China Calls for Stepped-Up Propaganda

China Calls for Stepped-Up Propaganda

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN
The Associated Press
Wednesday, January 23, 2008; 5:17 AM

BEIJING — Chinese President Hu Jintao has told officials to breathe new life into propaganda efforts, putting renewed emphasis on a key pillar of Communist rule ahead of this summer’s Beijing Olympic Games.

Hu’s remarks at a major party gathering reflected the government’s traditional focus on controlling information and guiding public opinion, yet also indicated concern that those efforts were losing their edge in the face of the Internet and other independent sources of information and entertainment.

Officials should “perform well the task of outward propaganda, further exhibit and raise up the nation’s good image,” Hu said.

Reports on his remarks Tuesday to party leaders and propaganda officials dominated the front page of the party’s flagship People’s Daily and other official newspapers Wednesday.

The reports did not indicate any direct mention of the Olympics by Hu. However, they said he called for boosting China’s “cultural soft power,” a reference to influence in culture, sports and other spheres outside traditional military might and hard-nosed diplomacy.

China has only lately embraced the concept of “soft power,” although propaganda has been a central tenet of Communist rule even before the party seized control in a 1949 revolution.

Directing those efforts is the Propaganda Department, which sits under the direct control of the party’s powerful Central Committee. The body outranks all government ministries and the Cabinet’s State Council Information Office, which is chiefly responsible for propaganda directed at foreign audiences.

As the voice of party rule, the department is headed by a party hard-liner and exercises broad control over print media, film, television and the Internet.

In an apparent attempt to appear more progressive, the department’s English name was changed a decade ago to the Publicity Department, although its name in Chinese remains unchanged.

The department has wide-ranging powers to punish outlets, writers, filmmakers and journalists that defy its guidelines, both written and implied, although the process of censorship is highly opaque.

Organizers of the Beijing Olympics inaugurated a media center early on and hired international public relations firm Hill & Knowlton to advise on publicity and media relations for the Games, which get under way in August.

Those efforts are especially important given human rights groups’ attempts to use the games to publicize their criticisms of Chinese policies on everything from religious freedoms to the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region.

In the reports on his remarks, Hu also emphasized the importance of propaganda in maintaining stability in a society increasingly riven by disparities between rich and poor, ethnic divisions, and challenges to the party’s once unquestioned authority.

Officials, he said, must “advance the building of the body of socialist core value and further boost unity and harmony between all ethnic groups.”

China’s farmers protest a key Mao tenet

By Peter FordTue Jan 22, 3:00 AM ET

The snowy, fogbound fields around this village in central China do not look like a battlefield. But in recent weeks they have become a flash point in a spreading peasants’ revolt against one of the key aspects of Communist Party rule: state ownership of farmland.

“My ancestors bought this land” before the 1949 Communist revolution, says Cheng Zhenhai, a grizzled cotton farmer huddling close to the stove in his dimly lit one-room home, “so I have to keep it. As a peasant, I want nothing else.”

Mr. Cheng was one of more than 10,000 peasants in Shaanxi Province who signed a public letter last month renouncing the collective land-ownership system that has governed China’s countryside for the past half century and declaring the land they farm to be their private property. At about the same time, farmers in four other provinces signed similar declarations that appeared on the Internet.

The statements represent only a theoretical change, since farmers are powerless to reform the law and local authorities have cracked down hard by arresting ringleaders of the nascent movement. But some observers suggest that if protests gather steam, they could spark radical changes.

“It could be a revolution,” says Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology. “Privatization of land is a foundation of democracy and the rule of law in China, because land is a basic resource.”

Others doubt the movement will get off the ground, given authorities’ hostility. “I just can’t see this being successful,” says Jon Unger, a China expert at Australian National University in Melbourne. “When peasants demand a different economic system in violation of the Constitution, they put themselves in a weak position.”

That the Chinese government is taking the movement seriously seems evident from the gravity of the charges laid against organizers of the declarations. Chen Sizhong, who circulated the Shaanxi letter in his village of Huayin, was detained in an unheated cell for a month before being charged with “attempting to overthrow state power,” a crime that carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Cheng, who farms cotton and corn on the 1-1/2 acres of land he leases, scoffs at that accusation. “We are peasants,” he says. “We have no goal but to get our land back. When we have achieved that, we won’t bother anyone.”

