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- VIDEO: China murder trial sparks debate
- Rail group pays up after attack by workers
- Tombs must go despite halt to removals
- Jobs freeze at Foxconn factory
- Compulsory insurance for environment risks
- Anti-pollution officials don't dare dip in river
- Chinese-led team links smoking, dementia risks
- Man threatens airliner to stop woman leaving him
- Have You Heard…
- China to push compulsory insurance for polluting industries
- After China’s multibillion-dollar cleanup, water still unfit to drink
- First Signs of Tightening in China Policy
- U.S. to tackle trade secret theft from China, others
- Apartment blast kills 1 person in Shanxi Province
- Man makes hoax plane bomb call to keep girlfriend
- China murder trial sparks debate
- Sailors on capsized Cambodian ship off S. Korean waters rescued: report
- Bird flu `epidemic' sparks chicken cull
- Diaoyu activists seek payout
- Taiwanese activists have demanded NT$5 million (HK$1.31 million) in compensation from Japan for allegedly damaging a boat they sailed near the disputed Diaoyu Islands during a protest last month.
| VIDEO: China murder trial sparks debate Posted: 21 Feb 2013 03:16 PM PST The trial of Chinese man in his 80s, accused of murdering a doctor more than 40 years ago at the height of China's Cultural Revolution, has prompted a vigorous online debate. |
| Rail group pays up after attack by workers Posted: 21 Feb 2013 09:21 AM PST A COUNTY government in southwest China's Yunnan Province said last night that an agreement had been reached over an incident in which villagers were beaten and their houses and property damaged by more than 100 railway construction workers. The China Railway Tunnel Group has agreed to pay 300,000 yuan (US$48,000) as compensation for daily necessities damaged by the workers, Funing County's publicity department said. The group also agreed compensation for motorcycles, agricultural vehicles and home appliances. Officials at the Funing section of a railway project have apologized to villagers. Chen Yujiang, an official with the Funing County's publicity department, said that 56 households in the small village were damaged in an incident triggered by a dispute on February 12. Two railway workers had ridden through Yan Village on a motorcycle, splashing mud onto villagers walking by. The villagers forced the duo to pay 600 yuan compensation and then beat them up, the official said. The next day more than 100 workers from the construction company arrived, attacking residents and smashing property as they rampaged through the village. An online post claimed that some villagers had taken children and the elderly into the mountains to hide in order to escape the attack. The construction group is building a line linking Kunming, the provincial capital, to Nanning, capital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, a distance of 710 kilometers. The railway project is due to be completed by 2015. |
| Tombs must go despite halt to removals Posted: 21 Feb 2013 09:19 AM PST VILLAGERS in a central China city who secretly rebuilt tombs after they were flattened by officials to provide more farmland are being forced to pull them down again. Authorities caused uproar last year in Henan Province by demolishing more than 2.4 million tombs but residents rebuilt hundreds of thousands of them over the lunar New Year holiday, the Southern Metropolis Daily said yesterday. Respect for ancestors is a deeply ingrained aspect of Chinese culture, with a major annual festival dedicated to maintaining tombs, and officials halted the "flatten graves to return farmland" policy in November in the wake of a public outcry. But a report in the Henan Daily newspaper said residents had "misunderstood" new rules on burials, wrongly believing that authorities would not remove the tombs if they were rebuilt. A local official quoted by the Southern Metropolis Daily said: "The action of flattening the tombs for the second time is proceeding. This started on February 14 and is nearing completion." The newspaper quoted online forum users saying officials were threatening fines if residents did not remove the rebuilt tombs. China's government encourages cremation, citing a shortage of land for burials, but many in the countryside continue to construct tombs due to traditional beliefs. The rebuilt tombs accounted for about 7.7 percent of those that had been removed, sources with Zhoukou's civil affairs bureau said, denying online rumors that a million had been rebuilt. The city's campaign to encourage the relocation of remains to public cemeteries so land could be reclaimed for agriculture met great resistance from local residents and aroused concern it contradicted traditional culture. Even so, more than 2 million of 3.5 million burial mounds were moved, allowing 2,000 hectares of farmland to be reclaimed before the operation was called off. Zhoukou has been dubbed the "barn in the east of Henan Province" due to its grain production. However, scattered burial mounds have severely eroded farmland and hindered mechanization, government sources said. Civil affairs officials said going against traditions that had existed for thousands of years was not an easy task. |
