Gobbledegook

PARIS (AFP) - Syphilis, virtually eradicated in China under Mao Zedong, has become a viciously-growing epidemic there, driven by prostitution, internal migration and poor health controls, a new study warns.

In 1993, the reported rate of syphilis in China was a mere 0.2 cases per 100,000.

In 2005, it had surged to 5.7 cases per 100,000, a figure that may well be a serious under-estimate, according to the paper by Chinese epidemiologists.

In addition, the number of babies born with syphilis has shot up. Congenital syphilis occurred among just 0.01 per 100,000 live births in 1991; in 2005 it was 19.68 — an annual rise of nearly 72 percent over that time.

“Surveillance data and focussed reports from throughout China provide compelling evidence of a substantial and worsening syphilis epidemic in individuals at high risk and in the general population,” the research says.

“The spread of syphilis in China has been insidious and has only recently attracted the attention it deserves.”

The paper, written by experts from China’s National Centre for STD (Sexually Transmitted Diseases) Control, appears in Saturday’s issue of the British health journal The Lancet.

Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by a bacterium, Treponema pallidum, that can be treated by antibiotics. If untreated, it can cause genital ulcers, damage the cardiovascular and nervous systems and brain, affect fertility and foetal health.

By the time the Communist Party took power in 1949, China had one of the biggest syphilis epidemics in history: one person in 20 in some large cities had the disease, and the rate was two to three percent among dwellers in the countryside.

In 1952, the Communists launched an unprecedented campaign, instituting mass screening for the T. pallidum germ, providing free treatment to infected individuals and closing brothels. By the 1960s, the initiative, while contested for its authoritarianism, virtually eradicated syphilis in China.

The Lancet paper says that this success ironically worsened the danger for the Chinese population when the country opened up its economy in the 1990s, unleashing the social earthquake that continues to this day.

As syphilis had been virtually absent for 20 years, the general population of young, sexually active individuals had become “completely susceptible” to infection, it says.

The driver for the epidemic has mainly been sex work, which has flourished with the expansion of China’s vast, shifting population of migrant workers.

There have also been changes in sexual habits, including a move towards sexual intercourse at an earlier age, with more partners and before marriage but also with poor use of condoms.

Syphilis prevalence is highest in the big-growth regions of coastal China, led by Shanghai (55.3 cases per 100,000), Zhejiang (35.9) and Fujian (26.8).

This was followed by Beijing (24.9 cases per 100,000) and the Zhujiang river delta, comprising Guangxi, Guangdong and Hainan provinces, with rates of 14-21 per 100,000 individuals.

Other countries have likewise reported a resurgence of syphilis in high-risk groups recent years, although China’s official rate is substantially higher than that of most developed nations. It is double that of the United States, where the infection rate was 2.7 percent in 2004.

The paper, lead-authored by Chen Xiang-Sheng, admits that the picture could be even worse, as the data is based on 26 nationwide “sentinel sites” which receive details of patient admissions from government STD clinics.

Many people, though, may get treated at family planning centres, gynaecological clinics and other facilities or by pharmacists or private practitioners, and these cases go largely unreported.

In addition, the increasing privatisation of health care in China has left many people without the resources to get screened or treated for syphilis.

By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
- from the November 29, 2006 edition

BEIJING – “I never meant to stay in China…. I never even meant to go to China.”

The contradiction defines Sidney Rittenberg’s life and world. Mr. Rittenberg knows China’s epic Communist revolution intimately, not as a witness, but a participant - often on the wrong side of history.

Not many people can still close their eyes and recall playing cards and folk dancing with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and the young rebels in the bean-oil lit caves of Yanan. But Rittenberg can. The idealistic Jewish boy from Charleston, S.C., stayed behind when the US Army left China, dreaming of a new social order where skin color and ethnicity wouldn’t matter.

Madame Sun Yat-Sen, wife of China’s founder, got him a UN relief job. He later joined the Communist Party, became a top cadre, translated Mao, rose in the broadcast department, married twice, played politics on the far left. Twice he was thrown in prison, once by Stalin and once by Mao - getting out only when those men died.

