Tag Archives: Country: China

AP: “‘I was writing a new post and suddenly my blog couldn’t open,’ lawyer Pu Zhiqiang told The Associated Press. Legal expert Xu Zhiyong said his blog on the popular Sohu Inc. portal was also shut down Wednesday, a day after his Sohu microblog was closed. Both men are well-known for taking on sensitive issues.”

AP: “A leading Chinese Internet regulator has vowed to reduce anonymity in China’s portion of cyberspace, calling for requirements that people use their real names when buying a mobile phone or going online, according to a human rights group.”

Financial Times: The G20 appears to be placing a large bet on China’s policymakers. At their summit last month, one developed country after another, bar the US, said they would cut fiscal deficits. “If these economies all decide to reduce their budget deficits, what will drive global growth?” asked Simon Johnson, the former IMF chief economist. ‘The answer in Toronto was obvious: China.’”

Bloomberg: “Google Inc. said the Chinese government has renewed its Internet license, after the company submitted a revised application to meet regulations in the world’s biggest Internet market by users.”

WSJ: “China is not manipulating its currency, but it remains undervalued, the Treasury Department said Thursday. Treasury made the announcement in a sensitive report to Congress that had been delayed in April to give China more time to adjust the value of its currency. Lawmakers and business groups argue China keeps the value of its currency artificially low to reduce the price of its exports at the expense of U.S. jobs . . . ”

WSJ: “China is blocking a United Nations Security Council move to condemn North Korea for the sinking of a South Korean warship, say diplomats familiar with the negotiations, marking a rankling divide on the issue between the Washington and Beijing.”

AFP: “A court in Beijing has thwarted attempts by a Chinese man to sue a Red Cross centre in the capital after his blood donation was turned down because he was gay, state media reported Thursday.”

Montreal Gazette: “Google Inc. is willing to talk to China as tensions mount over Internet policy, but will not return to censoring its search results. ‘We will not go back to self-censoring,’ Robert Boorstin, global director of public policy, said during a security conference in Ottawa Wednesday. ‘We’re going to continue our conversations with the Chinese government. I won’t talk about the conversations.’ As of noon Wednesday, the company confirmed that some features of its search engine were being blocked and were inaccessible to users within China.”

CNBC (Reuters): “General Motors’ first-half sales in China, the world’s biggest auto market, exceeded sales in its home U.S. market for the first time, according to data released on Friday. GM’s China auto sales jumped 48.5 percent to 1.21 million units in January through June, compared with the 1.08 million light vehicles it delivered in the U.S. over the same period, company data showed.”

ChristianNewsWire: “From Shanghai to Beijing, rights defense lawyers have witnessed the harassment of petitioners, Chinese citizens who bring community concerns of the people to their designated higher authorities in government. … In response, a group of Chinese human rights lawyers have joined together to form the Chinese Petitioners’ Rights Defense Association, a group of legal defenders who are committed to protecting the rights of petitioners, and promoting rule of law throughout China.”

Associated Press: “A Google search feature was blocked in China on Thursday, the company said as it awaited Beijing’s decision on whether to renew its operating license amid tensions over censorship. Mainland users were unable to use the search giant’s ‘suggest’ feature, which offers possible results as they start to type a query, the company said.”

Associated Press: “The news agency run by China’s ruling Communist Party launched a global English-language television channel Thursday as part of efforts to expand its influence abroad.”

Reuters: “Google Inc could face further pressure for its other products in China as Beijing is due to decide whether or not to renew a license for the firm’s flagship search engine in the world’s largest Internet market.”

Associated Press: “China threw open the gates of its secretive Central Party School on Wednesday, offering foreign journalists a rare but carefully scripted peek at the leafy campus where the country’s Communist elite are trained.”

Christian Science Monitor: “Foreign firms are being cut out of business opportunities by official discrimination in favor of Chinese companies, and there is no sign of the playing field being leveled in the near future, a major European business group complained on Tuesday.”

