A collection of news about China

Witnesses: Chinese village sealed
Report: Officials offer money to coverup shooting deaths

Saturday, December 10, 2005 Posted: 0417 GMT (1217 HKT)
BEIJING, China (AP) -- Officials are offering the residents of a besieged Chinese village cash payments to cover up the alleged killing of as many as 20 protesters by authorities earlier this week, a Hong Kong newspaper said Saturday.

Meanwhile, villagers in the community of Dongzhou in the southern province of Guangdong said armed police were continuing to hold them at bay, four days after authorities allegedly opened fire on thousands of demonstrators protesting the amount of compensation being offered for land to be used in the construction of a wind power plant.

Also, a city worker in nearby Shanwei offered the first official comment on the incident, denying there had been fatalities.

The worker, who refused to give his name, ascribed the problem in the area to drug trafficking.

"Some drug traffickers were arrested by local police in Dongzhou," he said. "Their relatives went to the police authorities, asking for the release of those drug traffickers. They stirred up troubles there."

On Saturday the Hong Kong-based English-language South China Morning Post quoted villagers as saying authorities were trying to conceal Dongzhou fatalities by offering families money to give up bodies of the dead.

"They offered us a sum but said we would have to give up the body," an unidentified relative of one slain villager, 31-year-old Wei Jin, was quoted as saying. "We are not going to agree."

Police were carrying photos of villagers and trying to find people linked to the protest, the newspaper said, citing villagers.

Inside the village a tense standoff prevailed, villagers said, with authorities refusing to allow residents to leave the area.

"Many police are surrounding the village today," said one woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. "We are not permitted to leave the village."

On Friday villagers described scenes of chaos during protests on Tuesday over compensation being offered for land being requisitioned for a wind power plant.

They said police fired into a crowd of several thousand people, killing a handful, mostly men. Accounts of the death toll ranged from two and 10, with many missing.

Hong Kong's Apple Daily newspaper on Saturday raised the death toll to nearly 20, citing villagers. There was no explanation for the wide ranging figures.

Also Saturday, another Hong Kong newspaper, Ming Pao Daily News, reported that Guangdong Communist Party Secretary Zhang Dejiang, a member of China's policymaking Politburo, had visited Dongzhou.

State media have made no mention of the incident and except for the Sanwei official, both provincial and local governments have repeatedly refused to comment. This is typical in China, where the ruling Communist Party controls the media and lower-level authorities are leery of releasing information without permission from the central government.

All the villagers contacted in Dongzhou said they were nervous and scared and most did not want to be identified for fear of retribution. One man said the situation was still "tumultuous."

A 14-year-old girl said a local official visited the village on Friday and called the shootings "a misunderstanding."

"He said (he) hoped it wouldn't become a big issue," the girl said over the telephone. "This is not a misunderstanding. I am . I haven't been to school in days."

She added, "Come save us."

Another villager said there were at least 10 deaths.

"The riot police are gathered outside our village. We've been surrounded," she said, sobbing. "Most of the police are armed. We dare not to go out of our home."

One woman said an additional 20 people were wounded.

"They gathered because their land was taken away and they were not given compensation," she said. "The police thought they wanted to make trouble and started shooting."

She said there were "several hundred police with guns in the roads outside the village on Friday. "I'm  of dying. People have already died."

The number of protests in China's vast, poverty-stricken countryside has risen in recent months as anger comes to a head over corruption, land seizures and a yawning wealth gap that experts say now threatens social stability. The government says about 70,000 such conflicts occurred last year, although many more are believed to go unreported.

Clashes have grown more violent, with injuries on both sides and damage done to property as protesters vent their frustration in face of indifferent or bullying authorities.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

from CNN

DONGZHOU, China -- The Chinese government is defending fatal police shootings in a southern village, saying officers opened fire after protesters angered by land requisition assaulted authorities. It said three people were killed, while residents put the toll at up to 20.

