| Huawei Denies Role in Controversial Singapore Project Posted: 19 Feb 2013 01:11 AM PST The Financial Times reported last week that the parents of American electronics engineer Shane Todd, who died mysteriously in Singapore just before he was due to leave his job and return to the U.S. last summer, believe he was murdered in connection with his involvement in a project between his Singaporean employer and Chinese telecom giant Huawei. While local police claimed Todd hanged himself, his parents retrieved a hard drive from his apartment that detailed the project and laid seeds of doubt about the official account of his death: Security and technology experts consulted by the FT reviewed the project plan and all noted its civilian and potential military applications. Robert York, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara – a world leader in GaN research and where Shane earned a doctorate in silicon devices – said it would be "unnerving but not surprising" if Huawei were to be trying to advance its GaN technology. The high-powered amplifier has civilian use but "could be used for a number of military applications: high-powered radar, electronic warfare including signal jamming and even potentially some weapons", Professor York added. Shane, it turns out, had deep misgivings about the project he was working on and feared he was compromising US national security. His family wants to know whether that project sent him to his grave.
Huawei denied on Monday that it had worked with IME on the project in question, according to Reuters: "IME approached Huawei on one occasion to cooperate with them in the GaN field, but we decided not to accept, and consequently do not have any cooperation with IME related to GaN," Huawei said in a statement. … At the heart of the family's theory is that Todd was concerned for his safety because of a project with a Chinese company. They believed, through information from his colleagues and from his computer files, that the company was Huawei. Reuters can't independently corroborate their views about the role of Huawei or the circumstances of Todd's death. … Huawei declined to say whether they had been working on other projects with IME. Colleagues said shortly after Todd's death that he had told them at one point he had been working on a project with Huawei but that it was not sensitive or high-level in nature.
© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: huawei, military technology, murder, Shane Todd, singapore, suicide
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| Photo: Spring Festival Children, Chengdu Wuhou Memorial Temple, by Dordordor Posted: 18 Feb 2013 11:04 PM PST |
| China Reporting Wins Polk Awards Posted: 18 Feb 2013 10:50 PM PST In a year of remarkable news coverage of China, several outlets have been singled out for their 2012 reporting with prestigious George Polk Awards. Two stories on high-level corruption in China, by Bloomberg and the New York Times, and a CBS News series on human rights activist Chen Guangcheng, have won the award. To mark the awards, a George Polk Seminar entitled, "A Revolution Betrayed: Covering Corruption and Human Rights in China" will be held Wednesday, April 10, 2013, at Long Island University. The Bloomberg stories cited by Long Island University, which oversees the awards, include investigative reports looking into the family wealth of disgraced Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai and incoming president Xi Jinping. The New York Times reports, by David Barboza, examined the financial connections between "princelings" and their extended families. One report looked into the vast wealth obtained by relatives of outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao. The CBS series reported on activist Chen Guangcheng, during the time he was held under house arrest in Linyi, Shandong, and after his escape to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. From the New York Times: In a series of articles, Bloomberg examined the wealth accumulated by Bo Xilai, who was the leader of China's sprawling Chongqing municipality before being ousted in a scandal that erupted over the murder of a British businessman. The series discovered a web of assets stretching from Beijing to the Caribbean worth at least $126 million. The series also revealed how relatives of Xi Jinping enriched themselves. Mr. Barboza's three-part report in The Times, "Princelings," examined the financial interests of high-ranking Chinese officials and their families. The articles showed that relatives of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had accumulated a fortune of $2.7 billion. The award for television reporting went to journalists from CBS News for their work uncovering human rights abuses in China. The correspondent Holly Williams and the cameraman Andrew Portch were recognized for their coverage of the human rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who fled China after years of being under house arrest for his work exposing how some Chinese women were forced to have abortions in order to comply with the country's one-child policy.
After the stories were published, both the Bloomberg and New York Times' sites were blocked in China. Later, the New York Times (along with the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post) revealed that their site had been hacked, with David Barboza's email communications the apparent target.
© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bloomberg, foreign media, high-level corruption, new york times
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| Why Southern Weekly? Posted: 18 Feb 2013 08:53 PM PST Former managing editor Qian Gang looks back on the Southern Weekly incident and the factors behind it, retracing the Guangdong newspaper's difficult past and examining why its New Year's greeting has long-rankled China's propaganda officials: Southern Weekly has long been a thorn in the side of Party conservatives and entrenched interests. Over the past 10 years, the paper has suffered repeated assaults from the authorities and many of its best reporters and editors have been forced to move on. Propaganda officials repeatedly tried sending down ideologically rigid officials from Party newspapers down to Guangzhou from Beijing to serve as editors-in-chief of the newspaper. They appointed "reviewers" who would go over copy with a strict eye. But a consistently strong core editorial team at Southern Weekly meant it was able to withstand such encroachments. In May 2012, the deputy director of Xinhua News Agency, Tuo Zhen (庹震), was appointed propaganda chief of Guangdong province. He made it his mission to bring Southern Weekly and Southern Metropolis Daily to heel. The campaign of pressure against Southern Weekly went into high gear. Instances of direct intervention and prior censorship began happening more frequently. In an open letter released in the midst of the Southern Weekly crisis last month, staff at the paper revealed that at least 1,034 reports had been killed in 2012 alone. … Every New Year's special edition of Southern Weekly since 1999 has included features in which reporters return to the countryside and to city districts to witness the changes underway there. Together these pieces, which always deal with the same places, form a serial portrait of change in China over more than a decade. Southern Weekly special editions are known for their outspokenness on core ideas like democracy and civil society. The 80th anniversary edition of the May Fourth Movement called for greater democracy. The 50th anniversary edition of the founding of the People's Republic of China called for an end to a society of feudal subjects (臣民社会) and the building of a civil society. After 2001, the special New Year's edition of Southern Weekly began choosing persons of the year as well as reviews of important achievements in press monitoring (much of it investigative reporting) over the past year. The newspaper also looked at some news stories it had been unable to cover during the previous year due to censorship instructions.
See also former Southern Newspaper editor Chang Ping's recent interview with ChinaFile, in which he discusses censorship and China's changing media landscape, as well as an op-ed by CDT's Xiao Qiang and Perry Link about the Southern Weekly incident and the "China dream."
© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: journalists, media censorship, media freedom, Qian gang, Southern Weekly, southern weekly protest 2013
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| Weibo Users Call Out Water Pollution Posted: 18 Feb 2013 07:46 PM PST Zhejiang entrepreneur Jin Zengmin has offered a reward to a senior Chinese official if he swims in a polluted river for 20 minutes, according to the South China Morning Post's Chris Luo: "If the environmental protection bureau chief dares to swim in [Ruian's] river for 20 minutes, I will pay [him] 200,000 yuan [HK$246,000]," Jin wrote on Sina Weibo. In three photos Jin posted, a river in small-town Ruian is seen entirely blocked by floating rubbish. Jin blamed a rubber overshoe factory for dumping industrial waste into the river. This river was where villagers used to wash vegetables and clothes in his childhood, Jin told Chinanews.com. Asked for comment, Ruian's environmental protection bureau chief, Bao Zhenmin, acknowledged the river was polluted, the report said. But he said the rubbish is from people, and not factories. "Overpopulation of this region is the main reason behind the pollution…[The population] has largely exceeded the local environment's capacity," Bao told Chinanews.com.
Jin's push in Zhejiang comes as activist web users accused factories in Shandong province of intentionally dumping waste into rivers, according to Li Jing at the South China Morning Post: It all started with a microblog post exposing factories in Shandong that injected toxic waste water underground, and evolved into an online campaign to uncover pollution scandals as people returning home from cities for the holiday encountered unbearable levels of water contamination. Deng Fei , a social activist who helped initiate the campaign, said some journalists and lawyers had mobilised to investigate clues offered by microbloggers, adding that several members of the National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference had expressed interest in looking into the problems. The first post, published on Tuesday on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo, said some chemical plants in Weifang – which were preparing for initial public offerings – had been secretly discharging untreated waste water deep underground, using high-pressure injection wells to avoid supervision. It has been reposted by about 50,000 microbloggers.
