid any calamity in relations, and he said he planned to visit China early next year.
The State Department was asking China about its refusal to let the three Navy ships into the Hong Kong harbor.
Cmdr. Pamela S. Kunze, chief spokeswoman for Admiral Roughead, said about 50 Navy ships visited Hong Kong each year. Before the recent refusals, the last American warship to be denied access to the harbor was the Curtis Wilbur, a guided-missile destroyer, in 2002. The Chinese did not provide a reason at the time, she said.
By David Shambaugh | International Herald Tribune
November 26, 2007
For Europe, the "China honeymoon" is over. As the 10th European Union-China summit meeting convenes in Beijing this week, and after 15 years of rapidly and dramatically developing ties, there are numerous indications of new strains emerging in the relationship.
Tensions have grown over the past year, for a number of reasons. In particular, there has been a changed mood in Europe about China. This is evident on a number of levels - public, corporate and governmental.
Positive public perceptions of China have dropped dramatically over the past year, dipping 15 to 20 percent in public surveys in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain. This is primarily the result of job outsourcing and the ballooning EU trade deficit with China, which is growing at €15 million per hour and likely to rise from €128 billion in 2006 to more than €170 billion in 2007.
Europe's mood has also been affected by publicized incidents of Chinese industrial espionage and attempted hacking into the computer networks of the German chancellor's office and the British Foreign Office (and the Pentagon), as well as concerns over human rights in China, particularly Tibet.
Criticism of China's human rights record has always been harsher among new EU member states in Eastern Europe - particularly the Czech Republic, Poland and Baltic states - which tend to view Beijing through the prism of their Communist past.
European corporations are also increasingly voicing their frustrations with China. A variety of discriminatory trade and investment practices plague European and other businesses in China, particularly the widespread theft of intellectual property and market-access barriers to China's financial services industries, distribution networks and protected industries.
By Howard W. French | The New York Times
24 November 2007
When the central government in Beijing announced an ambitious nationwide campaign to reduce energy consumption two years ago, officials in this western regional capital got right to work: not to comply, but to engineer creative schemes to evade the requirements.
The energy campaign required local officials to raise electricity prices as a way of discouraging the growth of large energy-consuming industries and forcing the least efficient of these users out of business. Instead, fearing the impact on the local economy, the regional government brokered a special deal for the Qingtongxia Aluminum Group, which accounts for 20 percent of this region's industrial consumption and roughly 10 percent of its gross domestic product.
Local officials arranged for the company to be removed from the national electrical grid and supplied directly by the local company, exempting it from expensive fees, according to an electricity company official who asked not to be named, an official of the aluminum company and the official Web site of the nearby city of Shizuishan. As a result, Qingtongxia continued to get its power at the lowest price available.
It was a cat-and-mouse game grimly familiar to Chinese officials, who have a long tradition of spearheading ambitious nationwide campaigns that are all too often thwarted at the local level, partly because local priorities clash with national ones.
Concerned about China's roaring economic engine consuming too much energy, national officials aimed to cut energy use by 20 percent per dollar of output within five years. China's energy consumption has more than quadrupled since 1980.
The environmental toll is staggering. The country is already the world's largest user of coal, the dirtiest type of energy. China's coal consumption alone is projected to double in the next 20 years, according to the International Energy Agency.
Beijing has so fixated on the 20 percent goal that it has become the centerpiece of its overall strategy to reduce pollution in addition to consumption, as well as its main talking point in diplomatic negotiations to curb the output of gases that cause global warming. The target has elicited support among environmentalists in China and abroad. They regard it as ambitious given the explosion of heavy industry in China, which consumes vast amounts of electricity and, as it expands, makes the overall economy less energy efficient.
Drive to Conserve Sputters
Even so, the drive has mostly sputtered. According to official estimates, which in China are often overly generous, the country saved only 1.23 percent of energy per unit of output last year. In the first half of 2007, the authorities claim to have achieved 2.4 percent, double the previous year's rate. Energy experts say they believe that the savings will increase over time, but to meet the goal of a 20 percent reduction by 2010, the country will have to reduce energy per unit of output by 4 percent a year on average, so the chances of achieving it look increasingly slim.
