Studies / Reports: November 2008 Archives
By Andrew Jacobs | THE NEW YORK TIMES
November 25, 2008
The Chinese government reacted angrily on Monday to what it called a slanderous United Nations report that alleges systemic torture of political and criminal detainees. The government said the authors were biased, untruthful and driven by a political agenda.
The report, issued Friday by the United Nations Committee Against Torture, documented what the authors described as widespread abuse in the Chinese legal system, one that often gains convictions through forced confessions.
The report recounts China's use of "secret prisons" and the widespread harassment of lawyers who take on rights cases, and it criticizes the government's extralegal system of punishment, known as re-education through labor, which hands down prison terms to dissidents without judicial review.
"The state party should conduct prompt, impartial and effective investigations into all allegations of torture and ill treatment and should ensure that those responsible are prosecuted," said the report, which was written by a 10-member committee of independent experts.
Qin Gang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, called the document "untrue and slanderous," and said that China cherished human rights and opposed torture. "To our regret, some biased committee members, in drafting the observations, chose to ignore the substantial materials provided by the Chinese Government," he said in a statement posted Monday on the ministry's Web site, adding that they "even fabricated some unverified information." The ministry did not describe the material it had provided to the United Nations committee.
The report's publication is another embarrassment for the Communist Party, which has been striving to demonstrate its commitment to human rights. Last month, the government was infuriated by the European Union's decision to honor Hu Jia, one of the country's best-known dissidents, who is serving a three-and-a-half year prison term for subversion; last week, China was angered by a United States Congressional report that criticized what it called China's failure to fulfill a pledge to improve human rights leading up to the Olympic Games and during them.
"Illegal detentions and harassment of dissidents and petitioners followed the Chinese government and Communist Party's instructions to officials to ensure a 'harmonious' and dissent-free Olympics," the report said. "Individuals detained for circulating a 'We Want Human Rights, Not Olympics' petition are now serving sentences in prison and 're-education through labor' centers."
Although China's Constitution includes provisions to protect human rights and China has ratified numerous international conventions banning torture, public security officials frequently use coercion to gain signed confessions. "I have yet to see a political case in which the person was not tortured or mistreated," said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher based in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch. Even though torture is technically illegal under Chinese law, he added, there is no explicit prohibition against evidence obtained through coercion.
Human rights advocates say that the government's crackdown on dissenters has not let up since the Games, when petitioners seeking permission to demonstrate in parks officially designated for protests were whisked away by the police.
The most recent cases include that of Guo Quan, an associate professor at Nanjing Normal University, who was detained on Nov. 13 on suspicion of "inciting subversion of state power" after he established an independent political party. Earlier, Liu Xueli, a farmer from Henan Province whose land had been confiscated by local officials, sought a protest permit during the Olympics and was sentenced to re-education through labor.
On Friday, a court in Chengdu handed down a three-year sentence to Chen Daojun, a journalist and environmental advocate who was convicted of "inciting to subvert state power." Mr. Chen was detained in May after he published articles on the Tibetan quest for greater autonomy and the spate of anti-Western demonstrations that erupted across China after the Olympic torch relay was disrupted by protesters in Paris, London and San Francisco.
Although prosecutors accused Mr. Chen, 40, of slandering the Communist Party, his lawyer, Zhu Jiuhu, suggested that the authorities might have been especially irked by Mr. Chen's participation in a demonstration this year opposing the construction of a petrochemical plant near Chengdu. Mr. Zhu said he was denied access to his client; the trial, he added, lasted less than an hour. "We tried our hardest," he said.
In an interview on Monday, Mr. Chen's wife, Zeng Qirong, said she had not seen her husband since he was taken into custody. She said he had often written literary criticism or articles about rural life.
The detention, she said, would be particularly onerous for the couple's 10-year-old son and Mr. Chen's sickly parents. "The process was not fair," she said of the trial. "They were only articles. It was his own opinion. He was only describing the way society is."
Agence France Presse - via UNCENSORED Yahoo! TECH News
November 22, 2008
China reacted angrily Saturday to a US congressional report that accused Beijing of developing sophisticated cyber warfare and militarising its space programme.
The annual China report to Congress of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission was aimed at misleading the public and impeding bilateral cooperation, foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.
"The commission has all along seen China through dark glasses and has deliberately attacked China with slanderous accusations aimed at misleading public opinion and obstructing the development of Sino-US relations," Qin said.
"The report is unworthy of rebuttal and the aims of the commission are doomed to failure," he said in a statement on his ministry's website.
