Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
The PAGEs (see Tabs, above) attempt to make the information more meaningful by putting some structure to the information we have researched and assembled since 2006.
British supermarket is investigating after newspaper report that six-year-old girl found message in card saying it was packed by Shanghai prisoners
Britain’s biggest retailer Tesco said it was “shocked by these allegations”. Photo: AFP
British supermarket giant Tesco suspended a Chinese supplier of Christmas cards on Sunday after a press report said a customer found a message written inside a card saying it had been packed by foreign prisoners who were victims of forced labour.
“We abhor the use of prison labour and would never allow it in our supply chain,” a Tesco spokesman said on Sunday.
“We were shocked by these allegations and immediately suspended the factory where these cards are produced and launched an investigation.”
donates £300,000 (US$390,000) a year from the sale of the cards to the charities British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK.
The Sunday Times said the message inside the card read: “We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu Prison China. Forced to work against our will. Please help us and notify human rights organisation.
“Use the link to contact Mr Peter Humphrey.”
Peter Humphrey is a British former journalist and corporate fraud investigator.
Humphrey and his American wife Yu Yingzeng were both sentenced in China in 2014
for illegally obtaining private records of Chinese citizens and selling the information to clients including drug maker GlaxoSmithKline. The couple were deported from China in June 2015 after their jail terms were reduced.
The message inside the card was found by a six-year-old girl, Florence Widdicombe, in London, The Sunday Times said. Her father contacted Humphrey via the LinkedIn social network.
Writing in The Sunday Times, Humphrey said he did not know the identities or the nationalities of the prisoners who put the note into the card, but he “had no doubt they are Qingpu prisoners who knew me before my release in June 2015 from the suburban prison where I spent 23 months”.
Tesco, Britain’s biggest retailer, said it had a comprehensive auditing process in place.
“This supplier was independently audited as recently as last month and no evidence was found to suggest they had broken our rule banning the use of prison labour,” the spokesman said.
“If a supplier breaches these rules, we will immediately and permanently delist them.”
Sky News said the cards were produced at the Zheijiang Yunguang Printing factory, which is about 100km (60 miles) from Shanghai Qingpu prison.
The company, which prints cards and books for food and pharmaceutical companies, says on its website it supplies Tesco.
Two phone calls and one emailed request for comment to the company went unanswered after usual business hours on Sunday.
Humphrey and his wife said in their trial they had not thought they were doing anything illegal in their activities in China.
Image copyright EENADU NEWSPAPER/A SRINIVASImage caption The photo that sparked an outcry
A five-year-old in the southern city of Hyderabad was enrolled in school after a photo of her peeking into a classroom sparked an outcry. BBC Telugu’s Deepthi Bathini reports on why the photo doesn’t tell the full story.
Divya is something of a local celebrity in the slum where she lives. The shy five-year-old was the subject of a recent photo which went viral – it showed her clutching a bowl and peeking into a classroom at the local government school.
The touching image was published in a Telugu newspaper on 7 November with a caption that translates from the Telugu as “hungry gaze”.
It quickly grabbed people’s attention: a children’s rights activist shared it on Facebook, lamenting that yet another child was being denied the right to food and education.
It had such an impact, the school enrolled Divya the following day.
But her father, M Lakshman, says the photo and the outcry it provoked was in fact unfair to him and his wife, Yashoda, who works as a sweeper.
Image caption Five-year-old Divya enrolled in school after a photo of her in a newspaper went viral
“I felt sad when I saw the photo,” he told the BBC. “Divya has parents and we are working so hard to give her a good future – but she was portrayed as a hungry orphan.”
Mr Lakshman says he was waiting for Divya to turn six so he could enrol her in a government hostel where his other two daughters are studying. The couple also have a son, who has finished school and is now applying to college while helping Mr Lakshman, who works as a rag picker.
Breaking the cycle
Divya and her parents live in a one-room hut in a shanty town in the heart of Hyderabad. The slum is about 100 metres from the government school, where Divya was photographed. Most of the 300 families living here are daily wage labourers and their children attend the school nearby.
The home is sparse and plastic and glass are piled outside, ready to be sold for recycling. He says between him and his wife, they earn about 10,000 rupees ($139; £108) a month, which pays for their food and clothes. Education, however, is free for the children, since they are all enrolled in government-run schools.
Mr Lakshman knows what it is to struggle: he himself grew up without parents and always battled to earn a decent living. “I never wanted my children to have the life I had. So I made sure they all go to school.”
The photo, he adds, was especially hurtful because he has also been taking care of his brother’s five children.
Image caption Divya’s father said the outcry over the photo was “unfair” to his family
“My brother and sister-in-law passed away sometime ago. I didn’t want their five children to grow up as orphans. So, I enrolled all of them in a hostel and I take care of them.”
When asked why Divya had gone to the government school with a bowl in hand, Mr Lakshman explains that a lot of the younger children from the slum go there around lunch time to take advantage of the free midday meal – a government programme which provides cooked meals to children in more than a million schools – which they know about because their older brothers and sisters are already enrolled.
“Divya doesn’t go every day but she happened to go on that day and someone photographed her,” he explained.
This was confirmed by teachers at the school who told the BBC that some children brought lunch from home, so leftovers over from the free meal scheme would be given to the younger children who had not yet joined.
“Children are children. And there is no day-care centre, so a lot of these children hang around the school anyway,” says one teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Image caption Divya says she’s excited to go to school
Mr Lakshman and his neighbours acknowledged the lack of an anganwadi, or government-sponsored day-care centre, in the neighbourhood was a major problem as parents had no place to leave their children so they could go to work.
