Studies / Reports: August 2009 Archives

By RADIO FREE ASIA
August 26, 2009

Parents in China say authorities are failing to make good on promises to test children for lead poisoning.

Promises by local government officials offering free blood tests to children affected by pollution from smelting plants in the central Chinese province of Hunan have yet to be fulfilled, residents and officials said.

An official at the hospital near worst-hit Wugang township, where more than 1,000 children are believed to have higher-than-normal levels of lead in their blood, said the hospital had not yet been told how to deal with the large numbers of worried parents trying to book tests.

"There are several dozen patients coming for blood tests every day, but I don't know the actual patient numbers per day," said an employee who answered the phone at the Wugang People's Hospital.

"Senior management has requested a survey [of lead poisoning cases], and we will know the procedure in a few days' time," she added.

Local officials have promised the closure of privately owned zinc and manganese smelting plants after being hit by a wave of violent clashes between police and angry parents in central Hunan and northern Shaanxi provinces in recent weeks.

Official Chinese media also reported that free blood tests would be available for children affected by the polluting factories, but residents of Wugang say the authorities have yet to deliver on their promises.

Bribery alleged

"There are only three government permission slips for free individual blood tests for the whole village," a mother surnamed Wang from Wugang said.

"Some parents are willing to pay the cost themselves in order to have their children checked. However, local hospitals have been bribed by someone, so the parents never see the correct results," she said.

Another Wugang villager surnamed Zhang said she had been turned down for lead tests at several hospitals in the area.

"Some said there was no electricity, some said the machines weren't working, and some said the maintenance staff hadn't shown up for work at the right time, and so on," Zhang said.

Some villagers even went as far as Hengyang city, taking their children to at least five hospitals, she said.

"But none of the children has actually been tested," she said.

A resident of nearby Shuangjiang village surnamed Liu said she was turned down for a blood test for her two-year-old as far away as southern Guangxi province.

"They knew about the lead poisoning cases in Wugang and they asked if I was from there," she said.

After she told the truth, the hospital refused to test her child.

Calls to the Wugang township government went unanswered during office hours Monday.

Cover-up

A villager from nearby Hengjiang village surnamed Wang said the township government had initially tried to cover up the widespread incidence of lead poisoning among local children.

"The government at first had promised to give an answer [to our complaints] but didn't keep their word," she said.

"Then, the villagers surrounded the cars of officials. Finally, the government [said it would] allow three children to go for free blood tests," she said.

More than 1,300 children have been poisoned by lead from the year-old manganese factory near Wugang, with hundreds of cases also reported near a cement factory in Hunan's Lengshugang city, and Fengxiang county in northern Shaanxi province.

The Dongling Lead and Zinc Smelting Co. was ordered by environmental protection authorities in Fengxiang county to suspend lead and zinc production Aug. 6 following a public outcry.

Fengxiang county government has offered free blood tests for 1,016 children aged 14 and under from three villages of Changqing Township, official media reported.

Original reporting in Mandarin by Qiao Long. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated by Chen Ping. Written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

>> Original source

By BBC World News
August 25, 2009

Police and local government officials in China have swamped a village at the centre of a lead poisoning case in Changqing, which left hundreds of children sick.

Villagers are forbidden from speaking to journalists, and reporters attempting to visit the area are being detained and questioned by the police.

Quentin Sommerville was one of those detained in Bao Ji, a township of Changqing.

>> Original source and video

By Saad Al-Ghamdi | Al-Watan (Saudi Arabia) | via ArabNews (Saudi Arabia)
August 16, 2009

Millions of Uighur Muslims in China's Xinjiang province have been the victims of persecution and exile or execution simply because they demand a dignified recognition of their religious, cultural and ethnic rights and identity. In their unwavering resistance to government suppression, the Uighurs are only armed with their faith in their religion and heritage. They tenaciously cling to their Turkic ethnicity and use the Arabic script to write their language.

Exiled Rebiya Kadeer, a 60-year-old mother of 11, is in the forefront of the struggle of the downtrodden Uighurs. While admitting her Chinese nationality, Kadeer is not willing to give up her ethnic and religious identity for the dominant Han culture in China.

According to a statement by an official of Amnesty International last year, "Few people around the world would know what's happening to the Uighurs if it weren't for a 59-year-old mother of 11 children who served as a representative in the National People's Congress, Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer."

This former member of the Political Consultative Congress and China's delegation to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women has become a big embarrassment to the Chinese government. She has exposed to the world the large-scale human rights violations practiced by the Chinese provincial and central governments.

Since the age of 14, despite poverty and poor health, she has been worried about the humiliating existence of the Uighurs and has worked to regain their lost freedom and dignity. She had to work as a laundress in order to feed her family as her husband's work did not suffice for the family.