Officials in Beijing, faced with the likelihood that they will fall short of their target, have issued uncharacteristically scathing assessments of the performance of some local leaders, and they have vowed to use more of their powers to bring wayward officials into line. In May, China's premier, Wen Jiabao, complained bitterly. "Understanding is not adequate, responsibilities are unclear, measures are not complementary, policies are incomplete, investment doesn't arrive, and coordination is ineffective," he said of efforts to cut energy consumption. "If these problems are not turned around, it will be difficult to achieve any obvious progress."
More recently, Zhang Lijun, a deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, warned that China was likely to miss its targets for emissions controls for the current five-year plan, which ends in 2010. "We haven't spotted any substantial indicators of a slowdown in the expansion of energy-intensive sectors," Mr. Zhang said.
The struggle to meet the target highlights the challenge of making China greener at a time when China's top leaders have continued to emphasize breakneck growth, even as they worry about its costs. Officials at all levels arguably still face greater risks to their careers if they allow economic performance, job creation or tax revenue to lag than if they fail to curb pollution. Slower growth also means fewer opportunities for friends and relatives of people in power to cash in on the country's boom.
The tug of war between localities and the central government also shows the limits of China's ability to impose change on a vast, unruly country by edict, while exposing the weaknesses of a one-size-fits-all approach to reform in a country where regional economic disparities are rapidly growing.
From CNN's Planet in Peril report
November 20, 2007
The air smells acrid from squat gas burners that sit outside homes, melting wires to recover copper and cooking computer motherboards to release gold. Migrant workers in filthy clothing smash picture tubes by hand to recover glass and electronic parts, releasing as much as 6.5 pounds of lead dust.
For five years, environmentalists and the media have highlighted the danger to Chinese workers who dismantle much of the world's junked electronics. Yet a visit to this southeastern Chinese town regarded as the heartland of "e-waste" disposal shows little has improved. In fact, the problem is growing worse because of China's own contribution.
China now produces more than 1 million tons of e-waste each year, said Jamie Choi, a toxics campaigner with Greenpeace China in Beijing. That adds up to roughly 5 million television sets, 4 million fridges, 5 million washing machines, 10 million mobile phones and 5 million personal computers, according to Choi.
"Most e-waste in China comes from overseas, but the amount of domestic e-waste is on the rise," he said.
This ugly business is driven by pure economics. For the West, where safety rules drive up the cost of disposal, it's as much as 10 times cheaper to export the waste to developing countries. In China, poor migrants from the countryside willingly endure the health risks to earn a few yuan, exploited by profit-hungry entrepreneurs.
International agreements and European regulations have made a dent in the export of old electronics to China, but loopholes -- and sometimes bribes -- allow many to skirt the requirements. And only a sliver of the electronics sold get returned to manufacturers such as Dell and Hewlett Packard for safe recycling.
Upwards of 90 percent ends up in dumps that observe no environmental standards, where shredders, open fires, acid baths and broilers are used to recover gold, silver, copper and other valuable metals while spewing toxic fumes and runoff into the nation's skies and rivers.
Accurate figures about the shady and unregulated trade are hard to come by. However, experts agree that it is overwhelmingly a problem of the developing world. They estimate about 70 percent of the 20-50 million tons of electronic waste produced globally each year is dumped in China, with most of the rest going to India and poor African nations.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it is ten times cheaper to export e-waste than to dispose of it at home.
By David Cho and Ariana Eunjung Cha | Washington Post
November 15, 2007
China's extensive spying inside the United States is the greatest threat to the security of American technology secrets.
Advances by the Chinese military are catching U.S. intelligence officials by surprise.
And the Defense Department may be inadvertently outsourcing the manufacturing of key weapons and military equipment to factories in China.
These are among the key findings released today by a bipartisan panel commissioned by Congress to study the economic and security relationship between the United States and China. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, created by Congress in 2001, has been criticized in the past for taking a hawkish stance on China in its annual reports.
The book-length report, the fifth produced by the panel, said China appears to be reversing its move toward free markets by setting up state-owned enterprises to maintain control over 12 key industries, including oil, telecommunications, shipping, automobiles, steel and information technology.
