By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Jul 21 2011 (IPS)

Despite new government regulations, China, for decades the dumping ground for the world’s electronic waste, still struggles to treat and process millions of tonnes of e-waste, prompting health and environmental concerns.

China, where sales of electronic devices are surging, generates as much as 2.3 million tonnes of electronic waste domestically each year, according to a report last year by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). That’s second only to the United States, which produces three million tonnes annually. Much of that waste ends up in China, where imports of e-waste are banned but largely tolerated.

Despite improvements to treatment facilities in recent years, China still lacks large numbers of high- tech recycling facilities and relies instead on environmentally damaging methods of disposal. Some e- waste is burned and large amounts of hazardous material are abandoned without treatment, according to a report by China Environment News.

“China still hasn’t established a proper e-waste management and recycling system,” Peng Ping’an, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry tells IPS. “Large quantities of e-waste are buried directly or dismantled by small, unlicensed plants with bare hands.”

The waste keeps piling up. Roughly 3.5 million tons of electronic waste is expected to be produced in 2011, according to a report by China Construction News, under the Ministry of Housing and Urban- Rural Development.

The UN report said that by 2020, e-waste from old computers is expected jump by 400 percent from 2007 levels in China, while discarded mobile phones will be seven times higher.

The government has begun to tackle the issue. On Jan. 1, 2011, the State Council issued new regulations to deal with the recovery and disposal of electronic waste. Under the new regulations the government agreed to establish a treatment fund for e-waste, which will be used to grant subsidies for the recovery and disposal of electronic products.

But legislation covering the treatment, disposal and recycling of e-waste is still in its infancy, and the current laws remain inadequate, Peng tells IPS. As a result, e-waste treatment remains profit-driven, scattered and disorganised.

There are about 100 companies and institutes engaged in e-waste recovery and disposal in China. They suffer from a lack of policy support and inefficient treatment facilities, Peng says.

Last year’s UN report called on developing countries to improve recycling facilities. Boosting developing countries’ e-waste recycling programmes can have the added benefit of creating jobs, cutting greenhouse gas emissions and recovering a wide range of valuable metals, including silver, gold, palladium, copper and indium, the report said.

There have been some successes. In Tianjin, a coastal city near Beijing, the municipal environmental bureau estimated that around four million television sets, refrigerators, computers, washing machines and air conditioners were scrapped in 2010, making up 38,000 tons of electronic waste, according to People’s Daily.

About 90 percent of that waste reached private businesses for recycling. And there is room for much more. Green Angel, a recycling centre under the auspices of the Tianjin government recycled 70,000 household appliances last year, well short of its treatment capacity of 200,000 units a year.

Improper handling of e-waste can impact human health and the environment. Heavy metals, including lead, tin and barium, can contaminate underground and surface water, and electrical wires are sometimes burnt in open air in order to get to the copper inside, spreading carcinogens into the air.

Foreign countries began dumping e-waste on China in the 1990s, creating both opportunities and problems. While profits were to be made from handling e-waste, China lacked regulations and adequate treatment facilities. Toxic substances were discharged directly into the soil and water without proper treatment.

One town, Guiyu, in southern China’s Guangdong province, is home to the world’s highest recorded levels of dioxin – environmental pollutants that threaten human health – which are released into the air by burning plastics and circuit boards to extract metals, according to a 2007 report by the China Academy of Sciences.

The government has tried to bolster the e-waste recycling industry by offering incentives to people to trade in old appliances for new ones. People can sell old products to home appliance stores such as Gome and Dazhong, which go on to sell them to treatment centres at a discount.

Some people take advantage of this system, however, buying cheap appliances from unlicensed plants that have already “treated” them by removing important components such as copper, glass and gold. Once these appliances reach legitimate treatment centres, they are worthless.

“In meetings we’ve had with our competitors, we’ve found they all have the same problem,” Lou Yi, who operates Taiding (Tianjin) Environmentally Friendly Science and Technology Corp., an e-waste recycling company, tells IPS.

Still, the trade-in scheme is essential to the survival of companies like Lou’s. “We will go bankrupt if the central government abolishes the policy.”

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Jun 20 2011 (IPS)

Rapid economic growth in China’s coastal regions has resulted in serious levels of ocean pollution, damaging marine life and posing a threat to humans. As much as half of China’s offshore areas are considered polluted.

Roughly 48,000 square kilometres of China’s oceanic territory is seriously polluted, an increase of 18,300 square kilometres from last year, according to a report by the State Oceanic Administration of China (SOA). Of the 18 ecological zones monitored by the SOA, 14 were found to have unhealthy levels of pollution.

After 30 years of explosive economic growth, China last year overtook Japan as the world’s second largest economy. While that growth has improved lives for tens of millions, it has also left China as one of the most polluted countries in the world, from sky to sea.

Booming coastal centres are dumping a growing amount of industrial and domestic waste at sea. About 147,000 square kilometres of China’s coastal waters failed to meet standards for “clear water” in 2009, a 7.3 percent increase from the year before, the SOA reported last year.

The new report, called the 2010 China Marine Environment Bulletin, found that 86 percent of China’s estuaries, bays, wetlands, coral reefs and seaweed beds were below what the SOA considers “healthy”.

China has up to five million hectares of estuaries and coastal wetlands, both of which are important ecosystems. Since the 1990s, land reclamation and dam building has threatened these areas. Coastal wetlands are disappearing at a rate of 20,000 hectares a year, and 337 of 457 discharge outlets in China’s estuary areas were found to have excessive levels of pollution, according to a 2009 report by the SOA.

In 2008, China had 13,380 square kilometres of reclaimed land, up from 8,241 square kilometres in 1990s, a Legal Daily story said last month.

Rapidly rising levels of oil, pesticides and other harmful pollutants are contaminating the country’s marine life, including the shellfish supply, according to state media reports last year. Shellfish in offshore areas were found to contain “excessive harmful chemicals” such as lead, cadmium and the insecticide DDT. Levels of lead detected in shellfish were 50 percent above normal, while cadmium and DDT levels were about 40 percent higher.

Lead can cause damage to the human nervous system and cause blood and brain disorders if consumed in unsafe amounts. The World Health Organisation considers DDT a “moderately hazardous” pesticide.

Last year China’s coastal waters suffered 68 “red tides”, or algae blooms, caused by excessive sewage in the water, affecting 14,700 square kilometres, 3.4 times the area affected in the 1990s, according to the report. “Algae bloom seriously threatens fishing resources,” Yu Rencheng, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Oceanology tells IPS. Severely polluted areas include the northern Yellow Sea, Liaodong Bay, Bohai Bay, Laizhou Bay, the Yangtze River estuary, Hangzhou Bay and the Pearl River estuary. Pollutants exceeding normal levels include inorganic nitrogen, reactive phosphate and oil. According to the SOA report, 50 percent of China’s offshore areas were facing problems with pollution, and 48,000 square kilometres did not meet Grade IV standards – meaning they were seriously polluted. Dangerous levels of pollution are generally found near areas experiencing rapid economic growth, Yu explains. The main causes of coastal pollution include the discharge of untreated sewage, the discharge of industrial and residential wastewater, and spillage resulting from shipping and marine accidents.

Between 1998 and 2008, there were 733 shipping accidents in China’s ocean jurisdiction, which led to massive economic and environmental losses, according to government figures. In the 1990s the government tried to curb pollution in China’s major rivers, which drain into the ocean. Along with national laws, local and provincial level governments have been encouraged to implement their own laws and regulations to prevent and control water pollution in small and medium-sized bodies of water, Yu says. In 2009, China’s State Council issued regulations to curb marine pollution caused by shipping. The regulation, which included 78 new rules that came into effect in 2010, called on transportation departments under the state council to develop emergency plans to deal with pollution caused by shipping.

Government officials have admitted there is still a long way to go in tackling the problem of marine pollution.

“Our environmental quality is only improving in certain areas, but overall the environment is still deteriorating,” Vice Minister of Environmental Protection Zhang Lijun told state media.

Lan Hongyan, an expert on marine environment at Hebei Normal University, says a large part of the problem is an uncoordinated approach to tackling ocean pollution. Several different government bodies – including the State Oceanic Administration, the Marine Safety Administration and other national and provincial departments – all oversee different aspects of regulating ocean pollution.

“We don’t have a powerful and coordinated system, which impacts law enforcement,” Lan tells IPS.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, May 6 2011 (IPS)

In China, where a growing demand for organ transplants coupled with a dramatic shortage of donors has fuelled a rampant black market trade, selling your organs for cash is a mouse click away.

An Internet search reveals a website offering kidneys for sale and the contact information of those able to procure them. A young woman, posing for IPS as a migrant worker from Hebei province, calls a man who has advertised on the website, identified as Mr. He.

“I need money,” she says over the phone. “Do you want a woman’s kidney?”

Mr. He asks her age. Twenty-five, she replies.

“Of course we want your kidney.”

Mr. He tells the woman to travel to Xuzhou city, Jiangsu province, where somebody will be waiting when her train pulls into the station. She’ll be given a physical examination and, if she’s found to be in good health, Mr. He will find a suitable transplant candidate. He says he’ll pay RMB 320,000 (50,000 dollars) – a dubious offer, since most kidneys in China sell for around RMB 100,000 (15,000 dollars) – and promises to transfer the money before surgery.

In China, around 1.5 million people require organ transplants, but just 10,000 receive them each year. The vast majority of organs in China still come from condemned prisoners, but new government regulations have reduced the number of organs for available for transplant. Meanwhile, few Chinese agree to donate their organs upon death, widening the gap between supply and demand.

Illegal organ traffickers have stepped in to fill that gap. Last month, Southern Weekend, a newspaper in Guangzhou, broke the story of Hu Jie, a migrant worker from Hunan province who decided to sell his kidney in Linfen, Shanxi province, in order to pay off debts.

Hu changed his mind before surgery but found that his mobile phone, identification and belongings had been taken. He was told by traffickers that he wouldn’t be allowed to leave the city until the surgery was completed.

The story exposed the workings of an illegal trafficking network.

“The illegal organ trade is widespread in China,” Zheng Xiaojun, a lawyer at Tian Run Hua Bang law firm, under the Sichuan Provincial Department of Justice, tells IPS. “There’s booming demand… so there’s a large underground market in organ trafficking in China, acting as an intermediary between organ seekers and organ donors.”

For decades, China, which executes more prisoners annually than any other country, has relied on organs removed from the condemned, a practice that has drawn international criticism. But in 2007, the government mandated all death penalty sentences to be reviewed by the Supreme Court, curtailing executions.

In 2007, the country banned organ transplants from living donors, except from spouses, blood relatives and step or adopted family members. With fewer organs available for transplant, and a growing list of patients in need, the black market trade flourished even further.

Organ trafficking is made easier by a lack of proper regulations and hospital loopholes, according to an article by the Procuratorial Daily this April.

The Regulation on Human Organ Transplantation, which came into effect in May 2007, requires administrative punishment for employees of medical institutes, but punishment for selling or purchasing remains lax, the article said. Many organ donors pose as spouses and relatives of organ seekers by using fake IDs.

The Ministry of Health recently announced it would crack down on medical facilities found conducting organ transplants without proper qualifications, levying large fines and ordering the hospitals to conduct institutional overhauls or risk closure. Staff found breaking laws will be stripped of licences, and officials in charge will be removed and held legally responsible.

The government is also trying to alleviate the organ shortage. In 2008, a liver transplant registry was established in Shanghai. In 2009, the country launched a nationwide system to coordinate donation after death, beginning with a pilot project in ten provinces and cities that encouraged post-death donations as well as starting a fund to provide financial aid for those in need and to donors’ families.

Despite these efforts, China Daily reported in 2009 that 65 percent of all transplants still came from executed prisoners.

By the end of this year, Chinese will be given the option of registering as organ donors when they apply for drivers’ licences. The government is also considering offering financial incentives to encourage voluntary donation.

“The move is to streamline the donor registration system so as to expand the pool of organs available for transplant surgeries,” Vice Health Minister Huang Jiefu was quoted in the state media as saying. “Other financial compensation could also be considered, such as tax rebates, medical insurance or tuition wavers for donors’ family members.”

Critics have expressed doubt the drivers’ licence scheme will have the desired effects.

“Most Chinese would think it was a curse for them to fill out such a form while applying for a driving licence,” Yang Junyi, a Shanghai Red Cross spokesman, told state media.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Apr 21 2011 (IPS)

Long considered a sign of weakness or a bourgeois indulgence, psychiatry is slowly entering the mainstream here, with a growing number of Chinese willing to talk through their problems with a therapist.

But treatment options remain grossly inadequate – despite worries that China might be on the verge of a mental health crisis as the population deals with massive social upheaval and the ghosts of the past. The mental health sector is chronically under-funded and many therapists lack proper training, leaving those in need of treatment with limited options.

While official statistics put the number of Chinese suffering from a mental disorder at 7 percent, other studies have pointed to a much more prevalent trend. According to a study by The Lancet, a British medical journal, one in five adults in China – totaling 173 million people – have a mental disorder. The study found that only one in 12 Chinese who needs psychiatric help ever sees a professional.

A recent Health Ministry survey found that incidents of mental disorders had climbed more than 50 percent from 2003 to 2008, and doctors have reported depression and anxiety to be on the rise.

For much of Chinese history, the treatment of mental illness was left to practitioners of traditional medicine. At the time of the Communist Revolution, China had only 60 psychiatrists for a half a billion people. Despite the trauma caused by the disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, the idea of talking through one’s problems remained stigmatised long after Mao Zedong’s reign.

Those traumas have never been properly addressed for many Chinese, and while China’s economic boom has undoubtedly improved the lives of millions, it has also ushered in complex new realities, the pressures of which are becoming increasingly evident.

Suicide is a leading cause of death among young people and migrant workers. Last year, a spate of high-profile suicides hit Foxconn Technology Group, which makes products for Apple Computers. The pressure on single men – exacerbated by a widening gender gap – was identified as one of the root causes of a series of murderous attacks last summer by middle-aged men upon children.

But the country has an acute shortage of control and prevention institutes and therapists, said Fan Li, vice-president of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army General Hospital, in an interview with China News Agency. He said the rate of young children suffering from mental problems has reached 15 to 20 percent, higher than the international level.

Fan noted that in 2005 there were only 572 medical institutes for mental health, with 16,383 registered therapists – roughly one therapist for every 10,000 people, well off the government’s target of one therapist for every 1,000 people.

Despite a lack of treatment options, the idea of therapy has become much more mainstream. Chinese television regularly airs “Dr. Phil”-inspired programmes that feature guests talking through their problems with an expert.

Zhong Jie, an assistant psychology professor at Peking University, runs a small psychotherapy practice, seeing five to seven patients a week at his office in north Beijing.

“They come in to visit me to help with problems – anxiety, depression, health, relationships,” Zhong tells IPS. “Chinese people are thinking about a new system to deal with mental health. I don’t know the result, but this is a chance to get our society and our government to help Chinese people and organise a new modern mental health system.”

The government has pledged to invest more in mental health, designating billions of dollars for new and improved psychiatric hospitals. The country added some 50,000 hospital psychiatric beds from 2003 to 2008.

Cheng Xi, a certified therapist and member of both the Chinese Psychological Society and the China Association of Mental Health, says the government has acknowledged the rise of mental health problems and is addressing the problems: establishing a suicide hotline, demanding hospitals have psychiatric departments, and creating psychological counseling programmes in schools.

But China has never adopted a national mental health law, and few people have insurance to cover psychiatric care. Despite pledges to improve insurance, last year a Health Ministry official said only 45,000 people were covered for outpatient treatment and only 7,000 for inpatient care.

There is also a shortage of inpatient beds, too few accredited professionals and a virtual absence of care in rural areas.

Because there are so few treatment options, psychiatric hospitals often charge exorbitant rates. According to a report in Shenzhen Special Daily last year, rates can reach RMB 300 (46 dollars) an hour to see a registered therapist. Those who can afford the fee often have unrealistic expectations of treatment; some therapists have reported being abused verbally and physically by patients who did not get the results they expected.

Chen says the government needs to create better institutions, improve training for therapists and lower prices for treatment. He says that although more Chinese are willing to talk about their problems, high fees and poorly trained professionals discourage many.

“Many therapists can’t advise patients,” Chen says, “because they just don’t know how.”

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Mar 18 2011 (IPS)

Despite deep historic tensions between the two Asian powers, a surge of sympathy has emerged among Chinese toward victims of last week’s earthquake and resulting tsunami in northern Japan, which has left an estimated 10,000 dead or missing.

These feelings of sympathy have so far drowned out other emotions – among them a darker one, which sees the twin catastrophes as some sort of karma for the many wartime atrocities Japan has inflicted on China.