Rittenberg left China after 35 years, in 1980, battered and bruised, sadder and wiser, but with his spirit intact - still delighting in the language and people of China.

Today, the man who urged on Page 1 of the People’s Daily to fight “until the international workers revolution proceeds to its conclusion!” is a business consultant in Seattle and Beijing.

China today is no longer the same country, of course, Rittenberg says. The days of no hot water or stoves, and of community baths are over. Chinese are proud that their rising position and voice is gaining its due respect.

But China’s spectacular rise carries hidden dangers, mainly for itself, he says. The nation is “at a crossroads, a life-and-death juncture, 70 years after the Long March.” The top problem is a lack of imparted moral and spiritual values, one reason for leader Hu Jintao’s “harmonious society” program.

“There are a lot of unhappy intellectuals, old party members, young people with high ideals, peasants, and farmers…. They hate the new corruption and the vice … making money as No. 1.,” he says. “They don’t have power, are docile and patient - but beware the anger of the patient man. I have to ask about China, ‘What does it mean to build a strong economy, but to lose your soul?’ ” he asks, paraphrasing the New Testament.

Rittenberg’s own soul has been extensively searched since leaving China. He admits to mistakes, naivete, and blindness - particularly his zeal in backing the Cultural Revolution, the terror and fear between 1965 and 1975. It was a time of “insane ideology” when people “hardened their hearts and blocked out all human feeling in the name of doing good.”

“I didn’t see what Mao was doing,” he says. “Mao betrayed his own promises. He unleashed the students to destroy his enemies, all in the name of democracy…. I didn’t see it then, what ‘class struggle’ really meant.”

Rittenberg’s story is that of a man who “loved not wisely, but too well,” he suggests. He is no longer a party member.

Rittenberg grew up a lawyer’s son at a time when, he says, “No white man in South Carolina had ever been convicted of rape or murder of a black person - they weren’t considered human. I felt the world as it was, was not acceptable. When I came to China, I thought they had the answer…. During the Cultural Revolution, I thought, ‘Wow, this is the real real new world!’

“If you asked me [then] about Libya, say, I could … tick off every answer in terms of class analysis. But now I’ve lost all those answers. I just have questions.”

China will develop a democracy, Rittenberg says, but probably in its own time and way. The party’s failure in delivering on its promises after 1949 - land for peasants, democracy, and fairness - was inherent in the ideology of Chinese communism.

“I feel it wasn’t just Mao, or good or bad people in charge … but in using dictatorship to achieve democracy, you turn out not to get democracy, just more dictatorship.”

Today, he has come to feel that the American revolution was uniquely successful.”When you read Washington and Jefferson, it’s clear America came much closer to achieving its ideals than France, Russia, or China.”

Rittenberg’s recent memoirs, “The Man Who Stayed Behind,” is serialized in the Shanghai Evening News under his Chinese name, Li Dunbai. Well past 80 years old, Rittenberg remains indefatigable, an adroit speaker, and funny (he quipped to a packed house in Beijing that the audience must have mistaken him for New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, the next speaker.) Rittenberg “figures in a long line of ‘China helpers,’ ” says Roderick MacFarquhar, an authority on China at Harvard University. “He is enormously experienced in the ways of the Chinese people.”

China experts describe Rittenberg’s endless energy. “So many people who took part in the story of China simply went down,” says a friend. “Either they were killed or died indirectly, or went into solitude. Rittenberg … never took an obstacle for the end of the road.”

Rittenberg turned down a scholarship to Princeton University to study philosophy at the University of North Carolina. The Army had him study Japanese for the US occupation after World War II. But, he says, he did not want to spend years in Japan. So he switched to Chinese, thinking he would come home early, and went to Stanford University. He knew French, Latin, and German. But he fell in love with Chinese. “It was magical…. I still get excited about learning a new character.”

