Signalfire

NEW DELHI: In yet another sign of increasing Chinese influence in India’s neighbourhood, Nepal is detaining refugees from China’s Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and handing them back to Chinese authorities.

Tibetan agencies in Kathmandu have brought the matter to the notice of the Indian embassy in Kathmandu but highly placed government sources said New Delhi is not inclined to take up the matter officially with Nepal.

According to information available with government agencies, Nepal intensified patrolling along its border with China in June and since then, has been regularly handing over Tibetan refugees, who were on their way to India, back to Chinese authorities. While Indian officials admitted this was another manifestation of China’s influence in Nepal, they said they had no option but to convey to the Tibetans that it may not be possible for India to intervene in the matter.

“The Indian embassy as well as some other embassies in Kathmandu are aware of the matter. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is trying to help us. We faced a similar situation in 2003 but it was sorted out. However, it started all over again in June this year,” Tibetan Refugee Welfare Office secretary in Kathmandu Trinlay Gyatso told TOI.

The first of such incidents was reported in June when 33 Tibetans who had crossed over into Nepal were caught and handed over to the Chinese. These refugees were on their way to India and by handing them over to China, Nepal violated its agreement with UNHCR to allow safe passage to Tibetan refugees to India. According to the human right groups active in Nepal, the three were jailed by Chinese authorities and they continue to languish there.

While New Delhi has its hands full dealing with the Maoist-instigated resentment in Nepal, China has quietly worked its way up not just within the Nepal establishment but also among its people with Chinese study centres mushrooming all over the country. China recently pledged $1.5 million to Nepal to check what it calls anti-China activities by Tibetans.

Sep 7, 2010
BEIJING – TWO Tibetan journalists have been arrested in north-western China after writing about a government crackdown on 2008 ethnic unrest in Tibet, a press freedom group said on Tuesday.

The writers, identified as Buddha and Kalsang Jinpa, were taken into police custody in Qinghai province in June and July respectively, and were accused of ‘separatism,’ the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.

It said the arrests bring the number of Tibetan journalists and writers jailed in China to 15, ‘almost half the number of journalists detained in China’ for their writings.

At least another 50 Tibetans are in custody for sending information abroad, the group said, without elaborating.

‘There has been no let-up in these arrests since March 2008 and their effect is to drastically curtail the ability of Tibetan intellectuals to make their voices heard,’ the group said, while demanding the pair’s release.

The India-based Tibet Post International said the two writers were arrested after publishing their articles outside China. Police in Xining, the capital of Qinghai province, denied any knowledge of the matter when contacted by AFP. — AFP

BEIJING (AP) — China has ordered local leaders to cool a surge in politically sensitive food prices by raising vegetable production amid rising tensions in poor countries over surging food costs.

Mayors were told to make sure local markets have a week’s supply of vegetables, said a Cabinet announcement on Friday. It said state banks were told to lend to producers to increase output amid shortages blamed on summer flooding and drought in some areas.

“Making sure of vegetable supplies and price stability is an important task for now and in the future,” the Cabinet statement said. “Local governments should manage inflation expectations well and realize the importance and urgency of this.”

China’s food price inflation spiked to 6.8 percent in July over a year earlier, pushing overall inflation to 3.3 percent, its highest level this year, according to government figures.

Elsewhere, a jump in food prices triggered deadly riots in Mozambique this week and the poor in Asia, the Middle East and Africa are under strain after global prices jumped 6 percent in the past two months alone.

No unrest has been reported in China but food prices are politically sensitive in an economy where the poor majority spend up to half their incomes to eat.

Beijing has repeatedly emphasized the importance of ensuring adequate food supplies this year and has threatened to punish merchants who profiteer.

China also suffered a spike in food costs earlier when vegetable prices jumped 14.9 percent in April and fruit prices soared 16.4 percent.

Beijing has repeatedly said it is confident of meeting its 3 percent inflation target for 2010. But private sector analysts expect overall August inflation to rise above 3.5 percent, driven partly by food costs.

29 Aug

ZHENGZHOU: In a vast muddy cornfield scarred with the tracks of heavy vehicles, two young engineers pore over a construction blueprint showing a grid of 100 rectangular factory blocks.