AP on MyWay: “Google Inc. said Tuesday it will stop automatically routing users in China to its Hong Kong site after Beijing threatened the company with the loss of its Internet license in their latest skirmish over censorhip.”

BioEdge: “Chinese petitioners, troublemakers and corruption whistleblowers are being locked up in psychiatric institutions, according to the BMJ. Liu Feiyue, founder of Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, says that he has documented more than 500 cases.”

LifeNews: “Steven Mosher, the expert on the China one-child policy credited with exposing and bringing attention to the problem of forced abortions carried out under it, reminded the audience at the National Right to Life convention that the forced abortions on women continue. Moreover, Mosher says they are producing a male-dominated culture that is responsible for an increase in prostitution, sexual trafficking of women, and even the sale of young girls.”

Associated Press: “ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, agreed in a Friday meeting to start using Chinese characters for suffixes handed out by Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwan-based Internet registries. It started allowing Arabic earlier this year.”

Associated Press: “Hong Kong’s legislature on Friday agreed to add 10 elected seats, completing a set of Beijing-backed electoral changes that critics say reinforce the territory’s undemocratic political system.”

Robert E. Scott writing at The Huffington Post: “Growing trade deficits with China eliminated or displaced 2.4 million U.S. jobs between 2001 and 2008. China’s manipulation of its currency, the Renminbi (RMB), is responsible for at least 1 million of these displaced jobs. … The world economy cannot afford to wait another three years for China to revalue, nor can we depend on China’s central bank to act responsibly. Congress must set a firm target and deadline for China to achieve a 40% revaluation of its currency.”

Financial Times: “The US remained the world’s biggest manufacturing nation by output last year, but is poised to relinquish this slot in 2011 to China – thus ending a 110-year run as the number one country in factory production.”

Business Week: “Medvedev, who has repeatedly called for a supranational currency to match the dollar, said discussions with China are continuing on broadening the global options. Russia sold U.S. Treasuries for a fifth consecutive month in April, the U.S. Treasury Department said June 15. The world may need as many as six reserve currencies, Medvedev said.”

NY Times: “In contrast to the Obama vision, the plan here preserves a central role for coal — the dirtiest fossil fuel in terms of emissions of greenhouse gases, but a resource that China has in abundance. And while Mr. Obama voiced goals of addressing climate change and improving national security at the same time, the discussions in China have been focused almost entirely on security issues, people inside and outside the government said . . . ”

NCPA Policy Digest: “Under the new rides, any individual seeking to start a personal website, such as a blog or photo-sharing page, must apply in person at their local Internet service provider’s offices. Website operators would have to show identification and allow the service provider to take their photo.”

TIME: “Plans for a mandatory Internet filter have been a long-term subject of controversy since they were first announced by Stephen Conroy, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, in May 2008 as part of an $106 million ‘cybersafety plan.’ The plan’s stated purpose is to protect children when they go online by preventing them from stumbling on illegal material like child pornography . . . ”

AP: “China’s holdings of U.S. Treasury securities rose by $5 billion to $900.2 billion in April, the Treasury Department said Tuesday. Total foreign holdings rose by $72.8 billion to $3.96 trillion.”

AolNews.: “Chinese authorities have brought a charge of ‘group licentiousness’ against a 17-year-old girl accused of participating in sex parties with multiple male students, according to a report in the English-language China Daily . . . Sexuality experts say the dusted-off offense is a leap backward for China’s modernization drive, reflecting Beijing’s effort to maintain social order amid the dizzying social changes brought by a sexual revolution and the Internet explosion in China.”

Hindustan Times: “In a massive crackdown against internet pornography, Chinese authorities have warned 55 websites of tough action if they continue to disseminate porn materials.”

AP: “Cuba and China are more peaceful than the United States, according to a global peace index published Thursday. The report, which says the world is becoming a more violent place, was prepared by the Sydney, Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace . . . ”

JURIST: “The Chinese government on Tuesday defended its Internet censorship laws in a report detailing Internet usage within the country. China reported that nearly 30 percent of its population currently has access to the Internet and that they expect that number to increase to nearly 50 percent in the next five years.”

