Chinese Subway Contractor Destroys Ancient Tombs

Now you see 'em, now you don't!  Once gone, they're gone forever. 

Of course, contractors are doing the same thing here in the USA every day, you just don't read about it in the press because not enough people give a damn.  Have you ever read of a construction contractor on U.S. soil being brought up on criminal charges for violating federal (and state) laws on deliberately destroying historical artifacts?  I'd like to hear about it!  We didn't send one fricking asshole to jail for their criminal activities in causing the Second Great Depression 2007 and ongoing still, so I I seriously doubt the government is chasing after any contractor for destroying ancient burial sites or entire villages for that matter.

One wonders if this Chinese contractor will be slapped with a tiny fine because of public outcry, and then of course, the Chinese central government will enact yet more restrictions on the internet and ban more sites and more news. 

From The South China Morning Post

Work on Guangzhou Metro Line 6 destroys five ancient tombs
Mimi Lau in Guangzhou
Monday, 17 June, 2013, 5:51am 

Guangzhou Metro is facing a public outcry after contractors destroyed a group of ancient imperial tombs in the Menggang district during construction of Line 6 of its subway system.

The tombs, ranging from 2,200 to more than 3,000 years old and still being studied by archaeologists, were wrecked by excavators on Friday night.

The protected site, on the eastern slope of Da Gong mountain, had been sealed off by the Guangzhou Archaeology Research Centre, with warning signs posted and red lines marking the protected area. It was fine when archaeologists left on Friday but had been torn up by the time they returned on Saturday.

"Yesterday we were still conducting archaeological excavations, but all five tombs were gone this morning," said an archaeologist quoted by Southern Metropolis Daily yesterday.

One of the archaeology technicians responsible for the site, Miao Hui , said: "At least five of them were destroyed … this time. They date from the late Shang dynasty to the Warring States. This is not the first time the construction company has destroyed ancient tombs. The area they dug up was sealed by red lines. They even specifically moved our archaeological tools aside before blazing in."

A foreman hired by the centre said the site was impossible to miss. "We have begun working with one of the tombs and used plastic film to cover the unfinished site. It's a very large and obvious target, it's impossible that the workers could miss it."

Yesterday's reports in most Guangzhou media put the number of tombs at five, while Xinhua reported on Saturday that six tombs were destroyed.

A manager for Guangzhou Metro's construction agent said the workers were confused by unclear warning signs and markings left by the archaeologists.

A Guangzhou Metro spokesman said the construction work had already been approved by the archaeology centre, according to Southern Metropolis Daily.

However, it was reported that the centre wrote to the company last month to say the site had not been cleared for construction.  The research centre's director, Zhang Qianglu , said the slope's densely packed tombs had significant historical value.

The subway project is reported to have destroyed more than a dozen ancient tombs in the first five months of the year.

The damage has triggered an outcry online, with internet users describing it as outrageous and shameless. One said she did not believe it was simply a mistake. "The constructor has never taken the historical relics seriously. If you are not sure where to dig, why don't you ask? They must be severely punished, otherwise we'll only see more cultural relics being destroyed."

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as Guangzhou subway work destroys five ancient tombs.

Misleading Title of Article Obscures Awful Truth

You have to read down into the article to get to the real meat of the article and the horrifying facts about female infanticide openly practiced in China, as well as persistent cultural sexual discrimination against females because "they aren't as good as boys":

Published at Fox News Online
One-child policy a surprising boon for China girls
Published August 14, 2011
| Associated Press

BEIJING – Tsinghua University freshman Mia Wang has confidence to spare. Asked what her home city of Benxi in China's far northeastern tip is famous for, she flashes a cool smile and says: "Producing excellence. Like me."

A Communist Youth League member at one of China's top science universities, she boasts enviable skills in calligraphy, piano, flute and pingpong.

Such gifted young women are increasingly common in China's cities and make up the most educated generation of women in Chinese history. Never have so many been in college or graduate school, and never has their ratio to male students been more balanced.

To thank for this, experts say, is three decades of steady Chinese economic growth, heavy government spending on education and a third, surprising, factor: the one-child policy. In 1978, women made up only 24.2 percent of the student population at Chinese colleges and universities. By 2009, nearly half of China's full-time undergraduates were women and 47 percent of graduate students were female, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. In India, by comparison, women make up 37.6 percent of those enrolled at institutes of higher education, according to government statistics.

Since 1979, China's family planning rules have barred nearly all urban families from having a second child in a bid to stem population growth. With no male heir competing for resources, parents have spent more on their daughters' education and well-being, a groundbreaking shift after centuries of discrimination.

"They've basically gotten everything that used to only go to the boys," said Vanessa Fong, a Harvard University professor and expert on China's family planning policy.

Wang and many of her female classmates grew up with tutors and allowances, after-school classes and laptop computers. Though she is just one generation off the farm, she carries an iPad and a debit card, and shops for the latest fashions online. Her purchases arrive at Tsinghua, where Wang's all-girls dorm used to be jokingly called a "Panda House," because women were so rarely seen on campus. They now make up a third of the student body, up from one-fifth a decade ago.

"In the past, girls were raised to be good wives and mothers," Fong said. "They were going to marry out anyway, so it wasn't a big deal if they didn't want to study."

Not so anymore. Fong says today's urban Chinese parents "perceive their daughters as the family's sole hope for the future," and try to help them to outperform their classmates, regardless of gender.

Some demographers argue that China's fertility rate would have fallen sharply even without the one-child policy because economic growth tends to reduce family size. In that scenario, Chinese girls may have gotten more access to education anyway, though the gains may have been more gradual.

Crediting the one-child policy with improving the lives of women is jarring, given its history and how it's harmed women in other ways. Facing pressure to stay under population quotas, overzealous family planning officials have resorted to forced sterilizations and late-term abortions, sometimes within weeks of delivery, although such practices are illegal. The birth limits are also often criticized for encouraging sex-selective abortions in a son-favoring society. Chinese traditionally prefer boys because they carry on the family name and are considered better earners.

With the arrival of sonogram technology in the 1980's, some families no longer merely hoped for a boy, they were able to engineer a male heir by terminating pregnancies when the fetus was a girl.

"It is gendercide," said Therese Hesketh, a University College London professor who has studied China's skewed sex ratio. "I don't understand why China doesn't just really penalize people who've had sex-selective abortions and the people who do them. The law exists but nobody enforces it."

To combat the problem, China allows families in rural areas, where son preference is strongest, to have a second child if their first is a girl. The government has also launched education campaigns promoting girls and gives cash subsidies to rural families with daughters. Still, 43 million girls have "disappeared" in China due to gender-selective abortion as well as neglect and inadequate access to health care and nutrition, the United Nations estimated in a report last year.

Yin Yin Nwe, UNICEF's representative to China, puts it bluntly: The one-child policy brings many benefits for girls "but they have to be born first."

Wang's birth in the spring of 1992 triggered a family rift that persists to this day. She was a disappointment to her father's parents, who already had one granddaughter from their eldest son. They had hoped for a boy.

"Everyone around us had this attitude that boys were valuable, girls were less," Gao Mingxiang, Wang's paternal grandmother, said by way of explanation — but not apology.

Small and stooped, Gao perched on the edge of her farmhouse "kang," a heated brick platform that in northern Chinese homes serves as couch, bed and work area. She wore three sweaters, quilted pants and slippers. Her granddaughter, tall and graceful and dressed in Ugg boots and a sparkly blue top, sat next to her listening, a sour expression on her face. She wasn't shy about showing her lingering bitterness or her eagerness to leave. She agreed to the visit to please her father but refused to stay overnight — despite a four-hour drive each way.

Fong, the Harvard researcher, says that many Chinese households are like this these days: a microcosm of third world and first world cultures clashing. The gulf between Wang and her grandmother seems particularly vast.

The 77-year-old Gao grew up in Yixian, a poor corn- and wheat-growing county in southern Liaoning province. At 20, she moved less than a mile (about a kilometer) to her new husband's house. She had three children and never dared to dream what life was like outside the village. She remembers rain fell in the living room and a cherished pig was sold, because there wasn't enough money for repairs or feed. She relied on her daughter to help around the house so her two sons could study.

"Our kids understood," said Gao, her gray hair pinned back with a bobby pin, her skin chapped by weather, work and age. "All families around here were like that."

But Wang's mother, Zheng Hong, did not understand. She grew up 300 kilometers (185 miles) away in the steel-factory town of Benxi with two elder sisters and went to vocational college for manufacturing. She lowers her voice to a whisper as she recalls the sting of her in-law's rejection when her daughter was born.

"I sort of limited my contact with them after that," Zheng said. "I remember feeling very angry and wronged by them. I decided then that I was going to raise my daughter to be even more outstanding than the boys."

