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- In China, 30 Mass Demonstrations in a Single Day
- Li Upsets Sharapova to Reach Australian Open Final
- Guangzhou to make Nansha Port a top priority
- US$2.5bn allocated for Matsu casino project infrastructure
- Foreign residents in China top 600,000 in 2012
- Prosecutors indict former Taipei 101 chairman
- ‘PNTR’ Spells Job Loss in US, Recent Studies Say
- Will China Save Apple? The Numbers Look Good
- Jason Wu may be granted previously denied 'Miss Wu' trademark
- UBS Securities cuts Acer's target price over write-down
- Taiwan seeking to expand industrial cooperation with Japan
- Taipei mulls locations for representative offices in China
- China issues US$4.8bn in seven-year T-bonds
- Chinese nurses train to work at care homes in Germany
- BMW, Mercedes-Benz undergo management reshuffle in China
- China elder Jiang steps down the ‘public’ order
- Chinese chop: Censors cut 40 min off sci-fi epic
- Top China Stories from WSJ: Lenovo, Export Demand, Shale Gas
- China to Train Cambodia Military
- Teen Dies Before Burning Protest
| In China, 30 Mass Demonstrations in a Single Day Posted: 23 Jan 2013 09:08 PM PST  Thousands of demonstrators in the town of Dongyong staged the seventh anti-corruption protest against the local government in Guangdong on Jan. 21. (Weibo.com) There were nearly three dozen large protests against officials in the ruling Chinese Communist Party around China on Monday, showing that such incidents are becoming more and more commonplace. Overall there were 30 public demonstrations in 16 provinces, according to the activist website molihua.org. There was only one protest on Sunday. Over 4,000 villagers in Shanwei, a city in southern Guangdong Province, partook in an anti-corruption protest on Sunday, demanding that the municipal government get rid of local officials who are suspected of confiscating and selling off their farmland. Police were deployed to quash the demonstration, which was said to be the seventh to erupt over the issue. The villagers' demonstration on Sunday was part of a series of ongoing protests against the confiscation of their land, which they claim was sold without their consent and received no compensation from the sale. Their protests demand that the local government investigate officials who were involved in such deals over the past two decades. Some 50 acres of farmland were sold off in 17 secret land sales, netting profits of several million dollars, which were then embezzled, they claimed. "We must keep it on. Otherwise, our painful three-month-long will come to nothing," villager Cai Siteng told The Epoch Times. A Chinese blogger, who apparently is from Dongyong, also said that around 1,000 people have gathered to protest "every night to gain more strength." But despite protests and thumbprint-covered petitions, the Shanwei government, where Dongyong is, has not responded.  A heavy police presence stood guard at the Shanwei municipal government building. (Weibo.com) Mass protests have been on the rise in China in recent years. In 2000, there were around 40,000 mass demonstrations or riots. But in 2009, there were 110,000, reported the Observer News Weekly last month. In the following year, that figure soared, with reports of 280,000 "mass incidents" taking place across China in 2010, according to the Observer. The Observer said that the number of people involved in these demonstrations has also increased by an average of 17 percent every year in the past decade. In 2000, there were a total of 1.63 million demonstrators involved, but in 2009, 5.72 million protested. Illegal land sales and confiscations, labor disputes, and environmental pollution are the main reasons why Chinese people protest, said Chen Guangjin, the deputy director of the sociology department at the China Academy of Social Sciences, reported the IBTimes. Among the dozens of demonstrations on Monday were: construction workers in Lanzhou, Gansu Province, blocking roads over wages; property owners in Chengdu going on strike about government policy; drivers of three-wheel vehicles in Tongxiang city of Zhejiang Province, protesting about not being able to pass certain roads; retirees from a military equipment factory in Nanjing; villagers in Guangzhou, Guangdong, demanding compensation for a railway construction project. Related ArticlesRead the original Chinese article. The Epoch Times publishes in 35 countries and in 21 languages. Subscribe to our e-newsletter. | ||
| Li Upsets Sharapova to Reach Australian Open Final Posted: 23 Jan 2013 09:09 PM PST China's Li Na has secured a shot at a second Grand Slam title, becoming the first player to make it through to Saturday's Australian Open women's final by pulling off a stunning 6-2, 6-2 upset of second seed Maria Sharapova on Thursday. | ||
| Guangzhou to make Nansha Port a top priority Posted: 24 Jan 2013 04:43 AM PST The development of Nansha Port in Guangzhou, the capital of southern China's Guangdong province, has become one of the major projects for the city government this year. Chen Hongxian, chairman of ... | ||
