ZGBriefs August 4, 2011
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FEATURED ARTICLE
There has been a huge amount of reporting on the July 23 train accident in Wenzhou that killed at least 39 and incited a continuing outcry among Chinese journalists and internet users, as well as government efforts to silence such criticism. Here, a collection of links connected to the rail crash and its aftermath. |
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GOVERNMENT / POLITICS / FOREIGN AFFAIRS
UN panel calls for Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo's release (August 2, 2011, BBC News) A United Nations panel of independent legal experts has called for the immediate release of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo from prison in China. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention says China should also free the Nobel Laureate's wife, Liu Xia, from house arrest. It says both should be entitled to compensation. The judgements were made public by the US-based human rights group Freedom Now, which represents the couple. Mr Liu was sentenced to 11 years in jail in December 2009 for inciting the subversion of state power. He was detained the previous year, just before the publication of Charter 08, a political manifesto that he helped draft, which calls for political change in China.
Tensions high after deadly unrest in China (August 2, 2011, AFP) Tensions ran high in China's remote Kashgar city Tuesday after authorities shot dead two men suspected of fomenting deadly ethnic unrest and vowed a further crackdown on "religious extremists". Police killed the men, both from the mainly Muslim Uighur minority that makes up around half the population of China's northwestern Xinjiang region, late Monday as they were trying to capture the pair, Kashgar officials said. The deaths bring to 21 the number of people reported killed in Kashgar, a famed city on the ancient Silk Road in Xinjiang, since the weekend in the latest bout of unrest stemming from Uighur frustration at Chinese rule. Thirteen civilians died in the two weekend attacks, one of which hit a busy restaurant. Pools of blood and overturned tables could still be seen Tuesday where diners had been forced to flee in panic from attackers wielding knives. The other six dead were alleged attackers, some of whom were trained in "terrorist" camps in neighbouring Pakistan, according to Chinese authorities.
China: Party Newspaper Warns the Philippines (August 2, 2011, The New York Times) China's main Communist Party newspaper sharply warned neighboring nations on Tuesday against asserting their claims to territory in the South China Sea, responding to a news report that the Philippines was building shelter for troops on one of the disputed Spratly Islands, which the Chinese call the Nansha Islands. The commentary accused the Philippines of "a little trick" by building the shelter shortly after the Association of Southeast Asian Nations called for restraint in actions that might inflame territorial disputes.
China media urges officials to speak to web users (August 2, 2011, AFP) The mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party on Tuesday urged more officials to go online and speak honestly with web users, in a sign of the growing importance of social networking sites in China. The comment piece in the People's Daily comes after Internet users flooded popular Twitter-like sites to vent their anger at the government's handling of the July 23 train crash that killed 40 people and injured nearly 200 more. Web users unleashed unusually high levels of vitriol after China's worst ever high-speed train accident, accusing officials of corruption, burying evidence and compromising safety in the drive to develop rail technology. "The first principles of speaking on weibo (micro-blogs) is not to use cliches and not tell lies," said the comment piece in the newspaper which itself was highly critical of the government's response to the disaster.
China orders more gov't openness after train crash (August 3, 2011, AP) Chinese leaders on Wednesday called for more openness in government after a high-speed train crash triggered widespread public anger at authorities over the lack of transparency in handling the accident. Chinese state media published a circular from the Cabinet calling for more government openness, saying that departments should publicize in detail their expenditures and data on major construction projects. "Local government departments must make more efforts to ensure transparency in government affairs in order to protect the people's rights to know about and supervise the government," the circular said. The notice published on the front page of the People's Daily did not mention the July 23 train crash near the eastern city of Wenzhou that killed at least 40 people.
Confirmed: Railways official stashed $2.8 billion USD overseas (August 3, 2011, Shanghaiist) Though the rumors had been kicking around for a while, an official report from CCTV confirms that the Shanghainese former deputy chief engineer for the Ministry of Railways Zhang Shuguang (张曙光) kept overseas deposits worth $2.8 billion USD. In contrast, former Minister of Railways Liu Zhijun (刘志军, he of the 18 mistresses), made off with only a piddling $155 million USD worth of red-packet money. 5 other officials from the Ministry of Railways are also under investigation. Zhang and Liu were together tasked with the goal of creating a high-speed rail network worth $300 billion USD spanning 10,000 miles by 2015.