The Christian Institute: “Abortion provider Marie Stopes International (MSI) is facing criticism for using UK taxpayers’ money to fund the opening of abortion clinics in China . . . The organisation carries out 65,000 abortions a year in Britain, most of them through NHS contracts for which it receives £30m a year, according to media reports.”

Xinhua: “A senior Chinese official has called for promoting the values of the country’s religions, such as sincerity, harmony, safeguarding the nation and loving the people.”

Christian Today: “Protestant churches in Hong Kong are blooming with an annual growth rate 6.2% over the last five years and the number of Protestants in the former British colony drawing close to 300,000.”

WSJ: “Watching China’s instant condemnation of the Israeli assault on an aid flotilla bound for Gaza, South Koreans must be wondering more than ever when China will muster a clear response to their own nautical tragedy.”

Telegraph: “Since 1978, China’s government has limited each couple to one child in a bid to stem the growth of the world’s largest population. To police the law, neighbourhood committees keep a close eye out for any pregnancies, and Family Planning officials have the power to force women to have abortions and sterilisations, as well as to monitor their contraception . . . Examining China’s census figures, Mr Liang came across discrepancies that proved the subterfuge. ‘In 1990, the national census recorded 23 million births. But by the 2000 census, there were 26 million ten-year-old children, an increase of three million,’ he said. ‘Normally, you would expect there to be fewer ten-year-olds than newborns, because of infant mortality,’ he added.”

Financial Times: “Adm Willard said the US viewed China’s growing influence in Asia as positive . . . ”

ADF Attorney Heather Gebelin Hacker writing at the Speak Up Movement blog (via the Christian Post’s Advancing Religious Liberty blog): “There was a compelling article in National Geographic last year that recently came to my attention. It is about the plight of North Korean defectors attempting to escape from the brutal regime and the Christian missionaries who come to their aid . . . Sometimes, as Americans, it is easy for us to forget about or grow indifferent to the shocking loss of basic freedoms that millions of people endure around the world. And as Christians, it is easy for us to take for granted the freedom we have in this country, and fail to take measures to protect it. But as I’ve noted in a previous post, Thomas Jefferson was right when he said that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.’”

Chester E. Finn Jr. writing at National Review Online: “Are we in the early stages of outsourcing our education system to the same country to which we’ve surrendered our manufacturing sector and entrusted our national debt? That’s probably too dire, at least for now, but the Chinese education ministry has been extending its tentacles worldwide, from the 550 higher-ed programs (‘Confucius Institutes’) already operating in 90 countries (including almost 70 on American shores) to the newer but no less worrisome K–12 language programs that are taking the U.S. by storm. One of Beijing’s chief U.S. partners in this venture, the Asia Society, has already opened 20 pilot sites in American public schools and seeks to launch 80 more by fall 2011. Some districts and states — notably North Carolina — are working directly with the Chinese government, while still more districts are turning to their local-university-based Confucius Institutes to get started.”

Business Week: “Almost half of these deaths occurred in just five countries — China, Nigeria, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Pakistan. Africa (4.2 million) and Southeast Asia (2.39 million) accounted for the highest numbers of deaths . . . “

Breitbart (AP): “The Obama administration faces a delicate balancing act in human rights talks with China that began Thursday: It looks to pressure China to improve treatment of its citizens while not angering a country that is crucial to U.S. international interests . . . ”

“Young female refugees from North Korea are increasingly becoming a commodity in China, where they are sold to farmers for up to 1,500 dollars a head, according to a Seoul campaigner. The human trafficking is far from new but has become more prevalent as prices soar amid a shortage of Chinese women in the countryside . . . ”

Christian Post: “The officially atheist Chinese government on Monday requested religious groups and people of faith to help with the rebuilding efforts in a northwest province devastated by a massive earthquake.”