| US$2.5bn allocated for Matsu casino project infrastructure Posted: 24 Jan 2013 04:43 AM PST An international developer bidding to build a casino resort on Taiwan's outlying island chain of Matsu said Wednesday it has allocated US$2.5 billion for the support infrastructure. This will remov... | ||
| Foreign residents in China top 600,000 in 2012 Posted: 24 Jan 2013 04:43 AM PST Who would like to have China's green card? One third of immigrants who became permanent residents obtained access through 'special contributions,' while very few made it through prior investments in t... | ||
| Prosecutors indict former Taipei 101 chairman Posted: 24 Jan 2013 04:43 AM PST Prosecutors indicted a former chairman of the Taipei Financial Center Wednesday for allegedly "hollowing out" a listed company more than a decade ago. The Taipei District Prosecutors Office demande... | ||
| ‘PNTR’ Spells Job Loss in US, Recent Studies Say Posted: 23 Jan 2013 08:23 PM PST  Container ships are positioned under cranes at the Port of Oakland Aug. 16, 2010, in Oakland, Calif. Multinational companies use China as a platform for producing goods to ship back to the United States, which has caused great loss of jobs here. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) During the first year of the Great Recession in 2008, when financial apocalypse descended, markets collapsed, and the economy buckled, America lost 900,000 manufacturing jobs. In 2001 the country had suffered a much more damaging—but quieter—blow: 1.5 million jobs in the manufacturing sector were eliminated. There was no major recession in 2001. Instead, it was the first year since U.S. policymakers had instituted Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with the People's Republic of China. Normal Trade Relations means that a country receives the lowest tariffs that the United States provides. Countries like England are able to trade normally with the United States, but North Korea can't. Prior to 2000, China's trade status was decided anew every year, and though there was some uncertainty, normal trade was never denied.
Then, President Clinton and Congress decided to make that arrangement permanent, on promises of a booming domestic market in China for U.S. exports, and an improvement in the Chinese communist regime's human rights record. Granting China PNTR was also a condition of its entering the World Trade Organization.  A worker is struck in the face with sparks from molten steel flowing into casts at the TAMCO steel mini mill on Oct. 4, 2002, in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. Since establishing Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs have been lost or not created. (David McNew/Getty Images) But the opposite of both those outcomes actually happened: in China, human rights abuses worsened, and in the United States millions of jobs were lost, shifted to China. The Chinese regime continued with nontariff import barriers, while it produced goods for export to the United States. Two recent academic papers show that PNTR with China was bad news for the manufacturing sector in the United States. The most recent, titled "The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment" by Peter Schott of Yale University's School of Management, and Justin Pierce of the Federal Reserve Board, provides a meticulous exploration of the data on U.S. job loss following PNTR with China. It shows that the key means by which PNTR damaged U.S. manufacturing jobs was that it eliminated uncertainty around the granting of normal trade relations to China—an annual, often politicized process. Once that uncertainty was taken away in October 2000, it was open season for U.S. multinational companies to shift their manufacturing facilities to China. "Firm death" took place when "firms competing head-to-head with China may simply exit rather than move production offshore," the paper said. Between 2001 and 2007, absent the change in policy, jobs in the manufacturing sector would have risen by nearly 10 percent. Instead, they declined more than 15 percent. "Manufacturing employment would have been higher by over 4 million employees in 2007 without the effect of PNTR," says Schott and Pierce's paper. A number of researchers have looked at the impact China has had on U.S. manufacturing jobs, but those studies have sometimes been sidelined because of the perceived background of the sponsoring institution. In this case the Pierce and Schott study stands as a powerful contribution by mainstream academia to an argument that U.S. manufacturing groups have been making for years. It goes along with one done by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor David Autor and colleagues, published last year. That study, titled "The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States," also paints a grim picture on the realities of trade with China. The report says, "The rapid increase in U.S. imports of Chinese goods during the past two decades has had a substantial impact on employment and household incomes, benefits program enrollments, and transfer payments in local labor markets exposed to increased import competition." In other words, a general decrease in incomes. "These effects extend far outside the manufacturing sector, and they imply substantial changes in worker and household welfare," the paper says. Welfare in this case refers to economic well-being. "These studies strongly reinforce a conclusion that we came to in the late 1990s, which is that trade expansion with China, especially WTO entry, was mainly not about enabling U.S.