Once in China with the Army, Rittenberg’s interest in the Communist Party thrust him into a cloak-and-dagger-world in Shanghai. He met Zhou Enlai after hearing him speak. China’s eventual No. 2 leader politely told Rittenberg he had been clapping too loudly, that Nationalist spies would see this, and it would cause harm. Rittenberg was stunned that Zhou would even have noticed.

A year or two later, Rittenberg walked 500 dusty miles to the caves of Yenan, headquarters of the revolution. His job was to put Mao’s message into readable English, and translate world news picked up by Morse code into Chinese (including dispatches from this newspaper). He felt he was helping liberate China from imperial cruelty. Yet in 1949, outside Beijing and on the eve of victory, Stalin sent a special cable that got Rittenberg jailed.

After Stalin died, Rittenberg was exonerated. He was told he never had to work again, that he could have a villa, and was offered funds for leisure travel. “The smartest thing I ever did was go right back to the work I was doing” at state media, he says. “And I met my [second] wife, Yulin, a few weeks later.”

It is a life of contradictions: He sat in prison for six years, yet decided he must forgive his jailers. His views on family changed: He used to feel personal life mattered little. But after his second jail term, he felt that if he could only make his wife happy, his life would not be wasted. Again, in the 1960s, he backed a wing of the party more extreme than the infamous “Gang of Four” - yet now is a businessman who feels “radical student movements are not the way to bring change.”

“People like Rittenberg were described by Arthur Koestler in ‘Darkness at Noon,’ ” says Jasper Becker, author of “Hungry Ghosts,” about China’s famine. “They remained heroically loyal even in jail, even falsely accused and about to be executed. Their commitment to a cause, without a wish for comfort or riches, is extraordinary. But they harbor illusions that made what they did justifiable….”

Rittenberg’s views on Mao remain complex: Mao “genuinely believed he was doing good.” Mao was “definitely a genius and a brilliant writer,” he says. Mao’s essay “On Protracted War,” for example, tells exactly how Japan’s military would crumble.

Yet Mao was despotic, “a peasant boy who grew up in a remote village, with a narrow education [who] never lost the capacity for the envy and revenge of his childhood.”

“Those who endorsed the party or Mao … are still reluctant to tell the truth,” Mr. Becker argues. “Mao was a tragedy for the Chinese people; you can’t really get around that.”

Realizing one’s mistakes is liberating, says Rittenberg. China may be in a spiritual crisis, but its history is a cycle of brokenness and renewal. “I’ve been impressed by the ingenuity and goodness of the Chinese people. No other nation has lived so long in one place, 2,000 years, with the same language, in the same territory, without destroying itself and others. In 20 or 30 years, China will work out and develop its own new moral code, find a new way, repair its civilization.”

An American in China: Rittenberg recalls prison

“The time I did was all solitary. Solitary time is different. The first year, with no light, I stopped worrying about whether I would be shot. That was not the issue; my sanity was the issue. You ask the most basic questions: Has your life mattered? What is happiness, opposed to mere animal pleasures?

“To survive you need a clear purpose. If your life is aimless, you won’t survive solitary darkness. You have to train yourself. There are a whole series of little battles to fight and win. At one point something unusual happened which I can’t stop thinking about even 30 years later.

“Getting out seemed like a less than 50-50 chance. I wasn’t allowed to speak. I started to feel that if I ever did get out I would never be normal. I felt despair, betrayal by … the communists I had given so much to. But … a little voice startled me. It asked me when I began to feel such fear? Finally I realized there was no one point when the fear began. I felt it but could not say precisely why or when,. The minute I saw this the fear went away. I began to wonder, where does this voice come from?

“I have begun to feel there is some moral nature in man, and that at some deep level this moral element performs a kind of Google function - to find more resources inside us.

“For example, I remembered clearly a poem by Edwin Markham that my aunt and sister had me read when I was sick back in South Carolina, and that helped me:

He drew a circle that shut me out-
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!

“One morning across the prison courtyard, I heard the dulcet tones of Jiang Qing [Mao’s wife, Gang of Four leader, and main perpetuator of the Cultural Revolution]. I heard her voice and I was very happy. I knew that if she is coming in - then I am soon going out.”