Here on the outskirts of Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of Henan in China’s interior, Foxconn, the largest company and exporter in “the workshop of the world” has staked its future on a mammoth new industrial complex.

New powerlines are being erected and roads built to the site under the watchful eye of local farmers who daydream about the entrepreneurial opportunities that up to 200,000 new workers in the area might present.

Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group, which includes its flagship Hon Hai Precision Industry, makes gadgets for a constellation of global brands including Apple, Dell, Nokia and Hewlett Packard.

Most of that production comes from its plants in Shenzhen, in the Pearl River Delta area, one of the three major Chinese coastal manufacturing hubs, along with the Yangtze River area around Shanghai and Bohai Bay north of Beijing.

With this leap into Henan province, 1,600 km (1,000 miles) from Shenzhen, Foxconn is expanding aggressively inland, where wages are lower and workers more plentiful, keeping mostly higher-value, engineering, and R&D work in China’s coastal areas. It will have as many as 1.3 million workers in China by the end of 2011, up from 920,000 now, company officials say.

Foxconn is by no means alone. Intel, the world’s biggest chip maker, opened a $600 million plant this year in Chengdu and Hewlett-Packard built a laptop factory in Chongqing, both cities in the western province of Sichuan.

Cheaper labour is not the only attraction. The worker has become the consumer in China, with the government determined to raise household incomes and reduce wealth disparities. Locating factories nearer to markets makes dollars and sense.

“Most of the villagers here think it’s a good thing,” said Meng, Xiangting, 46, a farmer prying stones from a wall with a crowbar for use on his own crumbling home. “They’ve guaranteed jobs for anyone in the area between 18 to 50 years of age. I’m not interested. I’d like to open a small shop for the workers instead.”

With factories closer to home, children of farmers like Meng won’t have to make the annual trek to distant coastal regions and live desultory lives as migrant workers in factory towns.

A rash of suicides at Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant which the company said weren’t work-related but which victims’ families blamed on tough conditions, helped fuel a wave of labour unrest — and has become yet another motivation to move operations into the less volatile interior.

Foxconn’s move will touch off a mini-boom in an ancient Chinese capital perhaps best known for the 5th-century Shaolin temple that is home to its famous brand of Kung Fu.

Foxconn’s suppliers will have to relocate as well. The workers will need housing and places to shop. Some may even be able to afford cars to commute to work on the new highways being built to Foxconn’s mega-factory and its satellites.

(AFP)
BEIJING — At least four Tibetans may have been killed and 30 others hurt when Chinese police fired on crowds protesting the expansion of mine operations blamed for environmental damage, a report said Saturday.

The shooting occurred August 17 in a remote region of southwestern China’s Sichuan province with a history of seething unrest involving the area’s Tibetan community, US-based Radio Free Asia said.

Quoting exiled Tibetans with sources in the region, the report said the confrontation began on or around August 13 when a group of Tibetans went to the Palyul county government headquarters to protest.

They complained that stepped-up Chinese gold-mining operations had brought large numbers of people and heavy machinery to the area, damaging farmland and the local grassland habitat, it said.

County officials rejected the accusations and had the demonstrators detained, touching off a steadily escalating confrontation that lead to the August 17 shootings.

Some of those injured were severely hurt, it said. Two police officers also were reportedly injured that day.

It quoted a county government official saying negotiations were under way to settle the dispute.

Local police denied knowledge of any confrontation when reached by AFP via phone. Calls to the county government went unanswered.

Palyul is in the Garze Tibetan Autonomous prefecture, one of many areas of the Tibetan plateau hit by widespread anti-Chinese rioting in March 2008 that was met with a massive security clampdown.

BEIJING, China — Police in China’s restive far west will pay between $1,500 to $15,000 for tip-offs about terrorist activity and may give lighter sentences or amnesty for suspects who turn themselves in, a public security spokeswoman said Friday.

The campaign, announced on the official Xinjiang government website, promises payments between 10,000 and 100,000 yuan for information about serious violent crime and terrorism. Suspects who surrender may be exempted from punishment or receive lighter sentencing in return for their co-operation.