They named her Qihua, a pairing of the characters for chess and art — a constant reminder of her parents' hope that she be both clever and artistic. From the age of six, Wang was pushed hard, beginning with pingpong lessons. Competitions were coed, and she beat boys and girls alike, she said. She also learned classical piano and Chinese flute, practiced swimming and ice skating and had tutors for Chinese, English and math. During summer vacations, she competed in English speech contests and started using the name Mia.

In high school, Wang had cram sessions for China's college entrance exam that lasted until 10 p.m. Her mother delivered dinners to her at school. She routinely woke up at 6 a.m. to study before class. She had status and expectations her mother and grandmother never knew, a double-edged sword of pampering and pressure.

If she'd had a sibling or even the possibility of a sibling one day, the stakes might not have been so high, her studies not so intense. Beijing-based population expert Yang Juhua has studied enrollment figures and family size and determined that single children in China tend to be the best educated, while those with elder brothers get shortchanged. She was able to make comparisons because China has many loopholes to the one-child rule, including a few cities that have experimented with a two-child policy for decades.

"Definitely single children are better off, particularly girls," said Yang, who works at the Center for Population and Development Studies at Renmin University. "If the girl has a brother then she will be disadvantaged. ... If a family has financial constraints, it's more likely that the educational input will go to the sons."

While her research shows clearly that it's better, education-wise, for girls to be single children, she favors allowing everyone two kids.

"I do think the (one-child) policy has improved female well-being to a great extent, but most people want two children so their children can have somebody to play with while they're growing up," said Yang, who herself has a college-age daughter.

Ideally, she said, China should relax the policy while also investing more in education so that fewer families will be forced to choose which child to favor when it comes to schooling.

While strides have been made in reaching gender parity in education, other inequalities remain. Women remain woefully underrepresented in government, have higher suicide rates than males, often face domestic violence and workplace discrimination and by law must retire at a younger age than men. It remains to be seen whether the new generation of degree-wielding women can alter the balance outside the classroom.

Some, like Wang, are already changing perceptions about what women can achieve. When she dropped by her grandmother's house this spring, the local village chief came by to see her. She was a local celebrity: the first village descendent in memory to make it into Tsinghua University.

"Women today, they can go out and do anything," her grandmother said. "They can do big things."

Water Crisis in China Spurs Big Plans

It seems there is no such thing as benefit/cost analysis and environmental impact studies in Communist China.  Their excessive population and disregard for the environment will bring China down.  I foresee China begging water plus nations like Canada and the US to export water to them...  I'm sure I'll see it within what is left of my lifetime.  I sincerely hope the "free marketers" will not be in control of either country when it starts - and ends.

By EDWARD WONG
Published: June 1, 2011
New York Times

Plan for China’s Water Crisis Spurs Concern

DANJIANGKOU, China — North China is dying.

A chronic drought is ravaging farmland. The Gobi Desert is inching south. The Yellow River, the so-called birthplace of Chinese civilization, is so polluted it can no longer supply drinking water. The rapid growth of megacities — 22 million people in Beijing and 12 million in Tianjin alone — has drained underground aquifers that took millenniums to fill.

Not atypically, the Chinese government has a grand and expensive solution: Divert at least six trillion gallons of water each year hundreds of miles from the other great Chinese river, the Yangtze, to slake the thirst of the north China plain and its 440 million people.

The engineering feat, called the South-North Water Diversion Project, is China’s most ambitious attempt to subjugate nature. It would be like channeling water from the Mississippi River to meet the drinking needs of Boston, New York and Washington. Its $62 billion price tag is twice that of the Three Gorges Dam, which is the world’s largest hydroelectric project. And not unlike that project, which Chinese officials last month admitted had “urgent problems,” the water diversion scheme is increasingly mired in concerns about its cost, its environmental impact and the sacrifices poor people in the provinces are told to make for those in richer cities.

Three artificial channels from the Yangtze would transport precious water from the south, which itself is increasingly afflicted by droughts; the region is suffering its worst one in 50 years. The project’s human cost is staggering — along the middle route, which starts here in Hubei Province at a gigantic reservoir and snakes 800 miles to Beijing, about 350,000 villagers are being relocated to make way for the canal. Many are being resettled far from their homes and given low-grade farmland; in Hubei, thousands of people have been moved to the grounds of a former prison.

“Look at this dead yellow earth,” said Li Jiaying, 67, a hunched woman hobbling to her new concrete home clutching a sickle and a bundle of dry sticks for firewood. “Our old home wasn’t even being flooded for the project and we were asked to leave. No one wanted to leave.”

About 150,000 people had been resettled by this spring. Many more will follow. A recent front-page article in People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, said the project “has entered a key period of construction.”

Some Chinese scientists say the diversion could destroy the ecology of the southern rivers, making them as useless as the Yellow River. The government has neglected to do proper impact studies, they say. There are precedents in the United States. Lakes in California were damaged and destroyed when the Owens River was diverted in the early 20th century to build Los Angeles.

Here, more than 14 million people in Hubei would be affected if the project damaged the Han River, the tributary of the Yangtze where the middle route starts, said Du Yun, a geographer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, the provincial capital.

Officials in provinces south of Beijing and Tianjin have privately raised objections and are haggling over water pricing and compensation; midlevel officials in water-scarce Hebei Province are frustrated that four reservoirs in their region have sent more than 775 million cubic meters, or 205 billion gallons, of water to Beijing since September 2008 in an “emergency” supplement to the middle route.

Overseers of the eastern route, which is being built alongside an ancient waterway for barges called the Grand Canal, have found that the drinking water to be brought to Tianjin from the Yangtze is so polluted that 426 sewage treatment plants have to be built; water pollution control on the route takes up 44 percent of the $5 billion investment, according to Xinhua, the official news agency. The source water from the Han River on the middle route is cleaner. But the main channel will cross 205 rivers and streams in the industrial heartland of China before reaching Beijing.

“When water comes to Beijing, there’s the danger of the water not being safe to drink,” said Dai Qing, an environmental advocate who has written critically about the Three Gorges Dam.

“I think this project is a product of the totalitarian regime in Beijing as it seeks to take away the resources of others,” she added. “I am totally opposed to this project.”

Ms. Dai and some Chinese scholars say the government should instead be limiting the population in the northern cities and encouraging water conservation.

The project’s official Web site says that the diversion “will be an important and basic facility for mitigating the existing crisis of water resources in north China” and that sufficient studies have been done. Wang Jian, a former environmental and water management official with the Beijing government and the State Council, China’s cabinet, agreed that the project “carries huge risks,” but he said there were no other options given the severity of the current water shortage.

The middle route is to start major operations in 2014, and the eastern route is expected to be operational by 2013. The lines were originally supposed to open by the 2008 Summer Olympics, but have been hobbled by myriad problems.

The diversion project was first studied in the 1950s, after Mao uttered: “Water in the south is abundant, water in the north scarce. If possible, it would be fine to borrow a little.”

In a country afflicted by severe cycles of droughts and floods and peasant rebellions that often resulted from them, control of water has always been important to Chinese rulers. Emperors sought to legitimize their rule with large-scale water projects like the Grand Canal or the irrigation system in Dujiangyan.

After the initial studies in the 1950s, the government did not look seriously again at the project until the 1990s, when north China was hit hard by droughts. In 2002, the State Council gave the green light for work to start on the middle and eastern routes; the western route, which would run at an average altitude of 10,000 to 13,000 feet across the Tibetan plateau to help irrigate the Yellow River basin, has been deemed too difficult to start for now.

Officials in Tianjin are so skeptical of the eastern route’s ability to deliver drinkable water that they are looking at desalinization as an alternative. Planners have more hope for the middle route, though the engineering is a much greater challenge — the canal has to be built entirely from scratch, with 1,774 structures constructed along its length to channel the water, since there is no pre-existing waterway like the Grand Canal to follow.

At the start of the route, the water level of the Danjiangkou Reservoir on the Han River has been raised 43 feet to 558 feet so that the water can flow downhill to Beijing. The government said the rising waters and a need to combat soil erosion necessitated moving 130,000 farmers last year from around the reservoir. Similar relocations are taking place all along the main channel, which runs through four provinces.

About 1,300 residents of Qingshan township have been moved to Xiangbei Farm, desolate land where a prison once stood. The villagers now live in sterile rows of yellow concrete houses 125 miles east of their abandoned ancestral homes. A government sign in the middle of the settlement says: “The land is fertile and has complete irrigation systems.”

The farmers know better. Each person is supposed to get a small plot of land free, but the soil here is well known to be exceedingly poor. The people also complain that in the government’s compensation formula, their old homes were undervalued, so many have had to pay several thousand dollars to buy new homes.

“There’s nothing here,” said Huang Jiuguo, 57. “There’s no enterprise. Our children are grown, and they need something to do.”