“Because of our history, I have a bad impression of Japanese people,” Zhang Wei, a 28-year-old teacher here, told IPS. “So when I first heard the news I was sort of happy. I thought they deserved it.

“But then I saw the images on television,” Zhang said. “I saw children, so many people dead, so many people missing, and I felt very uncomfortable. Very sad. I had no idea it was that serious.”

Discussion of the quake and its aftermath has been among the hottest topics on China’s leading micro-blog service, ‘Sina Weibo’, and is one of the highest trending topics on ‘Baidu’, China’s leading search engine.

According to an online poll conducted by ‘Sina Weibo’ and the Chinese social networking website ‘Kaixin001’, 68 percent of respondents, or 2,827 people, said they were “praying” for the quake and tsunami victims. Seventeen percent said they had no feelings about the disaster.

According to a report in ‘Global Times’, a state-owned newspaper, tens of thousands of Chinese have left messages at popular news portals 163.com and sina.com expressing sympathy for victims. Many netizens have called on their countrymen to put aside their differences with Japan and pray for the victims.

“The Japanese haven’t done anything wrong. They are different from Japanese soldiers,” one user wrote on a ‘NetEase’ web forum. “You can hate those soldiers, but there is no reason to hate common Japanese people.”

“If fighting with Japanese soldiers, I will hold a submachine gun and be on the front lines,” wrote one commentator going by the name Zhangzxin8511. “Now, after the earthquake I will be the first to hold a stretcher if they need my help. Let’s pray for Japan.”

Some Chinese netizens have launched efforts to track down the missing. ‘Weibo’, the leading Twitter-like micro-blogging service, launched a platform over the weekend to helps users search for family and friends in Japan.

But these sentiments are by no means universal.

“I’ll never forget the Japanese war against China. They killed so many people,” Wei Peng, a 23-year-old student at Beijing Foreign Studies University, told IPS. “They deserve it.”

This sentiment reflects deep tensions that remain between the two neighbours, rooted in Japan’s invasion and occupation of parts of China from 1931 to 1945. Japanese atrocities against China are often depicted in Chinese film and television.

In September, the two countries quarrelled in a territorial dispute over the Diaoyu Islands. Japan held a Chinese trawler captain after his fishing boat collided with Japanese coast guard vessels near the islands, prompting Beijing to cancel diplomatic meetings until his release.

Negative reaction to the quake in Japan sparked a backlash among Chinese netizens, calling into question the naked nationalism of some commentators.

“How many Japanese would write, ‘Congratulations on the Wenchuan earthquake’?” said one commentator on the ‘Weibo’ homepage – referring to the 2008 Sichuan quake that killed an estimated 80,000 people.

The Chinese government has set aside tensions. It has sent a 15-member highly trained emergency rescue team to Oofunato, a Japanese city heavily damaged by the quake. Several team members participated in rescue missions following the Indonesian tsunami and earthquakes in Sichuan, Haiti and Pakistan.

The School of Journalism and Communications at Jinan University in Guangzhou conducted a random survey of 505 Guangzhou residents and found that 90 percent supported the decision to send a Chinese emergency team to Japan and 80 percent agreed China should supply more assistance, the ‘Guangdong Daily’ reported.

The Red Cross Society of China pledged to donate one million RMB (152,000 dollars) in emergency funds to its counterpart in Japan.

Earlier this week, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao offered “deep condolences” to the Japanese people. “China is also a country prone to earthquake disasters and we fully empathise with how they feel now. We will provide more as Japan needs it and we want to continue to help as necessary,” Wen said.

The government is also trying to quell growing fears here of nuclear radiation drifting from Japan, after explosions and fires at the severely damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant.

Anonymous text messages have been circulating in China warning of radiation. The Sina Weibo/Kaixin001 poll found that 82 percent of all respondents were worried about nuclear radiation.

Zhang said the dominant topic of discussion at her school is of radiation drift. “The government says we’re safe, so I’ve started to relax a bit. But I’ve seen American movies about what happens to victims of radiation. So of course I’m still a little worried.”

Coastal municipalities in China have begun monitoring radiation levels and aviation officials in Shenyang and Dalian cities have begun checking exposure levels of incoming passengers on flights from Japan, according to state media.

China’s has six nuclear power facilities currently in operation, but has suspended approvals for any new nuclear plants and said it will revise its safety standards.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Mar 7 2011 (IPS)

Despite a greater government effort to monitor food safety in the wake of high profile contamination incidents – including the 2008 melamine milk poisoning scandal that killed six infants and made 300,000 ill – the majority of Chinese still feel insecure about the food they eat.

“I’m not optimistic about the overall state of food safety in China,” says Zheng Fengtian, professor at Renmin University, before listing off recent food scares, including contaminated cowpeas from Hainan Island, poisonous crayfish in Nanjing and the liberal use of recycled cooking oil throughout the country. “All of these make it impossible for Chinese people to expect more from food producers and the government.”

China has faced a number of food scandals in recent years. In 2004, 13 babies died of malnutrition in Fujian province after being fed a formula that contained little or no nutritional value. In 2008, the melamine milk scandal made international headlines and prompted the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to establish three offices in China. (Melamine is a chemical used in making plastics and when added to milk can make its protein content appear higher.)

Toxic food produced in China killed more than 100 people in Panama in 2006 and thousands of pets died in North America in 2007 after consuming adulterated wheat gluten from China.

Responding to the food safety crises, the government has revised food safety regulations – passing a Food Safety Law in 2009 – and cracked down on violators, according to China Daily, a state-owned English newspaper.

China has shown that it is willing to take extreme measures to punish violators. In 2009, a Chinese court sentenced two people to death in the melamine milk scandal and, two years earlier, the country executed Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of the Sate Food and Drug Administration, for accepting bribes from drug companies.

The government has announced the setting up of food safety monitoring centres in 31 provinces across China, according to China Daily. The national food safety work office under the State Council said food safety tests on agricultural products had been expanded to 128 medium and large-sized cities, the newspaper reported.

Despite these efforts, fake or toxic batches of wine, mushrooms, bean curd, rice noodles, dairy drinks and cooking oil have been reported in China in recent months. In November, another melamine scare occurred when contaminated dairy products were discovered in Hunan province.

China faced an unusually high number of food poisoning incidents in the first half of last year, prompting the Ministry of Health to issue a warning on food poisoning in July, the first time since the Food Safety Law was passed. From January to May 2010, there were 2,452 reported cases of food poisoning and 56 deaths, according to Xinhua News Agency.

In July, Chen Rui, deputy director-general of the Bureau of Food Safety Coordination and Health Supervision of the Ministry of Health, said the central government is planning to introduce a new batch of food safety standards, and will establish national standards for food safety.

A small but growing number of farmers is taking the rare measure of starting or joining organic farmers that abide by the community-supported agriculture model (CSA) model that is used in the United States. China has about 40 CSA farms and a recent CSA conference in Beijing attracted more than 250 people, according to media reports.

Feng Yujun, a researcher at the China Law Society’s Food Safety Legislation Research Centre, lauds the government’s efforts to tackle the food safety issue, but says problems remain – namely low-quality raw materials used in the production process and the overuse of food additives and chemicals.

Feng says China needs to strengthen punishments and simplify food safety management and supervision.

“There are over ten departments involved in management and supervision and no unifying food safety standards,” Feng tells IPS. “The central government needs to establish a powerful unified management mechanism.”

Nearly 70 percent of all Chinese do not believe the food they consume is safe, according to this year’s Consumer Food Security Confidence Report published by the Tsinghua University Media Survey Lab and China Insight Magazine, a state-owned publication.

Over 50 percent of those surveyed said food safety should be strengthened; 53 percent expressed concern over the quality of food in China; and 15.6 percent said they don’t trust the nation’s food safety at all. Over 60 percent of respondents said they do not trust genetically modified foods.

“Food producers have no morals”, was the top reason given for not trusting assertions of food quality. Despite increasingly strict supervision of food by the government, many respondents said China’s food producers were still subject to “inefficient government controls.” Only 20.5 percent of those surveyed thought the government put enough effort into food supervision, while 42.5 percent believed it made little or no effort at all.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Feb 26 2011 (IPS)

At Mr. Ma’s fruit and vegetable shop, located in a historic hutong alleyway a few blocks from the Lama Temple, the impact of China’s growing inflation is evident. In recent months, the prices of Mr. Ma’s products have soared. Eggs have gone from RMB 7 (6.5 RMB to a dollar) to RMB 10 per kilogram. Tomatoes have almost doubled. Cabbage has tripled.

Despite the government’s pledge to rein in food prices, Mr. Ma’s not so sure – a sentiment shared by a growing number of ordinary Chinese. “Prices will definitely keep rising,” he tells IPS. “There’s not much we can do.”

Soaring inflation has been the dominant news story coming out of China in recent months. In January, consumer prices in China climbed 4.9 percent compared to the same month a year ago, according to government figures. That was lower than expected, but still cause for concern. Critics claimed that the statistics bureau had recalculated the index to give less weight to food costs, meaning inflation might have actually been higher than reported.

Consumer confidence dropped four points to 100 in the fourth quarter of 2010, the lowest level since 2009, indicating concern among Chinese about inflation’s impact on their daily lives and salaries, according to a survey published by the China Economic Monitoring and Analysis Centre and the Nielsen Company, a media research firm.

According to the survey, numbers above 100 indicate degrees of optimism, while numbers below the 100 mark reflect pessimism. In the second quarter of 2010, Chinese consumer confidence was at 109 points.

The cost of food, most notably fruits and vegetables, has been climbing for the past year, and food prices now rank as the country’s third largest concern, behind income stability and health, the study found. January’s food prices soared 10.3 percent from the month before, and 84 percent of consumers believe food prices will continue to climb in the next 12 months.

Economists also expect more price increases the months ahead, as demand outstrips food supply and commodity prices remain high. China analysts have said that inflation is a major concern for the Communist Party, which has based its legitimacy to rule on economic prosperity. In many areas of China, families spend up to half their income on food.

For ordinary Chinese, life goes on. Small business owners interviewed by IPS on a recent morning say that although they were concerned about rising prices, most weren’t expecting a dramatic drop in business.

“Yeah, the prices are going up, but there’s nothing we can do,” says Ms. Shao, the owner of a tiny convenience store a few doors down from Mr. Ma’s vegetable shop. She says that the cost of most of the items she sells is on the rise, including milk, sugar, beer, cooking oil and flour. Cases of a popular brand of instant noodle are up from RMB 36 last fall to RMB 45 today. All major beer labels are hiking prices.

Ms. Shao has run this convenience store for eight years, and these are the highest prices she’s seen. But she’s not overly concerned – business is down slightly, but not significantly.

“People seldom complain. They know about inflation. You have to eat.”

On a busy street in the heart of central Beijing, Boss Liu barely has time for questions, his bread stand is so busy. His product has gone up from RMB 0.6 (less than a penny) to RMB 0.8, and he expects to sell each shao bing – layered flatbread with sesame seeds on top – for RMB 1 each soon enough.

He’s not too confident the government will be able to control prices, but his business has been largely unaffected by rising inflation.

“Some old people aren’t buying them anymore, but maybe just 1 percent of customers. We’ll be OK.”

The central government in Beijing has promised to rein in inflation by raising bank reserve requirements and interest rates. The central bank recently raised the reserve requirement ratio for banks by 50 basis points, or 0.5 percentage points, and it has raised interest rates three times since October, with more increases likely.

Beijing has tried to calm public concerns by paying subsidies to poor families, keeping prices low at university cafeterias and ordering local governments to ensure vegetable markets are well stocked.

But the government’s pledges offer little comfort to Ms. Tong, the owner of a beef noodle shop near Andingmen subway station. Rising costs are eating into her profit and she’s having trouble retaining staff. Over her lunch she says she’s thinking about closing shop and heading back to her home province of Shandong.

“Nobody wants to work here. They have to work long hours – it’s hard work,” Ms. Tong says. “The price of materials keeps rising and workers keep asking for raises. I can’t afford to keep this place anymore.”

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Feb 20 2011 (IPS)

While new research indicates that China’s overall suicide rate has been in decline for the last two decades, some segments of the population – including urban males and the elderly – are increasingly likely to take their own lives, the result of breakneck social change in the world’s most populous country.

Just over a decade ago, the suicide rate among rural citizens was much higher than urban dwellers, and more women committed suicide than men, according to China’s Ministry of Health, and reported in state media last year. Since then, however, there has been a 30 percent decrease in rural suicide rates, and more Chinese men are now reported to be taking their own lives than women. Precise figures have not been made available.

Suicides rates among the elderly living in urban areas have also climbed in recent years as China’s population ages. The suicide rate of people aged 70 to 74 and living in urban centres climbed to 33.76/100,000 in the period from 2000-2008, up from 13.39/100,000 in the 1990s, according to figures released in September and published in state media.

Rising medical costs and the hardship of relocation have contributed to rising depression rates among the elderly, Jing Jun, professor at Tsinghua University’s Department of Sociology, told Xinhua News Agency. As the country rapidly develops, many elderly people in China’s cities have been forced to relocate from traditional housing in the city centres to apartments on the outskirts.

Some senior citizens also feel abandoned by children who have not taken up the traditional filial role of supporting their parents into old age, Jing said.

Although the suicide rate appears to be rising among some segments of society, new research indicates that the overall rate has been in decline. Due to a significant drop in women’s suicides rates in rural areas in the last 20 years, China’s national suicide rate declined from 17.65/100,000 people in 1987 to 6.6/100,000 in 2008, far below that year’s global rate of 14.5/100,000, according to research by Tsinghua’s Jing.

The recent drop in suicide among rural women has been attributed to the mass migration to urban centres, which has lifted many rural women out of their subordinate roles in the family.

Earlier research had indicated that China has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, especially among rural women. A study in 2007, published in China’s state media, indicated that more than 287,000 people were ending their own lives every year on the Chinese mainland. The data, released by the Beijing Suicide Research and Prevention Centre, found that stress and depression caused 70 to 80 percent of suicides in urban areas.

Half of the suicides in China were women in rural areas, and the most common method of suicide was ingesting pesticides, the study found. Suicide was found to be the leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 34 and more than 20 percent of 140,000 high school students surveyed in a two- year study by Peking University had said they had considered committing suicide.

Last year saw a spate of suicides at factories in China, including a string of high-profile suicides at Foxconn Technologies’ factories in Shenzhen, a boomtown in Southern China. The suicides were attributed to poor working conditions and long hours at Foxconn, the world’s biggest contract maker of information technology goods.

Experts have said China’s massive social transformation has left many young people suffering from isolation and depression, and now those who have made the move from rural to urban areas.

Wu Fei, associate professor at Peking University’s Department of Philosophy, says suicide has not traditionally been a problem in China, but that many Chinese have not been able to adjust to the rapid social transformation of the last three decades.

Wu tells IPS that as China made economic development its top priority, many social problems have been ignored, including “conflict inside families, quarrels between couples and parents beating their children. These never attract attention, but they are actually fundamental problems.”

Zhan Chunyun, dean of the Guangzhou-based Kangning Psychology Hotline, says the three-decade old one-child policy has contributed to suicides among China’s youth. He says young people are most likely to commit suicide because of the intense pressures they face as only children.

“It’s a clear trend – an increasing number of young people killing themselves,” Zhan says. “Families put all their hope on one child. The reason why increasing number of youngsters, even little kids, commit suicide is because they can’t take the burden. It is too heavy.”

Zhang says the government has established a growing number of psychological clinics, but many of the counselors do not have proper training. Most hospitals only offer prescription medicine, when many patients need psychological help, he adds.

Yan Jun, an officer from the Ministry of Health, told People’s Daily that the ministry is improving management for mental illness treatment and is expanding the availability of treatment for common mental illnesses. Health care institutions are working to prevent and treat depression in order to lower suicide rates, Yan said.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Jan 25 2011 (IPS)

A growing number of reports in China’s state media have thrust the issue of child abuse into the national spotlight. Many young parents and teachers today have shifting attitudes about corporal punishment, but incidents of abuse are being reported across the country. Affected children are virtually unprotected under the law.

Zhiyin magazine reported earlier this month that 16-year-old Zhen Xiaojing was strangled to death by her father in September because she had been involved in a relationship with a boy at her school.

Last September, a migrant worker living in Jiaxing city in Zhejiang province beat her three-year-old daughter to death because she couldn’t remember a poem by the poet Li Bai, according to a report in Qianjiang Evening News.

Guangzhou Daily carried a story last June about a nine-year-old girl found dead in her family home in a village in southern China’s Guangdong province. Her parents, who had long been suspected by neighbours of beating the child and denying her food and sleep, were detained. The parents had falsely accused the little girl of stealing money from them.