The report issued in Washington Thursday accused China of developing a sophisticated cyber warfare programme aimed at penetrating US computer networks to extract sensitive information.
"China has an active cyber espionage programme," the report said.
"China is targeting US government and commercial computers."
The panel also criticised Beijing of exercising "heavy-handed government control" over its economy and "continuing arms sales and military support to rogue regimes" such as Sudan, Myanmar and Iran.
The commission also issued a warning about China's space programme. "China continues to make significant progress in developing space capabilities, many of which easily translate to enhanced military capacity," it said.
Qin urged the commission to stop issuing such reports and refrain from interfering in China's internal affairs.
By Edward Wong | The New York Times
November 19, 2008
URUMQI, China -- An exhibit on the first floor of the museum here gives the government's unambiguous take on the history of this border region: "Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China," says one prominent sign.
But walk upstairs to the second floor, and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story.
One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down, her lips pursed in death, her high cheekbones and long nose the most obvious signs that she is not what one thinks of as Chinese.
The Loulan Beauty is one of more than 200 remarkably well-preserved mummies discovered in the western deserts here over the last few decades. The ancient bodies have become protagonists in a very contemporary political dispute over who should control the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
The Chinese authorities here face an intermittent separatist movement of nationalist Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who number nine million in Xinjiang.
At the heart of the matter lie these questions: Who first settled this inhospitable part of western China? And for how long has the oil-rich region been part of the Chinese empire?
Uighur nationalists have gleaned evidence from the mummies, whose corpses span thousands of years, to support historical claims to the region.
Foreign scholars say that at the very least, the Tarim mummies -- named after the vast Tarim Basin where they were found -- show that Xinjiang has always been a melting pot, a place where people from various corners of Eurasia founded societies and where cultures overlapped.
Contact between peoples was particularly frequent in the heyday of the Silk Road, when camel caravans transported goods that flowed from as far away as the Mediterranean. "It's historically been a place where cultures have mixed together," said Yidilisi Abuduresula, 58, a Uighur archaeologist in Xinjiang working on the mummies.
The Tarim mummies seem to indicate that the very first people to settle the area came from the west -- down from the steppes of Central Asia and even farther afield -- and not from the fertile plains and river valleys of the Chinese interior. The oldest, like the Loulan Beauty, date back 3,800 years.
Some Uighurs have latched on to the fact that the oldest mummies are most likely from the west as evidence that Xinjiang has belonged to the Uighurs throughout history. A modern, nationalistic pop song praising the Loulan Beauty has even become popular.
"The people found in Loulan were Uighur people, according to the materials," said a Uighur tour guide in the city of Kashgar who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of running afoul of the Chinese authorities. "The nationalities of Xinjiang are very complicated. There have been many since ancient times."
Scholars generally agree that Uighurs did not migrate to what is now Xinjiang from Central Asia until the 10th century. But, uncomfortably for the Chinese authorities, evidence from the mummies also offers a far more nuanced history of settlement than the official Chinese version.
By that official account, Zhang Qian, a general of the Han dynasty, led a military expedition to Xinjiang in the second century B.C. His presence is often cited by the ethnic Han Chinese when making historical claims to the region.
The mummies show, though, that humans entered the region thousands of years earlier, and almost certainly from the west.
What is indisputable is that the Tarim mummies are among the greatest recent archaeological finds in China, perhaps the world.
Four are in glass display cases in the main museum here in Urumqi, the regional capital. Their skin is parched and blackened from the wear and tear of thousands of years, but their bodies are strikingly intact, preserved by the dry climate of the western desert.
Some foreign scholars say the Chinese government, eager to assert a narrative of longtime Chinese dominance of Xinjiang, is unwilling to face the fact that the mummies provide evidence of heterogeneity throughout the region's history of human settlement.
As a result, they say, the government has been unwilling to give broad access to foreign scientists to conduct genetic tests on the mummies.
"In terms of advanced scientific research on the mummies, it's just not happening," said Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania who has been at the forefront of foreign scholarship of the mummies.
Mr. Mair first spotted one of the mummies, a red-haired corpse called the Cherchen Man, in the back room of a museum in Urumqi while leading a tour of Americans there in 1988, the first year the mummies were put on display.
Since then, he says that he has been obsessed with pinpointing the origins of the mummies, intent on proving a theory dear to him: that the movement of peoples throughout history is far more common than previously thought.
Mr. Mair has assembled various groups of scholars to do research on the mummies. In 1993, the Chinese government tried to prevent Mr. Mair from leaving China with 52 tissue samples after having authorized him to go to Xinjiang and to collect them.