For three days last November, thousands of residents of a resettlement area in Qianjiang city blocked roads to protest poorly built homes and lack of promised compensation, according to a report by Radio Free Asia. Officials ordered the police to break up the rally, resulting in clashes, injuries and arrests.

Forced relocations, though, could pale next to larger fallouts from the project.

“We feel that we are still unsure how the project is going to impact on the environment, ecologies, economies and society at large,” said Mr. Du, the geographer in Wuhan, who carefully added he was not outright opposed to the project.

The central question for people in Hubei is whether the Han River, crucial to farming and industrial production hubs, will be killed to keep north China alive.

In a paper published in the Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mr. Du and two co-authors estimated that the diversion project would reduce the flow of the middle and lower stretches of the Han significantly, “leading to an uphill situation for the prevention of water pollution and ecological protection.” Though the study first appeared in 2006, the government has not altered its original plan, Mr. Du said.

Central planners decided on the amount of water to be diverted based on calculations of water flow in the Han done from the 1950s to the early 1990s; since then, the water flow has dropped, partly because of prolonged droughts, but planners have made no adjustments, Mr. Du said. The amount to be diverted is more than one-third of the annual water flow. “That will exert a huge damaging impact on the river,” he said.

The Han River is already facing enormous challenges — industries are discharging more and more pollutants, companies are dredging sand to feed construction needs in nearby cities and algal bloom has hit the river hard. The diversion of water to Beijing will add to the pressures. “If the water quality cannot be ameliorated effectively, the aquatic life populations will be further decimated,” Mr. Du and his co-authors wrote.

The diversion from the Han is necessitating more complex projects to raise water levels. One side diversion brings water from the Yangtze to the Han. Another would bring water from the Three Gorges reservoir to the Danjiangkou reservoir.

Government officials in the south are keenly aware of the changes coming to the Han. In Xiangfan, officials have shuttered some small factories like paper producers and forced others to use more nonpolluting materials, said Yun Jianli, director of the environmental advocacy group Green Han River. “The local government is very concerned about the river and impact of the diversion project,” she said.

The political conflicts are obvious. Mr. Du, a member of the provincial consultative legislature, said officials in Hubei had been in constant negotiations with officials in Beijing for compensation. In the 1990s, the central government proposed a package of water projects valued at $50 million at the time to help Hubei. After rounds of negotiations, the current proposal for supplemental water projects is estimated at more than $1 billion.

The demands of the north will not abate. Migration from rural areas means Beijing’s population is growing by one million every two years, according to an essay in China Daily written last October by Hou Dongmin, a scholar of population development at Renmin University of China. “With its dwindling water resources, Beijing cannot sustain a larger population,” Mr. Hou said. “Instead, it should make serious efforts to control the population, if not reduce it.”

Beijing has about 100 cubic meters, or 26,000 gallons, of water available per person. According to a standard adopted by the United Nations, that is a fraction of the 1,000 cubic meters, or 260,000 gallons, per person that indicates chronic water scarcity.

The planning for Beijing’s growth up to 2020 by the State Council already assumes the water diversion will work, rather than planning for growth with much less water, said Mr. Wang, the former official.

City planners see a Beijing full of golf courses, swimming pools and nearby ski slopes — the model set by the West. [Ohmhygoddess!]

“Instead of transferring water to meet the growing demand of a city, we should decide the size of a city according to how much water resources it has,” Mr. Wang said. “People’s desire for development has no end.”

Li Bibo, Jonathan Kaiman and Jimmy Wang contributed research from Beijing.

You CANNOT Fight Mother Nature. Period.

I used to call a policy like this "short sighted" - and indeed, it is that. But I realized recently that it doesn't go far enough to call these types of policies short-sighted. I need to emphasize that, while one may be able to fight City Hall (on occasion), one can NEVER FIGHT AND WIN in the long run against Mother Nature. Just a friendly reminder that we are of the Earth, the Earth is not of us!
China admits Three Gorges Dam has 'urgent problems' as drought persists
May 25, 2011|By Jo Ling Kent, CNN

In a rare admission, the Chinese government has said the Three Gorges Dam -- the world's largest hydropower plant -- is having "urgent problems," warning of environmental, construction and migration "disasters" amid the worst drought to hit southern China in 50 years.

China's State Council, the country's Cabinet, this week said that while the dam has been beneficial to the region, there has also been a variety of issues since construction began in 1992.

"At the same time that the Three Gorges Dam project provides huge comprehensive benefits, urgent problems must be resolved regarding the smooth relocation of residents, ecological protection and geological disaster prevention," the statement said.

This is the first major official acknowledgment of the dam's repercussions. The Chinese government also admitted the Three Gorges Dam has negatively impacted downstream river water, transport and migration.

"Some problems emerged at various stages of project planning and construction but could not be solved immediately due to the conditions at the time," the State Council said. "Some arose because of increased demands brought on by economic and social development."

The project, which cost more than 180 billion yuan (US$28 billion), has been a source of pride for the government while also arousing intense debate among scientists and villagers. Completed in 2006, the dam includes a five-tier ship lock, a reservoir, and 26 hydropower turbo-generators. The dam was originally touted for its ability to control the impact of flooding that threatens the Yangtze river delta each summer.

However, millions of Chinese citizens have been adversely impacted throughout the construction process and even after the dam's completion.

The Three Gorges displaced over 1.4 million residents along the Yangtze during the digging and construction of a giant concrete barrier, made up of 16 million tons of concrete. More than 1,000 towns and villages were flooded in the process. Landslides and pollution have plagued the areas near the dam since it was built.

Meanwhile, a prolonged drought has persisted along the Yangtze, affecting nearly 10 million people along the river's middle and lower sections, in Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi and Anhui provinces, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Citizens in the region are blaming the dam's restiction on river flow for exacerbating the effects of the drought.

 ****************************************************************

How would the United States government deal with a city say, the size of New York City, being without adequate drinking water, let alone water to bathe in, water the animals in the Central Park Zoo, water one's plants, wash one's car, wash one's clothes, cook, wash dishes, etc. etc. etc. 

This is the kind of environmental disaster we're talking about here, with the Three Gorges Dam. 

More information can be found in this article:

China admits problems with Three Gorges Dam, Nature News - note also the comments.  I can't help but wonder, were these made by people paid by the Chinese government? Who knows - maybe only The Shadow knows...

I will say this - the population explosion in China has long outstripped the fresh/clean water supply, long before the Three Gorges Dam was built  - probably long before it was dreamed of!  I know I've been reading periodic articles for years about the growing "water problems" in China - since I first got connected to the internet (December, 1998).  Since this blog has been online (May, 2007) I've posted several articles here about the growing problems of providing drinkable water to the population - that's drinkable water.  Who the hell knows what's in the water people are using these days to irrigate their crops!  When one thinks about what business interests in China have done to adulterate consumer products just in order to make an extra penny per sale - oh my!

Thank Goddess for the internet.  No matter how hard they may try, no government can totally block this source of international information sharing.  Not China, not Iran, not the USA, not Russia.  You can "spin," darlings, but you can't hide!

From the Brisbane Times (Australia)
Yangtze delta hit by worst drought in decades
Jonathan Watts
May 27, 2011

Guihu Lake in Wuhu, Anhui province. Photo: Reuters

BEIJING: The Yangtze delta is caught in its worst drought in 50 years, forcing an unprecedented release of water from the Three Gorges Dam and prompting warnings of power shortages.

The drought is damaging crops, threatening wildlife and raising doubts about the viability of China's huge water diversion ambitions.

Up until June 10, billions of cubic metres of water will be released from the dam as engineers sacrifice hydro-electric generation for irrigation, drinking supplies and ecosystem support.

The drastic measure comes amid warnings of power shortages and highlights the severity of the dry spell in the Yangtze delta, which supports 400 million people and 40 per cent of China's economic activity.

From January to April, the worst-hit province, Hubei, has had 40 per cent less rainfall than the average over the same period since 1961. Shanghai, Jiangsu and Hunan are severely affected.

Regional authorities have de- clared more than 1300 lakes ''dead'', which means they are out of use for irrigation and drinking supply. The shortages affect 4.4 million people and 3.2 million farm animals, according to the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.

The narrowing and shallowing of the Yangtze - Asia's longest river - and its tributaries has stranded thousands of boats and left a 220-kilometre stretch off limits for container ships.

The central government has sent water pumps and diesel generators to Hubei and Hunan to ease the impact. This is expensive and adds to the pressures on China's energy supply system at a time when the state grid authorities are warning of the worst summer power cuts in seven years.

''The primary cause of this drought is a lack of rainfall,'' said Ma Jun, founder of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. ''But we can also be certain that the Three Gorges Dam has had a negative impact on the water supply downstream. This is a reminder that the water in the Yangtze is not unlimited. We cannot bet everything on this river. We need to focus more on conservation.''

