9.29.2009
Veggie Scam (Solved)
9.25.2009
Yunnan Coffee Producer in violation of Nestle trademark
On September 3, around 12,000 bags of Hogood-produced non-dairy creamer packaged under the name "Coffee-Mate" were seized by Industrial and Commercial Bureau employees in the Panlong district. Panlong officials confirmed the next day that the confiscation was a response to a complaint filed by Nestlé.
However, on September 15 a Nestlé China public relations manager reportedly claimed that Nestlé had filed no such complaint. The source of the complaint is currently under investigation by the Panlong government.
Hogood CEO Xiong Xiangru (熊相入) told reporters after the confiscation that the company had no idea that Coffee-Mate was a trademark – despite it being clearly marked as such on all Nestlé Coffee-Mate products.
Xiong's denial seems more implausible considering that Hogood has been a supplier of beans to Nestlé, which it grows on farms in Dehong in southern Yunnan.
9.21.2009
Fall Drinks @ Chicago Coffee
9.18.2009
China News Update- Lead Poisioning
Picture: TimesOnline
At first the villagers could not understand why their bouncing babies turned into small children who refused their food and complained of feeling ill all the time, agitated one moment but listless the next.
Then, early this summer, so many of the youngsters began to sicken after playing in fields of corn around a giant lead smelter, that the puzzlement turned to foreboding.
“We took the children to local hospitals but every time the doctors told us there was no problem,” said one mother.
Eventually, one father became so worried by his son’s convulsions that he telephoned a relative in Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province in the centre of China, which has first-class medical facilities.
The family boarded a bus and made the 100-mile journey to Xijing hospital, where tests established that their baby had severe lead poisoning. When they returned, panic spread through the villages.
It was the start of a scandal that would explode onto the front pages of Chinese newspapers, only to vanish because of censorship, intimidation and a local cover-up that has now extended to restricting tests for the children.
The affair highlights the environmental price paid by many ordinary people for economic growth in a state that often ignores their interests.
A total of 851 children in seven villages were found to have excessive levels of lead in their blood. Some had 10 times the limit that China considers safe for children — 100mg per litre of blood. More than 170 were so seriously ill they had to be kept in hospital.
Lead poisoning damages the nervous and reproductive systems. It leads to high blood pressure, anaemia and memory loss. It is especially dangerous to toddlers, pregnant women and unborn children. The damage is usually irreversible.
On August 15, hundreds of farmers went to Fengxiang, the seat of local government, to ask for help. They sat outside its offices for two days but officials took no notice.
The Chinese countryside is supposed to be a place of placid toil but there have been occasions down the ages when it has exploded into violent revolt — and this was one of them.
On August 17, the farmers massed in their hundreds around the walls of the Dongling Lead and Zinc Smelting Company, a huge industrial complex looming above the rolling Shaanxi wheatfields.
They tore down part of a wall, broke into offices, wrecked computers, smashed cars, stoned the coal delivery lorries, blocked the factory’s railway tracks and sabotaged machinery. The managers fled.
The authorities sent thousands of police and plain-clothes security men to cordon off the villages. Running battles broke out along the rural roads and in muddy yards. “Hundreds of young men ran away to escape arrest,” said a villager.
The next day Dai Zhengshe, the mayor of Baoji, the nearest city, came to plead for calm.
China’s rulers were on the alert for trouble ahead of a grand celebration of 60 years of Communist party rule on October 1, so they did not want to take chances. Dai ordered the closure of the smelter.
That was the end of the story, as far as the Chinese media were concerned. It became an example of benevolent government intervention. As for the international media, police and plain-clothes toughs harassed reporters and threatened local people with dire consequences if they talked.
Then similar protests broke out in three other provinces, where horrified parents living near smelters of lead, copper and aluminium also learnt that their children had been poisoned — 1,300 of them in one city alone.
The spotlight moved on, local officials breathed sighs of relief and the young fathers stayed in hiding, all too aware of the state’s sly habit of concession followed by revenge.
The air still reeks in Changqing, the township that includes the plant and the tiny villages clustered around it. The corn has wilted and green vegetables planted in rows up to the smelter’s walls look pallid. The police cars and unmarked SUVs that kept reporters out are still there but in the soft rain of a central Chinese summer, the functionaries of the law prefer to stay dry.