But a Chinese researcher managed to slip a half-dozen vials to Mr. Mair. From those samples, an Italian geneticist concluded in 1995 that at least two of the mummies had a European genetic marker.
The Chinese government in recent years has allowed genetic research on the mummies to be conducted only by Chinese scientists.
By Edward Wong | THE NEW YORK TIMES
November 14, 2008
CHANG'AN, China -- Wang Denggui, father of three, arrived more than a year ago in the palm-lined streets this southern town with a single goal: toil in a factory to save for his children's school tuition.
But the plans of Mr. Wang and thousands of co-workers unraveled at noon on Nov. 1, when the Taiwanese chairman of their ailing shoe factory climbed over a factory wall to flee the country and his debts. That left several American shoe companies with unfilled orders and 2,000 workers without jobs.
"He just ran without telling anyone," Mr. Wang said.
For decades, the steamy Pearl River Delta area of southern Guangdong Province served as a primary engine for China's astounding economic growth. But an export slowdown that began earlier this year and that has been magnified by the global financial crisis of recent months is contributing to the shutdown of tens of thousands of small and mid-size factories here and in other coastal regions, forcing laborers to scramble for other jobs or return home to the countryside.
Furthermore, the slowdown inhibits China's ability to work with other nations in alleviating the worldwide crisis.
The Pearl River Delta, known as the world's factory, powered an export industry that pushed China's annual growth rate into the double digits and provided work for migrants from interior provinces with poor farmland. But circumstances have changed quickly. The slowdown in exports contributed to the closing of at least 67,000 factories across China in the first half of the year, according to government statistics. Labor disputes and protests over lost back wages have surged, igniting fear in local officials.
After the shutdown of their shoe factory, called Weixu in Chinese and China Top Industries in English, Mr. Wang and some co-workers took to the streets in protest, demanding two months of back pay, or $440 on average. The government called in the riot police. Seven workers were thrown in jail and six were beaten, including Mr. Wang, he said.
"I plan to return home once I get my money," Mr. Wang said as he stood outside the factory on Tuesday, showing the bloody shin wound that he said resulted from a blow from a metal baton. (The police declined to comment.) "I'm over 50 years old, and I won't be able to find work. I'll just retire."
Under pressure from Beijing to maintain social stability, local officials are also trying to tamp down unrest by doling out back wages. Here in Chang'an, after the worker protest, the government shelled out more than $1 million to pay back wages to most of the workers at the shoe factory. (Mr. Wang and some other laborers say they are still without back pay.)
The slowdown in exports has accelerated a major shift in the nature of Chinese manufacturing: small factories that were already being pinched by rising costs of labor, transportation and raw materials, as well as by the appreciating yuan, are closing en masse. That is especially the case in these towns scattered around the city of Dongguan, known for churning out low-end products. Soon the labor-intensive factories that rely solely on migrant work could disappear from southern China, and foreign companies could contract with similar factories in Vietnam and other countries where costs are lower.
"There's very serious damage being done down there, I don't deny it, and I think it'll get worse because we haven't seen the full impact of the economic downturn in Europe," said Arthur Kroeber, managing director of Dragonomics, an economic research and advisory firm based in Beijing. "I think next year we might see export growth in the country as a whole go down to 0 percent."
The export sector is still growing but has slowed considerably; year-on-year growth was at 9 percent in October compared with 26 percent in September 2007, Mr. Kroeber said.
The social problems arising from the slowdown have stirred anxiety in the top leadership of the Communist Party, whose legitimacy is based on maintaining economic growth. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao is pushing for policies that will increase domestic consumer consumption to wean China off its reliance on exports. Last Sunday, the government unveiled a stimulus package worth $586 billion over the next two years -- the largest ever announced in China -- to help create jobs, mostly by building new transportation infrastructure.
Foreign governments expecting China to take the lead in addressing the global crisis will be disappointed, say analysts and scholars. Chinese officials say they are focused on trying to ease domestic problems and keeping the country's annual growth rate above 8 percent, which they see as vital to generating enough new jobs. Some analysts say economic expansion could drop to as little as 5.8 percent in the fourth quarter this year, down from about 11 percent in 2007.
"I think China foresees that it'll need to spend a lot of money to get itself out of the current domestic situation," said Victor Shih, an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University who studies the political economy of China. "On the global financial crisis, China will not take a leading role."