Chinese citizen activist latest free speech cause (August 3, 2011, AP) Chinese rights advocates are calling for the release of an Internet activist who will soon face trial in a case that they say highlights the government's fear of increasingly bold public activism. Supporters say Wang Lihong, 56, represents a growing breed of Internet-empowered Chinese activists - ordinary people who mobilize others to fight problems such as corruption or miscarriages of justice. They say Wang is being punished for her involvement in a street protest in southern China against the prosecution of three bloggers. Wang, held at a detention center in central Beijing, is expected to be tried in several weeks on the vaguely worded charge of "creating a disturbance" and will plead not guilty, her lawyer Han Yicun said. If convicted, she faces up to five years in jail.
Chinese warships visit NKorea on goodwill visit (August 4, 2011, AP) Two Chinese warships are visiting a North Korean port as part of a goodwill visit to mark the 50th anniversary of a friendship treaty between the allies. Footage from Associated Press Television News in North Korea on Thursday showed citizens and soldiers welcoming the Chinese ships at the North's east coast port of Wonsan.
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EDUCATION / CULTURE
Palace Museum admits damage to ancient plate (August 1, 2011, Xinhua) Managers of the Palace Museum admitted on Sunday that a piece of 1,000-year-old porcelain among its invaluable collection had been damaged by error during research, which involved examining the artifact with an analytical device. This disclosure came after a netizen on Saturday blew the whistle on the accident and claimed the Beijing museum, also known as the Forbidden City, had been trying to cover up the incident. The porcelain plate, a grade-one cultural relic from the Ge kiln called "Celadon Plate with a Mouth in the Shape of Mallow Petals", was crushed and damaged on July 4 when a laboratory researcher used a device to examine it, according to a statement from the museum. The researcher stopped the operation immediately and reported the accident to the museum, the statement said. The museum did not reveal how badly the plate was damaged. |
SOCIETY / LIFE
China denies destroying evidence after fatal rail crash (July 23, 2011, Reuters) China's state news agency Xinhua has denied widespread rumors that railway authorities tried to conceal evidence by burying carriages damaged during a high-speed rail crash that killed at least 40 people last weekend. Citing an unnamed official with the Ministry of Railways, Xinhua said late on Friday that "the problem of burying rail carriages and 'destroying evidence' does not exist during the handling of the whole of the accident." The report said that only the damaged parts of some carriages were buried at the site in order to facilitate clean-up and rescue operations. In China's worst rail accident since 2008, a high-speed train rammed into the back of another in the eastern city of Wenzhou on July 23.
Beijing-Shanghai ticket sales fall after rail crash (August 2, 2011, AFP) Ticket sales on China's new Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail are flagging after a deadly accident on the network, with some trains selling as few as 30 percent of their seats, state media said Tuesday. More than 10 trains departed Shanghai on Monday with at least 200 empty second-class seats, each costing about 555 yuan ($86), data from the China Railway Customer Service Centre website showed. Some trains on the new $33-billion line -- opened amid much fanfare on June 30 to mark the 90th birthday of China's Communist Party -- have seen as many as 700 tickets unsold at departure time, the Shanghai Evening News reported.
Escalators for new Beijing subway line recalled (August 2, 2011, China Daily) A dozen escalators for the capital city's Yizhuang subway line have been recalled because they have the same risk of malfunction as the one that took the life of a 13-year-old boy on July 5. "Among the 102 escalators, more than 10 were found to have security risks," Xu Ronggen, secretary-general of the Beijing Chamber of Elevator Commerce, told China Daily on Monday. The maintenance company of the escalators, Beijing Chengjian Huiyou Escalator Co Ltd, confirmed the recall. China's top quality watchdog demanded local agencies overhaul the quality of escalators and elevators after a 13-year-old boy was killed when an ascending subway escalator suddenly reversed direction at the Beijing Zoo Station on subway line 4. According to the Beijing bureau of quality and technical supervision, the escalator had a design defect and was not well maintained during regular checks.
Officials Sent to Prison in Shanghai Tower Fire (August 3, 2011, The New York Times) A Shanghai court has sentenced nearly two dozen government officials, construction workers and contractors to jail for their role in a high-rise fire here that killed 58 people and injured 71 last November. The highest-ranking official sentenced Tuesday was Gao Weizhong, the head of the construction authority in the district where the fire took place. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison for corruption and abuse of authority. The court said he had confessed to accepting bribes and steering construction contracts to unqualified subcontractors.
