BEIJING - A BEIJING activist was detained on a charge of inciting subversion after posting a photo online of China's 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations that were eventually crushed by the military, killing hundreds of people.
It was the first time Bai Dongping, 47, had ever been arrested though he was taken out of Beijing 'on holiday' by police or told to stay inside his home during high-profile events such as the Olympics, said his wife, Yang Dan, said by telephone on Tuesday.
Bai was taken away on Saturday, Ms Yang said, and Beijing police called her on Sunday to tell her why. China often uses the vaguely worded charge of subversion to lock up activists who are seen as troublemakers.
'I'm really scared. That's such a strong charge. It's the first time I'd ever heard of such a thing,' Ms Yang said.
The arrest comes as several Chinese activists have reported increasing harassment after imprisoned author Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October. Liu is serving an 11-year sentence for subversion after co-authoring an appeal calling for reforms to China's one-party political system.
Bai was briefly released on Saturday before police returned and took him away again. He told his wife they had interrogated him about the Tiananmen photo he posted online.
Source: ST Online/AP
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Monday, November 29, 2010
China directed Google hacking
WASHINGTON - THE United States believes that Chinese authorities orchestrated a hacking campaign into computers of Google and Western governments, according to leaked documents cited on Sunday by The New York Times.
The secret cables released by whistleblower site WikiLeaks included one in which the US embassy in Beijing cited 'a Chinese contact' who pointed to a government role in the hacking, the newspaper said.
'The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government,' the newspaper said, citing the cable.
Chinese operatives are also believed to have broken into computers of US and Western allies along with those of Tibet's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, it said.
Google announced in March that it would no longer follow the communist government's instructions to filter searches for sensitive material after what it said were coordinated cyberattacks against the Internet company.
The hacking included infiltration of the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents. -- AFP
source: ST Online
The secret cables released by whistleblower site WikiLeaks included one in which the US embassy in Beijing cited 'a Chinese contact' who pointed to a government role in the hacking, the newspaper said.
'The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government,' the newspaper said, citing the cable.
Chinese operatives are also believed to have broken into computers of US and Western allies along with those of Tibet's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, it said.
Google announced in March that it would no longer follow the communist government's instructions to filter searches for sensitive material after what it said were coordinated cyberattacks against the Internet company.
The hacking included infiltration of the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents. -- AFP
source: ST Online
Same-sex marriage could curb HIV
BEIJING - AS HIV/AIDS becomes more prevalent among the gay population on the mainland, some experts have joined the gay community in calling for the legal recognition of same-sex marriage as a means of curbing the infection.
Although the rate of HIV infection is 0.05 per cent nationwide, gay men have been the hardest hit by the sexually transmitted disease, experts warned ahead of this year's World AIDS Day, which fell on Wednesday.
In some cities, nearly one out of five is HIV positive in the gay community, experts said.
'To legalise same-sex marriage could help stabilize and sustain gay relationships, thereby lowering the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS,' said Zhang Beichuan, a professor at Qingdao University and an outspoken gay rights advocate.
In the meantime, the government continues to work hard to reach vulnerable groups, particularly gay men, and to provide safe sex education and free condoms, said Hao Yang, deputy director of the disease prevention and control bureau under the Ministry of Health.
While government programs currently reach 90,000 gay men a month, Mr Hao said it was insufficient.
Source: CHINA DAILY/ANN
Although the rate of HIV infection is 0.05 per cent nationwide, gay men have been the hardest hit by the sexually transmitted disease, experts warned ahead of this year's World AIDS Day, which fell on Wednesday.
In some cities, nearly one out of five is HIV positive in the gay community, experts said.
'To legalise same-sex marriage could help stabilize and sustain gay relationships, thereby lowering the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS,' said Zhang Beichuan, a professor at Qingdao University and an outspoken gay rights advocate.
In the meantime, the government continues to work hard to reach vulnerable groups, particularly gay men, and to provide safe sex education and free condoms, said Hao Yang, deputy director of the disease prevention and control bureau under the Ministry of Health.
While government programs currently reach 90,000 gay men a month, Mr Hao said it was insufficient.
Source: CHINA DAILY/ANN
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Liu's wife cut off from outside world
LONDON - THE wife of jailed Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo has been completely cut off from the outside world since being put under house arrest following last month's prize announcement, a report said on Monday.
Liu Xia's telephone and Internet connections have been blocked and she has not been allowed to leave the couple's high-rise Beijing flat for almost a month, The Times said, quoting sources with knowledge of her family.
The report said she is allowed a daily phone call with her mother, but that is monitored by police. She also cannot leave to buy food - she must inform officers what she wants to eat for her evening meal so they can bring dishes from restaurants.
'She is not the kind of person who is able to bear this kind of pressure for anything more than a short period,' a friend who asked to remain anonymous told the newspaper. 'If it goes on beyond the (Nobel Prize) awards ceremony date, then I think she could be in a very bad way.'
The Chinese government reacted angrily to the Nobel prize committee's decision to award the peace prize to Liu Xiaobo, a dissident who is serving an 11-year jail sentence on subversion charges after calling for political reform. He will not be allowed to collect the prize at next month's ceremony in Oslo and at least six countries, including Russia, have said they will not attend.
The Times reported that a few days after the prize announcement on October 8, Liu Xia was allowed to visit shops, go to her parents' house and even take walks in the park as long as she was escorted by police. However, she was later told she would be allowed to stay in Beijing only if she agreed to stop communicating with friends and the outside world.
Her mother used to visit her but police insisted on being present, causing Liu to become angry and emotional and the visits have since been stopped, the Times said.
Source: ST Online/AFP
Liu Xia's telephone and Internet connections have been blocked and she has not been allowed to leave the couple's high-rise Beijing flat for almost a month, The Times said, quoting sources with knowledge of her family.
The report said she is allowed a daily phone call with her mother, but that is monitored by police. She also cannot leave to buy food - she must inform officers what she wants to eat for her evening meal so they can bring dishes from restaurants.
