Corruption: Kiss-and-tell stories expose Chinese corruption
Mistresses can damage officials’ careers as well as their marriages, anti-corruption investigators in China have warned.
Pillow talk which is passed on in interviews is offering crucial details of illicit dealings, according to the deputy director of the anti-corruption bureau in Dongguan, a major industrial city in the south.
“At least 80% of corrupt officials exposed in Dongguan had mistresses who gave us important information that we did not possess,” Zhou Yuefeng told the China Daily newspaper.
Video: chinese brutality
Pollution: Where Breathing Is Deadly
China’s biggest health disaster isn’t the terrible Sichuan earthquake this month. It’s the air.
The quake killed at least 60,000 people, generating a response that has been heartwarming and inspiring, with even schoolchildren in China donating to the victims. Yet with little notice, somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 Chinese die prematurely every year from the effects of outdoor air pollution, according to studies by Chinese and international agencies alike.
Video: China’s Pollution Busters - China
Video: ?? China from the Inside - Shifting Nature 1-6
Protests: China Protests - A New Approach?
Aftershocks from the huge protests that took place on June 28 in the remote town of Weng’an continue to reverberate, with news breaking Friday that both the local Communist Party commissar Luo Liaping and the chief of police, Shen Guirong have been dismissed for what official media reports described as “severe malfeasance.” Such speedy and decisive action by Beijing is, to put it mildly, unusual. That reflects both the gravity of the riot, which involved up to 30,000 people, and a desire by the central authorities — currently consumed by the build up to the Olympics — to stop the protests from spreading across the country. But there are other signs that the incident is more than a mere pre-Olympics anomaly and may be part of a new, more open approach by Beijing to outbursts of long-simmering rage.
Video: The New Workers Revolt - China
One Child Policy: ‘One Child’ Policy Weakens Chinese Economy, Expert Says
China’s “one-child” per couple population control policy may be costing the Chinese economy billions of dollars, Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, said at a lecture in Washington, D.C., on Friday.
During his talk, which was entitled “Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits,” Mosher also said the policy has led to a huge unbalance in China’s gender ratio, a booming sex trade around its borders and vast human rights abuses in the name of reproductive health.
Video: One Child Policy - China
Water: Beijing’s water crisis and economic collapse
Beijing consumes more water than is deposited there by rainfall and snow and has been forced into major water mining projects. In the past, around 50 years ago, the city had numerous aquifers that could be tapped by relatively shallow wells of 2 to 3 meters. Now wells of 50 metres are required to access that water. Indeed of Beijing’s consumption of almost 4 billion cubic metres of water per annum, most still comes from the disappearing aquifers. The fear is that this source of water is rapidly drying up and that has the potential to plunge the capital into major water resource crisis.
Video: United Nations may help millions in China facing water short
Disease: China confirms bird flu outbreak in Guangdong Province
An outbreak of bird flu in China’s southern Guangdong Province is under control, the Ministry of Agriculture said on Tuesday.
The testing of dead ducks at Yashan Village in recent days detected the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus, the ministry said in a brief statement, without saying when the outbreak began.
A total of 3,873 ducks died and another 17,127 ducks were culled, it said.
Supporting Rogue Regimes: The China-North Korea Relationship
China is North Korea’s most important ally, biggest trading partner, and main source of food, arms, and fuel. In the hope of avoiding regime collapse and an uncontrolled influx of refugees across its 800-mile border with North Korea, China has helped sustain Kim Jong-Il’s regime and opposed harsh international economic sanctions. After Pyongyang tested a nuclear weapon in October 2006, experts say that China has reconsidered the nature of its alliance to include both pressure and inducements. But Beijing, arguably, continues to have more leverage over Pyongyang than any other nation and has played a central role in the ongoing Six-Party Talks, the multilateral framework aimed at denuclearizing North Korea.
Shrinking Farmland: China says farmland down close to ‘critical’ level
The amount of farmland in China shrank closer to critical levels last year, state press reported Thursday, amid concerns in the world’s most populous country over how to contain food costs.
The rush in modern China to turn traditional farming areas into industrial zones or residential areas for expanding cities was again one of the factors behind the decline in 2007, the China Daily said, citing the land ministry.
Mercantilism: China Pursues ‘Manifest Destiny’ Through Mercantilism and Imperialism
China’s economic development strategy has often been called a new version of mercantilism, the philosophy of political economy that built the great nation-states and empires of Europe in the 16th-19th centuries. Mercantilist features have been most prominent in Beijing’s drive for exports and a large reserve of hard currency. The focus has usually been on China’s trade with the United States and Europe, the source of its large trade surpluses. But China’s relations with other parts of the world show different aspects of the mercantilist model.
Natural Disasters: Add locusts to China’s list of calamities
Riots — check. Earthquake — check. Flood — check. Plague — check. Such a concentration of woes in this high-profile year has fanned rumors and superstition.
First there was the freak snowstorm in February. Then the Tibetan riots in March. Then in rapid succession the controversial torch relay, Sichuan earthquake, widespread flooding and an algae bloom that’s tarnishing the Olympic sailing venue. Just when it seemed that nothing else could go wrong this year in China, the locusts arrived.
Locusts? What is going on here? The litany of near-biblical woes would seem to lack only a famine, frogs and smiting of the first born.
Kidnapped Wifes
Economic liberalisation in China has brought an ancient and sinister trade back to life — the kidnapping of women for sale as wives for lonely men. With remarkable access on an issue still classified by the government as ’sensitive’, Martin Adler follows a private detective, Zhu Wenguang — one of China’s new breed of entrepreneurs - on the trail of his wives and daughters who’ve been abducted and sold. His investigation takes us thousands of miles to remote Inner Mongolia - only to find that, despite a government campaign to stamp out the trade, the local police refuse to rescue an abducted woman. A remarkable and beautiful film about an ancient practice abolished by communists, that’s now coming back to haunt new China.
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