Myanmar-China

24 remain trapped in China coalmine

News Round Up

Beijing:  Two dozen workers were trapped in a flooded mine in northeast China on Sunday, the latest accident in the country’s notoriously dangerous coal industry.

The State Work Safety Administration has dispatched a team to investigate the Saturday afternoon flood at a mine in Jixi city of Heilongjiang province, said a man at the administration who refused to be identified. No further details were available, he said.

News of the trapped workers came one day after a blast at a workers’ dormitory killed at least 17 people in a northern city with a history of deadly mine accidents. The blast left a crater 65 feet (20 meters) across and about 16 feet (5 meters) deep, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

The explosion in the early morning hours on Saturday was blamed on explosives that had been illegally hidden in the area, Xinhua reported, citing a senior official with the mine’s owner, Yangquan Coal Industry (Group) Co. Ltd. One person has been detained.

Another seven people were seriously injured in the 2am blast at the Liugou mine in Linfen city in the northern province of Shanxi, Xinhua said.

It was not clear whether the mine was licensed. China has been trying to improve the safety of its mining industry, which is by far the world’s deadliest, but an unknown number of illegal mines exist to profit off the country’s huge appetite for power.

The website of the Yangquan Coal Industry (Group) Co Ltd says the company is state-owned. Phone calls to the company rang unanswered Sunday.

The gritty city of Linfen is especially well known for coal mine accidents. The city had nine major coalmine disasters, with more than 10 deaths each, between 2003 and 2008, the China Labour Bulletin reported last year.

The city’s most powerful job, that of party secretary, went unfilled for more than six months in 2008 and 2009, as officials appeared to shy away.

"The most unwanted job in the Chinese Communist Party," said the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin, which tracks labor issues on the mainland, when the post was finally filled with Xie Hai, who remains in the job.

His predecessor was fired after a massive landslide from an illegal mining operation submerged a village under Linfen’s oversight and killed at least 277 people in late 2008.

This year, Coalmine disasters in China have killed 351 people through July 18, according to the website of China’s work safety administration.http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/latest_news.php?nid=25072

2. China Pushes to End Public Shaming

 

BEIJING — The Chinese government has called for an end to the public shaming of criminal suspects, a time-honored cudgel of Chinese law enforcement but one that has increasingly rattled the public.

According to the state-run media, the Ministry of Public Security has ordered the police to stop parading suspects in public and has called on local departments to enforce laws in a “rational, calm and civilized manner.”

The new regulations are thought to be a response to the public outcry over a recent spate of “shame parades,” in which those suspected of being prostitutes are shackled and forced to walk in public.

Last October, the police in Henan Province took to the Internet, posting photographs of women suspected of being prostitutes. Other cities have been publishing the names and addresses of convicted sex workers and those of their clients. The most widely circulated images, taken this month in the southern city of Dongguan, included young women roped together and paraded barefoot through crowded city streets.

The police later said they were not punishing the women, but only seeking their help in the pursuit of an investigation.

The public response, at least on the Internet, has tended toward outrage, with many postings expressing sympathy for the women. “Why aren’t corrupt officials dragged through the streets?” read one posting. “These women are only trying to feed themselves.”

But much of the anger has been directed at the police, who are a focus of growing public mistrust. Although corruption among the police is rife in China, the disdain has been further heightened by a series of widely publicized episodes involving the torture of detainees, suspects who mysteriously died in custody and innocent people jailed on trumped-up evidence.

One man spent 10 years in prison for murder after the police extracted his confession — only to be freed when his supposed victim turned out to be alive.

Mao Shoulong, a professor of public policy at People’s University in Beijing, said the new regulations were necessary to rein in the worst impulses of the police.

“There are more modern tools for law enforcement,” he said. “Besides, if these kinds of tactics are allowed, the police will get used to dealing with problems outside of the law.”

The most recent wave of prostitution arrests involving thousands of suspects is part of a seven-month “strike hard” campaign aimed at gambling, drug use and violent crime. As part of the increased law enforcement efforts, judicial authorities have been encouraged to mete out swifter, and harsher, punishment. It is the fourth such campaign since 1983.

Public shaming of the accused and the condemned has been a long tradition in China — one that the Communist Party embraced with zeal during episodes of class struggle and anticrime crusades. Although public executions have been discontinued, provincial cities still hold mass sentencing rallies, during which convicts wearing confessional placards are driven though the streets in open trucks.

The practice has also taken hold in some Chinese neighborhoods of New York, with some supermarket owners threatening to post photographs of shoplifters and call the police unless the suspects hand over cash, sometimes demanding hundreds of dollars. The legality of the practice, however, remains in question.

It is unclear whether the directive against the humiliation of suspects will have the desired effect. Similar rules and regulations have been passed down through the years, beginning in 1988, when the Supreme People’s Court ordered prosecutors and the police to protect the identities of the accused. In 2007, the country’s top judicial and law enforcement bodies issued a similar notice that forbade the parading of convicts.