The mass layoffs have led to a profound change in the movements this year of migrant workers like Mr. Wang who spend virtually the entire year away from home. Many are heading home early for the Chinese New Year, in late January, and say they might not return to work in the coastal regions. A worker in the railway station in Guangzhou said that from Oct. 11 to Oct. 27, there were 1.17 million passengers on trains leaving the station, an increase of 129,000 over the same period last year. There have been reports of a similar jump in other regions.
By Robert R. Frump | Shipping Digest
November 10, 2008
Tim Demarais, a vice president of ABRO Industries, was cruising through the exhibits at the Canton Trade Fair in the fall of 2002 when he spied a picture of his wife happily staring back at him from a tube of super epoxy.
It was only then that ABRO, a South Bend, Ind.-based exporter of quality adhesives, epoxies and fillers to developing countries, discovered that its products and its packaging -- including the one with the photo of Katy Demarais on the label -- had been counterfeited and offered at a fraction of ABRO prices.
"I really was stunned to see a booth, a Hunan Magic Booth, full of ABRO products," Demarais said. "It had our epoxy, our super-glue, our gasket-maker. They literally had assumed our corporate identity.
"I noticed they had the actual photo of my wife in some of the paperwork," he said. "And I asked them, 'Who is this woman?' And they said, 'It's just some Western model.' I said: 'Western model! This is my wife!' "
Hunan Magic and other counterfeiters of U.S. goods steal more than the packaging and the brand image, of course. U.S. job and exports are at stake, and the problem has moved beyond the high profile knock-offs of film videos and expensive watches to the less glamorous grocery shelf and stock room and parts items.
The FBI estimates that intellectual property theft costs the U.S. economy more than $250 billion a year. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, that translates into more than 750,000 lost jobs.
Exactly what that means in terms of lost exports is tough to quantify, but Jonathan Huneke, vice president of the U.S. Council for International Business, believes it is profound.
"Products with significant IP (intellectual property) make up more than half of all U.S. exports, driving 40 percent of the country's growth," he said.
And according to Hank Cox, a spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers, the problem is made worse by the fact that most small businesses do not know there is a problem.
"Research conducted in the spring of 2005 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office indicates that only 15 percent of small businesses that do business overseas know that a U.S. patent or trademark provides protection only in the United States," Cox said.
He also noted that the FBI reports that in the U.S., all traditionally defined property crimes accounted for $16 billion in losses in 2005. "The best estimates we have for losses from piracy and counterfeiting exceed that number by five or 10 times," the NAM official said.
True, there have been some high profile busts lately. A doctor known as the "King of Viagra" pleaded guilty in October to being part of a global conspiracy to sell fake medicines in the United Kingdom. Dr. George Patino, 48, is expected to do serious jail time for helping to smuggle in fake copies of the impotence drug from illicit factories in China, Pakistan and elsewhere in Asia. He was caught in a sting operation.
Big pharmaceutical companies can devote millions of dollars to anti-counterfeiting operations and prosecutions, but the onslaught of piracy can be deadly to a medium-sized business such as ABRO.
With sales of about $100 million annually, nearly all of it outside the U.S., ABRO saw its sales plummet after the Canton Fair discovery because Hunan Magic and some other Chinese companies were offering much cheaper wholesale prices of inferior goods in fake ABRO packaging. Its U.S. suppliers saw orders drop by 18 to 20 percent, resulting in layoffs. The company said it lost tens of millions of dollars in sales as exports slumped significantly for years.
But even as business was dropping, Peter F. Baranay, president of privately held ABRO, made a decision. He fought back and fought back hard, even though it meant a concerted effort in the 150-plus countries where ABRO products were sold and hurt by counterfeits.
"We were pretty much the poster child for the new piracy," he said in an interview. "We were one of the first to let people know piracy is not just about software and movies and Gucci bags."
Indeed, the goods sold by ABRO are pretty much everyday items with relatively low margins. Over 65 years, the company developed a good brand name for products ranging from sealants, tapes and lubricants to small motorcycles. ABRO manufactured nearly all of them in the U.S. and exported nearly all of them to Third World markets.
Nearly six years after discovering its entire company had been counterfeited, ABRO has reclaimed its identity. Along the way, the head of Hunan Magic ended up in a London prison cell, at least briefly, following a "sting operation." The company is still in business but has agreed under pressure from the Chinese government to stop knocking off ABRO products; instead it presents its own product line under its name.
ABRO now routinely spends more than $1 million a year on private investigators, undercover operations and legal counsel.
