Chinese Officials Beat Activist and His Wife, Group Says

Mr. Chen was released from jail last year after serving a 51-month sentence for disturbing public order and destroying public property — charges linked to his uncovering of forced sterilizations and abortions in the eastern Chinese city of Linyi.

But since his release, he has been under “ruanjin,” or “soft detention,” a kind of house arrest increasingly being used by the authorities to silence people who have not violated the law. The authorities once celebrated Mr. Chen, a 39-year-old self-taught lawyer, as a symbol of the country’s efforts to build a legal system, but they turned against him when he used the law to protest government abuse. Earlier this year, a video was smuggled out showing the circumstances of his detention. Reporters who tried to visit him were turned away by undercover police officers who had encircled his home.

Now ChinaAid, a human rights group based in the United States, says it has evidence of increased harassment, including beatings and the confiscation of personal property. The group, which released Mr. Chen’s video, says it has obtained a letter from Mr. Chen’s wife, Yuan Weijing, that details the couple’s most recent travails.

Contents of the letter were confirmed by a friend of the family, He Peirong. Ms. He, who describes herself as a Nanjing-based Internet activist, said she visited Mr. Chen’s hometown in late May and spoke with people related to his family.

According to Ms. He’s account and the undated letter, Ms. Yuan said that in February and March, Communist Party officials from Shuanghou, a suburb of Linyi, stormed the couple’s home. Ms. Yuan said she was bundled into a blanket and repeatedly kicked so hard that she still cannot stand straight. She said she saw her husband being tortured by the men, who twisted his arms and neck until he passed out. The couple were denied medical aid, she said, except for one intravenous drip from a village doctor. They had to stay in bed because of their injuries, she said.

The men came back repeatedly, according to Ms. Yuan’s letter, and confiscated legal documents related to Mr. Chen’s case as well as a computer, video camera, audio recorder, flashlight and television antenna. Metal sheets were fixed over the windows, and the power was cut off. Telephone lines had already been cut.

Still later, she said, men took away their books, pictures of their daughter and calendars off the wall. The authorities installed video cameras to monitor the couple.

The house arrest extends to the couple’s 5-year-old daughter, Ms. Yuan wrote, and Mr. Chen’s mother.

Local authorities did not answer phone calls seeking comment, but the use of house arrest appears to have increased in recent years as the authorities try to silence critics. Several pastors of the Beijing-based Shouwang Church, for example, have been under house arrest for months since trying to lead outdoor services after their meeting place was closed. The church refuses to place itself under government control.

The authorities seem especially nervous, with a string of political anniversaries on the horizon. On July 1, the Communist Party celebrates the 90th anniversary of its founding, and later this year is the 100th anniversary of the revolution that overthrew China’s emperor. Next year, a crucial, twice-a-decade party congress will choose the country’s leadership for the next 10 years.

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Business Briefing | Acquisitions: U.S. Fast-Food Giant Yum Bids for Chinese Chain

HONG KONG — Yum Brands, the company behind KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, is planning to add another name to its list of restaurant chains: Little Sheep, which operates hundreds of colorful hot pot restaurants throughout China.

Based in Louisville, Ky., Yum has been betting on China’s giant population and rising affluence levels since 1987, when it first introduced the KFC brand in China. Last year alone, it opened more than 500 restaurants in mainland China and now generates more than one-third of its annual revenue in the country.

On Friday, Yum stepped up its expansion drive with a bid for Little Sheep, which is based in the Inner Mongolian city of Baotou and operates what is a well recognized brand within the highly fragmented Chinese restaurant market.

Yum, which already owns 27.2 percent of the Hong Kong-listed Little Sheep, offered to pay 6.50 Hong Kong dollars, or 84 U.S. cents, each for most of the shares it does not already own, with the aim of raising its stake to 93.2 percent. The offer, which had been signaled in late April, values the company at $682 million.

The founders of Little Sheep -- Zhang Gang, who is also chairman of the company, and Chen Hongkai -- would retain the remaining 6.8 percent.

“The restaurant industry in China is highly competitive, but we are optimistic about the outlook and the opportunities,” Sam Su, chairman and chief executive of Yum’s China division, said in a statement Friday announcing the planned transaction. “We are confident we can further strengthen Little Sheep’s brand, business model and market position in the industry.”

The transaction, which remains subject to regulatory approval, underlines the eagerness of many Western retailers and consumer goods companies to expand into China.

Disposable incomes have risen rapidly in China and in many other developing Asian nations over the past two decades, prompting an influx of companies wishing to sell products as diverse as luxury handbags and cars, chicken drumsticks and laundry detergent.

