Studies / Reports: December 2007 Archives

By Jim Yardley | The New York Times
28 December 2007

Every day, monitoring stations across the city measure air pollution to determine if the skies above this national capital can officially be designated blue. It is not an act of whimsy: with Beijing preparing to play host to the 2008 Olympic Games, the official Blue Sky ratings are the city's own measuring stick for how well it is cleaning up its polluted air.

Thursday did not bring good news. The gray, acrid skies rated an eye-reddening 421 on a scale of 500, with 500 being the worst. Friday rated 500. Both days far exceeded pollution levels deemed safe by the World Health Organization. In Beijing, officials warned residents to stay indoors until Saturday, but residents here are accustomed to breathing foul air. One man flew a kite in Tiananmen Square.

For Beijing officials, Thursday was especially depressing because the city was hoping to celebrate an environmental victory. In recent years, Beijing has steadily increased its Blue Sky days. The city needs one more, defined as scoring below 101, to reach its goal of 245 Blue Sky days this year. These improving ratings are how Beijing hopes to reassure the world that Olympic athletes will not be gasping for breath next August.

"We're definitely hoping for the best," said Jon Kolb, a member of the Canadian Olympic Committee, "but preparing for the worst."

For the world's Olympians, Beijing's air is a performance issue. The concern is that respiratory problems could impede athletic performance and prevent records from being broken. For the city's estimated 12 million residents, pollution is an inescapable health and quality-of-life issue. Skepticism about the validity of the Blue Sky ratings is common. Moreover, the concern is whether the city can clean itself up long after the Games are over.

Beijing has long ranked as one of the world's most polluted cities. To win the Games, Beijing promised a "Green Olympics" and undertook environmental initiatives now considered models for the rest of the country. But greening Beijing has not meant slowing it down. Officials also have encouraged an astonishing urbanization boom that has made environmental gains seem modest, if not illusory.

Beijing is like an athlete trying to get into shape by walking on a treadmill yet eating double cheeseburgers at the same time. Polluting factories have been moved or closed. But auto emissions are rising as the city adds up to 1,200 new cars and trucks every day. Dirty, coal-burning furnaces have been replaced, lowering the city's sulfur dioxide emissions. But fine-particle pollution has been exacerbated by a staggering citywide construction binge that shows no signs of letting up.

China's unsolved riddle is how to reconcile fast economic growth with environmental protection. But Beijing's Olympic deadline means the city needs an immediate answer. The ruling Communist Party envisions the Games as a public relations showcase and is leaving no detail untended. Scientists are cross-breeding chrysanthemums to ensure that flowers bloom in August.

>> Read the complete report

By Joseph Kahn and Mark Landler | The New York Times
December 21, 2007

HANDAN, China -- When residents of this northern Chinese city hang their clothes out to dry, the black fallout from nearby Handan Iron and Steel often sends them back to the wash.

Half a world away, neighbors of ThyssenKrupp's former steel mill in the Ruhr Valley of Germany once had a similar problem. The white shirts men wore to church on Sundays turned gray by the time they got home.

These two steel towns have an unusual kinship, spanning 5,000 miles and a decade of economic upheaval. They have shared the same hulking blast furnace, dismantled and shipped piece by piece from Germany's old industrial heartland to Hebei Province, China's new Ruhr Valley.

The transfer, one of dozens since the late 1990s, contributed to a burst in China's steel production, which now exceeds that of Germany, Japan and the United States combined. It left Germany with lost jobs and a bad case of postindustrial angst.

But steel mills spewing particulates into the air and sucking electricity from China's coal-fired power plants account for a big chunk of the country's surging emissions of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide. Germany, in contrast, has cleaned its skies and is now leading the fight against global warming.

In its rush to re-create the industrial revolution that made the West rich, China has absorbed most of the major industries that once made the West dirty. Spurred by strong state support, Chinese companies have become the dominant makers of steel, coke, aluminum, cement, chemicals, leather, paper and other goods that faced high costs, including tougher environmental rules, in other parts of the world. China has become the world's factory, but also its smokestack.

This mass shift of polluting industries has blighted China's economic rise. Double-digit growth rates have done less to improve people's lives when the damages to the air, land, water and human health are considered, some economists say. Outmoded production equipment will have to be replaced or retrofitted at high cost if the country intends to reduce pollution.

China's worsening environment has also upended the geopolitics of global warming. It produces and exports so many goods once made in the West that many wealthy countries can boast of declining carbon emissions, even while the world's overall emissions are rising quickly.