As a young man, Cheng was forcibly relocated from his home, as were 290,000 other farmers and their families in the region, to make way for the Sanmenxia dam, China’s first megaproject. The dam proved unusable, however, due to faulty design. Within a few years, as the planned reservoir shrank to a fraction of its original size, the land around Liren reappeared.

When farmers returned home spontaneously they were allocated only half the land they had been obliged to abandon, residents recall. The local authorities retained control over the other 25,000 acres, saying they were holding it in reserve for future returnees.

No more farmers came back, however, and over the past 20 years those 25,000 acres of publicly held land have shrunk to less than 7,000 acres, according to official documents.

“The rest has become the private property of local government officials who rent it out to peasants for their own profit,” says one local official in the district seat of Weinan who is sympathetic to the farmers and who asked to remain anonymous for fear of punishment.

Challenging a key Communist tenetSuch land grabs by corrupt officials – who sell the land to developers or rent it out for personal gain – are not uncommon in China: They are the cause of most of the tens of thousands of peasant riots that break out every year across the country.

But the spate of recent declarations asserting farmers’ private ownership over the land has taken such protests a crucial step further, challenging a central pillar of the Communist Party’s legitimacy.

Mao Zedong attracted millions of peasants to the 1949 revolution with his promise to seize the land from rapacious landlords and give it to them. Today, however, “officials have become the modern landlords,” the Sanmenxia region farmers complain in their declaration.

The announcements of land claims in five Chinese provinces, which government censors removed from websites as soon as they found them, appeared because “at a certain moment, the peasants couldn’t take it anymore. They have been petitioning the government every year without a solution. It just exploded,” according to the Weinan official.

But the timing of the announcements was no coincidence: The movement is being coordinated and encouraged by pro-democracy intellectual activists who see resolution of the peasants’ grievances as a step towards political freedom, says one such activist. “We are in touch with peasants in 13 other provinces and they will launch their demands when the time comes,” he says. “It will take time to organize.”

Whether the movement will gain traction, however, remains in doubt. The 120,000 farmers in whose name the declarations were issued are a drop in the ocean of China’s 700 million-strong peasantry. Both the central and local government authorities have tried hard to clamp down on them, forbidding any reporting of the issue in the domestic media, arresting peasant leaders, and detaining foreign journalists seeking to report on the movement.

“Farmers are desperate” in the face of official expropriations, “and a lot of them feel that if the land were privately owned, officials would not be able to do this,” says Professor Unger.

As a first step, collective ownership But surveys have shown, he adds, that most peasants would actually prefer a system under which former Communist-organized “production teams,” comprising between 10 and 20 families, owned the land collectively. That would allow them to redistribute their land occasionally as member families shrank or grew, needing less or more land to feed themselves.

Some leaders of the current movement acknowledge that collective ownership, if it were in the hands of villagers instead of district officials, might be a more realistic short-term goal than outright household private ownership. “Private ownership is a long-term goal; we cannot reach it now,” says Mr. Chen from Huayin.

“At the moment, Communist Party officials, not China the country, are the landlords,” adds the activist. “Once the collective has the land, the next step will be to distribute it back to households.”

The idea of privatizing farmland, now that much of the rest of the Chinese economy has been taken out of state hands, has gained considerable support in academic circles and in think tanks that advise the government, according to political observers here. But it remains a taboo subject for open debate, given the iconic status that land collectivization enjoys in the rhetoric of what is still nominally a Communist regime.

That rhetoric cuts little ice with cotton farmer Cheng, however, whose only modern convenience is a television in one corner of his simple home. “China is getting rich, but we peasants aren’t,” he says bluntly. “Only corrupt officials are getting rich. I live worse than my parents did, and it’s because we don’t have enough land.”

Copyright © 2008 The Christian Science Monitor

Taiwanese Question Independence Push

January 20, 2008

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 1:08 p.m. ET

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Disgruntled voters gave the thumbs-down to President Chen Shui-bian’s vision of an independent Taiwan this month, propelling the opposition Nationalist Party to a landslide victory in legislative elections.

People like 32-year-old Daphne Hwang are a big part of the reason.

Hwang is one of many Taiwanese who feel that Chen is pushing too hard, too fast, for formal and permanent separation from China — a move Beijing says would compel it to attack. The island of Taiwan already enjoys de facto independence, and most of its 23 million people don’t want to antagonize their militarily powerful neighbor.

Moreover, with the local economy struggling, Taiwanese such as Hwang are cashing in on the mainland’s economic boom, moving away to China to try to further their careers.