By hiding in the back seat of a rural taxi, it was possible to slip past the roadblocks and enter the villages, where families eyed strange vehicles with suspicion. A few children played in the farmyards.
“You can see my house is only 50 metres from the lead factory,” said Zhang Mintian, a farmer. “On sunny days I couldn’t see the sun. On summer evenings I couldn’t open the windows, even though it was terribly hot. My nose and my ears were full of lead dust and smoke.”
Most of the 3,000 inhabitants of Madaokou, previously a thriving market crossroads, have gone. Of the seven villages that rose in revolt, this is the closest to the plant, right next to the walls.
“Why did our young people run away? They’re afraid of being arrested because it was they who tore down the wall,” said a man in his sixties.
“Who’d stay here?” asked an old lady, Bai Xiuying. “If you’re a man, how will you find a wife who wants to come and live in a poisoned village? If you’re a girl, who’s going to marry you if you come from here?”
Bai Xiyun, the oldest villager, added: “As an old man of 82 I feel guilty that I’m still living in this world when 800 babies have got lead poisoning. I know children mean the future. I wish I could change places with them.”
...
Inquiries made last week have revealed that officials have now ordered doctors to restrict the blood tests for lead poisoning as part of a campaign to stanch the protests.
“Every day farmers bring in their babies for examination and we can’t accept them,” a local doctor said. “We can only accept babies brought in by officials. And it’s policy that we’re not even allowed to perform examinations on children older than 13.”
An even more damning revelation came from a doctor at a general hospital in Baoji who, like the first doctor, cannot be named. In the past, said the doctor, blood samples used to be sent for high-grade heavy metals testing at an institute in Xi’an which has a national reputation.
“Suddenly the local government ordered this to stop. None of the staff could understand it. Our duty is to save lives. We were told that if anyone must be tested they should be sent for a less reliable test at a local health centre.”
The order left a bitter taste in the mouths of the staff. The doctor opened a drawer and pulled out two sheets of results showing grave levels of lead poisoning in 35 small children who were tested last month. The doctor wondered how many more there might be now and added, in a rare burst of frankness: “There’s a rich political hue to all this.”
Chinese journalists, who had at first conducted energetic investigations, found out that local officials had done a deal with the smelter company because they were desperate to meet their targets for economic growth.
Some of the villagers still have a yellow brochure that was handed out by the local government six years ago describing the plant as “a garden-like factory”.
The farmers nevertheless stood in their fields to block the construction machines. In October 2003, local officials organised 3,000 young thugs to cow them into submission.
“I was one of them,” confessed Zhao Xinping, now a driver. “We cut down their corn stalks and beat them up but now, frankly, I’m ashamed of it. Farmers in China are the poorest and the most honest of us all.”
Promises that the villagers would move to new homes more than 1½ miles from the smelter were never kept.
A source close to the company said that it had paid £18m for resettlement to the local authorities but the funds were never spent for that purpose. “Officials believed the farmers would never dare to rebel,” he said.
Soon Dongling Lead and Zinc Smelting was producing 100,000 tons of lead and zinc a year and 700,000 tons of coke. Last year it paid more than £10m in taxes, a sixth of the local government’s revenue.
Today the smelter is cold and silent. The government has promised a nationwide clean-up and says new pollutant controls must be installed.
The farmers have once again been promised new homes or a buyout of their land in cash and crops. Their children play on with an insidious poison in their blood. The police still stalk the villages. The officials brood and wait. Doubts and suspicions plague all sides.
The company is set to lose millions. And as a result, on the London Metal Exchange the price of lead has reached its highest level this year.
Pollution protests
- Ten thousand demonstrators took hostages and fought police at a $5 billion petrochemical project in Fujian on the east coast. The battles forced the local government to promise strict anti-pollution measures at the plant.
- Authorities closed a chemical plant in central China after two locals died of cadmium poisoning. Chinese newspapers exposed a long-running scandal of political collusion that had allowed the plant to flout environmental standards.
- Mass protests broke out over “cancer villages” near polluted waterways in eastern China. A series of campaigns followed to win compensation for villagers who became ill living next to filthy canals and rivers full of factory discharge and effluent.
I wish these were the exception to the rule but these problems are way too common for that to be the case.