In its first statement on the violence, the government said Saturday that hundreds of people attacked a wind power plant Tuesday in Dongzhou, a village northeast of Hong Kong, and assaulted police.

On Sunday, the village was under heavy guard by at least 100 riot police, some with shields and helmets. No weapons were visible. There was no violence, but villagers could be seen arguing angrily with police.

Residents said earlier that families were pleading with police to return the bodies of slain loved ones.

Government banners hung at the village entrance said, "Following the law is the responsibility and obligation of the people" and "Don't listen to rumors, don't let yourself be used." Another tried to placate local anger, promising, "The people's government will always support the people of Dongzhou."

The police shootings Tuesday were the deadliest known clash yet amid growing anger in areas throughout China over government land seizures for construction of power plants, shopping malls and other projects.

Farmers often complain they are paid too little. Some accuse local authorities of stealing compensation money.

Such incidents have alarmed communist leaders, who are promising to spend more to raise living standards in the poor countryside, home to about 800 million people.

By the government's count, China had more than 70,000 cases of rural unrest last year. Protests are growing more violent, with injuries on both sides.

President Hu Jintao's government has made a priority of spreading prosperity to areas left behind by China's 25-year economic boom. But in many areas, families still live on the equivalent of a few hundred dollars a year.

Outside Dongzhou, police on Sunday were stopping vehicles at roadblocks, checking for local men.

Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper said villagers wounded in the shooting were "under police control" in hospitals. It quoted one villager as saying relatives were detained after they went to visit an uncle, who was recovering from a gunshot wound to the chest.

The Post quoted some residents as saying officials were trying to hide the death toll, offering families money to give up bodies.

The official Xinhua News Agency said villagers in Dongzhou were unhappy over land requisition and were demanding more compensation. It said the province has formed a group to investigate.

The villagers attacked the plant using knives, steel spears, sticks, dynamite, gasoline bombs and explosives used in fishing, Xinhua said. It said police dispersed the crowd with tear gas and arrested two people accused of inciting the violence.

However, the attackers regrouped, and after dark began throwing explosives at police, it said.

"olice were forced to open fire in alarm. In the chaos, three villagers died," Xinhua said.

A village woman told The Associated Press by telephone on Saturday that police were holding some bodies, refusing relatives' pleas to return them. The woman, who refused to give her name for fear of retribution, said 10 to 20 people were killed in Tuesday's violence.

A village man, who gave only his surname, Chong, put the number at 15 to 20. He said many families had gone to a local police station seeking compensation, but officers had turned them back.

Chong said dozens of people were missing, but didn't elaborate.

Telephone calls to the local police station went unanswered.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

慘痛

HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- Trade officials from nearly 150 nations are in Hong Kong this week to forge a global trade pact, but an air of uncertainty hangs over the latest meeting of the World Trade Organization.

Doubts about the progress of an international trade agreement, how much has been accomplished to help poorer nations and even the WTO itself persist as trade leaders meet in this special free-market Chinese enclave.

So many challenges face the WTO summit that opens Tuesday that trade officials and economic analysts already are saying expectations should remain low over any deals brokered at the Hong Kong summit. (Full story)

The Hong Kong summit follows WTO meetings in Seattle, United States (1999) and Cancun, Mexico (2003) that saw little substantive agreement on a trade pact.

"We did not have a successful ministerial meeting in Cancun and to have two failed ministerial meetings in a row is going to destroy the credibility of the multilateral system," said John Tsang, chairman of the WTO Conference. "If we miss this time, it's going to be years before we can come back to this."

Still, negotiators hope to lay the groundwork while in Hong Kong to establish a global trade deal sometime next year.

Rich-poor divide
The WTO's member nations have debated for years the best way to promote free and fair trade, something the World Bank says could add $300 billion to the global economy.

The current round of WTO talks -- the "Doha Round" that was launched in 2001 in the Qatari capital, was organized to address the concerns of poorer nations. On Monday, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and the European Union urged leaders at the WTO summit to pass a pact that helps poorer nations. (Full story)

The major issues at the Hong Kong summit include opening farming and service industries to international competition, analysts say. (The issues)

Wealthy countries such as the United States and United Kingdom want developing nations to open telecommunications, tourism and banking to international companies.