Striking Chinese taxi drivers back at work (August 3, 2011, AFP) Thousands of Chinese taxi drivers who went on strike over pay in the eastern hub of Hangzhou returned to work on Wednesday after accepting a government deal, the city's biggest taxi company said. Authorities in the popular tourist area have offered to raise fares by October and provide subsidies to drivers in a bid to end the strike, which had crippled the city. "The dispute is basically solved. I just went to the sites where the strike took place and not many taxis were there," said Shou Minglei, a manager at the Hangzhou Zhongrun Taxi Company, which runs a fleet of more than 1,000 cars. However, state news agency Xinhua said some drivers were still holding out.
China arrests 2,000 suspects, closes 4,900 businesses in food safety overhaul (August 3, 2011, Xinhua) China has arrested approximately 2,000 suspects and shut down more than 4,900 businesses for illegal practices during a national campaign launched in April to crack down on illegal additives in food. Agricultural, industrial, commercial, quality control and food authorities in their coordinated efforts have as of Sunday inspected 5.92 million food or additives manufacturers and catering businesses, according to a statement issued Wednesday by the Food Safety Commission under the State Council. The police have investigated 1,200 criminal cases concerning the illegal adding of non-edible materials in food and destroyed a series of underground sites for illegal production, storage and processing of food products.
Capital city cops raid 'black jail' (August 3, 2011, Global Times) Beijing police detained "black jail" operators and rescued detainees after receiving a complaint from six petitioners from Jiangsu Province who had been previously jailed there. More than 10 policemen broke into a remote storage compound and rescued 13 illegally jailed petitioners, according to Yan Tingzhong, one of six petitioners on Tuesday who presented a banner to thank Beiqijia police station in Changping district. Yan told the Global Times on Tuesday they had been forcibly thrown in a van by about seven men with tattoos on their bodies after visiting the Jiujingzhuang petitioner reception center in Fengtai district on July 4. They were taken to a courtyard in Changping, Yan said, where their identity cards, mobile phones, cash and other belongings were taken.
Southern city says residents can no longer keep dogs in urban sections (August 3, 2011, Xinhua) Keeping dogs will be banned in the urban sections of this Pearl River Delta city later this month. According to a public notice, local residents must resettle their pet dogs between Aug 10 and 25, while a special campaign will start on Aug 26 to remove all dogs from the city's Pengjiang, Jianghai and Xinhui districts. The Notice on Strengthening the Management of Dogs was jointly issued by the city's five departments and bureaus of public security, agriculture, urban comprehensive management, health, and industry and commerce.
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BUSINESS / ECONOMICS / TRADE
China central bank says inflation fight a policy priority (August 1, 2011, Reuters) China pledged to keep to a "prudent" monetary policy for the rest of the year to combat inflation, which is stubbornly fixed near a three-year high.In the latest sign that Beijing is taking a gentle easing in China's economy well in stride, the central bank reiterated that fighting inflation remains its policy priority. "Domestic inflation expectations remain on the high side," the People's Bank of China said in comments published on its website.
Taiwan's Foxconn to use one million robots by 2014 (August 1, 2011, AFP) Taiwan IT giant Foxconn -- hit by a spate of suicides at its Chinese plants -- plans to replace 500,000 workers with robots in the next three years, state media reported Monday. Foxconn -- the world's largest maker of computer components, which assembles products for Apple, Sony and Nokia -- plans to use one million robots to do "simple" work, China Business News quoted chairman Terry Gou saying. Gou announced the plan to 10,000 staff at a company event in Shenzhen on Friday, various media reports said. Foxconn currently has 10,000 robots doing painting, welding and assembly tasks. It will increase that number to 300,000 next year and to one million in 2014, the report said.
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LINKS TO DETAILED ARTICLES AND ANALYSIS
Mentally healthy people can be forced into asylums in China, but public awareness and a proposed law may bring change.
Contemporary China is experiencing many of the same demographic and socioeconomic pressures as the United States, he recently reported in The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. People are living much longer; family structures are changing; women have entered the work force in greater numbers. With no national health insurance program like Medicare and with the one-child policy that places elder care responsibilities on fewer shoulders, Chinese families also face some challenges greater than ours.
The Karmapa and the Dalai Lama lead different Tibetan Buddhist lineages and are not equals; the Dalai Lama, who is 76, is the pre-eminent spiritual leader of Tibet. And yet, many Tibetans are looking to the Karmapa to assume the mantle of the Dalai Lama when the elder lama dies, to take on the role as shepherd of the Tibetan people and lead them home from exile.
How Apple conquered China and learned to think like the Communist Party.
Wholesale prices for half-inch white pearls have fallen about 30 percent in the last several years, as the influx of high-quality Chinese farmed pearls - grown in former rice fields - has the industry in turmoil.