The commission also urged Congress to find ways to work with China to reduce its pollution, which is blowing significant amounts of smog into the air over the western United States, according to new studies quoted by the report. China, it added, is scheduled to build 562 coal plants over the next five years, a rate of about two a week, and may have already replaced the United States as the largest greenhouse-gas polluter in the world.
The panel presented 42 recommendations to Congress, and several of them raised questions about whether the Defense Department has been lax in overseeing the production of sensitive military technologies and gathering intelligence on the Chinese military.
The Pentagon increasingly is buying planes, weapons and military vehicles from private contractors that outsource the manufacturing to plants in China and elsewhere in Asia, the report said. But when questioned by the commission, defense officials said they do not have the ability to track where the components of military equipment are being made.
"As weaponry gets more and more sophisticated . . . I think we'll find ourselves more vulnerable for parts that are being manufactured by an adversary. It's really something the Pentagon needs to look at seriously," said commission member Bill Reinsch, who is also president of the National Foreign Trade Council, which promotes free trade on behalf of businesses.
Commission members said the group had never before delved so deeply into national security issues.
The report stated that China's military advances "have surprised U.S. defense and intelligence officials, and raised questions about the quality of our assessments of China's military capabilities."
By Dan Griffiths | BBC World News
November 02, 2007
In September the government promised to keep rates at current levels. But it now says rises are necessary to prevent inflation and social unrest. So why the change?
Beijing has long had a system of price controls on fuel.
But it can not ignore what is happening in the rest of the world.
While oil prices have been skyrocketing, domestic price controls mean that Chinese refiners are unable to pass those rises on to Chinese consumers.
Fuel shortages
That has meant a growing gap between the soaring global price of crude oil and domestic fuel prices.
Consequently, Chinese oil companies are losing money and are reluctant to increase production, knowing that would lead to even higher losses.
The result is fuel shortages across the country.
Large lines are a common sight outside many filling stations. Some have already shut down and tempers are rising.
State media reported that one man was killed in a fight after he tried to jump the queue at a petrol station in central China.
The government is hoping that higher prices will encourage oil refiners to boost output and reduce the fuel crisis.
But many companies may feel that the price hike is still not enough, especially if global oil prices continue to rise.
Inflation worries
Behind all this is China's insatiable appetite for oil.
The country's booming economy is sucking up crude at record rates and China is now the world's second largest consumer of oil after the US.
Net imports in the first eight months of this year soared by nearly 20%.
But rising fuel prices may have created another economic headache.
They are likely to add to soaring inflation which in August hit a 10-year high of 6.5%.
The central bank has already raised interest rates several times this year and another hike is likely before the end of the year.
Many analysts think that the increases are still not enough to curb inflation.
The government worries that inflation could lead to social unrest - rising prices were one of the factors in the run-up to the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
By Human Rights in China | 中国人权
October 29, 2007
Human Rights in China has learned that Shanghai petitioner and rights defender Mao Hengfeng was subject to another round of abuse at the Shanghai Women's Prison and at a hospital she was taken to earlier this month. Authorities prevented her husband, Wu Xuwei, from visiting her in prison until October 26. He now reports that Mao was beaten and force-fed in retaliation for publicizing mistreatment in July and August this year.
Mao Hengfeng told her husband that on September 13, at the instigation of prison authorities, a fellow inmate beat Mao in retaliation for revealing that she had been held in solitary confinement for 70 days. Mao was covered with bruises from the beating. She also reports being force-fed.
On September 24, prison authorities sent Mao to the Nanhui Prison Hospital. Mao had earlier refused to undergo a check-up because she feared being forcibly injected with drugs; this had been done during her incarceration at a psychiatric institution in the 1980s. At the hospital, Mao was stripped bare and tied to a bed such that she could only move her fingers. She was held this way until October 15, monitored by closed-circuit television, and force-fed by other inmates.
Her husband, Wu Xuwei, was finally able to visit Mao in prison on October 26. He alleges that his visit was delayed for 20 days because the authorities did not want him to see Mao's bruises evident from the September 13 beating. During his latest visit, Mao and her husband were supervised by prison guards, who stopped her from speaking several times when she attempted to go into details about being force-fed.
