Central China Hit by Drought, as Reservoirs Become ‘Dead Water’

BEIJING — A severe drought along the Yangtze River region in central China has rendered nearly 1,400 reservoirs in Hubei Province temporarily unusable, devastated farm fields and made drinking water scarce, according to a report on Monday by Xinhua, the state news agency.

The drought, which has lasted for five months, has brought water levels in the middle part of the Yangtze to a near-record low. For the second time since the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project, began operating, officials have had to make emergency water discharges from it to help ease the drought.

As of Sunday, 4 medium-size reservoirs and 1,388 small reservoirs in Hubei had dropped below the allowable discharge levels for irrigation, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, citing the director of the reservoir management office for the Hubei Provincial Water Resources Department. One-fourth of all small reservoirs had what officials called “dead water” remaining, which could be pumped for use only in an emergency.

The drought adds to concerns over the effect that a gargantuan water-diversion project will have on the central provinces of China. The project, called the South-North Water Diversion, is supposed to move water from the Yangtze and its tributaries north to Beijing along a canal, and to Tianjin along an eastern route.

Both routes are supposed to be fully operational within the next couple of years. Criticism of the project has become widespread, and many people along the Yangtze and in the south say precious water resources should not be sent north, where there has been a chronic water shortage.

The water on the middle route is supposed to flow from the Danjiangkou Reservoir in Hubei. The water level at the reservoir was measured at 443 feet on Saturday, about 13 feet below the level at which the water is considered dead, Xinhua reported.

Du Yun, a geography scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, said in an earlier interview that the central government had not done enough studies to assess the impact of the diversion project, especially when compared with all the research that was done before the building of the Three Gorges Dam.

“For that project, the preliminary discussion and studies phase was decades long,” he said. “There was the participation of institutions and experts from across China. Compared to that, this water diversion project did not do as comprehensive a preliminary study as the Three Gorges project did.”

As of Saturday, the drought had left 315,000 people and 97,300 head of livestock in Hubei short of drinking water, and more than two million acres of farmland had been affected, Xinhua reported. In neighboring Henan Province, the drought had affected at least 320,000 people.

Officials discharged 400 million cubic meters of water from the Three Gorges Dam from May 7 to May 11, according to Wang Hai, a spokesman for the dam’s construction and operation management bureau, Xinhua reported on Thursday.

This discharge is aimed at fighting the current drought and raising levels of the Yangtze to aid shipping. People in the city of Yichang, where the dam stands, have been hit especially hard. They say they have had to buy water rather than relying on water from their land.

The water levels in the section of the Yangtze between Yichang and Jiujiang in Jiangxi Province were about 8 to 18 feet lower than average, Xinhua reported, citing a statement by the Hubei provincial flood control and drought relief headquarters.

View the original article here

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Visits China

BEIJING — Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani arrived in China on Tuesday fora four-day visit, picking up some welcome diplomatic support at a critical moment in Pakistan’s relations with the United States.

The prime minister’s visit was planned as part of a long-planned celebration of diplomatic ties, but analysts said Pakistan is using it to hint that China is an alternative source of security and economic aid — a reassuring message for a nation angered and humiliated by the covert American raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

“It is being used for show, for politics, for domestic reasons, to show to the Pakistani public that if relations deteriorate with the United States, China is there to swing in with diplomatic and other support,” said Andrew Small, a fellow with the German Marshall Fund in Brussels. “China is playing along to some extent because Pakistan is in sort of a tight spot at the moment.”

Though Mr. Gilani arrived late Tuesday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said his visit would officially begin on Wednesday. The prime minister will meet with Premier Wen Jiabao, President Hu Jintao and various economic officials, the Chinese government said. He met earlier this week with Senator John Kerry, who flew to Islamabad to try to ease tensions over the raid.

Both Mr. Gilani and the Chinese media played up Pakistan’s ties with China. Xinhua, China’s official news agency, quoted Mr. Gilani on Tuesday saying, “We are proud to have China as our best and most trusted friend.”

A Foreign Ministry spokesman Tuesday promised China’s unswerving support to Pakistan’s fight on terrorism. A signed commentary the day before in People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, urged Americans to critically examine the unilateral nature of its raid and infringement on Pakistan’s territorial rights.

Analysts said that while China is happy to offer Pakistan diplomatic cover, it is wary of tilting too far in Pakistan’s direction. Annual trade between the two countries amounted last year to $8.7 billion, and China supplied Pakistan with two new civilian nuclear reactors, balancing a nuclear deal between the United States and India.

But “China wants to hold back from a full-on alliance,” Mr. Small said. “They don’t want to be stuck in a situation where they seem to have taken on too much direct responsibility” for a country with Pakistan’s security and political problems. While there is some talk in Islamabad that China might supplant the United States as Pakistan’s main economic backer, the Pakistani officials privately express little expectation that will happen.

Rong Ying, vice president of the China Institute of International Studies, said tense relations between the United States and Pakistan are more of a threat than a benefit to China. China has a huge stake in a stable Pakistan, he said, partly because it fears that Islamic militants could spill over into its western Xinjiang region.

“I think the United States should think about how it can damage-control relations with Pakistan,” he said.

Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Li Bibo and Jon Kaiman contributed research from Beijing.

 

China Allows Dissident Artist’s Wife to Visit Him

The attorney and family friend, Liu Xiaoyuan, said he had met on Monday with Lu Qing and that she said her husband appeared to be in good physical condition. Mr. Ai also asked about the health of his mother and family, he said, but the circumstance of the supervised visit offered no chance to discuss how his captors were treating him or other details of his confinement.

News service reports stated that Mr. Ai, who suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure, was receiving needed medications.

Ms. Lu said that Mr. Ai was not being held in a hospital or a jail but did not further describe his living conditions. “It appears he’s not in handcuffs, he was not wearing prison clothes and he was allowed to move freely within where he is living now,” Mr. Liu said. “So I guess it’s a form of house arrest, under supervision.”

Chinese authorities have yet to bring any charges against Mr. Ai, 53, who was seized at Beijing’s main airport on April 3 as he prepared to board a plane to Hong Kong. The government has since said that he was suspected of committing economic crimes, and tax investigators have searched his office records, Mr. Liu said.

A number of foreign governments, human rights organizations and art groups have denounced Mr. Ai’s detention, saying it was clearly linked to his sharp criticism of China’s government on a number of fronts. An internationally recognized artist and architect, Mr. Ai has used his art and leveraged his fame to criticize socials and political conditions in China, from restraints on freedom of expression to official corruption.

Mr. Ai’s mother said on Monday that she was relieved to learn that her son appears to be in good health but she said the family remains in the dark about why authorities are holding the activist.

“It is a huge relief to know that he was not tortured,” Gao Ying, 78, said in a telephone interview. She said Ms. Lu told her that “Weiwei seemed healthy and calm” and that “they seem to be treating him a civilized way.”

Ms. Lu was not allowed to ask her husband about his case during the visit, which lasted less than half an hour, Ms. Gao said.

Mr. Liu, the lawyer, said that Ms. Lu was taken by police to a location she did not recognize and talked with Mr. Ai across a table while police officials looked on.

Mr. Ai has emerged in recent years as a scathing critic of abuse of power by the Chinese government. He is the most prominent individual to be picked up by authorities in the biggest crackdown on dissent in years, apparently prompted by concerns that the revolts that have swept the Arab world would spill over into China.

Mr. Ai has not been charged with a crime, and his lawyer said police have not informed him or the family of the status of their investigation. Scores of others have been detained or put under house arrest since late February, many of them cut off from outside communication.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 16, 2011

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misspelled Lu Qing's name as?Lu Quing.