”Working (on the mainland) allows me to understand the greater China market and compete more successfully,” said Hwang, a marketing specialist for an American technology company in Shanghai. ”It’s better than staying in Taiwan.”

Chen’s contentious independence push, which includes restricting Taiwanese investment in China, will be put to the test in a March 22 presidential election to select his successor. A victory for Nationalist candidate Ma Ying-jeou, who favors closer economic ties with China, would almost certainly put Chen’s independence dream on ice for years to come.

That would delight not only China, but also the United States, which worries about the Chinese threat of attack.

Ma enjoys a big lead in opinion polls over Frank Hsieh, the candidate of Chen’s Democratic Progressive Party. The Nationalists’ big win on Jan. 12, when they took 81 of the 113 seats in the legislature, gave him a further boost, according to polls.

Nearly 60 years after Taiwan split from China, most Taiwanese favor a continuation of the ambivalent status quo, in which Taiwan operates independently but holds out the possibility of unification with China sometime in the future. In government surveys over the past six years, the status quo option consistently outpolls the independence-now option by at least a 5-1 margin.

The Democratic Progressive Party’s defeat resulted partly from an electoral system reform, and from disgust with corruption in Chen’s inner circle. But the key element, analysts say, was the Nationalists’ success in connecting Chen’s pro-independence push with Taiwan’s economic woes.

A December survey by Taipei-based CommonWealth Magazine put Taiwan’s economic dissatisfaction level at 72 percent. The telephone survey of 1,090 people gave a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Taiwan’s economy is growing at about half the rate of China’s, which has more than tripled in size since Chen took office. The economic dissatisfaction fed directly into Hwang’s decision to move to Shanghai in 2005.

”There are fewer and fewer good positions in Taiwan,” she said. ”The Taiwanese market is just too limited for me.”

The talent drain, numbering tens of thousands of Taiwanese, is a big challenge to Chen. He fears the communist government could leverage Taiwan’s estimated $100 billion in mainland investments, and China’s growing trade surplus with Taiwan, to dictate terms in any future confrontation.

Chen has tried to slow the trend by imposing restrictions on investment in China and encouraging Taiwanese to seek business in Vietnam, India and elsewhere.

He has also tried to promote a Taiwanese identity with its own traditions and history.

References to Taiwan as part of China have been toned down in school curricula, and ”China” has been removed from a slew of government company names.

All that represents a fundamental departure from previous government policy — first enunciated in the days after Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek arrived on the island in 1949 — that Taiwan and China are a single country, destined for eventual unification.

Until martial law was lifted in 1987 and Taiwan began embracing democracy, even talking about independence could mean a prison sentence.

In a December interview with The Associated Press, Chen defended his policies, pointing to polls showing that about two-thirds of the island’s people identify themselves first as Taiwanese, rather than Chinese — twice as many as when he first came to power in 2000.

But Yeh Yuan-chih, a 33-year-old manager at a Taipei electronics company, is among those who see no reason to push independence. Most Taiwanese are proud of China’s 5,000 year history, he said. They write in the same language, celebrate the same holidays, and ”There is no need to distinguish Taiwan and China.”

But Pan Yu-hsin, a 29-year-old graduate student from Taipei, said Chen’s campaign reinforces Taiwan’s freedoms.

”I can criticize Taiwanese leaders now without any problem. But if we unite with China, what will happen if I criticize officials then?” he asked. ”I do not want to be arrested for speaking my mind.”

——

Associated Press Writer Debby Wu contributed to this report.

Chinese Netizens Rally in Support of Hu Jia

2008.01.18

Video documentary made by Hu and Zeng last summer, while Hu was still under house arrest. Courtesy of Hu Jia.

HONG KONG—Ordinary Chinese have left numerous support messages online for detained AIDS activist Hu Jia and his wife and baby, who remain under tight restriction at the couple’s Beijing apartment. Authorities are meanwhile clamping down on blog posts and comments about Hu, who some believe was detained for his outspokenness around the Beijing Olympics.

“I am a neighbor,” read one comment to Zeng’s blog, which has now been blocked. “Please tell me how I can deliver baby formula to you.”

“This is to add my comment to the others, and to tell the world that the Chinese people love justice and we love the light,” said another. “We are praying for you.”

The authorities have cut off Hu’s wife Zeng Jinyan from telephone and Internet access, effectively detaining her and her baby daughter under house arrest.