Dismissed from her soap factory job in 1988 when she refused to abort a second pregnancy, Mao Hengfeng has been petitioning this dismissal and subsequent abuses since 1989. As a result of these activities, she has been forcibly admitted to a psychiatric hospital three times, detained multiple times, and served a one-and-a-half year sentence of reeducation-through-labor (RTL). In early June 2006, officers from Shanghai's Yangpu District Daqiao public security station detained Mao in a guesthouse for violating residential surveillance rules. During her detention there, she broke two table lamps, and on January 12, 2007, was sentenced to two years and six months in prison on the charge of "intentional damage of property." Mao has been subject to a range of abuses in prison, including an excessive 70-day period of solitary confinement in July and August this year which contravened article 15 of the Chinese Prison Law, stipulating a maximum of 15 days.
Human Rights in China condemns the abusive and humiliating treatment which Mao Hengfeng is being subjected to in prison. Human Rights in China is further concerned about reports that prison authorities instigated another inmate to beat, monitor, and force-feed Mao, violating international standards on the rights of prisoners. "Retaliation against inmates who expose abusive conditions is outrageous," said Human Rights in China Executive Director Sharon Hom. "These kinds of abuses in prison violate both domestic law and relevant international standards. Instead of retaliating against the whistle-blower, prison authorities should conduct a full investigation."
This article was reported by Walt Bogdanich, Jake Hooker and Andrew W. Lehren and written by Mr. Bogdanich | The New York Times
October 31, 2007
MILAN -- In January, Honor International Pharmtech was accused of shipping counterfeit drugs into the United States. Even so, the Chinese chemical company -- whose motto is "Thinking Much of Honor" -- was openly marketing its products in October to thousands of buyers here at the world's biggest trade show for pharmaceutical ingredients.
Other Chinese chemical companies made the journey to the annual show as well, including one manufacturer recently accused by American authorities of supplying steroids to illegal underground labs and another whose representative was arrested at the 2006 trade show for patent violations. Also attending were two exporters owned by China's government that had sold poison mislabeled as a drug ingredient, which killed nearly 200 people and injured countless others in Haiti and in Panama.
Yet another chemical company, Orient Pacific International, reserved an exhibition booth in Milan, but its owner, Kevin Xu, could not attend. He was in a Houston jail on charges of selling counterfeit medicine for schizophrenia, prostate cancer, blood clots and Alzheimer's disease, among other maladies.
While these companies hardly represent all of the nearly 500 Chinese exhibitors, more than from any other country, they do point to a deeper problem: Pharmaceutical ingredients exported from China are often made by chemical companies that are neither certified nor inspected by Chinese drug regulators, The New York Times has found.
Because the chemical companies are not required to meet even minimal drug-manufacturing standards, there is little to stop them from exporting unapproved, adulterated or counterfeit ingredients. The substandard formulations made from those ingredients often end up in pharmacies in developing countries and for sale on the Internet, where more Americans are turning for cheap medicine.
In Milan, The Times identified at least 82 Chinese chemical companies that said they made and exported pharmaceutical ingredients -- yet not one was certified by the State Food and Drug Administration in China, records show. Nonetheless, the companies were negotiating deals at the pharmaceutical show, where suppliers wooed customers with live music, wine and vibrating chairs.
One of them was the Wuxi Hexia Chemical Company. When The Times showed Yan Jiangying, a top Chinese drug regulator, a list of 186 products being advertised by the company, including active pharmaceutical ingredients and finished drugs, Ms. Yan said, "This is definitely against the law."
Yet in China, chemical manufacturers that sell drug ingredients fall into a regulatory hole. Pharmaceutical companies are regulated by the food and drug agency. Chemical companies that make products as varied as fertilizer and industrial solvents are overseen by other agencies. The problem arises when chemical companies cross over into drug ingredients. "We have never investigated a chemical company," said Ms. Yan, deputy director of policy and regulation at the State Food and Drug Administration. "We don't have jurisdiction."
China's health officials have known of this regulatory gap since at least the mid-1990s, when a chemical company sold a tainted ingredient that killed nearly 100 children in Haiti. But Chinese regulatory agencies have failed to cooperate to stop chemical companies from exporting drug products.