The Ruhr Valley city of Dortmund, where ThyssenKrupp once made steel, still suffers from high unemployment because of the loss of jobs to lower-cost countries like China. But Germans can buy Chinese-made iPods, washing machines and cargo ships at prices that, because of lax pollution controls, do not reflect the toll on the environment. And the outsourcing of polluting industries has given them cleaner air and water.

"It seems to me that China is making all the mistakes that we made in the 19th century," says Wilhelm Grote, an environmental regulator in Dortmund, who recalls washing his father's car as a child, only to see it immediately blanketed by soot. "They will find it is much more expensive to fix up later than to do it right from the start."

Having ignored the environmental consequences of its industrial binge for years, the Communist Party leadership now says it is determined to develop a cleaner economic model. Beijing has tried to enforce ambitious -- though so far unmet -- targets to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions.

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by CNN International | Source: The Associated Press
December 20, 2007

An online commentator who said next year's Beijing Olympics would force ordinary Chinese to live "like pigs and dogs" has been detained for nearly a week on a charge of subversion, his wife said Wednesday.

Though Beijing encourages Internet use for business and education, it tightly controls Web content, censoring anything it considers critical of -- or a threat to -- the Communist Party. Press freedom and human rights groups say China has jailed dozens of people for writings posted online.

Wang Dejia, who uses the pen name Jing Chu, has written numerous online articles about sensitive topics in China -- for example, backing Taiwan's bid for U.N. membership and criticizing Beijing for human rights abuses against journalists and dissidents.

Wang was taken from his home in Quanzhou County, part of southern China's Guilin city, early Friday on a charge of "subverting state authority," said his wife Wen Zhenyan. Officers confiscated his computer, memory cards, books and banking documents.

"The public security bureau said he was anti-communist," she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. Family members were told they were not allowed to visit Wang, who had often been under surveillance but never previously detained, his wife said.

In July, he told the Epoch Times, a newspaper linked to the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, that China's central government was ignoring the needs of common Chinese in the lead-up to the Olympics. Instead, he said, the Communist Party was most concerned about cracking down on dissidents and building new venues.

"Let the people live like pigs and dogs, I think that's how it will achieve its goal of a harmonious society," he said in the interview.

Press freedom group Reporters Without Borders said in a statement that Wang met with U.S. officials in October to discuss human rights issues. Wen said her husband did meet with a consular representative, but she didn't know what they talked about.

>> Read the complete article

By David Barboza | The New York Times
December 15, 2007

Here in southern China, beneath the looming mountains of Fujian Province, lie dozens of enormous ponds filled with murky brown water and teeming with eels, shrimp and tilapia, much of it destined for markets in Japan and the West.

Fuqing is one of the centers of a booming industry that over two decades has transformed this country into the biggest producer and exporter of seafood in the world, and the fastest-growing supplier to the United States.

But that growth is threatened by the two most glaring environmental weaknesses in China: acute water shortages and water supplies contaminated by sewage, industrial waste and agricultural runoff that includes pesticides. The fish farms, in turn, are discharging wastewater that further pollutes the water supply.

"Our waters here are filthy," said Ye Chao, an eel and shrimp farmer who has 20 giant ponds in western Fuqing. "There are simply too many aquaculture farms in this area. They're all discharging water here, fouling up other farms."

Farmers have coped with the toxic waters by mixing illegal veterinary drugs and pesticides into fish feed, which helps keep their stocks alive yet leaves poisonous and carcinogenic residues in seafood, posing health threats to consumers.

Environmental degradation, in other words, has become a food safety problem, and scientists say the long-term risks of consuming contaminated seafood could lead to higher rates of cancer and liver disease and other afflictions.

No one is more vulnerable to these health risks than the Chinese, because most of the seafood in China stays at home. But foreign importers are also worried. In recent years, the European Union and Japan have imposed temporary bans on Chinese seafood because of illegal drug residues. The United States blocked imports of several types of fish this year after inspectors detected traces of illegal drugs linked to cancer.

This week, officials from the United States and China signed an agreement in Beijing to improve oversight of Chinese fish farms as part of a larger deal on food and drug safety.

Yet regulators in both countries are struggling to keep contaminated seafood out of the market. China has shut down seafood companies accused of violating the law and blacklisted others, while United States regulators are concentrating on Chinese seafood for special inspections.

Fuqing (pronounced foo-CHING) is at the top of the list this year for refused shipments of seafood from China, with 43 rejections through November, according to records kept by the United States Food and Drug Administration. All of those rejections involved the use of illegal veterinary drugs.