Farmers are pumping water from nature reserves, prompting alarm among conservationists about the loss of habitat for endangered species including the finless porpoise - the last remaining cetacean in the Yangtze after the demise of the baiji dolphin.

To minimise the impact, the Three Gorges authority has been instructed to open the sluice gates. It has already discharged 1.8 billion cubic metres of water this month, taking the level of the reservoir below 153 metres from a peak of 175 metres.

The dam's role in the drought has been the subject of a fierce debate. Downstream communities have accused the Three Gorges authority of holding back too much water to generate power. Environmentalists say this has contributed to the demise of lakes and wetlands, which are already under pressure from urban development and the demands of agriculture. The operators say the reservoir is helping to ease the shortages through the timely release of water.

Last week the state council - China's cabinet - acknowledged that the Three Gorges faced ''urgent problems'' of geological disaster prevention, relocation and ecological protection and noted the negative impact on downstream water supplies and river transport.

Abuses in China's Official Population Control Policy

Gee, ya think?

From The New York Times [Excerpted]
Abuses Cited in Enforcing China Policy of One Child
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: December 21, 2010

BEIJING — Thirty years after it introduced some of the world’s most sweeping population-control measures, the Chinese government continues to use a variety of coercive family planning tactics, from financial penalties for households that violate the restrictions to the forced sterilization of women who have already had one child, according to a report issued by a human rights group.

The report, published Tuesday by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, documents breadwinners who lose their jobs after the birth of a second child, campaigns that reward citizens for reporting on the reproductive secrets of their neighbors and expectant mothers dragged into operating rooms for late-term abortions.

Not uncommon, according to the report, are the experiences of women like Li Hongmei, 24, a factory employee from Anhui Province who was at home recovering from the birth of her daughter when a dozen men employed by the local government carried her off to a hospital for a tubal ligation. “I promised I would have the surgery when I got better but they didn’t care,” Ms. Li said in a telephone interview. “I screamed and tried to fight them off but it was no use.”

Although most of the abuses documented in the report are not new, its authors are seeking to highlight the darker side of birth-control restrictions at a time when the public debate has largely focused on whether China’s family-planning policy has been too successful for its own good. This year as the nation marked the 30th anniversary of the so-called one-child policy, officials have been praising such measures for preventing 400 million births. A smaller population, they argue, has helped fuel China’s astounding economic growth by reducing the demands on food production, education and medical care.

Some demographers, however, argue that plummeting fertility rates and a rapidly aging population are reasons enough to ease the rules. Sociologists fret about the surfeit of unmarried men — the result of selective abortions that favor sons — and the demands on only children forced to care for elderly parents.

As the report makes clear, China’s family-planning policies are unevenly applied and replete with exceptions. The rich simply pay the fines levied on those who ignore the restrictions, and some middle-class women have gotten around the rules by traveling overseas to give birth to a second child. Millions of couples refuse to register their newborns with the authorities, although that approach leaves such children ineligible for an array of social benefits, including a free education.

The policy is also not as all encompassing as many believe. Parents who themselves were raised in single-child families are allowed to have a second baby, as are many rural residents if their first is a girl. Ethnic minorities in some places, like Tibet and Xinjiang, can have as many as four children.

The worst abuses, the report says, take place in small towns and in rural areas, where a point system rewards or punishes local officials based on their ability to meet quotas. In many places, the revenues earned through fines on scofflaws, known as “social maintenance fees,” feed an entrenched bureaucracy.

In Jiangsu Province, parents who give birth to an “out of quota” child can be fined four times the average annual per capita income of the area. Other fines are imposed on women who miss regular gynecological exams or fail to undergo surgery for an intrauterine device. In one city in Hunan Province, the authorities collected $1.8 million in fines between July and September, according to government figures.

He Yafu, an independent demographer who has studied family-planning regulations for two decades, said one of the biggest obstacles to changes in the policy are county and township governments. “It’s become a huge vehicle for officials to collect money,” he said. “In some localities, the budget relies almost entirely on such fines.”

The report cites a number of recent cases that have wiggled through the media controls that normally filter out stories about family planning excesses. Last April, more than 1,300 people in Puning city, in Guangdong Province, were held hostage in government buildings in an effort to force women who had had a second child to undergo sterilization. The detainees, it turned out, were mostly elderly people whose daughters had left town to evade family planning restrictions. The campaign was so effective, according to a government Web site, that 3,000 sterilizations had been carried out by the fall.

Zhang Jing contributed research.

China's Publicity Stunt Backfires

Oh my Goddess! This is funny, LOL! What an eye-opener, too!  I thought at least some of the Chinese ruling elite were more sophisticated than this. Guess not.

From Yahoo News
China stood up by winner of 'Confucius peace prize'
By Michael Martina Michael Martina – Thu Dec 9, 6:00 am ET

That grimace on the unidentified little girl is supposed
to be a smile!  She was obviously chosen to evoke
an "awwwww, ain's she cute" reaction.  Yes, she
is very cute.  No, your stupid "Prize" didn't work.

BEIJING (Reuters) – It was meant to be China's answer to the Nobel Peace Prize, a timely riposte to the honoring of jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo. But the winner of the first "Confucius Peace Prize" didn't even bother to show up.

Instead, it was left to a scared-looking girl, whom organizers did not properly identify, to collect a stack of bills for the $15,000 cash prize meant for former Taiwan vice-president Lien Chan.

Lien had won the prize for his efforts to improve relations between China and Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing claims as its own, beating out five other nominees, including past Nobel Peace Prize winners Mahmoud Abbas and Nelson Mandela.

"We believe that Mr. Lien Chan, with his knowledge, dignity, and political wisdom, would not refuse peace, and he would not refuse this prize," Confucius Prize organizer Tan Changliu gamely told a packed news conference in Beijing.

Lien, now honorary chairman of Taiwan's ruling Nationalist or KMT party, has not commented publicly on the prize.

Lai Shin-yuan, chairwoman of Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, told Taiwan lawmakers that the island's government found the prize "amusing."

"As far as we know it is an unofficial prize. We don't plan to make any comment on it," she said. "But we do find it amusing." [I'll bet you do, LOL!]

Chinese Expedition to Kenya Hopes to Recover the Past - Suitably Edited

From The Wall Street Journal online:

DECEMBER 4, 2010
Recovering China's Past on Kenya's Coast
By Virginia Postrel

A team of Chinese archeologists arrived in Kenya last week, headed for waters surrounding the Lamu archipelago on the country's northern coast. They hadn't made the trip to study local history. They came to recover a lost Chinese past.

In the early 1400s, nearly a century before Vasco da Gama reached eastern Africa, Chinese records say that the great admiral Zheng He took his vast fleet of treasure ships as far as Kenya's northern Swahili coast. Zheng visited the Sultan of Malindi, the most powerful local ruler, and brought back exotic gifts, including a giraffe. "Africa was China's El Dorado—the land of rare and precious things, mysterious and unfathomable," writes Louise Levathes in her 1994 history of Zheng's voyages, "When China Ruled the Seas."

Now the Chinese government is funding a three-year, $3 million project, in cooperation with the National Museums of Kenya, to find and analyze evidence of Zheng's visits. The underwater search for shipwrecks follows a dig last summer in the village of Mambrui that unearthed a rare coin carried only by emissaries of the Chinese emperor, as well as a large fragment of a green-glazed porcelain bowl whose fine workmanship befits an imperial envoy. Although Ming-era porcelains are nothing new in Mambrui—Chinese porcelains fill the local museum and decorate a centuries-old tomb—the latest finds suggest that the wares came not through Arab merchants but directly from China.

For a resurgent China with often-controversial business ventures in Africa, Zheng's voyages epitomize what the 20th-century literary critic Van Wyck Brooks called a "usable past"—a historical tradition that serves present needs. Falling somewhere between history and myth, a usable past selects and emphasizes what is relevant and resonant for the present and omits the contradictory or distracting. It both shapes and communicates identity, whether national, ethnic, artistic, religious, institutional or personal.


—Virginia Postrel is the author of "The Future and Its Enemies" and "The Substance of Style." She is writing a book on glamour.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page C12
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Miscellany - on Tuesday Night!

I haven't done a Friday Night Miscellany for quite awhile.  Today I found four stories I thought would be great for this format, so here it is - Tuesday night, I'm watching "The Biggest Loser" and thinking about how the heck I can find the correct Marie Louise Adele Seguin dit Laderoute who was my great-great grandmother on my father's side and anxious to get back to digging through censuses, marriage, birth and death records for my ancestors.

So, without further ado - TA DA! Tuesday Night Miscellany!

