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China Watch, part 1
The latest issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine contains a lengthy article comprising contributions from a dozen authors, each praising the marvelous progress on one front or another to be seen in China. And yet...
Popular train sets are the latest target of safety action by U.S.
WASHINGTON -- Every one of the 24 toys recalled for safety reasons in the United States so far this year, including the enormously popular Thomas and Friends wooden train sets, was manufactured in China, a record that is increasingly causing alarm among consumer advocates, parents and regulators.
The latest recall, announced last week, involves 1.5 million Thomas and Friends trains and rail sets -- or about 4 percent of all those sold in the United States over the past two years -- that were coated at a factory in China with potentially poisonous lead paint.
In just last past month, a so-called Floating Eyeballs toy made in China was recalled after it was found to be filled with kerosene, sets of toy drums and a toy bear were recalled because of lead paint and an infant wrist rattle was recalled because of a choking hazard. ...The number of products made in China that are being recalled in the United States by the Consumer Product Safety Commission has doubled in the last five years, driving the overall number of recalls in the country to a record level.
It has meant that China today is responsible for about 60 percent of the overall product recalls, compared with 36 percent in 2000.
... The problem is most acute with low-price, no-name toys that are often sold at dollar stores and other deep discounters, as they are manufactured and sent to the United States often without the involvement of major American toy importers.
China is also the source of 81 percent of the counterfeit goods seized last year at ports of entry in the United States -- products that typically are not made to standards of the labels they are copying. ... Scott Wolfson, a second Consumer Product Safety Commission spokesman, would not say how long ago [the toy maker] discovered the problem or when it first reported it to federal authorities....
New intelligence reveals China is covertly supplying large quantities of small arms and weapons to insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban militia in Afghanistan, through Iran.U.S. government appeals to China to check some of the arms shipments in advance were met with stonewalling by Beijing, which insisted it knew nothing about the shipments and asked for additional intelligence on the transfers. The ploy has been used in the past by China to hide its arms-proliferation activities from the United States, according to U.S. officials with access to the intelligence reports.
Some arms were sent by aircraft directly from Chinese factories to Afghanistan and included large-caliber sniper rifles, millions of rounds of ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades and components for roadside bombs, as well as other small arms.
The Washington Times reported June 5 that Chinese-made HN-5 anti-aircraft missiles were being used by the Taliban.
According to the officials, the Iranians, in buying the arms, asked Chinese state-run suppliers to expedite the transfers and to remove serial numbers to prevent tracing their origin. China, for its part, offered to transport the weapons in order to prevent the weapons from being interdicted.
The weapons were described as "late-model" arms that have not been seen in the field before and were not left over from Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq.
U.S. Army specialists suspect the weapons were transferred within the past three months. ... Apologists for China within the [U.S.] government said the intelligence reports were not concrete proof of Chinese and Iranian government complicity. ...
Iran is adding Chinese-made small boats armed with anti-ship cruise missiles to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps navy that can be used in attacks on shipping in the oil-rich Persian Gulf, according to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).
Chinese revealed to be using slave labor... The boats can be used in attacks against shipping and include infantry weapons, unguided barrage rockets, recoilless guns, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles and rocket-propelled grenades.
HONGTONG, Shanxi, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Police in north China on Friday announced they had rescued a further 220 slave workers from brick kilns and other illegal workplaces, such as small iron and coal mines.
The rescues of the workers, all in Shanxi Province, brings the total number of slave workers reported freed in China to 468 in the last month. ... Sources from Shanxi Provincial Public Security Bureau said they raided 769 brick kilns, small coal and iron mines in Linfen, Yuncheng and Jincheng cities, where most of Shanxi's brick kilns are concentrated, after May 27 when the police freed 31 migrant workers who were forced to work as slaves in a brick kiln in Hongtong.
... Police have also detained 38 people who were suspected of allegations including kidnapping and forced labor, said the sources.
...Zhang Baoshun, secretary of Shanxi Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), has asked local authorities to be firm in cracking down on illegal employers across the province, including brick kiln owners and freeing migrant workers who were forced to work for the illegal employers.
A province-wide key task operation has been launched in Shanxi following's Zhang Baoshun's directive. There have been raids on coal mines, brick kilns, private contractors and small enterprises after media reports revealed that hundreds of children in Henan Province had been kidnapped and forced to work in kilns in Shanxi.
China says U.S. warning on toothpaste irresponsible
BEIJING (Reuters) - China has branded a U.S. warning against using its toothpaste as irresponsible, saying low levels of diethylene glycol (DEG) were not harmful."So far we have not received any report of death resulting from using the toothpaste. The U.S. handling (of this case) is neither scientific nor responsible," China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said in a statement posted on its Web site over the weekend.
"All the toothpaste exported to the United States had been registered by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for marketing in the States."
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued the warning on Friday after toothpaste containing DEG was detected in a shipment seized at the border.
