We deeply mourn the loss of thousands of innocent lives as a result of the terrible earthquake that struck the Sichuan province in China at mid-afternoon today.
]]>Africans living in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou are being forced to leave the country because of new visa policies, the South China Morning Post reported, citing an unidentified spokesman for the community.
Nearly half of the 10,000 Africans in the city have already been forced to leave because their visa-renewal applications have been denied and at least 100 people are stranded in Macau without enough money to return home, the newspaper reported.
African nationals in the city have been running small businesses on flexible, six-month ``F'' visas and are now being given only tourist visas of up to 15 days, the Morning Post said.
The General Committee of African People in Guangzhou has sent a letter to 10 African embassies in Beijing asking them to press the Chinese government on the issue, the newspaper added.
]]>The mud and brick schoolhouses in the lush mountain villages of this remote part of southwestern China are dark and barebones in the best of times. These days, they also lack students.
Residents say children as young as 12 have been recruited by child labor rings, equipped with fake identification cards, and transported hundreds of miles across the country to booming coastal cities, where they work 12-hour shifts to produce much of the world's toys, clothes and electronics.
"Last year I had 30 students. This year there are only 14. All the others went outside to find work," said Ji Ke Xiaoming, 35, a primary school teacher whose students in Erwu Village are mostly ages 12 to 14. "You know, we are very poor. Some families can't even afford a bag of salt."
China is now investigating whether hundreds, perhaps thousands, of poor children of the Yi ethnic minority group in Liangshan were lured or even kidnapped to work in factories that are increasingly desperate for the kind of cheap labor that powered China to prosperity over the past two decades.
Labor recruiters -- government investigators and some local residents portray them as con men -- have connected two radically different parts of China's turbulent society. They have brought together ethnic minorities untouched by economic development in their mountainous isolation, and factory owners in the prime export manufacturing zones of southern Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong.
Exporters have struggled to adjust to soaring inflation, a fast-rising currency and, with some irony, stricter enforcement of labor laws that make it harder to hire regular workers on a seasonal basis. Using child workers from a remote region, many of whom cannot even speak Mandarin, the country's main national dialect, have provided a temporary, albeit illegal, solution.
A scandal involving Liangshan's children first came to light late last month, when Southern Metropolis, a state-run newspaper, reported that as many as 1,000 school-age workers from the area were employed in manufacturing zones near Hong Kong.
The report was deeply embarrassing for Beijing, which is preparing to host the Olympics and coping with international criticism of its handling of riots in Tibet. Last week, the authorities in Liangshan said they had detained several people for recruiting children and illegally ferrying them off to factories.
And officials in Dongguan, one of the manufacturing zones where the children worked, said that they had "rescued" more than 160 young people from factories. The legal minimum working age in China is 16.
Now, officials have begun to play down the scandal, saying there is little evidence of widespread violations of child labor laws. A two-day government sweep involving more than 3,000 factories around Dongguan, which was conducted after the initial raids, turned up only 6 to 10 children, officials said.
But residents of Liangshan say abject poverty, drug abuse and a lack of jobs have forced many children to head for factories. Sometimes it is with their parents' permission. Other times, children disappear, on their own or with job recruiters, and then call home from a factory dormitory, hundreds of miles away.
]]>China faces mounting appeals to prod cyclone-ravaged Myanmar to allow access to foreign aid workers but is giving no sign it will use its influence over its ally, insisting instead that the world respect the military junta's sovereignty.
The disaster is a reminder of China's close ties with dictatorships such as Zimbabwe, Sudan and Myanmar -- also called Burma -- at a time when Beijing wants to use the Summer Olympics to polish its global image.
Human Rights Watch appealed Saturday to China to help persuade Myanmar -- or force it, if necessary -- to drop restrictions on assistance.
"China and Burma's other friends should lead international efforts, including at the U.N. Security Council, to persuade or compel Burma to accept the international aid that cyclone survivors so badly need," the group's Asia director, Brad Adams, said in a statement.
]]>China will not guarantee it won't censor the Internet over this summer's Beijing Olympics, nor can it guarantee to stamp out piracy of Olympic-branded goods, officials said on Thursday.
