The bird-flu scare has hit the city at a bad time, with many citizens still distrustful of the authorities after the dumping in March of 16,000 dead pigs into tributaries of the Huangpu river. The government has still not said what killed the pigs, although it says it has found no trace of H7N9 in those tested for the virus. That the second H7N9 fatality was a pork butcher has done little to reassure the public.
Even in the official media, questions have been asked about why 27 days elapsed between the first death from H7N9 and its public announcement. The authorities say it took that long to confirm the cause, because the virus had never before been identified in humans. They have not explained, however, why on March 7th, three days after the first death, health officials in Shanghai denied rumours in social media that people had died of bird flu in a local hospital. One man was later proved to have died there of bird flu, along with one of his sons who was not found to have the virus. Despite official denials, suspicions remain that this could have been human-to-human transmission.
”A deadly outbreak of bird flu is testing China’s political leaders, as well as its response to health emergencies.
China: Four more infected with H7N9 bird flu
A further four cases of a bird flu virus not previously seen in humans have been reported by authorities in China.
Three women aged 32, 45 and 48, and an 83-year-old man were diagnosed between 19 and 21 March and are critically ill.
There have now been seven confirmed cases of the H7N9 virus, the World Health Organization said. Two people have died.
But the WHO says there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission.
Pro-democracy protesters step on the mock Chinese PLA tanks after tens of thousands people march at a down town street during the annual pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong, July 1, 2012.
Chinese censors target tomatoes amid Bo Xilai scandal
Chongqing hotpot = King of the Southwest = King Who Pacifies the West = Minister of Yu = Tomato
What do these words have in common? They are all coded references to Bo Xilai, the disgraced former Communist Party leader in southwestern Chongqing, and they were all censored in China on Tuesday, according to the Berkeley-based China Digital Times website. Bo was removed from his post in March, and state media reported Wednesday he had been suspended from the governing Politburo and Party Central Committee. Propaganda officials censored speculation about Bo’s downfall and its implications for political stability, so Internet users adopted terms like the ones above to avoid triggering keyword filters. Now these, too, have been blacklisted, according to China Digital Times. Will this senseless battle to hide information ever end?
"Lost" Great Wall of China Segment Found?
A forgotten section of the Great Wall of China has been discovered deep in the Gobi Desert—and outside of China—researchers say.
With the help of Google Earth, an international expedition documented the ancient wall for roughly 100 kilometers (62 miles) in a restricted border zone in southern Mongolia in August 2011.
Huge protest in Tibet after farmer's death
Thousands of Tibetans gathered at the weekend to mourn a farmer who burned himself to death to protest Chinese rule in Tibet, bringing to about 30 the number in a wave of self-immolations in the Himalayan region.
Foxconn Employees Threaten Mass Suicide
Foxconn, the world’s largest electronic component maker (think: Apple, Amazon, Nintendo, Dell, Panasonic… well, you get the point) is not a nice place to work. So rampant have the suicides been that last year the company made workers sign pledges not to kill themselves.
Via The Atlantic Wire:
As American consumers ogle over shiny new gadgets at this week’s Consumer Electronic’s Show, the workers that make those products are threatening mass suicide for the horrid working conditions at Foxconn. 300 employees who worked making the Xbox 360 stood at the edge of the factory building, about to jump, after their boss reneged on promised compensation, reports English news site Want China Times. It’s not like this is the first time working conditions at Foxconn have made news outside China. But iPhone and Xbox sales surely haven’t lagged in the wake of those revelations and neither Apple nor Microsoft has done much of anything to fix things.
As The Atlantic Wire points out, this week’s This American Life features a trip to a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China where approximately 350,000 to 450,000 people are employed.
You can listen to the episode here.
Image: Workers at Foxconn via China Southern Weekly
Over the Horizon: Is worrying about war with China a self-fulfilling prophecy?
…The obvious Cold War analogy is to the policy of containment: George Kennan believed that the Soviet Union hoped to dance on America’s grave but he was prepared to wait for history to inevitably unspool itself; the Soviets could thus be deterred by a patient and persistent policy of containment. Finkelstein argues that a combination of forceful American diplomacy, which he credits the Obama administration with undertaking, and the current level of American military presence — the Pacific fleet and 60,000 active-duty troops in the region — has already contained China’s ambitions, and will probably continue to do so. Kaplan, too, for all his projections of growing Chinese naval and air power, argues for maintaining the current state of military deployment. In short, it’s the intentions that matter.
The authors of “Asian Alliances,” by contrast, tend to infer China’s intentions from its capacities. In an ominous scenario that carries a strong whiff of Herman Kahn, or perhaps Dr. Strangelove, they describe China using missiles and bombers to launch a devastating attack on Taiwan and the United States responding with a missile strike against the mainland, which in turn leads to … Armageddon. The only way to preclude such a cataclysm, the authors argue, is to adopt much tougher counter-measures: rollback, in Cold War terms.
The “Asian Alliances” report warns that “Asia’s future demands nothing less” than a new “shared strategic concept.” The web of Cold War alliances should give way to a military partnership among the United States, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, and others that would require a major increase in military spending and in military and intelligence cooperation. “[A]ny would-be aggressor” would be made to understand “that targeting one ally means invoking the ire of the rest.” It’s hard to believe that these states would agree to join such an explicitly anti-Chinese coalition. There’s also the danger that China would react by concluding that time was no longer on its side, thus turning the coalition into a devastatingly self-fulfilling prophecy…
Tibetan monk dies in self-immolation protest, group says
BEIJING (Reuters) - A Tibetan Buddhist monk burned himself to death on Monday in southwest China calling for the return of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader condemned by Beijing as a separatist, a group campaigning for Tibetan self-rule said.
The monk’s self-immolation could spark fresh tensions in heavily ethnic Tibetan parts of Sichuan, which neighbors the official Tibet region, following protests in March when a Tibetan monk there also burned himself to death.
The London-based Free Tibet organization said the latest immolation-protest was carried out by a 29-year-old monk, Tsewang Norbu, who was from a monastery in Tawu, about 150 km (93 miles) from where the last immolation happened.
“Tsewang Norbu drank petrol, sprayed petrol on himself and then set himself on fire,” Free Tibet said in an emailed statement, citing an unnamed witness.
“He was heard calling out: ‘We Tibetan people want freedom’, ‘Long live the Dalai Lama’ and ‘Let the Dalai Lama Return to Tibet’. He is believed to have died at the scene,” the group said.
China’s official Xinhua news agency also reported the monk’s self-immolation, but said “it was unclear why he had burned himself.”
One-child policy a surprising boon for China girls
…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.
Before you go off on me about gendercide and the mistreatment of girls in China, please read the full article. I’m posting this because I think it’s very interesting that the policy has been credited with such divergent results.
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“There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llt5e55LNF1qg4lyzo1_500.jpg)
“There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.”
Perhaps not. In the dead of night last Thursday, the statue was dismantled. Workers left some ugly blue corrugated iron fencing in its place.
“This may mean the left wing is growing more powerful in China,” speculates Kong Weidong, spokesman for the International Reunion Association of Confucius’ Descendants. “This was definitely a government decision.” The mystery of Confucius’ disappearance from Tiananmen Square