The seizure was the most recent in a series of scares over the safety of locally made products which have put China's food and drug exports under scrutiny around the world.
Similarly contaminated toothpaste has been seized across Latin America, and in Panama, the government says at least 100 people died after taking cough syrup that contained DEG, an industrial solvent used in paint and antifreeze.
The FDA identified products by Goldcredit International Enterprises Ltd., Goldcredit International Trading Co. Ltd., and Suzhou City Jinmao Daily Chemicals Co. Ltd as containing DEG. Brands include Cooldent, Clean Rite and Oralmax and are usually found at discount retailers, the FDA said.
"It is not allowed. There are restrictions limiting its use," said an employee at Suzhou City Jinmao Daily Chemicals on Saturday, when asked about DEG.
The employee, reached by telephone, declined to be named and said he was new at the company and was not too familiar with its exports.
An employee at Goldcredit International Trading Co. Ltd., said the company did not export to the United States but declined to comment further.
China destroys U.S. imports on safety grounds
BEIJING: Raisins and health supplements imported from the United States failed to meet Chinese safety standards and have been returned or destroyed, the country's food safety agency said Friday.
The move comes as China itself faces international criticism, especially in the United States, over a series of scandals that have plagued Chinese food, drugs and other products from poisoned cough syrup to tainted toothpaste and pet food.
Inspectors in the ports of Ningbo and Shenzhen found bacteria and sulfur dioxide in products shipped by three American companies, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said.
"The products failed to meet the sanitary standards of China," the agency said in a brief notice posted on its Web site. No details were given on when or how the inspections were conducted.
The agency said it was asking "all local departments to increase quarantine examinations of foods imported from the United States."
BEIJING (AP) - China on Monday rejected international pressure to adopt mandatory caps on greenhouse gas production as it unveiled its first national program to help combat global warming.The program offered few new concrete targets for reducing emissions in outlining steps that the Chinese government says it will take to meet a previously announced goal of improving overall energy efficiency in 2010 by 20 percent over 2005's level.
"Although we are not committed to quantified emissions reduction, it does not mean we do not want to shoulder our share of responsibilities," said Ma Kai, head of the National Development and Reform Commission, the Cabinet-level economic planning agency.
Ma said China is still a developing country and economic growth will continue to be a priority, but he said the government would remain aware of the problems of global warming.
"We must reconcile the need for development with the need for environmental protection," he told reporters. "In its course of modernization, China will not tread the traditional path of industrialization, featuring high consumption and high emissions. In fact, we want to blaze a new path to industrialization."
Given an economy that has been growing at better than 9 percent annually over the past 25 years, the plan's overall effect, if implemented, would be to slow the increase in greenhouse gases rather than reduce their absolute amount.
China has come under increasing pressure to take more forceful measures to curb releases of greenhouse gases. The country relies on coal—among the dirtiest of fuels—to provide two-thirds of its energy and is projected to surpass the U.S. as the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases sometime in the next two years.
Henry Jacoby, a professor at MIT's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, said the Chinese government is feeling pressure not only from the international community but also from domestic groups and even from the effects of global warming itself.
"China is very vulnerable to climate change," he said, noting it is heavily dependent on agriculture and is struggling with desertification in its western regions.
The new program was laid out in a 62-page report apparently designed to pre-empt criticism when Chinese President Hu Jintao attends an expanded summit of the Group of Eight industrialized nations Friday. The meeting in Heiligendamm, Germany, will feature a session on global warming.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, host of the summit, gave a cautious welcome to China's announcement, saying it was evidence "no one can escape" the issue. She added, however, that China eventually will have to say "something about clear targets."
Ma argued the bulk of responsibility for battling climate change lies with developed countries, which "are in a better position to cap emissions" after decades of unrestrained industrialization.
He said they have the obligation to provide financial and technical support to China and other developing nations whose "overriding priority at the moment is still economic development and poverty eradication."
China's plan calls for stepped-up efforts to put inefficient industries on a more sustainable footing and promises "to make significant achievements in controlling greenhouse gas emissions."
Measures include expanded research and deployment of energy-saving technologies, improvement of the agriculture system, increased planting of trees and improved water management.
John Reilly, associate director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, questioned the ability of the central government to implement the plan, since much of the reporting and monitoring happens at the local level.
Still, Reilly said China's engagement with the issue was progress. "The fact that they're responding to concerns in any way is a positive thing," he said.
Yang Ailun, climate and energy campaign manager of Greenpeace China, welcomed the plan's inclusion of such steps as reforestation and the use of renewable energy, but he also voiced skepticism about putting the proposals into practice.
"The problem right now is more how the Chinese government can implement these targets," Yang said.
Ma called President Bush's new initiative on global warming a "useful complement" to the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol but said it should not be a substitute for the treaty, which expires in 2012.