China's bullet train was supposed to signal its arrival as a high-tech leader. Instead, a crash that killed at least 40 people has made it a lightning rod for anger at the human cost of recklessly fast development... The crash is especially sensitive for communist leaders because it hurt members of China's urban middle class, who are among the chief beneficiaries of the booming economy and an important base of support for the Communist Party's continued monopoly on power.
Melissa Block talks with David Bandurski, researcher with Hong Kong University's China Media Project, about Chinese media coverage of the July 23 high-speed rail crash in Wenzhou. Bandurski says both state-run and commercial media covered the crash aggressively for a week, defying a government ban on coverage. A subsequent directive from propaganda authorities largely put an end to that this past weekend.
Estimated 10m-plus surveillance cameras were installed in China last year, prompting human rights concerns.
Kashgar and Hotan, historic centres of Uighur and Islamic culture in the south of China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, have been the scene of recent bloodshed.
Microblogs are increasingly popular channels for serious discourse in China, which means they could be doomed.
Now, leaders in Beijing are pouring money into research and development - 698 billion yuan ($108 billion) last year - in what some see as a form of techno-nationalism.
China's government has prioritized the development of supercomputers, going "from zero to hero" in just a decade.
More scientific papers come out of China than out of any other country but the U.S., and Chinese leaders vow it will be a research superpower by 2020. But repeated scientific fraud scandals continue to bedevil China's reputation as an innovator. Zhang and others say blame lies in part with traditional Chinese culture, which values rote memorization and repetition and holds that copying a teacher's work is a way of learning.
China has been accused of mounting a five-year hacking operation that stole industrial and national secrets on an unprecedented scale, after an investigation by a leading internet group uncovered a huge international security breach.
While 9.3 million Chinese students took the college-entrance exam in 2011, close to 1 million high school graduates did not, and among them, some 200,000 chose to go to foreign universities instead. Today over 100,000 Chinese high school graduates attend college in the U.S. each fall, and this year at least 17 of the top 100 mainland students chose to go to the University of Hong Kong.
Juggling their iPhones with spades, a group of young professionals are getting their hands dirty - digging vegetables. During the week, they are teachers, PR consultants, and computer programmers. But at the weekend, these city slickers return to the soil. "We're worried about food safety," says He Liying, explaining why they grow vegetables.
The deserted streets and shuttered shops in the usually bustling Chinese areas of Kashgar city Wednesday stand as testament to the splintered ethnic lines in the western region of Xinjiang.
In jail, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei recounts, he was monitored round the clock by sleepy teenage police officers and it was as if they were being punished with him. The interrogations were more like informal chats, and conversation at times turned to, for instance, the merits of different sauces for zhajiangmian, the Northern noodle dish, he recalls. It has been more than a month since his release from detention and the humour and humanity of Ai, 54, seemed intact in an interview with Apple Daily which was published in Hong Kong yesterday.
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LINKS TO BLOGS
Contemporary China is experiencing many of the same demographic and socioeconomic pressures as the United States, he recently reported in The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. People are living much longer; family structures are changing; women have entered the work force in greater numbers.
Urbanization is a cornerstone of China's development strategy. But the relationship between a growing urban population and a sustainable growth path isn't as straightforward as many investors believe.
Beat your bus-phobia (and save some dough) with this handy beginner's guide to riding the roads in China's capital.
How China might look if the one-child policy were strictly enforced
China's one-child policy is crumbling in the face of popular discontent and demographic reality. Last month Guangdong, the prosperous southern province which is also China's most populous, appealed to Beijing to end it. But do not imagine that doing so is going to make a crucial difference to the rapid aging of China's population.
One of today's major official news announcements in China, pinned to the top of most major web portals through the day, was a notice from top Party leaders urging governments at all levels to be more conscientious in advancing the goal of a more open government, particularly around "sudden-breaking events and problems of key concern to the people."
In China, news has a habit of disappearing; from state media, traditional media, personal blogs, microblogs, and Internet forums alike. After an important incident, citizens have roughly a day to opine before the government apparatus catches up.
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RESOURCES FOR RESEARCHERS
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RESOURCES
I came across this really catchy song which teaches how to say different body parts in Chinese language. Hope you will enjoy it.
Let me say from the outset that this book possesses unusual worth for all students of Chinese Christianity. Not only does it analyze a very important sector of the Chinese church, but also presents a model which, with some variations, is both inspiring and challenging.
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