| Jobs freeze at Foxconn factory Posted: 21 Feb 2013 09:02 AM PST APPLE Inc's manufacturing partner Foxconn Technology Group has frozen hiring at a Shenzhen plant that makes gadgets including the iPhone 5 and put the brakes on recruiting for other factories across China, but said the move was not linked to any single client. Foxconn, which runs a network of factories in the world's second largest economy making products for companies from Hewlett-Packard to Dell, sought to pour cold water on a Financial Times report that it had imposed a hiring freeze while slowing production of Apple's latest smartphone. "Due to an unprecedented rate of return of employees following the Chinese New Year holiday compared to years past, our company has decided to temporarily slow down our recruitment process," the company said in a statement. "This action is not related to any single customer and any speculation to the contrary is false and inaccurate." Like other Chinese contract manufacturers, Foxconn relies on a large number of migrant workers from across the country. They journey home for the most important holiday of the year but many do not make it back to work afterward. However, Foxconn spokesman Louis Woo said this year up to 97 percent of employees had returned. The Shenzhen plant "is not hiring at the moment because workers' return rate after Chinese New Year is very high this year," Woo said. "We replenish each year depending on the return rate." Apple sold a less-than-expected 47.8 million iPhones in the 2012 holiday quarter, fanning fears that its dominance of consumer electronics is on the wane as Samsung Electronics Co and other manufacturers that use Google Inc's Android software gain market share. Apple watchers often take cues from its component suppliers and manufacturing partners. In January, CEO Tim Cook took the unusual step of warning investors that it is difficult to extrapolate from limited "data points." RBC Capital Markets estimates that just 70 to 80 percent of Chinese workers return to factories it tracks. "This year we believe the return rates have been closer to 90 percent, which may minimize the need to hire," said analyst Amit Daryanani. "Given the timing of the freeze, it may have more to do with higher return rates of employees versus what was expected by Foxconn and other supply chain companies." Another Foxconn spokesman, Liu Kun, was quoted by the newspaper as saying: "Currently, none of the plants on China's mainland has hiring plans." This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Compulsory insurance for environment risks Posted: 21 Feb 2013 09:00 AM PST China is to force heavily polluting industries to join an insurance program to guarantee they can provide adequate compensation in the event of any damage. Pollution has become a core concern for the government because of the public anger and protests it generates. Companies that must participate in the scheme include mining and smelting industries, lead battery manufacturers, leather goods firms and chemical factories, the Environment Ministry and China Insurance Regulatory Commission said yesterday in a joint statement. Petrochemical companies and firms that make hazardous chemicals and hazardous waste would also be encouraged to take part, it added. Special environmental protection funds would be allocated to companies taking out the insurance, and they would be given priority for bank lending, the statement said. Companies which don't apply for the insurance may face negative environmental impact assessments and credit downgrades, which could hamper their development, it added. A pilot insurance program currently covered more than 2,000 companies across a dozen provinces and had underwritten some 20 billion yuan (US$3.21 billion) in risk, the government departments said. "Using the tool of insurance ... is conducive toward pushing companies to raise their environmental risk management and reduce incidents of polluting accidents," their statement added. The insurance scheme follows a spate of rules aimed at cleaning up the filthy environment. The issue has sprung back in focus during a particularly smoggy winter that has renewed widespread concern over China's environmental problems. Air quality levels in Beijing and other northern Chinese cites have regularly been labeled as unhealthy or hazardous in recent weeks. |
| Anti-pollution officials don't dare dip in river Posted: 21 Feb 2013 08:00 AM PST AFTER two Wenzhou environmental protection officials were challenged to swim in polluted rivers, the city agency didn't issue bathing caps and trunks but instead bought a full-page ad. The city's environmental protection bureau bought the advertisement to publicize its achievements, a move widely criticized on the Internet. The authority in the city in Zhejiang Province claimed to have improved the public satisfaction rate by 4.6 percent last year and to have been cited as a model agency by provincial authorities. It also said it cleaned up 16 polluted rivers and strictly monitored 298 factories, according to the ad published on Tuesday's Wenzhou Evening News. According to an online posting of the newspaper's ad rates, 140,000 yuan (US$22,442) is quoted for a full-page color ad placement. Neither the paper nor the authority confirmed the cost. Netizens called it a misuse of public money for boasting instead of using it to control pollution. Wenzhou bloggers posted pictures of multicolored rivers that they said had been stained after unrestrained chemical discharges to refute what the authority claimed. Besides water in hues of blue and yellow, the rivers were crammed with trash, including in one