View the original article here

China Delays Report Suggesting North Korea Violated Sanctions

China has tried to suppress a report at the United Nations suggesting that North Korea and Iran have been routinely sharing ballistic missile technology, United Nations diplomats said Saturday, expressing concern that Beijing was again working to shield the North.

The report, by a United Nations panel of experts, said prohibited “ballistic missile-related items” were suspected of being transferred between North Korea and Iran in breach of United Nations sanctions against North Korea. It said the transfers were believed to be taking place on regular scheduled flights of Air Koryo and Iran Air, using air cargo hubs that had less stringent security than passenger terminals.

The panel’s findings, first reported by Reuters, said that the technology transfers had “trans-shipment through a neighboring third country.” The report did not specify which, but several United Nations diplomats identified that country as China, North Korea’s neighbor and most important ally.

The report was submitted to Security Council members over the weekend, but had been delayed for days before that after the Chinese expert on the panel refused to sign off on the report.

“The Chinese expert refused to sign the report, under pressure from Beijing, and this raises serious issues about a panel of experts that is supposed to be free from political interference,” said a senior United Nations diplomat, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the issue.

The panel is charged with monitoring the North’s compliance with United Nations sanctions, including a ban on trading nuclear and missile technology, an arms embargo and the freezing of assets of several North Korean individuals. Sanctions were imposed on North Korea after it conducted nuclear tests in 2006 and in 2009. North Korea has also conducted a battery of missile tests that have yielded mixed results, and it has come under scrutiny for selling its nuclear and missile technology.

China has in the past tried to block reports on North Korea and Sudan, and earlier this week Russia moved to suppress a deeply critical expert panel report on Iran. Both Russia and China, which are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, typically cleave to the view that the world body should not impinge upon the sovereignty of member countries.

 

Henry Kissinger on China

  John Dominis/Time & Life Pictures — Getty ImagesThe easy part: Kissinger, Nixon, Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in 1972.

Henry Kissinger was not only the first official American emissary to Communist China, he persisted in his brokerage with more than 50 trips over four decades, spanning the careers of seven leaders on each side. Diplomatically speaking, he owns the franchise; and with “On China,” as he approaches 88, he reflects on his remarkable run.

To the degree that Washington and Beijing now understand each other, it is in good measure because Kissinger has been assiduously translating for both sides, discerning meaning in everything from elliptical jokes to temper tantrums. At every juncture, he has been striving to find “strategic concepts” that could be made to prevail over a history of conflict, mutual grievance and fear. As President Nixon’s national security adviser, then secretary of state for Nixon and Gerald Ford, and since 1977 as a private interlocutor extraordinaire, Kissinger has been unwaveringly committed to surmounting what he considers the legitimate Chinese resentment of American interference in their internal affairs and Americans’ distaste for China’s brutal suppression of ethnic, religious and political dissent.

The surprise buried in his lumbering review of Sino-American relations is that the much ballyhooed Nixon-Kissinger journeys to China in 1971-72 turned out to have been the easy part. “That China and the United States would find a way to come together was inevitable given the necessities of the time,” he writes. “It would have happened sooner or later whatever the leadership in either country.” Both nations were exhausted from war (Vietnam, clashes on the Soviet border) and domestic strife (antiwar protests in Nixon’s case, the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s). Both were determined to resist Soviet advances and so could quickly agree to make common cause. The menace of Moscow took the leaders’ minds off confrontations in Vietnam and Taiwan and quelled their ritual denunciations, whether of international imperialism or Communism. They decided that the adversary of my adversary was my pal, and for more than a decade that was fruitfully that.

But that was a different time. China finally escaped from Mao Zedong’s mad doctrine of perpetual revolution and from the enfeebling nostrums of central planning; it became an industrial powerhouse. The Soviet Union and its empire collapsed. And the United States, feeling supreme, began promoting democracy with missionary zeal even as it grew dangerously addicted to foreign oil, goods and credit. The radical shift in the balance of power turned China and the United States into mutually dependent economic giants, but it left them without an overarching strategic design of partnership.

It is to demonstrate the need for such a design that Kissinger reviews the ups and downs of Sino-American relations, reaching even into ancient Chinese history to define national characteristics. (He finds it apt that the Chinese like to play “wei qi,” or “go,” a protracted game of encirclement while we play chess, looking for control of the center and total victory.) Kissinger draws heavily on much recent scholarship and on notes of his trips to Beijing to celebrate the pragmatism of Mao’s successors. He says they are content to remain within their restored historic frontiers, willing to await a peaceful reunion with Taiwan, and most determined to continue their remarkable economic growth and to eradicate China’s still widespread poverty. He is less confident about America’s capacity to sustain a steady foreign policy, noting that “the perpetual psychodrama of democratic transitions” is a constant invitation to other nations to “hedge their bets” on us.

As students of Kissinger well know, he has long considered democracy to be a burden on statecraft — both the clamor of democracy within the United States and our agitations for democracy in other lands.

He recalls yet again his agonies in office in the 1970s, when he thought that American demonstrations during the Vietnam War could have misled Mao into believing that a “genuine world revolution” was at hand. He argues that the “destruction” of Nixon in the Watergate crisis, the withdrawal of Congressional support for Vietnam, new curbs on presidential war powers and the “hemorrhaging” of intelligence secrets all combined to undermine the quasi alliance with China, making America appear ineffectual against the Soviets. He is glad that Jimmy Carter did not let his human rights concerns upset relations with China and that Ronald Reagan’s cheerful personality overcame the “almost incomprehensible contradictions” of his dealings with Beijing even as he promoted the idea of an independent Taiwan.

Max Frankel, a former executive editor of The Times, covered the Nixon-Kissinger journey to China in 1972.

 

Henry Kissinger on China

  John Dominis/Time & Life Pictures — Getty ImagesThe easy part: Kissinger, Nixon, Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in 1972.

Henry Kissinger was not only the first official American emissary to Communist China, he persisted in his brokerage with more than 50 trips over four decades, spanning the careers of seven leaders on each side. Diplomatically speaking, he owns the franchise; and with “On China,” as he approaches 88, he reflects on his remarkable run.

To the degree that Washington and Beijing now understand each other, it is in good measure because Kissinger has been assiduously translating for both sides, discerning meaning in everything from elliptical jokes to temper tantrums. At every juncture, he has been striving to find “strategic concepts” that could be made to prevail over a history of conflict, mutual grievance and fear. As President Nixon’s national security adviser, then secretary of state for Nixon and Gerald Ford, and since 1977 as a private interlocutor extraordinaire, Kissinger has been unwaveringly committed to surmounting what he considers the legitimate Chinese resentment of American interference in their internal affairs and Americans’ distaste for China’s brutal suppression of ethnic, religious and political dissent.

The surprise buried in his lumbering review of Sino-American relations is that the much ballyhooed Nixon-Kissinger journeys to China in 1971-72 turned out to have been the easy part. “That China and the United States would find a way to come together was inevitable given the necessities of the time,” he writes. “It would have happened sooner or later whatever the leadership in either country.” Both nations were exhausted from war (Vietnam, clashes on the Soviet border) and domestic strife (antiwar protests in Nixon’s case, the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s). Both were determined to resist Soviet advances and so could quickly agree to make common cause. The menace of Moscow took the leaders’ minds off confrontations in Vietnam and Taiwan and quelled their ritual denunciations, whether of international imperialism or Communism. They decided that the adversary of my adversary was my pal, and for more than a decade that was fruitfully that.