"If markets deregulate, that will help us expand in those markets, and again, if there will be further adjustments and deregulations to markets, that generally means an opening up of the economy and basically means the economy will grow as a result," said Mike Smith, president and CEO of HSBC bank.

But developing nations like India want wealthier countries to cut the billions of dollars allocated for farm subsidies. Poorer countries say their farmers cannot compete against subsidized industries.

The United States says it will cut subsidies if other nations follow suit. But the European Union so far isn't budging. India and Brazil, for their part, say they'll cooperate, but only if richer nations do the same.

"The WTO has now become a platform for quarrels," said Wang Kangmao of the East China University of Politics and Law. "eople are now frustrated and are simply taking their regional view. So there is nothing leftover for the WTO."

Hong Kong prepares for thousands
Some 6,000 delegates are expected to attend the conference, along with 2,000 non government organization members and 3,000 journalists.

Authorities also expect as many as 10,000 protesters on the streets. On Sunday, about 4,000 activists held a peaceful march through downtown, chanting slogans and holding up banners that read, ''Stop the WTO'' and ''Our World is Not for Sale.'' Organized protests also are scheduled for Tuesday and on Sunday, the days the summit opens and concludes.

The WTO gatherings tend to be a flashpoint for violence, often when activists are confronted by riot police.

Two years ago at Cancun, protesters cut through metal barricades, battled with police and threatened to storm the meeting hall. One Korean farmer stabbed himself to death.

At the summit in Seattle, five days of riots inflicted millions of dollars of damage to the city. Police arrested 500 people.

Hong Kong authorities have set up a variety of security precautions, blocking off access to roads near the conference site, setting up barricades and enclosing pedestrian walkways in nets.

The Associated Press reported that local authorities have glued bricks into the sidewalks to prevent protesters from pulling them up and throwing them.

South Korean activists, known for joining in fierce battles with riot police and for dramatic gestures including committing suicide to highlight their causes, warned they planned to escalate their protests as the WTO meeting progresses. (Full story)

CNN's Eunice Yoon contributed to this report.

Copyright 2005 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report.

HONG KONG, China (Reuters) -- Pressure on Western firms to improve conditions at factories in China is paying off, experts say, with some firms granting workers rights that are still taboo for most employees in the Communist state.

After being faced with boycotts in the 1990s, many international companies adopted stricter labor codes to counter accusations by consumers and labor activists that the firms were operating sweatshop- factories in developing countries.

Now factory managers in China supplying big retailers such as Nike say they regularly receive surprise audits, with inspectors turning up unannounced to question workers about their food, working hours, and even checking that their beds are a proper minimum size.

"There's a real push to get the rules up to international standards. (Beijing is) slowly exploring letting businesses get on with it -- they do it very discreetly," said Stephen Frost, a research fellow at Hong Kong's City University.

For its part, China is eager to burnish its image to attract further investment and has stepped up labor law reforms, and Beijing has approached the International Labor Organization to ratify parts of its labor code.

"Ever since China joined the World Trade Organization and emerged as a major economic power, they are very aware that they have to play by the global rules, and I think that's why we have seen so many reforms to the labor laws in recent years," said Auret van Heerden, president of non-profit Fair Labor Association.

Open for business
To be sure, many international companies continue to be drawn to China precisely because they can escape the protective labor and environmental regulations that contribute to the higher cost of production in their home countries.

International protests have led some companies to raise working standards above what is legally required in China. Even so, pay and working conditions in China generally remain far below those in developed countries, including at companies that have set new minimum standards.

"China does not have to depend on having clean manufacturers to get work -- what China has is incredible mass and economies of scale," said Frost.

Protests have had an impact, acknowledges Reiner Hengstmann, global head of environmental and social affairs at German sports brand Puma AG, which works with Fair Labor.

