By Sally Sara | ABC - Australian Broadcasting Corporation
July 03, 2009
The Chinese Government has reacted angrily to an Australian parliamentary delegation's visit to meet Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, in India.
It is the first time a group of Australian MPs and senators has travelled to meet the Tibetan spiritual leader in the Indian hill town of Dharamsala.
The Chinese Embassy in Canberra says the visit constitutes interference in China's internal affairs.
The Dalai Lama says Tibet has been given a death sentence by the Chinese Government.
"No freedom of speech, no freedom of press. Their own people put in dark. It is, I think, immoral," he said.
The Dalai Lama spent more than an hour meeting with members of the first Australian parliamentary delegation to visit him in Dharamsala.
He thanked the all party group of MPs and senators for their support.
"Usually I describe our supporters not like pro-Tibetan, but rather pro-justice," he said.
Labor MP Michael Danby says several members of the delegation are hoping to travel to Tibet later in the year during an official visit to China.
"If the Parliament asks the Chinese Government to allow this group to go, I don't see why they shouldn't be," he said.
"They would be breaking their word and I'm sure the Chinese Government wouldn't like to be seen to be doing that."
The delegation expressed its support for the Dalai Lama's middle way approach of autonomy rather than independence for Tibet.
The Chinese Embassy in Canberra has condemned the Australian visit, saying it constitutes interference in China's internal affairs.
Fifty years after the Dalai Lama fled Tibet, more activists are continuing to arrive in Dharamsala.
The Australian delegation visited a new arrivals centre and met one man who says he was shot by Chinese forces during a protest in March last year.
He told the delegation he thought he was going to die because he was bleeding so heavily.
On Monday, the Dalai Lama will celebrate his 74th birthday and he remains hopeful of returning home.
"Even some of my friends, Tibetan, are now 90 years old. Some, even [though] they [are] also still waiting, one day [will] go back," he said.
"So then I compare them who [are] already in [their] 90s. So I am a bit younger."
By David Barboza | The New York Times
June 23, 2009
Liu Pan, a 17-year-old factory worker, was crushed to death last April when the machine he was operating malfunctioned.
Somehow Mr. Liu became stuck in the machine, his sister Liu Yan recalled during a tearful interview in a village near the factory.
"When we got his body, his whole head was crushed," Ms. Liu said. "We couldn't even see his eyes."
Investigating the accident, inspectors found a series of labor and safety violations at the factory, Yiuwah Stationery, which supplies cards, gift boxes and other paper goods to Disney, the British supermarket chain Tesco and other companies.
The investigators also discovered that Mr. Liu was hired illegally, at 15, below the legal age limit here. Disney has called the situation at the factory "unacceptable."
In a statement issued Wednesday, Disney said it had instructed its vendors and licensees to "cease new orders of any Disney-branded products in the Yiuwah factory" until conditions were improved.
A spokesman for Tesco said that company was also working to improve conditions at the factory.
While the accident at the Yiuwah factory was particularly tragic, working conditions elsewhere are worsening. A year and a half after a landmark labor law took effect in China, experts say conditions have actually deteriorated in southern China's export-oriented factories, which produce many of America's less expensive retail goods.
With China's exports reeling and unemployment rising because of the global slowdown, there is growing evidence that factories are ignoring or evading the new law, and that the government is reluctant to enforce it.
Government critics say authorities fear that a crackdown on violators could lead to mass layoffs and even social unrest.
"The economic downturn has given regulators the perfect excuse to ignore the law," says Zhang Zhiru, director of the Shenzhen Chunfeng Labor Dispute Service, a nonprofit group that supports workers. "I don't see any fundamental change."
But workers are fighting back. Earlier this month, the government said Chinese courts were trying to cope with a soaring number of labor disputes, apparently from workers emboldened by the promise of the new contract labor law.
The number of labor disputes in China doubled to 693,000 in 2008, the first year the law was in effect, and are rising sharply this year, the government says.
The law requires that all employees have a written contract that complies with minimum wage and safety requirements. It also strengthens the monopoly state-run labor union and makes it more difficult for companies to use temporary workers or to dismiss employees.
Western companies that outsource to China say they have stepped up their monitoring of supplier factories to ensure they comply with the law. But they acknowledge that ensuring compliance is challenging in China.
A spokesman for the local Dongguan government here said that they were strictly enforcing the new law. But in interviews, some factory owners acknowledged that they were seeking ways to get around it, complaining that the law's regulations were too costly and cumbersome.
Lawyers say some local governments have issued their own competing rules or interpretations of the law that weaken it, to aid factory owners.
"Many local governments want to develop their own versions of the law," says Liu Cheng, a professor of law at Shanghai Normal University and one of the law's authors.
China's huge and complicated labor market has long thrived on cheap labor and lax regulation. In recent years, labor rights advocates say they have seen incremental gains for workers. But they say there are growing signs of labor abuse. They point to a string of recent cases, like one several weeks ago in which police in southern China's Anhui province said they had freed 30 mentally handicapped workers from what they called "slave conditions" in a brick kiln.
On the same day, police said a fire in the dormitory of an illegal factory in southern Guangdong province killed 13 female workers and seriously injured four others.
A few weeks earlier, 7,000 workers went on strike at a factory that supplies some of the world's biggest technology companies, saying they were being cheated on overtime wages and fed unsanitary food.
Experts say cheating workers on wages, forcing them to log up to 200 hours of overtime a month and denying them health benefits is commonplace in China.
Many factories are violating not just the new contract labor law, but also a 1994 law, which covered a broader set of labor and wage practices, they said.