By comparison, Thailand, also a major exporter of seafood to the United States, had only two refusals related to illegal veterinary drugs. China as a whole had 210 refusals for illegal drugs.

"For 50 years," said Wang Wu, a professor at Shanghai Fisheries University, "we've blindly emphasized economic growth. The only pursuit has been G.D.P., and now we can see that the water turns dirty and the seafood gets dangerous. Every year, there are food safety and environmental pollution accidents."

Environmental problems plaguing seafood would appear to be a bad omen for the industry. But with fish stocks in the oceans steadily declining and global demand for seafood soaring, farmed seafood, or aquaculture, is the future. And no country does more of it than China, which produced about 115 billion pounds of seafood last year.

China produces about 70 percent of the farmed fish in the world, harvested at thousands of giant factory-style farms that extend along the entire eastern seaboard of the country. Farmers mass-produce seafood just offshore, but mostly on land, and in lakes, ponds, rivers and reservoirs, or in huge rectangular fish ponds dug into the earth.

"They'll be a major supplier not just to the U.S., but to the world," said Richard Stavis, the chairman of Stavis Seafoods, an American company that imports Chinese catfish, tilapia and frog legs.

China began emerging as a seafood power in the 1990s as rapid economic growth became the top priority in the country. But environmental experts say that headlong pursuit of higher gross domestic product has devastated Chinese water quality and endangered the country's food supply. In Guangdong Province in southern China, fish contaminated with toxic chemicals like DDT are already creating health problems.

"There are heavy metals, mercury and flame retardants in fish samples we've tested," said Ming Hung Wong, a professor of biology at Hong Kong Baptist University. "We've got to stop the pollutants entering the food system."

More than half of the rivers in China are too polluted to serve as a source of drinking water. The biggest lakes in the country regularly succumb to harmful algal blooms. Seafood producers are part of the problem, environmental experts say. Enormous aquaculture farms concentrate fish waste, pesticides and veterinary drugs in their ponds and discharge the contaminated water into rivers, streams and coastal areas, often with no treatment.

"Water is the biggest problem in China," said Peter Leedham, the business manager at Sino Analytica, an independent food safety testing firm that works with companies that buy from China. "But my feeling is China will deal with it, because it has to. It just won't be a quick process."

>> Read the complete report

Agence France-Presse - Hong Kong
December 13, 2007

A leading Chinese anti-pollution campaigner Thursday launched a new website that names more than 4,000 companies, including 40 multi-national firms, belching out dangerous emissions across China.

Ma Jun, the author of "China's Water Crisis" and head of an environmental think tank, launched the China Air Pollution Map which pinpoints the worst polluters in factories and power plants south of the Yangtze River.

He hopes the map will help China tackle its worsening pollution problem.

"Access to information is a pre-condition for meaningful public participation," Ma said.

He added he hoped the site will shame companies into "providing the public with an open explanation and taking corrective action."

The new map, which has taken 10 months to pull together, uses data already publicly available from government departments and official media on factories that are breaking emission standards.

Out of the 4,000 violations, more than half are in southern China.

Visitors to the site (air.ipe.org.cn) will be able to view rankings of various air pollutant levels, and compare them to other cities.

The project aims to follow the success of a similar map run by Ma's Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, which has focused on polluters of China's waterways.

The scheme has sparked numerous media reports on the worst offenders and, in some cases, convinced companies to improve their treatment facilities.

The new scheme is backed by global environmental organisation WWF and ADM Capital Foundation.

"We believe there is a strong correspondence beteeen transparency and improved environmental regulation," Liam Slater, head of WWF's Hong Kong climate programme, told reporters.

At a press conference to launch the site, Ma said China has set tough environmental standards nationally, but they are often ignored on a local level.

Pollution has become a major problem in China as the economy booms and is second only to the United States in greenhouse gas emissions, which are blamed for global warming.

By RADIO FREE ASIA
December 07, 2007

When Chinese security forces opened fire on local protesters in the southern township of Dongzhou two years ago, the world suddenly took notice as never before of China's surging rural unrest.

Now, as Dongzhou remembers its dead--the official tally is three--reports of similar rural protests over land acquisition by local government, among other grievances, are surfacing several times a week. Meanwhile, life-threatening pollution problems and unpaid wages are likely to send China's urbanites out onto the streets.

Mass protests in the southeastern port city of Xiamen earlier this year persuaded local officials to beat a strategic retreat on plans to build a paraxylene (PX) plant in the city for a while.