Xinjiang has been beset by ethnic conflict and a sometimes violent separatist movement by Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), a largely Muslim ethnic group that sees Xinjiang as its homeland.

Police launched a sweeping crackdown on terrorist activity after deadly riots in the regional capital of Urumqi last year. Uighurs attacked Hans — China’s largest ethnic group — overturning buses and cars and torching shops in the regional capital of Urumqi in a riot the government says killed 197 people. In the aftermath, hundreds were arrested and about two dozen sentenced to death. Many other Uighurs remain unaccounted for and are believed to be in custody.

Rights groups say the crackdown has also targeted critics of the Chinese government and its policies in the region.

A spokeswoman for the information office of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau said Friday that the reward campaign, which was launched online Thursday, was aimed at mobilizing ordinary people to help fight terror and crime.

“We have offered similar awards before to people who provided clues in some police campaigns such as gun control,” said the woman who would only give her surname, Li.

Lydia Wang, a 28-year-old marketing manager in Shanghai, gripes that the shoes and clothing she normally buys are at least 50 percent pricier than in 2009. Wu Sengyun, a 54-year-old retiree in the coastal city of Ningbo, Zhejiang, says prices of fruit and fish are up more than 20 percent in the past year.

Willy Lin has cut back on free drumsticks in the canteen of his Jiangxi clothing factory as meat and vegetables grow dear. “The workers suffer,” he says. “Everybody is crying.”

Officially, China’s consumer price inflation topped out at 3.3 percent in July compared to a year before, a 21-month high. Officials say the spike is a one-off caused by crop damage from recent flooding. Other costs, they say, such as cars, mobile phone bills, and clothing, are falling, and pressure on prices should ease as the economy cools. At an Aug. 12 press conference, Pan Jiancheng, a deputy director in the statistics bureau, said the inflationary threat was “overhyped.”

Consumers, investors, analysts and academics interviewed by Bloomberg BusinessWeek in its Aug. 30 issue beg to differ.

“There has been a jump in prices that isn’t reflected in the numbers,” said Chinese Academy of Social Sciences economist Yu Yongding, a former adviser to China’s central bank.

Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Peking University, said he wonders how a country that grew 10.3 percent last quarter and is seeing upward pressure on wages could register a price rise of a few percentage points. Multinationals in China expect to raise wages an average of 8.4 percent this year, according to Hewitt Associates Inc., a human resources consultant.

Ordinary Chinese

Ordinary Chinese have yet to see increases in their housing, education, and medical expenses reflected in the official numbers, these analysts said.

“Inflation could well be 6 percent now for most people in China,” Peking University’s Pettis said.

If the doubters are right, then the government has an inflation problem that it either hasn’t figured out how to measure, or has chosen to ignore. Other vital Chinese statistics, like retail sales and unemployment, have also been murky. In the case of inflation, misjudging could prevent the kind of swift action needed to tame prices now, and force the government to apply harsher measures later, such as an increase in interest rates or an appreciation of the currency to curb growth. There are political risks too: Social unrest in China has been triggered when ordinary workers can’t keep up with the cost of living.

Data ‘Oddity’

Unlike most countries, China refuses to release in detail how much weighting it gives different product categories when calculating inflation, a situation that World Bank senior economist Louis Kuijs called an “oddity.” An official with the statistics bureau said there has been no major change in the basket that makes up the price index since 2005. Plans call to adjust the weighting next year to reflect housing costs more and food prices less, said the official, who declined to be identified because of agency rules.

Chinese consumers, when asked, will detail how household expenses have changed in the past decade. Medical costs are the No. 1 concern for 84 percent of China’s rural residents, according to a recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Officially, medical prices are only up 2.8 percent so far this year. That number does not include the cost of gifts to hospital doctors and administrators to ensure adequate care.

Housing and rising rental costs also eat up more of Chinese budgets. For 26-year-old Beijing resident Wang Yulu, the monthly rent of her 35-square-meter one-bedroom apartment just increased more than 20 percent, to $338.

Too Expensive

“It’s too expensive,” said Wang, who works in the Beijing office of a Hong Kong advertising company. “I’m thinking of moving.”