In December 2009, a teacher forced Zhang Jixin, a middle school student in Wujing, Shandong province, to stand outside his dormitory in freezing cold for breaking school rules, according to a China Radio International report. The teacher went drinking and forgot about Zhang, who froze to death during the night.

A school official later prompted public fury by saying in an interview, “Zhang died peacefully. You can’t find pain on his face.”

Corporal punishment has long been commonplace in China, where many parents believe in the creed “spare the rod and spoil the child.”

In a survey by the Guangdong provincial government, 76 percent of parents, 52 percent of university students and 59 percent of middle school students said they believed there was a direct correlation between physical punishment and properly raising a child. Eighty percent of parents and teachers believed in the benefits of corporal punishment.

Forty-eight percent of those polled said it is acceptable for parents to beat or scorn their children, and 48 percent of parents, 37 percent of university students and 29 percent of middle school students agreed that “it always makes sense when grown ups punish kids.”

According to another survey coordinated by Dr. Chen Jingqi of Peking University’s Institute of Youth and Juvenile Studies, over 56 percent of 16- year-old students surveyed reported experiencing humiliation or physical punishment, and of those, 19 percent said they had suffered “severe” punishments.

“China has a tradition of educating kids with physical punishment, so no one thinks it is a big deal if a parent beats his or her child for not behaving well,” says Yang Menghua, youth psychotherapist and secretary-general of the Children & Youth Service Volunteers Association in Beijing.

Tian Wenyue is a 31-year-old accountant in Beijing currently six months pregnant with twins. She says her parents physically punished her when she was a child and she expects to do the same with her kids.

“I will beat my kids if they don’t behave well. It won’t hurt much, but I will make them remember for the rest of their lives,” Tian tells IPS.

She says that most people her age were also beaten by their parents when they were young, but finds that attitudes toward physical punishment are changing among her peers.

Fu Xuling, a 25-year-old designer living in Guangzhou, has a three-year-old son. Fu does not believe in physical punishment and has never beaten his child.

“I don’t believe physical punishment is the best way to address problems,” he says. “I’ll stand at my son’s shoes and solve problems with him together.”

Fu, whose parents also did not believe in physical punishment, says the drawbacks of beating children – including estranged relationships and low self-esteem – outweigh the benefits.

Yang Menghua says China lacks strong laws against physical or emotional abuse against children, and that local committees designed to protect minors are ineffectual and poorly funded.

Yang says attitudes among younger parents are changing and severe physical abuse is becoming less common in China, generally occurring in smaller centres and among poor families.

But she says emotional abuse, a product of pressures caused by the one- child policy, is a growing problem. “Well-educated parents always torture their kids mentally,” she tells IPS, “(because) the only child has to shoulder all of the family’s hopes.”

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Jan 19 2011 (IPS)

In China, a country with a history of famine and where rural dwellers still use the greeting “have you eaten?”, food is close to sacred. Feeding the country’s massive population remains one of the biggest threats to future economic growth and social stability, experts warn.

Since 1997, China has lost some 8.2 million hectares (20.2 million acres) of arable land to urbanization, industrialization, re-forestation and damage caused by natural disasters. Thirty-seven percent of China’s territory suffers from land degradation and the country’s per capita available land is 40 percent of the world average.

“China has made remarkable economic and social progress over the past three decades, lifting several hundred million out of poverty, and food security has benefited significantly from this overall progress,” said Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, when he visited China in December.

“However, the shrinking of arable land and the massive land degradation threatens the ability of the country to maintain current levels of agricultural production, while the widening gap between rural and urban is an important challenge to the right to food of the Chinese population.”

The right to food requires people to have incomes that allow them to purchase food, and that food systems be sustainable enough that satisfying current demands does not jeopardize future needs.

“It’s obvious that these two conditions are facing important challenges today,” De Schutter said.

Recent food price increases may be a sign of things to come, the UN Rapporteur added, urging China to make the shift to more sustainable types of farming. Without mitigating actions, including a shift to low carbon agriculture, climate change will cause agricultural productivity to drop by five to ten percent by 2030.

In 2010, China recorded its seventh consecutive record grain harvest with production of 546 million tons, according to state media reports. The government has said current grain stocks exceed 200 million tons and that grain self-sufficiency has stood at 95 percent for the last decade.

China has pledged to maintain a grain self-sufficiency level of more than 90 percent in the decade to come by developing agricultural technologies and improving land use, He Bingsheng, president of China Agricultural University and one of the country’s leading economists, told China Daily.

But He warned that shrinking farmland and an imbalanced use of land pose challenges for the country’s grain producers.

“A certain amount of imports are necessary. But for the whole country, food security has to be ensured, because for a country as big as China the international market falls far short of our demand,” He said.

Li Guoxiang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Rural Development Institute, says China’s food security remains stable for now.

Li says China has pursued a food security policy that is mostly autonomous, with only a small percentage of agricultural products coming from abroad, meaning China is only marginally affected by rising food prices worldwide.

“We’ve had record grain harvest for seven years in a row, with a growth rate of 3 percent in 2010,” Li tells IPS. “Although international grain prices grew over the past year, in general the grain price in China remained stable. Most people’s lives haven’t been impacted.”

Li admits that threats to China’s food security remain, including soil degradation and desertification. He notes that the government has taken steps to tackle the issue, such as increasing the share of fixed capital investment allotted to agricultural areas and increasing agricultural subsidies. In 2010, the central government invested about RMB 800 billion (120 billion dollars) on the agricultural sector, a number that is expected to reach 900 billion RMB this year.

But Li says the government still has much to do, including protecting farmland and improving agricultural productivity and water infrastructure.

“Food is the most powerful political weapon,” Li says. “There is no substitute for food consumption. No one can live without food, so food security is the basis of national security. A lack of food security will hinder social development and trigger social unrest.”

Zhao Xiaofeng, a researcher at the China Rural Governance Research Centre at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, Hubei province, says drought – often the result of large-scale dam building – continues to be a major threat to China’s food security.

Places such as Henan province, one of the country’s core grain producing regions, have been severely impacted by droughts, Zhao says, adding that the government needs to improve water infrastructure around river ways and reservoirs to protect nearby agricultural land.

Zhao tells IPS that China’s risk to food security will reach dangerous heights if more than 10 percent of the food supply comes from imports. It currently stands at five percent.

“China is the most populous country in the world. You can imagine what it will be like if its people don’t have enough food.”

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Jan 14 2011 (IPS)

Authorities in remote Xinjiang province rescued a group of mentally ill men last month. The men had been sold by a shelter operator and forced to work in a factory. The rescue shone a light on the darkest side of China’s rapid economic growth – slavery.

Police arrested Li Xinglin, the boss of the building materials factory in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. He had attempted to flee after state media ran reports exposing the plant’s working conditions, according to Xinhua News Agency.

Reports said at least a dozen workers, eight of them mental disabilities, were sold to the factory to work without pay. Authorities said the workers were given no protective gear, forced to work during the winter when other factories suspended operations, and were fed the same food as the factory leader’s dog. Some of them had been held for four years.

Li Xinglin’s son Li Chenglong was also arrested, in Chengdu, capital of southwestern China’s Sichuan province. He had fled to the region with 12 mentally ill workers. The workers were rescued and placed in government custody.

In January, three more people were detained in the case, according to official news reports. Zeng Lingquan and his wife ran a beggars’ shelter in Quxian country, Sichuan, and had allegedly sold mentally handicapped people to workplaces since 1993. Several officials tied to the case were fired from their jobs.

Zeng, a farmer who once served as an executive committee member of the Quxian Federation of Industry and Commerce, sold a number of workers to the Jiaersi Green Construction Material Chemical Factory in Xinjiang, and received salaries that were supposed to be paid to the workers. Officials said Zeng’s shelter was a front for a slavery ring.

Tales of modern slavery periodically make news in China, which last year overtook Japan as the world’s second largest economy. While working conditions and salaries have generally improved for factory workers across the country as the economy has soared, experts say slavery of mentally ill workers and children remains a persistent problem.

In May 2009, police in Anhui province arrested ten men for allegedly enslaving more than 30 mentally handicapped people who had been forced to work at brick kilns. In 2007, hundreds of brick kiln slaves, many of them children or mentally handicapped, were freed in raids across northern China.

Reports of enslaved mentally ill workers have come from ten provinces since 2007, according to the China Association of Mentally Handicapped People. There have been 20 cases of mentally ill workers being killed, a Legal Daily report said.

Meng Weina, founder of the Beijing Huiling Community Services for People with Learning Disabilities, says mentally ill people are especially vulnerable in China, where the social security net is small and care generally falls into the hands of the family. When parents die, many mentally handicapped people have no one to care for them. In rural areas, where 70 percent of mentally disabled people live, there are virtually no organisations that offer support.

“We have seen so many cases of abduction,” Meng tells IPS, “but when they are reported to place, no one really cares.”

Liu Kaiming, labour researcher and executive director at the Shenzhen-based Institute of Contemporary Observation, says the root cause is imperfect social safety nets, inadequate laws and regulations protecting mentally ill people, and lack of punishment for officials who neglect their duties.

“I don’t think the central and local governments have done anything to protect mentally ill workers,” Liu tells IPS.

Meng says social services for mentally handicapped workers need to be improved. Support needs to reach China’s more remote regions as well, he says, instead of focusing on major centres such as Beijing.

After the publicity sparked by the brick kilns slavery reports, major revisions were made to laws governing children’s rights in China. New laws included mandated adequate sleep time as well as time for entertainment and sports.

But little appears to have been done to protect the rights of mentally ill workers. Last November Luis CdeBaca, senior advisor to the U.S. State Department, said in a visit to Beijing that China needed to improve its effort in the fight against “modern slavery” and better support forced labour and human trafficking victims. “The government itself cannot solve the problem of modern slavery,” CdeBaca said, according to a report in China Daily. “Instead, you have to have civil society working with government; the two working together to harness the power in a way that the victims find themselves in a better place.”

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Dec 31 2010 (IPS)

Authorities in China are lauding a sweeping crackdown on prostitution across the country in recent months. But the sex trade continues to thrive in this booming nation, while services and support for women working in the industry remain inadequate, experts say.

The Ministry of Public Security launched the “Strike Hard” campaign in June, following successful raids of clubs in Beijing and other cities last spring. A total of 557 women were detained in the Beijing raids and four clubs were ordered to suspend business for six months, the harshest penalty handed out in China for operating an escort service, the People’s Public Security News reported.

In May, police in Dongguan city, known for being an area for sex work, investigated 30 entertainment venues and detained over 1,100 suspects. On Jul. 8, authorities in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, investigated 97 clubs and detained 279 suspects.

The nationwide campaign targeted a total of 26 cities over six months. In one night alone in July, 10 supervision teams arrested 370 suspects in eight cities in six provinces, including Jilin, Shanghai and Hainan.

The Ministry said criminal cases involving sex work dropped by 18.4 percent year-over-year in October, and the ‘Beijing Morning Post’ reported in November that 30 percent of sex workers had switched to different industries in the previous six months.

But experts say the crackdown, although larger in scale and more effective than previous campaigns, barely scratches the surface of the vast, underground sex work operating here. They argue that the government needs to combine raids on bath houses and karaoke clubs – notorious in China for being dens of prostitution – with better education and job training for poor women working in the industry.

Some even suggest that the government legalise red light districts in a bid to control an industry that employs potentially millions of young women.

“Prostitution in China has a huge market,” says Sun Wenguang, a professor at Shandong University’s Business Management Institute, who researches sex work in China.

Sun says prostitution in China is rooted in two main factors – poverty and demand. The vast majority of workers are young women from rural areas, who are poorly educated and have difficulty finding decent jobs. The demand comes primarily from migrant workers, who spend months and years separated from their families working long hours in dismal conditions.

Sun says the government launches crackdowns almost every year, but they amount to little more than “face jobs” – token gestures to demonstrate that the government is taking action. The raids “don’t tackle the practical problems. The government doesn’t know the root cause of this problem. They never figure out what these prostitutes can do for a living after they quit or lose their jobs (in sex work).”

While there are some non-governmental organisations working with sex workers, they receive little financial and policy support, Sun says.

Qiao Xinsheng, director of the Centre for Social Development Research at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, says corrupt local governments, deeply intertwined with organised crime, sometimes act as “shields” to the prostitution industry.

“Officials take advantage of their powers for personal gain,” he tells IPS.

(The Ministry of Public Security said in a document released in December that the most recent raids also targeted the “protective umbrellas” that shield the sex trade, including local government officials.)

Qiao says the only way to effectively manage sex work in China is to legalise and monitor red light districts. He says that most local authorities have already realised that prostitution is so prevalent – and the laws against it broken so often – that many have already shifted focus to trying to contain the spread of sexually transmitted diseases instead of trying to eradicate sex work.

Many experts agree that legalisation is the best solution, although few think the government will follow this path.

“There will always be demand for extramarital sex,” Sun tells IPS. “In order to minimise the occurrence of sexually transmitted diseases and sex-related crimes, I think it is a better idea if we make prostitution legal.”

In an interview with ‘Global People Magazine’, Li Yinhe, a sociologies and feminist, said that traditional crackdowns force women in sex work further underground, often operating under control of organised crime. She said the government should open “women’s schools,” where sex workers would learn life skills, while sex work is legalised.

“We should change our attitudes. We can’t just crack down on them. We should help them,” Li told the magazine.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Dec 29 2010 (IPS)

While China faces grave water shortages, researchers at institutions across the country are working on new water- saving and desalination technologies that they hope can alleviate the crisis in the crucial years to come.

Despite billions of dollars spent on damming rivers, building reservoirs and digging deeper wells, farmers in the north toil on parched land while hundreds of cities across the country face water shortages and deteriorating water quality.

Beijing’s water shortage will soon reach 200 million to 300 million cubic metres, according to state media reports, as the city awaits the completion of the 62 billion U.S. dollar South-North Water Transfer Project, which will displace some 330,000 people.

The World Bank has warned that the country’s water crisis could spark unrest, pitting rich against poor and urban against rural. Without serious changes in water use, tens of millions of Chinese will become environmental refugees in the next decade, the Bank argues.

Meanwhile, countries downriver from the growing superpower – including Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam – argue that China’s aggressive dam building in the Mekong River is robbing their citizens of water.

For some, the answer lies in desalination technology. China has been engaged in desalination research since 1958, and in 1975 it began research on medium- and large-scale distillation devices. In 1986, it finished construction of a seawater reverse-osmosis desalination device.

Tianjin, a coastal port city about 150 kilometres from Beijing, has become a national leader in desalination technology. In fact, the city has refused water from the south and instead focused on desalination efforts. According to the local government, the nearby Dagang Xinquan Seawater Desalination Project is the “largest seawater desalination plant in Asia.”

“Indeed, the municipality has been developing desalination technologies since the year 2000, and this has been regarded as a more likely source of water to meet the water supply needs of the municipality,” said a report by Probe International, an independent environmental advocacy group.

Wang Shichang, director of the Desalination and Membrane Technology Centre at Tianjin University, says researchers in China are currently working on more than 200 desalination projects, receiving support from the Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Science Foundation of China.

The centre that Wang leads introduced the first multi- stage flash (MSF) distillation devices, which distills water through several “multi-stage” chambers, each operating at progressively lower pressures. The vapor generated by flashing is condensed at each stage and turned into fresh water. The technology uses 25 percent less “feed water” than other desalination devices, Wang says.

The country’s desalination capacity reached nearly 200,000 tonnes per day in 2008, up from 30,000 tonnes in 2005. According to the government’s current development plan, the figure is expected to reach 800,000 to one million tonnes by the end of this year.

But Wang says support is still not enough. He notes that the gap between China’s innovation capacity and development and manufacturing capabilities compared to those of foreign countries remains vast. He says greater state subsidies and access to bank loans are needed to bridge that divide.

While Wang works toward creating new usable water, Tian Juncang, a professor at Ningxia University, is trying to reduce water wasted in agriculture.

Tian’s work focuses on using plastic mulch in conjunction with drip irrigation to suppress weeds, maximise the effectiveness of fertiliser and conserve water in crop production. Plastic mulch and drip irrigation can reduce the amount of water used in irrigation process by up to 50 percent, Tian says.

China’s agriculture industry currently uses 70 percent of all the country’s water, and much of it goes to waste, he says. Drip irrigation under plastic mulch can reduce the industry’s use to 50 percent.

“China’s agricultural industry faces grave challenges,” Tian tells IPS. But by implementing new technology, “the current amount of water can support double the farming land.”

The government has moved to promote water conservation. In 2007, it issued it’s 11th five-year plan for water conservation, proposing detailed targets, including increasing the agricultural water conservation rate to 50 percent from 45 percent between 2005 and 2010.

But Tian says water conservation must be a systematic effort with the support and cooperation of industry and society as a whole. Efforts to conserve water also require increased funding from the state, improved laws and regulations and more advanced and better-managed facilities, Tian says.