But residents are planning a new series of demonstrations as news has emerged that the government is once more pushing the proposal to the fore.

The municipal government held a news conference Wednesday saying that an environmental impact assessment into the proposed plant had already been completed, along with public consultation lasting 10 days.

Opposition to chemical plant

Online forums saw calls for further mass demonstrations in the form of a "collective walk" beginning at 10 a.m. Saturday morning outside the municipal library, and walking to the city government offices to show the level of opposition to the plans.

One Xiamen resident told RFA's Cantonese service that no formal notification had been sent out of a demonstration, but that he would definitely attend if other people did.

"I would definitely go on a protest. We are all very concerned about this issue. This project would have an effect on the citizens of Xiamen if it were ever built. We are dead against such a thing." He said he believed such projects should be built away from major population centers.

Another Xiamen resident agreed: "In another 10 days, the government will announce whether or not this project will go ahead. The environmental assessment came out yesterday. Now they are running a consultation to hear the opinions of ordinary citizens."

>> Read the complete report

By Keith Bradsher | The New York Times
December 08, 2007

Every night, columns of hulking blue and red freight trucks invade China's major cities with a reverberating roar of engines and dark clouds of diesel exhaust so thick it dims headlights.

By daybreak in this sprawling metropolis in southeastern China, residents near thoroughfares who leave their windows open overnight find their faces stiff with a dark layer of diesel soot.

After Mary Leung opens her tiny open-air shop along a major road soon after dawn, she must wipe the soot off her countertops and tables; the tiny yellow-and-olive bird that has kept her company is harder to clean.

Trucks are the mules of this country's spectacularly expanding economy -- ubiquitous and essential, yet highly noxious.

Trucks here burn diesel fuel contaminated with more than 130 times the pollution-causing sulfur that the United States allows in most diesel. While car sales in China are now growing even faster than truck sales, trucks are by far the largest source of street-level pollution.

Tiny particles of sulfur-laden soot penetrate deep into residents' lungs, interfering with the absorption of oxygen. Nitrogen oxides from truck exhaust, which build all night because cities limit truck traffic by day, bind each morning with gasoline fumes from China's growing car fleet to form dense smog that inflames lungs and can cause severe coughing and asthma.

The 10 million trucks on Chinese roads, more than a quarter of all vehicles in this country, are a major reason that China accounts for half the world's annual increase in oil consumption. Sating their thirst helped push the price of oil to nearly $100 a barrel this year, before a recent decline, and has propelled China past the United States as the world's largest emitter of global-warming gases.

Yet cleaning up truck pollution presents complex problems for China's leaders.

For instance, regulators have begun raising emissions standards for new trucks, but have left millions of older ones belching black smoke. Forcing businesses and farmers to buy more expensive vehicles could put a drag on the economy, which already faces inflationary pressure from rising food prices and other costs.

That fear of inflation -- not to mention political and social unrest -- has led Beijing to prevent the country's mostly state-owned oil companies from increasing diesel prices at the pump in pace with global oil prices. Raising fuel prices for farmers, whose incomes have lagged behind those of city dwellers and who need diesel for their tractors, is one concern. Lower diesel prices also essentially subsidize every manufacturer in China's elaborate export machine.

But price controls create a vicious circle. Oil giants like Sinopec, losing money on every gallon of diesel they refine because of the low sales prices, upgrade refineries slowly, if at all. And they seek out cheap crude, which has high levels of sulfur, to make diesel, negating the effects of higher emissions standards for new vehicles.

"Sinopec is trying our best to purchase low-quality crudes -- much heavier and more sulfur content," said Evan Jia, a Sinopec spokesman. "We buy those kinds of crudes to lower the purchasing cost."

Low diesel prices frequently make trucks more cost-effective than trains, which pollute less. Sales of large freight trucks in China outpace those in the United States by a wide margin. Demand for diesel at service stations is so great, and supplies are so tight, that rationing and shortages have become common. Truck drivers idle for hours only to be allowed to buy as little as five gallons of fuel.

Since 2000, sales of heavy-duty trucks have risen sixfold while car sales have risen eightfold. This has created myriad problems, from gridlock that chokes China's cities to pollution that chokes its citizens, contributing each year to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths from heart and lung problems, according to the World Bank.

Working in the Fumes

Ms. Leung, the shopkeeper, is a slender, tidy, 44-year-old woman with a cheery disposition. She used to keep her little bird in a wooden cage over the entrance to the two battered plastic tables where she serves soft drinks and fresh waffles for less than 40 cents each.

