Posts tagged ‘Pearl River Delta’

29/05/2013

China to issue new plan for air pollution control

China Daily: “China to issue new plan for air pollution control

A national plan for air pollution control could be outlined as early as this week, said 21cbh.com, a professional financial news website Tuesday.

The outline will target the reduction of air pollution on a national scale by establishing clear standards of air quality in different regions.

Coal plants, motor vehicles and dust that produce fine particulate matter will be the focus of strict control in the outline initiated by the Ministry of Environmental Protection, according to multiple sources who told the news website.

The overall plan has undergone multiple revisions and will be submitted to the State Council, China’s cabinet, for review by the end of this month, the Shanghai Securities News quoted Yang Tiesheng, deputy director of the energy saving department under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as saying on May 22.

The specific measures put forward by the plan include stipulating the declining rates of atmospheric pollutants such as PM2.5 (particles smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter), sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide in cities, the reduction of coal consumption throughout the country, as well as the promotion of using clean energy such as natural gas, while banning coal-fired power plants in cities and minimizing heavy-polluting vehicles.

The Yangtze River Delta region and the Pearl River Delta region will be the key areas of the new air pollution prevention campaign.

Roughly one million heavy-polluting vehicles, popularly known as “yellow label cars”, will be prohibited from driving on roads in Beijing, Tianjin municipality and Hebei province, which would reduce half of the PM2.5 by vehicle emissions alone, said one environmental expert as quoted by the news website.

The outline stipulates that air quality must “make substantial progress” in the upcoming five years rather than the next 20 years, a standard previously adhered to by big cities such as Beijing, according to a source from the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s economic planning body.

Grade II air quality stipulates the average concentration of PM2.5 over a 21 hour period should be between 35 to 75 milligrams per cubic meters, according to the latest standard made by the Ministry of Environmental Protection in 2012.”

via China to issue new plan for air pollution control |Politics |chinadaily.com.cn.

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

07/01/2013

* Use of student interns highlights China labor shortage

Reuters: “In September, the largest factory in the northeastern Chinese coastal city of Yantai called on the local government with a problem – a shortage of 19,000 workers as the deadline on a big order approached.

Chinese college students majoring in textile work at a garment factory in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, October 19, 2012. More and more factories in China move inland from higher-cost coastal manufacturing centers, labor is turning out to be neither as cheap nor abundant as many companies believed. As a result, many multinationals and their suppliers are corralling millions of teenage vocational students to work long hours doing assembly line jobs that might otherwise go unfilled - jobs that the students have no choice but to accept. Picture taken October 19, 2012. REUTERS/Stringer

Yantai officials came to the rescue, ordering vocational high schools to send students to the plant run by Foxconn Technology Group, a Taiwanese maker of smartphones, computers and gaming equipment.

As firms like Foxconn shift factories away from higher-cost centers in the Pearl River Delta in southern Guangdong province, they are discovering that workers in new locations across China are not as abundant as they had expected.

That has prompted multinationals and their suppliers to use millions of teenage students from vocational and technical schools on assembly lines. The schools teach a variety of trades and include mandatory work experience, which in practice means students must accept work assignments to graduate.

In any given year, at least 8 million vocational students man China’s assembly lines and workshops, according to Ministry of Education estimates – or one in eight Chinese aged 16 to 18. In 2010, the ministry ordered vocational schools to fill any shortages in the workforce. The minimum legal working age is 16.

Foxconn, the trading name of Hon Hai Precision Industry, employs 1.2 million workers across China. Nearly 3 percent are student interns.

The company “has a huge appetite for workers”, Wang Weihui, vice director of the Yantai Fushan Polytechnic School, told Reuters during a recent visit to the city.

“It tightens the labor market,” said Wang, whose school sends its students to work at Foxconn and other firms.

Local governments eager to please new investors lean on schools to meet any worker shortfall. That’s what Yantai, in Shandong province, did in September when Foxconn had trouble filling Christmas orders for Nintendo Co Ltd Wii game consoles.

“It has been easier to recruit workers in the Pearl River Delta than some inland locations,” Foxconn told Reuters in written comments in late December.

Some companies cite rising wages in southern China for the shift elsewhere. Wages are a growing component of manufacturing costs in China, making up to 30 percent of the total depending on the industry, according to the Boston Consulting Group.

Wages began to rise around 2006 as the migration of rural workers to Guangdong ebbed. China’s one-child policy, plus a jump in higher education enrollment, further depleted the number of new entrants to the workforce, forcing up wages.”

via Use of student interns highlights China labor shortage | Reuters.

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