“Agricultural water conservation efforts have been strengthened in recent years,” he says, “but it’s still not enough.”

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Dec 27 2010 (IPS)

Researchers in China, the world’s leading provider of wind turbines and solar panels, are working toward making renewable energy cheaper, more efficient and a bigger part of the country’s power grid.

A wind farm outside Tianjin. China is the world's leading manufacturer of wind turbines and solar panels. Credit: Mitch Moxley/IPS

Zhao Xingzhong, professor at Wuhan University’s School of Physics and Technology, is researching dye-sensitised solar cells, a low-cost, high- efficiency alternative to more prevalent solid-state semiconductor solar cell technology.

The practical implications are apparent, Zhao says.

“The production process of dye-sensitised solar cells doesn’t produce carbon dioxide, which means it won’t induce environmental pollution,” Zhao tells IPS. “And dye-sensitised solar cells only cost one- fifth of traditional semiconductor solar cells made from crystalline silicon.”

Although Zhao’s team’s research is unique at home and abroad, he says support from the Chinese government is far from enough. He notes that Japan and South Korea have jointly invested about 1.6 billion U.S. dollars on research on third-generation solar technology since 2000. In China, however, Zhao says there have been just five native projects in the solar field in the last decade, with spending of around 4.5 million dollars per project.

“It is difficult to break through the technological bottleneck because of the inadequacy of (financial) input,” Zhao says.

In recent years, China has become the global leader in renewable energy technology manufacturing, surpassing the United States in terms of both the number of wind turbines and solar panels it makes. The accounting firm Ernst & Young in September named China the best place to invest in renewable energy.

Chinese companies, led by the Jiangsu-based Suntech, have one-quarter of the world’s solar panel production capacity and are rapidly gaining market share by driving down prices using low-cost, large-scale factories. China’s 2009 stimulus package included subsidies for large solar installation projects.

In terms of wind power, home-grown companies have rapidly gained market share in recent years after the government raised local partnership requirements for foreign companies to 70 percent from 40 percent (the government has since removed local partnership requirements) and introduced major new subsidies and other incentives for Chinese wind power companies.

By 2009, there were 67 Chinese turbine providers and foreign companies’ market share fell to 37 percent from 70 percent just over five years ago.

But most of the parts produced by Chinese companies are based on technology developed from abroad, with scant focus on homegrown innovation in the renewable energy field.

Wang Mengjie, deputy director of the China Renewable Energy Society and former vice chairman of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Engineering, works in the biomass industry. He says bioenergy can be used to improve living standards in rural areas, and he is currently involved in projects aimed at providing farmers with equipment that can turn organic waste into clean biogas and fertiliser.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, the number of biogas pools in China’s rural areas reached over 35 million as of the end of 2009, producing 12.4 billion cubic metres each year. The government has increased financing of biogas pools in recent years, to 5 billion RMB (754,547 million dollars) in 2009 from an average of 2.5 billion RMB (377.2 million dollars) in 2006 and 2007.

Despite the investment, Wang says China still faces technological hurdles in the biomass industry.

“In terms of biodiesel technology, Western countries like the United States and Germany lead the world, while China is still at its infancy stage,” Wang says. “China has no definite regulations or policies on biomass energy right now. Under the present circumstances, there’s no possibility for relevant enterprises to develop further.”

Critics say China’s interest in renewable energy is essentially a business opportunity – most of what it produces is sold abroad – and that it is less interested in applying the more expensive technology at home.

China has not yet caught up to the United States in terms of renewable energy production. The country is the biggest consumer of coal in the world and is expected to burn 4.5 billion tonnes of standard coal by 2020, according to figures from the National Energy Administration.

While coal will still make up two-thirds of China’s energy capacity in 2020, the government has promised to invest billions of dollars into the development of wind, solar and nuclear power. The country’s top legislature, the National People’s Congress, now requires power grid companies buy 100 percent of the electricity produced from renewable energy generators.

Official statistics released last April said that low- carbon energy sources would account for more than a quarter of China’s electricity supply by the end of 2010, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. The figures revealed that hydro, nuclear and wind power were expected to provide 250 gigawatts of capacity by the end of 2010, while coal will account for 700 gigawatts.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Dec 21 2010 (IPS)

After her run to the finals of the 2005 “Super Girl” talent contest, Wang Bei, from central China’s Hubei province, lived on the cusp of pop stardom. In November, Wang opted for cosmetic surgery in an effort to improve her chances of success.

But the 24-year-old’s death in the operating room, officially ruled an accident, has prompted nationwide outrage over the dismal standards of China’s rapidly growing cosmetic surgery industry.

About 2.2 million surgeries were conducted in China in 2009, comprising 12.7 percent of the global total, a report by the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ISAPS) found. State media have put the figure above three million surgeries. According to the Chinese Association of Plastics and Aesthetics, there are 200,000 people working in the industry, which earns 2.3 billion U.S. dollars a year.

The most common surgeries in China in 2009 were breast augmentation, liposuction and eyelid surgery, ISAPS found.

China’s cosmetic surgery industry has until now been largely unregulated, and many unqualified surgeons, lured by big pay cheques, are entering the profession without adequate training and experience. According to the China Consumers’ Association, over half of all surgeries require follow-up procedures because of problems with the initial surgery.

Health authorities confirmed that Wang died on Nov. 15 in Wuhan, Hubei’s capital, as a result of complications from anesthetic during a “facial bone grinding surgery,” according to state-owned Xinhua News Agency. Wang’s mother was also having work done on her jaw at the hospital at the same time.

The news sparked an immediate outcry from netizens, while some questioned Wang’s decision in the first place.

“I hope the tragedy can raise people’s awareness of the slack supervision of the plastic surgery industry,” one web user said, according to Xinhua. “She’s so pretty, why bother having surgery?” another netizen, with the username “short life,” asked on the popular chat service, QQ.

The Ministry of Health called on local authorities to step up supervision of the cosmetic surgery industry. “The investigation results should be made public without delay,” the ministry said.

Chen Huaran, an expert on cosmetic surgery who has worked in the industry for over two decades, says rising incomes and a growing fixation on beauty are fuelling the trend. He says the industry is growing 200 percent per year in China.

“The overwhelming majority of people who received cosmetic surgery in the past were actors or actress in the entertainment circle,” Chen tells IPS. “But now a growing number of ordinary people are coming to receive cosmetic surgery. They want to become prettier to find a better job, or a good marriage. Some officials are coming to make themselves look young.”

In recent years, state media have run reports about cosmetic surgery’s growing popularity among teens and college graduates looking for jobs. China has held a “Miss Plastic Surgery” contest in the past, and in 2009 a patient angry over a bad nose job kidnapped and threatened the life of a nurse in Foshan, Guangdong province.

According to statistics from the China Consumers’ Association, there were 2,970 complaints filed in 2009 about medical procedures, a large portion of which were people who underwent unsuccessful plastic surgery operations.

While China issued training standards for reconstructive plastic surgery in 2010, the country still lacks any regulations for cosmetic surgery. The industry also suffers from inadequate supervision and management, Chen says.

But the government has promised to take steps to better regulate the industry.

In November, the Ministry of Health organised a working conference on the cosmetic surgery industry. Ma Xiaowei, vice health minister, said at the conference that the government would work to improve laws and regulations and soon would require cosmetic surgeons to receive special training in order to practice the trade, something required in most developed countries, including the United States.

Aside from hospitals, minor cosmetic surgery is also performed at beauty parlors, salons and fitness clubs. Customers are made to believe the doctors are well-qualified to perform the surgeries, when in fact the vast majority lacks special training, Chen says.

“In China, motivated by huge profits, some surgeons carry out these types of operations without any special training,” Chen points out.

Li Bin, chief manager at Yimeier Plastic Surgery Hospital, one of China’s top cosmetic surgery facilities, says the “black clinics” offer surgeries at very low prices, but with untrained doctors and inadequate emergency facilities.

“Beauty parlors or institutions like this are not qualified to perform these surgeries, but a large quantity of surgeries are being carried out at such places. Also the unqualified surgeons at small institutions are performing complex cosmetic surgeries….If an emergency happens during the process, it is very dangerous,” Li says.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Dec 13 2010 (IPS)

In late October, a speeding Volkswagen struck two students as they roller skated on the grounds of Hebei University, leaving them motionless in a pool of blood. Security guards intercepted the driver as he attempted to flee, but he refused to leave the car. “Sue me if you dare,” he warned, “my father is Li Gang!”

One victim, a poor farm girl named Chen Xiaofeng, later died. The driver was Li Qiming, the son of the district’s deputy police chief. Alarmed Communist Party censors tried to prevent state media from covering the story, but an online community of furious netizens turned the incident into a national discussion about abuse of privilege.

Today, “my father is Li Gang” has become a catchphrase for skirting responsibility and has come to symbolise the growing divide between China’s powerful and its poor.

Across China, talk of the “rich 2nd generation,” “official 2nd generation” and “poor 2nd generation” fills blogs, chatrooms and editorial pages. Angry citizens say the wealthy sons and daughters of Party cadres and rich businesspeople have unfair advantages in life, while experts warn of social instability as the gap between rich and poor widens.

In two separate online surveys in 2010 by ‘People’s Daily’, the Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, respondents ranked the growing divide between rich and poor as one of the most pressing issues facing the country. They said that despite China’s tremendous economic growth, they barely registered any improvement in their own lives. Forty- four percent of respondents said the widening income gap and “social classes division” required the most attention from the government.

“Is China wealthy? It might be. But after the financial crisis, the rich people in China are even richer, while the poor are poorer. Only the rich live a happy life, not the poor,” one respondent said.

‘People’s Daily’ reported that China’s Gini Coefficient, an index that measures inequality, sits at 0.47, not far from the 0.5 marker that is seen as a risk of social instability. The paper noted that decades of economic growth have resulted in major wage gaps between rich and poor, urban and rural. By 2009, the richest 10 percent of Chinese controlled 45 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 10 percent has just 1.4 percent.

Critics argue that for many young people today, avenues toward upward mobility are cut off, while the rich and powerful are not only able to afford the best schools, but also use their parents’ connections and relationships – or ‘guanxi’ – to obtain the best jobs as well.

“In education, recruitment, employment and various other sectors, the pattern of power-retention by the powerful is solidifying, yet the rights of the lower classes often suffer encroachment. The hardening of the hierarchy is right before our eyes. The channel of upward mobility for the lower classes is narrowing by the day,” wrote Dai Zhiyong, a columnist for ‘Southern Weekend’ newspaper.

State media has reported a growing number of netizens who consider themselves part of the “Poor 2G” say they do not want to burden their children with the same fate they inherited, so they are choosing to not have children at all. “I am a poor 2nd generation, and I don’t want to give birth to the poor 3rd generation,” Wang Xiaolei, a 28-year-old web editor in Beijing, told ‘China Youth Daily’ newspaper.

The central government has shown signs of concern. Last summer, it ordered television stations to start promoting traditional values after a female dating-show contestant, Ma Nuo, said on air, “I would rather cry in a BMW than smile on the back of my boyfriend’s bicycle.” The statement sparked outrage on the Chinese blogosphere and Ma was seen as representing the rise of rampant materialism.

The government has also proposed policy measures to narrow the rich-poor gap, including implementing a wage increase mechanism, improving the minimum wage system and ensuring that wages are paid in a timely manner. It hopes to increase farmers’ salaries and improve social insurance in both the cities and countryside.

In March, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao addressed the issue during a speech at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, saying that the benefits of China’s rapidly growing economy need to be distributed more fairly. As part of the plan, the government is working to reform the household registration system – or ‘hukou’ – so that migrant workers living in urban areas are able to receive more government benefits.

“We will not only make the ‘pie’ of social wealth bigger by developing the economy, but also distribute it well,” Wen said. “(We will) resolutely reverse the widening income gap.”

But Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, says the “fundamental solution” to improving the plight of the poor is to allow workers the right to organise their own workers’ unions – “to let them speak out what they really want to say in order to enhance their social positions.”

Meanwhile, the Internet is increasingly being used by citizens as a tool to monitor the behaviour of high officials, says Shao Jian, a professor of Nanjing Xiaozhuang University’s School of Humanities. In the Li Gang case, pressure from Netizens resulted in apologies from both father and son, broadcast on CCTV, the state broadcaster. State media later reported that Li Qiming had been arrested.

“Without the Internet, we wouldn’t know anything” about the case, Shao says.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Dec 7 2010 (IPS)

As China’s economy continues to soar, many experts here remain only cautiously optimistic about the country’s future growth, confident that its fundamentals remain strong but concerned that a real estate bubble and rising inflation could slow economic growth.

After a surprisingly strong recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, China overtook Japan in August to become the world’s second largest economy. Its 2010 annual economic growth is easily expected to surpass the government’s own estimate of 8 percent, with forecasts of more growth ahead.

China’s economy grew 11.9 percent in the first quarter of 2010 and 10.3 percent in the second quarter. In December, the World Bank raised its 2010 growth forecast for China to 10 percent, up from 9.5 percent, based on “still surprisingly strong” 9.6 percent Gross Domestic Product growth in the third quarter. The bank predicts 8.7 percent growth in 2011.

Earlier in October, the International Monetary Fund had upwardly revised its 2010 forecast to 10.5 percent.

Justin Yifu Lin, the first Chinese citizen to serve as chief economist of the World Bank, is among the bulls about China’s economic path. He has said he expects the country’s next 10 or 15 years of economic growth to be even more spectacular than the last decade, and he believes that by 2025 China’s economy will be the largest in the world.

Other economists are more cautious.

Xie Guozhong, an independent economist and financial investment advisor who is a former Morgan Stanley managing director, tells IPS that China’s excessive production capacity and, more importantly, its real estate bubble, pose real challenges to the country’s future economic growth.

“The bubble will keep growing in the next two years and will break someday without exception,” he says.

Su Jian, deputy director of Peking University’s School of Economics, says that while inflation is on the rise, due largely to rapidly increasing food prices, China’s economic performance remains strong. He said that China’s real estate market “is plagued with bubbles… but China’s economy is not heading toward a crash.”

Indeed, the long-term strength of China’s economy is the subject of debate among economists and financial experts. While the majority opinion seems to fall on the side of sustained growth, at least in the medium-term, a minority of critics, mainly from Western countries, are warning that China’s economy is not what it seems and predict the country could be heading toward a financial crisis within the next few decades.

James S Chanos, a prominent U.S. hedge fund manager who made a fortune by predicting the fall of Enron and other companies, has warned that China’s economy is heading toward a crash, rather than sustained boom. He has said that the government is exaggerating the county’s economic strength and faking its growth rates. China’s real estate bubble is “Dubai times 1,000 – or worse,” Chanos has warned.

Since late 2008, critics like Chanos have warned that asset bubbles could emerge in China. They argue that the 596 million dollar stimulus package, record bank lending and massive inflows of foreign “speculative capital” have been pumped into the stock and real estate markets.

In November, Martin Wolf, among the most influential writers on economics, said at the 2010 World Economy Annual China lecture in Ningbo that China is “almost certain” to experience a financial crisis in the next 25 years. He warned that China has “significant vulnerabilities”, adding that large losses in its banking sector are possible in the coming years.

Wolf said China’s growth model of the last 10 years is “fundamentally unsustainable.” Among the key challenges ahead for China’s policymakers include raising productivity levels, managing declining investment rates and securing natural resources at workable prices, he added.

“My view is that however remarkable the success China has had in the last three decades, the next two decades will be ineluctably more difficult than what has already been achieved,” he said.

There are other potential problems ahead. The World Bank itself has warned that global tensions over trade imbalances and currency manipulation could cast a pall over the otherwise positive economic outlook.

It suggests that a more flexible exchange rate mechanism would allow for more policy options, including interest rate hikes, which would help Beijing control mounting inflation. Inflation exceeded the government’s target of 3 percent in May and reached 4.4 percent in October 2010.

The government has acknowledged that it needs to slow down the economy in order to cool inflation. In early December, top Communist Party leaders said they would switch to a “prudent” monetary policy, although they did not indicate what that might mean. The government has already taken steps to curb lending, raising banks’ required reserves twice in the last month.

Beijing has also begun taking steps to rein in the real estate market, including implementing stricter mortgage policies to curb soaring housing prices, Su says.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Nov 30 2010 (IPS)

Quan Zhenyuan discovered Buddhism by accident. After the owner of a vegetarian restaurant here in the Chinese capital gave her a book about the religion, she became hooked. Today, Quan is one of a growing number of urban Chinese who turn to Buddhism for spiritual fulfillment.

Tibetan prayer flags in Zhong Lu village, China's Sichuan province. Credit: Mitch Moxley/IPS

China, an officially atheist country, is experiencing a Buddhism revival.