Tea Leaf Nation's Liz Carter writes that the issue has become the number-one trending topic on Sina Weibo: News broke on social media that not only were companies polluting the water, but were intentionally pumping wastewater into the ground through high-pressure pipes in order to avoid complying with regulations. The polluted water has caused cancer in many nearby residents, according to reports, and affected the development of local children. A company in Weifang, Shandong was implicated when a journalist travelled there to cover the story. In a post deleted by censors on Sina Weibo, a lawyer named Gan Yuanchun described how officials from Weifang, Shandong sent some of their subordinates to Beijing to prevent media from breaking the news. China Central Television (CCTV)'s coverage of the story was shelved. and the journalist who traveled to Weifang is still being held there involuntarily. Gan Yuanchun wrote in a follow-up post, "Weifang: You think that by harmonizing [censoring] CCTV, you can cover up the truth about #UndergroundWaterPollution? And you're still trying to help this kind of soulless company complete its IPO? You must be dreaming!!"
The state-run Global Times reported that the online outcry in Weifang prompted a response from local authorities, who offered rewards to any whistle-blower whose tips proved accurate, and Ernest Kao and the South China Morning Post reports that an editorial in the Beijing News last week urged officials to tackle the water pollution issue: Beijing's official mouthpiece called for a "declaration of war" in the new Lunar Year on "unscrupulous enterprises" engaged in the illegal and often secretive discharge of untreated waste into waterways. It urged the public and netizens to help. … The editorial said local governments were only compounding the problem by upholding lax environmental regulations and shielding "superstar" companies, deemed too important, from punishment. "The reason why groundwater pollution has long been ignored is that the vast majority of contamination cases occur in rural counties, where farmers lack the right to speak out," it said. The editorial said the fundamental problem lay in governance – or lack of it – and encouraged the public to "take action to investigate and expose any of those unscrupulous companies". It also called on "the relevant parties" to encourage supervision and ensure citizen activist channels are unimpeded".
See also recent CDT coverage of water pollution in China, including an accident at a chemical plant which caused the contamination of a river in northern Shanxi province.
© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: industrial pollution, Internet activism, microblogging, online public opinion, Shandong, sina weibo, water pollution
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| Chinese Farms Breed Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Posted: 18 Feb 2013 03:11 PM PST In 2011, human consumption of antibiotics in China was ten times the global average. Because overuse of the drugs can give rise to resistance in the bacteria they target, the Health Ministry has repeatedly promised to cut down on unnecessary use. Overconsumption among humans is not the only problem, however. Among the various side effects of China's surging meat consumption is the large-scale adoption of American-style intensive farming techniques, including routine preventative dosing of animals. A paper published last week by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Science and Michigan State University documents the consequent proliferation of drug-resistant bacteria at three large pig farms around China. From Maryn McKenna at Wired: If you've followed news about food in China (at this blog or elsewhere), you'll have seen that regulation of food safety is failing under the twin pressures of needing to produce a lot of protein and wanting to make a lot of money. (I think of food in China as being where the United States was before Upton Sinclair came along.) This lack of regulation is as true for agricultural antibiotic use as it is for other aspects of food production. China is both the largest producer and the largest consumer of antibiotics in the world, and it is putting almost half of its annual production into agriculture: about 96 million kilograms, which by my math (using the newest ADUFA numbers in my last post) works out to about 7 times what the US is using each year. […] To quote from the paper: "The diverse set of resistance genes detected potentially confer resistance to all major classes of antibiotics, including antibiotics critically important for human medicine." […] Their summation: The diversity and abundance of (antibiotic resistance genes) reported in this study is alarming and clearly indicates that unmonitored use of antibiotics and metals on swine farms has expanded the diversity and abundance of the antibiotic resistance reservoir in the farm environment. The coenrichment of ARGs and transposases further exacerbates the risks of transfer of ARGs from livestock animals to human-associated bacteria, and