In 2006, at least 138 Panamanians died or were disabled after another Chinese chemical company sold the same poisonous ingredient, diethylene glycol, which was mixed into cold medicine.
China has an estimated 80,000 chemical companies, and the United States Food and Drug Administration does not know how many sell ingredients used in drugs consumed by Americans.
The Times examined thousands of companies selling products on major business-to-business Internet trading sites and found more than 1,300 chemical companies offering pharmaceutical ingredients. How many others sell drug ingredients but don't advertise this way on the Web is not known.
If the Milan show is any guide, most, if not all, are not certified by China's drug authorities.
By Oliver August | WIRED Magazine
October 2007
I didn't know I was a surveillance target until the day I walked into a hotel in China's Fujian province. I was pushing past half a dozen workmen changing lightbulbs in the glum but busy lobby when a uniformed man stepped in front of me. Blue jacket, creased trousers, braided epaulets, peaked cap: government security officer. Politely, he asked whether I would mind answering a few questions. He stood erect, with the manicured swagger of a corporate CEO. Next to him, a gangly plainclothes colleague gave me a so-you-thought-we-wouldn't-catch-you look.
How had they known I would be here? The only people who had my itinerary were my editors in London. A few days earlier, I had sent them an email outlining my trip, and I'd been updating them daily by phone. I could only assume that the authorities had been monitoring my email and calls. I had been chasing down leads on the whereabouts of Lai Changxing, China's most-wanted man. Lai had cheated the government out of $3.6 billion by smuggling oil, cars, and cigarettes. Embarrassed, Beijing wanted to hinder any reporting of his case.
The two officers in the hotel demanded to see my passport and asked what I knew about Lai. Then they withdrew to a corner of the lobby to confer. Eventually, they took me to a police car, drove me to the airport, and put me on a plane to Beijing.
It was, in short, impressive evidence of the government's ability to monitor and control electronic communication. And my experience only hinted at the Chinese government's appetite for control. Beijing has recently added a new weapon to its arsenal of surveillance technologies, a system it believes to be a modern marvel: the Golden Shield. It took eight years and $700 million to build, and its mission is to "purify" the Internet -- an apparently urgent task. "Whether we can cope with the Internet is a matter that affects the development of socialist culture, the security of information, and the stability of the state," President Hu Jintao said in January.
The Golden Shield -- the latest addition to what is widely referred to as the Great Firewall of China -- was supposed to monitor, filter, and block sensitive online content. But only a year after completion, it already looks doomed to fail. True, surveillance remains widespread, and outspoken dissidents are punished harshly. But my experience as a correspondent in China for seven years suggests that the country's stranglehold on the communications of its citizens is slipping: Bloggers and other Web sources are rapidly supplanting Communist-controlled news outlets. Cyberprotests have managed to bring about an important constitutional change. And ordinary Chinese citizens can circumvent the Great Firewall and evade other forms of police observation with surprising ease. If they know how.
Like its namesake, the Great Firewall consists of hundreds of individual fortifications spread out along a vulnerable frontier. At its core is a giant bank of computers and servers. Traffic generated by China's 162 million Internet users is routed through the shield, which checks all requested URLs against a blacklist of tens of thousands of Internet addresses. The list includes pages offering political information deemed dangerous by the government, like BBC News and Voice of America. Access to these sites is blocked (at least in theory), and when users attempt to view one of them, they are punished with an involuntary time-out lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes. Search engines are similarly restricted. If you enter the characters for "democracy" or "Tiananmen Square massacre" into Google.cn you will generally get zero results. This is a technological breakthrough for the Chinese government. Until recently, it could not interfere with the inner workings of search engines and instead blocked entire sites, not just individual pages of a site.
The Golden Shield hardware -- supplied by Cisco and other US companies -- is supplemented by human censors who are paid about $170 a month. They sit at screens in warehouse-like buildings run by the Public Security Bureau. These foot soldiers in China's information war monitor domestic news sites, erasing and editing politically sensitive stories. Some sites provide the censors with access so the authorities can alter content directly. Others get an email or a call when changes are required. Similar methods are applied to blogs. Sensitive entries are erased, and in the most egregious cases blogs are shut down altogether.
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