In the three decades since Premier Deng Xiaoping announced the ‘Reform and Opening Up’ policy, a spiritual void has opened among many Chinese, experts say. Stressed and overfocused on careers and material gain, many of its citizens have started to look for answers in religion, none more than Buddhism, which has a 2,000-year history in China.

A 2007 survey by the Research Centre for Religious Culture at East China Normal University found that of 4,500 people questioned across 31 provinces and autonomous regions, 33 percent claimed to believe in Buddhism.

Liu Zhongyu, the research team’s leader, told Phoenix News Media that “Buddhism is the major belief among intellectuals and young people” in China. He said that more than 300 million Chinese likely believe in Buddhism. Ten years earlier, the State Bureau of Religious Affairs pegged the number at 100 million.

Liu attributed the growing interest in Buddhism to social instability, pressures and anxiety caused by the rapidly developing market economy in China.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ ‘Blue Book on China’s Religions’ said Buddhism has experienced a “golden period” during China’s three decades of reform. During this period, nationwide organisational systems have been created, conducting summer camps and public education activities.

Research by the Centre on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University in the United States, announced at the 7th Symposium of the Social Scientific Study of Religion in China in July, found that interest in Buddhism has exploded in the last three decades. About 185 million Chinese follow Buddhism today, the Centre found.

Around the first century AD, Buddhism began to spread from India to China via the Silk Road. Gaining the support of emperors and royalty, the religion’s teachings spread rapidly. Indian dignitaries were invited to teach Buddhist philosophy and many sutras were introduced in China.

Mao Zedong, who was famously hostile toward religion, did not ban Buddhism outright, but many temples and Buddhist organisations were soon overtaken by the state.

When China brutally suppressed Tibetan Buddhism in 1959, this was supported by the government-controlled Buddhist Association of China. During the Cultural Revolution, many Buddhist holy sites were ravaged, but following Mao’s death in 1976, the suppression of Buddhism and other religions eased somewhat.

Like many young urban Chinese, a man in his thirties who gave his nickname as Eddie has turned to Buddhism to find meaning in his life. Buddhism has helped him answer questions about mankind’s purpose and about what comes next, he says.

“It shows me a brand new world. It’s like a light to guide my life, it gives me hope. It makes me understand the power of now,” says Eddie. “I think I’m on the right track in connecting with myself.”

But Duan Yuming, a professor at Sichuan University’s Institute of Religious Studies, says that while interest in Buddhism is growing, very few Chinese can actually call themselves Buddhist. “They practice Buddhism just for peace of mind.”

Still, even a cursory interest is a good thing, Duan tells IPS.

“Buddhism is a spiritual development leading to true happiness. Buddhist practices, such as meditation, are a means of transforming oneself and developing the qualities of awareness, kindness and wisdom….Chinese people today are always urgent to do things. They don’t even know how to relax. Meditation can help them find peace of mind,” he says.

Over the past decades, Buddhist monuments have been erected and restored across China, and tourism to Buddhist and other religious sites has increased. In 2006, China organised the World Buddhist Forum, and the next year banned mining on Buddhist sacred mountains.

Part of the rising interest in Buddhism stems from a growing fascination with Tibet. Although the vast majority of Chinese view the Autonomous Region as an inalienable part of China, many urban Chinese think of Tibet as a romantic, rugged frontier. As a result, tourism to the capital, Lhasa, and beyond has exploded in recent years.

Duan says that the growing interest in Buddhism among the majority Han Chinese can help improve understanding of and relations with Tibet – something the exiled Dalai Lama, who fled China for India in 1959, has said himself.

He told his biographer, the author Pico Iyer: “If thirty years from now Tibet is six million Tibetans and ten million Chinese Buddhists, then maybe something will be O.K.”

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Nov 25 2010 (IPS)

Yu Mengxiang is a 24-year-old office manager at a foreign company in Beijing. Although he looks and acts like a typical urban male, his household registration – or ‘hukou’ – is in a village in north-east Liaoning province, which means he isn’t entitled to government benefits in the capital. Bucking conventional wisdom, he doesn’t want any.

Yu isn’t alone. Recent studies reveal a significant majority of migrant workers living in cities are reluctant to give up their rural hukou, surprising scholars and experts who have long called for a significant overhaul to China’s household registration system.

According to a recent study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 80 percent of migrants interviewed said they were reluctant to give up their rural hukou. A separate survey by the Chongqing Municipal Agricultural Department found that just 30 percent of the 350 migrant workers interviewed wanted to give up their land in exchange for an urban hukou.

Zhao Yuankun, the leader of the team coordinating a trial hukou reform in Chongqing, told Xinhua News Agency that the reason most migrants don’t want to change their registration is because of changes in benefit distribution. Rural residents don’t have to pay agriculture taxes and those from low-income brackets are entitled to certain benefits. Poor students, for example, are exempted from paying tuition and other fees.

Many migrants also don’t want to lose valuable land they own in their home provinces, a condition for an urban hukou in many provinces. Yu, for example, owns farmland in his home province, where he plans to return to later in life.

He says there are other preferential policies he doesn’t want to give up. He is allowed to have two children despite China’s one-child policy, for example; he receives a government subsidy to buy household appliances; and he enjoys the benefits of the rural cooperative medical system, meaning visits to the doctor are reimbursed by the government.

The trend is nationwide. In Zhejiang province, the number of people who gave up their rural hukou for an urban identity fell to 189,000 in 2009 from 577,000 in 2004. In Guiyang, Guizhou province, just 10,000 people changed their residential status in 2008. The Guiyang public security bureau found that 98.7 percent of rural residents were reluctant to give up their hukou.

Still, experts say the current household registration system is leaving tens of millions of struggling migrants without government assistance in this country of more than 1.3 billion people. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China had 229.87 million migrant workers as of the end of 2009, making up more than one-third of the country’s urban population. The vast majority of these people do not qualify for low-income housing, cannot vote in local elections or send their children to public high schools.

Over 45 percent of Chinese lived in urban areas as of the end of 2008, 44.9 percentage points higher than in 1976, according to a report released in October by the Institute of Finance and Trade Economics under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. That number should grow when China reveals data from its recently conducted census.

“Urbanisation can’t be stopped,” says She Hexing, a professor at the China National School of Administration, which consults the government on public policy. She adds that reform needs to be carried out with the end goal of equality in mind. “The most important thing the government should do is to establish a public service equalisation system – meaning urban and rural people enjoy the same benefits on education, healthcare and work opportunities.”

She says a major roadblock to hukou reform is that while China’s big cities want to soak up cheap labour from the countryside, most do not want to take responsibility of guaranteeing public services and social security.

Indeed, hukou reform is a daunting and expensive task. A report by the China Development Research Foundation found that if the government spent 2 trillion yuan (301 billion U.S. dollars) per year to give non-agricultural residences to 20 million migrant workers, it would take 20 years to include the whole ‘floating’ population.

In some areas, household registration system reform in already underway. In Chongqing, a trial plan will see 10 million migrants registered in the city in the next 10 years. One and a half million of them will be registered by the end of this year.

The Chongqing government has said 660,000 rural students will have to change their residential status by the end of 2011. Students at several universities in the municipality have complained of being forced to change their residential status or risk losing scholarships or expulsion.

Tang Jun, a prominent sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says migrant workers do, in fact, want urban hukou – but ones that are fair. He said some provinces have forced migrant workers to exchange their land for an urban hukou, basically amounting to a land-grab.

“Hukou reform is a good thing,” Tang says. “(But) the hukou reform we are talking about is handling the problems caused by different treatment between people of urban and rural areas….The core problem is to actually guarantee social security.”

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Nov 16 2010 (IPS)

On a chilly but bright fall day near the Drum and Bell Towers, one of the Chinese capital’s top tourist draws, business is brisk for Boss Liu. Drivers working for Liu’s rickshaw business ferry dozens of foreign and domestic tourists through the historic alleyways of a treasured neighbourhood that, as recently as October, was slated for demolition.

The Bell Tower in Beijing. A plan to redevelop the surrounding alleyways has been scrapped by city officials. Credit: Mitch Moxley/IPS

The news drew international attention. But in September the plans were quietly scrapped – welcome news to Boss Liu and others who live and work in the neighbourhood’s narrow lanes, called ‘hutong’.

“If Gulou is demolished, Old Beijing will disappear,” he says. “Beijing will look like all big cities… .There will be no business for us.”

The redevelopment of historical neighbourhoods is nothing new to Beijing residents. In the lead-up to the 2008 Olympic Games, many of Beijing’s hutong neighbourhoods and their signature courtyard homes were torn down to make way for high-rise apartments, office buildings and shopping malls, even in areas officially designated preservation zones.

Other neighbourhoods have been torn down and rebuilt with little regard for historical accuracy. Qianmen, a once- vibrant Ming and Qing dynasty commercial neighbourhood near Tiananmen Square, was bulldozed and converted into an idealised version of what it once was. Today, mint-condition trolleys run visitors up and down a soulless avenue of luxury shops.

“Eighty percent of Beijing’s courtyards have disappeared at astonishing speeds,” says Zhang Wei, founder of OldBeijing.org. “If we do nothing to stop this, Beijing’s ‘hutong’ and courtyard homes will only be accessible in museums. Beijing can be transformed into New York in five decades. But it would take New York 5,000 years to become a city like Beijing.”

Gulou, however, seemed impervious to the city’s development scramble, and the news of its redevelopment sparked an outcry from historians and preservationists.

The Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Centre (CHP) spearheaded the opposition, calling for any development to preserve the area’s historical integrity. He Shuzhong, a lawyer and CHP’s founder, organised Gulou residents to discuss the plans, despite police opposition, and invited media to cover the developments. CHP is currently working on a plan to improve living conditions for residents in the neighbourhood, although He would not discuss specifics.

“I’m confident the neigbhourhood can be preserved,” He told IPS. “Gulou is precious.”

For now the city seems to agree, although no one is quite sure why the plan was shelved. Some have attributed it to complications caused by the merger of the Chongwen and Dongcheng district governments. Others say it was simply too expensive.

Still, Gulou’s future still remains uncertain. An unidentified city official was quoted in the state media in September as saying the Time Cultural City was “a thing of the past,” but that the neighbourhood’s future remained unclear.

Even after the neighbourhood nearly succumbed to the wrecking balls, residents have a hard time believing anything could happen to it.

“The plan is nonsense – it’s too expensive,” says Li Jian Xin, 29, the owner of two shops on nearby Nanluoguxiang, a popular hutong home to dozens of bars, cafes and stores. “Gulou is a residential area, and there are too many people living there to turn it into a commercial area.”

But some residents, who live in cramped and often decrepit homes, are disappointed they will not be moved.

Chen Yi, 64, lives with her daughter and grandson in a tiny apartment with no central heating or toilet. The kitchen doubles as a shower, and Chen’s room is so cluttered with boxes, clothes, children’s toys and more that there’s barely room for the single bed she sleeps on. The nearest public toilet is 40 metres down the alley.

“Of course I hope they tear down this area,” says Chen, who has been denied subsidised housing three times. “I’m not happy here. For old people – we’re too weak.”

Other long-time residents say they will fight to the end to stay in their ancestral homes.

“It’s impossible to change this place. Gulou is our country’s heritage,” explains one of a group or grey-haired ladies chatting in a lively hutong.

“It’s too expensive” to tear the neighbourhood down, another says.

“We don’t want to move. We’ve lived here a long time,” says the oldest of the group, a 96-year-old surnamed Gong.

Gong insists her home is not too cold in the winter, so she will not consider living in a high-rise apartment. She was raised in this neighbourhood and says it has changed very little since she was a young girl.

“It’s impossible to tear this down,” Gong says. “It’s a very special place.”

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Nov 2 2010 (IPS)

Although Li Xiaoxue and her husband, Dai Chunlin, are already happy parents to a young boy, they plan to skirt China’s one-child policy by having another baby. And like a growing number of affluent, urban Chinese, their fingers are crossed for a baby girl.

“If my son wants to work in a place far from us when he grows up, the daughter can stay and take care of us,” says the 34-year-old Li.

She and her husband own a software company in Beijing that earns the couple about 500,000 yuan (74,828 U.S. dollars) a year – enough to afford circumventing the one-child policy. Under this policy, couples need to pay a fine, based on families’ annual income, that has been reported to range from 45,000 dollars to more than 100,000 dollars.

“And it’s too expensive to raise a boy, especially in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai. We have to buy him an apartment at least. Otherwise it will be difficult for him to find a girlfriend,” Li adds.

Li and Dai are not alone in their wish for a girl of their own. In China, where a historical preference for boys has led to a dramatic gender imbalance, attitudes about having girls are beginning to change in urban areas. According to a 2009 survey of 3,500 prospective parents in Shanghai, 15 percent of those interviewed wanted a baby daughter compared to 12 percent who wanted a baby boy. The rest had no preference.

Li says many of her friends also hope to have a baby girl, aware that China’s gender imbalance has reached dangerous levels. She also views as outdated the attitude that girls cannot accomplish as much as boys. “Girls can also inherit a family business,” she says. “They can be as able as men.”

Several factors have contributed to changing these attitudes, sociologists and demographers say. A booming economy in the last decade has created more opportunities for woman, particularly in the cities. Rising incomes have rendered moot the traditional reasons for wanting a boy – namely that a boy will earn more money to support his parents in old age.

Others, like Li, think that the cost of raising a boy is too great and feel that a daughter is better equipped to take care of them in old age.

China’s gender imbalance remains potentially calamitous. In 2005, the last year for which data is available, there were 119 boys born for every 100 girls. In some areas, the ratio was as high as 130 males for every 100 females.

In rural areas especially, the historical preference for boys has led to a number of societal ills, including selective abortion, prostitution and human trafficking. China has a surplus of some 32 million boys.

But as attitudes change, some demographers have suggested China could follow a path blazed by neighbouring South Korea, where a dramatic shift in gender attitudes has taken place in the last 20 years. In 2006, Korea’s gender ratio was 107.4 boys born for every 100 girls, down from a peak of 116.5 boys to every 100 girls in 1990, according to a 2007 World Bank study. (Demographers consider a 105 to 100 ratio normal).

Beginning in the late 1980s, Korea experienced many of the same changes China is undergoing today. Major shifts in the country’s economy created opportunities for women in the work force, changing long-held attitudes toward women’s role in society. In the 1970s, the Korean government launched a campaign to change the public’s attitudes about gender and in 1987 it banned doctors from revealing the sex of a foetus before birth.

China still has a long way to go before it can match Korea, however.

A study in 2010 by the government-supported Chinese Academy of Social Sciences named the gender imbalance among newborns – not overpopulation – the country’s most serious demographic problem. “Sex-specific abortions remained extremely commonplace, especially in rural areas,” the study said.

The study attributed the gender imbalance to China’s three-decade-old one-child policy and to a poor social security system. Wang Guangzhou, one of the study’s researchers, said the imbalance could lead to men who earn lower incomes having difficulty in finding wives, according to the English-language ‘Global Times’ newspaper.

“The chance of getting married will be rare if a man is more than 40 years old in the countryside. They will be more dependent on social security as they age and have fewer household resources to rely on,” another researcher, Wang Yuesheng, told the ‘Global Times’. The paper, citing the National Population and Family Planning Commission, said abductions and trafficking of women were “rampant” in areas with too many men.

But Zheng Zhenzi, director of the Institute of Population Research at the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences, says that although attitudes about having a baby girl are changing in the cities, the preference for boys in rural areas remains firmly in place.

At the same time, Zheng told IPS that China has made great strides in terms of gender equality. There are a growing number of women in government administrative positions, legislation on gender equality continues to rise and there are more women receiving education at high levels.

“Most women today have equal status as their husbands,” Zheng says. “But there is still a long way to go.”

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
JIAJU, China, Oct 27 2010 (IPS)

In 2005, the ‘National Geographic China’ magazine named this ethnic Tibetan village in western Sichuan province, sprawled over a valley wall amid snow-capped mountains, China’s most beautiful. Depending on how you look at it, that distinction was either a blessing or a curse.

A Tibetan woman in Zhong Lu village, in China's western Sichuan province. Credit: Mitch Moxley/IPS

On almost every rooftop, alongside faded Tibetan prayer flags, flies the red and yellow flag of the People’s Republic of China.

“It’s beautiful,” a young woman from Chengdu, visiting with five friends, says of the village. “It’s not that famous yet, like Shangri-la or Lijiang, but it’s getting more popular.”

Shangri-la and Lijiang are among the most popular tourist destinations in China’s south-west, home to a good number of the country’s rich mix of ethnic groups. The old town of Lijiang is also a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Heritage Site.