Getting a handle on rising prices is a particular challenge in China. Hundreds of millions of rural Chinese keep moving to cities, pushing up rents and food prices in urban coastal areas. The prices charged by millions of restaurants, coffee shops, and fitness centers go largely unrecorded as entrepreneurs evade taxes. A standard foot massage, popular in Chinese cities, has risen from around $10 in 2008 to about twice that today, said Zoe Wang, a 29-year-old strategy consultant from Shanghai.

“Unfortunately, my salary didn’t double,” she said. Official figures only record a 0.4 percent rise in recreation and education costs this year. China doesn’t separate these two categories in its figures.

Residents in far-western China face higher prices in part because of the long distances products must travel to reach them. A fast-growing population of pensioners feels price increases much more acutely than others.

Pensions Spent

Said retiree Wei Mingxiang, 54, as she shopped carefully in Beijing’s Rundeli vegetable market: “Prices have gone up too far. My entire monthly pension of $147 is spent on food.” One staple, cowpeas, recently doubled in price in two weeks to 40 cents a pound.

By periodically releasing wheat, rice, and corn from its reserves, the government has avoided the 100 percent price surge that hit global grain markets in 2007 and 2008. Beijing continues to cap prices on everything from phone bills to water, electricity, and fuel prices, and when it wants to cool growth the government orders banks to stop lending.

“The government has tended to use less mainstream instruments that economists don’t like so much,” said Kuijs of the World Bank. “And they tend to use interest rates less.”

Deposit Rates

One-year deposit rates at 2.25 percent have not been changed since November 2008, which means Chinese savers are actually losing money now that inflation has passed 3 percent. Officials fear higher rates could draw speculative investors into China.

Some analysts said that Beijing is doing a decent job of calculating prices. Arthur Kroeber, the Beijing-based managing director of economic consultancy Dragonomics, estimated that actual inflation may exceed the official figure but by not much more than one percentage point. Kroeber added that a tightening labor market and rising wages will push China into higher inflation in the coming years.

Others wondered whether the historic aversion of China’s rulers to the political risks of inflation creates pressures to keep official figures low.

Factory Jobs

Similar pressures help explain how official unemployment targets of just over 4 percent were met in 2008 and 2009, when China’s factories laid off tens of millions of workers, some economists said.

“The government has made it quite clear” what its inflation target is for 2010, Tsinghua University management professor Patrick Chovanec blogged on Aug. 12. “A whole parade of official sources have issued statements over the past few weeks predicting, with the unruffled, enigmatic certainty one normally associates with a blackjack dealer dealing a fixed deck, that inflation will come in right at 3 percent this year.”

August 25, 2010

Beijing (AsiaNews / Agencies) – At least 13 residents (including three members of the electoral college of control) have been arrested and several others sought in the wake of protests that erupted in late July over elections in the village of Raolefu, a rural area in the suburbs of Beijing.

On July 27, candidate Song Jianzhong lost to the village head and secretary of the local Communist Party (CCP) Jiandong Wei by just five votes. But the final results did not include data from 51 ballots and residents demanded a recount. Wei turned down their request and ordered police to immediately remove the ballot boxes. At least 500 angry people then locked the doors to prevent the removal of the votes.

The election officials promised full clarification, that never arrived. Instead a day after more than 200 riot police came who forcibly took away the ballot boxes. There were clashes and 4 residents were arrested allegedly for blocking a highway, an accusation the villagers deny.

In the following weeks, protests continued, with groups of dozens of residents around the city blaming Wei of fraud and of having bought votes and calling for new elections. Police arrested at least nine other people, including President of the Election Committee Liu Jinfu, who was accused Wei of fraud and said that the Committee had been prevented by him and the police from verifying the votes. Song has disappeared and is believed to be hiding.

Under the law, there are direct elections only to elect village chiefs and local representatives for the People’s Congress. Other elections are restricted to and People’s Congress controlled by the CCP.

Wei insists that he called the police to “protect the votes from residents who wanted to take them”.

But the well-known pro-human rights lawyer Li Xiongbing tells the South China Morning Post that “under the electoral law, Wei had no power to order police to take away the ballot boxes. The Commissioner of elections is the only one who can do it. “

August 11, 2010

SHENYANG, China — Forget the calls by many Chinese patients for more honest, better-qualified doctors. What this city’s 27 public hospitals really needed, officials decided last month, was police officers.