case an overturned vehicle. "I thought I was watching oil paintings at first, but I felt unable to continue (looking) when I saw a sea of rubbish," a netizen posted. Over the weekend, Jin Zengmin, chairman of an eyeglasses company in Hangzhou, asked Bao Zhenming, director of the environmental protection bureau in his hometown of Rui'an, which is governed by Wenzhou, to swim in a local river for just 20 minutes. He promised a 200,000 yuan reward. Jin claimed that shoe-manufacturing workshops along the river were discharging industrial waste directly into the river as well as toxic gas into the air. Jin also claimed that 17 of the 1,000 villagers died from cancer last year. Bao admitted the pollution, but blamed household garbage rather than industrial waste. He denied that the workshops were linked to cancer. He vowed to build facilities to combat the pollution. Workers were sent to the scene to clear garbage, the Beijing Times reported. On Tuesday, Su Zhongjie, Bao's counterpart in Cang'nan County in Wenzhou was also asked to swim in an oily and dirty river, with 300,000 yuan in reward money. The Longgang Town government in Cang'nan promised to thoroughly check nearby restaurants, which it blamed for the pollution. |
| Chinese-led team links smoking, dementia risks Posted: 21 Feb 2013 08:00 AM PST A RESEARCH team led by Chinese scientists has linked smoking to higher risks of dementia, Health News reported yesterday. The research results, published in the British Occupational and Environmental Medicine journal, concluded that environmental tobacco smoke, including smoking and passive smoking, should be considered an important risk factor for severe dementia syndromes. The research was conducted by a team from Anhui Medical University, in cooperation with British and American scientists. The team interviewed 5,921 people aged 60 and above in five provinces in China from 2007 to 2009. They used scientific models to calculate the relative risk of moderate and severe dementia among participants exposed to such smoke. According to the results, 626 participants, or 10.6 percent of the total, had severe dementia, and 869, or 14.7 percent, moderate syndromes. Among them, 292 smokers or passive smokers, or 13.6 percent of participants exposed to smoke, had severe dementia, an incidence rate much higher than the 8.9 percent among the non-exposed group. The study further found that, among those exposed to smoke for over 40 years, the risk of severe dementia escalated to 19.3 percent, showing a positive association between intensity of smoke exposure and rate of severe dementia. The study did not find a correlation between exposure and moderate dementia. |
| Man threatens airliner to stop woman leaving him Posted: 21 Feb 2013 08:00 AM PST A SHENZHEN Airlines flight made an emergency landing in an east China city yesterday after a man made a fake bomb call in an attempt to stop his girlfriend from leaving him. The airport of Hefei, capital of eastern China's Anhui Province, received the warning by telephone shortly after midnight yesterday, soon after flight ZH9786 bound for Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, departed the airport. The plane landed at the airport of Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi Province. A thorough examination of the aircraft and 160 passengers did not find any explosives. The caller, identified by the surname Chen, 32, gave himself up to Anhui police at 2:50am and admitted he didn't want his girlfriend to go after they quarreled on Wednesday and the woman got on the flight, the airport police said. Chen was detained for making and spreading false terror information, the police said. The airline sent another plane that picked up the passengers and landed in Shenzhen at 1:30pm. Hoax calls have become more frequent this year with more than 10 affecting domestic carriers. A Shandong Airlines flight SC1170 from Guangzhou to Jinan was diverted in the Hefei Airport after receiving a threatening call on February 8 that proved to be false. In October, two Air China flights received threatening calls before take-off on the same day. Both turned out to be hoaxes after thorough checks revealed nothing suspicious, the airline said. Some hoax callers have gotten a year in prison. Under Chinese law, when such hoax threats to airliners result in injuries, callers face minimum sentences of five years. |
| Posted: 21 Feb 2013 08:46 AM PST Have You Heard…   |
| China to push compulsory insurance for polluting industries Posted: 21 Feb 2013 08:49 AM PST  Source: Reuters (Reuters) – China will force heavily polluting industries to participate in a compulsory insurance program to ensure they can adequately provide compensation for damage, the government said on Thursday. Companies that must participate in the scheme include mining and smelting industries, lead battery manufacturers, leather goods firms and chemical factories, the Environment Ministry and China Insurance Regulatory Commission said in a joint statement. Petrochemical companies and firms that make hazardous chemicals and hazardous waste would also be encouraged to participate, it added. Special environmental protection funds would be allocated to companies taking out the insurance, and they would be given priority for bank lending, the statement said. Companies which don't apply for the insurance may face negative environmental impact assessments and credit downgrades, which could hamper their development, it added. A pilot insurance program currently covered more than 2,000 companies across a dozen provinces and had underwritten some 20 billion yuan ($3.21 billion) in risk, the government departments said. "Using the tool of insurance … is conducive towards pushing companies to raise their environmental risk management and reduce incidents of polluting accidents," it added. The insurance scheme follows a spate of rules aimed at cleaning up the country's notoriously filthy environment. The issue has sprung back in focus during a particularly smoggy winter that has renewed widespread concern over China's environmental problems. Air quality levels in Beijing and other northern Chinese cites have regularly been labeled as unhealthy or hazardous in recent weeks.   |