"You rip off my product, that is a criminal activity," Baranay said. "We've gotten that message out there and we've gotten our company back. I'm happy to say we are back to our original level of sales and above that level, aiming at $250 million a year now.
"We also have a full-time attorney on staff devoted to nothing but intellectual property protection," Baranay said. "And he is on the road 75 percent of the time."
Not all stories end so happily.
In the world of small business, there may not always be a chance to fight back. A painter and designer, who asked that her name not be used, two years ago sent out a fabric design to be reproduced by a Chinese manufacturer. She obtained an international copyright and seemed to follow all the steps needed for a modest expansion of her little operation in a resort town.
But as she was holding a press conference to unveil her new design, friends hesitantly told her that they had already seen purses with the design available in the shops of the tourist area where she worked. The counterfeits were from China.
"The fakes actually were turned around faster than her originals," a friend said. "There was nothing she could do that made any sort of economic sense as she had no resources to fight it. All of us in the design business learned a lesson that very small businesses must be very careful in outsourcing material."
By CBS NEWS - 60 MINUTES - Broadcast on November 09, 2008
60 Minutes is going to take you to one of the most toxic places on Earth - a place government officials and gangsters don't want you to see. It's a town in China where you can't breathe the air or drink the water, a town where the blood of the children is laced with lead.
It's worth risking a visit because much of the poison is coming out of the homes, schools and offices of America. This is a story about recycling - about how your best intentions to be green can be channeled into an underground sewer that flows from the United States and into the wasteland.
That wasteland is piled with the burning remains of some of the most expensive, sophisticated stuff that consumers crave. And 60 Minutes and correspondent Scott Pelley discovered that the gangs who run this place wanted to keep it a secret.
What are they hiding? The answer lies in the first law of the digital age: newer is better. In with the next thing, and out with the old TV, phone or computer. All of this becomes obsolete, electronic garbage called "e-waste."
Computers may seem like sleek, high-tech marvels. But what's inside them?
"Lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium, polyvinyl chlorides. All of these materials have known toxicological effects that range from brain damage to kidney disease to mutations, cancers," Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and authority on waste management at the Natural Resources Defense Council, explained.
"The problem with e-waste is that it is the fastest-growing component of the municipal waste stream worldwide," he said.
Asked what he meant by "fastest-growing," Hershkowitz said. "Well, we throw out about 130,000 computers every day in the United States."
And he said over 100 million cell phones are thrown out annually.
At a recycling event in Denver, 60 Minutes found cars bumper-to-bumper for blocks, in a line that lasted for hours. They were there to drop off their computers, PDAs, TVs and other electronic waste.
Asked what he thought happens once his e-waste goes into recycling, one man told Pelley, "Well my assumption is they break it apart and take all the heavy metals and out and then try to recycle some of the stuff that's bad."
Most folks in line were hoping to do the right thing, expecting that their waste would be recycled in state-of-the-art facilities that exist here in America. But really, there's no way for them to know where all of this is going. The recycling industry is exploding and, as it turns out, some so-called recyclers are shipping the waste overseas, where it's broken down for the precious metals inside.
Executive Recycling, of Englewood, Colo., which ran the Denver event, promised the public on its Web site: "Your e-waste is recycled properly, right here in the U.S. - not simply dumped on somebody else."
That policy helped Brandon Richter, the CEO of Executive Recycling, win a contract with the city of Denver and expand operations into three western states.
Asked what the problem is with shipping this waste overseas, Richter told Pelley, "Well, you know, they've got low-income labor over there. So obviously they don't have all of the right materials, the safety equipment to handle some of this material."
Executive does recycling in-house, but 60 Minutes was curious about shipping containers that were leaving its Colorado yard. 60 Minutes found one container filled with monitors. They're especially hazardous because each picture tube, called a cathode ray tube or CRT, contains several pounds of lead. It's against U.S. law to ship them overseas without special permission. 60 Minutes took down the container's number and followed it to Tacoma, Wash., where it was loaded on a ship.
When the container left Tacoma, 60 Minutes followed it for 7,459 miles to Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong.
It turns out the container that started in Denver was just one of thousands of containers on an underground, often illegal smuggling route, taking America's electronic trash to the Far East.
Our guide to that route was Jim Puckett, founder of the Basel Action Network, a watchdog group named for the treaty that is supposed to stop rich countries from dumping toxic waste on poor ones. Puckett runs a program to certify ethical recyclers. And he showed 60 Minutes what's piling up in Hong Kong.
"It's literally acres of computer monitors," Pelley commented. "Is it legal to import all of these computer monitors into Hong Kong?"