A different perspective on the sexual abuse of children scandal currently engulfing the Church of Rome by Maureen Dowd.  I don't always see eye-to-eye with her but in this column she's sooooo totally right on.  Those priests - gutter scum - every one who committed sexual crimes against children should be taken out, shot, and left to rot for the carion.  But first I would cut off their nuts and stuff them down their throats.  Crude - yes - but effective.

To shave or not to shave, that is the question
Seems some women want to walk around with hairy legs and think they're making some kind of "statement." Yeah, wow, some statement, ladies. Just be sure you shave your pits. Unshaved arm pits smell, even if you use antisperspirant. I've travelled a little in Europe where women aren't as keen on personal hygiene as most Americans - they just think we're anal and bourgeois. But let me tell you - unshaved pits SMELL BAD, even in the winter-time. And you don't have to get too close to a funky underarm either, to experience the, er, aromatic effects. Eeeeuuuuuwwwwwww. The epitome of Euro fashion - a drop dead gorgeous frock, perfect hair, make-up and accessoriess, hairy legs, moldy crotch "perfume" and funky underarms.

On Chinese hacking into computers
From a reporter based in China whose yahoo email account was hacked.  No one wants to say what the truth is that's staring everyone in the face - it's the frigging Chinese doing all the hacking.  They are liars and thieves and worse, and believe they are SUPERIOR to all races and cultures in the world today. The Chinese in mainland China today think they can do whatever they want to get ahead - and there are no consequences for breaking laws, stealing, lying, cheating, killing.  The government approves, too.  They think the rest of us are cockroaches to be stomped out.  They don't care that they're depleting all of their ground water and polluting their land for the next 1,000 years.  They're looking to take what WE have - first in Russia, then in Europe, and finally, here in the Americas.  Think I'm paranoid?  Just take a look at who's running things in China today - and why.  That provides all the answers.  Do a litle digging.  Don't just accept what Newsweek or NYT or Fox News says.  And be scared.  Be very, very scared.

More on China and cheating as an accepted lifestyle
There are no consequences even for those who are exposed as plagerizers and cheaters. In fact, people who refuse to cheat are not trusted and are considered abnormal - they are blocked from promotions and ostracized in other ways, too.
I got a good laugh reading this article from The Wall Street Journal:
Millionaires going bankrupt and facing foreclosure - boo hoo hoo, my hearts bleeds - NOT!

Dead Babies Wash Up on Chinese Beach

Dead babies wash up on Chinese beach
Two mortuary workers were detained and two senior hospital staff were sacked in eastern China after the bodies of at least 21 infants and foetuses were found in a river.
Published: 9:25PM BST 30 Mar 2010

At least eight bodies had tags indicating they were from the hospital of Jining Medical University in Shandong province, Xinhua news agency reported.

Authorities were quoted by Beijing News saying the corpses could have been those of aborted foetuses or babies who had died of illness. They were found on the outskirts of the city of Jining.

Xinhua quoted a spokesman for the city government as telling reporters that two mortuary workers had been sacked in connection with the incident and were in police custody.

Naming the two workers as Zhu Zhenyu and Wang Zhijun, Xinhua quoted the spokesman as saying that the two had been paid to dispose of the bodies.

“Investigations by police and health authorities show that Zhu and Wang had reached verbal agreements privately with relatives of the dead babies to dispose the bodies and charged fees,” the spokesman, Gong Zhenhua, said.

“They subsequently transported the bodies secretly to the Guangfu River, but they had failed to bury the bodies completely,” he was quoted as saying.

The river was not a source of drinking water for the city and municipal tests found it had not been contaminated, Xinhua reported. [Yeah, right. One has to now wonder how many other bodies and body parts were dumped into the river.  I don't believe for an instant that any of these bodies were "buried" and somehow became "uncovered."  And that is just an outright lie about the river not being a source of drinking water.  Right now China is experiencing a SEVERE drought of several years' duration and ALL rivers are being used as sources of drinking water, right while unprocessed chemical pollutants and unprocessed human waste continue to be dumped into them at record rates.]

Two senior officials, Li Luning and He Xin, director and deputy director of the hospital’s logistics department, were removed from their posts, and a vice president of the hospital, Niu Haifeng, was suspended, Gong said.

The incident exposed “a serious loophole in the hospital’s management and indicates a lack of ethics and legal awareness of some hospital staff,” Gong said. “It exerts a very negative impact on society and teaches us a profound lesson.”

He said the city government had ordered health authorities to immediately launch a general overhaul of body treatment at all local hospitals.

One of the bodies had been bundled into a plastic bag marked “hospital waste”, Beijing News said.

Abortion is common in China, where at least 13 million births are terminated every year, due in part to the nation’s so-called “one-child policy,” which limits most urban couples to just one offspring.

The family-planning rules are widely blamed for fuelling abortions of female foetuses in China, where boys are traditionally favoured.

Reports of poor treatment of patients – both living and dead – in China’s underfunded hospitals are also not uncommon.

Last June, a hospital in central China’s Hubei province was found to have dumped the bodies of two adults and six aborted foetuses at a construction site after failing to locate relatives of the dead, state media reported. [Question: How could an aborted foetus not have a relative? Is the mother not a relative?]

A bag containing severed human limbs was also discovered in the case, in the city of Xiangfan.

**************************************************************

This is just one incident that has been "discovered" and reported (shocking, actually, that it was allowed to make the news) - multiply this about 10,000 times and you will begin to get a picture of what is really happening in China these days - day in and day out.

Lose This - Lose a Better Life

From The New York Times: Files Vanished, Young Chinese Lose the Future By SHARON LaFRANIERE Published: July 26, 2009 WUBU, China — For much of his education, Xue Longlong was silently accompanied from grade to grade, school to school, by a sealed Manila envelope stamped top secret. Stuffed inside were grades, test results, evaluations by fellow students and teachers, his Communist Party application and — most important for his job prospects — proof of his 2006 college degree. Everyone in China who has been to high school has such a file. The files are irreplaceable histories of achievement and failure, the starting point for potential employers, government officials and others judging an individual’s worth. Often keys to the future, they are locked tight in government, school or workplace cabinets to eliminate any chance they might vanish. But two years ago, Mr. Xue’s file did vanish. So did the files of at least 10 others, all 2006 college graduates with exemplary records, all from poor families living near this gritty north-central town on the wide banks of the Yellow River. With the Manila folders went their futures, they say. Local officials said the files were lost when state workers moved them from the first to the second floor of a government building. But the graduates say they believe officials stole the files and sold them to underachievers seeking new identities and better job prospects — a claim bolstered by a string of similar cases across China. Today, Mr. Xue, who had hoped to work at a state-owned oil company, sells real estate door to door, a step up from past jobs passing out leaflets and serving drinks at an Internet cafe. Wang Yong, who aspired to be a teacher or a bank officer, works odd jobs. Wang Jindong, who had a shot at a job at a state chemical firm, is a construction day laborer, earning less than $10 a day. “If you don’t have it, just forget it!” Wang Jindong, now 27, said of his file. “No matter how capable you are, they will not hire you. Their first reaction is that you are a crook.” Perhaps no group here is more vilified and mistrusted than China’s local officials, who shoulder much of the blame for corruption within the Communist Party. The party constantly vows to rein them in; in October, President Hu Jintao said a clean party was “a matter of life and death.” ... While not quite as important as in Communist China’s early days, when it was a powerful tool of social control, the file, called a dangan, is an absolute requirement for state employment and a means to bolster a candidate’s chances for some private-sector jobs, labor experts say. Because documents are collected over several years and signed by many people, they are virtually impossible to replicate. Rest of article.