Dissatisfaction with medical care is common in the city and across China.

And not just at the entrance, but as deputy administrators. The goal: to keep disgruntled patients and their relatives from attacking the doctors.

The decision was quickly reversed after Chinese health experts assailed it, arguing that the police were public servants, not doctors’ personal bodyguards.

But officials in this northeastern industrial hub of nearly eight million people had a point. Chinese hospitals are dangerous places to work. In 2006, the last year the Health Ministry published statistics on hospital violence, attacks by patients or their relatives injured more than 5,500 medical workers.

“I think the police should have a permanent base here,” said a neurosurgeon at Shengjing Hospital. “I always feel this element of danger.”

In June alone, a doctor was stabbed to death in Shandong Province by the son of a patient who had died of liver cancer. Three doctors were severely burned in Shanxi Province when a patient set fire to a hospital office. A pediatrician in Fujian Province was also injured after leaping out a fifth-floor window to escape angry relatives of a newborn who had died under his care.

Over the past year, families of deceased patients have forced doctors to don mourning clothes as a sign of atonement for poor care, and organized protests to bar hospital entrances. Four years ago, 2,000 people rioted at a hospital after reports that a 3-year-old was refused treatment because his grandfather could not pay $82 in upfront fees. The child died.

Such episodes are to some extent standard fare in China, where protests over myriad issues have been on the rise. Officials at all levels of government are on guard against unrest that could spiral and threaten the Communist Party’s power.

Doctors and nurses say the strains in the relations between them and patients’ relatives are often the result of unrealistic expectations by poor families who, having traveled far and exhausted their savings on care, expect medical miracles.

But the violence also reflects much wider discontent with China’s public health care system. Although the government, under Communist leadership, once offered rudimentary health care at nominal prices, it pulled back in the 1990s, leaving hospitals largely to fend for themselves in the new market economy.

By 2000, the World Health Organization ranked China’s health system as one of the world’s most inequitable, 188th among 191 nations. Nearly two of every five sick people went untreated. Only one in 10 had health insurance.

Over the past seven years, the state has intervened anew, with notable results. It has narrowed if not eliminated the gap in public health care spending with other developing nations of similar income levels, health experts say, pouring tens of billions of dollars into government insurance plans and hospital construction.

The World Bank estimates that more than three in four Chinese are now insured, although coverage is often basic. And far more people are getting care: the World Bank says hospital admissions in rural counties have doubled in five years.

“That is a steep, steep increase,” said Jack Langenbrunner, human development coordinator at the World Bank’s Beijing office. “We haven’t seen that in any other country.”

Still, across much of China, the quality of care remains low. Almost half the nation’s doctors have no better than a high school degree, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Many village doctors did not make it past junior high school.

Primary care is scarce, so public hospitals — notorious for excessive fees — are typically patients’ first stop in cities, even for minor ailments. One survey estimated that a fifth of hospital patients suffer from no more than a cold or flu. Chinese health experts estimate that a third to a half of patients are hospitalized for no good reason.

Once admitted, patients are at risk of needless surgery; for instance, one of every two Chinese newborns is delivered by Caesarean sections, a rate three times higher than health experts recommend.

Patients appear to be even more likely to get useless prescriptions. Drug sales are hospitals’ second biggest source of revenue, and many offer incentives that can lead doctors to overprescribe or link doctors’ salaries to the money they generate from prescriptions and costly diagnostic tests. Some pharmaceutical companies offer additional under-the-table inducements for prescribing drugs, doctors and experts say.

An article in November in The Guangzhou Daily in southeastern China cited one particularly egregious example of unnecessary treatment: a patient paid roughly $95 for a checkup, several injections and a dozen different drugs, including pills for liver disease. He had a cold.

The Health Ministry has ordered hospitals to reduce prices of specific drugs 23 times in a decade, but the World Bank says hospitals have responded, in part, by ordering higher-priced alternatives.

Some experts fear that the newly opened spigot of government insurance money will inspire further excesses, rather than reduce the financial risk of illness for most Chinese. Indeed, one study shows only a slight drop in the share of household spending devoted to health care — 8.2 percent in 2008, down from 8. 7 percent in 2003.