But that was a different time. China finally escaped from Mao Zedong’s mad doctrine of perpetual revolution and from the enfeebling nostrums of central planning; it became an industrial powerhouse. The Soviet Union and its empire collapsed. And the United States, feeling supreme, began promoting democracy with missionary zeal even as it grew dangerously addicted to foreign oil, goods and credit. The radical shift in the balance of power turned China and the United States into mutually dependent economic giants, but it left them without an overarching strategic design of partnership.

It is to demonstrate the need for such a design that Kissinger reviews the ups and downs of Sino-American relations, reaching even into ancient Chinese history to define national characteristics. (He finds it apt that the Chinese like to play “wei qi,” or “go,” a protracted game of encirclement while we play chess, looking for control of the center and total victory.) Kissinger draws heavily on much recent scholarship and on notes of his trips to Beijing to celebrate the pragmatism of Mao’s successors. He says they are content to remain within their restored historic frontiers, willing to await a peaceful reunion with Taiwan, and most determined to continue their remarkable economic growth and to eradicate China’s still widespread poverty. He is less confident about America’s capacity to sustain a steady foreign policy, noting that “the perpetual psychodrama of democratic transitions” is a constant invitation to other nations to “hedge their bets” on us.

As students of Kissinger well know, he has long considered democracy to be a burden on statecraft — both the clamor of democracy within the United States and our agitations for democracy in other lands.

He recalls yet again his agonies in office in the 1970s, when he thought that American demonstrations during the Vietnam War could have misled Mao into believing that a “genuine world revolution” was at hand. He argues that the “destruction” of Nixon in the Watergate crisis, the withdrawal of Congressional support for Vietnam, new curbs on presidential war powers and the “hemorrhaging” of intelligence secrets all combined to undermine the quasi alliance with China, making America appear ineffectual against the Soviets. He is glad that Jimmy Carter did not let his human rights concerns upset relations with China and that Ronald Reagan’s cheerful personality overcame the “almost incomprehensible contradictions” of his dealings with Beijing even as he promoted the idea of an independent Taiwan.

Max Frankel, a former executive editor of The Times, covered the Nixon-Kissinger journey to China in 1972.

 

China probes adoption 'scandal'

 10 May 2011 Last updated at 10:28 ET  Chinese families are limited to one child under a controversial policy introduced in the 1980s China is investigating reports that about 20 babies were seized under the country's one-child-per-family policy and put up for international adoption.

Chinese media say family planning officials in Hunan province took the children from poor homes unable to pay fines for having more than one child.

The children were allegedly listed as orphans and adopted by foreigners for fees of about $3,000 (￡1,800) each.

Xinhua news agency said some were now in the US, the Netherlands and Poland.

The reports first appeared in Caixin magazine and caused such outrage that the Hunan provincial government has launched a formal investigation.

A government spokeswoman confirmed to AFP news agency that the investigation began on Monday.

Correspondents say the one-child policy is not always strictly enforced and the worst that violators normally expect is a fine.

However, Caixin reported that when some families in poorer parts of Hunan were unable to pay their fines, authorities would tear down their houses.

Then - about 10 years ago - officials started confiscating their children, it is claimed.

Missing daughter

Enforcers from the family planning bureau are said to have listed about 20 children as orphans - many of them from impoverished Longhui county. They then reportedly sent them to welfare centres from where they were put up for international adoption.

Officials in Longhui county allegedly received 1,000 yuan ($155; ￡94) for each child and the welfare agencies received up to $3,000 per child put up for adoption, it said.

One couple said their only child was taken away by mistake while they were working in another city. Migrant worker Yang Libing told Caixin he had since tracked down his daughter, now seven years old and living in the US.

Tens of thousands of Chinese children have been adopted by foreign couples since the one-child policy came into force in the 1980s.

The policy was aimed at curbing China's surging population.

Latest census figures revealed last month showed China's population grew to 1.34 billion people by 2010, with a sharp rise in those over 60.

The figures showed China's population was growing more slowly than in the past.

Clinton condemns China on rights

 10 May 2011 Last updated at 14:09 ET Hillary Clinton: "We had candid discussions on some of our most persistent challenges"

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has criticised China's crackdown on dissent as "a fool's errand", saying Beijing is trying to halt history.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Mrs Clinton also called the nation's human rights record "deplorable".

She defended US dealings with Beijing, saying: "We live in the real world."

The BBC's Kim Ghattas in Washington says Mrs Clinton seemed to suggest the Chinese system itself would collapse and that democracy was inevitable.

The article quotes Mrs Clinton as saying last month that China's leaders were "worried" that the wave of pro-democracy protests overtaking the Middle East would spread east to China.

"They're trying to stop history, which is a fool's errand," she said. "They cannot do it, but they're going to hold it off as long as possible."

China-US talks

Since February, China has detained hundreds of pro-democracy activists, lawyers and writers and has clamped down on news media reporting on the Middle East protests.

Mrs Clinton's remarks were published as US and Chinese officials held high-level strategic and economic talks in Washington.

At the opening of the meetings on Monday, Mrs Clinton said in a speech that the US remained concerned about the human rights situation in China.

"We know over the long arch of history that societies that work toward respecting human rights are going to be more prosperous, stable, and successful," she told Chinese officials.

"That has certainly been proven time and time again, but most particularly in the last months."

Criticism of China's human rights record had been muted at the beginning of the Obama administration but has become increasingly more vocal, our correspondent says.

However, Mrs Clinton said later that the US and China were achieving much greater understanding through regular talks between top officials.

"I do think we are reaching a much better understanding and I think that's one of the principal purposes of the dialogues," she said following the third Strategic and Economic Dialogue between the two countries.

Briefly: China Said to Plan Campus in Laos

China has long been a favored destination for foreign universities seeking to export their programs, but now a Chinese university is preparing to open the mainland’s first overseas campus.

Soochow University, in Jiangsu Province, is expected to open an affiliate in Laos next year, according to People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party.

The report, posted late last month, called Soochow the first foreign education institution to receive approval from the Laotian government to offer undergraduate and graduate programs. The university plans to provide courses for about 5,000 students in Laos, a country of more than six million where only 13 percent of the undergraduate-age population is enrolled in higher education, according to 2008 Unesco statistics.

A university official quoted in the report said Soochow would offer 12 majors, including Chinese language and literature, economy and trade, and engineering. Soochow University, which has about 50,000 students in China, expects the Laos campus to begin enrolling students next year, the report said.

While the university will initially send Chinese academics to the Laos campus, it plans to gradually employ more local teachers. The campus is estimated to cost $25 million.

— LIZ GOOCH

London music college plans to offer degree in Singapore

Students in Singapore will soon be able to pursue a music degree conferred by the Royal College of Music in London. The college, one of the world’s leading music conservatories, has signed a partnership with the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts to confer, for the first time, its degree outside of Britain.

Intended as a degree course that builds on Nanyang Academy’s three-year music diploma program, the new program will give students the choice of five music disciplines: keyboard, composition, orchestral, vocal and Chinese instrumental studies.

The Singaporean government will significantly subsidize some tuition fees for the two-year degree course, to be offered starting in August. Although full fee for the bachelor of music degree course is 56,000 Singapore dollars, or about $45,450, the government subsidy means that Singaporean students will pay 18,500 dollars over the two years. Permanent residents will pay 23,400 dollars.

At the signing of the deal, Nanyang Academy’s president, Choo Thiam Siew, said that as the economic center of gravity moves toward the east, so too has Asian education, and correspondingly, Asian arts have witnessed greater attention.

“We have seen an influx of international students choose to do their exchanges or internships in Singapore, as well as witness more collaborations between Singapore and other international schools,” he said.

“The recent announcement of Singapore’s first Liberal Arts College through a partnership between Yale and N.U.S. is a prime example,” he added, referring to the National University of Singapore. “Our partnership with the distinguished Royal College of Music is another step in this inevitable direction of educational marriages between the West and the East.”