'She is not the kind of person who is able to bear this kind of pressure for anything more than a short period,' a friend who asked to remain anonymous told the newspaper. 'If it goes on beyond the (Nobel Prize) awards ceremony date, then I think she could be in a very bad way.'
The Chinese government reacted angrily to the Nobel prize committee's decision to award the peace prize to Liu Xiaobo, a dissident who is serving an 11-year jail sentence on subversion charges after calling for political reform. He will not be allowed to collect the prize at next month's ceremony in Oslo and at least six countries, including Russia, have said they will not attend.
The Times reported that a few days after the prize announcement on October 8, Liu Xia was allowed to visit shops, go to her parents' house and even take walks in the park as long as she was escorted by police. However, she was later told she would be allowed to stay in Beijing only if she agreed to stop communicating with friends and the outside world.
Her mother used to visit her but police insisted on being present, causing Liu to become angry and emotional and the visits have since been stopped, the Times said.
Source: ST Online/AFP
Friday, November 19, 2010
Chinese woman sent to labour camp for retweeting
China has sentenced a woman to a year in a labour camp for "disrupting social order" by retweeting a satirical message urging Chinese protesters to smash the Japan pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, an international rights group said.
Cheng Jianping, 46, re-posted a message from the social networking site Twitter last month hinting that Chinese protesters should smash the Japan pavilion at the Shanghai Expo and adding on the message "Angry youth, charge!" according to Amnesty International, which condemned the sentence in a statement last night.
Amnesty and Cheng's husband said her retweet was meant as satire, mocking anti-Japanese protesters who had grown in number since tensions between the countries increased after a dispute erupted in September over islands claimed by both Japan and China.
"Sentencing someone to a year in a labour camp, without trial, for simply repeating another person's clearly satirical observation on Twitter demonstrates the level of China's repression of online expression," Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific Director Sam Zarifi said in a statement.
Cheng's husband, Hua Chunhui, said he thought the government reacted the way it did to the tweet was because he and his wife are activists.
"My personal opinion is that this sentencing wasn't about this one statement. The government wants to make an example of us activists," said Hua, who lives in Wuxi in China's eastern province of Jiangsu. "The government doesn't like what we do. We actively communicate with other Chinese activists and celebrated on Twitter Liu Xiaobo's Nobel prize."
Hua said that he posted the original tweet because he was mad at all the anti-Japanese protests.
"So I posted that message on Twitter, satirically saying that if they really want to do something big, they should just get on a plane and attack the Japan pavilion at the expo. Of course, that is not possible."
The Shanghai Expo was a major event treated with great sensitivity by China and any threats against it would have been taken seriously by the government. Authorities pulled out all the stops to make sure it was a success and imposed heavy security to ensure there were no disruptions. More than 70 million people visited it before it closed at the end of October after its six-month run.
Government officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
Twitter is blocked in China, but some human rights activists use it by bypassing government controls.
Hua said his wife arrived at a labour re-education centre in central China's Henan Province on Wednesday evening. He said he is not allowed to visit her.
Cheng's sentencing comes as China is under fire for its hardline reaction to the Liu's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Source: Guardian online
Cheng Jianping, 46, re-posted a message from the social networking site Twitter last month hinting that Chinese protesters should smash the Japan pavilion at the Shanghai Expo and adding on the message "Angry youth, charge!" according to Amnesty International, which condemned the sentence in a statement last night.
Amnesty and Cheng's husband said her retweet was meant as satire, mocking anti-Japanese protesters who had grown in number since tensions between the countries increased after a dispute erupted in September over islands claimed by both Japan and China.
"Sentencing someone to a year in a labour camp, without trial, for simply repeating another person's clearly satirical observation on Twitter demonstrates the level of China's repression of online expression," Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific Director Sam Zarifi said in a statement.
Cheng's husband, Hua Chunhui, said he thought the government reacted the way it did to the tweet was because he and his wife are activists.
"My personal opinion is that this sentencing wasn't about this one statement. The government wants to make an example of us activists," said Hua, who lives in Wuxi in China's eastern province of Jiangsu. "The government doesn't like what we do. We actively communicate with other Chinese activists and celebrated on Twitter Liu Xiaobo's Nobel prize."
Hua said that he posted the original tweet because he was mad at all the anti-Japanese protests.
"So I posted that message on Twitter, satirically saying that if they really want to do something big, they should just get on a plane and attack the Japan pavilion at the expo. Of course, that is not possible."
The Shanghai Expo was a major event treated with great sensitivity by China and any threats against it would have been taken seriously by the government. Authorities pulled out all the stops to make sure it was a success and imposed heavy security to ensure there were no disruptions. More than 70 million people visited it before it closed at the end of October after its six-month run.
Government officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
Twitter is blocked in China, but some human rights activists use it by bypassing government controls.
Hua said his wife arrived at a labour re-education centre in central China's Henan Province on Wednesday evening. He said he is not allowed to visit her.
Cheng's sentencing comes as China is under fire for its hardline reaction to the Liu's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Source: Guardian online
Fishing in the Yellow River
NEAR CHANGPO VILLAGE, China — From his perch on an overhang above the Yellow River, Wei Jinpeng pointed to a fisherman's cove below and began counting his latest catch. He stopped after six, and guessed that perhaps a dozen human corpses were bobbing in the murky waters.
The bodies were floating facedown and tethered by ropes to the shore, their mud-covered limbs and rumps protruding from the water.
Wei is a fisher of dead people. He scans the river for cadavers, drags them to shore with a small boat and then charges grieving families to recover their relatives' corpses. Wei said he kept the faces submerged to preserve their features. Any dispute about identity makes it harder to collect his bounty.
Wei doesn't worry about how they got here, but he's heard tales over the years from relatives who've come to claim the bodies, haunting portraits of average people crushed in the extraordinary stress of China's economic boom.
While some of the 80 to 100 bodies Wei gathers each year are victims of accidents and floods, he thinks that the majority end up in the river after suicide or murder. There's no overt sign of a crime spree, though there's evidence of many people taking their own lives. Indeed, suicide is the leading cause of death for women in rural China, and 26 percent of all suicides in the world take place in the nation, according to the World Health Organization
Most of the bodies apparently are swept downriver from Lanzhou, the provincial capital of Gansu in the country's northwest. The city boasts rows of new skyscrapers, built by a rush of poor laborers with few rights, and businessmen notorious for operating above the law.