Even if such directives must be issued repeatedly, Joshua Rosenzweig of the Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group, said he was somewhat encouraged that the government recognized the need to abolish such practices.“Repetition can increase pressure and help force change, but ultimately it will take a great deal of political will to implement these kinds of changes,” he said.http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/world/asia/28china.html?ref=asia&pagewanted=print

3.Chinese economy set to pass Japan’s

BEIJING — China is set to overtake Japan as the world’s second-largest economy in a resurgence that is changing everything from the global balance of military and financial power to how cars are designed.

By some measures it has already moved to second place after the U.S. in total economic output — a milestone that would underline a pre-eminence not seen since the 18th century, when the Middle Kingdom last served as Asia’s military, technological and cultural power.

China is already the biggest exporter, auto buyer and steel producer, and its worldwide influence is growing. The fortunes of companies from Detroit automakers to Brazilian iron miners depend on spending by China’s consumers and corporations. And rising wealth brings political presence: Chinese pressure helped to win developing countries a bigger voice in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

"Japan was the powerhouse driving the rest of Asia," said Rob Subbaraman, chief Asia economist for Nomura Securities. "Now the tide is turning and China is becoming a powerful influence on the rest of Asia, including Japan."

China‘s rise has produced glaring contradictions. The wealth gap between an elite who profited most from three decades of reform and its poor majority is so extreme that China has dozens of billionaires while average income for the rest of its 1.3 billion people is among the world’s lowest. Beijing has launched two manned space missions and is talking about exporting high-speed trains to California and Europe while families in remote areas live in cave houses cut into hillsides.

Japan‘s people still are among the world’s richest, with a per capita income of $37,800 last year, compared with China’s $3,600. So are Americans at $42,240, their economy still by far the biggest. But Japan is trapped in a two-decade-old economic slump, the U.S. is wrestling with a financial crisis, and China’s sheer economic size and the lure of its vast consumer market adds to its clout abroad.

Its explosive growth has driven conflicting shifts in Asia and beyond, triggering a scramble for commercial opportunity but fueling unease that the wealth is helping to finance a military buildup to press the communist government’s claims in the region.

"I think everyone in the region is trying to benefit from Chinese economic dynamism but at the same time is trying to make sure China does not become a regional hegemon," said Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian newspaper.

Exactly when China passes Japan formally will be unclear until after this year ends. It depends on shifting exchange rates and data reported in different forms by the two governments.

Chinese GDP in 2009 was $4.98 trillion and Japan’s was $5.07 trillion. In 2010, Chinese GDP was $1.335 trillion for the April-June quarter — a period for which Tokyo has yet to report. China is growing at 10 percent a year, while Japan’s expansion this year is forecast at no more than 3 percent.

"On that basis, the crossover probably happened last quarter," said Julian Jessop, chief international economist for Capital Economics in London, in an e-mail.

Beijing appears to take it for granted that it already has overtaken Japan.

"China already is the world’s second-biggest economic body," said a deputy central bank governor, Yi Gang, in a policy discussion posted July 30 on the foreign exchange agency’s website.

Australia has been one of the biggest beneficiaries as China’s voracious appetite for iron ore, coal and other commodities drove a mining boom that kept its economy growing through the global crisis.

That booming trade prompted Australia to reconsider its stance toward China, previously seen as a communist aggressor. In 2008, then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a Mandarin-speaker who was a diplomat in Beijing, called for closer political, economic and academic engagement with the Chinese government.

Unlike Japan, which renounced aggressive force after its World War II defeat, Beijing sees itself as Asia’s rightful military leader. It has openly possessed nuclear weapons since the 1960s and is spending heavily to build up the Communist Party’s military arm, the 2.5 million-soldier People’s Liberation Army.

Beijing’s military outlays are the world’s second-highest and have tripled since 2000 to an estimated $100 billion last year, though well behind Washington’s $617 billion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

China’s demand for oil, iron ore and other raw materials is pumping money into developing economies as far-flung as Angola and Kazakhstan that supply them. Chinese companies are making inroads into Africa in search of resources and markets.

"Now, Africa has an alternative development model," said Derek Scissors, a Heritage Foundation scholar in Washington. Instead of Western investment with environmental or other strings attached, Scissors said, "they now see the Chinese as an alternative: ‘We don’t want to deal with you. We’ll get some Chinese state-owned company to put $1.5 billion into this mining project.’ "

Chinese pressure helped to trigger the biggest changes in decades in the U.S.- and European-dominated World Bank and IMF, which agreed to give China, Turkey, Mexico and other developing countries a bigger say in picking leaders and deciding policy.

The boom has helped communist leaders pay to cultivate "soft power" — educational and media activity to win hearts and minds abroad. Of course, even after slipping to third place, Japan is still rich and comfortable — the Switzerland of Asia.

The society that created hybrid cars and the Walkman has 99 percent literacy and the world’s longest life expectancy at 83 years. Tokyo is the capital of fine dining, with more Michelin-starred restaurants than Paris.www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/31/china-sets-milestone-economy-passes-japans/print/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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