— SONIA KOLESNIKOV-JESSOP

Grant is offered to build Israeli liberal arts college

The Shalem Center announced Tuesday that it had been awarded a $12.5 million challenge grant from the Tikvah Fund to found what its sponsors say would be Israel’s first liberal arts college.

Israeli institutes of higher education typically offer three-year programs on a particular subject. Shalem College, by contrast, would be the first to offer a four-year bachelor of arts degree along the American model and would also be the first to feature an undergraduate senior thesis as a graduation requirement, said Daniel Polisar, president of the Shalem Center.

Although Shalem College would be open to international students, the main goal is to enroll Israelis. Classes would be taught in Hebrew, though plans are being discussed to develop a yearlong program for overseas English speakers.

“A young, democratic country like Israel needs thoughtful leaders, active, engaged citizens, and people as broad as possible in their knowledge,” Mr. Polisar said.

The Shalem Center, founded in 1994, is devoted to the study of Jewish and Zionist history, philosophy and political theory, and Middle East studies, among other topics. The grant by the Tikvah Fund, a New York organization devoted to the promotion of Jewish thought and traditions, is intended to encourage others to donate toward creation of the school.

— REBECCA APPEL

 

China Leads Push to Go Green

China’s production of green technologies has grown a remarkable 77 per cent a year, according to the report, which was commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature. The report was expected to be released Monday at an industry conference in Amsterdam.

“The Chinese have made, on the political level, a conscious decision to capture this market and to develop this market aggressively,” said Donald Pols, an economist with the organization.

Denmark, a longtime leader in wind energy, derives 3.1 percent of its gross domestic product from renewable energy technology and energy efficiency, the report said, with a total value of about €6.5 billion, or $9.4 billion.

China is the largest producer in monetary terms, earning more than €44 billion, or 1.4 percent of its gross domestic product.

The United States ranks 17 in the production of clean technologies with 0.3 percent of G.D.P., or €31.5 billion, but those industries have been expanding at a rate of 28 percent per year since 2008.

“The U.S. is growing substantially,” Mr. Pols said, but its growth could not compare with that of China.

“When you speak to the Chinese, climate change is not an ideological issue. It’s just a fact of life. While we debate climate change and the transition to a low carbon economy, the debate is past in China,” Mr. Pols said. “For them it’s implementation. It’s a growth sector, and they want to capture this sector.”

The report was prepared by Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, a global firm based in Germany. It gathered data on 38 countries from energy associations, bank and brokerage reports, investor presentations, the International Energy Agency and a score of other sources.

It measured the earnings from producing renewables like biofuels, wind turbines and thermal equipment, and energy efficiency technology like low-energy lighting and insulation.

“Clean technologies are really growing fast, but China is responsible for the majority of that growth,” said Ward van den Berg, who compiled and analyzed the data for the consulting firm.

Until recently, Chinese production of solar cells was aimed at the export market, but the Chinese are now making solar systems for the home market, as they have been doing for several years in wind energy, Mr. Van den Berg said.

Following Denmark and China, other countries among the top five clean-technology producers, in terms of percentage of G.D.P., are Germany, Brazil and Lithuania, the report said.

 

In China, Fear of Fake Eggs and ‘Recycled’ Buns

Big mistake: Mr. Zhu’s buns were soft, tasty and fresh, made every day, he said, at 3 a.m. The supermarket’s, on the other hand, came from a filthy workshop where workers “recycled” buns after their sell-by date. The workers merely threw the stale buns into a vat, added water and flour, and repackaged them to be sold anew.

It has been two years since China’s government, reeling from nationwide outrage over melamine-contaminated baby milk that sickened 300,000 infants and killed at least 6, declared food safety a national priority. Since then, it has threatened, raided and arrested throngs of shady food processors — and even executed a couple.

But a stomach-turning string of food-safety scandals this spring, from recycled buns to contaminated pork, makes it clear that official efforts are falling short. Despite efforts to create a modern food-safety regimen, oversight remains utterly haphazard, in the hands of ill-trained, ill-equipped and outnumbered enforcers whose quick fixes are even more quickly undone.

“Most of them are working like headless chickens, having no clue what are the major food-borne diseases that need to be addressed or what are the major contaminants in the food process,” said Dr. Peter Ben Embarek, a food safety expert with the World Health Organization’s Beijing office.

In recent weeks, China’s news media have reported sales of pork adulterated with the drug clenbuterol, which can cause heart palpitations; pork sold as beef after it was soaked in borax, a detergent additive; rice contaminated with cadmium, a heavy metal discharged by smelters; arsenic-laced soy sauce; popcorn and mushrooms treated with fluorescent bleach; bean sprouts tainted with an animal antibiotic; and wine diluted with sugared water and chemicals.

Even eggs, seemingly sacrosanct in their shells, have turned out not to be eggs at all but man-made concoctions of chemicals, gelatin and paraffin. Instructions can be purchased online, the Chinese media reported.

Scandals are proliferating, in part, because producers operate in a cutthroat environment in which illegal additives are everywhere and cost-effective. Manufacturers calculate correctly that the odds of profiting from unsafe practices far exceed the odds of getting caught, experts say. China’s explosive growth has spawned nearly half a million food producers, the authorities say, and four-fifths of them employ 10 or fewer workers, making oversight difficult.

China’s iron political controls ensure that no powerful consumer lobby exists to agitate for reform, press lawsuits that punish wayward producers or lobby the government to pay as much attention to consumer safety as it does to controlling threats to its own power. Instead, like Alice after falling through the rabbit hole, consumers must guess what their food and drink contain.

“Basically, people now feel nothing is safe to eat,” said Sang Liwei, who directs the Beijing office of the Global Food Safety Forum, a private agency. “They don’t know what choices to make. They are really feeling very helpless.”

Chinese consumers may have their hands tied compared with their Western counterparts, but they are increasingly middle-class, well-educated and dismayed by their lack of protection. Even top officials are discomfited.

“All of these nasty cases of food-safety problems are enough to show that lack of integrity and moral decline have become a very serious problem,” Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told government officials in mid-April, according to The People’s Daily.

“We feel really ashamed,” Vice Premier Wang Qishan said at a meeting in March with legislators, according to Xinhua, the official news agency. “Just when the people have enough to feed themselves, we have this food-safety problem. Really embarrassing, this is really embarrassing for us.”

Some progress is evident. China adopted a far-reaching food-safety law in 2009 and is bringing hundreds of standards in line with international norms. Already, nearly half of dairy food companies have been ordered to halt production after failing to meet new licensing requirements.

“The situation is steadily improving, “ said Luo Yunbo, the dean of the food sciences college at China Agricultural University in Beijing. “It is not as bad as people think it is.”

View the original article here

China Creates New Agency for Patrolling the Internet

BEIJING — A powerful arm of China’s government said Wednesday that it had created a new central agency to regulate every corner of the nation’s vast Internet community, a move that appeared to complement a continuing crackdown on political dissidents and other social critics.

But the vaguely worded announcement left unclear whether the new agency, the State Internet Information Office, would in fact supersede a welter of ministries and other government offices that already claim jurisdiction over parts of cyberspace.

China’s State Council Information Office said it was transferring its own staff of Internet regulators to the new agency, which would operate under its jurisdiction. Among many other duties, the agency will direct “online content management;” supervise online gaming, video and publications; promote major news Web sites; and oversee online government propaganda. The agency will also have authority to investigate and punish violators of online content rules, and it will oversee the huge telecommunications companies that provide access for Internet users and content providers alike.