Video taken by the couple in recent months shows a team of national security police camped outside the couple’s apartment round the clock; the police are turning away any journalists who try to visit Zeng, but she was briefly captured by a UK television crew peering from the window, her baby in her arms.

Chinese blogger Isaac Mao said it had taken some time for the news of Hu’s Dec. 27 detention for “subverting state power,” to filter through to Chinese netizens, but that now they were reacting.

Hu Jia and his wife, Zeng Jinyan, January 2007. Photo courtesy of Hu Jia.

“They have almost certainly got wind of the news via the overseas media,” Mao told RFA’s Mandarin service. “Now, a lot of the grassroots media in China are reporting Hu Jia’s detention.”

“Some are even getting together to send Zeng some baby milk powder. There is a lot of concern, because some of the milk powder was not delivered but was intercepted by those guarding the door,” Mao said.

“People are not only sending the milk powder but are also making a public record of the fact. People have got used to much more intellectual freedom in the past year or so they are willing to make judgments and even to play a part in spreading the news of events like this,” said Mao, a keen proponent of citizen journalism and grassroots Web development.
Call to action

The overseas-based Chinese-language news site Boxun.com carried an announcement calling on people to travel to Hu and Zeng’s home in Beijing’s Bobo Freedom City on Sunday.

Meanwhile, former journalist and editor of the nonprofit Minjian magazine Zhai Minglei said his news blog had been blocked after he posted an article in support of Hu by Guangdong-based university professor Ai Xiaoming.

“I think it’s because I’ve been doing some posts on the situation of Hu Jia,” Zhai told Mandarin reporter Ding Xiao.

“It was blocked soon after I posted an article from Ai Xiaoming entitled ‘Saving an ordinary person in a everyday way,’” Zhai said.

Ai was warned off public comment by authorities in 2005 after writing an article strongly supporting the campaign in Guangdong’s Taishi village to remove an elected village chief accused of corruption amid a land dispute.

“It must be that, because I have been posting articles about him and appeals on his behalf since the blog was unblocked. I posted three in a row,” Zhai said.
Sensitive reaction

People are not only sending the milk powder but are also making a public record of the fact. People have got used to much more intellectual freedom in the past year or so they are willing to make judgments and even to play a part in spreading the news of events like this.

Chinese blogger Isaac Mao

Typically, blogs containing posts that the government deems politically subversive are deleted, and the author warned by the government. Those hosted on overseas servers are filtered from Chinese netizens through the use of forbidden keywords, so they are removed from search engine results.

Zhai said the government’s reaction appeared to be even more sensitive than usual, given the tenor of many of the comments and blog posts.

“Most people who are making these comments have no knowledge of China’s civil rights movement, and they are commenting from a humanitarian perspective, because Jinyan hasn’t managed to get milk to feed the baby, and she still has big black bruises on her arm where the national security police gripped her. The articles that I have written, as Hu Jia’s friend, and which have been written by Li Jinsong and Ai Xiaoming, are pretty middle-of-the-road and moderate. I don’t think it’s very wise of the government to suppress such moderate hopes that the government will manage to reconcile its differences with Hu Jia.”

Beijing-based legal scholar Teng Biao said he has been frequently taken in for questioning and warnings by national security police since Hu’s detention.

“Sometimes it’s the national security police from Changping county. When things are more serious, then it’s a more senior level of national security police. They basically tell me not to get involved in Hu Jia’s case, and threaten and warn me, saying that I could end up being fired and detained myself if I insist on continuing to represent all these human rights cases.”

Teng said authorities had asked him specifically about an article he and Hu published in September 2007 titled “The truth about China before the Olympics,” detailing widespread rights violations directly linked to the Olympics, including mass evictions and the illegal detention of those making complaints against the government through legal channels.

“I wrote that article with him last September. They asked me if I wrote it. I said that it was mostly written by me, and that Hu Jia had just added on a bit specifically to do with AIDS.”

Teng said the charges of incitement to overthrow state power against Hu were unfounded. He said Hu Jia wasn’t against the Olympics, but rather that he had called publicly for an improvement to Chinese society as a result of the Olympics.

Prominent AIDS activist Wan Yanhai was also taken in by police for questioning on the day of Hu’s arrest, Dec. 27. And Gao Yaojie, a well-known AIDS doctor, says that the day Hu Jia was detained she received a “mysterious phone call” from a stranger inviting her to attend an AIDS seminar. Upon verification she learned that there was no such seminar.