Wang Wei, executive vice president of the Beijing Olympic organizers, had promised media would have "complete freedom" to report over the event, but rights groups have regularly criticized China's commitment to that pledge.
China maintains a tight grip over the Internet, whose use is exploding in the world's most populous nation, preventing access to sites it considers anti-government, such as those of the banned spiritual group Falun Gong or Tibet independence groups.
"China has always been very cautious when it comes to the Internet," Technology Minister Wan Gang told a news conference as the Olympic torch was being paraded atop Mount Everest.
"I've not got any clear information about which sites will be shut or screened. But to protect the youth there are controls on some unhealthy websites.
"We will guarantee as much as possible" that sites will not be blocked over the Olympics, he added. "Every country limits access to some websites. Even in developed countries not every site can be accessed."
As part of China's plan to hold a "high-tech Olympics," broadband wireless Internet services will be widely available, according to a handbook issued at the same news conference, to ensure "convenience for journalists (and) promptness of news."
Last week, the United States said again it was concerned about Internet controls in China.
]]>After the French protest at the Beijing Olympic Torch relay, official Chinese media have been highly critical of France. Since then, a retaliatory boycott on French goods has been advocated, resulting in a Chinese protest and boycott of the France-invested retailer Carrefour. Yet the escalating boycott has begun to unintentionally hurt Chinese suppliers of Carrefour as well.
On April 24, a food supplier in Beijing received a fax from Carrefour requesting a goods return. "If the boycott continues, we will certainly suffer greater loss in the future," said the helpless supplier who mentioned that other food suppliers also received goods return notice from Carrefour.
A Beijing supplier was told to go to Carrefour and process 70 boxes of returned goods, or their order would be null and void. "Seventy boxes equates to about a 10 day sales amount in Carrefour," explained the supplier.
According to a China Business Journal report, from the over 100 Carrefour outlets, 95 percent of the goods come from over 1,000 local suppliers in China. Based on Carrefour's unconditional goods return contract, the loss from returned goods will eventually be borne by the suppliers.
"The protests in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Suzhou are relatively restrained," said a Carrefour manager, whose name was withheld by request, "The protests outside our stores in Hefei, Xuzhou, Kunming, Changsha, Wuhan, and Qingdao are very intense." Carrefour stores in Wuhan and Hefei have had to suspend operations due to the protests.
"Because of the boycott, our total sales declined almost 20 percent in the past few days. We are gradually receiving goods return notices from various Carrefour stores," said the manager.
Yang, a General Manager from the Shanghai Chengxie Logistics Distribution Ltd. is very concerned as his company supplies between 70 to 80 percent of the goods for Carrefour Shanghai. In his opinion, many goods have to wait two months before one can see the true impact of the goods return on them.
Yang said that for Carrefour, the incident is merely a sales loss in the short term, and subsequently a partial profit loss. But the real victims are the over 1,000 Chinese suppliers, he said.
Yang explained that Carrefour normally operates on a three-month accounting cycle and returns goods unsold in two months. "Now the goods return rate for Carrefour is about eight percent," said Yang. "If the rate reaches over 20 percent after one or two months, it will hurt the suppliers greatly, especially the food suppliers."
A fresh produce supplier verified that with fewer Carrefour customers, the fresh produce may be affected the most. "Our product sales will decrease at least 30 percent on the whole, and the returned products that cannot be sold will all be borne by the suppliers."
]]>US actress and activist Mia Farrow accused China on Friday of "underwriting the atrocities in Darfur" as she tried to put pressure on Beijing to end years of bloodshed in the Sudanese region.
Farrow, speaking in Hong Kong as the Olympic torch relay was borne through the southern Chinese city, is using the high profile of this summer's Beijing Games to highlight China's support of the Sudanese government.
"It isn't a pretty way to say this, but China is underwriting the atrocities in Darfur through the oil revenues which now top 4 billion US dollars a year," she told AFP in an interview.
"Some 70 percent of that money has been used to attack the population of Darfur."
]]>A U.S. senator accused the Chinese government on Thursday of ordering U.S.-owned hotels in China to install Internet filters that can spy on international visitors coming to see the summer Olympic games.
Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, made the charge at a Capitol Hill news conference where he and other lawmakers denounced China's record of human rights abuses and urged President Bush not to attend the Olympic's opening ceremonies in Beijing.
"This is wrong, it's against international conventions, it's certainly against the Olympic spirit," Brownback said. "The Chinese government should remove that request and that order."
Brownback said he has seen the language of memos received by at least two U.S.-owned hotels. He declined to name them, and said he obtained the information from two "reliable but confidential sources" in the hope that public pressure would persuade the Chinese government to back off the demand.
The filters could enable the government to monitor Web sites viewed by hotel guests and restrict Internet information coming in and out of China, Brownback said.
The senator called China "the foremost enabler of human rights abuses around the world" and said the Chinese government is turning the summer games into "an Olympics of oppression."
A call Thursday to the Chinese embassy in Washington was not immediately returned.
]]>China's lawyers face official harassment, meddling, even jail for defending suspects and sensitive causes, a rights group said in a new report, adding to criticism of the nation's rights record before the Olympics.
Human Rights Watch says the ruling Chinese Communist Party's avowed commitment to rights and rule of law has not been matched by its treatment of lawyers seeking to defend those principles.
"Chinese lawyers continue to face huge obstacles in defending citizens whose rights have been violated and ordinary criminal suspects," the New York-based monitoring group said in the report. "China has a long way to go to lift arbitrary restrictions on lawyers and establish genuine rule of law."
The criticisms and demands for better protection for lawyers will add to a long list of human rights complaints about China ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games in August.
]]>Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say.
The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.
But then some of them saw TV images of protesters holding the emblem and they alerted the authorities, according to Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper.
Tibet independence
The factory owner reportedly told police the emblems had been ordered from outside China, and he did not know that they stood for an independent Tibet.
Workers who had grown suspicious checked the meaning of the flag by going online.
Thousands of flags had already been packed for shipping.
Police believe that some may already have been sent overseas, and could appear in Hong Kong during the Olympic torch relay there this week.
>> Read complete news ]]>
Chinese Student and Scholar Associations (CSSA) in Japanese universities have received notice from the Chinese Embassy, asking them to mobilize all possible manpower to Nagano on April 26 to support the Beijing Olympic Torch Relay.
Sources disclosed that yellow T-shirts will be distributed to them by the Embassy and that the Embassy will also give every one a bottle of mineral water and a pen. All expenses incurred will be paid by the Embassy.
In addition, participants were told by the embassy to claim that the activity is spontaneously organized by unofficial organizations, which have nothing to do with the embassy.
Sources also revealed that the Chinese Embassy in Japan has received orders to prevent human rights protests similar to those that happened in the UK and France from recurring in Japan at all costs.
It has been repeatedly exposed by media that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manipulates overseas Chinese students to work for them. It incites students and secretly develops spies to infiltrate students.
Wei Jingsheng, a well-known Chinese democracy activist pointed out that the CCP on one hand deceives and makes the public fanatical with its control of media, especially Chinese media. On the other hand it threatens and lures students with gains through the operation of its embassies and consulates, overseas education bureaus, and student associations.
]]>An activist group that wants peace in Darfur said Thursday it will organize protests against Beijing Olympics sponsors that it said are failing to use the Games to press China to help end fighting in the region.
Dream for Darfur said 16 companies including General Electric Co., Coca-Cola Co. and Microsoft Corp. showed "moral cowardice" and will be the target of protests. In a 61-page report, the group said Eastman Kodak Co., Adidas AG and McDonald's Corp. have taken adequate action and would not face protests.
With actress Mia Farrow as its spokeswoman, Dream for Darfur is the most prominent of a series of groups that are waging a public relations campaign to prod sponsors to lobby Beijing to pressure its ally Sudan to end the conflict.
"The majority of the 2008 Olympic corporate sponsors in this report have distinguished themselves for moral cowardice in the hopes of safe profitability," the report said.
Dream for Darfur said it also would protest at company headquarters and urge viewers to turn off commercials during the Games in August. It said the first demonstration will be this weekend against Coca-Cola but gave no other details.