Although her first marriage eventually broke up, with hard work and determination she became a successful businesswoman and once she was even ranked as the seventh wealthiest business personality in China. She has also spent a lot of time doing charitable work in order to aid her people.

She hoped to work within the Chinese system and improve the downtrodden Uighurs. It was while looking for an ally in her service to the people that a likeminded Uighur activist, Saddiq Razi, was released from jail after nine years of punishment. She visited him and offered to marry him with a proposal to struggle jointly for the cause of Uighurs. Surprised by the wealthy woman's proposal, he asked her why she wanted to marry an ex-convict like him, her reply was, "For the sake of Uighurs. I want us to be together in the struggle for Uighurs."

Razi married her though his colleagues initially suspected her of being a government's agent.

Impressed by Kadeer's philanthropic efforts, the provincial and central governments nominated her to the Political Consultative Congress in 1992, and appointed her a member of China's delegation to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. Such positions never distracted her from demanding a dignified life for her people.

Using her influence in Beijing, Kadeer tried to persuade high ranking Chinese officials to change their repressive policies against Uighurs. Her insistence on real autonomous authority for the people and especially her harsh criticism of the government's human right violations during a National People's Political Consultative Conference session in 1997 prompted the government to turn against her.

She was arrested in 1999 and then sentenced to eight years in jail.

Kadeer's case became an international embarrassment for the Chinese government after Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch publicized her case and worked for her freedom. After her release on medical grounds, she toured the world, actively campaigning for the rights of the Uighur people.

Lately, the Chinese government has reportedly been extorting confessions from the people in Urumqi and other places that Kadeer incited them to riot and rebel against the government so that she could be arrested again on fabricated charges which might even warrant her execution. Even before the July riots in Urumqi, the Chinese authorities had tortured her sons and other relatives for forced confessions against her. Despite the government's intimidating pressures and the torture of her own children, that fragile woman from the remote Uighur region remains unwavering in her stand.

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By Vivian Wai-yin Kwok | FORBES MAGAZINE via forbes.com
August 07, 2009

In addition to its cheap labor costs, China has another comparative advantage as the world's factory: Companies often pay almost nothing to pollute China's air, water and soil and to poison its people.

Need pliant workers to handle toxic chemicals? Wages are just $2.60 a day. What if the chemicals contaminate a town? Compensating a family of five costs just $732. Local water supply contamination makes 4,000 people vomit? That's just $7 per household. Cost of bribing local Chinese officials to look the other way rather than adhering to safety standards? Well, that's unknown, but given the frequency of China's pollution atrocities, apparently it is cost-effective.

While companies can get away with pollution atrocities for years, the Chinese government, in the long run, may have to pay a high price for allowing it: political instability triggered by the unanswered grievances of pollution victims.

Ammonia Leak in Inner Mongolia

In the past few weeks, local officials in Hunan Province and Inner Mongolia have been busy trying to control public anger after a spate of serious pollution incidents. In the latest one, 246 people--factory workers, emergency rescuers and nearby residents--were sickened by an ammonia gas leak at a pharmaceutical plant in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region on Wednesday morning.

Liquid ammonia spilled from a pipe that suddenly burst while a truck was unloading 30 tonnes of the chemical at the Chifeng Pharmaceutical Group factory. The Inner Mongolia government ordered people living within 2 kilometers and downwind of the leak to evacuate, and the local public security, environmental protection and work safety authorities set up a team to investigate the accident, according to China Daily.

An initial investigation blamed old pipes, the failure of emergency valves in the ammonia tanker, and the overloaded truck, as major reasons for the leak, Xinhua reported Thursday afternoon.

Ammonia, which is widely used as a household cleaner, is a corrosive substance. People exposed to very high levels of the chemical can experience severe burns to their skin, eyes, throat or lungs, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a federal public health agency under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Sewage in the Water Supply

Residents of Chifeng, the run-down mining city in Inner Mongolia where the ammonia leak occurred, had only just recovered from another environmental disaster. Two weeks before the spill, thousands had been sickened when local water supplies were contaminated. More than 4,300 Chifeng citizens fell sick with diarrhea, vomiting and fever after drinking tap water. The city's water supply has yet to be fully restored.

Local officials say the water was contaminated after heavy rains on July 23 caused a power outage at a sewage pump station. The outage allowed raw sewage to flood into the well that supplies tap water to most of the city, various local media reported.

Chifeng citizens could have avoided the danger if they had been notified immediately about the incident. Instead, the local authorities stalled. They didn't alert the public for two days.

After the dirty water sickened the city, two senior officials, including the director of the Chifeng municipal construction commission and his deputy, were sacked. The state-owned water supply company agreed to pay 50 yuan ($7.30) in compensation to each household.

Metals Contamination in Hunan Province

Meanwhile, in the central province of Hunan, desperate citizens in Liuyang City have been trying to take to the streets again this week to protest unsafe operations at a government-protected factory. The pollution has already killed at least five people and poisoned another 500 with toxic pollution from cadmium and indium, metals used at the local factory.