Bush proposed last week that the 15 biggest emitters of greenhouse gases hold meetings and set an emissions goal, but each country—including the U.S., China, India and the major European countries—would be able to decide individually how to implement it.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol is an international treaty that caps the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted from power plants and factories in industrialized countries. It exempts developing countries like China and India, which is one of the reasons the U.S. and Australia refused to sign on.
HONG KONG (Reuters) - A young clerk with no knowledge of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown allowed a tribute to victims slip into the classified ads page of a newspaper in southwest China, a Hong Kong daily reported on Wednesday.
The tiny ad in the lower right corner of page 14 of the Chengdu Evening News on Monday night, read: "Paying tribute to the strong(-willed) mothers of June 4 victims".
An investigation was launched by Chinese authorities to find out how the advertisement slipped its way past censors.
Public discussion of the massacre is still taboo in Beijing and the government has rejected calls to overturn the verdict that the student-led demonstrations were "counter-revolutionary", or subversive. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed when the army crushed the pro-democracy protests on June 4, 1989.
Hong Kong's South China Morning Post said a young woman on the Chengdu Evening News classified section had allowed the ad to be published because she'd never heard of the June 4 crackdown.
A man gave the advertisement to the clerk, who had recently graduated and worked for an advertising company responsible for receiving content for the ads section, the Post reported.
"She called the man back two days later to check what June 4 meant and the man said it was (a date on which) a mining disaster took place," the Post quoted a source at the paper as saying.
"This highlights (the fact) that the government needs to face up to history," the paper quoted the source as saying.
References to the massacre are barred in state media, the Internet and printed works, meaning many of China's younger generation are ignorant of the events.
Monday, May 21, 2007BEIJING: An intensive campaign to enforce strict population-control measures prompted violent clashes between the police and local residents in southwestern China in recent days, witnesses said, describing the latest incident of rural unrest that has alarmed senior officials in Beijing.
Villagers and visitors to several counties of the Guangxi autonomous region in southwestern China said rioters smashed and burned government offices, overturned official vehicles and clashed with the riot police in a series of confrontations over the past four days.
They gave varying accounts of injuries and deaths, with some asserting that as many as five people were killed, including three officials responsible for population control work. A local government official in one of the counties affected confirmed the rioting in an interview by telephone but denied reports of deaths or serious injuries.
The violence appeared to stem from a two-month-long crackdown in Guangxi to punish people who violated the country's birth control policy. The policy limits the number of children families can have legally.
Corruption, land grabs, pollution, unpaid wages and a widening wealth gap have fueled tens of thousands of incidents of unrest in recent years, many of them occurring in rural areas that have been left behind in China's long economic boom.
The central government, expressing concern that unrest could undermine one-party rule, has alleviated the tax burden on peasants and sought to curtail confiscations of farmland for development. But China's hinterland remains volatile compared with the relative prosperity and stability of its largest cities.
To limit the growth of its population of 1.3 billion, many parts of China rely more on financial penalties and incentives than on coercive measures, including forced abortions and sterilizations, that were common in the 1980s, when the so-called one-child policy was first strictly enforced.
But local officials who fail to meet annual population-control targets can still come under heavy bureaucratic pressure to reduce births in their area of responsibility or face demotion or removal from office.
According to villagers and witness accounts posted on the Internet, officials in several parts of Guangxi mobilized their largest effort in years to roll back population growth by instituting mandatory health checks for women and forcing pregnant women who did not have approval to give birth to abort fetuses.
Several people said officials also imposed fines starting at 500 yuan and ranging as high as 70,000 yuan, or $65 to $9,000, on families that had violated birth control measures any time since 1980. The new tax, called a "social child-raising fee," was collected even though the vast majority of violators had already paid fines in the past, the people said.
According to an account published on a Web forum called Longtan, officials in Bobai County of Guangxi boasted that they had collected 7.8 million yuan in social child-raising fees from February through the end of April.
Many families objected strongly to the fees and refused to pay. Witnesses said in such cases villagers were detained, their homes searched and valuables, including electronic items and motorcycles, confiscated by the government.
"Worst of all, the gangsters used hammers and iron rods to destroy people's homes, while threatening that the next time it would be with bulldozers," said a local peasant, who identified himself as Nong Sheng and who faxed a petition letter complaining of the abuses to a reporter in Beijing.
Nong said the crackdown was widespread in several counties in Guangxi. He said local courts had declined to hear any cases related to the matter, citing an edict from local officials.
Other villagers reached by phone described an escalating series of confrontations that began Thursday and continued through the weekend.
Several described in detail an assault on the government offices of Shapi Township, Bobai County, by thousands of peasants.
They said villagers broke through a wall surrounding the government building, ransacked offices, smashed computers and destroyed documents, then set fire to the building itself. There were inconsistent reports of deaths and injuries during that clash and a subsequent crackdown by riot police officers.