The work of "body fishers" has received increased attention in Chinese media lately, including the release of a documentary about a clan of them who work near Wei. One English-language state newspaper described the profession as "living on the dead"; it noted that the filmmaker saw the family retrieving bodies almost daily.
Wei's fishing spot is about 18 miles from Lanzhou. A bend in the river and a hydroelectric dam slow the currents and give the bodies a place to float to the surface.
The family members who come to claim them whisper about a father who, unable to make ends meet with low pay, killed himself by jumping off a bridge. Wei also has retrieved bodies with gagged mouths and bound hands, the hallmark of criminal gangs and corrupt police. Finally, there are the remains of young women whom no one recognizes, which Wei eventually cuts loose back into the river, he said.
"Most of the bodies that are not claimed by relatives are female migrant workers who had moved to Lanzhou," said Wei, who drives a red motorcycle and wears large circle-rimmed sunglasses. "Most of them have been murdered. ... Their families don't know; they think they're still working in Lanzhou."
The families who are left to search for the deceased often do so without much help from the police and, instead, have to haggle with men such as Wei over the price of the dead.
A Lanzhou business journal wrote in 2006 about a local firm that got a call from a body fisher who'd found a corpse floating in the river with employee identification. When a company representative, identified only by the surname Wang, went to collect the body, he was told that it would cost 200 yuan (about $30) to view the face and 6,000 yuan ($895) to take the dead man away. Wang and the body fisher argued, finally settling on 4,000 yuan ($597). The news article expressed outrage at the situation and quoted police as saying there'd be a crackdown, something that almost four years later has yet to happen.
Body fishing is by all accounts a thriving business in Gansu province; practitioners advertise their names and phone numbers by painting them on the sides of buildings near the river. Chinese newspapers and news websites have run stories recently about body fishers working from the southwest mega-city of Chonqing to the eastern coastal province of Shandong.
Wei and others said they called the police when they'd found murder victims, though it isn't clear that's always the case.
"They're not only making a business from this, but they're cheating people," said Zhu Wenhuan, a Lanzhou man who's visited Wei twice looking for his mother after she vanished June 3.
Police in the area refused interview requests for this story.
However, Lanzhou residents and news accounts confirmed much of what Wei and his colleagues said.
For example, the wife of Lanzhou resident Zhang Daqiang went missing on May 22. On the suspicion that his wife had flung herself into the river because of problems at work, Zhang has posted fliers and made the rounds of local body fishers. In a telephone interview, he told McClatchy that his wife was facing increased pressure at work after management withheld pay and canceled holidays. She's one of three workers who've disappeared since employees at the company staged a strike in March to protest the conditions, Zhang said.
Lanzhou is a dusty outpost compared with the glitter of a Shanghai, but it anchors a province whose economic output more than doubled from 2004 to 2009. There are BMW and Audi dealerships near towering office buildings in what once was a part of the old Silk Road.
Dong Xiangrong, a Lanzhou university student, said that everyone knew the other side of that new wealth: Workers in the city of some 2 million people, especially migrants, are at times treated like cattle.
"Sometimes their bosses don't pay them, and when they go to argue, the bosses beat them and dump them in the river," Dong, 21, said with a matter-of-fact tone.
Sitting at a nearby park, the Ma brothers paused to consider the issue.
"Some employers don't pay the staff, so their employees commit suicide," said Ma Yinglong, a 55-year-old retired factory worker.
Ma Yingbao, a 44-year-old who's out of work, added: "There could be many reasons for a body to be in the river. ... Some people are under too much pressure."
Before Wei got into the business in 2003, he ran a pear orchard and made some 4,000 yuan a year. He now charges 500 yuan when a farmer comes to gather a body, 2,000 yuan if the customer has a job and 3,000 yuan when a company is covering the bill.
Wei acknowledged that some in the community criticize the work as profiting from tragedy. He pointed out that it's a job that few others are willing to do. Several people in Lanzhou agreed that without Wei and others scooping up bodies, there'd be no way to collect the dead.
Just down the road, Wei Yingquan and his two sons, who were profiled in the documentary, have diversified from sheep farming to body fishing. They charge people 300 yuan (about $45) just to turn over corpses to see whether they recognize them.
"Some people say that I am a swindler, that I am kidnapping bodies," said Wei Yingquan, a 64-year-old with tobacco-stained teeth and a grimy white sweater. Nevertheless, he said, "people come every day to look at the bodies."
Source:Mcclatchy Online
The bodies were floating facedown and tethered by ropes to the shore, their mud-covered limbs and rumps protruding from the water.
Wei is a fisher of dead people. He scans the river for cadavers, drags them to shore with a small boat and then charges grieving families to recover their relatives' corpses. Wei said he kept the faces submerged to preserve their features. Any dispute about identity makes it harder to collect his bounty.
Wei doesn't worry about how they got here, but he's heard tales over the years from relatives who've come to claim the bodies, haunting portraits of average people crushed in the extraordinary stress of China's economic boom.
While some of the 80 to 100 bodies Wei gathers each year are victims of accidents and floods, he thinks that the majority end up in the river after suicide or murder. There's no overt sign of a crime spree, though there's evidence of many people taking their own lives. Indeed, suicide is the leading cause of death for women in rural China, and 26 percent of all suicides in the world take place in the nation, according to the World Health Organization
Most of the bodies apparently are swept downriver from Lanzhou, the provincial capital of Gansu in the country's northwest. The city boasts rows of new skyscrapers, built by a rush of poor laborers with few rights, and businessmen notorious for operating above the law.
The work of "body fishers" has received increased attention in Chinese media lately, including the release of a documentary about a clan of them who work near Wei. One English-language state newspaper described the profession as "living on the dead"; it noted that the filmmaker saw the family retrieving bodies almost daily.
Wei's fishing spot is about 18 miles from Lanzhou. A bend in the river and a hydroelectric dam slow the currents and give the bodies a place to float to the surface.