The village of Jiaju has no doubt benefited as a result of tourism – there are few signs of poverty and many villagers own new cars and sports utility vehicles But tourism has also impacted the surrounding environment and changed the fabric of the village. Indeed, Jiaju embodies many of the issues China’s minority regions face as the country’s internal tourism industry grows.

Fuelled by growing middle-class and government support, China’s tourism industry recorded a 9 percent jump in revenue in 2009, to 1.26 trillion yuan (188.54 billion dollars). This year, total revenue is expected to reach 1.44 trillion yuan (215.4 billion dollars), a year-on-year jump of 14 percent, according to state media.

As Chinese grow wealthier and become better travelled, many are seeking more authentic experiences than tour groups can offer. These tourists, armed with Gore-Tex outerwear and telephoto camera lenses, are beginning to visit China’s remote regions – many populated by minority groups – including Sichuan, Yunnan and Tibet.

Wang Huigui, who works for an international company in Beijing, is an example of this new breed of Chinese traveller. Wang, who calls himself a ‘lao lu’ – seasoned traveller – travels solo and has been to Sichuan’s Tibetan region five times, and Tibet proper four times.

“I come every year to these areas. I like taking pictures,” Wang says atop an ancient Tibetan tower in the town of Zhong Lu, a less travelled village about 20 minutes drive from Jiaju. “I’m very interested in China’s minorities – their history, their culture, their language.”

Li Fei, a manager at state-controlled China Shan-Shui Travel Agency, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Land and Resources, says interest in trips to the Tibetan Autonomous Region has skyrocketed in recent years. He says the agency receives up to 70 and 80 applications to visit Tibet every day, and will accommodate about 2,000 tourists a year.

“They love Tibet,” Li says. “The feedback we get is very positive. They think the lakes and sky are really clean.”

In China, however, appreciation of minority cultures can quickly turn to exploitation. The country is home to a growing number of minority-themed tourists parks, such as the Dai Minority Park in south-west China’s Yunnan province.

There, local villagers are forbidden from making major changes to their traditional wooden-stilt home and are paid to perform a daily water-splashing ritual for which they are famous. The real water-splashing festival normally lasts just three days a year. The park, owned by and catering to majority Han Chinese, welcomes a half-million tourists per year.

The most famous minority park in China, Beijing’s Nationalities Park, for years featured English signs with the unfortunate translation “Racist Park.” In many parks, the ethnic minorities featured are actually Han Chinese dressed up as natives.

In minority villages, the idea is to provide a more authentic experience. But in places like Jiaju, a Disneyland-like atmosphere persists, and the local culture adjusts to fit Han preconceptions.

Jiaju, once an isolated mountain village, was introduced to the world after a 1998 visit by a Hong Kong traveller, who persuaded a local family to turn their home a guesthouse. Within a few years, dozens of neighbours followed suit, converting their homes or building new hostels from scratch.

Soon, tour buses began clogging the winding road to town. Logging and home building stripped the surrounding mountainside, bringing dangerous landslides. Trash began piling up in ditches around town.

He Ming, the director of Yunnan University’s Research Centre of Ethnic Minorities in China’s South-west Frontier, says increased tourism helps foster development of minority regions and increases local incomes. For Han tourists, the experience of visiting minority regions provides a valuable cultural exchange that promotes goodwill between China’s different ethnic groups.

But He says that governments at the federal and local level must take steps to protect the rights and interests of the minority cultures, rather than exploiting them to accommodate Han tourists.

“These cultures are unique, and an invasion of different cultures will destroy them. Furthermore, with an increasing number of tourists pouring into minority regions, the local governments commercialise the cultures, and even religious practices are changed,” He says.

“Every coin has two sides,” the tour operator Li says. “Profits from the tourism industry have poured into the minority regions. At the same time, cultural assimilation occurs. We make sure to tell tourists the local customs and taboos before their departure.”

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Oct 5 2010 (IPS)

Despite successful campaigns to promote gender equality, China continues to struggle with high rates of domestic violence, which experts say impacts not only families but society as a whole.

One-third of Chinese households cope with domestic abuse, both physical and psychological, according to a national survey by the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF), the largest women’s non-government organisation in China.

The study found that the violence mostly takes place in rural areas, in young families and in households with lower educational levels. Men commit 90 percent of the violent acts, the study found.

Another study conducted by the China Law Institute in Gansu, Hunan and Zhejiang provinces found that one-third of the families surveyed had experienced family violence and that 85 percent of the victims were women. It found that domestic abuse was so prevalent that both men and women identified it as a part of normal family life. Just 5 percent of respondents said their marriage was unhappy.

Domestic violence “has a pernicious influence on families and society as a whole. It threatens social stability, imperils marriages and threatens children’s well-being,” said Xu Rong, chief of the projects section at the Beijing Cultural Development Centre for Rural Women.

In rural areas in particular, the long-standing idea that women should be in subordinate positions to men is a primary contributor to abuse. In China, as in many other countries, domestic violence is considered a private matter and this makes it difficult for women in distress to seek help.

Domestic violence is also a main contributor to high rates of suicide among women in rural areas.

According to a report posted on Da Ai Net, a news portal that focuses on mental health and family education, about 157,000 Chinese women kill themselves each year, and the rate of suicide is three to five times higher in rural areas than urban centres.

According to one survey based on 260 cases of suicide among rural women, 66 percent had been victims of domestic violence. Xie Lihua, editor of ‘Rural Women’ magazine and secretary-general of the Development Centre for Rural Women, attributed the violence to the traditional belief that boys are more valuable that girls, the subordinate position of women in the countryside and the lack of assistance available to abused women, according to Da Ai Net.

But there is evidence that domestic violence is prevalent in higher-income families as well. A survey by the Guangdong Municipal Women’s Federation showed that of 548 cases of household abuse, 111 had members with college diplomas, 72 were public servant households and 88 of the households had incomes above 2,000 yuan (298 U.S. dollars) per month.

China’s constitution stipulates that “women in the P.R.C. (People’s Republic of China) enjoy equal rights to men in all spheres of life.” But until recently, there were no laws specifically addressing domestic violence in China, said Li Yinhe, China’s first female sociologist who currently works as a researcher and mentor to doctoral students at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Sociology.

In 2001, an amendment to the marriage law included the term “domestic violence” for the first time in Chinese law. In that same year, stipulations about domestic violence appeared for the first time in an amendments to the General Provisions of the Marriage Law.

China has since signed The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and has its own stand-alone laws that ban domestic violence against women and children.

An alliance of civil society organisations was recently created to conduct a project they call ‘Domestic Violence in China: Research, Intervention and Prevention’, and Chinese courts are starting to tackle the problem.

In August 2008, a court in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, issued China’s first court order on the protection of personal safety when it prohibited a husband from beating or humiliating his wife.

Xu, whose work focuses primarily on suicide prevention in rural areas, said that despite still high rates of domestic violence, there have been significant improvements in recent years. Notably, increased rural incomes have helped alleviate the problem somewhat.

Still, much more needs to be done.

Li said China needs to increase funds for women’s shelters and promote gender education. Xu added that China should also strengthen its laws against domestic violence, and promote prevention and protection. “We need to spread the idea that domestic violence is illegal across the whole society,” Xu said.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Sep 30 2010 (IPS)

As recently as the mid-1980s, China relied on steam-powered relics to transport citizens and goods around its vast territory. Today, the country is home to 6,900 kilometres of high-speed passenger train routes in what is the largest rail network in the world – and growing.

China's high-speed rail network is the largest in the world, and is set to more than double by 2020. Credit: Mitch Moxley/IPS

China already has 2,000 km of routes that can run at top speeds of 350 km per hour. A high-speed line that opened in 2009 connects Wuhan, in Hubei province, to Guangzhou, in Guangdong province, over 1,000 km to the south, in just three hours. Passengers can now travel between Beijing and neighboring Tianjin in 30 minutes on a 2.34 billion U.S. dollar line that opened in 2008, and the Shanghai-Wuhan- Chengdu high-speed rail corridor opened at the end of August.

China’s growing rail network “promotes economic development and infrastructure construction and will create more job opportunities,” said Wang Shengwu, president of School of Civil and Safety Engineering at Dalian Jiaotong University. “Investment in railway construction not only improves transportation, but pushes the development of other industries – energy, steel, cement…. For every one yuan invested in railway construction, 5.7 yuan (85 cents) will be added to the GDP.”

China has built its high-speed network on knowledge obtained through joint ventures with Siemens AG, Alstom SA and Japan’s Shinkansen bullet train operators. Its reputation for railway building has grown internationally and the country’s railway companies are fighting for a part of a global market that is worth about 155 billion dollars a year, according to estimates by Unife, the Association of the European Rail Industry.

Chinese railway companies are currently building high- speed rail networks in Venezuela and Turkey, and will begin construction in Burma soon. In 2009, Saudi Arabia awarded a Chinese company a contract to build a 350 km-per-hour rail link connecting Mecca and Medina.

China’s planned international expansion project will involve 17 nations, a Ministry of Railways official recently told ‘Global Times’, a state-owned newspaper. One route will begin in Kunming, capital of south-west Yunnan province, and run to Singapore. A second route, dubbed ‘the New Silk Road’, will start in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, and connect countries including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, finishing in Germany, the paper reported.

The governor of California in the United States, Arnold Schwarzenegger, recently scouted China’s high-speed rail network and said he was hoping for “creative financing” from countries – including China – to help lower costs for his state’s proposed high-speed rail network.

“Today what I have seen is very, very impressive. We hope China is part of the bidding process, along with other countries around the world, so that we can build high-speed rail as inexpensively as possible,” Schwarzenegger told reporters after posing for photos in front of a high-speed train in Shanghai in mid-September.

China, along with at least six other countries, has expressed interest in helping California develop its high- speed rail network. Experts say cash-rich China has an advantage because its banks were left relatively unscathed by the financial crisis.

China’s new high-speed rail network does have its critics, however.

Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University, said China’s investment in high-speed rail is misguided. He argues that Beijing should focus on expanding and improving its regular passenger and cargo networks, instead of building more super high-speed routes that it does not need.

He says China’s high-speed network targets high-income passengers, which leaves out the vast majority of Chinese who are not able to afford the pricey tickets. China may also lack the technical expertise to maintain its planned network of high-speed rail. “There’s still a considerable gap between China’s railway technologies and the advanced ones in foreign countries,” Zhao told IPS.

“It’s difficult for China’s current railways to meet the development needs of the national economy, so it’s absolutely necessary to expand the network,” he said. “But China has invested too much in the construction of its high- speed rail network, which doesn’t mesh with China’s basic national circumstances and the purpose of its rail network.”

China’s domestic airlines are also concerned that the growing rail network poses a threat to their viability. Some airlines have slashed ticket prices as much as 80 percent between cities that are connected by bullet trains, and in other cases flights have been ceased all together.

But Wang said rail growth is not necessarily a bad thing for the airline industry. He said China’s airlines are also developing quickly, making transportation in the country cheaper and safer.

“They will develop together,” he said. “I think the competition will encourage the two transport services to develop faster and better.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Sep 22 2010 (IPS)

Dubbed “The Great Green Wall,” a human-made ecological barrier designed to stop rapidly encroaching deserts and combat climate change is coming up across China. By 2050, the artificial forest is to stretch 400 million hectares – covering more than 42 percent of China’s landmass.

China already has the largest human-made forest in the world, covering more than 500,000 square kilometres, and the Communist Party this year announced it had reached its stated goal of 20 percent forest cover by 2010. The government envisions a line of trees stretching 4,480 km from Xinjiang province in the far west to Heilongjiang province in the east.

The project began in 1978, and three years later the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body, passed a resolution to make it the duty of every citizen above age 11 to plant at least three Poplar, Eucalyptus, Larch or other saplings every year.

Ordinary citizens have planted some 56 billion trees across China in the last decade, according to government statistics. In 2009 alone, China planted 5.88 million hectares of forest. Former U. S. Vice President and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore has said China plants two and a half times more trees every year than the rest of the world combined. He called the endeavour “the largest tree-planting programme the world has ever seen.”

The reforestation programme is part of a multi-pronged effort by China to combat climate change.

In 2007, China surpassed the United States as the world’s biggest carbon emitter, and emissions are expected to grow as China’s economy does. China has invested heavily in clean technology and has pledged to close thousands of heavy- polluting factories, but it has also faced criticism from other countries for moving too slowly and failing to agree to international standards.

The benefits of reforestation, advocates say, are evident. Notably, the trees help stop China’s fast-moving deserts in the west and north. In a 2006 report to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, China declared that 2.63 million square km – or 27 percent of its landmass – was covered with desert, compared with 18 percent in 1994. China’s grasslands have shrunk by 15,000 square km annually since the early 1980s.

Moreover, China’s forestry scientists say the new forests are better at absorbing carbon than slow-growth forests (of which China has virtually none remaining). They argue that fast-growing poplar and white birch trees capture perhaps double the amount of carbon as Korean pine, larch and firs.

The government is increasingly using the Great Green Wall as a propaganda tool to trumpet its efforts combating climate change. Every spring, about three million Communist Party members, civil servants and model workers head to the countryside to plant trees in a massive propaganda event.

In April, President Hu Jintao planted trees in Beijing to mark the city’s 26th annual voluntary tree planting. Some two million people joined Hu in that planting exercise, according to the state’s ‘People’s Daily’ newspaper.

But doubts remain about the impact of this green campaign.

While the government stresses the forests’ importance in combating decades of environmental damage, some critics say the type of forests planted, and their location, limit their effectiveness. They argue that the Great Green Wall has contributed to a significant decline in China’s forest quality. In many of the newly planted forests, few animals thrive, some experts explain.

Jiang Gaoming, professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Botany and vice secretary-general of the China Society of Biological Conservation, said the Great Green Wall has, in some places, accelerated ecological degeneration by putting pressure on precious water resources in arid and semi-arid regions.

Jiang also said that trees planted during the Great Green Wall project are non-native. “Native trees actually play a much bigger role in preventing desertification,” he told IPS.

In a study released in May, scientists from the University of Oklahoma and Fudan University in Shanghai found that reforestation and afforestation – the creation of new forests – actually lowers a forest’s potential to lessen climate change.

The study found that areas where natural forests are replaced by reforestation – called plantations – do not actually help control carbon emissions, and that converting farmland to forests decreases the amount of carbon absorbed by the soil.

Authors of the study also said that converted soil also loses 80 percent of its capability to degrade methane, a greenhouse gas that traps more heat than carbon dioxide.

Jiang Fengguo, director at the Soil and Water Conservation Supervision Station in Hexigtan Banner, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, told IPS that the Great Green Wall has had some success slowing the encroaching desert.

But he worries about the Great Green Wall’s influence on the local biological chain, including its impact on animal species. Moreover, Jiang said, the Great Green Wall may not be enough. “There will still be problems. Desertification still exists, and the continuing deterioration of the ecological environment has not been reversed,” he said.

* This IPS story is part of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network http://www.cdkn.org

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Sep 3 2010 (IPS)

Campaigns featuring some of China’s biggest celebrities, including basketball star Yao Ming and actor Jackie Chan, have persuaded some Chinese to think twice about eating shark fin soup. But changing attitudes about the centuries-old delicacy, a large contributor to decimated shark populations, continues to be a challenge.

Shark fin from different parts of the world are bound for China. Credit: WildAid

As China’s economy has soared, so has demand for the soup. As a result, many of the world’s shark populations have plummeted by as much as 90 percent in recent decades. As many as 100 million sharks are killed each year, about 73 million of these for their fins, according to some estimates. Because shark meat holds little value, fishermen often slice off fins and toss the sharks back to sea to die.

About 50 to 80 percent of all shark fins, or about 10,000 tonnes, goes through Hong Kong’s ports, with the majority of the product destined for the Chinese mainland, and to a lesser extent Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia and Thailand. The supply of fins from various shark species comes from different parts of the world, including Central and South America, Europe, the United States, Indonesia and Taiwan.

In recent years, high-profile campaigns in China have emerged to do battle against the consumption of shark fin soup. Groups campaigning for a stop to eating shark fin soup assert that the soup is a wasteful delicacy, and can in fact be harmful to humans, because some research has shown that high levels of arsenic, methylmercury and other harmful substances have been found in shark fins.

In 2004, WildAid, a group that fights the trade in illegal wildlife, opened a Beijing office and began working via advertising and public relations campaigns to advocate the protection of sharks. WildAid’s most prominent anti- shark fin campaign features basketball star Yao Ming, who was born in Shanghai and plays for the U.S. National Basketball Association.

The advertisements are featured on China Central Television (CCTV), a state-owned broadcaster, and on billboards and public screens in China’s major cities.

“When the buying stops, the killing can too,” Yao says in the advertisements.