The State Council is a cabinetlike agency that effectively manages the government’s day-to-day operations. Two former officials at its Information Office will run the new agency, and executives from two central ministries — public security and information technology — will also serve in senior positions, the announcement stated.

The mushrooming growth of China’s Internet business has spawned a sort of land rush for regulatory turf by government agencies that see in it a chance to gain more authority or more money, or both. At least 14 government units, from the culture and information technology ministries to offices that oversee films and books, have some hand in what appears on China’s Internet. Others have interests in Internet-related ventures like the sale of censorship software that could prove to be lucrative sources of income.

Wednesday’s announcement indicated that the new office would work with other government units that regulate parts of the Internet, which could dilute internal opposition. But the sweeping nature of the announcement left some experts unconvinced.

“My guess is that it’s going to be quite a fight for these existing regulators to give up power, because it’s such a big and lucrative endeavor,” Bill Bishop, a Beijing-based independent analyst of the Internet industry, said an interview. “It’s not clear from this announcement, either in English or Chinese, whether the new agency is going to oversee them or coordinate with them.”

View the original article here

China Creates New Agency for Patrolling the Internet

BEIJING — A powerful arm of China’s government said Wednesday that it had created a new central agency to regulate every corner of the nation’s vast Internet community, a move that appeared to complement a continuing crackdown on political dissidents and other social critics.

But the vaguely worded announcement left unclear whether the new agency, the State Internet Information Office, would in fact supersede a welter of ministries and other government offices that already claim jurisdiction over parts of cyberspace.

China’s State Council Information Office said it was transferring its own staff of Internet regulators to the new agency, which would operate under its jurisdiction. Among many other duties, the agency will direct “online content management;” supervise online gaming, video and publications; promote major news Web sites; and oversee online government propaganda. The agency will also have authority to investigate and punish violators of online content rules, and it will oversee the huge telecommunications companies that provide access for Internet users and content providers alike.

The State Council is a cabinetlike agency that effectively manages the government’s day-to-day operations. Two former officials at its Information Office will run the new agency, and executives from two central ministries — public security and information technology — will also serve in senior positions, the announcement stated.

The mushrooming growth of China’s Internet business has spawned a sort of land rush for regulatory turf by government agencies that see in it a chance to gain more authority or more money, or both. At least 14 government units, from the culture and information technology ministries to offices that oversee films and books, have some hand in what appears on China’s Internet. Others have interests in Internet-related ventures like the sale of censorship software that could prove to be lucrative sources of income.

Wednesday’s announcement indicated that the new office would work with other government units that regulate parts of the Internet, which could dilute internal opposition. But the sweeping nature of the announcement left some experts unconvinced.

“My guess is that it’s going to be quite a fight for these existing regulators to give up power, because it’s such a big and lucrative endeavor,” Bill Bishop, a Beijing-based independent analyst of the Internet industry, said an interview. “It’s not clear from this announcement, either in English or Chinese, whether the new agency is going to oversee them or coordinate with them.”

 

As China Invests, U.S. Could Lose

Now, China is poised to return the investment favor. The question is whether the United States will be willing and able to fully participate, according to a new study to be released Thursday.

Flush with capital from its enormous trade surpluses and armed with the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, China has begun spreading its newfound riches to every corner of the world — whether copper mines in Africa, iron ore facilities in Australia or even a gas shale project in the heart of Texas.

The study, commissioned by the Asia Society in New York and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, forecasts that over the next decade China could invest as much as $2 trillion in overseas companies, plants or property, money that could help reinvigorate growth in the United States and Europe.

But the report, to be released at a Washington news conference that Commerce Secretary Gary Locke plans to attend, also warns that the United States risks missing out on a large share of the Chinese investment boom because of politics, a growing rivalry between the two nations and deep-seated perceptions that Chinese investments are unwelcome in America.

“If political interference is not tempered,” the study warns, some of the benefits of Chinese investment — “such as job creation, consumer welfare and even contributions to U.S. infrastructure renewal — risk being diverted to our competitors.” While Wall Street banks have lobbied for more Chinese investments in the United States, hoping that will bring bigger deals for the banks, Washington has remained wary — even though the Obama administration says it welcomes Chinese money.

But anti-China rhetoric is hot in Washington and among many state and local officials. One frequently cited worry is that Chinese companies, many of them owned partly or entirely by the government, will use their purchases to gain military secrets. Another concern is that Chinese companies will buy American companies with manufacturing operations in the United States, close those factories and move production to China.

China, of course, is already a force in global markets. Over the last few years, it has made multibillion-dollar loans to developing nations and let its state-owned companies acquire minority stakes in global powerhouses like Rio Tinto, Morgan Stanley and the Blackstone Group.

China is also a major player in the global debt markets, holding about $1.6 trillion in United States Treasury bonds, an investment that helps keep American interest rates low and finances America’s enormous debt.

But China is still a relatively small player in overseas direct investments, which include purchases of large, voting stakes in foreign companies and plants. That also includes investments in new construction projects on previously undeveloped land — so-called greenfield facilities.

Last year, China’s overseas direct investments amounted to about $59 billion. By comparison, the United States’ figure was over $300 billion.

But with Beijing pushing its big companies to go overseas and invest in resources and technology, China’s investments could soon reach $100 billion to $200 billion a year, according to the Asia Society study.

The potential problem for Beijing is that Chinese companies are not always welcomed overseas — not only because China wields enormous economic clout but because state-owned giants are believed to be subsidized by the state and possibly working in the interest of the government.

Congressional critics of China’s investment aspirations include Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island. “Many of these companies are so closely intertwined with the government of China that it is hard to see where the company stops and the country begins, and vice versa,” Mr. Reed recently told Reuters.

A series of proposed Chinese deals in the United States have been blocked by regulators or attacked by local politicians, who say they are worried China could gain access to sensitive military technology or take control of valuable natural resources.

In 2005, one of China’s giant oil companies, Cnooc, dropped its bid to acquire the American oil giant Unocal after a Congressional investigation into the purchase. And in recent years, the Chinese telecommunications giant, Huawei, has repeatedly been rebuffed from making deals in the United States, over national security concerns.

Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Hong Kong.

 

Eyeing the White House After Service in China

Blindsided, Pentagon officials considered whether the best response would be to pack up and leave before the mission had even begun. The American ambassador, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., advised forcefully against it. Too much was at stake, he said. Better to make clear Mr. Gates’s displeasure, then move on to more serious business.

Which is what Mr. Gates did, raising the issue with President Hu Jintao and relaying Mr. Hu’s embarrassed response to reporters shortly afterward.

“Jon came in and gave sensible advice,” said a person who was privy to the discussion and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the debate had been both private and official. “It was classic and proper handling of a difficult situation with the Chinese.”

It was also classic Huntsman. The ambassador, who was to leave his post on Saturday, has proved deft with the carrot and stick, mixing measured criticism of China’s government with a relentless effort to cement its fractious relations with the United States. It has not always worked: in recent months, as China’s growing crackdown on domestic dissidents drew Mr. Huntsman’s pointed objections, the efforts of the ambassador and other American diplomats have been angrily rejected by Beijing.

When President Obama selected Mr. Huntsman, then the popular Republican governor of Utah, as ambassador in 2009, pundits speculated that the president was working to edge him out of the race for the 2012 Republican nomination. Mr. Huntsman has implied otherwise in speeches, expressing respect for Mr. Obama’s skills and saying that they share a common cause in improving relations.

Now that Mr. Huntsman is publicly pondering a run for the nomination anyway — an unstated but clear reason behind his departure — the question may not be whether his China stint hurt his chances, but whether it improved them. Clearly, he did not achieve the goals he set. In a valedictory speech last month in Shanghai, he put his frustrations with China’s prickly and suspicious diplomacy on full display.