The 80-year-old doctor says she believes that it was a trick to lure her out of her house. She says her phone line is being tapped, her e-mail has been blocked, and her family has been harassed and even threatened.

Original reporting in Mandarin by Ding Xiao. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

Trial Scheduled for Chinese Writer

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN
The Associated Press
Friday, January 18, 2008; 11:04 AM

BEIJING — A Chinese dissident writer who penned essays about local corruption will face trial next week on subversion charges, his wife said Friday.

Lu Gengsong, who will appear Tuesday at No. 1 Intermediate Court in the eastern city of Hangzhou on Tuesday, was arrested late last summer and indicted on charges of “inciting subversion of state power,” a charge used frequently to silence whistle-blowers and critics of the Communist Party.

News of Lu’s trial came as a journalist group urged Britain’s visiting prime minister to call for greater media freedoms in meetings with Chinese leaders

Sentencing was expected to take place on the same day of the trial, Lu’s wife Wang Xue’e said.

Wang said the indictment cited five of Lu’s essays, but did not identify the allegedly subversive passages. She said Lu had written on local corruption cases, including allegations that city officials colluded with business people on real estate development projects.

“China is such a big country, what possible effect could these have?” Wang said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “He only opened his mouth, he never took any action.”

Wang said she planned to attend the trial together with her daughter and sister-in-law. She said authorities were limiting attendance to immediate family members, despite her request to make the trial open to the public.

Four court officials working in separate departments refused to answer questions about Lu’s case when reached by telephone, apparently due to rules barring clerks from releasing docket information. They declined to give their names as is typical with Chinese bureaucrats.

Lu has worked as a freelance writer since being fired from his job as a lecturer at a police training academy in 1993, according to Wang.

China’s ruling Communist Party maintains tight control over all media and the Internet, although it has loosened some restrictions on foreign reporters ahead of this summer’s Beijing Olympics.

However, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said Beijing has failed to consistently apply even those modest reforms.

The group urged British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to encourage Chinese leaders to live up to promises of greater openness made when Beijing was awarded the Games in 2001.

“We call on you to urge Chinese authorities to meet their pledge and implement immediate measures to improve conditions for both the national and international media before August,” the group said in an open letter to Brown, who began a state visit to Beijing on Friday.

The media watchdog labels China the world’s leading jailer of journalists, saying at least 29 reporters are currently locked up and their lawyers routinely harassed.

“Time is running out to ensure that the spotlight currently trained on Beijing makes a meaningful difference to journalists on the ground in China,” the group said.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said Friday evening there was “no specific discussion of specific (human rights) cases” during Brown’s meetings with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and other top leaders.

RSF: European parliament calls for Hu Jia’s release

17 January 2008

CHINA
European parliament calls for Hu Jia’s release

The European parliament today majority approved a resolution on leading Chinese dissident Hu Jia, who has been held by the Chinese authorities since his arrest in Beijing on 27 December. During today’s debate on the resolution, European commissioner Meglena Kuneva announced that an European Union “troika” had begun negotiations with the Chinese authorities with the aim of obtaining Hu’s release.

The resolution:
- “Strongly condemns the detention of Hu Jia and demands his prompt release and that of all the dissidents who have been arrested and jailed for crimes of opinion;
- “Urges China not to use the Olympic Games as a pretext to arrest and illegally detain and imprison dissidents, journalists and human rights activists who either report on or demonstrate against human rights abuses;
- “Urges the Chinese authorities to close the so-called ‘black jails’, places of detention set up to detain ‘troublemakers’ in advance of this year’s Olympics;
- “Reiterates its opinion that human rights concerns should receive far more attention in the build-up to the Beijing Olympic Games, and highlights the need for ‘respect for universal fundamental ethical principle’ and the promotion of a peaceful society concerned ‘with the preservation of human dignity’ as enshrined in Articles 1 and 2 of the Olympic Charter.”

The resolution noted that Hu suffers from a liver disease that obliges him to take medication every day, that Time magazine named his wife, Zeng Jinyan, as one of the world’s 100 “heroes” in 2007, and that she and Hu jointly received the Reporters Without Borders – Fondation de France special “China” prize last November.

European parliament president Hans-Gert Poettering already issued a call on 31 December for Hu’s release.