"No way. It is absolutely illegal, both from the standpoint of Hong Kong law but also U.S. law and Chinese law. But it's happening," Puckett said.
So he personally drove us to a shop.
"Let me explain what's happening here," Pelley remarked while in Guiyu. "We were brought into the mayor's office. The mayor told us that we're essentially not welcome here, but he would show us one place where computers are being dismantled and this is that place. A pretty tidy shop. The mayor told us that we would be welcome to see the rest of the town, but that the town wouldn't be prepared for our visit for another year.
By RADIO FREE ASIA (credits at end of article)
November 04, 2008
Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in China's formerly booming coastal cities are heading home amid factory closures and labor disputes sparked by the global downturn.
SHENZHEN, China: Worker is detained during a sit-in protest outside a government building, 30 October 2008.
Millions of workers who flooded to China's booming coastal cities to find work during the past decade are now beginning to return home amid a wave of factory closures and unemployment sparked by the global financial crisis.
In a phenomenon more usual around the Lunar New Year holiday in late January, trains and long-distance bus networks are packed full of people heading west and inland, making tickets hard to come by as people head home to cut losses and be reunited with their families.
"A lot of people are workers returning to their family homes," one passenger on a packed train in southwestern China's Yunnan province said.
Factory closures and rising unemployment in the Pearl River Delta and eastern coastal regions are also sparking labor unrest, as workers stage demonstrations to demand their back pay and severance benefits from factories now in administration.
Police in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen detained eight former workers for the now bankrupt Hong Kong-invested watchmaker Yijinli following days of sit-ins and clashes with hundreds of workers who had not yet been paid by the administrators.
"There were about six or seven security personnel detaining one person," a former Yijinli worker surnamed Ou said of clashes that began Friday in the city's Bao'an district.
Workers demand back pay
"They pressed him to the floor and beat him really badly. Then they told us to get in the police vehicles, that there would be a free bus back to the factory. They still hadn't given us a response [to our demands]."
He said the workers had refused to move until their demands were met.
"Soon after that, more than 100 riot police came rushing in and started to drag us away. If anyone refused to get on the bus they would beat them. They said that the workers who had led the protest were disturbing public order. They detained seven people," Ou said.
A relative of one of the detainees, surnamed Yang, said the detention of his relative brought the total to eight.
"On Friday evening they detained one other worker. His name was Yang Daicheng. He had been speaking out quite fiercely around the factory," Yang said.
"That day they detained seven people. Now the total is eight. Four other people were taken in for questioning and held overnight."
Bao'an factories closed
He said most of the workers had left Shenzhen after collecting their back pay and severance benefits.
Government labor officials in the crisis-hit coastal cities have been scrambling to deal with a wave of such disputes, according to official media.
Four workers were injured in a scuffle with security guards when they took to the Shenzhen streets demanding back wages from Taiwan-invested appliance maker Shunyi Appliance Factory, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
The factory bosses couldn't be contacted, said Xinhua, which blamed the wave of closures on the rising value of the yuan, spiraling costs, and eroding orders.
The Shenzhen Labor and Social Security Bureau on Tuesday publicized the names of 30 companies that owe a combined 12 million yuan (U.S. $1.75 million) in back pay to workers. The Bureau demanded that executives report to the local labor authorities within 30 days, Xinhua said.
Fear of social unrest
In some places, the government has paid workers out of its own coffers to avoid further social unrest. Xinhua said the township government of Zhangmutou had pledged a payout to workers at the bankrupt Smart Union factory in Dongguan city worth 24 million yuan (U.S.$3.5 million).
Chinese experts say governments at different levels plan to earmark money for contingency reserve funds to help unpaid employees, most of them migrant workers. Plans were also being put forward for a mandatory reserve fund contribution by companies at start-up.
As for the former Yijinli protesters, Yang said the workers who had received government payout seemed to have forgotten about their former colleagues being held by police.
A police officer who answered the phone at the Bao'an district police station confirmed that the detentions had been made during the protest.
"At that time we detained a few people who were making trouble. I can simply tell you that all the people we detained will be dealt with according to law, with all documentation approved by higher levels of leadership," he said.
"However, if there are any dissenting opinions from among the relatives about the way we are handling this, they can launch an appeal at the Shenzhen Municipal People's Court," he added.
China's national police chief has called on police officers to mend relations with ordinary Chinese people, and to be careful of how they use force to settle disputes.
Original reporting in Cantonese by Hai Lan and in Mandarin by Gao Shan. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
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