Yum was a relatively early entrant to the Chinese market, and KFC has become one of the most dominant and visible fast-food chains in China — more so than rivals like McDonald’s.

There are now more than 3,200 KFC outlets in more than 700 mainland Chinese cities, according to Yum. The Pizza Hut brand, which was introduced in China in 1990, now counts 520 restaurants and 120 home delivery outlets across this market of 1.3 billion people.

Yum also pledged to help Little Sheep, which listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2008, to introduce the hot pot concept — customers dip vegetables or meat into boiling broth at their tables — and the Little Sheep brand “to a wider global audience.”

“I believe that the strong capability and expertise Yum possesses in managing world-class brands and growing restaurant networks will significantly further Little Sheep’s development in China and overseas,” Mr. Zhang of Little Sheep said in the statement Friday, “and should leave us well positioned to develop into an internationally recognized restaurant chain.”

 

Chinese State Media, in a Show of Openness, Print Jet Photos

 

BEIJING — The J-15 Flying Shark is China’s newest attack jet, a sinuous fighter with the folding wings, shortened tail cone and bulked-up landing gear it needs to serve on China’s first aircraft carrier, which is expected to start sea trials soon. It is indisputable evidence of China’s growing mastery of military technology.

Also military technology of Russia and Ukraine, albeit not entirely with their consent.

Barely two weeks after splashing photographs of the aircraft carrier on the Internet, China’s state media on Monday published the first close-up pictures of the J-15. The day before, Web sites that focus on China’s military had run the same photograph, snapped outside the Shenyang plant in northeast China where the plane is being developed.

Like the aircraft carrier it will call home, the jet faces years of tests and refinement before it will formally enter service, military analysts say. The photographs nevertheless suggest that the People’s Liberation Army, long notoriously secretive, is lifting some veils.

“The recent spate of releases of photographs of airplanes under development is a sign of relaxed control of military information in China,” Lan Yun, an editor at the Beijing-based Modern Ships magazine, said in an interview. “It could be seen as a sign of more transparency of the Chinese military.”

Mr. Lan and Andrei Chang, the Hong Kong-based editor of Kanwa Asian Defense Review, said that the photograph indicated that the aircraft had passed factory tests and was now bound for flight testing.

Internet posts by analysts and Chinese aviation enthusiasts point to a fighter crammed with the best technology China can produce: holographic “heads-up” instrument displays, advanced anti-ship radar and, Mr. Lan said, self-guiding missiles, in contrast to the gravity-controlled bombs and sight-guided missiles that largely populate China’s existing 3,200-aircraft fleet.

When it is deployed — probably sometime after 2015 — the J-15 will signal the dawn of a new ability by China to assert authority along its coastline.

The carrier and its jet are said to employ the best Chinese technology, but both are also direct descendants of weaponry devised in the dying days of the old Soviet Union.

China’s new carrier, expected to be christened the Shi Lang, is a retrofitted version of a 1988 Soviet aircraft carrier that Chinese interests bought from Ukraine after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, supposedly for conversion into a floating casino in Macao. But the Macao gambling license never materialized, and as many had suspected, the ship wound up elsewhere — in Dalian, a city in northeastern China where workers began a decade-long retrofit.

The J-15 has followed an even more tortuous route.

At the century’s turn, many news reports say, the Chinese beseeched Moscow to sell them a Sukhoi-33, a 1980s Soviet fighter capable of landing on carriers. Moscow refused. But in 2001, the Chinese bought an Su-33 prototype from Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, and began a teardown to learn its secrets.

The Russians were incensed.

Yet the J-15 unofficially unveiled this week, which externally seems a clone of the Su-33, in fact has been remade inside with Chinese improvements. Mr. Lan said that advances in the plane’s outdated avionics and missile-guidance systems had made it a far more sophisticated version of the Russian jet.

The J-15 is being compared in some quarters to the American F-18, a workhorse on Navy carriers. But Mr. Lan said it had a shorter range, in large part because its takeoff method — flying off a ski-jump-style runway — dictated that it could carry less fuel than a comparable American jet, which is propelled off a flat carrier runway.

Flying a ski-jump is not duck soup. And in February, a Ukrainian court convicted a Russian man of conspiring to give the Chinese details of a Crimean air base that had been used to train Su-33 pilots to take off from a carrier’s ski-jump ramp.

In Huludao, a navy installation on China’s northeast coast, workers are said to have built a rough clone of the Crimea test center, complete with a ski ramp for ascending jets.

None of this is exceptional. Russian, Chinese and American espionage agents wage unacknowledged wars to steal the others’ technology.

But the Chinese, some experts say, are notably adept.

“They take what they can get, and improve what they can,” Abraham M. Denmark, an independent expert on China’s military in Washington, said in an interview. “It’s a strategy that permeates many of their innovations.”