All day, trucks, buses and cars grind past. While large trucks are banned in Guangzhou from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., some obtain special permits for daytime access. And many medium-size trucks with diesel engines are allowed in the city during the day if they carry local license plates.

"We had to put out bowls of water in the cage," Ms. Leung said, so the bird could constantly wash itself. She finally moved the bird, a Pekin robin, to her home on a quieter street.

She tries not to think about what the exhaust fumes are doing to her own health.

"My throat hurts all the time," she said. "I suck on throat lozenges for it. It's unbearable."

International experts say that hundreds of millions of Chinese are exposed every day to the potentially lethal mix of soot particles and smog.

American regulators have labeled diesel soot a likely carcinogen. A growing body of academic literature blames tiny airborne particles from diesel exhaust, coal-fired power plants and other sources for up to 90 percent of all deaths from outdoor air pollution, because the particles penetrate so deeply into lungs. Diesel engines also emit large quantities of nitrogen oxides, which react with gasoline fumes to produce photochemical smog when hit by sunlight.

Mainland Chinese atmospheric scientists concluded in an analysis this year in The Journal of Environmental Sciences that, here in Guangzhou, particles were the pollutant farthest out of line with air-quality norms 226 days a year. Sulfur dioxide, which comes mainly from burning coal, was the pollutant that exceeded norms by the widest margin 45 days a year, while nitrogen oxides were the most prominent pollutant 23 days a year.

The air was relatively clean on the remaining 71 days a year.

New tests by Chinese and American researchers in Tianjin, in northeastern China, found that diesel engines in trucks and buses accounted for 93 percent of all nitrogen oxides from vehicles in China and 97 percent of particles.

A separate academic study of diesel exhaust here in Guangzhou found that Chinese trucks put out particles in unusually large quantities and sizes, as engines with often inadequate or damaged emissions equipment were forced to pull overweight loads.

Ms. Leung said she had little choice but to stick it out.

She and her husband had a shop on a less-busy street, but the building was torn down and the local government gave her the current lease as a substitute. They are not allowed to sell the lease or apply for a different one, and the shop is their sole means of support for two daughters, the elder one the first in the family to go to college.

The only option, Ms. Leung said, is to hope that her building will be condemned so the city will issue her a lease in a more healthful location. "I'm dreaming of it," she said.

>> Read the complete report

By Jim Yardley | The New York Times
December 05, 2007

Unnoticed and unappreciated for five decades, a large female turtle with a stained, leathery shell is now a precious commodity in this city's decaying zoo. She is fed a special diet of raw meat. Her small pool has been encased with bulletproof glass. A surveillance camera monitors her movements. A guard is posted at night.

The agenda is simple: The turtle must not die.

Earlier this year, scientists concluded that she was the planet's last known female Yangtze giant soft-shell turtle. She is about 80 years old and weighs almost 90 pounds.

As it happens, the planet also has only one undisputed, known male. He lives at a zoo in the city of Suzhou. He is 100 years old and weighs about 200 pounds. They are the last hope of saving a species believed to be the largest freshwater turtles in the world.

"It's a very dire situation," said Peter Pritchard, a prominent turtle expert in the United States who has helped in trying to save the species. "This one is so big and it has such an aura of mystery."

For many Chinese, turtles symbolize health and longevity, but the saga of the last two Yangtze giant soft-shells is more symbolic of the threatened state of wildlife and biodiversity in China. Pollution, hunting and rampant development are destroying natural habitats, and also endangering plant and animal populations.

China contains some of the world's richest troves of biodiversity, yet the latest major survey of plants and animals reveals a bleak picture that has grown bleaker during the past decade. Nearly 40 percent of all mammal species in China are now endangered, scientists say. For plants, the situation is worse; 70 percent of all nonflowering plant species and 86 percent of flowering species are considered threatened.

An overriding problem is the fierce competition for land and water. China's goal of quadrupling its economy by 2020 means that industry, growing cities and farmers are jostling for a limited supply of usable land.

Cities or factories often claim farmland for expansion; farmers, in turn, reclaim marginal land that could be habitat. Already, China has lost half of its wetlands, according to one survey.

For the Chinese scientists and conservationists trying to reverse these trends, the challenge begins with trying to convince the government that protecting wildlife is an important priority. For centuries, Chinese leaders emphasized dominance over nature rather than coexistence with it. Animals and plants are still often regarded as commodities valued for use as medicine or food, rather than as essential pieces of a natural order.