The family members who come to claim them whisper about a father who, unable to make ends meet with low pay, killed himself by jumping off a bridge. Wei also has retrieved bodies with gagged mouths and bound hands, the hallmark of criminal gangs and corrupt police. Finally, there are the remains of young women whom no one recognizes, which Wei eventually cuts loose back into the river, he said.
"Most of the bodies that are not claimed by relatives are female migrant workers who had moved to Lanzhou," said Wei, who drives a red motorcycle and wears large circle-rimmed sunglasses. "Most of them have been murdered. ... Their families don't know; they think they're still working in Lanzhou."
The families who are left to search for the deceased often do so without much help from the police and, instead, have to haggle with men such as Wei over the price of the dead.
A Lanzhou business journal wrote in 2006 about a local firm that got a call from a body fisher who'd found a corpse floating in the river with employee identification. When a company representative, identified only by the surname Wang, went to collect the body, he was told that it would cost 200 yuan (about $30) to view the face and 6,000 yuan ($895) to take the dead man away. Wang and the body fisher argued, finally settling on 4,000 yuan ($597). The news article expressed outrage at the situation and quoted police as saying there'd be a crackdown, something that almost four years later has yet to happen.
Body fishing is by all accounts a thriving business in Gansu province; practitioners advertise their names and phone numbers by painting them on the sides of buildings near the river. Chinese newspapers and news websites have run stories recently about body fishers working from the southwest mega-city of Chonqing to the eastern coastal province of Shandong.
Wei and others said they called the police when they'd found murder victims, though it isn't clear that's always the case.
"They're not only making a business from this, but they're cheating people," said Zhu Wenhuan, a Lanzhou man who's visited Wei twice looking for his mother after she vanished June 3.
Police in the area refused interview requests for this story.
However, Lanzhou residents and news accounts confirmed much of what Wei and his colleagues said.
For example, the wife of Lanzhou resident Zhang Daqiang went missing on May 22. On the suspicion that his wife had flung herself into the river because of problems at work, Zhang has posted fliers and made the rounds of local body fishers. In a telephone interview, he told McClatchy that his wife was facing increased pressure at work after management withheld pay and canceled holidays. She's one of three workers who've disappeared since employees at the company staged a strike in March to protest the conditions, Zhang said.
Lanzhou is a dusty outpost compared with the glitter of a Shanghai, but it anchors a province whose economic output more than doubled from 2004 to 2009. There are BMW and Audi dealerships near towering office buildings in what once was a part of the old Silk Road.
Dong Xiangrong, a Lanzhou university student, said that everyone knew the other side of that new wealth: Workers in the city of some 2 million people, especially migrants, are at times treated like cattle.
"Sometimes their bosses don't pay them, and when they go to argue, the bosses beat them and dump them in the river," Dong, 21, said with a matter-of-fact tone.
Sitting at a nearby park, the Ma brothers paused to consider the issue.
"Some employers don't pay the staff, so their employees commit suicide," said Ma Yinglong, a 55-year-old retired factory worker.
Ma Yingbao, a 44-year-old who's out of work, added: "There could be many reasons for a body to be in the river. ... Some people are under too much pressure."
Before Wei got into the business in 2003, he ran a pear orchard and made some 4,000 yuan a year. He now charges 500 yuan when a farmer comes to gather a body, 2,000 yuan if the customer has a job and 3,000 yuan when a company is covering the bill.
Wei acknowledged that some in the community criticize the work as profiting from tragedy. He pointed out that it's a job that few others are willing to do. Several people in Lanzhou agreed that without Wei and others scooping up bodies, there'd be no way to collect the dead.
Just down the road, Wei Yingquan and his two sons, who were profiled in the documentary, have diversified from sheep farming to body fishing. They charge people 300 yuan (about $45) just to turn over corpses to see whether they recognize them.
"Some people say that I am a swindler, that I am kidnapping bodies," said Wei Yingquan, a 64-year-old with tobacco-stained teeth and a grimy white sweater. Nevertheless, he said, "people come every day to look at the bodies."
Source:Mcclatchy Online
Friday, November 12, 2010
China Not Taking Yuan ‘Medicine’ Stalls G-20 Progress
Nov. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Group of 20 nations’ efforts to tackle currency and trade imbalances floundered as China rejected policy prescriptions that fault its exchange rate regime and directed criticism at monetary easing in the U.S.
“Don’t make other people take the medicine for your disease,” Yu Jianhua, a director general at China’s Ministry of Commerce, told reporters in Seoul late yesterday. “Quantitative easing will have a very big impact on developing countries including China.”
At stake for the global economy is averting a repeat of the currency and trade tensions that erupted in the 1930s and were blamed for worsening the Great Depression. The pivotal roles China and the U.S. must play to get a breakthrough at the G-20 was underscored by an 80-minute meeting between Presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao dominated by exchange rates.
“The Chinese can’t help but think this is just a way of continuing to point the finger at China,” said Neil Mackinnon, an economist at VTB Capital Inc. in London and a former Treasury official. “It doesn’t look as if we’re going to see anything specific or substantive that will address global imbalances.”
China’s record $28 billion trade surplus with the U.S. in August heightened criticism its government maintains an unfair cap on yuan appreciation to the detriment of U.S. businesses. Obama, who has pledged to double exports within five years, has sought to broaden the currency debate by linking it to a worldwide effort to rein in current-account excesses.
Germany’s Surplus
Germany’s current-account surplus as a percentage of gross domestic product for 2010 is set to be 6.1 percent, the second highest in the G-20 after Saudi Arabia, based on International Monetary Fund projections. The U.S. is likely to see a deficit equivalent to 3.2 percent of GDP, the third deepest, it said.
China is seeking to modify the language on trade imbalances in the summit communique, said a German official taking part in the talks who requested anonymity because he isn’t authorized to speak publicly for the government. G-20 finance chiefs last month agreed to “pursue the full range of policies conducive to reducing excessive imbalances and maintaining current account balances at sustainable levels.”