]]>In little more than 100 days, China will open its arms to a deluge of foreigners, many of whom will be pleasantly surprised to find a dizzying array of designer boutiques and painfully hip martini bars that divert expatriates and middle-class Chinese in this once dowdy capital.
But even as Beijing is promising to welcome 1.5 million visitors to the Olympic Games, public security officials are tightening controls over daily life and introducing visa restrictions that are causing anxiety among the 250,000 foreigners who have settled here in recent years.
The visa rules, which were introduced last week with little explanation, restrict many visitors to 30-day stays, replacing flexible, multiple-entry visas that had allowed people to remain for up to a year. The new rules make it harder for foreigners to live and work in Beijing without applying for residency permits, which can be difficult to obtain. The restrictions are also complicating the lives of businesspeople in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore used to crossing the border with ease.
"I can't begin to explain how serious this is going to be," said Richard Vuylsteke, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. "A barrier like this is going to have a real ripple effect on business."
The government wants to present a blemish-free image of Beijing for the Olympics. Police officers have cleared away street beggars and closed down shops selling pirated DVDs, while also forcing some migrant workers to go back to the countryside.
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Because the government has not issued formal guidelines about the new visa rules, rumors and uncertainty have been rife, and travel agents say that a handful of tourists have been denied visas without evident rationale.
Cloris Yip, the manager of Smiley Travel in Hong Kong, cited the example of two tourists, a Swiss and a German; the Swiss citizen received a 30-day visa while his German companion was given one for five days. The men, she said, canceled their trip.
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]]>European business officials warned Wednesday that anti-French protests in China could spark a backlash against Chinese exports, while reports surfaced that protesters had confronted an American outside an outlet of French retailer Carrefour.
The incident with the American occurred when dozens of protesters confronted 22-year-old James Galvin, an English teacher working in the southern city of Zhuzhou, mistakenly thinking he might have been French.
Galvin was quickly whisked away by police and was not hurt in the Sunday incident, said Helen Claire Sievers, executive director of the WorldTeach program based in Cambridge, Mass.
''It was frightening for him because he didn't know what was going on,'' Sievers said.
France and high-profile French retailer Carrefour have been targeted by Chinese nationalists who felt insulted by raucous anti-China protests that accompanied the April 7 Paris leg of the Olympic torch relay.
Anger spiked this past weekend with protests at the French Embassy in Beijing and at Carrefour outlets in at least nine Chinese cities. Carrefour has denied rumors that it supports the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled Buddhist leader.
Joerg Wuttke, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, said a boycott of French products, as some activists are calling for, would likely hurt Chinese workers and companies, and could be met by similar action against Chinese products in Europe.
]]>China has spent billions of dollars to fulfill its commitment to stage a grand Olympics. Athletes will compete in world-class stadiums. New highways and train lines crisscross Beijing. China built the world's largest airport terminal to welcome an expected 500,000 foreign visitors. Thousands of newly planted trees and dozens of colorful "One World, One Dream" billboards line the main roads of a spruced-up capital. The security system has impressed the FBI and Interpol.
But beneath the shimmer and behind the slogan, China is under criticism for suppressing Tibetan protests, sealing off large portions of the country to foreign reporters, harassing and jailing dissidents and not doing enough to curb air pollution. It has not lived up to a pledge in its Olympic action plan, released in 2002, to "be open in every aspect," and a constitutional amendment adopted in 2004 to recognize and protect human rights has not shielded government critics from arrest.
The two realities show that when China had to build something new to fulfill expectations, it has largely delivered. But in areas that touch China's core interests, Olympic pledges come second.
"To ensure a successful Olympic Games, the government did make some technical and strategic efforts to improve the environment, human rights and press freedom. They did make some progress. But in these three areas, there's a long, long way to go," said Cheng Yizhong, an editor who tracks China's Olympic preparations.
With the Games less than four months away, the International Olympic Committee is scrambling to nail down specifics of how China will treat criticism of its actions during the event. Pressed this month, IOC President Jacques Rogge clarified that athletes would be allowed to speak freely in Beijing's Olympic venues, calling it an "absolute" human right.
"I can't help but feel cynical about all this," said David Wallechinsky, an Olympic historian, who said the IOC should have been more forceful with China earlier. "What are they going to do, take away the Games?"
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