-based manufacturers to supply China," says Alan Tonelson, a research fellow at the U.S. Business & Industrial Council Educational Foundation, a Washington research group. Instead, he says, "It was to create the opportunity for U.S. companies to go to China and set up factories and labs and hire workers, at a much lower cost, in a much less regulated production environment, where substantial subsidies are available," and then sell things back to the United States and the rest of the world. Tonelson added: "Market access to China was never the priority; it was the pretext, and the pretext only." He says the real supporter of the plan was multinational companies which fill the coffers of politicians' electoral campaigns, and were keen to lower their costs of production by shifting manufacturing to China. Another publicly stated goal of granting China PNTR was to pave its way into the World Trade Organization, effectively welcoming it into the community of nations, and therefore over time improving human rights conditions in the communist country. But that didn't work either. "After ten years, it's clear that China is not living up to its promises or the unrealistic expectations of its supporters. Far from becoming freer, the Chinese people are burdened with limited or no rights to basic freedoms of speech, religion, and assembly," said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) at a hearing about China's 10 years in the WTO, held in 2011. Carolyn Bartholemew, a former vice chair of the U.S.-China Commission, a committee that reports to Congress on China, said at a recent forum in Washington: "During President Clinton's administration, it was pitched: get China into the World Trade Organization, and the markets in China would open up to U.S. goods and services and it would solve all the problems." This was a belief that the WTO would force China to change, to do business according to the established practices of countries with functioning legal systems and democratic governments around the world. Related ArticlesThe Epoch Times publishes in 35 countries and in 21 languages. Subscribe to our e-newsletter. | ||
| Will China Save Apple? The Numbers Look Good Posted: 23 Jan 2013 08:02 PM PST Breaking out it's China revenues as a separate category in an earnings call for the first time, Apple revealed that previous quarter sales in the world's second-largest economy rose 60% from a year earlier, hitting $7.3 billion. | ||
| Jason Wu may be granted previously denied 'Miss Wu' trademark Posted: 24 Jan 2013 03:59 AM PST New York-based Taiwanese fashion designer Jason Wu's application to register his sub-label Miss Wu may be approved if he applies again this year with solid evidence proving its market popularity, a se... | ||
| UBS Securities cuts Acer's target price over write-down Posted: 24 Jan 2013 03:59 AM PST Swiss brokerage UBS Securities cut its target price on shares of Taiwanese computer vendor Acer late Tuesday after the company announced it would take a NT$3.5 billion (US$120 million) write-down on t... | ||
| Taiwan seeking to expand industrial cooperation with Japan Posted: 24 Jan 2013 03:59 AM PST A Taiwanese delegation of economic officials, economists and industrial leaders visited Japan last week to study industrial cooperation strategies and expand partnerships between enterprises of the tw... | ||
| Taipei mulls locations for representative offices in China Posted: 24 Jan 2013 03:59 AM PST Taiwan's Straits Exchange Foundation said Wednesday that it would prefer to choose Chinese cities where most Taiwanese business operators and students are congregated as places to locate its China off... | ||
| China issues US$4.8bn in seven-year T-bonds Posted: 24 Jan 2013 03:35 AM PST China's Ministry of Finance announced Wednesday that it will issue 30 billion yuan (US$4.78 billion) in seven-year book-entry treasury bonds. The issuance marks the ministry's third issuance of boo... | ||
| Chinese nurses train to work at care homes in Germany Posted: 24 Jan 2013 03:35 AM PST The first group of nurses from China heading for Germany to as caregivers for seniors are currently learning German language and culture at a training center in Shandong province, according to local m... | ||
| BMW, Mercedes-Benz undergo management reshuffle in China Posted: 24 Jan 2013 03:23 AM PST BMW and Mercedes-Benz are simultaneously reshuffling their management in China in order to consolidate their status in what is a major market market for the German marques. On Jan. 21, a report wa... | ||
| China elder Jiang steps down the ‘public’ order Posted: 23 Jan 2013 05:44 PM PST Influential Chinese ex-President Jiang Zemin has been moved down the top leadership's pecking order — at least in public — as the ruling Communist Party prepares for the final stages of a generational handover in power. 