——-

CHINE
Le Parlement européen adopte une résolution appelant à la libération de Hu Jia

Le 17 janvier, le Parlement européen a voté à la majorité une résolution concernant la détention du dissident Hu Jia, interpellé par les autorités chinoises le 27 décembre 2007. Pendant la session du Parlement sur le sujet, la commissaire européenne Meglena Kuneva a annoncé qu’une troïka de l’Union européenne avait entamé des négociations avec les autorités chinoises pour obtenir la libération de Hu Jia.

La résolution affirme :
- “Condamner fermement la détention de Hu Jia et réclamer sa libération immédiate ainsi que celle des autres dissidents emprisonnés pour un délit d’opinion.
- Demande instamment à la Chine de ne pas prendre prétexte des Jeux olympiques pour arrêter, détenir illégalement ou emprisonner des dissidents, des journalistes et des défenseurs des droits de l’homme.
- Demander aux autorités chinoises de fermer les ‘black jails’, prisons mises en place pour détenir les ‘fauteurs de troubles’ à l’approche des Jeux olympiques.
- Réaffirme que les préoccupations liées aux droits de l’homme méritent une attention beaucoup plus grande dans le cadre des préparatifs des Jeux olympiques de Pékin, et qu’il y a nécessité de promouvoir une société non violente incluant « la protection de la dignité humaine » comme il est mentionné dans les articles 1 et 2 de la charte olympique.”

Le Parlement européen rappelle également que Hu Jia est malade du foie et doit prendre des médicaments quotidiennement. Il précise que son épouse, Zeng Jinyan, a été désignée par le Time comme l’une des cent personnes les plus influentes de l’année 2006, et que le couple a remporté le prix Reporters sans frontières – Fondation de France spécial « Chine » en novembre 2007.

Hans-Gert Pöttering, président du Parlement européen, avait déjà demandé la libération de Hu Jia, le 31 décembre 2007.
———-

CHINA
El Parlamento Europeo aprueba una resolución pidiendo la libertad de Hu Jia

El 17 de enero, el Parlamento Europeo ha aprobado, por mayoría, una resolución relativa a la detención del disidente Hu Jia, detenido por las autoridades chinas desde el 27 de diciembre de 2007. En la sesión del Parlamento sobre el asunto, la comisaria europea Meglena Kuneva anunció que una troika de la Unión Europea ha iniciado negociaciones con las autoridades chinas, para conseguir la libertad de Hu Jia.

La resolución dice:
- “Condenar firmemente la detención de Hu Jia y pedir su libertad inmediata, así como la de los demás disidentes encarcelados por delitos de opinión.
- Hacer un llamamiento para que no se utilicen los Juegos Olímpicos como pretexto para arrestar, detener ilegalmente o encarcelar a disidentes, periodistas y defensores de los derechos humanos.
- Pedir a las autoridades chinas que cierren las “black jails”, cárceles creadas para internar a los “propagadores de disturbios” al acercarse los Juegos Olímpicos.
- Reiterar su advertencia de que, durante la preparación de los Juegos Olímpicos de Pekín, debe prestarse especial atención a los problemas relativos a los derechos humanos, y que es necesario promover una sociedad no-violenta que incluya “la protección de la dignidad humana” tal y como aparece en los artículos 1 y 2 de la carta olímpica”.

El Parlamento Europeo recuerda también que Hu Jia está enfermo del hígado y tiene que medicarse diariamente. Precisa que su esposa, Zeng Jinyan, ha sido incluida por el Times en su lista de las cien personas más influyentes del año 2006, y que la pareja fue galardonada con el Premio Reporteros sin Fronteras – Fundación de Francia especial “China, en noviembre de 2007.

Hans-Gert Poettering, Presidente del Parlamento Europeo, ya pidió la libertad de Hu Jia el 31 de diciembre de 2007.

Dry, polluted, plagued by rats: the crisis in China’s greatest river

The waters of the Yangtze have fallen to their lowest levels since 1866, disrupting drinking supplies, stranding ships and posing a threat to some of the world’s most endangered species.

Asia’s longest river is losing volume as a result of a prolonged dry spell, the state media warned yesterday, predicting hefty economic losses and a possible plague of rats on nearby farmland.

News of the drought – which is likely to worsen pollution in the river – comes amid dire reports about the impact of rapid economic growth on China’s environment.

