Photo of a Cross Walk in Beijing

Photo of Beijing Traffic

Chinese Allegedly Beaten To Death in Protests Over Lead Poisining

China has had some severe problems lately, non the least of which are mass rioting. The riots started in Shanghai with a trucker strike, and lately they have been seen in Inner Mongolia, southern and central China. The riots seem to revolve around injustice, high costs of living and double standards vz the monied and poor. In the latest news, wantchinatimes reports that allegedly some children who were stricken with lead poisoning were discharged with little to no medical help. The villagers protested, and then were forcibly removed. In this removal, some were allegedly beaten to death by the authorities. The problem is that China seems to be undergoing a change and does not take as much of the authoritarian behaviour as they once did.

 

 

Villagers from Linjiang township protested in Heyuan city after their children, suffering from lead poisoning, were discharged from hospital on the orders of local authorities. (Internet Photo) (wantchinatimes.com)

 

Holding a Meeting in China, Keep It Small- China Fact

If you have a conference in China and will have more than 120 attendees, you must get approval from the provincial government to host such a great number of people.

China News- China Has Worst Milk Quality in World

Several Chinese news sources have confessed that Chinese milk sucks and have gone so far as to say it is the worst quality in the world. The reasons they give are many, and I will blog them later, but suffice it so say that no one in the world is probably surprised by the news. It would be more newsworthy if they reported that China does not have the worst milk quality in the world…
Quote from here “Unwilling to make investment due to low profit margins, China’s dairy industry has the lowest quality standards in the world, experts say.”

Forced Abortions in China

This is a pretty sad article. It talks about forced abortions in China. They address the issue of late term abortions of women even in their ninth month due to enforcement of the one-child policy laws. In some cases, the issue is not even the case that the woman had one child already but that she was unmarried so her child was aborted.
article here
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9766870

China’s Corruption is Endemic to the System

This is an intriguing quote and shows how deeply rooted corruption is in China. Its not as if they don’t think it is wrong, but it is such a part of their culture it is thought of like taxes, just something one must pay.

excerpt

Deeply rooted in Chinese political theory is the
concept that laws must be used to strengthen state capacity and fulfil political ends. This is
often given heavier weight than the ideals of fairness and justice
-Eric Chi-yeung Ip

Photo of a Chinese Store

Forced Sterilizations in China

You can google this issue, but it seems that in Puning city, up to ten thousand people have been rounded up for forced sterilizations in China. Usually this is not due to the one child policy which in many areas is ignored. Usually it is due to a power trip or some whacked scheme by some official trying to climb the ladder to Beijing. This says a lot about how the Chinese view humanity.
google search
http://www.google.com/search?q=puning+city+sterilizations&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

The Powre of Chinese Emperors

From here (Where Chinese Leaders Above the Law?)

The First Emperor (Shihuangdi) drew on ideas previously associated with gods and ancestors to adopt a new title that symbolized his claim to greater authority than that of past sons of heaven. He also drew on Legalist theory tempered by Ruism, Daoism, the five agents (earth, wood, metal, fire, and water), and yin (shadow) and yang (sun), to extend a centralized bureaucratic system (junxian) down to the local level and out beyond the frontiers of the former Zhou realm. (Bodde 1967; Li Xueqin 1985) Writings on bamboo discovered in the 1970s indicate that the Qin established a highly rational and effective administrative system with detailed written instructions to officials on how to conduct and report criminal investigations and how to make fine distinctions among offenses. The Qin established certain durable legal practices, such as accepting an offender’s voluntary confession as a mitigating factor in sentencing. Given the Qin’s major achievements of establishing peace and order, decreeing the standardization of weights and measures (another enduring, though rarely enforced, ideal), and recognizing households and private property as the bases of the social and economic systems, it is not surprising that its administrative system long survived the dynasty.