"The employment contract in many factories here is a mere scrap of paper," says Liu Kaiming, director of the Institute of Contemporary Observation, a labor rights group in Shenzhen. "Here is a common trick: The factory signs contracts with 1,000 workers but actually they've hired 2,000. The factory reports to the government saying they have 100 percent of their workers registered."
Heather White, a consultant who has inspected factories in China for Tommy Hilfiger, Polo Ralph Lauren and other big companies, says many exporters evade the law by subcontracting to so-called shadow factories, which operate under illegal conditions.
"The market is penalizing anyone who complies with the law," she says, meaning their products are more expensive. "And so many companies are subcontracting" to shadow factories.
By Keith Bradsher | The New York Times
June 25, 2009
The Chinese Health Ministry on Thursday ordered sharp restrictions on Internet access to medical research papers on sexual subjects. It is the latest move in what the ministry calls an antipornography campaign that many China experts see as a harbinger of a broader crackdown on freedom of expression and dissent.
In the past month, central government officials have cited a need to control pornography in ordering that filtering software be preinstalled on all new computers sold in China starting July 1.
They have also forced Google to disable a function that lets the search engine suggest terms and on Wednesday night even briefly blocked access nationwide to Google's main search engine and other services like Gmail. Some users were still having problems accessing Google sites on Thursday night.
In addition, Chinese bloggers say they have detected evidence of a concerted effort to stain Google's image. They say that someone in Beijing manipulated Google's software to make it more likely to suggest a pornographic search term during a state television broadcast.
At the same time, the government seems to have stepped up harassment of human rights advocates.
Liu Xiaobo, one of China's best-known dissidents, was formally arrested Tuesday on suspicion of subversion, six months after he was detained for joining other intellectuals in signing a document calling for democracy. This month, the authorities refused to renew the licenses of more than a dozen lawyers after they agreed to represent clients in human rights cases.
The same public security agencies charged with fighting pornography are responsible for suppressing illegal political activity, said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch. The government's statistics for seizures of illegal publications tend to include both pornographic and political documents, he noted.
"The two are closely associated," Mr. Bequelin said. "These campaigns work hand in hand."
By RADIO FREE ASIA
June 21, 2009
Tibetans cite a new government effort to control what news they hear.
KATHMANDU--Chinese authorities have begun to remove satellite dishes in a Tibetan-populated region of China in an effort to block access to foreign broadcasts, according to Tibetan sources.
Tibetan-language broadcasts by Radio Free Asia and Voice of America appear to be particular targets of the campaign, one source said.
"Beginning in April of this year, the local broadcasting department oin Kanlho [in Chinese, Gannan] prefecture [of Gansu province] dispatched staff to the counties to install cable lines and to pull down the satellite dishes used by local Tibetans to listen to foreign broadcasts like RFA and VOA Tibetan programs," a Tibetan woman in the Labrang area of Kanlho said.
"They also installed cable lines for listening to government-approved programs," the woman added, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"Local Tibetans were told by officials that they were carrying out the directives of central and provincial level authorities," she said.
"They distributed copies of the letters issued by the government."
A Gannan prefecture document obtained by RFA, citing State Council document #129, describes what it calls "unprecedented efforts to collect satellite dishes" to restrict access to long-distance broadcasts in Gansu province, a site of repeated Tibetan protests against Chinese rule during the past year.
Anyone failing to comply with government directives to remove the dishes would be "dealt with in accordance with law," the memo said.
Begun in 2000
Tibetan writer Woeser, in the June 15 entry of her blog "Invisible Tibet," noted efforts "as early as 2000" by China's government to block broadcasts by Radio Free Asia and Voice of America.
Hundreds of jamming towers have been built in Tibetan regions for this purpose, she wrote.
"The Chinese government is now forcing Tibetan monks to pull down satellite dishes so that they cannot listen to RFA and VOA broadcasts. In May this year, the Chinese authorities carried out the policy vigorously in Kanlho."
"In their place, the local Tibetans are forced to listen to [state-controlled] local TV programs connected through land lines," she wrote.
Originally reported by Lhumbum Tashi for RFA's Tibetan service. Tibetan service director: Jigme Ngapo. Translations by Karma Dorjee. Written in English by Richard Finney. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
By Zheng Yuwen | VOICE OF AMERICA NEWS | The Epoch Times
June 16, 2009
A Beijing court recently sentenced a bookstore owner to three years in prison for printing and circulating the Bible. He was officially convicted for conducting "illegal business activities." Observers say that this sentencing shows China only pays lip service to religious freedom. People's right to follow their own faith is heavily restricted or even stripped away.
The bookstore sells Christian books in Beijing. The owner, 38-year-old Mr. Shi Weihan, is also the leader of a house church. On June 10, a court in Beijing sentenced him to three years in prison, and charged him 150,000 Yuan (approximately $20,000) in fines. Six others, including members of the same church and workers at the printing house, were also sentenced to prison or fined.
Shi's wife, Ms. Zhang Jing, told VOA that the family was surprised by the long sentence term. Shi's daughters, who are 8 and 12, are having a hard time accepting the sentence. Ms. Zhang said, "The two kids feel that their father is innocent. They don't know why he was convicted and sentenced."
Shi was arrested on November 28, 2007 by the authorities. He was released on January 4, 2008, but was arrested again on March 19, 2008. He had been detained at the Haidian Detention Center since then.
Ms. Zhang said that Shi has severe diabetes. Since March 2008, family members were prohibited from visiting or giving him medicine. His lawyer requested medical parole but received no response. The family is very concerned about Shi's health.
Shi's youngest daughter was born in the United States and is a US citizen. Since Shi's arrest, the U.S. Embassy in China has called his family several times to inquire about his situation.
A VOA reporter called Haidian Police Bureau for Shi's information. Bureau staff told the reporter to submit a written request before they would grant an interview.
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