The WildAid campaign has had notable success. According to a survey commissioned by WildAid in the run up to the 2008 Olympics, 55 percent of those interviewed had seen the campaign. Of those, 94 percent said it had an impact; 83 percent had stopped or reduced consumption of shark fin; and 89 percent said it should be banned.

“Those kinds of figures are indicative that we are having an impact. But there’s a long way to go,” Steve Trent, president of WildAid, told IPS. “I can’t tell you that we are saving sharks in the wild, but I can tell you that China is increasingly aware and understanding of the problems, and they’re willing to act.”

As a sign of growing momentum, Alibaba, China’s version of eBay, recently banned the sale of shark fins on their site. In May, a dozen Hong Kong restaurants and hotels pledged to offer shark-free options for banquets.

In one success story, a restaurant in southern Guangzhou city spent 3,000 U.S. dollars on a live 200-kilogramme nurse shark and then advertised it in a local newspaper to attract customers. Green Eyes China, a Wenzhou-based environmental group that works to expose animal rights abuses and environmental damage, sent employees to pose as customers and found that more than 70 people are already made reservations to try the shark.

Green Eyes petitioned the restaurant to let the shark go, while volunteers protested outside the restaurant with placards. The protests drew media attention and eventually, the restaurant released the shark to Guangdong’s fishery authorities, who found a home for it in the province’s Ocean Park.

Despite growing public awareness, changing deeply ingrained attitudes remains difficult.

According to a study conducted by WildAid China and the China Wildlife Conservation Association, over one-third of the participants surveyed in 16 Chinese cities had consumed shark fin in the past year, while 75 percent said they were unaware that shark fin soup was actually made of shark fins.

The trade in shark fins is also a big-money industry.

When Yao Ming said in 2006, “I pledge to stop eating shark fin soup and will not do so under all circumstances,” companies from China, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore signed a joint letter of protest, complaining that the campaign would negatively impact their business.

According to a CCTV programme aired in a January, a single plant in Puqi, a town in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, can process 6,000 to 7,000 tonnes of shark fins annually, worth about 6 7.3 million dollars. That is about 10,000 dead sharks per plant, and Puqi alone has dozens of processing plants.

Fang Minghe, Green Eyes China’s leader, said that the public awareness campaigns will be ineffective without a nationwide law to protect sharks.

“We need to conduct ethics education, tell people that sharks face extinction and please don’t eat them,” Fang told IPS. “But, you know, ethics education means nothing if there is no law. If there’s a law, things will be different.”

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Aug 26 2010 (IPS)

While Hollywood blockbusters and state-funded historical epics continue to dominate China’s box office, a vibrant independent film scene is quietly growing.

Lacking distribution channels that lead to wide audiences, these films, which tend to focus on aspects of day-to-day life in China, are finding a home at the few independent cinemas that exist here and at film festivals dedicated to independent and documentary filmmaking at home and abroad.

“Although these kinds of films aren’t allowed to be screened at most theatres, independent film is developing well in China,” Cui Weiping, a film professor at the Beijing Film Academy, told IPS. “You can find people talking about them at university lectures, in art salons, etcetera. Independent film is an influential part of China’s film industry.”

China’s box office take is expected to hit 1.5 billion U.S. dollars this year, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency. Hollywood films, 20 of which are allowed to play in China per year, continue to be the biggest money makers. ‘Avatar’, James Cameron’s 3-D epic, pulled in 204 million dollars in China in 2010.

China’s home-grown, big-budget film industry is also growing. ‘Aftershock’, which focuses on the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, recently became the highest-grossing Chinese film in history after it earned 79 million dollars in ticket sales as of early August, overtaking ‘The Founding of a Republic’, a 2009 film that depicts Mao Zedong’s rise to power and pulled in 62 million dollars.

Film Bureau Director Tong Gang told Xinhua that China had made 288 movies in the first half of 2010 and is projected to complete 500 this year, which will make China the third largest film producer in the world, after India and the United States. Only a small number of Chinese films make it to theatres, and many of these are produced by the state-run China Film Group and often play on a swelling national pride to attract wide audiences.

The growing number of big-budget films playing in China’s multiplexes is not necessarily a bad thing for independent cinema in the country, said Wu Jing, programming and marketing manager at Broadway Cinematheque, an independent cinema in Beijing. As the audience for big-budget films grows, an interest in independent films will emerge accordingly, Wu told IPS.

“Cinema is growing very fast in China,” she said. “As the audience grows, they become eager to find other things to see.”

Broadway Cinematheque was founded 14 years ago in Hong Kong by Bill Kong, producer of films including ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ and ‘Hero’. The Beijing branch, which opened in December 2009, hosts a number of film festivals – including, recently, a tribute to Charlie Chaplin – and helps shine the spotlight on local talent. The cinema also hosts lectures and runs a library, bookstore and café.

More than half of the films screened at Broadway are made by Chinese directors. Even though these films all meet Wu’s definition of independent movies – they do not appear in commercial theatres – they are still subject to the country’s censors, as are all films played in China.

China currently has film festivals dedicated to independent and documentary films in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou and Chongqing, and some of China’s independent films are finding a small audience abroad. dGenerate films, a U.S. based distributor, carries 25 titles available for online streaming at five dollars per film, and for purchase, at varying prices.

Independent cinema in China emerged in the 1980s, when underground films were made outside of state funding. Some were screened at international film festivals. In the 1990s, national control of distribution was opened up, allowing filmmakers to cooperate with private businesses to see their films distributed.

Notable films representative of this period, according to Beijing Film Academy’s Cui, include Wu Wenguang’s 1990 documentary ‘Bumming in Beijing’, considered one of China’s first independent documentaries, and Zhang Yuan’s 1993 film ‘Beijing Bastards’, one of China’s first independently produced films.

Broadway Cinematheque’s Wu said that for independent film to truly thrive today and reach a wider audience, China’s censor system will need to be overhauled – something unlikely to happen anytime soon. She also worries about the aspirations of younger directors, whose goals are to make big- budget films destined for commercial theatres.

The weakened international film market, meanwhile, gives little incentive for Chinese directors to make controversial films that skirt the censors in order to appeal to an international audience, Wu said.

For some filmmakers, however, China is the land of opportunity.

Qiao Li, 24, was born in Jinan, Shandong province, raised in Melbourne, Australia, and in 2006 moved to Beijing, where he co-wrote and co-directed a feature film called ‘Ring Roads’ and has maintained a constant stream of work since then. He says the low cost of entry and the freedom he has as an independent director working outside the mainstream Chinese film industry have given him opportunities that do not exist in Australia.

“The reason I decided to work in China were the many, many opportunities available to a filmmaker here,” Qiao told IPS. “China to me seemed like a land of potential and where there didn’t seem to be many rules and for me, that was all I needed to know to make my mind up to be based here. The overall industry here is thriving and it’s free enough to let me do my thing and still be able to pay the rent, and that’s something I would have had a hard time doing back home.”

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Aug 18 2010 (IPS)

China, now the world’s second largest economy with a ferocious appetite for resources, is aggressively strengthening relations with Latin American countries, but this has not been without roadblocks.

According to a report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), released in May, China will displace the European Union as the region’s second largest trading partner by the middle of 2011. Latin American countries are actively exploring cooperative arrangements with China in the fields of mining, energy, agriculture, infrastructure and science and technology, the report said.

China has in recent years diversified its investment in Latin America, from natural resources to manufacturing and the services industry, according to a July report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Latin American Studies.

China’s interest in Latin America ranges from oil from Venezuela to timber from Guyana and soybeans from Brazil.

Zhang Sengen, executive director of the Institute of Chinese International Economic Relations, said Latin America has dual appeal for China: It has abundant resources, which are needed to fuel China’s future growth, and it is a huge market for Chinese products – with 560 million consumers and a combined Gross Domestic Product of 4 trillion U.S. dollars.

“Latin America is a very attractive spot for Chinese investment,” Zhang said.

China’s foreign direct investment in Latin America reached 24.8 billion dollars in 2008, making up 14.6 percent of China’s total foreign direct investment, according to figures from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce. Meanwhile, Latin American investment in China hit 112.6 billion dollars, roughly 14 percent of the total foreign capital China absorbed.

Exports from Latin American countries to China are expected to reach 19.3 percent of the total by 2020, up from 7.6 percent in 2009, according to the ECLAC report.

China has prided itself on what it calls a “win-win” relationship with Latin America, in which the region sells China raw materials, such as copper, iron and oil, while Latin American countries receive goods from China, including mobile phones and cars.

But relations have not been altogether smooth. Across the region, a growing wariness about trade with China has also been emerging.

In Brazil and Argentina, manufacturers have accused China of dumping products in their markets, prompting new tariffs on some Chinese importers. Other countries worry about China’s aggressive efforts to win access to energy reserves.

In Peru, a state-owned Chinese company has faced a nearly two-decade long revolt from mine workers, featuring repeated strikes, clashes with police and arson attacks, ‘The New York Times’ reported earlier in August. Disputes at the mine, founded in 1992 by steelmaker Shougang Corp, focus on wages, environmental damage and the company’s treatment of local residents.

Wang Peng, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Latin American Studies, said Chinese companies in Latin America need to do proper risk assessment and better protect the local environment. “There are more NGOs in other countries than in China, and many of them focus on environmental protection,” Wang told IPS. “If our companies violate local environmental laws, no wonder tension happens.”

Despite the problems, relations continue to develop. In April, Chinese President Hu Jintao visited Brazil, a move that was heralded in China’s state media as a significant step in cementing relations with Latin America.

“China and Latin American countries, all as developing countries, share extensive common interest. China has always attached great importance to its relations with these countries,” Vice Foreign Minister Li Jinzhang said at a press conference in April, according to state-run Xinhua News Agency.

During the meetings, Brazil and China inked a joint action plan for 2010 to 2014 and reached agreements in the fields of culture, energy, finance, science and technology and product quality inspection, according to Xinhua.

China is Brazil’s largest trading partner and biggest export market. Trade with Chile, China’s second largest trading partner in the region, reached a record 17.7 billion dollars in 2009.

Oil-rich Venezuela is China’s fifth largest trading partner in Latin America with a trade volume of 7.15 billion dollars in 2009. In March that year, Su Zhenxing, director of the CAAS’s Institute of Latin American Studies, told ‘Beijing Business Today’ that Latin America will become a leading strategic provider of crude oil.

Jiang Shixue, vice president of the Chinese Association of Latin American Studies and deputy director-general of the Chinese Centre for the Third World Studies, said China’s interest in Latin America is not just economic, but also political.

Of the 23 countries in the world that have diplomatic relations with Taiwan, 12 are in Latin America. China can gain leverage over these countries though investment incentives, Jiang said.

Excerpt:

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Aug 2 2010 (IPS)

Yu Daihai, a 23-year-old college graduate from Dandong city in northern Liaoning province, uses his computer and mobile phone everyday to communicate with his friends. But technology is having an unwanted side effect: Yu, like a growing number of young Chinese, is starting to forget how to write his native language.

A man browses books of Chinese calligraphy at an art market in Beijing. Credit: Mitch Moxley/IPS

It has been at least half a year since Yu last wrote anything by hand, and he is having difficulty even remembering how to do so. At a job fair in 2009, he was asked to write a personal resume on the spot. When he realised he could not remember how to write some of the characters or ‘hanzi’, he suggested he submit the resume online.

The problem is so common that the Chinese have invented a term for it: ‘tibiwangzi’, which translates into “take pen, forget character.”

A poll commissioned by ‘China Youth Daily’ newspaper in April found that 83 percent of the 2,072 respondents admitted having problems writing characters. Another survey by Dayang Net, a popular Guangzhou-based news portal, found that 80 percent of respondents acknowledged they have forgotten how to write some characters.

Many simply do not have to. The Dayang poll found that 43 percent of respondents use a computer all the time for their jobs, and another 43 percent write out characters only for signatures and for filling out a few lines on forms.

Experts say the biggest culprit in the decline of using characters is mobile phones. China sends more text messages than any other country in the world. Because phones rely on ‘pinyin’ for short messaging, typing is replacing the elaborate strokes that make up Mandarin characters, the oldest continually used writing system in the world.

Each character in Mandarin can have one or more meanings and the language has many words that sound the same but have different meanings. The only way to learn a specific character’s meaning and match it with the right way to write it, is to memorise it.

Characters date back to 1200 B.C., when pictographs, called “oracle bones,” were first carved into bones and turtle shells.

In truth, there have been movements throughout Chinese history to abolish the use of characters. Mao Zedong wanted to scrap them entirely before deciding instead to simplify some in an attempt to promote wider reading, in what is today known as ‘simplified Chinese’. Today, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau, as well as some overseas Chinese communities, still use traditional characters.

Lu Jianming, a professor in the Department of Chinese at Peking University, said characters have been simplified throughout Chinese history, and the latest round of simplification under Mao helped improve literacy rates.

To learn Mandarin, Chinese children spend a lot of time memorising and copying characters, which are core to learning the language. By age 15, Chinese students will have learned to write a minimum of 3,000 characters.

At the same time, characters are more than simply a writing system for many Chinese – they are an integral part of spiritual and cultural identity, thought even to improve concentration and longevity.

“It is the essence of Chinese culture,” Lu told IPS.

But students are grappling with difficulties in remembering how to write many words and characters, as a growing number rely on computers for their schoolwork. A survey conducted in Chongqing municipality found that 65 percent of pupils only write characters while taking notes in class or when taking exams, according to ‘Chongqing Daily’. Over 75 percent of students said they thought writing by hand could be totally replaced by computers.

The Chinese government is starting to take action. In 2008, the Ministry of Education found that 60 percent of the 3,000 teachers it surveyed complained about a decline in writing ability among their students. Last year, the ministry launched a writing competition with 10 million participants and has now initiated programmes to encourage more handwriting at schools.

In 2009, university educators held the first nationwide conference on the problem with ‘hanzi’. They discussed making students submit handwritten papers, instead of typed versions.

Wu Bailing, a calligraphy teacher at the Teacher Training College in Dandong, has studied calligraphy for 20 years and taught the subject for 10. He said schools should focus on teaching students calligraphy to ensure that handwritten characters become part of a student’s daily life.

Wu remains confident that the Mandarin characters will not be going anywhere. “Characters are China’s greatest accomplishment,” Wu told IPS. “The character at its core is Chinese culture, and it won’t be replaced by any advanced technology.”

Excerpt:

Fourteen years ago, Fang Xin declared war on her parents. Whatever they wanted of her, Fang, now 28, did the opposite. She refused to watch news broadcasts by the state’s China Central Television, or the annual Spring Festival Gala, with her father and mother. She would not eat meals with her family. When it came time for university, she ignored her parents’ wishes and attended a school far from her hometown. The latest battle was fought last year, when her parents wanted Fang to become a mother.

Fang’s story, chronicled in the Guangzhou-based newspaper ‘Southern Weekly’, is increasingly common in China: Young people born into the one- child policy are beginning to reject what for them are their overbearing parents and, by extension, the deep-seated notions of family values in China.

Many, like Fang, are participating in “anti-parent” online discussion groups. One such group on Douban.com, one of the most popular online communities in China, operates under the slogan ‘Parents are Poison’ and has over 12,000 members.

“It has been growing rapidly. I’m really surprised. At the beginning, it had about 20 people,” Zhang Kun, the forum’s organiser, told China Radio International in an interview.

Topics include advice on how members can avoid duplicating their parents’ “failed lives,” and tips on how to “fight against your parents.”

The group was established in January 2008, with the stated goal of operating “under the premise of being filial, to protest pedantry, ignorance, restriction and persecution from parents,” according to the state newspaper ‘People’s Daily’.

Education experts see the forum as a rejection of one of the unintended consequences of China’s one-child policy designed to limit population growth in the world’s most populous country: authoritarian parenting. Many parents place their hopes and dreams squarely on the shoulders of their lone offspring, creating a pressure that many children increasingly find suffocating in a society different from that their parents grew up in.

That, coupled with a cultural tradition of strong parental control, has become too much to bear for many among the increasingly independent- minded millennial generation in this country of 1.3 billion people, education experts say.

“The traditional parent-child relationship in China is that parents have absolute power over their children,” Tao Hongkai, an education expert at Huazhong Normal University, told IPS. “Chinese parents always think ‘I gave birth to them,’ so children have to do whatever the parents say.”

Tao said he sees a shift in values among younger Chinese, evidence of which has popped up elsewhere in Chinese society, most notably in a string of protests at factories belonging to foreign companies operating in China.

“Young people don’t want to lead the life their parents have already assigned to them, the one their parents will force them to accept,” he said.

At the same time, however, children born into the one-child policy are heavily dependent on their parents, Tao said. That causes them to lash out. “They are far from independent financially and mentally. Because of the one- child policy, they were spoiled. Most of them don’t earn any money until they graduate, and some of them even live with their parents after graduating.”