"Consumer pressure is definitely one case, while in general all companies have implemented their standards and are looking very closely into the manufacturing process now," he said. Improved working conditions are "definitely" good for business, he said, noting they help attract skilled workers amid a labor shortage in southern China.

Hong Kong supply chain manager Linmark Group Ltd. has helped China National Textile and Apparel Council (CNTAC), an industry group, promote a charter on workers' rights.

And Nike agreed to publish a list of more than 700 of its contract factories around the world in an effort to crack down on abuses, winning praise from human rights activists.

Room for engagement
A number of firms' labor codes include freedom of association and collective bargaining, which theoretically pave the way to full trade union rights to negotiate with management.

But China, which recently granted rights for collective bargaining and freedom of association, only recognizes the Communist Party-controlled All China Federation of Trade Unions, outlawing any attempts to form independent unions.

"Chinese workers are not allowed to form a real, independent trade union and, therefore, they have no power to negotiate with their employers," said Lucy Lu, CNTAC's spokeswoman in Beijing.

CNTAC, whose code of conduct specifically mentions collective bargaining, is headed by a government-appointed official. Beijing's willingness to allow a prominent industry group to encourage collective bargaining might be a sign the government is responding to outside pressure, some observers say.

"Freedom of association, collective bargaining, those are areas where ... there is room for engagement," said William Anderson, head of social and environmental affairs at Adidas-Salomon AG.

But the move to promote in-house labor standards may be mostly practical, since China's labor laws can be confusing to implement and some manufacturers ignore them altogether.

"Weak enforcement of Chinese labor laws is a well-known fact, and the existence of a variety of operating standards makes it even harder to implement them, for the factories are not sure which one they should follow," said Li Qiang, founder of New York-based China Labor Watch.

Despite constraints on collective action, China's workers also are becoming more vocal in demanding better working conditions. Last year, workers staged 74,000 protests, up 16,000 from 2003.

But Fair Labor's van Heerden sees progress, at least among foreign companies operating in China.

"If you spend a lot of time on the ground in China," he said, "you would see that the situation is moving a lot quicker than expected."

Copyright 2005 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Maybe slowness is not a good thing, anyway it is improving. That's good to hear.  on one hand, The government should care about the labours and try their best to improve the laboub's work and living conditions, the other hand, the labor themselves should strive for their rights in proper time. only do the two intergrate together, the conditions will improve fast and good, whichmost lalours are looking forward to...

BEIJING, China (AP) -- China is damming a waterway in its northeast in an effort to reduce the impact of a river-borne toxic spill flowing towards a city in Russia's Far East, the government said Saturday.

Work began Friday to dam the waterway along the Heilong River, which is carrying the spill toward Khabarovsk, a city of 480,000 people, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

The waterway links the Heilong to the Wusuli River, which also supplies water to Khabarovsk, and authorities hope to shield it from pollution.

The dam is the latest Chinese effort to repair strains with Russia over the slick caused by a November 13 chemical plant explosion that already has disrupted water supplies to millions of people in China.

"The temporary dam will be removed after the pollutant slick passes Khabarovsk along the Heilong River," Xinhua said. "China will bear the cost for the construction and demolition of the dam."

Moscow is China's main foreign arms supplier and an important source of oil for the energy-hungry Chinese economy.

The spill of 100 tonnes of benzene, nitrobenzene and other toxins was spewed into the Songhua River, which flows into the Heilong.

Russia has built a dam on another waterway linked to the Heilong near Khabarovsk in an effort to move the slick past the city more quickly and protect nearby wetlands.

China also has sent 150 tonnes of carbon to Khabarovsk for use in water filtration plants.

The head of the slick arrived Thursday in Tongjiang, a Chinese border city where the Songhua flows into the Heilong, Xinhua said.

The slick has lengthened and slowed as the rivers freeze, stretching from 90 kilometers (60 miles) in length at its start to 150 kilometers (90 miles) at the last report.