The government also revealed yesterday that the country’s most prosperous province, Guangdong, has just had its worst year of smog since the Communist party took power in 1949, while 56,000 square miles of coastline waters failed to meet environmental standards.

But the immediate concern is the Yangtze, which supplies water to hundreds of millions of people and thousands of factories in a delta that accounts for more than 40% of China’s economic output. According to the Chinese media, precipitation and water levels are at or near record lows in its middle and upper stretches.

The scale of the problem was revealed by the Yangtze water resources commission in a report on the Xinhua news agency’s website yesterday. It said that the Hankou hydrological centre near Wuhan city found the river’s depth had fallen to its lowest level in 142 years.

The measurement confirmed fears raised in recent weeks by the appearance of islands and mud flats not normally seen at this time of year. Local farmers reported far more ships than usual being trapped in unnavigable shallow waters.

Jianli county is among the areas suffering water shortages. Officials say the problem has grown worse in the past decade, raising concerns of a link to climate change.

“Before 1996, we were short of water for three months of the year, but now there are only three months when we can use water as normal,” Wu Chunping, the vice-manager of Jianli county’s water utility, was quoted as saying by Xinhua. “I heard that the water level will drop further in February.”

Li Lifeng, director of the freshwater programme of WWF China, said: “The major worry is for aquatic species and birds. If the water level goes too low they will lose a huge level of habitat.”

Among the endangered animals likely to be affected are the finless porpoise and the Chinese sturgeon, which returns to the sea at this time of year.

With the Yangtze three times as crowded with traffic as the Mississippi, conservationists fear the animals will be torn up by boat propellers or contaminated by more concentrated pollution from the 9,000 chemical plants along the Yangtze. Birds such as the Siberian crane may also suffer from the impact on their wintering area.

Local media have expressed concern that the drought could lead to a plague of rats similar to the one near Dongting lake last year after a drought was followed by fast-rising waters that drove the vermin to seek food in farm fields. “When the waters fall, the reeds die and the rats are driven inland in search of food,” said an official in the Yueyang farming and aquatic bureau who declined to give his name.

China Cites Tiananmen Protests In Obituary Praise

January 17, 2008

By REUTERS

Filed at 4:52 a.m. ET

BEIJING (Reuters) – An official Chinese obituary praised a late Communist Party city boss on Thursday for “maintaining stability” during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in a rare mention of a subject that remains taboo to this day.

Publication of the obituary for Zhang Lichang, late Party boss of Tianjin, in the official People’s Daily, coincided with the third death anniversary of Zhao Ziyang.

Zhao was toppled as national Party chief in 1989 for opposing a decision by then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping to send in troops to crush the student-led pro-democracy protests.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed.

Families of victims and dissidents are kept under tight police surveillance and have had no success in petitioning the government to reverse the official verdict that the protests were “counter-revolutionary,” or subversive.

Authorities warned several dissidents, Tiananmen survivors and relatives of victims not to visit Zhao’s courtyard home in Beijing, dissident Jiang Qisheng said by telephone.

“There are police outside. They won’t let me visit Zhao Ziyang’s home. Others have also been told not to go,” Jiang said.

The Communist Party remains nervous about Zhao’s residual influence and has tried to erase him from public memory, blanking out his role in economic reforms that turned China from an economic backwater to an export powerhouse.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu was terse when asked about Zhao and any memorial activities.

“There has already been an assessment of Comrade Zhao Ziyang,” Jiang told a news conference. “The concerned social activities should conform to relevant laws and regulations.”

Zhang, Party boss of Tianjin for almost 10 years until March 2007, did not play a direct role in the crackdown in nearby Beijing on June 3-4, 1989.

“During the political disturbance that occurred when spring was changing into summer in 1989, he resolutely supported the Party Central’s major decisions and policies … maintained social stability and guaranteed the livelihood of city residents,” the obituary read.

Zhang, 68, was once one of the country’s most powerful men, sitting on the Party’s decision-making Politburo until last October. He died in Tianjin on January 10.

(Editing by Nick Macfie and Sanjeev Miglani)

China’s nerves on edge over inflation

By Eadie Chen
Reuters
Sunday, January 13, 2008; 1:50 AM

BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese policy makers will have a tough time in 2008 battling inflation, excess liquidity and rapid investment, Vice Finance Minister Li Yong said on Sunday.

China has taken a series of measures such as cutting export tax rebates and tightening investment criteria to cool an economy that expanded 11.5 percent in the first nine months of 2007 compared with a year earlier.