By MARA D. BELLABY, Associated Press Writer Tue Nov 28, 12:00 PM ET

KIEV, Ukraine - A Chinese journalist serving a 10-year jail sentence for allegedly leaking state secrets has been awarded a press freedom prize, the World Association of Newspapers said Tuesday.

The association awarded its annual Golden Pen of Freedom honor to Shi Tao, a former writer for the financial publication Contemporary Business News, who was sentenced under state secrecy laws to 10 years in prison in 2005 for allegedly providing state secrets to foreigners.

Good to see that we have another faithful follower of the Party line putting the screws to those Tibetan Terrorists.

China tries to gag climbers who saw Tibet killings

By Leonard Doyle, Foreign Editor
Published: 11 October 2006, The Independent

Chinese diplomats in the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu are tracking down and trying to silence hundreds of Western climbers and Sherpas who witnessed the killing of Tibetan refugees on the Nangpa La mountain pass last week.

This ominous development comes as fears grow for the safety of a group of Tibetan children, aged between six and 10, who were marched away after at least two refugees including a nun, were shot dead.

The children were being sent by their parents into exile in Nepal to be educated as part of a group of about 70 refugees crossing the Nangpa Pass. Secretive crossings are usually made at night or in winter. But this time - probably because of the children in their group - the Tibetans crossed in the morning. They were travelling lightly, clad in jackets and boots without any mountaineering equipment, when they were attacked.

The nun who was killed, Kelsang Namtso, 17, was leading the children. A 13-year-old boy was also gunned down during 15 minutes of shooting witnessed by Western climbers, including two British policemen, 1,000 yards away at Cho Oyu camp.

Later three Chinese soldiersmarched the child-ren through the camp - some 12 miles west of Mount Everest - as climbers and Sherpas looked on. None of the Westerners tried to help the Tibetans.

Fears for the safety of Western climbers still in Tibet and worries that China will clamp down on profitable climbing operations - it costs up to £30,000 for an attempt on Everest - have meant that news of the incident has been slow to emerge. An American climber, who asked not to be identified, told of his revulsion at the failure of other climbers to speak out.

“Did it make anyone turn away and go home? Not one,” he said. “People are climbing right in front of you to escape persecution while you are trying to climb a mountain. It’s insane.”

So far there has been no official Chinese comment about the incident.

After the attack about 41 refugees, including a seven-year-old girl escaped over the pass into Nepal. There they have been cared for and interviewed by the International Campaign for Tibet. One of the monks who escaped said: “When the Chinese started shooting, it was terrifying. We could only hear the gunfire and our friends screaming. We tried to take care of the seven-year-old girl with us.”

Chinese border security personnel now have custody of nine children, aged between six and eight, as well as an old man.

The Chinese embassy in Kathmandu yesterday contacted Steve Lawes, a British police officer who witnessed the shooting, and called him in for interview.

Mr Lawes, speaking from Nepal, described an “intimidating” atmosphere as the security personnel “took over” the camp at Cho Oyu, on the border between Tibet and Nepal. Mr Lawes from Bristol, said that about half-an-hour after the shooting the children were marched through their camp. “The children were in single file, about six feet away from me. They didn’t see us - they weren’t looking around the way kids normally would, they were too frightened. By that time, advance base camp was crawling with soldiers. We were doing our best not to do anything that might spark off more violence.”

The shooting happened at around 10.30am on 30 September. Mr Laws said: “A group of between 20 and 30 people on foot [was] heading towards the Nangpa La Pass. Then those of us at advance base camp heard two shots, which may have been warning shots.

“The group started to cross the glacier and there were more shots. We were probably about 300 yards away from the Chinese who were shooting. This time it definitely wasn’t warning shots: the soldiers were putting their rifles to their shoulders, taking aim, and firing towards the group.

“One person fell, got up, but then fell again. We had a telescope with us but the soldiers took this. Later they used it to look at the dead body.”

Between 2,500 and 4,000 Tibetans make the crossing through the Himalayas via Nepal to India each year. The group that came under attack is typical of Tibetans who make the journey - mostly monks and nuns, seeking a religious education not possible in Tibet due to restrictions imposed.