The local school inspector, SU Shivram Prasad, says he hopes the attention generated by the Divya’s photo will hasten the process of setting up one up.
“It will help the parents and the children can eat a nutritious meal,” he adds.
Teachers at the school also hope that the media spotlight will improve facilities. They say there is an acute shortage of staff and teaching materials, and the school did not even have a compound wall, which meant they have to constantly watch the children during their breaks.
Divya, however, is excited to be going to school. She insists on taking her school bag with her everywhere, even to the playground. Other than saying her name, she does not answer any questions.
“She is a very calm child,” says Mr Lakshman, as his daughter holds his hand and kisses it.
And he admits that despite everything, the photo did do some good.
“Now other children who are Divya’s age are also enrolling in school. So that makes me happy.”
Cai Rui and Wu Chen are the proud parents of twins but they had to go abroad for the IVF treatment they needed to bring the children into the world
Wu Chen (far left) and Cai Rui (right) are raising their young family together in China. Photo: Cai Rui
When three-year-old twins Harry and Helen are asked about their dad, they have a set answer.
The children tell the curious that they do have a father but he lives in the United States.
Harry and Helen live on the outskirts of Kunming in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan with their two mothers, Cai Rui and Wu Chen.
Cai gave birth to the twins after being implanted at a US IVF clinic with ova from Wu and sperm from an American donor.
The couple were forced to seek treatment abroad because Chinese clinics will only perform IVF procedures on couples who can produce a marriage certificate – something limited to heterosexuals.
For Cai and Wu, it was a leap into the unknown – there was little information in China and few others had gone public about their experience.
But their biological clocks were ticking and the couple were used to taking difficult paths.
Gay Chinese find a place to be themselves on ‘Rainbow Cruise’ to Vietnam
Cai and Wu met while studying in Britain and registered their marriage there in 2014. Both women were in their thirties and soon began thinking about having children.
They looked forward to being mothers and felt the experience would strengthen their relationship even more, Cai said.
“I think it’s natural for a woman to aspire to be a mother once she turns 30,” she said. “We were both aware that the older a woman is, the harder it is for her to get pregnant. So it’s an immediate thing for us.”
Their parents were also worried about the couple’s welfare as they grew older.
“Our parents have accepted our relationship, thinking it’s our own choice. However, they worried that when we are old, there will be no children to look after us,” Cai said.
Wu Chen (left) and Cai Rui (right) brought their twin children Helen and Harry into the world with help from IVF treatment in the United States. Photo: Cai Rui
The couple embarked on two rounds of IVF in London, with Cai impregnated with Wu’s fertilised ova, but both rounds failed.
They then returned to China and searched for other options but at the time there were few posts by Chinese lesbians sharing their experience of having babies abroad, Cai said.
So they contacted three clinics in the US and finally decided to go through one in Portland, Oregon, in large part because of the city’s gay-friendly reputation.
Cai said that when it came time to choose a sperm donor, they were less concerned about his outward appearance and more focused on his physical and mental health, his academic record and his experience growing up.
“We wanted to make sure our baby’s father was a healthy and interesting guy,” she said.
The couple chose the sperm of a white man and implanted two fertilised eggs into Cai’s body to raise the chances of success. Twelve weeks later, the couple flew back to Beijing where Harry and Helen were born on April 1, 2016.
Thanks to a more relaxed population policy since 2016, Cai was able to register the children as a single mother while the children were given her partner’s surname.
“So my lover is their biological mother and I am their birth mother,” Cai said.
Small victory for China’s online lesbian community as censored forum is restored, but another remains blocked
The family lived in Beijing for about a year before moving to Yunnan for work commitments. Cai said there had not been any big problems raising the children there apart from some annoying questions from neighbours about why the children are biracial and why the father is not in the home.
“These questions are like flies around us. But they’re not a big deal and won’t affect our life,” she said.
She said she told various villagers in their community about the children’s conception and they responded by saying, “What an advanced lifestyle you have!”
Twins Harry and Helen celebrate Lunar New Year. Photo: Cai Rui
The couple have also tried to explain the situation to the twins.
“We instilled diverse family values in them from a very young age, through everything including cartoon books they read and stories we made up by ourselves,” Cai said.
“So we told [them] that you have a father. But the reason for forming a family is love. We don’t have love with your father, so he doesn’t live with us.”
About four years ago the couple opened a public account on social media app WeChat called Rainbow Babies, to share their experience with other lesbians on the mainland. Cai said the account had more than 17,000 followers, many responding by relating their own stories about IVF.
One woman wrote on the platform that she and her partner had been together for 10 years and after having a daughter they were pregnant with a boy.
“I am not confident of us lesbians raising a boy. Do you have any tips to share with us?” the woman wrote.
Why China’s gays and lesbians are still stuck in the closet
Another woman wrote that since she and her partner decided to have a baby, they had confronted obstacles at every step in the process, but the biggest benefit was that “after so many hardships, our love has been consolidated and we have cherished each other more than before”.
Cai said the most popular destinations for mainland lesbians seeking IVF treatment were the US, Thailand and Cambodia, with at least 1,000 either pregnant or having given birth.
“Some people are hesitant to have babies because of social pressure. [But] as times goes by and women get older, the possibility of them getting pregnant becomes lower,” Cai said.
Cai said she and Wu were often praised for their courage but they were in the habit of choosing a tougher road.
“On many occasions, this habit is the most reliable way to push us to keep our innocent heart and to do things to be ourselves,” she said.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 