Bai Cai is a member of the popular Internet forum. At 22, Bai felt as though he was a “pathetic victim of his parents,” who forced him to practise calligraphy, which he felt was “useless” in the computer age. He wanted to major in English; his parents forced him to major in Chinese. When he wanted to start his own software company, his parents accused him of having an Internet addiction and forced him to become a teacher in Beijing.

Finally, Bai had had enough. Ignoring his parents, he moved to the eastern city of Hangzhou to work at an information technology company.

“Parents don’t know anything,” Bai wrote on the forum. “They hold sceptical, even negative, attitudes about our decisions. If these parents aren’t a disaster for their children, who is?”

Improving the parent-child relationship in China would require a massive change to the Chinese social dynamic, namely better communication between parent and child, and a greater degree of autonomy for the child, said Yang Yang, vice director of the School of Politics and Public Management at China University of Political Science and Law.

“Because of the one-child policy, parents put all their attention on the sole child, which puts huge amounts of pressure on the child,” Yang said. “Parents can’t regard children as their private property.”

By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Jul 21 2010 (IPS)

China is stepping up its 10-year-long effort to develop its vast western regions, home to energy and mineral resources crucial to its future growth. So far, the campaign’s results have been mixed.

Earlier in July, China’s Communist Party announced a plan to invest more than 100 billion U.S. dollars in 23 infrastructure projects “to promote the fast and healthy development of the western areas,” according to ‘China Daily’, a state-owned newspaper.

The announcement is part of larger campaign to address inequalities between China’s western hinterlands and coastal east.

In 1978, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world and ushered in an era of prosperity in the heavily populated coast. But the country’s vast western regions – which make up 71 percent of China’s area but just 28 percent of its population – were largely left behind, even though diverted rivers and hydropower projects helped fuel the east’s boom.

In 2000, the government launched its plan to develop and modernise the west, from the Tibetan plateau to the deserts of Xinjiang, and beyond. In January that year, the State Council announced that then-Premier Zhu Rongji would lead a Leadership Group for Western China Development.

Ten years on, development has been slow and tensions between local ethnic groups and majority Han Chinese remain. But the west is key to China’s future development.

“The main components of the strategy include developing infrastructure, attracting foreign investment, increasing environmental protection, education promotion, and the retention of high-skilled labour from flowing to richer provinces,” state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) said in a report.

China’s National Development and Reform Commission said the money would be used to build railroads, coalmines, airports and power grids. The money will go to projects in the Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia autonomous regions, as well as Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. Beijing announced tax breaks for coal, oil and natural gas projects.

Announcing the new funds, the Communist Party touted its success in narrowing the gap between the coastal east and the remote west.

“Economic growth, in sharp contrast to previous records, has reached 11.9 percent, year on year (in western regions),” Du Ying, vice minister of the National Development and Reform Commission, said at a press conference reported by CCTV. “In the past ten years, the main macro-economic indicators have more than doubled, and we’ve seen breakthroughs in infrastructure development.”

Du said railway and highway capacity are 1.6 and 2.8 times higher than 10 years ago, and installed power capacity is 5.5 times higher than 2000. Fixed asset investment over the past 10 years has hit 3.6 trillion yuan (531 billion dollars), or five and a half times greater than the previous five decades combined.

The government announcement came a year after ethnic violence in Xinjiang autonomous region – pitting Uighur, a Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslim group, against Han Chinese – claimed the lives of at least 200 and injured 1,600 more. It was the worst ethnic violence in China in decades.

The west’s mineral and energy deposits make its development a key part of plans for China’s growth. From 2000 to 2009, the government spent some 325 billion dollars on projects in the western regions, ‘China Daily’ reported.

Still, the west lags behind China’s more prosperous regions. And the massive hydropower and infrastructure projects there have caused problems like desertification, soil erosion and water scarcity.

Western China’s GDP per capita has increased in recent years from 600 to 1,933 dollars, but the gap with the rest of China remains wide. The west’s GDP was only 17.8 percent of China’s total in 2008 and its average GDP per capita was only 41.09 percent that of the east, says a 2010 report by the Centre for Studies of China Western Economic Development at North-west University in Xi’an, Shaanxi province.

In a July conference here, President Hu Jintao said western China would become the cornerstone of the country’s energy programmes. Hu said that in the next 10 years, living standards there will be “greatly improved” and the environment would be “better protected.”

This is part of a two-pronged campaign to develop the west and soothe ethnic tensions, Ma Dazheng, deputy director of the Border History and Geography Research Centre at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences told IPS.

But China’s pledge to develop the west has done little to quell ethnic tensions, with critics arguing that the government was trying to dilute ethnic majorities in Xinjiang and Tibet through investment and immigration.

In March 2008, violent protests broke out in Tibetan regions to mark the failed 1959 uprising in Tibet against Beijing’s rule. The July 2009 clashes between Uighurs and Han were followed by an outbreak of violence in September in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.

Chen Xiushan, director of the Institute of Regional and Urban Economics at Renmin University of China, said that Beijing’s campaign to develop the west has had some success, but that development has been unbalanced. “Some areas have developed soundly – such as Chengdu city in Sichuan province, and Chongqing (municipality),” Chen said. “But conditions in some areas have even deteriorated despite the years of investment.”

Chen Yao, a professor of regional economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said western development – including mass migration from east to west – can help alleviate overpopulation in the east.

“If (migrant workers) continue to move to big cities, like Beijing and Shanghai, it will be a disaster for China,” Chen said. “The huge resource and environmental pressure faced by China can also be attributed to unbalanced population distribution. The rapid development of the west may alleviate this problem.”

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By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Jul 8 2010 (IPS)

When Britain announced it would stop giving public money to China as part of a plan to direct financial aid to countries in greater need, it was symbolic of China’s shift from aid receiver to aid giver.

Following the lead of other Western nations, Britain’s Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell said in June that the 40 million pounds (60.6 million U.S. dollars) that his government sends annually in China – home to the world’s fastest growing, and soon to be second largest, economy – would be better spent elsewhere.

“UK money should be spent helping the poorest people in the poorest countries, with every penny making a real difference by giving families the chance of a better future,” Mitchell said.

Indeed, China, whose own poverty rate has plummeted over the last two and a half decades, has in recent years become a formidable aid donor and investor in developing countries.

According to a report released in 2009 by the U.S. Congressional Research Service, China’s aid to Africa, Latin America and South-east Asia increased from less than one billion dollars in 2002 to an estimated 25 billion dollars in 2007.

“In the past several years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has bolstered its diplomatic presence and garnered international goodwill through its financing of infrastructure and natural resource development projects, assistance in the carrying out of such projects, and large economic investments in many developing countries,” the report said.

The study found that China’s foreign aid activities in African and Latin American countries serve its long-term economic interests – via infrastructure and public works projects and natural resource development – whereas those in South-east Asia reflect longer-term diplomatic and strategic objectives.

However, the report noted that while China’s aid projects “are a highly visible reminder of China’s growing ‘soft power,’ other countries and regions, such as the European Union, the United States and Japan, continue to dominate foreign direct investment in Africa, Latin America and South-east Asia.”

Still, China’s growing aid and foreign direct investment projects do reflect the country’s growing acceptance of its role as a leader of the developing world.

“As it becomes richer, it’s China’s responsibility to help other poor countries,” said Wang Yaohui, director general at the Centre for China & Globalisation (CCG), an independent, non-profit think tank in Beijing that conducts research on a range of social science issues. “It’s a natural transition.”

China does not have a central aid agency. Its development assistance is primarily administered by the Ministry of Commerce as well as the Export- Import Bank of China, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In Cambodia alone, China’s foreign direct investment hit a total of eight billion dollars this June, making China the largest investor in the poor South- east Asian nation. China’s investments target the agriculture, tourism, infrastructure and hydropower and garment industries, Kong Vibol, secretary of state for the Ministry of Economy and Finance, said recently.

African countries have been major beneficiaries of Chinese aid: By the end of September 2009, China’s total aid to Africa hit 11.15 billion dollars. More than half of China’s 900 ongoing projects in Africa are aimed at improving the livelihood of local citizens, through infrastructure projects like railways and power plants, Wang Wei, a researcher of China Institute of International Studies, wrote recently on China.org.cn.

Donating aid to Africa has strategic advantages. China has its eyes on Africa’s vast resource and energy riches, and it has made no secret of its desire to be a major influence in the region.

China has become Africa’s second-largest trading partner. From 2000 to 2009, bilateral trade grew from 10.6 billion to 91.1 billion dollars, an annual increase of 27 percent. Sino-African trade now makes up 10 percent of Africa’s total foreign trade.

In addition to enhancing aid to Africa, China has started to cancel African debt and has dispatched volunteers to the continent. The Chinese government also recently set up a human resource development fund for African countries, which will offer scholarships to African students, help African countries set up laboratories, fund school construction and dispatch teachers and young volunteers.

“The close relations between China and African countries have exerted a positive effect on African economic development,” Wang wrote. “Infrastructure construction in transportation, hydropower and telecommunications has enhanced African economic development.”

The CCG’s Wang said it is likely that the growing superpower is not motivated by altruism alone. “It’s true that China may have a bigger say in front of these countries. I don’t think that China’s specific purpose is to help these countries alone,” Wang said.

But Niu Jun, a professor in the School of International Relations at Peking University, said China also gives aid in situations where it does not expect anything in return, such as disaster relief.

“As China becomes richer and more developed, it will give aid to more and more countries. We will encourage their development,” Niu said.

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By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Jul 4 2010 (IPS)

When a distraught landlord wielding a kitchen cleaver stormed into a kindergarten classroom in south-east China’s Fujian province in May and killed several people, including children, it was the bloodiest of five recent attacks at schools across the country.

In the end, the Fujian landlord hacked to death seven children and two adults before returning home and killing himself on May 12.

That brought the number of casualties from a spate of school attacks in China to more than 20 students and adults dead, prompting calls for the government to improve protection for schoolchildren. Several of the attackers were reported to be suffering from mental illnesses.

The violent incidents seem to point to a quiet crisis in China: the growing prevalence of mental illnesses and a lack of care for those afflicted. And it’s a struggle the government appears to be coming to terms with.

According to estimates from senior health officials, China has at least 100 million people suffering from some form of mental illness, affecting 7 percent of the population. In 2009, this surpassed heart disease and cancer as the biggest burden on China’s health care system.

The conditions that come with these mental illnesses include depression, anxiety, drug addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Recent reports in state-run media indicate the government is beginning to recognise the problem. Premier Wen Jiabao said “deeper causes” may have prompted the recent attacks. An article in ‘China Daily’ newspaper said the government “was taking urgent steps” to expand treatment for mentally ill patients.

Vice Minister of Health Yin Li said at the recent National Conference on the Comprehensive Management of Public Security that “social transformation” has increased pressure on people and therefore the prevalence of mental illnesses, according to ‘China Daily’.

“The increase of social problems, competition, the rich-poor gap as well as other psychological obstacles means the number of people suffering from mental disorders is on the rise,” Cao Rifang, the deputy secretary of the Hangzhou Association for Mental Health, told IPS. “These patients are in an unstable condition, and if there is inadequate care, these people can easily hurt others. China has no complete care system to take care of mental disorders.”

Cao notes, however, that the vast majority of the estimated 100 million people who suffer from mental illnesses in China demonstrate symptoms remain functioning members of society, with no impulses toward violence.

The Communist Party of China’s current five-year plan (2007-2012) includes mental illness as a major field of research. Beijing has pledged to build six new mental health clinics in the city to treat the 150,000 people who are estimated to suffer from mental illness. In February, the government launched a nationwide mental-health awareness campaign, part of an effort linking treatment to reducing social unrest.

But providing effective treatment for mentally ill patients will be an uphill struggle in a country where the subject has long been taboo.

The practice of psychiatry was outlawed during the Cultural Revolution and Chairman Mao Zedong said all mental illnesses could be attributed to an inadequate understanding of class struggle. Many Chinese suffering from mental illnesses were removed from hospitals and sent to labour camps in the countryside due to their “counter-revolutionary” behaviour.

Despite the recent school attacks, some officials have insisted the horrific episodes were isolated incidents and have called instead for increased security.

According to a report last year in London’s ‘Telegraph’ newspaper, there are only 4,000 qualified psychiatrists and another 15,000 doctors working in psychiatric hospitals to serve China’s 1.3 billion people.

Often, mental illness has been used as an excuse to detain people who cause trouble for local governments.

Zhou Rongyan, an office director for the Agricultural Committee in Chongqing, was sentenced to prison for 10 years in 1998 for fighting for petitioners’ rights. A psychiatrist diagnosed her with a mental disorder, though the Chongqing Procuratorate later issued as statement to say she did not.

Upon her release, Zhou started investigating mental illness in China and found that at least 1,000 had been detained illegally based on false psychiatric diagnoses, according to a post she placed on ‘Tianya’, a popular Internet forum.

Cao said that prejudices against mentally ill continue to exist and that they may find it difficult to find jobs or enroll in schools. But attitudes are improving, and the government is taking important steps toward providing better care for mental health problems, he said.

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By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Jul 2 2010 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama may have squeezed in the last word as the G20 summit wrapped up recently in Toronto, but it was China that came away looking like the summit’s winner.

Indeed, the U.S. president kept up the pressure many foreign governments were trying to put on China to help rebalance the world’s economy. He reminded Beijing’s leaders that the U.S. government expects the growing superpower to allow its currency, the yuan, to rise and to reduce the country’s massive trade surplus.

“My expectation is that they’re going to be serious about the policy that they themselves have announced,” Obama said, referring to Beijing’s recent pledge to end the yuan’s two-year peg to the U.S. dollar.

“A strong and durable recovery also requires countries not having an undue advantage,” Obama said at his post-summit press conference Jun. 27, demanding “currencies that are market-driven.” The G20 summit, from Jun. 26 to 27, brought together leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies.

China has long faced criticism from developed countries, particularly the United States, that it keeps its currency artificially low and that this helps fuel its export-driven economy by keeping production costs down.

But thanks to a recent announcement that its currency will be allowed to rise against the dollar, yuan revaluation remained in large part a sideline issue at the summit.

Indeed, China scored a big victory by having a line removed from the final G20 statement that said it would stop pegging the yuan to the U.S. dollar – a line that many G20 leaders had hoped to keep.

New reports said the line had been included in the statement until just prior to the summit’s final day, but was removed at the request of the Chinese. Economists have argued that the yuan is undervalued by about 20 percent against the dollar and that a revaluation is needed to help balance the world economy.

“Leading up to the summit, senior Chinese officials warned that ‘finger-pointing’ would undermine the objectives that world leaders had set out for the meeting,” wrote the ‘Economic Observer’, a weekly newspaper in China, adding that Chinese President Hu Jintao walked away from the meeting “a winner.”

The Chinese officials’ “message seems to have gotten through,” the paper said.

Hu reiterated at the summit that China will not be bullied into relaxing currency controls.

“It is appropriate to address trade frictions appropriately through dialogue and consultation and under the principle of mutual benefit and common development,” Hu said in Toronto.

For China, the biggest obstacle to global economic recovery is Western countries shielding their producers from competition from emerging economies. “We must take concrete actions to reject all forms of protectionism and unequivocally advocate and support free trade,” Hu said.

Indeed, reforming the global financial regulatory system was the central focus of conversation at the summit.

China is expected to surpass Japan as the world’s second biggest economy, and it will be transferred International Monetary Fund (IMF) voting shares accordingly. China believes the current voting structure favours Europe and the United States over rapidly-growing developing nations.

European countries, loath to see their voting share diluted, are putting up stiff resistance to reform. China currently has the sixth largest voting share at 3.7 percent, compared to the United States’ 17 percent share.

Another big topic of conversation at the summit was the so-called “bank tax.” European leaders – including Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron – called for fiscal restraint and for a new levy on bank profits.

Here, China scored another victory by supporting Canada’s counterproposal, which called for enforcing tougher standards on banking capital. In return, Canada expressed its support for international financial institutions that “better reflect the emerging economies of the world,” and therefore gave a boost to China’s call for international financial institution reform.

Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University, said G20 members still have a long way to go before true reform to the international financial system occurs.

“There were discussions of international financial reform (in Toronto), but actually I think none of the G20 countries have been seriously dealing with it,” Shi said. “The international community has been calling for reform since the financial crisis, but I can’t see any improvements.”

Zhang Xiaojing, an economics professor and the director of the macroeconomics department at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Economics, said China is increasingly accepting the role of leader of developing nations, spearheading calls for change in the global economic order through groups like the G20.

That is a role Zhang expects to become even more prominent in the future.

“The G7 and G8 no longer have an exclusive say over world affairs. China has become a much more powerful player and is beginning to have a strong voice in the international community,” Zhang said.

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