 

Robberies Chill an Underground World of Chinese Gambling

Clad in black and speaking Chinese, the three men entered a mah-jongg parlor hidden in a building on Hester Street in Chinatown. They pulled out a pistol and a knife and stripped gamblers of more than $5,600, the police said.

Over the next seven weeks, from late February to early April, three more parlors were robbed: one in Chinatown and two in Flushing, Queens. Each was hit by a small group of Chinese-speaking men with firearms — in one case, an assault rifle.

The robbers may have counted on the silence that has long kept these places in the shadows: The gambling is illegal, so owners and bettors are unlikely to report crimes. But in these cases, victims did, opening a peephole into the busy world of underground Chinese gambling and rattling many of those who work and play in it.

Several gamblers in Flushing said two more parlors were robbed this month, though the attacks were not reported to the police. “We’re really scared now,” one player said as he emerged from a secret den. “Now we have to be especially careful.”

The parlors are tucked in basements or upstairs in warrenlike office buildings, places where a steady stream of players can go unnoticed in the commotion of everyday traffic, say gamblers and others in the Chinese community. Some games take place in private apartments, with paper covering the windows or shades pulled tight, or in the backrooms of community associations.

Because operators frequently shift locations to avoid police detection, it is unclear — to the authorities as well as to those who work there — how many parlors there are.

But the police, familiar with the business for generations, said they were surprised by the sudden rash of armed invasions.

“Historically, there’s been gambling in Chinatown locations, but we haven’t had a significant amount of violence associated with it,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. Last year, he said, there were no reported robberies at the parlors.

The police have not made any arrests in the recent crimes, which they believe were all the work of the same crew, Mr. Browne said.

Gambling parlors involving cards, unauthorized lotteries, mah-jongg and other games have been a fixture in Chinese immigrant communities in the United States since the 19th century.

The parlors became a key source of income for some district and family organizations in Chinatown and eventually for street gangs, said Ko-lin Chin, a Rutgers University criminologist. But even after law enforcement broke the gangs’ stranglehold on the neighborhood in the 1990s, gambling rooms continued to flourish.

Today, some are exclusively devoted to mah-jongg, a tile game that is one of the most popular forms of recreation among the Chinese. Other operations include high-stakes card games like poker, and sometimes even the sorts of electronic gambling machines found in legal casinos.

“You see these here?” said one parlor boss, pointing at some three-story walk-up apartment buildings just off Main Street in Flushing. “They all have at least one mah-jongg parlor.”

Some stay open around the clock, while others do business for only a few hours a day.

One popular mah-jongg parlor in Flushing thrived, until recently, in a two-bedroom apartment where as many as 20 people played at a time. Some regulars would stay for as long as two days, taking catnaps on a sofa. They would eat takeout food, and in the evening the boss would oversee the preparation of more elaborate meals.

At parlors devoted to mah-jongg, the stakes do not get very high, with maximum wins and losses usually amounting to no more than several hundred dollars per person in a session. In other parlors, however, players may experience swings involving tens of thousands of dollars.

Not all mah-jongg games involve gambling; acquaintances often gather to play for fun, with no wagering. Gambling becomes illegal, according to state law, when the house takes a percentage, Mr. Browne explained.

In a faint echo of places like Las Vegas, parlor bosses sometimes treat their favored customers to dinners, spa visits and sessions in karaoke bars. They might even lend them money.

Officials in the Manhattan district attorney’s office said that this year they had prosecuted 25 people in gambling-related cases in the Fifth Precinct, which includes Chinatown, and a total of 82 during the past three years. Most were charged with promoting gambling or possession of gambling records, low-level felonies, then pleaded guilty to misdemeanors and received penalties of community service, officials said.

It is unclear why victims in the four recent robberies took the risk of contacting the police. But Mr. Browne said the authorities were not pressing gambling charges in those cases because the victims had cooperated with investigators.

Mr. Browne said the four parlors were relatively large operations, each serving 20 or more players. “These were not informal mah-jongg games between acquaintances,” he said.

The robberies have chilled the mah-jongg network. Bosses have been more careful about whom they let in; most parlors have outer doors with peepholes, and some have closed-circuit security cameras, gamblers say. The operators have also been warning clients to be careful.

“We just tell them not to bring too much cash,” said the parlor boss in Flushing.

A Flushing parlor that was robbed shut down after the incident, but reopened last week.

Signs newly posted on the door in English and Chinese warned that the premises were under police video?surveillance. When a reporter rang the parlor’s bell one recent evening, he was buzzed into the building. But as he climbed to the second-floor apartment, he could hear people scrambling around, speaking in the Shanghai dialect and scraping chairs and tables across the floor.