G-20 negotiators made progress on currency and current- account issues late last night, G-20 committee spokesman Kim Yoon Kyung said today.
‘Positive’ Prospects
“The prospect is now positive. The G-20 leaders will likely move forward beyond the Gyeongju commitment over currency and current-account issues,” he said, referring to the South Korean city where the G-20 finance chiefs met last month.
Obama and Hu spent “the bulk” of their talks discussing exchange rates before attending a dinner with other leaders, said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he was “not so sure” an agreement can be reached in time for the summit’s conclusion later today.
Hu told Obama yesterday that China was committed to reforming the yuan exchange rate regime, Chinese delegation spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told reporters last night. Hu told Obama that it would be an “incremental process” that required a “sound” global economy, Ma said.
“They have to deal with the underlying causes for this instability, which are these imbalances,” said Josef Ackermann, chief executive officer of Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank AG. “It’s not about assigning blame to who is in deficit and who is in surplus -- the markets will decide who is in surplus and who in deficit -- but to create a framework to find the right balance.”
Yuan Gains
China’s yuan rose 0.16 percent to 6.6238 per dollar as of 5:30 p.m. in Shanghai yesterday, according to the China Foreign Exchange Trading System. The yuan has risen about 3 percent against the U.S. currency since June 19, when China said it was allowing a resumption of appreciation that was frozen in 2008. China permitted a faster pace of gains this week, a strengthening of about 0.8 percent since Nov. 8, the yuan’s biggest three-day advance since a currency peg ended in July 2005.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has said that the yuan remains undervalued and that China needs to show continued commitment to allow the Chinese currency to rise further over time. China says that a quick increase in the yuan’s value would cause economic and social disruption.
Geithner is due to meet with Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan and People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan today.
October Meeting
The G-20 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers last month agreed to move toward “more market-determined exchange rate systems” and make efforts on “reducing excessive imbalances.” The U.S. Federal Reserve a week later said it would pump $600 billion into the economy to spur growth. Brazil, Germany and China said the move would drive down the dollar and fuel speculative capital flows that risk asset bubbles.
Copper on the London Metal Exchange rose to a record yesterday, while gold and cotton touched all-time highs this week as investors sought assets as a hedge against currency debasement. The weak dollar and low interest rates are fueling inflows of funds to higher-yielding markets, with governments in South Korea, Brazil and Taiwan raising barriers to foreign investors.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, writing in an opinion piece in the Financial Times yesterday, said that both the U.S. and China were depressing their currencies.
No Weapon
“We will never seek to weaken our currency as a tool to gain competitive advantage,” Geithner said in an interview with CNBC television, according to a transcript released yesterday.
China, the U.S.’s second-largest trading partner, had a trade surplus in excess of $170 billion with the U.S. in the 12 months through August, according to the American Department of Commerce.
China, along with Germany, opposed a suggestion last month by Geithner that the G-20 consider targets for reining in current-account imbalances. To meet the targets, countries like China would likely have to let the value of their currency rise, making their exports more expensive.
Differences in competitiveness between nations can’t be leveled by “politically imposed limits,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told global business leaders in Seoul yesterday.
Setting limits on trade gaps “is an idea that should be discussed,” French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said.
France takes over the presidency of the Group of 20 tomorrow after the summit chaired by South Korea’s Lee.
“Some countries, those with big deficits, need to deal with those deficits,” U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said in Seoul. The big fear is “countries pursuing beggar-my-neighbor policies -- trying to do well for themselves but not caring about the rest of the world.”
Source: Bloomberg
“Don’t make other people take the medicine for your disease,” Yu Jianhua, a director general at China’s Ministry of Commerce, told reporters in Seoul late yesterday. “Quantitative easing will have a very big impact on developing countries including China.”
At stake for the global economy is averting a repeat of the currency and trade tensions that erupted in the 1930s and were blamed for worsening the Great Depression. The pivotal roles China and the U.S. must play to get a breakthrough at the G-20 was underscored by an 80-minute meeting between Presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao dominated by exchange rates.
“The Chinese can’t help but think this is just a way of continuing to point the finger at China,” said Neil Mackinnon, an economist at VTB Capital Inc. in London and a former Treasury official. “It doesn’t look as if we’re going to see anything specific or substantive that will address global imbalances.”
China’s record $28 billion trade surplus with the U.S. in August heightened criticism its government maintains an unfair cap on yuan appreciation to the detriment of U.S. businesses. Obama, who has pledged to double exports within five years, has sought to broaden the currency debate by linking it to a worldwide effort to rein in current-account excesses.
Germany’s Surplus
Germany’s current-account surplus as a percentage of gross domestic product for 2010 is set to be 6.1 percent, the second highest in the G-20 after Saudi Arabia, based on International Monetary Fund projections. The U.S. is likely to see a deficit equivalent to 3.2 percent of GDP, the third deepest, it said.
China is seeking to modify the language on trade imbalances in the summit communique, said a German official taking part in the talks who requested anonymity because he isn’t authorized to speak publicly for the government. G-20 finance chiefs last month agreed to “pursue the full range of policies conducive to reducing excessive imbalances and maintaining current account balances at sustainable levels.”
G-20 negotiators made progress on currency and current- account issues late last night, G-20 committee spokesman Kim Yoon Kyung said today.
‘Positive’ Prospects
“The prospect is now positive. The G-20 leaders will likely move forward beyond the Gyeongju commitment over currency and current-account issues,” he said, referring to the South Korean city where the G-20 finance chiefs met last month.
Obama and Hu spent “the bulk” of their talks discussing exchange rates before attending a dinner with other leaders, said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he was “not so sure” an agreement can be reached in time for the summit’s conclusion later today.
Hu told Obama yesterday that China was committed to reforming the yuan exchange rate regime, Chinese delegation spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told reporters last night. Hu told Obama that it would be an “incremental process” that required a “sound” global economy, Ma said.
“They have to deal with the underlying causes for this instability, which are these imbalances,” said Josef Ackermann, chief executive officer of Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank AG. “It’s not about assigning blame to who is in deficit and who is in surplus -- the markets will decide who is in surplus and who in deficit -- but to create a framework to find the right balance.”