Gordon G. Chang writes at Forbes: Chinese leaders these days congratulate themselves for the success of this much-criticized policy, which they credit for preventing up to 300 million births. Yet the program, which remains in effect, has inevitably created demographic abnormalities that cannot be remedied for decades. As Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute writes in the Far Eastern Economic Review, “These problems will compromise economic development, strain social harmony and place the traditional Chinese family structure under severe pressure; in fact, they could shake Chinese civilization to its very foundations.”

Telegraph: “China is considering measures to force all its 400m internet users to register their real names before making comments on the country’s myriad chat-rooms and discussion forums, in a further sign of tightening controls on freedom of speech.”

NY Times: “Gao Zhisheng, a prominent human rights lawyer whose 13-month disappearance at the hands of Chinese security agents stirred an international outcry until he resurfaced in March, has again vanished, his friends said Friday.”

New York Times: “In 1978, when China began its bold, capitalist-style economic and social experiment known as Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, attitudes toward sex began changing fast, along with almost everything else . . . Swinging is just one of a slew of controversial habits arising from China’s sexual liberalization. Sadomasochism clubs, many organized online, are flourishing.”

AP: “Now the long-sacrosanct policy may be on its way out, as some demographers warn that China is facing the opposite problem: not enough babies.”

Christian Science Monitor: “The Obama administration will soon face the first test of its policy toward human rights in China, after American officials announced on Thursday that they would resume human rights talks with Beijing in Washington next month . . . US State department spokesman Philip Crowley said he expected the two governments to have ‘a candid discussion’ of religious freedom, Internet freedom, and the rule of law.”

Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission: “Fan Yafeng, a Chinese human rights lawyer and religious liberty advocate, has received the 2009 John Leland Religious Liberty Award for his defense of persecuted Christians in China. Richard Land, president of Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, presented the award during an April 14 ceremony at the U.S. Capitol.”

AP: “A Chinese court jailed three people Friday who posted material on the Internet to help an illiterate woman pressure authorities to reinvestigate her daughter’s death, one defendant’s lawyer said, in a trial that attracted scores of supporters . . . ”

The Baptist Standard: “The Chinese government’s new head of religious affairs has downplayed the role of house churches during his first official visit to Hong Kong, saying they must be registered with the government for their own protection.”

Radio Free Asia: “Authorities in the troubled northwestern region of Xinjiang have rejected an appeal from an ethnic minority house church leader who was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment on charges of revealing state secrets to overseas organizations.”

NY Times: “The one constant is its growing importance. Censorship used to be the sleepy province of the Communist Party’s central propaganda department, whose main task was to tell editors what and what not to print or broadcast. In the new networked China, censorship is a major growth industry, overseen — and fought over — by no fewer than 14 government ministries . . . That’s not all. Not content merely to block dissonant views, the government increasingly employs agents to peddle its views online, in the guise of impartial bloggers and chat-room denizens.”

Christian Science Monitor on Yahoo News: “Is the most surprising thing about China how much it’s changed in recent decades – or how little? . . . ”

LifeSiteNews: “Law professor Yang Zhizhu was notified by officials from the China Youth University for Political Sciences on March 26 that he was being fired because he had violated Beijing’s family planning regulations . . . ”

AP: “The wife of jailed Chinese dissident Hu Jia has appealed to prison authorities for her husband’s release, saying he has a serious disease that she fears might turn into liver cancer . . . ”

AP: “A crusading Chinese rights lawyer whose disappearance more than a year ago caused an international outcry said Wednesday that he is abandoning his once prominent role as a government critic in hopes he’ll be allowed to reunite with his family . . . ”

Daily Globe and Mail: “Canadian researchers have uncovered a vast ‘Shadow Network’ of online espionage based in China that used seemingly harmless means such as e-mail and Twitter to extract highly sensitive data from computers around the world.”