then spread among human populations. Overuse of antibiotics in agriculture is still a major problem in the United States, where 80% of all antibiotics sold are consumed by farm animals and the industry has fought beak and trotter to resist regulation. In a New York Times report last September, Sabrina Tavernise summed up the stakes: Antibiotics are considered the crown jewels of modern medicine. They have transformed health by stopping infections since they went into broad use after World War II. But many scientists say that their effectiveness is being eroded by indiscriminate use, both to treat infections in people and to encourage growth in chickens, turkeys, cows and pigs. Whatever the cause, resistant bacteria pose significant public health risks. Routine infections once treated with penicillin pills now require hospitalizations and intravenous drip antibiotics, said Cecilia Di Pentima, director of clinical services at the Infectious Diseases Division at Vanderbilt University's Department of Pediatrics. Infections from such strains of bacteria are believed to cause thousands of deaths a year. "The single biggest problem we face in infectious disease today is the rapid growth of resistance to antibiotics," said Glenn Morris, director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. "Human use contributes to that, but use in animals clearly has a part too." See further discussion of "the doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics" at the Bulletin of the World Health Organization in 2010, and a Telegraph report on antibiotic overuse in China and its dangers from the same year. Last month, Shanghai-based researchers shed new light on one process by which bacteria develop resistance. From Alice Yan at South China Morning Post: Now researchers at Fudan University's Shanghai Medical College say they have uncovered an important mechanism leading to resistance. The team, led by Professor Alastair Murchie, a British molecular biologist, said in a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Cell last week, that they had found a special section of ribonucleic acid (RNA) in some infectious bacteria that could make antibiotics useless. […] Murchie said that while aminoglycoside antibiotics accounted for only about 20 per cent of all antibiotics, the research was important because drug resistance remained a significant threat due to the way it evolved and emerged. "It's important that we understand the underlying mechanism [of] why resistance happens, how are the bacteria so flexible and why do they respond so well to treatment by antibiotics?" Murchie said.
© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agriculture, agriculture policy, antibiotics, Chinese Academy of Science, disease, health ministry, meat, pork, public health, research, United States, world health organization
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| ‘China’s Leonard Cohen’ Calls Out Corruption Posted: 18 Feb 2013 11:28 AM PST NPR's Louisa Lim profiles singer Zuoxiao Zuzhou, who has been described as "China's Leonard Cohen" by Michael Timmins of Cowboy Junkies, and as the most important musician in China by Ai Weiwei. On These Tiny Grapes, Zuoxiao's new album of edgy ballads focusing on the woes of modern-day China, he hones in on rampant corruption, food scandals, injustice and abuse of power. "The government blamed [milk company] Sanlu, and Sanlu blamed the farmers, and the farmers blamed the cows," he sings about the 2008 tainted milk scandal in which six infants died. […] "Chinese people are too rubbish. I'm also one of them," Zuoxiao says. "No one is willing to stand up and speak out. Now our house is being demolished and so many people are happy for their houses to be destroyed. Out of 100 houses, maybe only one or two of us will stick out." […] His mood is best summed up on his new album — improbably, an album of children's songs — where innocent-sounding voices highlight the darkness of the words. The album opens with the lines, "One group of corrupt officials takes down another group of corrupt officials, and that's anti-corruption / A group of despots roots out another group of despots, and that's beating the mafia." Short samples of Zuoxiao's music are included in the audio version of the report. Four full tracks are also available for streaming at NPR.org, with more at the artist's own site. The singer's battle to prevent the demolition of his home has attracted considerable support online. His comments on Chinese people's supposed passivity echo those of author Yan Lianke, who said recently that intellectuals, including himself, "haven't taken enough responsibility. They always have an excuse, saying they don't have a reason to talk or don't have the environment". See also a 2010 interview with Zuoxiao Zuzhou at The China Beat and considerably more information on his official site, via CDT.
© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: corruption, farmers, food scandal, forced demolition, milk, music, musicians, nailhouse, Sanlu, Zuoxiao Zuzhou
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