Archive for ‘Culture’

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02/02/2013

* Corrupt Shaanxi banker disappears with US$160 million

This disappearance will probably be the first of many.

China Daily Mail: “Posted by chankaiyee2 ⋅ February 2, 2013

Chaoyang District

In my post “Police uncover Shaanxi fraudster’s 41 Beijing properties; arrest 4 ‘accomplices’”, I told SCMP’s story of Gong Aiai, a small potato who was for some time deputy chief of a county bank. However such a small potato was found by police to have assets worth more than 1 billion yuan ($160.2 million).

Singtao Daily reports today police investigation of her started due to a post on the internet informing against her in early December.

Singtao says that Gong denied that she had such properties in an interview with chinanews.com, but later disappeared. There is rumour that she has fled abroad using her passport with fake identity.

Chinese media have made investigation and found that Gong had valuable properties in Xian and her hometown Shenmu County and owns two large hotels in Shenmu.

However, with all such wealth, Gong was not happy and tried a failed suicide last October due to pressure from her business. Her daughter who studied in Beijing was in poor health due to excessive dieting for weight reduction.

SCMP reports: “Police have uncovered the false documents of a business partner of Gong Aia. Gao Yiner – who owned properties with Gong in Chaoyang district – had two Beijing household registration papers, called hukou, and at least two identification cards listing different birthdays.

Gong, dubbed the ‘elder sister of property’ by mainland media, reportedly had four IDs and four hukou, three of which were from her hometown of Shenmu county, Shaanxi province.”

Ming Pao says, according to Chinese web newspaper yicai.com, the household registries in many areas are somewhat in a mess. They have not only become the places for police officers to make extra money by providing people with fake identities but also shelters for corrupt officials to hide their assets.

Some police officers have revealed that some party and government officials have two household registrations to keep two identities. They use their fake identities to own their ill-gotten assets, while there are no illegal assets under their true identities. In that way, they are not afraid of declaration of their property.

From this, we see Xi Jinping’s wisdom. As soon as he took over the reigns, he said he wanted to reform the letters and calls, reeducation through labour and household registration systems.

He has conducted a swift reform of the letters and calls system to prevent local officials from intercepting and persecuting petitioners and informers so that people dare to inform against corrupt officials.

He said that he would abolish the reeducation through labour system. If that system is really abolished by the National People’s Congress, local government and police will not be able to imprison people in labour camps without proper legal procedures.

As for the household registration system, I thought that he meant allowing migrant workers to have household registration in the cities they work. That will take a long time and no priority should be given to that reform.

However, reform of the system to prevent corrupt officials from having fake identities, and discovering such fake identities, will be vital to the success of Xi’s anti-corruption drive. Xi seems to have his own source of information, so that he decided to give priority to that reform.

Sources: chinanews.com, yicai.com, Singtao Daily, Ming Pao, SCMP”

via China: Corrupt Shaanxi banker disappears with US$160 million « China Daily Mail.

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02/02/2013

* China’s Environmental Protection Racket

WSJ: “Beijing’s choke-inducing air – which blanketed the city for nearly a week before being cleared away by a bout of sorely-needed wind on Friday — prompted Premier Wen Jiabao to call for action to protect the environment and public health.

If the premier and his colleagues can see through the smog on the policy front, they might consider something that has been all but overshadowed by the capital’s plight: the sorry track record of the environmental watchdog in little Nantong in east China’s Jiangsu province.

The problems in Nantong are a tale of environmental protection gone seriously wrong in a country where money clearly talks. They may also be small but critical components of an increasingly toxic environment.

According to a series of newspaper reports, online versions of which appear to have vanished into the country’s not-so-thin air, more than 30 environmental and other officials from the Nantong area were implicated in a scandal that involves bribery and turning a blind eye to pollution problems. Thanks to the reporting of the Shanghai-based China Business News (in Chinese here and here), it’s now fairly clear that Nantong environmental officials were running something closer to an environmental protection racket.

The newspaper, which had been following the story since the summer of last year, reported earlier this month that the scandal had reached the highest level of the local environmental protection bureau. Contacted by the Wall Street Journal, an official with the Nantong Environmental Protection Bureau was unable to elaborate beyond the official posting on the Nantong discipline inspection committee’s website, which stated that former bureau director Lu Boxin was found guilty of accepting bribes and sentenced to 12 years in prison (in Chinese).