“Turning the relationship on and off in reaction to unwelcome events is inconsistent with the objective of a positive, cooperative and comprehensive relationship that our leaders have set out to achieve,” Mr. Huntsman said. “Canceling meetings as a sign of displeasure will not encourage greater respect for each other’s views.”

“We cannot move forward if, when differences emerge, only one of us is fully committed and fully engaged,” he said.

Getting China fully engaged — and persuading it to temper the suspicion and resentment that has marked even warm periods in its relationship with the United States — is the Obama administration’s strategic goal and, by all accounts, Mr. Huntsman’s passion. If that goal is, by many assessments, only slightly less distant than it was two years ago by, his pursuit of it wins wide praise.

“The course of a major relationship such as that between the United States and China is not going to be guided solely by the skill or lack thereof of an ambassador, but what an ambassador can do is make a meaningful difference,” J. Stapleton Roy, a China-born diplomat who served President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and was President Bill Clinton’s first ambassador to China, said. “If Washington has confidence in the ambassador and the ambassador has access, then a lot of business will get done.” Mr. Huntsman, he said, “has what it takes. He’s done a superb job.”

Current and former diplomats and White House officials said he skillfully managed preparations for the two signal occasions of his tenure, the state visits of both nations’ leaders to the other’s capital. Workers at the United States Embassy in Beijing give him high marks for his management of the United States’ second-largest diplomatic outpost.

Officially, the Chinese government bade him a fond farewell. Vice President Xi Jinping, the heir apparent to President Hu, called him “an old friend of China” in a meeting last month, adding, “We will never forget what you have done.”

Polished by years in American politics and fluent in Mandarin, Mr. Huntsman was nothing if not charming in his courtship of the Chinese. He regularly reminded Chinese audiences of his adopted Chinese daughter and his years in Asia as a youth. He flummoxed Chinese security guards — but perhaps left a distinctively American impression on Chinese diplomats — by forgoing the requisite limousine and suit and instead bicycling in casual clothes to several meetings at the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

He nevertheless spent much of his two years in the diplomatic doghouse. Mr. Huntsman did win the rare permission to visit Tibet, but he was denied an official visit to the restive western region of Xinjiang. (He went anyway, as a private citizen.) The cold shoulder included efforts to limit his official dealings to lower-level Chinese diplomats, as is standard for ambassadors who are out of favor. Most of those moves were a consequence of the deep chill that settled over relations in 2010, when the Chinese crimped Google’s Chinese search-engine business and the White House entertained the Dalai Lama and approved the sale of weapons to Taiwan. That was dispelled only after the successful visit to Washington by Mr. Hu last winter.

Perhaps Mr. Huntsman’s greatest misstep, which he has insisted was just a coincidence, was to wander into the tense scene of a pro-democracy protest in February while on a stroll through central Beijing with his family. The protest, the first of several Internet-based calls for a “Jasmine Revolution,” drew a horde of security agents who regarded Mr. Huntsman as a potential provocateur.

Mr. Huntsman later publicly condemned the beating and detention of foreign journalists at the scene. The Chinese, who appear to believe he deliberately attended the event, placed him back in the doghouse. But last week, at a farewell reception at the United States Embassy, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi shared a toast with Mr. Huntsman and his wife. He appears to leave China in good standing — much as a future president, Mr. Bush, did when he left the chief diplomatic post in 1975.

 

Eyeing the White House After Service in China

Blindsided, Pentagon officials considered whether the best response would be to pack up and leave before the mission had even begun. The American ambassador, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., advised forcefully against it. Too much was at stake, he said. Better to make clear Mr. Gates’s displeasure, then move on to more serious business.

Which is what Mr. Gates did, raising the issue with President Hu Jintao and relaying Mr. Hu’s embarrassed response to reporters shortly afterward.

“Jon came in and gave sensible advice,” said a person who was privy to the discussion and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the debate had been both private and official. “It was classic and proper handling of a difficult situation with the Chinese.”

It was also classic Huntsman. The ambassador, who was to leave his post on Saturday, has proved deft with the carrot and stick, mixing measured criticism of China’s government with a relentless effort to cement its fractious relations with the United States. It has not always worked: in recent months, as China’s growing crackdown on domestic dissidents drew Mr. Huntsman’s pointed objections, the efforts of the ambassador and other American diplomats have been angrily rejected by Beijing.

When President Obama selected Mr. Huntsman, then the popular Republican governor of Utah, as ambassador in 2009, pundits speculated that the president was working to edge him out of the race for the 2012 Republican nomination. Mr. Huntsman has implied otherwise in speeches, expressing respect for Mr. Obama’s skills and saying that they share a common cause in improving relations.

Now that Mr. Huntsman is publicly pondering a run for the nomination anyway — an unstated but clear reason behind his departure — the question may not be whether his China stint hurt his chances, but whether it improved them. Clearly, he did not achieve the goals he set. In a valedictory speech last month in Shanghai, he put his frustrations with China’s prickly and suspicious diplomacy on full display.

“Turning the relationship on and off in reaction to unwelcome events is inconsistent with the objective of a positive, cooperative and comprehensive relationship that our leaders have set out to achieve,” Mr. Huntsman said. “Canceling meetings as a sign of displeasure will not encourage greater respect for each other’s views.”

“We cannot move forward if, when differences emerge, only one of us is fully committed and fully engaged,” he said.

Getting China fully engaged — and persuading it to temper the suspicion and resentment that has marked even warm periods in its relationship with the United States — is the Obama administration’s strategic goal and, by all accounts, Mr. Huntsman’s passion. If that goal is, by many assessments, only slightly less distant than it was two years ago by, his pursuit of it wins wide praise.

“The course of a major relationship such as that between the United States and China is not going to be guided solely by the skill or lack thereof of an ambassador, but what an ambassador can do is make a meaningful difference,” J. Stapleton Roy, a China-born diplomat who served President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and was President Bill Clinton’s first ambassador to China, said. “If Washington has confidence in the ambassador and the ambassador has access, then a lot of business will get done.” Mr. Huntsman, he said, “has what it takes. He’s done a superb job.”

Current and former diplomats and White House officials said he skillfully managed preparations for the two signal occasions of his tenure, the state visits of both nations’ leaders to the other’s capital. Workers at the United States Embassy in Beijing give him high marks for his management of the United States’ second-largest diplomatic outpost.

Officially, the Chinese government bade him a fond farewell. Vice President Xi Jinping, the heir apparent to President Hu, called him “an old friend of China” in a meeting last month, adding, “We will never forget what you have done.”

Polished by years in American politics and fluent in Mandarin, Mr. Huntsman was nothing if not charming in his courtship of the Chinese. He regularly reminded Chinese audiences of his adopted Chinese daughter and his years in Asia as a youth. He flummoxed Chinese security guards — but perhaps left a distinctively American impression on Chinese diplomats — by forgoing the requisite limousine and suit and instead bicycling in casual clothes to several meetings at the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

He nevertheless spent much of his two years in the diplomatic doghouse. Mr. Huntsman did win the rare permission to visit Tibet, but he was denied an official visit to the restive western region of Xinjiang. (He went anyway, as a private citizen.) The cold shoulder included efforts to limit his official dealings to lower-level Chinese diplomats, as is standard for ambassadors who are out of favor. Most of those moves were a consequence of the deep chill that settled over relations in 2010, when the Chinese crimped Google’s Chinese search-engine business and the White House entertained the Dalai Lama and approved the sale of weapons to Taiwan. That was dispelled only after the successful visit to Washington by Mr. Hu last winter.