When he knocked, someone inside shouted, “We’re eating!” Five minutes later, the door opened and about two dozen people flooded out, down the stairs and into the night, saying nothing.

 

For Many Chinese, New Wealth and a Fresh Face

 

But her jaw line? Too square for her liking. So the 22-year-old television reporter recently traveled from a coastal province to a private hospital in downtown Beijing to have it reshaped — for about $6,000. Her boyfriend, a 29-year-old businessman wearing designer eyeglasses, picked up the bill.

“I am not nervous at all,” said Devil (the English first name she chose for herself, and the only one she would reveal) as she awaited surgery at Evercare Aikang hospital in downtown Beijing. “I will look more sophisticated and exquisite.”

The breathtaking pace of transformation for upwardly mobile Chinese — from bicycles to cars, village to city, housebound holidays to ski vacations — now extends to faces. In just a decade, cosmetic and plastic surgery has become the fourth most popular way to spend discretionary income in China, according to Ma Xiaowei, China’s vice health minister. Only houses, cars and travel rank higher, he said.

No official figures exist, but the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery estimated in 2009 that China ranked third, behind the United States and Brazil, with more than two million operations annually. And the number of operations is doubling every year, Mr. Ma said at a conference organized by the Health Ministry in November.

“We must recognize that plastic and cosmetic surgery has now become a common service, aimed at the masses,” he said.

Face-lifts and wrinkle-removal treatments are in vogue, just as in the West. But at Evercare, which runs a chain of cosmetic-surgery hospitals in China, two-fifths of patients are in their 20s, said Li Bin, the general manager and one of the founders.

Nationally, the most requested surgeries have nothing to do with age: The No. 1 operation is designed to make eyes appear larger by adding a crease in the eyelid, forming what is called a double eyelid, said Zhao Zhenmin, secretary general of the government-run Chinese Association of Plastics and Aesthetics.

The second most popular operation raises the bridge of the nose to make it more prominent — the opposite of the typical nose job in the West. Third is the reshaping of the jaw to make it narrower and longer, he said.

The youthful patients include job applicants hoping to enhance their prospects in the work force, teenagers who received cosmetic surgery as a high school graduation present and even middle school students, most of whom want eye jobs, surgeons say.

China’s regulatory system, by all accounts, has not kept up. At the conference in Beijing in November, Mr. Ma, the vice health minister, said the situation “can even be called neglect.”

Out of 11 clinics and hospitals offering cosmetic or plastic surgery that were inspected late last year, he said, fewer than half met national standards. Employees lacked professional credentials, he said; equipment and materials were subpar. Beauty parlors are flagrant violators, illegally administering Botox injections and performing eyelid surgery.

Mr. Ma likened the industry to a medical “disaster zone,” with frequent accidents. His point was underscored when a 24-year-old former contestant on the Chinese reality show “Super Girl” died after her windpipe filled with blood during an operation to reshape her jaw in Hubei Province.

Health officials demanded an inquiry. But Mr. Zhao, who also serves as the vice director of Beijing’s government-run Plastic and Cosmetic Surgery Hospital, said it was impossible to gather evidence because the body was quickly cremated — a common practice in China when hospitals privately settle malpractice claims.

“Personally speaking, I think this is pretty despicable,” he said. “We need to get to the bottom of such cases in order to protect people in the future.”

The shortcomings of China’s medical system are hardly limited to cosmetic and plastic surgery. But the industry now generates an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue, and the government has begun to take note. Officials say new regulations will probably be issued this year.

One implicit goal is to halt the flow of Chinese patients to better-established hospitals in South Korea. Mr. Ma estimates that Chinese make up 30 percent of cosmetic surgery patients in Seoul.

For now, many beauty salons, like one downtown Beijing branch of a major chain, are capitalizing on the lack of oversight. One recent afternoon, a 62-year-old woman in a white coat who described herself as an internist said she could summon a doctor who could give a visitor double eyelids in 20 minutes about $180, a fraction of the standard hospital fee.

“Immediately you will look different,” she said.

Shi Da, Li Bibo, Zhang Jing and Jonathan Kaiman contributed research.

 

For Many Chinese, New Wealth and a Fresh Face

 

But her jaw line? Too square for her liking. So the 22-year-old television reporter recently traveled from a coastal province to a private hospital in downtown Beijing to have it reshaped — for about $6,000. Her boyfriend, a 29-year-old businessman wearing designer eyeglasses, picked up the bill.

“I am not nervous at all,” said Devil (the English first name she chose for herself, and the only one she would reveal) as she awaited surgery at Evercare Aikang hospital in downtown Beijing. “I will look more sophisticated and exquisite.”