Theft of Boys in China

From The New York Times Chinese Hunger for Sons Fuels Boys’ Abductions By ANDREW JACOBS Published: April 4, 2009 SHENZHEN, China — The thieves often strike at dusk, when children are playing outside and their parents are distracted by exhaustion. Deng Huidong lost her 9-month-old son in the blink of an eye as a man yanked him from the grip of his 7-year-old sister near the doorway of their home. The car did not even stop as a pair of arms reached out the window and grabbed the boy. Sun Zuo, a gregarious 3 1/2-year-old, was lured off by someone with a slice of mango and a toy car, an abduction that was captured by police surveillance cameras. Peng Gaofeng was busy with customers when a man snatched his 4-year-old son from the plaza in front of his shop as throngs of factory workers enjoyed a spring evening. “I turned away for a minute, and when I called out for him he was gone,” Mr. Peng said. These and thousands of other children stolen from the teeming industrial hubs of China’s Pearl River Delta have never been recovered by their parents or by the police. But anecdotal evidence suggests the children do not travel far. Although some are sold to buyers in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, most of the boys are purchased domestically by families desperate for a male heir, parents of abducted children and some law enforcement officials who have investigated the matter say. The demand is especially strong in rural areas of south China, where a tradition of favoring boys over girls and the country’s strict family planning policies have turned the sale of stolen children into a thriving business. Su Qingcai, a tea farmer from the mountainous coast of Fujian Province, explained why he spent $3,500 last year on a 5-year-old boy. “A girl is just not as good as a son,” said Mr. Su, 38, who has a 14-year-old daughter but whose biological son died at 3 months. “It doesn’t matter how much money you have. If you don’t have a son, you are not as good as other people who have one.” The centuries-old tradition of cherishing boys — and a custom that dictates that a married woman moves in with her husband’s family — is reinforced by a modern reality: Without a real social safety net in China, many parents fear they will be left to fend for themselves in old age. The extent of the problem is a matter of dispute. The Chinese government insists there are fewer than 2,500 cases of human trafficking each year, a figure that includes both women and children. But advocates for abducted children say there may be hundreds of thousands. Sun Haiyang, whose son disappeared in 2007, has collected a list of 2,000 children in and around Shenzhen who have disappeared in the past two years. He said none of the children in his database had been recovered. “It’s like fishing a needle out of the sea,” he said. Mr. Peng, who started an ad hoc group for parents of stolen children, said some of the girls were sold to orphanages. They are the lucky ones who often end up in the United States or Europe after adoptive parents pay fees to orphanages that average $5,000. The unlucky ones, especially older children, who are not in demand by families, can end up as prostitutes or indentured laborers. Some of the children begging or hawking flowers in major Chinese cities are in the employ of criminal gangs that abducted them. “I don’t even want to talk about what happens to these children,” Mr. Peng said, choking up. Police Indifference Here in Shenzhen and the constellation of manufacturing towns packed with migrant workers, desperate families say they get almost no help from the local police. In case after case, they said, the police insisted on waiting 24 hours before taking action, and then claimed that too much time had passed to mount an effective investigation. Several parents, through their own guile and persistence, have tracked down surveillance video images that clearly show the kidnappings in progress. Yet even that can fail to move the police, they say. “They told me a face isn’t enough, that they need a name,” said Cai Xinqian, who obtained tape from a store camera that showed a woman leading his 4-year-old away. “If I had a name, I could find him myself.” Rest of story.

China Tries to Stop Auction

From People's Daily Online Chinese lawyers try to stop Christie's sale of stolen relics 21:48, February 10, 2009 A team of 81 Chinese lawyers has written to auction giant Christie's in an effort to stop the sale of two bronze relics, which were looted from an old Beijing palace. The two artifacts, the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) bronze rabbit and rat head sculptures, will be auctioned by Christie's in Paris from Feb. 23 to 25. They were expected to fetch 8 million to 10 million euros (about 10.4 to 13 million U.S. dollars) each. "We've sent a letter to Christie's representative in China through e-mail," Liu Yang, one of the lawyers working on the case, told Xinhua. The letter will also be sent to Christie's headquarters by a liaison person in France, he said. Liu said they hope Christie's could give a second thought to the sale of the Chinese relics, withdraw them from the auction and persuade the owner of the stolen artifacts to return them to China. The two bronze head sculptures were housed in Yuanmingyuan, Beijing's Imperial Summer Palace. They were stolen when the palace was burnt down by Anglo-French allied forces during the Second Opium War in 1860. The rabbit and rat head sculptures currently belong to the Pierre Berge-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation and were put up for auction by Pierre Berge. Liu said his team had also sent a letter to Pierre Berge, asking him not to auction the relics and return them to China. He said his team would sue Pierre Berge if there were no "positive feedback from them (Pierre Berge and Christie's) within a reasonable period". Christie's would be involved in the lawsuit as the third party. But he declined to say how long his team would wait for the "positive feedback". Christie's Public Relations Officer in China Chen Yan confirmed that the company's Beijing office had received the letter. Chen said the sale of all the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge collection will go for charity. All the articles, including the two Yuanmingyuan bronze sculptures, have legal documents showing that they are possessed by their keepers legally, she said. "Therefore, the auction will go on as scheduled," she said in an e-mail to Xinhua. Chen said Christie's understands that the auction of the two bronze sculptures is "sensitive" in China and hopes to work with other parties to find a "satisfactory" solution. China and France signed the 1995 Unidroit Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects, which stipulated that any cultural object looted or lost because of reasons of war should be returned without any limitation of time span. Liu refuted Chen's comments and said Pierre Berge does not have legal ownership of the two sculptures. He said according to the principle of the Civil Law System, the right of the owner of an article will not exceed the right of the article's previous owner. "The fact that the sculptures were stolen from China and illegally possessed by some people previously, means that the ownership of their current keeper is not legal," he said. Christie's carried a detailed introduction of the two bronzes on its website, saying that the two formed part of the zodiacal clepsydra that decorated the Calm Sea Pavilion in the Old Summer Palace of Emperor Qianlong (1736-1795). "Constructed between 1756 and 1759 under the supervision of the famous Jesuit priest Giuseppe Castiglione, the heads are characterized by a distinctly western style," Mathilde Courteault, head of the company's Asian Department, was quoted by the website as saying. "The clepsydra comprised the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac each of which, in their turn, spouted water to mark the various hours of the day with the exception of midday, when this elaborate hydraulic mechanism triggered all of the animals simultaneously," Courteault said. Early reports said Liu and his team had had trouble finding an appropriate plaintiff to sue Christie and channeling enough money for the lawsuit. But Liu said those problems were gone as the Global Aixinjueluo Family Clan, a civil society registered in Hong Kong, has agreed to be the plaintiff. Aixinjueluo is the clan name of the emperors of the Qing Dynasty. A company in Shenzhen in south China agreed to donate 400,000 yuan (58,823 U.S. dollars) to the lawyers to cover the legal cost, Liu said. He declined to release the company's name and said his team still need to sign an agreement with the company before they get the money. The action of the lawyers has gained support from many Chinese netizens, who are furious about the auction. Many netizens pasted comments on the forum of sina.com, saying that "looted relics must be returned to China for free." China's State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) said earlier that Christie's auction of the two stolen relics is unacceptable and China will not try to buy them back. Song Xinchao, director of the museum department with the SACH, said the best way to deal with the issue was to ignore it, because some business people might use the patriotism of the Chinese people to raise bidding prices for monetary gain. The American auction house Sotheby's tried to put a bronze horse head for auction in 2007. But Macao billionaire Stanley Ho bought the relic at a price of 69.1 million Hong Kong dollars (about 9 million U.S. dollars) before the auction and donated it to the Chinese government. China's Special Fund for Rescuing Lost Cultural Relics from overseas had negotiated with the keeper of the two relics in 2003 and 2004, but were deterred by an asking price of 10 million U.S. dollars for each artifact. So far, five of the 12 bronze animal heads have already been returned to China, while the whereabouts of five others is unknown. Source:Xinhua

Something Wrong with this Picture...

Is it only me, or is there something wrong with this picture? Why are these chess dudes (2008 Nanjing), only one of whom is Chinese, all dressed in these 21st fantasy versions of the Mao jacket? YECHY - and damn scary, too! What does this say about the modern Chinese mentality? Reminds me of the Borg - EEK! Now that's really scary! (Photo from Susan Polgar's excellent blog)

Erosion May Spell Future Famine for China

China's crops at risk from massive erosion Fri Nov 21, 2008 9:13am EST BEIJING (Reuters) - Over a third of China's land is being scoured by serious erosion that is putting its crops and water supply a risk, a three-year nationwide survey has found. Soil is being washed and blown away not only in remote rural areas, but near mines, factories and even in cities, the official Xinhua agency cited the country's bio-environment security research team saying. Each year some 4.5 billion tonnes of soil are lost, threatening the country's ability to feed itself. If the loss continues at this rate, harvests in China's northeastern breadbasket could fall 40 percent in 50 years, adding to erosion costs estimated at 200 billion yuan ($29 billion) in this decade alone. "China has a more dire situation than India, Japan, the United States, Australia and many other countries suffering from soil erosion," Xinhua quoted the research team saying. Beijing has long been worried about the desertification of its northern grasslands, and scaled back logging after rain rushing down denuded mountainsides caused massive flooding along the Yangtze in the late 1990s. But around 1.6 million square km of land are still being degraded by water erosion, with almost every river basin affected. Another 2.0 million square km are under attack from wind, the report said. The survey was the largest on soil conservation since the Communist Party took control of China in 1949. ($1=6.835 Yuan) (Reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison)