Mary Beth Markey, executive director of the International Campaign for Tibet, said: “We are seeking assurances from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) to ensure full protection to those Tibetans in the group who are now in Nepal, noting previous incidents where refugees have been sent back from Kathmandu even after appealing to the UNHCR for protection.”

‘Soldiers started shooting and I ran for my life’

This is the eyewitness account of a Tibetan monk:

We started walking early through the Nangpa La Pass. Then the soldiers arrived. They started shooting and we ran; there were 15 children from eight to 10; only one escaped arrest. I just ran to save my life by praying to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I think the soldiers fired for 15 minutes. They were shouting, but I did not hear them… I just heard gunshots passing my ears. I don’t remember how many people were shot. First 36 people escaped, and the rest came later.

The Pass was about two hours and the snow was knee deep. The nun who was with us was shot and a boy was shot in the leg. There were people behind us who might be arrested. We don’t know because we reached Nepal. I saw that western mountaineers took pictures, I’m sure they would have pictures.

But not far enough. And not in today’s middle kingdom.

Shadow of cyber-Mao falls on Shanghai
Michael Sheridan, Far East Correspondent

The Sunday Times October 01, 2006

CHINA’S high-speed dash into the future is on show today in the Formula One China Grand Prix, but the race is being run in a city that has suddenly become the scene of a drama straight out of its Maoist past.

New details have emerged in Shanghai of the Communist party’s most significant purge of the past decade in an unfolding power struggle over the future of the Chinese economy.

The political upheaval deepened this weekend with a round-up of businessmen and lower-ranking officials by secret police and every Shanghai official above the rank of office director has had to surrender his passport.

It is Communist China’s first purge in the internet age, allowing Chinese analysts an opportunity to examine how the party has used both cyber-propaganda and old-fashioned repression against its victims.

They have vanished into a labyrinth of well-guarded villas where they are being questioned by party interrogators under draconian internal disciplinary procedures that give the accused no legal rights.

The purge is seen as a decisive move by President Hu Jintao to cement his authority and to satisfy demands from the left to restrain China’s freewheeling brand of capitalism.

Local journalists who have followed the dramatic events of the past week say the president’s men updated their traditional methods by orchestrating an online campaign against the Shanghai party chief, Chen Liangyu.

It began last Monday, when the state news agency, Xinhua, revealed that Chen had been sacked for alleged corruption over a scandal in which at least £215m, a gigantic sum by Chinese standards, had been either unwisely invested or misappropriated from the city’s pension fund.

Upon news of Chen’s downfall, the party’s cyber-tacticians sprang into action as more than 300,000 readers logged on to the Xinhua website within half an hour to read the charges. On cue, thousands of internet users were encouraged to write comments applauding the government for acting against corruption.

Chatroom censors blocked anything sceptical. Internet users suspected that state security agents were planting well-timed messages to steer the chat in the correct direction. They did not neglect the Shanghai city website, from which all portraits and speeches by Chen, who studied at Birmingham University for a few months in 1992, vanished at the click of a mouse.

At the same time, the party’s well-worn techniques of detention and denunciation were brought into play. Plainclothes agents, accompanied by officers from the Public Security Bureau wearing olive green uniforms, ushered those under suspicion from their grandiose offices into black limousines that sped them to secure locations around the city.

The latest arrests, which became known on Friday, were of two chairmen of state-owned companies, Wang Cheng Ming and Wu Ming Lie, and a senior local party official, Sun Luyi.

Journalists learnt that they had fallen into the hands of a much-feared body known as the disciplinary check committee. From accounts of its procedures, the men will be kept in comfortable but confined surroundings.

As veteran party men they will know what comes next. They will be required to present themselves at a stated place and time with their confession. Their interrogations will drag on for months until their questioners are satisfied that they have incriminated themselves.

The case will then be handed over to civil prosecutors for a show trial. Corruption charges can lead to the death penalty. But the precedent of Chen Xitong, the mayor of Beijing ousted for graft in 1995, implies that very senior officials may get away with a prison sentence.