About a thousand villagers from Shuangqiao, Jiankou and Puhua villages besieged a police station and city government headquarters last week to complain that the local government had failed to protect them from the deadly pollution.

This week, they didn't get the chance to protest. Instead, thousands of police officers were deployed to seal off major government buildings in Liuyang to prevent another riot. At least eight journalists who tried to interview villagers or take photos of the factory were detained, and told they could rely on the government to give them all the information they needed, according to the South China Morning Post.

Residents blame the Xianghe chemical plant, which had been illegally producing indium, a metal used to produce thin-film coatings for lamps and for liquid crystal displays (LCDs) in flat-panel video screens. Last week, the riot drew publicity, forcing the government to shut down the illicit plant.

The factory opened in 2004. Workers there were paid 18 yuan ($2.6) a day--about the cost of a McDonald's Happy Meal--to produce the highly toxic chemicals used to make the TVs which sell for more than an average worker's yearly salary.

Indium compounds are highly toxic, and can damage the heart, kidney, liver or embryos of those exposed to it. Cadmium, also used at the plant, can cause short-term lung damage in humans who inhale it. Prolonged exposure to cadmium causes chronic kidney disease. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says exposure to cadmium probably causes cancer too.

China is the biggest producer of indium, contributing over 40% of the global supply. Indium prices averaged about $685 per kilogram in 2008, down from a peak of $946 a kilo in 2005, based on the estimates by United States Geological Survey, which forecast a supply deficit for indium for at least another year.

High indium prices gave Xianghe an incentive to produce it illegally, probably with the cooperation of corrupt officials. A former Xianghe worker told the South China Morning Post that local environmental inspectors visited the plant occasionally, but that plant's management was always alerted ahead of time.

The factory and the local government tried to appease residents by providing free medical check-ups to the 2,888 residents living within a 1.2 kilometer radius of the factory plus compensation of about 5,000 yuan ($732) for a family of five, according to a report by AFP.

After the medical checks showed abnormally high concentrations of cadmium and indium in nearly a fifth of the area residents, local officials could no longer deny that Xianghe had discharged life-threatening pollution. In July, several villagers died, and autopsies showed their bodies contained massive amounts of indium.

Those who have been poisoned are demanding free medical treatment, and untested residents who live further from the factory demanded the government provide medical tests. After authorities sent sick villagers back home, protesters rioted last week.

The tension between citizens and the government is increasing, and thousands of police are monitoring villagers in an effort to prevent further riots.

A Plea From Environmentalists

Meanwhile, two environmental advocates aren't just counting on the Chinese government to stop pollution. They are taking a different approach, trying to publicly shame Western firms buying from Chinese polluters.

Green groups Friends of Nature and the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs called on Timberland to monitor two Chinese suppliers the non-profits say have repeatedly breached China's pollution limits.

The two Timberland suppliers are Shanghai Richina Leather, which has been fined by pollution watchdogs since 2004 for producing emissions higher than the legal limits, and Falcon Tannery in Guangdong, which violated water pollution limits for three years, according to the South China Morning Post.

>> Original source

By Edward Wong | The New York Times
August 06, 2009

Human rights advocates are calling on the Chinese government to cancel the criminal trials of two men who pushed for official investigations into the causes of widespread school collapses during the devastating 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province.

The trial of one man, Huang Qi, began Wednesday but adjourned without a verdict. Mr. Huang, a well-known blogger and civil rights campaigner, is accused of possessing state secrets, which carries a sentence of five years to life. The second defendant, Tan Zuoren, a writer and also a prominent rights advocate, faces a potential five-year sentence for subversion and is to go on trial Wednesday.

"These trials are not about a reasonable application of the law, but about silencing government critics whose work has considerable public benefit and sympathy," Sophie Richardson, the Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group based in New York, said in a written statement released Tuesday. "The government is likely seeking to squelch those who cause it embarrassment, but in the process it is undermining domestic and international confidence in its ability to cope in a transparent way with natural disasters."

Mr. Huang's wife, Zeng Li, said in a telephone interview that her husband's trial began at 10:30 a.m. and continued for three hours. It was unclear Wednesday night when the trial, closed to the public, would resume.

The May 2008 earthquake was the most devastating natural disaster in China in decades, killing nearly 69,000 people and leaving about 18,000 missing, all presumed dead, according to official estimates. Initial reports from the official news media said about 7,000 schoolrooms collapsed and as many as 10,000 schoolchildren might have died. In May, the government released the first official toll of students killed in the quake, saying 5,335 students were dead or missing.

Many of the schools collapsed even though buildings next to them remained standing, which grieving parents and advocates attributed to shoddy construction and corruption. Officials in Sichuan blamed the earthquake itself, not bad construction.

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