NY Times: “In what appeared to be a coordinated assault, the e-mail accounts of more than a dozen rights advocates, academics and journalists who cover China have been compromised by unknown intruders. A Chinese human rights organization also said that hackers had disabled its Web site for five days in a row . . . the victims of the most recent intrusions included a law professor in the United States . . . ”

Wall Street Journal: “The confusion over a major outage in China of Google Inc.’s search sites on Tuesday spotlights one of the most remarkable aspects of the Chinese government’s Internet censorship apparatus: It is designed to be obscure.”

AP: “Rural traditions of abandoning dead infants may have played a role in the case of 21 babies’ bodies found along a river in eastern China, apparently dumped by hospital mortuary workers.”

Breitbart (AP): “Yahoo e-mail accounts belonging to foreign journalists appeared to have been hacked and Google’s Chinese search engine was intermittently blocked Tuesday, the latest troubles in China’s heavily censored Internet market.”

AP: “The bodies of 21 babies, believed dumped by hospitals, have washed ashore on a riverbank in eastern China, state media reported Tuesday. ideo footage showed that the bodies – stashed in yellow plastic bags, at least one of which was marked ‘medical waste’ – included some infants several months old. Some wore identification tags with their mothers’ names, birth dates, measurements and weights . . . ”

CNET: Workers at Internet network operation centers around the world are trying to figure out why traffic to sites such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook was redirected to servers in China this week, giving Web surfers around the globe a glimpse of what Chinese Internet users see when they try to access those blocked sites . . . ‘This was a real world example of the Net security industry’s worst nightmare,’ he said. ‘And last night it happened.’ . . . ‘The wider problems are that it appears that someone in China can disrupt Facebook for someone in California,’ he said. ‘It appears we can no longer see the Internet as a friendly shared resource and that strict boundaries will have to be put in place. The problem is the technology is not really there to make that happen.’”

Gizmodo: “Dell’s said to be joining Google in fleeing China in search of a ‘safer environment with [a] climate conducive to enterprise,’ potentially taking the $25 billion it spends on equipment and parts in China to India . . . ”

NY Times: “. . . censorship had become more than a human rights issue and was hurting profit for foreign companies . . . The fallout from China’s restrictive Internet policies widened on Wednesday when a Internet services company, the Go Daddy Group, said it would halt registration of Chinese domain names.”

Wall Street Journal: “Behind Google Inc.’s dramatic decision to shutter its China-based search engine this week was co-founder Sergey Brin’s change of heart about the compromises required to do business in a land that was increasingly reminding him of his native Soviet Union . . . ”

“To understand some of the big changes sometimes long term history affects the now . . . thats really the end of the Western Christian empire . . . . its the end of a whole system . . . ”

One News Now (AP): “Google’s attempted detour around China’s Internet censorship rules was met with countermeasures Tuesday by the communist government, which blocked people on the mainland from seeing search results dealing with such forbidden topics as the pro-democracy movement . . . ”

Boston Globe (AP): “. . . Beijing ‘should seriously consider the implications when one of the world’s most recognizable institutions has decided that it’s too difficult to do business in China.’”

AP: “An Internet company run by one of Asia’s richest men said Tuesday it has ended its affiliation with Google Inc. as the American search giant stopped censoring the Internet in violation of Chinese regulations . . . ”

Gizmodo: “The Chinese government regulates the Internet according to laws and will improve its regulation step by step according to its own needs. It is a pure internal affair.
Regrettably, Google’s recent behaviors show that the company not just aims at expanding business in China, but is playing an active role in exporting culture, value and ideas. It is unfair for Google to impose its own value and yardsticks on Internet regulation to China, which has its own time-honored tradition, culture and value.”

LA Times: “With negotiations at an impasse in the high-profile showdown that has escalated tensions between China and the United States, Google Inc. has begun to redirect users of its Chinese-language search engine to uncensored results on its Chinese-language service based in Hong Kong.”

Spero News (AsiaNews): “China’s State Religious Affairs Administration has issued new, more restrictive financial accounting rules for religious organisations. For experts, the new regulations give the authorities more tools to limit the latter’s activities.”