BEIJING: Police in southwest China are investigating an allegation of rape against a popular Taoist priest, whose thousands of followers include a business tycoon and a pop singer, state media said on Monday.
Li Yi allegedly raped a female college student in 2004 or 2005 and then tried to silence her by paying her 7,000 yuan (over 1,000 dollars), the Global Times and the Southern Metropolis Daily said, citing a former student of the priest.
"The rumour about the rape has been circulating around the temple for a long time," the former follower was quoted by the Global Times as saying.
The Southern Metropolis Daily said police in the southwestern mega-city of Chongqing had confirmed they were investigating the allegations against Li, but police said they were unaware of the case.
State media also said the local committee for religious affairs was looking into the matter. Officials there declined to comment when contacted by AFP about the reports.
Li has a reported 30,000 followers, who include business leaders such as Jack Ma, the founder of Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba.com, and celebrities such as Chinese pop singer Faye Wong. The priest is renowned for his expensive health and philosophy programmes at the Shaolong Taoist Temple near Chongqing, the reports said.http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6318210.cms?prtpage=1
2. Book critical of China’s premier to go on sale
HONG KONG: A controversial book that criticizes China’s premier Wen Jiabao is set to hit Hong Kong bookstores on Monday, after mainland Chinese police warned its dissident author he could be thrown in jail.
Yu Jie, the 36-year-old author of "Wen Jiabao: China’s Best Actor", was interrogated in Beijing by state security agents in July and warned that publishing the book could see him sent to prison.
Bao Pu, head of Hong Kong publisher New Century Press, said he was going ahead with the book’s release on Monday.
"The printing factory will deliver the book by late afternoon," he said. "There has been no pressure or interference whatsoever (in publishing the book)."
However, Bao wrote in his foreword for the book that the author was warned after authorities knew about their plan to have it published in Hong Kong.
"The police’s logic is that the leader is not an ordinary person."
"Criticising the leader is a very serious criminal case. It would be very likely for (Yu) to be punished severely like the way Liu Xiaobo was," Bao wrote, referring to the dissident who was jailed for 11 years for promoting a manifesto calling for China to become a democracy.
Yu’s books have been banned on the mainland since 2004 but are widely available in Hong Kong.
The book on Wen is likely to cause shockwaves, as China’s premier enjoys a generally good reputation both at home and abroad, where he is sometimes described as progressive.
But Yu said in an interview in July that the 67-year-old premier had actually worked to further restrict civil liberties and increase the powers of China’s feared secret police.
The premier is sometimes referred to as "Grandpa Wen" because of his down-to-earth interactions with the public but Yu’s book is scathing of the way Wen dealt with opposition voices and criticism. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6317989.cms?prtpage=1
3.China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy: The NY Times
SHANGHAI — After three decades of spectacular growth, China passed Japan in the second quarter to become the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States, according to government figures released early Monday.
The milestone, though anticipated for some time, is the most striking evidence yet that China’s ascendance is for real and that the rest of the world will have to reckon with a new economic superpower.
The recognition came early Monday, when Tokyo said that Japan’s economy was valued at about $1.28 trillion in the second quarter, slightly below China’s $1.33 trillion. Japan’s economy grew 0.4 percent in the quarter, Tokyo said, substantially less than forecast. That weakness suggests that China’s economy will race past Japan’s for the full year.
Experts say unseating Japan — and in recent years passing Germany, France and Great Britain — underscores China’s growing clout and bolsters forecasts that China will pass the United States as the world’s biggest economy as early as 2030. America’s gross domestic product was about $14 trillion in 2009.
“This has enormous significance,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It reconfirms what’s been happening for the better part of a decade: China has been eclipsing Japan economically. For everyone in China’s region, they’re now the biggest trading partner rather than the U.S. or Japan.”
For Japan, whose economy has been stagnating for more than a decade, the figures reflect a decline in economic and political power. Japan has had the world’s second-largest economy for much of the last four decades, according to the World Bank. And during the 1980s, there was even talk about Japan’s economy some day overtaking that of the United States.
But while Japan’s economy is mature and its population quickly aging, China is in the throes of urbanization and is far from developed, analysts say, meaning it has a much lower standard of living, as well as a lot more room to grow. Just five years ago, China’s gross domestic product was about $2.3 trillion, about half of Japan’s.
This country has roughly the same land mass as the United States, but it is burdened with a fifth of the world’s population and insufficient resources.
Its per capita income is more on a par with those of impoverished nations like Algeria, El Salvador and Albania — which, along with China, are close to $3,600 — than that of the United States, where it is about $46,000.
Yet there is little disputing that under the direction of the Communist Party, China has begun to reshape the way the global economy functions by virtue of its growing dominance of trade, its huge hoard of foreign exchange reserves and United States government debt and its voracious appetite for oil, coal, iron ore and other natural resources.