This brief report, posted under the banner headline of “Study the Spirit of the 18th Communist Party Congress, Promote and Deepen the Anti-corruption Campaign and the Building of Clean Government,” said that the bribes were taken on more than one occasion.”

via China’s Environmental Protection Racket – China Real Time Report – WSJ.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/economic-factors/greening-of-china/

Posted in China alert, Consumer protection, corruption, Economics, Environment, Green, Illegal practices, Pollution | Leave a Comment »

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30/01/2013

* Panicked property fire sale in China amid corruption fight

Sydney Morning Herald: “Thousands of Chinese communist officials have been panicked into a fire sale of their illicit properties and billions of pounds have been smuggled overseas as the country’s new leaders intensify a campaign to root out corruption.

Corruption-fighter Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan in Beijing, China.

Luxurious properties are being dumped on the market in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou for anyone able to pay in cash as officials try to cover their tracks. A report by the party’s anti-corruption unit, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, said “a wave of luxury home sales began last November and has accelerated since December”.

It said the volume of deals had intensified by “a hundred times” after Xi Jinping, the incoming Chinese president, warned that corruption could kill the party and put one of the country’s most vigorous and resolute politicians, Wang Qishan, in charge of stamping out graft.

Fu Zongmo, an estate agent in Sanya, Hainan, said his colleagues had sold two houses recently for government officials. In recent years, the tropical beaches and golf courses of Sanya have attracted plenty of speculators but recently the market has stalled.”

via Panicked property fire sale in China amid corruption fight.

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22/01/2013

* China’s Xi urges swatting of lowly flies in fight on everyday graft

Reuters: “Chinese president-in-waiting Xi Jinping on Tuesday took his campaign against corruption to the petty bureaucracy and minor infractions of lowly officials who are the bane of many Chinese people and businessmen’s everyday lives.

China's Communist Party chief Xi Jinping looks on during his meeting with U.N. General Assembly President Vuk Jeremic at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing December 27, 2012. REUTERS/Wang Zhao/Pool

Xi, in comments carried by the official Xinhua news agency, said it was just as important to go after the “flies”, or lowly people, as it was to tackle the “tigers”, or top officials, in the battle against graft.

“We must uphold the fighting of tigers and flies at the same time, resolutely investigating law-breaking cases of leading officials and also earnestly resolving the unhealthy tendencies and corruption problems which happen all around people,” he said.

Bureaucrats must not be allowed to get away with skirting rules and orders from above or choosing selectively which policies to follow, added Xi.

“The style in which you work is no small matter, and if we don’t redress unhealthy tendencies and allow them to develop, it will be like putting up a wall between our party and the people, and we will lose our roots, our lifeblood and our strength,” Xi told a meeting of the party’s top anti-graft body.

Xi called for “a disciplinary, prevention and guarantee mechanism” to be set up to prevent corruption, Xinhua said, though Xi did not provide any details.

Chinese bureaucrats have long had a poor reputation for laziness, a love of excessive paperwork and minor acts of corruption which infuriate the man on the street and add to growing mistrust of the party.

Since taking over as Communist Party head in November from Hu Jintao, Xi has vowed to root out corruption no matter how high it is, warning the party’s survival is at risk if it does not take the problem seriously.”

via China’s Xi urges swatting of lowly flies in fight on everyday graft | Reuters.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2012/12/03/5515/

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20/01/2013

* In China, Discontent Among the Normally Faithful

NYT: “Barely two months into their jobs, the Communist Party’s new leaders are being confronted by the challenges posed by a constituency that has generally been one of the party’s most ardent supporters: the middle-class and well-off Chinese who have benefited from a three-decade economic boom.

A Jan. 9 demonstration in Guangzhou, where people protested the censorship of a paper known for investigative reporting.

A widening discontent was evident this month in the anticensorship street protests in the southern city of Guangzhou and in the online outrage that exploded over an extraordinary surge in air pollution in the north. Anger has also reached a boil over fears concerning hazardous tap water and over a factory spill of 39 tons of a toxic chemical in Shanxi Province that has led to panic in nearby cities.

For years, many China observers have asserted that the party’s authoritarian system endures because ordinary Chinese buy into a grand bargain: the party guarantees economic growth, and in exchange the people do not question the way the party rules. Now, many whose lives improved under the boom are reneging on their end of the deal, and in ways more vocal than ever before. Their ranks include billionaires and students, movie stars and homemakers.

Few are advocating an overthrow of the party. Many just want the system to provide a more secure life. But in doing so, they are demanding something that challenges the very nature of the party-controlled state: transparency.