The central bank also raised interest rates six times last year and ordered banks on 10 occasions to set aside more deposits in reserve.

“Although these policies are working well, there is still a shortfall from the desired and expected effects,” Li told a forum.

Consumer prices rose 6.9 percent in the year to November, the fastest pace in a decade, setting alarm bells ringing in the halls of power.

Chen Jiagui, vice head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the State Council, or cabinet, held an emergency price meeting last Friday and would hold another one on Monday.

The State Council said after yet another conclave devoted to inflation last Wednesday that it would keep a freeze on energy prices and would temporarily intervene directly in the market to hold down prices of daily necessities.

With climbing global grain and raw material prices adding to domestic price pressures, China’s year-average inflation could be as high as 4.6 percent in 2008, Xu Lin, a senior official from the National Development and Reform Commission, said on the sidelines of the forum.

That would match the rate for the first 11 months of 2007.

HANDS TIED

Li said inflationary pressure was still mounting, but China now had less room for maneuver even though it shifted its monetary stance in early December to “tight” from “prudent.”

Banks’ reserve requirements were already at a historical high of 14.5 percent, while it was difficult to raise interest rates further given that rates are falling in countries such as the United States, Li said.

Even without an attractive interest rate differential, the U.S. credit crisis could trigger unwanted speculative capital flows into China, especially at a time when global investors view emerging markets as a relatively safe haven, he said.

Li said China’s trade surplus, which rose 48 percent last year to a record $262.2 billion, was likely to remain elevated in the first half of 2008, adding to liquidity in the banking system.

With the yuan also on an appreciating track, the problem of excess liquidity was unlikely to fundamentally ease any time soon, the official warned.

Li said the impetus behind fixed-asset investment remained strong as the large number of projects launched in 2007 would require continued capital spending this year.

Closer coordination of fiscal and monetary policy was needed to tackle the array of problems, Li said.

The Finance Ministry is considering issuing more types of treasury bonds so that the central bank has a broader range of paper with which it can conduct open market operations, Li said.

Speaking at the same forum, newly promoted deputy central bank governor Yi Gang said the People’s Bank of China would fight inflation by further tightening monetary policy, but it would do so cautiously to ensure stable economic growth.

“We will unwaveringly fight against inflation and implement a tightening policy. But we will make sound arrangements to ensure fairly stable economic growth,” Yi told reporters.

Chinese property and share prices, though very high in some cases, were close to their equilibrium levels, he added.

(Reporting by Eadie Chen; Editing by Alan Wheatley and Ken Wills)

China to legalise horse racing and betting

China to legalise horse racing and betting

By Richard Spencer in Beijing
Last Updated: 1:58am GMT 12/01/2008

The Chinese government is set to legalise horse racing, and even betting, as the ruling Communist Party loosens controls on practices it once banned as feudal, colonial and backward.

China to legalise horse racing and betting
Hong Kong race course where punters flock to watch the racing

The sprawling industrial city of Wuhan in central China, once a European “concession” or colonial settlement, will be the first to open a race-track next year.

Gambling, apart from a state sports lottery, has been banned on the mainland since the Communist takeover in 1949.

The decision is a response to a market-driven explosion in traditional popular culture, at least where it does not touch on politics.

The Orient Lucky Horse Group, the company granted the first licence to run races, said the venture would start small, with jockey clubs around the country invited to put forward 250 horses to compete.
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A spokesman said the State Sports General Administration had granted the licence from September – immediately after the Beijing Olympics – but that the first races would not be held until next year.

“The proposal for betting on horse racing is being reviewed and discussed,” a spokesman for the China Sports Lottery Administration Centre said.

“Betting” might not take the form regularly associated with racing elsewhere. Punters may have to pay to compete in an “intelligence competition” in which those who correctly identify the best horse in advance will be rewarded with prizes.

Racing was stopped after the civil war partly because of its colonial reputation. It was introduced by the British who dominated the foreign “concessions” in China in the 19th and early 20th century. Racing lived on in Hong Kong, where it remains both the focus of society life and of the only permitted form of gambling in the territory.

The Jockey Club is to help Wuhan develop a code of rules.

The government’s change of heart is most likely dictated by an acceptance of reality, with millions of mainland Chinese every year pouring into the other post-colonial enclave, Macau, where casinos are the main industry, and the realisation that it is better to find some way of profiting from the national love of gambling.

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