Perhaps Mr. Huntsman’s greatest misstep, which he has insisted was just a coincidence, was to wander into the tense scene of a pro-democracy protest in February while on a stroll through central Beijing with his family. The protest, the first of several Internet-based calls for a “Jasmine Revolution,” drew a horde of security agents who regarded Mr. Huntsman as a potential provocateur.

Mr. Huntsman later publicly condemned the beating and detention of foreign journalists at the scene. The Chinese, who appear to believe he deliberately attended the event, placed him back in the doghouse. But last week, at a farewell reception at the United States Embassy, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi shared a toast with Mr. Huntsman and his wife. He appears to leave China in good standing — much as a future president, Mr. Bush, did when he left the chief diplomatic post in 1975.

 

In China, Art Is Making a Commercial Statement

The tricked-out design for new T-shirts in China was created by Chen Leiying, a 27-year-old artist known as Shadow Chen who lives in the coastal city of Ningbo. She is not even an employee of the company, but multinationals like Adidas are beginning to turn to young creative types like her to dream up images and logos for the under-30 set in China, a group that is 500 million strong.

Call them China’s youth whisperers. From Harbin in the north to Guangzhou in the south, young artists, musicians and designers are being tapped to make companies’ brands cool.

Like its counterparts elsewhere, this arty crowd sometimes looks and acts unconventional — but it’s not with political ends in mind. These young artists tend to set aside politics for commerce, and the promise of attractive paydays from foreign businesses.

At the center of this experiment is NeochaEdge, the first and only creative agency of its type in China. It was started in 2008 by two Americans, Sean Leow and Adam Schokora, to showcase the work of illustrators, graphic designers, animators, sound designers and musicians from across China. It now has 200 member-artists; NeochaEdge pays them per project to work on campaigns and product designs for brands like Nike, Absolut vodka and Sprite.

Adidas wants to be cool, “and the only way to be cool is to appeal to young people,” says Jean-Pierre Roy, who until recently helped oversee product development in China for Adidas. To help enhance that image, Adidas selected four Chinese artists, including Ms. Chen, to design 20 graphics for its new T-shirts.

Over the last year, members of the agency have also produced a soundtrack and a streetlight graffiti show for Absolut, designed sneakers for the Jimmy Kicks shoe company and created content for an e-magazine for Nike about basketball culture in China. And by the end of this year, NeochaEdge will also become a virtual art gallery, selling artwork from its artists through its Web site.

“You can’t just stroll into China and see who is a hot artist,” says Mr. Roy (who now works for Oakley, the eyewear company, in Shanghai). “It’s all still a little underground.” So Mr. Schokora, 30, and Mr. Leow, 29, have become trusted guides.

“There are not many young Americans who speak fluent Mandarin and are as much at home talking to chief marketing officers as they are talking to graffiti artists in Guangzhou,” says Paul Ward, head of operations for Asia at the advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty in Shanghai, which has collaborated with NeochaEdge on projects over the last year.

Members of NeochaEdge are a far cry from Ai Weiwei, the 53-year-old Chinese artist and dissident who was recently detained by the government. These graphic designers, sound artists and animators have other motivations.

“They want to advance their careers, not challenge the political establishment,” Mr. Leow says. “Commercial art has rarely, if ever, contained dissent.”

Defne Ayas, an art history instructor at New York University in Shanghai, put it this way in an e-mail: “For some artists in this younger generation, the new political has become the ‘market.’ They tend to be curious and friendly to the market; they don’t want to miss out on its opportunities.”

In fact, the government is putting its muscle behind companies like NeochaEdge. In Shanghai alone, the government has created more than 80 creative industry zones for 6,000 businesses. In 2008, the Shanghai municipal government named NeochaEdge as “one of the top representatives of the creative industry.”

SO how did two young guys from the United States — Mr. Schokora grew up in Detroit and Mr. Leow in Silicon Valley — end up becoming conduits to the young, creative community in China?

Before founding the company, Mr. Leow, who studied Chinese as an undergraduate at Duke, was living and working in Shanghai as a business consultant and consuming large quantities of Chinese culture.

“I was going to a lot of art exhibitions and indie rock shows, and I always thought that China was all about imitation and nothing creative, but I was wrong,” Mr. Leow says. That prompted the idea to develop a social networking site for creative types in China called neocha.com. (“Cha” is Chinese for tea.) There was just one problem: revenue from advertisers was not coming in.

At the same time, Mr. Schokora, who has been living in China since 2003, was working as a manager of digital and social media for Edelman, the global communications firm.

“I knew about neocha.com even before I met Sean,” Mr. Schokora recalls. “It was pretty much the only site out there aggregating what young, creative kids in China were doing online.” In 2007, Mr. Schokora and Mr. Leow met at a music festival in Shanghai, and the meeting quickly evolved into a partnership.

 

Trying to Stir Up a Popular Protest in China, From a Bedroom in Manhattan

Two months after calls shot across the Web for a Tunisian- and Egyptian-style “Jasmine Revolution” in China, he is among the few online dissidents still trying to promote a popular protest movement inside the country. The effort has failed to provoke any major street demonstrations, but it has led to a fierce crackdown by the authorities.

Yet despite the widespread arrests of activists, including the well-known artist Ai Weiwei, many of those who began the grass-roots push for change remain active. They guard their anonymity closely, especially inside China, where they communicate using Gmail and Skype and broadcast messages to supporters beyond the country’s so-called Great Firewall of censorship.

“Our group is expanding,” said the uptown blogger, who studied the classics and graduated from Columbia University. He asked to be called Gaius Gracchus, in honor of the ancient Roman reformer, but also uses the pseudonym Hua Ge, or “Flower Brother,” online.

He spoke confidently of the power of his group of 25 young Internet-savvy activists inside and outside of China — in Paris, Seoul, Hong Kong, Australia and Taiwan — to influence China’s top leaders. With a partner in China, he was among the first to publish the times and places for protesters to gather, and he remains one of the strongest voices calling for a revolution modeled on those in the Middle East, online activists said.

“The Jasmine Revolution is like a flag,” he said. “It’s out there to be taken up by whoever wants it.”

That is the hope of the dissidents, and it appears to be a concern of the Chinese authorities. For both, the thousands of isolated protests each year over an array of issues — including environmental grievances, land seizures and corruption — have the potential to become a national movement.

“The government seems to fear how easy it is to make the small protests meaningful,” said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific director.

But that online bravado has not succeeded in rallying disparate interest groups under a single banner for political change. In two recent large-scale protests — the truck drivers who protested rising prices by blocking a dockyard in Shanghai, and the Nanjing residents who delayed the destruction of the city’s iconic French plane trees — the organizers neither sought to connect their efforts to a Jasmine movement nor displayed any indication that they were even aware of it.

Some activists question the value of such efforts, saying that the calls for widespread protests have accomplished little except to provoke the government into arresting dozens of activists since February.

“It’s an admirable attempt at free expression, but we have not seen any sudden change come of it,” said Pu Zhiqiang, a leading human rights lawyer and advocate of democratic reform in China. “Instead, we’ve mainly seen the Chinese Communist Party frighten itself over it. So it’s hard to see the significance of it in the short term.”

The very first call for a Jasmine movement was broadcast from a Twitter account using the name mimisecret0, which was quickly overwhelmed by suspect messages and subsequently shut down, dissidents overseas said. The call was taken up by Boxun, a Chinese-language site run out of North Carolina, before that site too suffered a massive cyberattack in late February. Those attacks continue to cripple the site, said its editor, who is known by the pseudonyms Wei Shi or Watson Meng.

After the Boxun site was attacked, the New York blogger who calls himself Gaius Gracchus connected with activists in China to publish molihuaxingdong.blogspot.com, or Jasmine Movement, a simple blog on Google’s blogger platform, to keep the momentum going online. His role was first reported by The Associated Press.