Yuan Gains
China’s yuan rose 0.16 percent to 6.6238 per dollar as of 5:30 p.m. in Shanghai yesterday, according to the China Foreign Exchange Trading System. The yuan has risen about 3 percent against the U.S. currency since June 19, when China said it was allowing a resumption of appreciation that was frozen in 2008. China permitted a faster pace of gains this week, a strengthening of about 0.8 percent since Nov. 8, the yuan’s biggest three-day advance since a currency peg ended in July 2005.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has said that the yuan remains undervalued and that China needs to show continued commitment to allow the Chinese currency to rise further over time. China says that a quick increase in the yuan’s value would cause economic and social disruption.
Geithner is due to meet with Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan and People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan today.
October Meeting
The G-20 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers last month agreed to move toward “more market-determined exchange rate systems” and make efforts on “reducing excessive imbalances.” The U.S. Federal Reserve a week later said it would pump $600 billion into the economy to spur growth. Brazil, Germany and China said the move would drive down the dollar and fuel speculative capital flows that risk asset bubbles.
Copper on the London Metal Exchange rose to a record yesterday, while gold and cotton touched all-time highs this week as investors sought assets as a hedge against currency debasement. The weak dollar and low interest rates are fueling inflows of funds to higher-yielding markets, with governments in South Korea, Brazil and Taiwan raising barriers to foreign investors.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, writing in an opinion piece in the Financial Times yesterday, said that both the U.S. and China were depressing their currencies.
No Weapon
“We will never seek to weaken our currency as a tool to gain competitive advantage,” Geithner said in an interview with CNBC television, according to a transcript released yesterday.
China, the U.S.’s second-largest trading partner, had a trade surplus in excess of $170 billion with the U.S. in the 12 months through August, according to the American Department of Commerce.
China, along with Germany, opposed a suggestion last month by Geithner that the G-20 consider targets for reining in current-account imbalances. To meet the targets, countries like China would likely have to let the value of their currency rise, making their exports more expensive.
Differences in competitiveness between nations can’t be leveled by “politically imposed limits,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told global business leaders in Seoul yesterday.
Setting limits on trade gaps “is an idea that should be discussed,” French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said.
France takes over the presidency of the Group of 20 tomorrow after the summit chaired by South Korea’s Lee.
“Some countries, those with big deficits, need to deal with those deficits,” U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said in Seoul. The big fear is “countries pursuing beggar-my-neighbor policies -- trying to do well for themselves but not caring about the rest of the world.”
Source: Bloomberg
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
China jails tainted milk activist Zhao Lianhai
A Chinese activist who campaigned for compensation for victims of a 2008 contaminated baby milk scandal has been jailed for two-and-a-half years.
Zhao Lianhai, whose child was among the 300,000 made ill by the milk, was convicted of inciting social disorder.
Mr Zhao founded a website to provide information for parents after it was found milk formula had been laced with the industrial chemical melamine to give it a high protein-content reading.
At least six babies died.
"It is such a harsh sentence," Mr Zhao's lawyer Li Fangping told the Associated Press news agency.
"The crimes he was accused of were nothing more than what regular citizens would do to defend their rights."
Mr Zhao's wife, Li Xuemei, said the sentence was unacceptable.
"We will appeal. This is something we have to do," she was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying after the verdict was delivered in Beijing.
Mr Zhao had previously worked for the country's food quality and safety authority.
Major embarrassment
Melamine is normally used to make plastics, fertilisers and concrete.
When added to food products it indicates a higher apparent protein content but can cause kidney stones and kidney failure.
In 2008, melamine was found in the products of 22 Chinese dairy companies - one out of every five suppliers in China.
More than 20 people were convicted for their roles in the scandal, and three people were given the death penalty.
The incident led to a worldwide recall of Chinese dairy products, and was a major embarrassment for the leadership, who vowed to tackle the problem and restore consumer confidence.
Mr Zhao's sentence comes at a time when China is facing intense scrutiny over the amount of criticism it tolerates from its own people.
Source: BBC News
Zhao Lianhai, whose child was among the 300,000 made ill by the milk, was convicted of inciting social disorder.
Mr Zhao founded a website to provide information for parents after it was found milk formula had been laced with the industrial chemical melamine to give it a high protein-content reading.
At least six babies died.
"It is such a harsh sentence," Mr Zhao's lawyer Li Fangping told the Associated Press news agency.
"The crimes he was accused of were nothing more than what regular citizens would do to defend their rights."
Mr Zhao's wife, Li Xuemei, said the sentence was unacceptable.
"We will appeal. This is something we have to do," she was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying after the verdict was delivered in Beijing.
Mr Zhao had previously worked for the country's food quality and safety authority.
Major embarrassment
Melamine is normally used to make plastics, fertilisers and concrete.
When added to food products it indicates a higher apparent protein content but can cause kidney stones and kidney failure.
In 2008, melamine was found in the products of 22 Chinese dairy companies - one out of every five suppliers in China.
More than 20 people were convicted for their roles in the scandal, and three people were given the death penalty.
The incident led to a worldwide recall of Chinese dairy products, and was a major embarrassment for the leadership, who vowed to tackle the problem and restore consumer confidence.
Mr Zhao's sentence comes at a time when China is facing intense scrutiny over the amount of criticism it tolerates from its own people.
Source: BBC News
Visiting HK for groceries
HONG KONG/SHANGHAI - GROWING inflationary pressure on the Chinese mainland, led by rising food prices, is driving mainland buyers to Hong Kong to fill their shopping carts - not for the luxury and imported goods the financial hub is known for, but for daily necessities that used to flow the other way.
More and more residents in South China's Guangdong province, especially Shenzhen, have in the past few weeks been queuing to cross the border into Hong Kong to buy sugar, salt, soybean sauce and even tissue paper in bulk to cushion increasing pressure from rising food prices at home.
Figures from the Shatoujiao border station in Shenzhen show that in the past two weeks, the number of people passing the station to visit Hong Kong on weekdays has increased by 16.7 per cent compared with two weeks ago, while at weekends the figure has been up by 27.8 per cent. Many of them are going to the other side to buy daily necessities, according to local media reports.