“Their protection may not really be improving with insurance,” said Mr. Langenbrunner of the World Bank. “That is the scary part.”

Doctors seem as unhappy as patients. They complain that they are underpaid, undervalued and mistrusted. One in four suffers from depression, and fewer than two of every three believe that their patients respect them, a survey by Peking University concluded in October.

In June, more than 100 doctors and nurses in Fujian Province staged their own sit-in after their hospital paid $31,000 to the family of a patient who died. The doctors were upset because after the patient died the relatives took a doctor hostage, setting off a bottle-throwing melee that injured five employees.

Like some other cities, Shenyang has been seeking ways to ward off disturbances, including setting up hospital mediation centers. Still, the city reported 152 “severe conflicts” between patients and doctors last year.

At Hospital No. 5, the memory of a January attack remains fresh. After a doctor referred a patient with a temperature to a fever clinic — standard practice in China — frustrated relatives beat the doctor and several nurses with a mop and sticks.

Now a banner strung across the hospital’s main lobby exhorts: “Everyone participate in the sorting out of the law and order problem!”

Li Bibo, Helen Gao and Xin Hui contributed research from Beijing, and Wang Xiao from Shanghai.

August 2, 2010

At the intersection with Shanxi Lane, a busy crossing in this northwest China metropolis, 11 surveillance cameras eye the bustle from a metal boom projecting over one corner. Still more cameras stare down from the other three corners — 39 in all, still-photo and high-resolution video.

“The whole city is under surveillance,” said one nearby shopkeeper who, like many here, refused to give his name. Asked why, he replied sourly, “It’s not my business.”

But it is no secret. Roughly a year ago, Urumqi’s ethnic Han and Uighur populations took part in the worst ethnic rioting in modern Chinese history, killing at least 197 people. The riots caught the Communist Party and the local government unaware.

Now at least 47,000 cameras scan Urumqi to ensure there are no more surprises. By year’s end, the state news media says, there will be 60,000.

Video surveillance is hardly uncommon in the West. But nowhere else is it growing as explosively as in China, where seven million cameras already watch streets, hotel lobbies, businesses and even mosques and monasteries — and where experts predict an additional 15 million cameras will sprout by 2014.

Much of the proliferation is driven by the same rationales as in Western nations: police forces stretched thin, rising crime, mushrooming traffic jams and the bureaucratic overkill that attends any mention of terrorism.

But China also has another overriding concern — controlling social order and monitoring dissent. And some human rights advocates say they fear that the melding of ever improving digital technologies and the absence of legal restraints on surveillance raise the specter of genuinely Orwellian control over society.

Video software can already spot a chosen automobile in a stream of traffic by reading license plates, and cameras have improved so greatly that some can even take clear pictures of people inside autos. Facial-recognition software is in its infancy, but already, China requires Internet cafe users to be photographed, so that computers can identify them no matter which cafe they patronize, and what identification they present.

“This is not a self-contained system of video surveillance, but one part in a much larger architecture of surveillance that includes Internet monitoring and censorship, telecommunications and law enforcement databases,” Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, wrote in an e-mail exchange. “Privacy safeguards are simply nonexistent in China, making the state entirely free to mobilize this architecture of surveillance for political ends.”

It is unclear what share of China’s growing camera population is government-controlled. The Ministry of State Security reported one year ago that police had installed 2.75 million cameras nationwide, most in urban public spaces, and had asked local police forces to place more in rural areas.

IMS Research, a company based in Britain that tracks China’s surveillance industry, estimates that 30 percent of new camera installations have purely governmental uses, from police surveillance to cameras in libraries or prisons. Cameras on roads and in airports, subways and other modes of transport are the second most common use.

But that underestimates the extent of state surveillance. The video cameras in China’s Internet cafes are required to be linked to government security offices. Guangdong Province, in southeast China, last year ordered hotels, guesthouses, hospitals and places of entertainment to install cameras in all main rooms and reception areas, joining museums and galleries, schools, newspapers and television stations on a growing list.