The blog has registered more than 600,000 visitors, more than half of them from within China, and his group’s e-mail list includes more than 3,000 names.

Sitting at a spare black desk in his girlfriend’s Morningside Heights apartment, where he lives, Gracchus said that his group protects itself against malicious viruses by using Linux-based operating systems and by opening e-mail attachments using iPads, both of which are less susceptible to them. To secure his communications, he employs a Google application that sends a unique code, which changes every minute, to his mobile phone so he can log into his e-mail.

Such commercially available security precautions are not the stuff of cloak-and-dagger cyberwarfare, and Gracchus readily admits putting his faith in Google. “If Google falls, we would worry about our safety, but we believe that Google has better engineers than the Chinese government,” he said.

Despite his work, the revolution remains notional. No protesters have gathered in Chinese streets under the banner of the Jasmine movement since late February. Only the police heed the calls for protest each Sunday, blanketing areas in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities in an attempt to snuff out coordinated gatherings.

Mark McDonald contributed reporting from Seoul.

 

U.S. Envoy Sees ‘Backsliding’ Of Human Rights in China

BEIJING — The chief United States representative to human rights discussions with China offered a cheerless portrait of those talks after their conclusion on Thursday, saying the United States was worried by “a serious backsliding” of freedoms in China and at loggerheads with Beijing officials over many aspects of the issue.

“Our disagreements are profound,” the envoy, Assistant Secretary of State Michael H. Posner, said at a news conference at the United States Embassy here in Beijing, even as he expressed optimism that China’s rights situation would improve over time.

In the two days of talks this week, however, Mr. Posner indicated that Chinese officials offered few if any concrete responses to American queries about the conditions of the human rights and legal activists who have been seized or imprisoned by Chinese authorities. And he said that the talks, while “respectful in tone,” were colored with new seriousness on both sides by the perception that disagreements between the nations had widened.

“I don’t think anybody stood up and said, ‘Oh yeah, things have gotten worse,’ except me,” he said. But, he added, “there’s no question that the atmosphere is different, because the facts are different.”

Since the imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last October, Chinese authorities have detained, imprisoned or harassed hundreds of critics, lawyers, bloggers, writers and other gadflies deemed a threat to the state’s security. The pace of detentions and harassment accelerated markedly this spring after pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East prompted an anonymous online campaign for a “jasmine revolution” in China.

In the discussions, Mr. Posner said, American officials raised special concerns about a growing crackdown on lawyers who defend human rights advocates and dissidents. They included Teng Biao, a lawyer and professor who has not been heard from since he vanished in February; Chen Guangcheng, a blind self-taught lawyer and civil rights activist who has been under house arrest since September; and Gao Zhisheng, an internationally recognized rights lawyer who vanished last April shortly after having been freed from a previous confinement.

The officials also asked the Chinese for information on Ai Weiwei, the artist and social critic who has not been seen since he was seized this month, and Liu Xiaobo’s wife, Liu Xia, an artist and poet who has been held incommunicado in the couple’s apartment since her husband was named a Nobel laureate. And they asked about Xue Feng, an American geologist sentenced to eight years in prison last July on charges of stealing state secrets after he bought a database on China’s oil industry.

Mr. Posner did not detail the Chinese response to each case, but his description of the government’s answer to queries about Mr. Ai appeared to be the norm. “On that case,” he said, “we certainly did not get an answer that satisfies. There was no sense, no sense of comfort from the response or the language.”

The annual human rights dialogue, a staple of the diplomatic relationship, has long been irritating to the Chinese. This year’s meeting, held shortly after the State Department issued its annual evaluation of human rights in China and other nations, was preceded by broadsides in the Chinese news media recounting flaws in the United States’ human rights record. At the Foreign Ministry’s briefing on Thursday, a spokesman, Hong Lei, accused Washington of using human rights “as a pretext for meddling in China’s internal affairs.”

Mr. Posner rejected that on Thursday, and he said that while the United States’ record was imperfect, the government allowed critics of all stripes to attack its flaws and crusade for change without fear of retaliation. “Those people are not at risk,” he said. “We allow these things, and frankly, they make us stronger.”

 

Religious Rights Groups: China 'House Churches' Face Increasing Persecution

 William Ide ?April 24, 2011

Chinese youths detained by police officers from an area where members of a unregistered church planned to hold Easter service are led into a police station in Beijing Sunday, April 24, 2011.

Religious rights groups in the United States say the decision by Chinese authorities on Sunday to detain nearly 40 members of an unapproved evangelical Christian church as they tried to hold Easter service highlights the struggle for freedom of religion in China. ?

Although China's constitution allows for freedom of religion in state sanctioned churches, religious rights advocates say government persecution of so-called "underground" or "house" churches, like Sunday's crackdown on the Shouwang Church in Beijing, is increasing.

Mark Shan is a spokesman for ChinaAid, a rights group that tracks cases of religious persecution in China. "In the past five years, every year, the degree of persecution increased, from the perspective of how many church's were persecuted, how many Christians were arrested, sentenced, abused or tortured.? So it's a national phenomenon; it's a common phenomenon.? Every year is like this," he said.

Members of the Shouwang Church say more than 500 members of the congregation were also put under house arrest.? It's unclear, however, whether any of those detained or under house arrest will face formal charges.

Mark Shan says the crackdown is not limited to Beijing.? "From Henan, Shandong province this month, even Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, the crackdown has never stopped and it is more serious than last year," he said.

According to official Chinese government statistics, about 15 million Protestants and five million Catholics worship at registered churches.? Experts say an estimated 50 million others are believed to pray at so-called "underground" or "house" churches like Shouwang, which refuse to submit to government regulation.

Joseph Kung of the Cardinal Kung Foundation, a group that monitors the treatment of Roman Catholics in China, says that although the Chinese economy is booming, such advances have done little to slow the persecution of Catholics in the country. "There are people still in jail, and priests still in jail.? Bishops are still in jail, we do not know where they are.? We don't even know whether they are still alive," he said.

Kung, a relative of the late Cardinal Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei, was referring to Bishop Sue Zhiming and Bishop Shi Enxiang -- two Catholic underground church leaders who disappeared more than 10 years ago.

Kung says members of the underground Catholics constantly struggle to worship discretely in homes across China or in fields to avoid being discovered by authorities. "The police still find them out and once they find them out, without any notice they will just simply barge in and take the priests away, take the parishioners away and sometimes take the sacraments away and so forth.? So there really is no freedom for the underground Catholic church in China," he said.

Sunday's crackdown on the Shouwang Church follows a string of detentions of dissidents, activists and human rights lawyers.? Authorities in China have been particularly vigilant in recent weeks, following anonymous calls on the Internet for so-called "Jasmine" protests each Sunday.

Joseph Kung says the online calls might have made authorities nervous. "And also I believe that they want to show their independence.? But I really can't second guess the mind of the communists.? They could do anything they want," he said.

ChinaAid's Mark Shan agrees that the online protest calls might be having an affect.? But mostly, he says, Chinese authorities are concerned about the growing influence of house churches.

Last October, the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, invited more than 200 Chinese house church leaders to attend a meeting in Cape Town, South Africa.

"So from that time, the Chinese government also many scholars, even Christians ourselves, were surprised to see.? Wow!? The house church is really something; it is really large scale because you can see the whole country, they can choose 200 delegates to represent the whole house church.? So that was something that caused the Chinese government to really panic," said Shan.

In December, Shan says, Chinese authorities launched a crackdown called "Operation Deterrence" against house churches.? He says that although the Beijing government eased up in February, when calls for the Jasmine protests grew, it now is intensifying the campaign.