Business analysts in the city, which is China’s commercial capital and home to its main stock exchange, doubt that Chen was genuinely implicated in white-collar crimes. A smooth operator, he was a protégé of the former president Jiang Zemin, a fellow Shanghainese. This left him exposed to machinations in Beijing, while his role in turning Shanghai into a global business centre made him a symbol to the left of ideological decay.

Indeed, his downfall coincided with a visit to Shanghai by Sir John Major, the former prime minister, who represents the Carlyle Group, an American investment fund that has seen its plans for a big takeover in China caught up in Beijing’s political struggles.

Relations between the capital and the vibrant port city are historically strained: Shanghai has its own dialect, cuisine, a tradition of foreign trade and a reputation for decadence that led it to be known in the 1930s as the “Paris of the East”.

Today it is a showcase for reform, boasting a dazzling new centre, lively nightlife and a huge international business community, including many British investors.

This weekend many Shanghai citizens were thrilled by the noise and glamour of the grand prix, the latest in a series of events that symbolise its re-emergence as Asia’s pre-eminent business destination.

But the upheaval inside its ruling elite provides a reminder that in China politics remain secretive, unpredictable and dangerous. The well-honed language of denunciation in the Shanghai newspapers, reminiscent of the days when Mao Tse-tung used them to detonate the Cultural Revolution, hints that more is to come.

“Shanghai is facing a moment of truth,” proclaimed Hang Zheng, the man appointed as Chen’s acting successor, in a speech reported on Friday.

“We must fight against corruption and rally round the central committee and promote development in accordance with Hu Jintao’s requirements.”

A text of Hang’s remarks in the Liberation Daily left little doubt that it was an ultimatum to local officials.

The same newspaper headlined a pledge from Beijing to hand out £35 a month to citizens over 80, including 92 centenarians, to protect them against pension losses.

“The next move will be state intervention to deflate the property bubble in Shanghai and to impose regulations to stop house prices rising so fast,” said one local journalist.

“That will please the left but it will hurt speculators and foreign buyers,” he added.

There are rumours in Shanghai that the president will dispense with a second member of the city’s elite, vice-premier Huang Ju, a simple move on health grounds since he is reported to be seriously ill with cancer.

To some analysts, this dramatic return to the days of detentions and purges is merely a powerplay by Hu ahead of a central committee meeting next month and a big party congress next year. To others it means the president has struck an alliance with the old guard, whose doctrines of state control have been reasserted in a stream of recent edicts.

If that is the case, then the purge in Shanghai heralds a fundamental shift back to the left in China.

And where does it lead? To Hu Jintao, of course.

An excellent idea to centralize the management of people’s pensions … if you’re a communist or worse a liberal.

Centralization allows for more efficient control, does it not? Or does it?

Centralization permits, in this case, more money to fall under the control of the current leadership. Hu Jintao has just scored a major coup, with the central authority becoming more central and more authoritative.

China to centralize pension funds after Shanghai scandal

Tue Sep 26, 12:19 AM ET

SHANGHAI (AFP) - China plans to centralize the management of pension funds, state press has said, a day after Shanghai’s Communist Party boss was sacked for alleged graft involving his city’s retirement program.

The Ministry of Labor and Social Security may issue rules early next year that would take away management of provincial pensions from local governments, the Shanghai Daily said, citing Chen Liang, a senior official at the ministry.

The top regulator for China’s welfare system will oversee the new regime, which would be a “market-based mechanism” in which independent fund managers are entrusted with the money, Chen said.

The same rules would apply for corporate annuities, according to Chen.

The report comes after the government announced Monday that Shanghai Communist Party secretary Chen Liangyu had been sacked from his post and the Politburo over the misuse of around a third of the city’s 1.2-billion-dollar pension fund.

Over 100 investigators from Beijing are in Shanghai looking at the illegal investment of about 3.2 billion yuan (400 million dollars) in speculative real estate and highway deals from the pension fund.