More and more Chinese say they distrust the Wizard-of-Oz-style of control the Communist Party has exercised since it seized power in 1949, and they are asking their leaders to disseminate enough information so they can judge whether officials, who are widely believed to be corrupt, are doing their jobs properly. Without open information and discussion, they say, citizens cannot tell whether officials are delivering on basic needs.

“Chinese people want freedom of speech,” said Xiao Qinshan, 46, a man in a wheelchair at the Guangzhou protests.”

via In China, Discontent Among the Normally Faithful – NYTimes.com.

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Posted in Censorship, China alert, corruption, Democracy, Dissident, Economics, Governance, Inequalities, Openness, Politics | Leave a Comment »

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31/12/2012

* Report confirms blog’s power in fighting graft

This research report confirms what has been obvious for several years: the power of the Internet over formal communications channels.

China Daily: “Micro blogs, like the social networking site Sina Weibo, have improved authority’s efficiency in handling anti-corruption cases, but also pose challenges in distinguishing true from false, according to a recently released report by Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Public Opinion Research Lab.

Of the 24 widespread micro blog reports this year, nine have been confirmed as frauds, the report said.

“The micro blog plays a major role in fighting corruption nowadays, but posts online need to be carefully sifted to find what is reliable information,” the report said.

As more netizens become familiar with and participate in fighting corruption, more messages spread each day that await authorities’ attention, said Xie Yungeng, an expert in public opinion and new media at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

“A regulation should be established on what kind of reports discipline authorities should respond to and set time limits for their response,” he said.

“The new way of fighting corruption is testing the wisdom and ability of disciplinary bodies,” said Zhu Lijia, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Governance.”

via Report confirms blog’s power in fighting graft[1]|chinadaily.com.cn.

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Posted in China alert, corruption, Digital communications, food safety, Illegal chemicals, Inequalities, Petition, public protest, social media | 1 Comment »

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30/12/2012

* Corrupt Chinese Officials Draw Unusual Publicity

Yet more evidence that the new leadership is serious when declaring that corruption must be stopped.

NY Times: ““Something has shifted,” said Zhu Ruifeng, a Beijing journalist who has exposed more than a hundred cases of alleged corruption on his Web site, including the lurid exertions of Mr. Lei. “In the past, it might take 10 days for an official involved in a sex scandal to lose his job. This time he was gone in 66 hours.”

————————————————————————————

The Chinese have become largely inured to tales of voracious officials stockpiling luxury apartments, $30,000 Swiss watches or enough stolen cash to buy their mistress a Porsche.

But when images of a bulbous-faced Communist Party functionary in southwest China having sex with an 18-year-old girl spread on the Internet late last month, even the most jaded citizens took note — as did the local party watchdogs who ordered his dismissal.

These have been especially nerve-racking times for Chinese officials who cheat, steal and bribe. Since the local bureaucrat, Lei Zhengfu, became an unwilling celebrity here, a succession of others have been publicly exposed. And despite the usual cries of innocence, most have been removed from office while party investigators sort through their bedrooms and bank accounts.

In the weeks since the Communist Party elevated a new slate of top leaders, the state media, often fed by freelance vigilantes, have been serving up a head-spinning collection of scandals.

Highlights include a deputy district official in Shanxi Province who fathered 10 children with four wives; a prefecture chief from Yunnan with an opium habit who managed to accumulate 23 homes, including 6 in Australia; and a Hunan bureaucrat with $19 million in unexplained assets who once gave his young daughter $32,000 in cash for her birthday.

“The anticorruption storm has begun,” People’s Daily, the party mouthpiece, wrote on its Web site this month.

The flurry of revelations suggests that members of China’s new leadership may be more serious than their predecessors about trying to tame the cronyism, bribery and debauchery that afflict state-run companies and local governments, right down to the outwardly dowdy neighborhood committees that oversee sanitation. Efforts began just days after Xi Jinping, the newly appointed Communist Party chief and China’s incoming president, warned that failing to curb corruption could put the party’s grip on power at risk.””

via Corrupt Chinese Officials Draw Unusual Publicity – NYTimes.com.

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22/12/2012

* Yiwu’s purveyors of Christmas tat give China a dose of ho-ho-ho

This article illustrates extremely well our view that the Chinese mindset is practical, materialistic and down-to-earth. And I am talking about the entrepreneurs at Yiwu City and the shopkeepers embracing the Christmas spirit (or at least the Christmas decorations anyway); as well as the average urbanite who wants to celebrate international festivals whatever the origin and raison d’etre.