"The whole idea of ecology and ecosystems is a new thing in the culture," said Lu Zhi, a professor of conservation biology at Peking University.

Scientists say China's status as a leading center of biodiversity makes the threatened state of wildlife a global concern. Many of China's species are concentrated in the mountainous southwestern region -- sometimes popularized in the West as Shangri-La -- as well as in Tibet, Hainan Island and along the North Korean border. Endangered indigenous animals include the giant panda, several varieties of pheasants and monkeys, and a range of small mammals including shrews and rodents.

"China is one of a small handful of countries, maybe a dozen, that has remarkably high numbers of species, and a remarkably high number of species that are not found anywhere else," said Jeffrey A. McNeely, chief scientist for the World Conservation Union.

Nearly every major international conservation group has established a China office to promote different wildlife protection initiatives. The group WildAid has sponsored a public education campaign featuring billboards with the Chinese basketball star Yao Ming. "Endangered species are our friends," Mr. Yao said at a news conference last year in Beijing.

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By The Associated Press | The New York Times
05 December 2007

(Geneva, Switzerland): China continues to evict 13,000 people each month in preparation for the Beijing Olympics, despite worldwide attention and increased scrutiny, a housing rights group said Wednesday.

The Center on Housing Rights and Evictions said a recent trip to the Chinese capital confirmed an estimate it made earlier this year that 1.5 million people would be displaced by the time the 2008 Games are held.

Beijing says the group is grossly inflating the number of people being relocated as a result of the Olympic preparations, and that residents are content with the compensation they have received.

''Despite courageous protests inside China, and condemnation by many international human rights organizations, the Beijing municipality and Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games have persisted with these evictions and displacements,'' said Jean du Plessis, the Geneva-based COHRE's deputy director.

The group -- which claimed in June that 1.25 million had already been displaced -- said it returned to Beijing in August and found that forced evictions were continuing unabated.

In September, the Beijing municipality demolished several buildings in a run-down neighborhood called the ''petitioners' village'' in Fengtai District, which provided housing for thousands from all over China who came to complain to the central government about land seizures, forced evictions and corruption, COHRE said.

''Evictions in Beijing often involve the complete demolition of poor peoples' houses,'' the group said. ''The inhabitants are then forced to relocate far from their communities and workplaces, with higher transportation costs driving them further into poverty.

''In Beijing, and in China more generally, the process of demolition and eviction is characterized by arbitrariness and lack of due process. In many cases, tenants are given little or no notice of their eviction and do not receive the promised compensation.''

>> Read the complete article

By Human Rights Watch
December 03, 2007

'Work and Study' Programs Put Hundreds of Thousands of Children at Risk

The Chinese government should abolish the use of income-generating child labor schemes in middle and junior high schools because of their chronic abuses, Human Rights Watch said today. Many programs interfere with children's education, lack basic health and safety guarantees, and involve long hours and dangerous work."China claims that it is fighting child labor, and repeatedly cites its legal prohibition against the practice as proof," said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. "But the government actively violates its own prohibitions by running large programs through the school system that use child labor, lack sufficient health and safety guarantees, and exploit loopholes in domestic labor laws."  
 
Under "Work and Study" programs regulated by the Ministry of Education, schools in impoverished areas are encouraged to set up income-generating activities to make up for budgetary shortfalls. According to official statistical material from the Ministry of Education seen by Human Rights Watch, more than 400,000 middle and junior high schools, which are for children ages 12 to 16, nationwide are running agricultural and manufacturing schemes. In 2004, proceeds from Work and Study programs generated over 10 billion yuan (US$1.25 billion), the statistics show.  
 
Chinese law prohibits the use of child of labor under age 16 but stipulates that children may be employed under special circumstances, such as in sports or in the arts, or if their "occupational training" and "educational labor" does not adversely affect their personal health and safety. Regulations that govern Work and Study programs in middle and junior high schools prohibit hazardous work and stress that "education must come first," but fail to provide a clear definition of the acceptable kind, intensity, and overall time duration of this special category of work.  
 
The majority of schools limit these schemes to seasonal agricultural work (such as growing and harvesting crops), improving school facilities, or producing small handicrafts over summer breaks, either independently or through contract with outside employers.  
 
But overly vague Work and Study regulations and poor supervision have led to widespread abuse of the system by schools and employers alike. Children as young as 12 have been employed in heavy agricultural and hazardous construction work. Others have been dispatched to local factories for weeks or months of "summer employment." Some schools have turned into full-fledged workshops to produce local handiwork or foodstuff while relegating teaching to a few hours a week. 

 
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