| After China’s multibillion-dollar cleanup, water still unfit to drink Posted: 21 Feb 2013 08:52 AM PST  Source: Reuters By David Stanway (Reuters) – China aims to spend $850 billion to improve filthy water supplies over the next decade, but even such huge outlays may do little to reverse damage caused by decades of pollution and overuse in Beijing's push for rapid economic growth. That new cash injection will be vital, with rivers and lakes throughout China blighted by algae blooms caused by fertilizer run-off, bubbling chemical spills and untreated sewage discharges. Judging by Beijing's cleanup record so far, however, the final tally could be many times higher. Over the five years to 2010, the country spent 700 billion yuan ($112.41 billion) on water infrastructure, but much of its water remains undrinkable. The environment ministry said 43 percent of the locations it was monitoring in 2011 contained water that was not even fit for human contact. "The reason why they have achieved so little even though they have spent so much on pollution treatment is because they have followed the wrong urbanization model – China is still putting too much pressure on local resources," said Zhou Lei, a fellow at Nanjing University who has studied water pollution. A close look at publicly available documents shows limited environmental ambitions, as Beijing strives to prolong three decades of blistering economic growth and fill the estimated annual water supply shortfall of 50 billion cubic meters (bcm) required to feed growing energy and agricultural demand. At the same time, the government faces growing pressure to address environmental effects of fast growth, as public anger over air pollution that blanketed many northern cities in January has spread to online appeals for Beijing to clean up water supplies as well. The huge costs suggest that treatment, rather than prevention, remains the preferred solution, with industrial growth paramount and pollution regarded as just another economic opportunity, Zhou said. "They always treat environmental degradation as an economic issue. China is even using pollution as a resource, and using the opportunity to treat environmental degradation as a way to accumulate new wealth," he said, referring to business contracts local governments offer to big water treatment firms. "INDUSTRIAL-USE ONLY" On top of the 10-year rural water plan, China last year vowed to spend another 250 billion yuan on water conservation, and has since allocated a further 130 billion yuan to treat small and medium-sized rivers over the next two years. Local governments are also spending heavily, with Dianchi Lake in southwest China's Yunnan province being lavished with 31 billion yuan of investment in the next three years in order to produce "obvious improvements" in water quality, records show. East China's Lake Tai, a test case for China's environmental authorities after suffering a notorious bloom of algae and cyanobacteria in 2007, has spent 70 billion yuan in the five years since, and more is expected. Both cleanup projects have been designed merely to bring water up from "grade V" – meaning "no human contact" – to "grade IV", which is designated "industrial use only", according to detailed plans listed on local government websites. Even such negligible gains could be crucial for a country that has the same amount of water as Britain although its population is 20 times as big. Data from China's Ministry of Water Resources shows that average per capita supplies stand at 2,100 cubic meters, 28 percent of the global average. The government has vowed to cap total use to 700 bcm a year by 2030, but that will still require a big increase in supplies, with consumption now about 600 bcm. Costly engineering and technological feats, though unlikely to address the underlying causes of pollution, could at least make more water available, allowing marginal quality improvements without interfering with industrial growth or the country's ambitious and water-intense urbanization plans. "Part of this increase in the supply of water will come from removing all 'grade V' water supplies, which is actually useless even for agriculture," said Debra Tan, director at the China Water Risk organization. "Grade IV is not safe to swim in, but it at least is usable." ($1 = 6.2270 Chinese yuan)   |