The breathtaking pace of transformation for upwardly mobile Chinese — from bicycles to cars, village to city, housebound holidays to ski vacations — now extends to faces. In just a decade, cosmetic and plastic surgery has become the fourth most popular way to spend discretionary income in China, according to Ma Xiaowei, China’s vice health minister. Only houses, cars and travel rank higher, he said.

No official figures exist, but the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery estimated in 2009 that China ranked third, behind the United States and Brazil, with more than two million operations annually. And the number of operations is doubling every year, Mr. Ma said at a conference organized by the Health Ministry in November.

“We must recognize that plastic and cosmetic surgery has now become a common service, aimed at the masses,” he said.

Face-lifts and wrinkle-removal treatments are in vogue, just as in the West. But at Evercare, which runs a chain of cosmetic-surgery hospitals in China, two-fifths of patients are in their 20s, said Li Bin, the general manager and one of the founders.

Nationally, the most requested surgeries have nothing to do with age: The No. 1 operation is designed to make eyes appear larger by adding a crease in the eyelid, forming what is called a double eyelid, said Zhao Zhenmin, secretary general of the government-run Chinese Association of Plastics and Aesthetics.

The second most popular operation raises the bridge of the nose to make it more prominent — the opposite of the typical nose job in the West. Third is the reshaping of the jaw to make it narrower and longer, he said.

The youthful patients include job applicants hoping to enhance their prospects in the work force, teenagers who received cosmetic surgery as a high school graduation present and even middle school students, most of whom want eye jobs, surgeons say.

China’s regulatory system, by all accounts, has not kept up. At the conference in Beijing in November, Mr. Ma, the vice health minister, said the situation “can even be called neglect.”

Out of 11 clinics and hospitals offering cosmetic or plastic surgery that were inspected late last year, he said, fewer than half met national standards. Employees lacked professional credentials, he said; equipment and materials were subpar. Beauty parlors are flagrant violators, illegally administering Botox injections and performing eyelid surgery.

Mr. Ma likened the industry to a medical “disaster zone,” with frequent accidents. His point was underscored when a 24-year-old former contestant on the Chinese reality show “Super Girl” died after her windpipe filled with blood during an operation to reshape her jaw in Hubei Province.

Health officials demanded an inquiry. But Mr. Zhao, who also serves as the vice director of Beijing’s government-run Plastic and Cosmetic Surgery Hospital, said it was impossible to gather evidence because the body was quickly cremated — a common practice in China when hospitals privately settle malpractice claims.

“Personally speaking, I think this is pretty despicable,” he said. “We need to get to the bottom of such cases in order to protect people in the future.”

The shortcomings of China’s medical system are hardly limited to cosmetic and plastic surgery. But the industry now generates an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue, and the government has begun to take note. Officials say new regulations will probably be issued this year.

One implicit goal is to halt the flow of Chinese patients to better-established hospitals in South Korea. Mr. Ma estimates that Chinese make up 30 percent of cosmetic surgery patients in Seoul.

For now, many beauty salons, like one downtown Beijing branch of a major chain, are capitalizing on the lack of oversight. One recent afternoon, a 62-year-old woman in a white coat who described herself as an internist said she could summon a doctor who could give a visitor double eyelids in 20 minutes about $180, a fraction of the standard hospital fee.

“Immediately you will look different,” she said.

Shi Da, Li Bibo, Zhang Jing and Jonathan Kaiman contributed research.

 

For Many Chinese, New Wealth and a Fresh Face

。

But her jaw line? Too square for her liking. So the 22-year-old television reporter recently traveled from a coastal province to a private hospital in downtown Beijing to have it reshaped — for about $6,000. Her boyfriend, a 29-year-old businessman wearing designer eyeglasses, picked up the bill.

“I am not nervous at all,” said Devil (the English first name she chose for herself, and the only one she would reveal) as she awaited surgery at Evercare Aikang hospital in downtown Beijing. “I will look more sophisticated and exquisite.”

The breathtaking pace of transformation for upwardly mobile Chinese — from bicycles to cars, village to city, housebound holidays to ski vacations — now extends to faces. In just a decade, cosmetic and plastic surgery has become the fourth most popular way to spend discretionary income in China, according to Ma Xiaowei, China’s vice health minister. Only houses, cars and travel rank higher, he said.

No official figures exist, but the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery estimated in 2009 that China ranked third, behind the United States and Brazil, with more than two million operations annually. And the number of operations is doubling every year, Mr. Ma said at a conference organized by the Health Ministry in November.

“We must recognize that plastic and cosmetic surgery has now become a common service, aimed at the masses,” he said.