9.17.2009
The Veggie Scam
9.13.2009
Justice better served late than never
9.11.2009
A Nebraskan Birthright
9.09.2009
China & Suicide
Deng announced the finding a few days before World Suicide Prevention Day which falls on September 10.
Deng said suicide has become the fifth cause of death for Chinese people, with a suicide rate of 22.2 per 100,000 people. Roughly 2.25 million people attempt suicide in China each year, while 250,000 die from their attempts.
A recent global medical research study shows that 1 million people die from suicides worldwide each year, and 30 percent of those are from China.
Mind blowing numbers on the China front. I have spent years researching suicide and specifically suicide in China and it was only a few years ago that I tried to raised awareness about this issue. It gets very little attention for a problem that is so massive. To put this in prospective I spent 99% of my day interacting with high school students, college students, and young adults and professionals and among these fellow young people I am more likely to hear that one committed suicide then any other cause of death. Despite this why is this issue more than other more likely to fall on deaf ears? Why is this problem the one that is always ignored? Is it that more and more people have no idea what to do or how to help or relate to someone that is depressed or dealing with suicidal ideation? My pleas for change were ignored when I was enrolled in college. How will it be any different this time around? I would love for the opportunity to ensure a different outcome this time around.
9.07.2009
22 Chinas
One China? One dream?
Not so, say McKinsey & Co. analysts. The firm counts 22 Chinas, each of them with different aspirations.
Of course, the consulting firm isn’t being “splittist” — the term Beijing uses to deride anyone seen to challenge its sovereignty.
Instead, McKinsey’s count is the latest attempt to give its clients insight into what it finds are deep differences in consumer patterns throughout the world’s most populous nation.
“China is a complicated place,” says McKinsey analyst Max Magni. “It is a continent, not a country.”
For their latest survey, McKinsey researchers studied 815 Chinese cities along lines including industry composition, government policy, demographic characteristics and consumer preferences. The 22 city clusters – population areas anchored by a city – it identified in the 2009 Annual Chinese Consumer Study are meant to underscore how the nation has many markets.
Its findings are based on face-to-face interviews with 15,000 consumers in 58 cities between last December and March 2009.
The firm last month published another large report on consumerism in China that concluded that it could become the third largest consumer market by 2020, but that private consumption expenditure remains only 36% of gross domestic product, the lowest of any large country.
For its “cluster” report, McKinsey Insights China says the global financial crisis has affected different cities in different ways, and that companies hoping to tap into the Chinese consumer should understand both where and how to play. The firm says marketers would do better to build a defensibly large market position in one city, rather than small positions over a wide area.
Driving the differentiation between markets within China is its urbanization, with 350 million people likely to move to urban areas over the coming 15 years. “There’s a magnitude of complexity (in China) we’ve never seen in the world,” says Mr. Magni.
Consumption patterns can vary widely. McKinsey analysts found consumers in the relatively well-off and largely Cantonese city of Guangzhou, for instance, to be far more loyal to certain brands than those who live just a few hours drive across the same province in the national melting pot city of Shenzhen.
Media also help drive decision making. About 62% of those in Shanghai say they are influenced more by local television channels than national ones, while 80% of those in Kunming say national broadcasters hold their attention.
Guangzhou is one of the 49 cities among the biggest 100 that McKinsey determined are likely to lag behind the average GDP and consumption growth through 2015. Shanghai will about match averages, and Beijing could exceed them, possibly seeing its levels of consumption doubling between 2008 and 2015.
The breakdown could be important.
The financial crisis, McKinsey analysts said, has made many companies keen to tap China for profits immediately, rather than set down strategic stakes that may or may not immediately make money.
One of the firm’s analysts quoted a client as saying, “the best way to be profitable in the long term is to be profitable in the short term.”
9.05.2009
China News Update- Responsible???
Chen Ronghua, chairman of Fujian Association of the United States, told reporters that their application was approved not only because of the sound Sino-US relations but also because China is a responsible country.
"Many Americans admire China due to the success of last year’s Beijing Olympics," said Chen.
More than 1,000 people will attend the ceremony and the performances held after it, according to Zhao Luqun, who will direct the performances.
Zhao said the performances will demonstrate the friendship, magnanimous spirit and kindness of modern Chinese people.
Hmm. Interesting. Responsible wasn't exactly the first word that came to mind.