| First Signs of Tightening in China Policy Posted: 21 Feb 2013 09:06 AM PST  Source: Wall Street Journal by Tom Orlik There is no secret to what is driving the turnaround in China's growth: credit. Spurred on by interest-rate cuts in June and July, China's banks went on an end-of-year lender bender. Now there are signs that Beijing has had enough.  This week, China's central bank used its open market operations to drain a record 910 billion yuan in liquidity from the banking system. It was also the first time the bank had issued 28-day and 91-day repurchase agreements since June. The drain was equivalent to a full percentage-point increase in China's reserve requirement ratio—a tool that is used to control lending by locking up bank deposits. The Lunar New Year effect is part of the explanation. The week before the holiday, the central bank injected 662 billion yuan into the system to meet increased demand for cash. With the holiday over, the central bank is partly just taking extra liquidity back. But there is more to it. With several months of data confirming growth is back on track, and prices for everything from food to real estate picking up, the focus of China's monetary policy is shifting from supporting growth to controlling inflation. There is still ample liquidity around. Short-term interest rates remain low, with the one-week repo at 3% on Thursday. But China's equity markets aren't waiting to find out where the central bank is headed. The Shanghai Composite Index was down close to 3% on Thursday. With China's liquidity draining away, investors don't want to be caught high and dry.   |
| U.S. to tackle trade secret theft from China, others Posted: 21 Feb 2013 09:10 AM PST  Source: Reuters By Doug Palmer (Reuters) – The White House said on Wednesday it will step up diplomatic pressure and study whether tougher laws are needed to stop a wave of trade secret theft from China and other countries in a strategy that offered few new ideas for dealing with the threat. "Emerging trends indicate that the pace of economic espionage and trade secret theft against U.S. corporations is accelerating," the White House warned in the report, which listed threats to corporate intellectual property from cyber attacks and more conventional methods of economic espionage. The report did not specifically name any country as the main culprit. But it listed more than a dozen cases of trade secret theft by Chinese companies or individuals, far more than any other country mentioned in the report. U.S. corporate victims of the Chinese theft included General Motors, Ford, DuPont, Dow Chemical and Cargill. "For an economy like ours, that's going to win based on our innovation of what we produce and create, this is a critically important issue," U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk told Reuters in an interview ahead of the report's release. The Obama administration released the strategy one day after a U.S. computer security company said it believed a secretive Chinese military unit was behind a series of hacking attacks. China flatly denied the accusations made by the company, Mandiant, calling them "unprofessional." Its Defense Ministry said hacking attacks are a global problem and that China is one of the biggest victims of cyber assaults. Victoria Espinel, the White House intellectual property rights enforcement coordinator, said the new strategy coordinates and improves existing U.S. government efforts to protect the innovation that drive the American economy and supports jobs in the United States. Kirk said the problem of trade secret theft in China was a factor in the decisions by some U.S. companies to move operations back to the United States. The companies have "had very frank conversations with the Chinese, (saying) 'you know it's one thing to accept a certain level of copyright knock-offs, but if you're going to take our core technology, then we're better off being in our home country," Kirk told Reuters.   |
| Apartment blast kills 1 person in Shanxi Province Posted: 21 Feb 2013 01:29 AM PST A 20-year-old university student was confirmed dead in an explosion that occurred in a residential building in Xiangfen County, Shanxi Province on Monday, the China News Service reported today. The victim was the daughter of a local Party official. The four-story building housed the families of local tax bureau officials. The explosion in a first-floor apartment blew off windows and sent a window frame up to the balcony of the second floor, the report said. Other people living in the building fled unharmed after the blast. Police are still investigating the cause of the explosion. |
| Man makes hoax plane bomb call to keep girlfriend Posted: 21 Feb 2013 12:53 AM PST A domestic passenger plane made an emergency landing in the early hours of Thursday after a man made a fake bomb call in order to prevent his girlfriend leaving him, airport police said. |
| China murder trial sparks debate Posted: 21 Feb 2013 05:42 AM PST The trial of an elderly Chinese man accused of murder during the Cultural Revolution sparks online debate about the excesses of the period. |
| Sailors on capsized Cambodian ship off S. Korean waters rescued: report Posted: 20 Feb 2013 10:53 PM PST TWELVE crew members aboard a Cambodian-flagged ship that capsized off South Korea's east coast earlier today have all been rescued, local media reported. The sailors, including three South Koreans and nine Chinese nationals, left a Japanese port two days ago en route to a port in Sokcho, South Korea, according to broadcaster YTN. The 296-ton vessel capsized in waters some 550 kilometers northeast of the South Korean island of Ulleung. The authorities were notified of the accident this morning. |
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