Only a few years ago it was Hong Kong residents who would come to Shenzhen to spend weekends shopping and dining.
A Shenzhen local woman surnamed Zhang said shopping for supplies in Hong Kong has been the norm for her since 2009, when she was allowed to apply for multiple entries to Hong Kong within one year.
Since then, the number of items on her shopping list has been growing from imported goods to most daily necessities, including products made on the mainland.
Source: CHINA DAILY/ANN
More and more residents in South China's Guangdong province, especially Shenzhen, have in the past few weeks been queuing to cross the border into Hong Kong to buy sugar, salt, soybean sauce and even tissue paper in bulk to cushion increasing pressure from rising food prices at home.
Figures from the Shatoujiao border station in Shenzhen show that in the past two weeks, the number of people passing the station to visit Hong Kong on weekdays has increased by 16.7 per cent compared with two weeks ago, while at weekends the figure has been up by 27.8 per cent. Many of them are going to the other side to buy daily necessities, according to local media reports.
Only a few years ago it was Hong Kong residents who would come to Shenzhen to spend weekends shopping and dining.
A Shenzhen local woman surnamed Zhang said shopping for supplies in Hong Kong has been the norm for her since 2009, when she was allowed to apply for multiple entries to Hong Kong within one year.
Since then, the number of items on her shopping list has been growing from imported goods to most daily necessities, including products made on the mainland.
Source: CHINA DAILY/ANN
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Hookers' 'training' ring busted
BEIJING - POLICE in Beijing have cracked a gang suspected of forcing nearly 100 women into sex slavery after giving them a 'training course' and requiring them to pass a 'hooker test', state media said on Tuesday.
At least 20 people have been arrested for allegedly forcing the girls to train as prostitutes and sending them to bathhouses, karaoke bars and massage parlours to work, the Global Times reported, quoting the police.
The gang was reportedly led by a 32-year-old man called Xie Zhaobin, who posted job ads in small newspapers in several Beijing districts last year, claiming to be looking for receptionists and PR workers, it said.
After a fake interview process, Xie's accomplices would allegedly confiscate the girls' IDs and he would then rape them and film the act, using the footage as leverage to force them to work as prostitutes.
Xie and his girlfriend Niu Xueying even provided a 'training course' for the girls, which sometimes involved the couple having sex in front of them to show them what to do and ended in a 'hooker test', the report said.
The gang allegedly received agent fees from the bars and clubs where the women were sent to work, and pocketed the girls' pay, making more than 500,000 yuan (almost S$97,000 dollars), according to initial police investigations.
Source: ST Online/AFP
Monday, November 1, 2010
For some Chinese college students, sex is a business opportunity
In a country fast-changing economically and culturally, some middle-class women become mistresses to live a better life. A university pimp explains how it works.
Reporting from Beijing — The girls from the drama academy cost the most. Actresses are pretty, after all, and pretty is the point. Steady access to their sexual favors could cost a man more than $25,000 a year, not to mention the perks and gifts they would expect.
The gentleman on a budget had better browse through students at the tourism institute, or perhaps the business school. Women there can be had for as low as $5,000 a year.
Those are the prices advertised by the young man who calls himself "Student Ding," a senior at Shanghai University who, in the grand tradition of Chinese entrepreneurship, is earning his money by working as a pimp.
Ding calls himself "an agent, a fixer," but his job is all pimp. He started out small: fliers passed on the street to the chauffeurs of expensive cars. He has found his niche arranging long-term, cash-for-sex arrangements between wealthy men and aspirational students, taking a 10% commission off the top.
He is nonchalant about the work, even vaguely proud. He insists that he is doing a service to the men who don't want to hire streetwalkers, and to his middle-class, ambitious and frostily pragmatic college friends.
"Most of the girls are financially comfortable, but they see their classmates carrying Louis Vuitton or Gucci bags, and they're jealous," he said on the phone from Shanghai. "These girls want to have better lives."
He is feeding on a wave of prostitution that, academics and sex workers say, has spread throughout universities and among young, would-be professionals in recent years. This semester, at least two universities introduced rules banning students from working as escorts or mistresses.
But the motivation is strong. The young women are coming of age at a time when China's family structure has eroded and staggering class divisions mean living, for the first time, in a country where shiny things are dangled carelessly under the noses of those who can't afford them.
In China, everybody seems to be ing something these days. Advertising crowds the skyline and the roadsides. A closed country has opened up in a span of decades, and is experiencing an economic boom that has introduced new desires and an "anything goes" mentality.
Reporting from Beijing — The girls from the drama academy cost the most. Actresses are pretty, after all, and pretty is the point. Steady access to their sexual favors could cost a man more than $25,000 a year, not to mention the perks and gifts they would expect.
The gentleman on a budget had better browse through students at the tourism institute, or perhaps the business school. Women there can be had for as low as $5,000 a year.
Those are the prices advertised by the young man who calls himself "Student Ding," a senior at Shanghai University who, in the grand tradition of Chinese entrepreneurship, is earning his money by working as a pimp.
Ding calls himself "an agent, a fixer," but his job is all pimp. He started out small: fliers passed on the street to the chauffeurs of expensive cars. He has found his niche arranging long-term, cash-for-sex arrangements between wealthy men and aspirational students, taking a 10% commission off the top.
He is nonchalant about the work, even vaguely proud. He insists that he is doing a service to the men who don't want to hire streetwalkers, and to his middle-class, ambitious and frostily pragmatic college friends.
"Most of the girls are financially comfortable, but they see their classmates carrying Louis Vuitton or Gucci bags, and they're jealous," he said on the phone from Shanghai. "These girls want to have better lives."
He is feeding on a wave of prostitution that, academics and sex workers say, has spread throughout universities and among young, would-be professionals in recent years. This semester, at least two universities introduced rules banning students from working as escorts or mistresses.
But the motivation is strong. The young women are coming of age at a time when China's family structure has eroded and staggering class divisions mean living, for the first time, in a country where shiny things are dangled carelessly under the noses of those who can't afford them.