Face-lifts and wrinkle-removal treatments are in vogue, just as in the West. But at Evercare, which runs a chain of cosmetic-surgery hospitals in China, two-fifths of patients are in their 20s, said Li Bin, the general manager and one of the founders.

Nationally, the most requested surgeries have nothing to do with age: The No. 1 operation is designed to make eyes appear larger by adding a crease in the eyelid, forming what is called a double eyelid, said Zhao Zhenmin, secretary general of the government-run Chinese Association of Plastics and Aesthetics.

The second most popular operation raises the bridge of the nose to make it more prominent — the opposite of the typical nose job in the West. Third is the reshaping of the jaw to make it narrower and longer, he said.

The youthful patients include job applicants hoping to enhance their prospects in the work force, teenagers who received cosmetic surgery as a high school graduation present and even middle school students, most of whom want eye jobs, surgeons say.

China’s regulatory system, by all accounts, has not kept up. At the conference in Beijing in November, Mr. Ma, the vice health minister, said the situation “can even be called neglect.”

Out of 11 clinics and hospitals offering cosmetic or plastic surgery that were inspected late last year, he said, fewer than half met national standards. Employees lacked professional credentials, he said; equipment and materials were subpar. Beauty parlors are flagrant violators, illegally administering Botox injections and performing eyelid surgery.

Mr. Ma likened the industry to a medical “disaster zone,” with frequent accidents. His point was underscored when a 24-year-old former contestant on the Chinese reality show “Super Girl” died after her windpipe filled with blood during an operation to reshape her jaw in Hubei Province.

Health officials demanded an inquiry. But Mr. Zhao, who also serves as the vice director of Beijing’s government-run Plastic and Cosmetic Surgery Hospital, said it was impossible to gather evidence because the body was quickly cremated — a common practice in China when hospitals privately settle malpractice claims.

“Personally speaking, I think this is pretty despicable,” he said. “We need to get to the bottom of such cases in order to protect people in the future.”

The shortcomings of China’s medical system are hardly limited to cosmetic and plastic surgery. But the industry now generates an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue, and the government has begun to take note. Officials say new regulations will probably be issued this year.

One implicit goal is to halt the flow of Chinese patients to better-established hospitals in South Korea. Mr. Ma estimates that Chinese make up 30 percent of cosmetic surgery patients in Seoul.

For now, many beauty salons, like one downtown Beijing branch of a major chain, are capitalizing on the lack of oversight. One recent afternoon, a 62-year-old woman in a white coat who described herself as an internist said she could summon a doctor who could give a visitor double eyelids in 20 minutes about $180, a fraction of the standard hospital fee.

“Immediately you will look different,” she said.

Shi Da, Li Bibo, Zhang Jing and Jonathan Kaiman contributed research.

 

For Many Chinese, New Wealth and a Fresh Face

。

But her jaw line? Too square for her liking. So the 22-year-old television reporter recently traveled from a coastal province to a private hospital in downtown Beijing to have it reshaped — for about $6,000. Her boyfriend, a 29-year-old businessman wearing designer eyeglasses, picked up the bill.

“I am not nervous at all,” said Devil (the English first name she chose for herself, and the only one she would reveal) as she awaited surgery at Evercare Aikang hospital in downtown Beijing. “I will look more sophisticated and exquisite.”

The breathtaking pace of transformation for upwardly mobile Chinese — from bicycles to cars, village to city, housebound holidays to ski vacations — now extends to faces. In just a decade, cosmetic and plastic surgery has become the fourth most popular way to spend discretionary income in China, according to Ma Xiaowei, China’s vice health minister. Only houses, cars and travel rank higher, he said.

No official figures exist, but the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery estimated in 2009 that China ranked third, behind the United States and Brazil, with more than two million operations annually. And the number of operations is doubling every year, Mr. Ma said at a conference organized by the Health Ministry in November.

“We must recognize that plastic and cosmetic surgery has now become a common service, aimed at the masses,” he said.

Face-lifts and wrinkle-removal treatments are in vogue, just as in the West. But at Evercare, which runs a chain of cosmetic-surgery hospitals in China, two-fifths of patients are in their 20s, said Li Bin, the general manager and one of the founders.

Nationally, the most requested surgeries have nothing to do with age: The No. 1 operation is designed to make eyes appear larger by adding a crease in the eyelid, forming what is called a double eyelid, said Zhao Zhenmin, secretary general of the government-run Chinese Association of Plastics and Aesthetics.

The second most popular operation raises the bridge of the nose to make it more prominent — the opposite of the typical nose job in the West. Third is the reshaping of the jaw to make it narrower and longer, he said.