China Trying to Calm the Restive Provinces

In addition to clamping down - hard - on the Muslims within the "autonomous regions", China has enacted "land reform." Yeah - right. Let's see how far this reform is implemented in the face of totally corrupt local bureaucracies that the central government continues to do absolutely nothing about: China Enacts Major Land-Use Reform By JIM YARDLEY Published: October 19, 2008 BEIJING — After days of uncertainty, the governing Communist Party on Sunday announced a rural reform policy that for the first time would allow farmers to lease or transfer land-use rights, a step that advocates say would raise lagging incomes in the Chinese countryside. The new policy, announced by Chinese state media, is a major economic reform and is also rich in historical resonance, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the land reforms enacted by the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, which were considered the first critical steps in the policies that have fueled China’s rapid economic growth. For President Hu Jintao, whose tenure has disappointed some reformers, the new policy seems intended to position him as a worthy heir to Deng. “The new measures adopted are seen by economists as a major breakthrough in land reforms initiated by late leader Deng Xiaoping 30 years ago,” reported Xinhua, the country’s official news agency. Under the current system, farmers are assigned small plots of land. Under the new policy, the government will establish markets where farmers can “subcontract, lease, exchange or swap” land-use rights or join cooperatives. Reform advocates say allowing leasing or transfer would enable the creation of larger, more efficient farms that could increase output. The fate of the reform program has been uncertain for the past week. Analysts had expected an announcement last Sunday after the conclusion of an important annual Communist Party planning session. But the communiqué released after the meeting made no mention of land reform, fueling speculation that opponents may have derailed the plan. Critics had warned that weakening the existing system of collective village ownership could deprive peasants of the security of having a piece of land and possibly lead to millions of landless farmers. [Well, duh! Of course it will, darlings!] But the existing system has become rife with corruption, as local officials and developers have illegally seized farmland for urban expansion while paying minimal compensation to farmers. Signs that the reforms had been approved began to appear during the week. In Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern Sichuan Province, a government land market opened last Monday. On Thursday, a leading Communist Party magazine published an article by one of the country’s most senior officials on rural issues in which he said that the party would create a market for transferring land-use rights in the countryside. Deng’s reforms broke up the collective use, if not ownership, of land and created a household registration system that assigned land to individual families to use as they saw fit. Those reforms enabled farm incomes to rise sharply during the early 1980s, even as city dwellers suffered. But the later creation of an urban real estate market saw an explosion of wealth in the cities that contributed to a sharp income divide between increasingly affluent city dwellers and impoverished peasants. In recent years, rural protests have become increasingly common as disgruntled farmers have demonstrated against illegal land grabs or corrupt local officials. At the same time, tens of millions of farmers have flocked to cities in search of work, leaving plots of land to be tended by their elderly parents. Reducing the rural-urban income gap has been a major priority for Mr. Hu, but the gap has continued to widen in recent years, as China has become one of the most unequal societies in the world. On Sunday, Xinhua also announced the party’s intention to establish a modern rural financial system to extend more credit and investment into the countryside. Chinese banking regulators have been ordered to establish 40 more rural banking institutions by year’s end. Increasing incomes in the countryside is a major part of the government’s effort to raise China’s domestic consumption at a time when the overall economy is slowing. More than 700 million people are still designated as rural inhabitants, yet their spending is minimal. [Well, duh again! That's because they don't have the money to spend, nim-nuts!] Economists say that jump-starting the rural economy is one way to offset the possibility of a recession, as exports are expected to slow because of the global financial crisis. [Yeah, right. Good luck with that.] Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

Did Government Pressure Lead to Poison Milk Cover-up?

Delay since as far back as December, 2007 and certainly since June, 2008 in reporting to government officials evidence of widespread milk poisoning and ordering product recalls may have been due to pre-Olympics government pressure that no bad news be released. China Says Complaints About Milk Began in 2007 By DAVID BARBOZA Published: September 23, 2008 SHANGHAI — One of China’s biggest dairy producers received consumer complaints about its baby milk formula as early as December 2007 — much earlier than previously thought and 10 months before the producer ordered a nationwide recall because of concerns that the formula had been adulterated with a toxic industrial chemical, state media said Tuesday. The disclosure, in a government report publicized by the official Xinhua News Agency, is the latest indication that the producer, Sanlu Group, had repeatedly tried to hide information about its contaminated dairy supplies from the public. Powdered milk formula in China tainted by melamine, a chemical compound, has already sickened more than 53,000 infants and killed three children nationwide, according to the Health Ministry, leading to recalls of Chinese-made dairy products in China and other parts of Asia, devastating this nation’s huge dairy industry and casting a renewed pall over the quality of Chinese food production. Officials at the Sanlu Group, which is based in northern China’s Hebei Province, could not be reached for comment on Tuesday. The government report did not include details about the nature or number of consumer complaints but put the timing of when they began at least six months earlier than first reported. Earlier this month, government investigators said that Sanlu officials had delayed acting on consumer complaints and warnings in June, and that local government officials in Hebei knew of the problems in early August, just before the Olympic Games opened in Beijing. Sanlu announced a nationwide recall in early September. The Fonterra Group of New Zealand, which is one of the world’s biggest dairy exporters and has a 43 percent stake in Sanlu, says it pressed its Chinese partner to announce a recall in August, but company and local government officials refused. Food safety experts say the delays may have allowed the tainted powdered milk supplies to spread more widely, making tens of thousands of children ill. The delays have led to widespread speculation in China that Sanlu and some government officials were trying to cover up the problem during the Olympics because Beijing had pressed Chinese journalists and companies not to release negative news. In the two weeks since reports spread about the contamination and sickness, though, the milk recall has mushroomed, with worried parents rushing to hospitals, supermarket chains pulling dairy products off shelves and dairy farmers dumping milk because no one is willing to drink it. China’s dairy industry has been booming for more than a decade, with the aid of a government initiative to get Chinese to drink more milk. But worries about baby formula tainted with melamine, which is used to produce plastics and fertilizer, led to government checks that uncovered evidence that products made by 21 other dairy producers, including some of China’s best known dairy brands, have also been tainted by melamine. On Monday, the government announced that the head of the nation’s quality watchdog had been forced to resign for failing to properly supervise the dairy market. Several government officials from Hebei Province have also been forced to step down, along with the chairwoman of the Sanlu Group. The government announced Tuesday that more than 7,000 tons of dairy products had been removed from store shelves. Also on Tuesday, the Ministry of Agriculture said the nation’s dairy collection system was “out of control,” The Associated Press reported, making it possible for unscrupulous businesses to intentionally spike dairy supplies with melamine, which can be used to illegally and artificially inflate the protein count in milk and other foods.

Four Babies Now Dead from Melamine Poisoning

Four babies are now dead in China due to consuming melamine poisoned milk, and thousands more are hospitalized - and the response of the Chinese government is to fire a mayor? Gee, that must really make the Chinese citizens feel secure and confident in their government's ability to police the food supply and punish criminals. Mayor in China Fired in Milk Scandal By EDWARD WONG September 19, 2008 (The New York Times) BEIJING — China’s adulterated milk scandal continued to widen Thursday, as authorities arrested a dozen people, fired a senior government official and acknowledged that a wider range of milk products showed traces of a chemical used to disguise its poor quality. Officials said a fourth infant had died from tainted baby formula, while health regulators in neighboring Hong Kong announced a broader recall of mainland Chinese-made milk, yogurt and ice cream contaminated with the chemical melamine. Tainted milk is the latest in a long string of food and drug safety problems that have caused consumers in China and in the country’s major export markets to worry about the quality of some Chinese goods. Shoddy infant formula was at the center of another scandal in 2004 that prompted a crackdown on rogue suppliers. But the new safety problems are much more widespread, involving at least 22 dairy companies and contaminated milk products that have appeared nationwide. China Central Television, the main government network, reported Thursday night that melamine had been found in some liquid milk from three major brands. The authorities also announced that Ji Chuntang, the mayor of Shijiazhuang, a city whose officials have been accused of failing to deal with reports of tainted formula, had been dismissed. He was the most senior official to be punished so far. Sanlu Group, one of China’s largest dairy companies and the first company that was found to be selling contaminated formula, has its headquarters in Shijiazhuang, which is in the northern province of Hebei. Investigators have discovered traces of melamine, an industrial chemical, in batches of powdered baby formula made by the 22 dairy companies, all of which have said they were recalling their milk products. Producers trying to cut costs often dilute milk with water, which lowers the nutritional content. But the addition of melamine, which is high in nitrogen, helps the milk appear to meet nutrition standards by artificially raising its protein count. Mr. Ji was dismissed in the investigation of what appeared to be a chain of neglect and a cover-up that began with Sanlu. Sanlu received complaints months ago about suspected problems in the formula, but the company waited until Aug. 2 to tell the Shijiazhuang city government, Hebei’s deputy governor said Wednesday. City officials waited until Sept. 9 to tell provincial officials, who did not inform the central government until the next day. Sanlu finally recalled 700 tons of the formula on Sept. 11. Mr. Ji’s firing indicated that the political consequences of the scandal could increase as more information emerges on the role played by officials and as the death toll climbs. Four city officials were fired before Mr. Ji’s dismissal. The general manager of Sanlu, Tian Wenhua, has also been fired and was detained by the police. The police in Hebei Province have arrested 18 people, including six who sold melamine to milk producers, the official news agency Xinhua reported. The others were milk producers who added melamine to their products and then sold the milk to dairy companies. On Thursday, Hong Kong ordered the recall of the dairy products of Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group after tests found melamine in 8 of the company’s 30 products. The police are seeking a milk seller named Xue Jianzhong, who is accused of adding melamine to his milk. Mr. Xue was put on a wanted list late Wednesday, Xinhua reported. United States Food and Drug Administration officials said they had been reassured by manufacturers of infant formula for the American market that they did not import products or ingredients from China. An F.D.A. official said the agency was also inspecting bulk shipments from Asia to examine milk-derived ingredients, like milk protein concentrate and whey powder, in order to determine if they were contaminated with melamine. So far all the samples have shown no contamination. Andrew Martin contributed reporting from New York. Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