In China, everybody seems to be ing something these days. Advertising crowds the skyline and the roadsides. A closed country has opened up in a span of decades, and is experiencing an economic boom that has introduced new desires and an "anything goes" mentality.
Tiny village becomes hub
Taobao changed residents' lives to a focus on online business and getting rich. Xu Junqian found out how they run stores in Qingyanliu, Zhejiang province.
It is a few minutes to 4:00 pm at Qingyanliu, a small village tucked away in Yiwu, Zhejiang province, and it is so quiet you can almost hear a pin drop. Few people can be seen walking around. Rooms on the first floor of every building are tightly shuttered. The entire village is so quiet and empty, it appears to have been evacuated. The one innocuous sight is the number of luxury cars parked in the streets.
However, behind the iron gates of almost every residence in the village, narrow staircases lead to a totally different world consisting of thousands of 300 square meter underground warehouses.
This is "Taobao village", as it has become known, and it is famous for its billion yuan annual sales volume on taobao.com, China's largest online shopping bazaar.
Illuminated brightly by hundreds of fluorescent lights, the underground space is a world buzzing with activity. Lines of shelves groaning with boxes of goods take up more than half of the basement.
Workers busily shuttle through, picking up goods according to the printed orders in their hands and passing them to other workers who sit on stools immersed in packing.
The floor is piled with so many paper boxes of different sizes that one can barely set foot in. The sound of tape being ripped mingles with shouted demands. The stuffy air is ripe with the smell of perspiration. Lunch box leftovers litter what little space remains.
At the stroke of 4:00 pm, the whole village seems to wake up and spring into action, as if by order of an invisible magic hand.
The small gates that separate the underground world from the outside are all opened. Wrapped boxes come pouring out.
Trucks and vans crowd into the village one after another and park by the gates, waiting to be filled up. The underground workers emerge and begin bustling about with the freight.
"This is the everyday routine of the village. People's lives here are centered around the business schedule of Taobao," said Liu Wengao, secretary-general of the local e-commerce association, which was voluntarily founded by some online business dealers in the village in April.
"They get up at noon, begin taking orders from all around the country, then express deliveries come to pick up the goods at dusk. Dealers continue their business late into the night," Liu added.
It all started in 2005, said Liu, who was born and bred in the village. Before that, just 1,500 people lived a largely carefree life of leisure like most countryside people in East China. They did little work and would gather together and play mahjong during the day, living mostly on the proceeds of renting out their family property.
But 2005 witnessed a facelift for the century-old village. More than 200 five-floor buildings were constructed, creating an abundance of cheap rooms.
Given its strategic location next to Yiwu's biggest shipping market, the village became an ideal base for young entrepreneurs, who flock there from all over the country. Yiwu is home to the world's largest wholesale market.
In 2009, there were around 120 stores in the village whose owners bought goods from the market and sold them online. The annual sales volume reached 4 billion yuan ($600 million), five times that in 2008.
This year the total number of online stores rose to 1,800 and the sales volume is expected to be 10 billion yuan.
Home to more than 8,000 people now, Qingyanliu village has become a "lucky base" for hundreds of millionaires who are making their fortunes there.
Tales of rags to riches are in plentiful supply here. Having worked as a salesman in Handan, Southwest China, on a salary of less than 2,000 yuan every month, 28-year-old Wang Shibing left for the village in 2005 and now has more than 40 employees, a factory that produces items such as key rings, folding baskets and nylon bags for both his own store and other online sales platforms - and piles of cash.
"Qingyanliu is a 'dangerous' place," said Wang. "One may come to the village to try one's luck but end up spending the rest of one's life here." Wang has bought apartments, got married, had a son here and brought both his parents from their hometown to the village.
The businessman was unwilling to reveal details of his annual income, but he told China Daily that the sales volume of his store used to account for 3 percent of the entire grocery market on Taobao, which had more than 100,000 stores of this kind, before it was blocked and forced to "readjust" by the website administrators over fears of price manipulation. The business steadily increased by 300 to 400 percent year-on-year at the beginning but has slowed down to 50 to 60 percent in recent years.
Tempted by the large profits, locals put away their mahjong and started their own online stores as well.
Zhang Feng, a 25-year-old college graduate, is one of them. After a few frustrating experiences in the job market, he opened his online grocery shop in 2008 with an investment of 40,000 yuan, taken out on his credit card. Today, he has a brand new black BMW in his crowded garage, has broken away from Taobao, established an independent online sales platform and sells products manufactured by his own factory.
Despite the high-speed development of online shopping, businessmen in the village including Wang Shibing and Zhang Feng are far from satisfied with the current situation.
According to statistics from iResearch, there were around 400 million netizens in China in 2009. Twenty-eight percent of them have shopped online at least once. The proportion is expected to rise to 30 percent in 2010. In the United States, 94 percent of netizens regularly shop online. In South Korea, the number is 99 percent.
The overall sales volume of online shopping reached 247.35 billion yuan in China last year, accounting for 1.97 percent of the Chinese retail industry. It is expected to increase to 4.83 percent in 2013.
The flourishing online business in the village has also boosted many other industries.
Manufacturers of paper boxes and tape have soared. The number of restaurants that serve midnight snacks has risen exponentially.
There are also more than 20 express delivery companies in the village. Picked by the e-commerce association from hundreds of candidates, these companies agreed to lower their price from an original 5 yuan for each article to 3.5 yuan.
That saves the village's dealers a total of 30 million yuan every year and increased the number of articles handled by about 1.5 million.
With the ever-expanding scale of online business in the village, many sellers have had to relocate elsewhere to bigger warehouses.
"As much as we are attached to this second hometown, our growing business left us no choice but to leave for a more spacious area," said Wang, the grocery magnate, who has bought a new 8,000 square meter warehouse in an industrial district miles away from Qingyanliu.
"We have built an efficient network for newcomers and old timers to together enjoy the privilege of doing business here," said Liu, of the e-commerce association. "It is called a supermarket of online goods. "Maybe one day, our village will also become a shopping destination for tourists."
By Xu Junqian
Source: China Daily
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