The youthful patients include job applicants hoping to enhance their prospects in the work force, teenagers who received cosmetic surgery as a high school graduation present and even middle school students, most of whom want eye jobs, surgeons say.

China’s regulatory system, by all accounts, has not kept up. At the conference in Beijing in November, Mr. Ma, the vice health minister, said the situation “can even be called neglect.”

Out of 11 clinics and hospitals offering cosmetic or plastic surgery that were inspected late last year, he said, fewer than half met national standards. Employees lacked professional credentials, he said; equipment and materials were subpar. Beauty parlors are flagrant violators, illegally administering Botox injections and performing eyelid surgery.

Mr. Ma likened the industry to a medical “disaster zone,” with frequent accidents. His point was underscored when a 24-year-old former contestant on the Chinese reality show “Super Girl” died after her windpipe filled with blood during an operation to reshape her jaw in Hubei Province.

Health officials demanded an inquiry. But Mr. Zhao, who also serves as the vice director of Beijing’s government-run Plastic and Cosmetic Surgery Hospital, said it was impossible to gather evidence because the body was quickly cremated — a common practice in China when hospitals privately settle malpractice claims.

“Personally speaking, I think this is pretty despicable,” he said. “We need to get to the bottom of such cases in order to protect people in the future.”

The shortcomings of China’s medical system are hardly limited to cosmetic and plastic surgery. But the industry now generates an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue, and the government has begun to take note. Officials say new regulations will probably be issued this year.

One implicit goal is to halt the flow of Chinese patients to better-established hospitals in South Korea. Mr. Ma estimates that Chinese make up 30 percent of cosmetic surgery patients in Seoul.

For now, many beauty salons, like one downtown Beijing branch of a major chain, are capitalizing on the lack of oversight. One recent afternoon, a 62-year-old woman in a white coat who described herself as an internist said she could summon a doctor who could give a visitor double eyelids in 20 minutes about $180, a fraction of the standard hospital fee.

“Immediately you will look different,” she said.

Shi Da, Li Bibo, Zhang Jing and Jonathan Kaiman contributed research.

 

Truckers Protest, Adding to Chinese Fears of Unrest

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at a container-handling facility at the city’s Baoshan port, news reports stated, monitored by dozens of police officers. On Thursday, thousands of drivers staged a noisy protest at the huge Waigaoqiao port, smashing truck windows of drivers who had refused to join them, and officers arrested several drivers who tried to overturn a police car.

The protests threatened to snarl operations at the world’s busiest harbor, but analysts said that any impact was likely to be small. China’s state-controlled newspapers ignored the strike, and censors removed reports on the disturbance from Web sites.

Online reports quoted by the Chinese newspaper Economic Observer said that the truckers intended the blockage of the Shanghai ports to last three days.

The drivers were protesting low wages, increased fuel prices — the government recently raised diesel prices by five percent — and higher fees imposed by port operators. “The various fees they have to pay leave them no profit,” said Liu Cheng, a law professor and labor specialist at Shanghai Normal University. “This kind of conflict is hard to resolve because it’s the government that is collecting those fees.”

The complaints mirror general unhappiness with inflation here. Prices rose 5.4 percent last month compared with the preceding March, the largest increase since 2008, but a worrisome rise in month-to-month prices suggests to some analysts that the annual inflation rate could approach the double-digit range.

The increase in food prices — 11.7 percent in the first quarter of this year — is a crucial factor in a nation where food is the major expense in some household budgets.

Other protests so far have been scant. But the government, mindful that soaring inflation played a crucial role in the 1989 protests that climaxed in the bloody suppression of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, has taken pains to show concern.

Premier Wen Jiabao has said that he checks prices of staples daily, and has frequently said that inflation and corruption are the greatest dangers to national stability.

But the government has other worries as well. For months, it has been vigorously squelching civil dissent by political activists, a campaign that has included the arrests and disappearances of prominent human rights lawyers and social critics like Ai Weiwei, the artist.

The government appears determined to crush even isolated protests lest they merge into a larger uprising that might threaten the Communist Party’s hold on power.

China was hit with a spate of worker protests last year, also fueled by complaints about low wages and high prices, which led to wage increases in some key industries. But inflation now appears to be eroding those gains.

On Friday, in what appeared to be a government bid to assuage some of the current economic unhappiness, Shanghai newspapers reported that the government would reduce the monthly fees that independent taxi drivers must pay the companies that employ them, to $1,260 from $1,305.

In 2008, China was hit with a wave of strikes by taxi and bus drivers unhappy with the erosion in their take-home pay.

Many experts say that China’s own monetary policies fuel inflation, and that the global rise in food and oil prices has only worsened the situation here.