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| Chinese chop: Censors cut 40 min off sci-fi epic Posted: 23 Jan 2013 05:20 PM PST Censors in China have reportedly edited out 40 minutes of content from the sci-fi epic "Cloud Atlas" before its release next week, cutting the film to just 137-minutes for its mainland version. 
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| Top China Stories from WSJ: Lenovo, Export Demand, Shale Gas Posted: 23 Jan 2013 06:08 PM PST Many in the shipping industry see a sluggish year ahead for Chinese exports; Lenovo Group Ltd. has turned a profit from selling smartphones in China; China's revolution in shale gas is more a distant dream than a work-in-progress. | ||
| China to Train Cambodia Military Posted: 23 Jan 2013 05:13 PM PST  China will train Cambodia's military under a new deal signed Wednesday, following an earlier agreement to sell 12 helicopters to Phnom Penh, officials said. Cambodia is in need of the military assistance and China had honored its request with the deal, Cambodian Defense Minister Tea Banh said at the signing ceremony. Moeung Samphan, secretary of state in Cambodia's Ministry of Defense, inked the agreement in Phnom Penh with the deputy chief of general staff of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), who is on a three-day visit to the country. Under the deal, China will enhance the capacity and expertise of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces by offering training courses and providing military equipment and materials, according to China's Xinhua state news agency. It will also provide musical instruments to be used during a military procession for the cremation of Cambodia's late King Sihanouk next month. Helicopters Tea Banh said that the training and the 12 helicopters will help boost the military's capabilities. "So far we haven't had the equipment for emergency rescue and long-distance operations. We will use this to prepare our military," he said. The Chinese-built Zhi-9 army utility helicopters are part of a U.S. $195 million loan cemented late last year. Tea Banh said they would be used mainly for emergency relief efforts. Qi said after singing the training deal that China will continue to help Cambodia as long as long as it needs help. "We have decided to provide helicopters for Cambodia to help develop this country. When Cambodia has a natural disaster, Cambodia can use its helicopters," he said. China has played a key role in improving Cambodia's dilapidated military inventory since 2010, when Beijing donated 250 jeeps and trucks to Cambodia's army after the U.S. scrapped a similar plan. China is also investing heavily in Cambodia, with its companies pledging in the past year to pump $8 billion into the country, a figure equivalent to almost two-thirds of the Cambodian economy, according to Reuters news agency. Reported by Sok Serey for RFA's Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Rachel Vandenbrink. | ||
| Teen Dies Before Burning Protest Posted: 23 Jan 2013 04:50 PM PST  A Tibetan teenager died of suspected poisoning while he was set to burn himself in protest against Chinese rule in China's Gansu province, sources in Tibet said Wednesday.  A copy of the suicide note. Jigji Kyab "died from consuming a poisonous drug used for killing foxes before he could execute his plan to self-immolate in protest against Chinese rule," a Tibetan source said. "The poison killed him before he could light his body on fire," the source said. Ninety-eight Tibetans have self-immolated to highlight opposition to Chinese rule and seek the return of the Dalai Lama since the wave of fiery protests began in February 2009. In his death note, Jigji Kyab said, "I pray that my hopes are fulfilled … Rise up the sons of the land of snow [Tibet]." He also said, "The Tibetan singers rise up, may the Dalai Lama live long, I bow down to show respect to the Snow Lion [the national symbol of Tibet]." "Father and mother, please take care of my body, you are the most loving persons on this earth. I hope to pay back your kindness in my later life…" Another Tibetan source said Jigji Kyab was a "good young boy with excellent conduct." "He is a devoted Tibetan youth who took great interest in those Tibetans who sacrificed themselves for the Tibetan issue." Reported by RFA's Tibetan Service. Translated by Karma Dorjee. Written in English by Parameswaran Ponnudurai. |
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