Chen became the highest-ranking official to lose his job in a corruption scandal since former Beijing mayor and politburo member Chen Xitong was removed from his post on graft charges in 1995.

China now has 230 billion yuan in national-level pensions under its social security system, mainly to fund living and medical expenses for the elderly and the poor, the Shanghai Daily said.

The country also has about 100 billion yuan in local pension funds, mostly corporate annuities, that have been contributed to by companies as employee retirement benefits apart from basic social security.

Provincial and municipal governments currently decide how those pensions are invested and usually do not employ professional asset managers or custodians.

As a result, a substantial portion of the money is held in investments such as real estate projects and long-term loans without public accountability and subject to low liquidity and high risk, the newspaper said.

Filthy urchins, anyway …

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Beijing municipal authorities have shut down more than 50 schools for the children of migrant workers during the past two weeks in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, a U.S.-based human rights watchdog said on Monday.

Human Rights Watch said the closures were part of a campaign to close all unregistered schools for migrants by the end of September and threatened to leave tens of thousands of children without access to education.

The campaign appears designed to discourage migrants from staying in the capital, the group said. In mid-September, city officials discussed expelling a million migrant laborers from Beijing for the duration of the Olympics, it said.

“Beijing is spending over $5 billion to prepare for the 2008 Games, yet at the same time it’s denying a basic right to migrant workers’ children, most of whom are unable to access state-run schools,” Sophie Richardson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division, said in a statement.

“Beijing appears to be moving ‘faster, higher, and stronger’ toward limiting — not ensuring — migrant children’s access to education, all in the name of the Olympics.”

Human Rights Watch said a document from the Beijing Municipality showed there were 239 unregistered migrant schools in the Chinese capital that provide education to more than 90,000 children.

“While governments have the right to license and regulate schools, China’s international legal obligations require it to provide all children with an adequate and nondiscriminatory education,” the group said.

“China may not arbitrarily deny education to children of migrant workers.”

Human Rights Watch said Beijing justified the closures on the grounds that the schools were unregistered, substandard, unhygienic and dangerous. But school operators have told the group that registration is arbitrarily refused or unreasonable conditions imposed.

A corruption scandal in Shanghai makes political mileage for Hu Jintao
From The Economist print edition
Looting the aged
Sept 7th 2006

EVEN if they were well managed, China’s social-security funds would find themselves hugely in the red in a few years’ time, as a bulge of retired workers start demanding pensions. But recent allegations of massive corruption in the management of Shanghai’s fund, involving the illicit use of $400m, reveal just how much officials can worsen the problem.

For a city that is trying to promote itself as China’s sophisticated financial capital, the scandal is a serious blow. For President Hu Jintao, eager to display his authority in the run-up to an important Communist Party conclave next year, it may be beneficial. In his handling of the allegations, he has shown a willingness to crack down on waywardness in the provinces, which have been frustrating the central leadership’s efforts to rein in the economy. As a particularly powerful enclave, which enjoys the status of a province, and is reputed—though evidence for this is debatable—to be a bastion of Mr Hu’s political rivals, Shanghai was a perfect case for Mr Hu to act upon. More than 100 officials have been dispatched from Beijing to investigate the alleged graft, according to the government news agency, Xinhua.

China’s official media have described it as Shanghai’s biggest financial scandal in many years. It allegedly involves the misappropriation of one-third of the city’s $1.2 billion social-security fund. Since the scandal was uncovered in July, the director of Shanghai’s Municipal Labour and Social Security Bureau, Zhu Junyi, and a district government chief, Qin Yu, have been sacked. Mr Qin happens to be a former top aide of the city’s party chief, Chen Liangyu, who is also a member of the ruling Politburo. Several prominent people in the business world are being questioned. On September 5th Chinese media said Wu Minglie, the chairman of one of Shanghai’s biggest property developers, New Huangpu Group, had been detained.