China is already a major driver of global growth. The country’s leaders have grown more confident on the international stage and have begun to assert greater influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America, with things like special trade agreements and multibillion dollar resource deals. www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/business/global/16yuan.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
4. Tensions Over Chinese Mining Venture in Peru: By Simon Romero in the NY Times, Aug 15
SAN JUAN DE MARCONA, Peru — In its worldwide quest for commodities, China has scoured South America for everything from Brazilian soybeans to Guyanese timber and Venezuelan oil. But long before it made any of those forays, China put down stakes in this desolate mining town in Peru’s southern desert.
The year was 1992. Chinese companies had begun to look abroad. One steelmaker, the Shougang Corporation of Beijing, set its sights on an iron ore mine here and bought it in a move that seemed particularly bold. At the time, Peru was still plagued by attacks by the Maoist guerrillas of the Shining Path.
But the hero’s welcome for Shougang soon faded. Workers at the mine, which was founded by Americans in the 1950s and nationalized by leftist generals in the 1970s, began fomenting the unexpected: a revolt that has endured to this day, marked by repeated strikes, clashes with the police and even arson attacks against their nominally Communist bosses from China.
“We quickly realized that we were being exploited to help build the new China, but without seeing any of the rewards for doing so,” said Honorato Quispe, 63, a longtime union official at the mine, where workers have held three strikes this year alone, including an 11-day stoppage last month.
The long-festering conflict with Shougang over wages, environmental pollution and Shougang’s treatment of residents of this company town does not square well with China’s celebratory vision of its rising profile in Latin America, in which everyone benefits and a “win-win” is “the consensus.” Latin America, as this idea of so-called South-South cooperation goes, sells China raw materials like copper, oil or iron; in return, the region buys goods like cellphones, cars and cheap plastic toys.
The tension in Marcona, one of the most conflict-ridden towns in a country increasingly prone to conflict over mining and energy projects, suggests that China’s engagement in the region — like that of the United States, Britain and other powers that preceded it in Latin America — is not without pitfalls.
While not the dominant theme in the region’s relations with China, a wariness is crystallizing in some countries over the booming trade with China.
Reactions to this surge largely focus on cheap Chinese imports or on China’s assertive efforts to win access to energy reserves. In both Brazil and Argentina, for instance, manufacturers accused Chinese companies of unfairly dumping Chinese products in their markets, prompting new tariffs against some Chinese imports.
But perhaps nowhere in the region has wariness and regret over Chinese investment coalesced as much as in Marcona. With about 15,000 residents, it still has the look of a mining town in the American Southwest, a legacy of its construction in the 1950s by engineers from the United States.
The Americans are long gone, but the Chinese managers now live in the same ranch-style houses built for their predecessors in a district called Playa Hermosa (Beautiful Beach). They drive sport utility vehicles and talk to subordinates through translators. They eat meals at their own cafeteria, avoiding mixing with Peruvians in town.
Workers here said the problems with Shougang began in the 1990s, when the company slashed the mine’s work force to 1,700 from 3,000 and brought in some Chinese workers. Resistance in the form of strikes soon convinced the managers to return their workers to China.
Resentment also emerged when Shougang did not invest a promised $150 million in the mine and the town’s infrastructure, opting instead to pay a $14 million fine for failing to do so, and left blocks of housing once occupied by workers vacant in a town with an acute housing shortage.
At a union building, workers spoke of low wages and company resistance to enacting government-mandated raises, and they claimed that Shougang had dumped chemical waste into the sea.
On the other side of Marcona from Playa Hermosa, some workers at the mine live in bleak company housing. Others rent squalid rooms in the town. A lower class of squatters subsists on Marcona’s edge in a driftwood shantytown, Ruta del Sol.
“The Chinese see us as little more than slaves,” said Hermilia Zamudio, 58, a resident of Ruta del Sol, whose husband was fired from the mine after working there for almost 30 years. “They deem it beneath them to talk to us, and when they need to address problems here, they do so with their thugs.”
Clashes with private security guards and with the police, who receive a monthly stipend paid by Shougang, are common in Ruta del Sol, on land where Shougang says it has concessionary rights to exploit deposits of dolomite, a mineral it hopes to extract for smelting iron and steel.
At one clash last year, Wilber Huamanñahui, 21, a construction worker, was shot dead as he and dozens of others tried to take possession of land controlled by Shougang. The case remains unsolved. “I know there will never be justice for his killing,” said his widow, Zoila Benites, 18.
Elected officials here still express dismay over the inability to punish those responsible for Mr. Huamanñahui’s killing. “We think there’s an effort by judicial authorities to delay the process for four or five years until the matter is forgotten,” Joel Rosales, the mayor of San Juan de Marcona, said this month.
Shougang, which keeps its Chinese managers cloistered away from the news media, has generally responded to such statements with silence. An effort to approach Chinese executives at their private cafeteria here was met by a threat of forceful expulsion by a guard. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/world/americas/15chinaperu.html?ref=asia&pagewanted=print