Friday Night Miscellany

Hola! Ohmygoddess! Humpy lost the second game of the second set of play-off games today in Nalchik (where?) and has been eliminated from the Women's World Chess Championship by 14 year old Hou Yifan. So, it's Hou Yifan v. Alexandria Kosteniuk for the final. Now that every last one of my favorite players is out of the championship, I've totally lost interest. But I must - I simply must - suck it up and report on it at Chess Femme News. And I will - I swear. I will.

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There's a long involved story about how I decided to set up a wireless computer network at home - I should have done it LONG ago! But, being technologically challenged I finally did not get serious about the idea until Sunday, when I purchased a new laptop computer. I'd been pricing them and doing comparison shopping for months, and finally pulled the trigger on a nice Toshiba for a great price. That got me thinking about how I'd be using this laptop at home. One modem - one desktop connected to modem, connected to the one and only phone jack upstairs. Where would I connect the laptop to the internet? Oops! Time to go wireless, Jan. And so I did some research online and it looked like a relatively simple procedure to hook it up, I just had to get the right components (wireless router and, for the desktop which I purchased in 2003 without wireless capability, a USB wireless adaptor). Purchasing the stuff was the easy part - I had a list of my top 3 picks and went to the OfficeMax in the mall on my lunch hour Wednesday. Ta da, less than an hour later, I had the top picks on my list for under $100 (tax included). The procedure for hooking everything up sounded easy enough too, reading it online. Hmmm....well, it's a lesson worth learning all over again. NEVER trust any directions about how to do something you read on the internet! NEVER! Soooo, I get my wireless components home Wednesday night and set things up in less than an hour. WRONGO! When I tried to go online last night, I had no internet connection! LOL! After trying various remedies and the SBC diagnostic tool (which told me I had no internet connection, duh), in desperation I re-connected the network cable that I had removed the night before from the back of the router to the computer ethernet port and voila! The internet connection was restored. However, that cable isn't supposed to be there! Obviously I'd done something wrong, but I was too tired to putz with it. The USB wireless adaptor wasn't able to connect to the router, either. Oh crap! I checked and double-checked the settings and the instructions on the DVD that came along with the little thingy (it looks like a zip drive) and thought I'd done everything a-okay, but obviously - NOT! So, today is one of my last day offs before the official end of summer (September 21) and I tackled the re-install of the router and adaptor before 9 this morning. What a comedy of errors! Trying to be "smart" (I should know better by now, wouldn't you think?) I thought "I must delete the prior installation information and start from scratch." So, I pull up my programs, and I can't find the router stuff anywhere. I did delete something - it turned out to be my ethernet drivers - but I didn't discover that until later on. Much later on... Two tries later I'm practically in tears (why is it that women start to cry when we get frustrated? Well, at least this woman does). I know I must do the dreaded call to "tech support" and speak to someone with an accent so heavy I won't be able to understand what he is saying. I pick up the telephone and dial. A mere 30 minutes later I have successfully manuevered myself past never-ending menus and mechanical voices and reach "Danny" who was either from India, Bangladesh or Pakistan judging by the accent; it wasn't as heavy as some tech support helpers I've talked to in the past, I could understand him and only had to ask him to repeat himself about half a dozen times during our 30 minutes on the telephone. Success! Danny got my ethernet drivers restored (all it finally took was a reboot of the machine, geez!) so I could get back on the internet and figure out how to "restore default settings" to my router. Arrrgggghhhh. After several attempts I was able to finally restore the default settings to my router and after that, I got it installed! (I hoped it was successfully installed, but I wouldn't know until I reinstalled the USB wireless adaptor if it really worked). Then I tackled the USB wireless adaptor. Oh my. I put in the DVD and follow the directions, but then in the middle of everything up pops this screen that says I have to download this other Linksys program - and although I tried and tried I couldn't get out of the screen; when I exited out of the DVD and tried re-running it, the same thing happened again at the same point in the installation. So, 45 minutes later, after this program had finished installing itself, I was able to complete the installation of the adaptor. Only - it didn't work! After several fruitless tries, it was sheer luck that led me to use the same password for the adaptor that I had selected as my "security key" for the router and it worked! Instantly there was the connection - all the little green lights on the modem and router were glowing! To make sure I had it right (finally), I cut the front lawn in a soft rain, took a long nap, and then I disconnected the network cable and powered everything up again. It all worked!

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The Chinese are at it again. It wasn't bad enough that they killed thousands of Americans' beloved pets with pet food poisoned with melamine. Nope - now they're poisoning their own children with baby formula adulterated with melamine. The Chinese officials are "investigating." So they'll chop off the heads of a few peasant farmers and confiscate their land, and that will be the end of that. Geez.

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Mother Nature flexes her muscles. New Orleans emptied out (good thing, actually), in the face of Hurricane Gustav; now Galveston is in the sights of Hurricane Ike. I LIKE the fact that these two devastating storms are named after guys. Ha ha. But I sure don't like the devastation that this storm is sure to bring, not to mention a big jump in gasoline prices. That affects me even though I don't own a car. It seems, unfortunately, that about 90,000 people were stupid and stayed behind on Galveston Island. Geez!

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A tart that is sweet - yet savory. Hmmm....

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Fascinating - the White Priestess of Yoruban Black Magic.

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The appearance of The Goddess (in the form of the Virgin Mary) at Lourdes celebrates its 150th anniversary. Is the Pope still holding secret revelations that Bernadette gave him prior to her death???

Divine Justice?

Just wondering... I find it interesting that Russia has (thus far) had such an anemic showing at the Olympics. As of today’s reporting, the USA has exactly twice as many medals (72) as Russia (36), and yet their population isn’t that much lower than ours. Hmmmm…. Will Miniputin now follow China and pour billions into training athletes from infancy on, to Borg perfection? Is the Great Goddess having a joke at Mother Russia’s lying expense? I find it interesting that while China adamantly refused and continues to refuse to use any of its influence to mediate the Darfur crisis, while China ruthlessly silences all dissent by immediately arresting any Chinese person and immediately deporting any foreign person who dares apply for a license to hold a protest rally in any of the designated "protest parks", and while China uses thug tactics to silence grieving parents of thousands of children killed in shoddily constructed schools during the June earthquake, China’s great track star was unable to race, being sidelined by a lingering injury to his ACHILLES’ HEEL. Now is that poetic justice or what? Are people all around the world now snickering into their hands at these two "super" powers – tee hee hee… Remember that great line uttered by Ann Baxter (as Neferteri) to Yul Brynner (as Pharaoh Rameses) in "The Ten Commandments: Do you hear laughter, Pharaoh?

Official Chinese News Agency Reports 16 Police Killed

Can this be confirmed by independent sources? If not, I don't believe it. Report: 16 police killed in China border attack By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: August 4, 2008 Filed at 12:13 a.m. ET BEIJING (AP) -- China's official Xinhua News Agency says an attack on a border patrol station on the country's frontier with Central Asia has killed 16 police officers. The report says the assailants used a dump truck to ram their way into the paramilitary police station in Kashi and then tossed two hand grenades. Besides the dead, Xinhua says 16 officers were injured. Xinhua, citing police, said two attackers were arrested. It did not identify them. The area is home to a Muslim Turkic people, the Uighurs (WEE'-gurs). The Uighurs have waged a simmering rebellion against Chinese rule. The attack comes four days before the opening of the Olympics in Beijing. THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below. BEIJING (AP) -- China's official Xinhua News Agency says an unknown group of people has attacked a border patrol station on the country's frontier with Central Asia, leaving dozens of police officers injured. The report says the assailants drove two vehicles inside the paramilitary police station in the Kashi region Monday and then threw two grenades. The brief Xinhua dispatch described the attackers as ''rioters.'' The area is home to a Muslim Turkic people, the Uighurs (WEE'-gurs). The Uighurs have waged a simmering rebellion against Chinese rule, with some drawn to the militant Islam that has buffeted Central Asia.