The Times: “On Thursday the Ling Guo massage parlour, in the central business district of Beijing, suddenly turned festive.

A vendor hangs Christmas decorations in between Santa Claus dolls at her stall ahead of Christmas at a wholesale market in Wuhan, Hubei province, ChinaAn outsized image of Father Christmas beamed from the window, flanked by a manic array of snowmen, reindeer and present-stuffed stockings. The masseuses greeted customers in Santa hats.

It is not a triumph of Western culture, but of raw Chinese salesmanship, entrepreneurial flair and desperation.

Elsewhere, the festive decorations are up, adorning everything from roadside noodle shops to suburban shopping malls. Where China’s Christmas lights used to be restricted to the big hotels and stores in Beijing and Shanghai, the briskest sales are now to small shops in provincial cities.

“We are absolutely focused more on the Chinese market and we are shifting 2,000 plastic Christmas trees a day domestically,” said Liu Qing, from Yanghang Art and Crafts, who has been part of the all-out push by manufacturers to persuade the Chinese to celebrate someone else’s season of goodwill.

“Our biggest buyers are now from Shandong and Chongqing, which is so different from a couple of years ago,” Mr Liu said. “Chinese people’s living standards have improved so much, so people start going after something more spiritual. Christmas is a lively holiday. The younger generations like it.”

For a growing number of Chinese businesses making Christmas-related goods, domestic sales now represent their single biggest — and often fastest-growing — market. It is an unexpected development in a country that does not celebrate Christmas. Without it, though, hundreds of factories would be driven to bankruptcy because, despite strong sales, Santa’s Chinese elves are working on tiny margins.

The key to the tinsel-strewn, gold-baubled Christmas-ification of China is to be found on the country’s east coast in Yiwu, the acknowledged world hub of yuletide tat — or “ornamental handicrafts” as they are described by the city’s factory owners.

It is from these workshops that Yiwu annually exports about £200 million of plastic trees, self-illuminating angel choirs and every other Christmas decoration conceivable. Other manufacturing centres in China also feed into the great £1.3 billion flow of Christmas exports, but none do it with such determination and concentration as Yiwu.

The problem, however, is that Yiwu became too good at its trade at just the wrong moment. In 2010 the city had 400 companies making Christmas products; now there are more than 750, with about 120,000 workers engaged in making Christmas goods.

The huge jump in capacity and competition coincided with a drop of about 25 per cent in what had traditionally been Yiwu’s strongest markets for its tawdry wares, Europe and the United States. The effect on profits has been harsh. This year labour costs in Yiwu have risen by 15 per cent and material prices have risen by about 10 per cent.

Chen Jinlin, from the Yiwu Christmas Products Industry Association, said that some of his members have suffered 20 per cent to 25 per cent declines in orders. “There are nearly twice as many companies as there were two years ago fighting for pieces of a smaller cake,” he said. “We are encouraging manufacturers to develop new products, especially lower-cost ones, to adjust to the new economic reality.”

But the longer-term answer, said Mr Hu, the sales manager of the Youlide Art & Crafts Company, has to be to look for new markets, China being the most convenient and potentially vast. Many of Yiwu’s Christmas goodsmakers have seen the domestic share of their sales rocket to 20 per cent of the total over one or two years.

They have also changed the way that they look at opportunities abroad: a shift of marketing focus has made Brazil the largest export destination for Yiwu’s Christmas goods, accounting for 12 per cent of the total. A similar drive has proved successful in Russia, where sales of Yiwu’s seasonal goods have tripled in the past year.

“About 80 per cent of our products go to South America, so we’ve had to change things to reflect that,” Mr Hu said. “Brazilians like their artificial Christmas trees in a paler shade of green than the Europeans.””

via Yiwu’s purveyors of Christmas tat give China a dose of ho-ho-ho | The Times.

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06/12/2012

* Senior provincial official under investigation

Will this be the first of many such investigations?

Senior provincial official under investigation

China Daily: “Li Chuncheng, deputy secretary of the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is under investigation for alleged discipline violation, according to the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

via Senior provincial official under investigation |Politics |chinadaily.com.cn

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04/12/2012

Just when you thought one oriental dancing fad (Korean) is enough for Christmas, another (Chinese) comes along. Will there be a third from Japan to complete the set?

Posted in China alert, Culture | 1 Comment »

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