Russian experts have begun taking regular water samples from the Heilong, Xinhua said.

China hasn't given a figure for the total damage and economic losses from the slick. But the biggest city on the river, Harbin, a Chinese industrial center of 3.8 million people, is borrowing 640 million yuan ($79 million) to pay for recovery efforts.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistribute

BEIJING, China (AP) -- Rescuers have found the bodies of 39 coal miners in a flooded mine in central China and were searching for three other miners who were still missing, the government said Saturday.

The privately owned mine in Xin'an County in Henan province flooded on December 2 when a nearby river broke its banks and flowed into the mine.

"The 39 miners had been retrieved and rescue operation is still going on," the official Xinhua News Agency said. "Most of the victims were natives of the town."

Ten mine managers have been detained and will face "stern punishment" for the accident, Xinhua said. It reported earlier that the mine's owner lacked a safety license.

A total of 76 miners were working underground at the time of the disaster and 34 escaped.

Six divers went into the mine's flooded shafts in hopes of finding survivors in possible air pockets. But no one has been found alive since the day of the flood.

China's coal mines are the world's deadliest, with more than 5,000 deaths reported every year in fires, floods and other underground disasters.

Most are blamed on disregard for safety rules or lack of required ventilation and fire-control equipment.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- China is likely to declare itself the world's fourth largest economy next week, having leapfrogged Italy, France and Britain, helped by a likely huge revision of its gross domestic product figures.

Economists say the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which is due to release part of the results of its first national economic census on December 20, is likely to put a much bigger figure on the size of China's services sector.

The South China Morning Post, citing unnamed economists, reported on Tuesday that the agency would probably revise GDP by as much as $300 billion, or about 20 percent of 2004 output.

A revision of that magnitude could catapult China from the world's seventh-largest economy into fourth spot, now occupied by Britain.

Jim O'Neill, chief global economist at Goldman Sachs in London, said China could attain that status even without such a big revision based on growth rates and currency changes in 2005.

Not only has China grown far more quickly than Italy, France and Britain this year, but the yuan has risen about 2.5 percent against the dollar, further boosting its output when measured in dollars. The euro and sterling, by contrast, have fallen.

"China could squeak in ahead of Britain even without a revision," O'Neill said. "It just goes to show how much it's contributing to the world economy."

Economists said an upwards revision of 20 percent, as reported by the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, would be in line with their own estimates -- or could even be too modest.

Chen Xingdong, chief China economist for BNP Paribas Peregrine in Beijing, said he would not be surprised if the NBS revised up its estimate of China's GDP, which totalled $1.65 trillion in 2004, by 15 percent to 20 percent.

China's number-crunchers have failed to capture the boom in small and medium-sized industrial enterprises, Chen said.

"We always argue that it has been largely underestimated for a long, long time," he said. "Even a number like 15 percent is not that large for us."

Understated
Dong Tao, chief economist for non-Japan Asia at Credit Suisse First Boston (Hong Kong) Ltd, said China's GDP would still be understated even if it was revised up by $300 billion.

"There's a massive under-reporting of GDP in the service sector," Tao said.

He cited the relatively low quality of data collection in China as one reason for that. Economists have long pointed to shortcomings in China's statistics, due to a central planning legacy that put priority on collecting data on the production of physical goods from state-owned enterprises.

Tao said another reason was that many service enterprises fall through the statisticians' net because they fail to report income for tax reasons.

"Just take a walk into any restaurant in Shenzhen or Beijing. If you buy a meal without asking for the receipt, for tax reasons these things will not be in China's GDP," he said.

Still, Tao said that, on CSFB's calculation, China would probably need another year before it could catch up with Britain, whose GDP totalled $2.14 trillion in 2004, according to the World Bank.

France came fifth in the World Bank's rankings, with 2004 GDP of $2.00 trillion, and Italy sixth, with output of $1.67 trillion. The United States, followed by Japan and Germany, topped the list.

Copyright 2005 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.