 

Truckers Protest, Adding to Chinese Fears of Unrest

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at a container-handling facility at the city’s Baoshan port, news reports stated, monitored by dozens of police officers. On Thursday, thousands of drivers staged a noisy protest at the huge Waigaoqiao port, smashing truck windows of drivers who had refused to join them, and officers arrested several drivers who tried to overturn a police car.

The protests threatened to snarl operations at the world’s busiest harbor, but analysts said that any impact was likely to be small. China’s state-controlled newspapers ignored the strike, and censors removed reports on the disturbance from Web sites.

Online reports quoted by the Chinese newspaper Economic Observer said that the truckers intended the blockage of the Shanghai ports to last three days.

The drivers were protesting low wages, increased fuel prices — the government recently raised diesel prices by five percent — and higher fees imposed by port operators. “The various fees they have to pay leave them no profit,” said Liu Cheng, a law professor and labor specialist at Shanghai Normal University. “This kind of conflict is hard to resolve because it’s the government that is collecting those fees.”

The complaints mirror general unhappiness with inflation here. Prices rose 5.4 percent last month compared with the preceding March, the largest increase since 2008, but a worrisome rise in month-to-month prices suggests to some analysts that the annual inflation rate could approach the double-digit range.

The increase in food prices — 11.7 percent in the first quarter of this year — is a crucial factor in a nation where food is the major expense in some household budgets.

Other protests so far have been scant. But the government, mindful that soaring inflation played a crucial role in the 1989 protests that climaxed in the bloody suppression of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, has taken pains to show concern.

Premier Wen Jiabao has said that he checks prices of staples daily, and has frequently said that inflation and corruption are the greatest dangers to national stability.

But the government has other worries as well. For months, it has been vigorously squelching civil dissent by political activists, a campaign that has included the arrests and disappearances of prominent human rights lawyers and social critics like Ai Weiwei, the artist.

The government appears determined to crush even isolated protests lest they merge into a larger uprising that might threaten the Communist Party’s hold on power.

China was hit with a spate of worker protests last year, also fueled by complaints about low wages and high prices, which led to wage increases in some key industries. But inflation now appears to be eroding those gains.

On Friday, in what appeared to be a government bid to assuage some of the current economic unhappiness, Shanghai newspapers reported that the government would reduce the monthly fees that independent taxi drivers must pay the companies that employ them, to $1,260 from $1,305.

In 2008, China was hit with a wave of strikes by taxi and bus drivers unhappy with the erosion in their take-home pay.

Many experts say that China’s own monetary policies fuel inflation, and that the global rise in food and oil prices has only worsened the situation here.

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Justices Decline to Hear Appeal From Chinese Detainees

The prisoners, from the largely Muslim Uighur region of western China, were captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan after the Sept. 11 attacks. They have been determined by the government to pose no threat to the United States, and Justice Breyer wrote that all concerned agree that their detention is “without lawful cause.” The prisoners do not want to be returned to China, where they are considered terrorists and fear torture or execution.

The question in the case, Justice Breyer wrote, is whether judges may order the prisoners to be released here over the government’s objection.

The Supreme Court agreed in 2009 to decide that question, but it dismissed the earlier case last year after the government told the court that it had obtained resettlement offers from Palau, an island nation in the Pacific, and an unidentified second country.

In an unsigned decision last year, the Supreme Court returned the case to the lower courts for further proceedings in light of those developments. “No court has yet ruled in this case in light of the new facts,” the decision said, “and we decline to be the first.”

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which had ruled against the prisoners the first time around, did so again. In a concurring opinion in that decision from which Justice Breyer quoted on Monday, Judge Judith W. Rogers wrote that the prisoners had not contended that they would have been subject to mistreatment had they accepted the resettlement offers, and that the government deemed the solution appropriate.

Justice Breyer also noted that the government remained willing, in its words, once again to “discuss the matter with the government of Palau” and that it “continues to work to find other options for resettlement.”

Given all of that, Justice Breyer wrote, “I see no government-imposed obstacle to petitioners’ timely release and appropriate resettlement.” But he added that the prisoners remained free to return to court “should circumstances materially change.”

Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor joined Justice Breyer’s statement. Justice Elena Kagan was disqualified from the case because she had worked on it as solicitor general.

Her absence made a ruling for the prisoners unlikely had the court agreed to hear the case, Kiyemba v. Obama, No. 10-775, and the more liberal justices may have taken account of that in voting not to hear it.

The justices took no action Monday on Virginia’s unusual request that its challenge to the recent health care law be heard by the Supreme Court before an appeals court has had a chance to weigh in. The case is Virginia v. Sebelius, No. 10-1014.