According to Chinese press reports, the fund lent money that was used to invest in risky toll-road and real-estate projects. In theory, social-security funds should mainly be invested in treasury bonds and bank deposits, which yield very low returns. The government has been cautious about allowing funds to be put into stocks because China’s capital markets are still rather rough and ready. It also fears that any loosening of controls could encourage abuses by local officials. But a lack of transparency in the management of funds, combined with pressures to make up pension deficits, still result in frequent wrongdoing. Xinhua quoted an official as saying that 16 billion yuan ($2 billion) had been embezzled from the funds since 1998.

Shanghai’s case is the latest in a series of big corruption stories reported by the Chinese media in recent weeks. A deputy mayor of Beijing, a chief prosecutor in nearby Tianjin, a deputy commander of the navy and a deputy governor are among those who have been arrested. But the scandal in Shanghai has aroused particular attention because of widespread public concerns about meagre pensions and unemployment benefits as well as the fast-rising cost of health care. A commentary on one official newspaper website spoke of a “crisis of confidence” in the social-security system generated by the Shanghai case. The famous words of Lord Acton, a 19th-century historian, were quoted in another: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The Chinese media say government auditors are now examining accounts at social-security departments across the country. Such checks are conducted regularly, but this time they are being carried out by officials from other regions, in an apparent effort to minimise the possibility of cover-ups.

Shocking, just shocking.  Say it ain’t so, brother.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - The Communist Party secretary of Shanghai has been dismissed for corruption, state media announced on Monday, making him the most senior official felled by a graft probe since Hu Jintao became party chief in 2002.

Chen Liangyu was implicated in a corruption case involving the commercial hub’s social security funds that has already felled two city officials, Xinhua news agency reported, citing a Communist Party Politburo decision on Sunday.

Chen was also dismissed from the Politburo, the party’s 24-member leadership council, the announcement said.

“Comrade Chen Liangyu has been involved in the misuse of social security funds by the Shanghai Bureau of Labor and Social Security,” it said, also accusing him of illegally enriching companies and relatives, and protecting staff involved in “grave law-breaking.”

The agency said Chen had “created malign political effects.”

Chen would be temporarily replaced as city party boss by Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng, Xinhua said.

“Whoever it is, no matter how high their position, anyone who violates party rules or national law will be severely investigated and punished,” the agency said, citing the central leadership’s decision.

Let’s see the signed contract, if any, showing Beijing promising to improve human rights. But would it matter? We all know that the rights of the Party outweigh the rights of others … as it should be, Comrades.

Amnesty accuses China of breaking Olympic promises

Ewen MacAskill
Thursday September 21, 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk

China is failing to live up to promises to improve human rights it made when bidding for the 2008 Olympics, according to an Amnesty International report published today. As well as widespread use of the death penalty, the persecution of democracy activists and media restrictions, the report documents cases of excessive punishment of residents protesting about being forced from their homes to make way for Olympic projects.

Amnesty has sent the lengthy document to the International Olympic Committee, urging it to hold China to its promises. When it awarded the games to Beijing, the IOC promised to monitor the country’s human rights record.

Kate Allen, the UK director of Amnesty International, said: “Unless basic human rights are urgently improved, China’s gleaming Olympic stadiums will hide a brutal reality of injustice, execution, torture and repression.”

One case raised is that of Ye Guozhu, who was evicted when his home was earmarked for development. He was jailed for four years after seeking permission to organise a demonstration in Beijing with other victims of forced evictions in December 2004. Amnesty said it had emerged that Mr Ye had been tortured in detention, including being suspended from the ceiling by his arms.

Beijing city authorities have also decided that to clean up the city’s image in the run-up to the Olympics, “unlawful advertising or leafleting, unlicensed taxis, unlicensed businesses, vagrancy and begging” should also be worthy of imprisonment without trial.

Ms Allen said: “Thousands of people are executed every year after unfair trials; people are tortured in prisons and thrown in jail just for peacefully standing up for human rights. And the authorities continue to harass and imprison journalists and internet users - hardly the ‘complete media freedom’ the government has spoken of. [It runs] counter to the most basic interpretation of the ‘Olympic spirit’.”

China’s foreign ministry and the IOC had no immediate comment.