In Guangdong, adjoining Hong Kong, security officials are just wrapping up a reported $1.8 billion installation of one million video cameras covering major cities like Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Beijing was expected to have 470,000 cameras by the end of 2009, says the Beijing Security and Protection Industry Association. Chongqing, a sprawling South China city, will add 200,000 cameras by 2012 to the 300,000 it now has.

China’s string of “coming-out parties,” from the 2008 Olympics to this year’s Shanghai Expo and the Guangzhou Asian Games, have all been preceded by security clampdowns that included extensive installations of surveillance cameras.
Officials say the cameras leverage the latest technology to battle crime and terrorism. Guangdong provincial officials told Chinese news services last year that their new cameras had deterred more than 18,000 street crimes even before the one million cameras had been fully deployed. In Kunming, in south-central China, crime dropped 10 percent after the police installed new cameras, the city’s deputy police chief told a security forum last spring.

That said — and some Western skeptics dispute claims of the cameras’ crime-fighting success — China’s video surveillance clearly has a darker side.

After ethnic rioting in Tibet in 2008 and Urumqi in 2009, security authorities installed live cameras both inside and on the grounds of monasteries and mosques, and hoteliers were ordered to place high-quality cameras and scanners in their buildings. Deploying video cameras for 24-hour monitoring of dissidents and troublemakers, such as citizens seeking to bring grievances to authorities, is now standard procedure.

Most recently, Mr. Bequelin said, the Beijing writer Yu Jie and environmental activist Wu Lihong have come under constant video watch after coming under official scrutiny.

The longer-term concern, he said, is that video surveillance will become a pervasive tool for controlling not only China’s comparative handful of dissidents, but the masses of people who ordinarily would not run afoul of the state.

In Urumqi, Communist Party and security officials initially agreed to a reporter’s request for an interview about cameras there, then demurred, explaining that cameras were a well-known anticrime tool and that there was nothing new to say. Still, recent reports in the Chinese news media, which was given broad access to security officials to report on the surveillance system, hint at the cameras’ potential.

Urumqi’s taxi fleet has had live video cameras for two years. Officials said they had since posted cameras on the city’s 3,400 buses and in 200 bus stations, 200 major stores and markets, 270 schools and along 4,400 roads — and would continue to mount new cameras until the entire city is blanketed.

In the city’s Tianshan district, a Uighur neighborhood racked by riots a year ago, a report on the Chinese Internet portal NetEase described 20 staff members at the local Public Security Bureau scanning the monitors. “One showed the picture inside of a Line 50 bus; the other showed the picture in front of a major supermarket on Qinnian Road,” the report said. “As the monitoring camera rotated 360 degrees, every corner in front of the supermarket was in clear panoramic view.”

Which was a comforting sight, the report assured its readers. The purpose of the surveillance, it stated, “is to ensure the safety of the public places, and to provide good public service for all people of different ethnicities.”

When asked, Han Chinese in the city generally saw the cameras as a good thing. “I think the whole thing was probably triggered by the incident last July,“ said 42-year-old Xie Gang, a wholesaler, referring to last year’s ethnic riots. “But the significance of the cameras is not to crack down on rioters, but to prevent crimes. If something happens, the message will get to the authorities right away.“

Ethnic Uighurs had a markedly different take. “Oh, the security is very, very good here,“ one man who refused to give even his first name said, with evident sarcasm, when asked whether the cameras deterred crime. “You can see the police patrolling everywhere.“

Jul 30
SHANGHAI (Reuters) – A blast rocked a local tax office in central China, killing at least four people and injuring 19, in what police say appeared to be a deliberate attack, the official Xinhua news agency said Saturday.

Friday afternoon’s explosion occurred at a district tax office in Changsha, capital of Hunan province, Xinhua said.

Initial investigations showed the explosion was a planned attack, Xinhua cited the city’s police department as saying in a statement.

China is struggling to contain social tensions, and anger over issues ranging from the cost of health care to a rapidly widening rich-poor gap in the past has exploded into violence.

TOKYO — The rapid rise of labour costs in China is “inevitable” and Japanese auto giant Toyota Motor has no immediate plan to review its supply chain in the country, its vice president said Tuesday.

Foreign-run factories in China have been targeted in recent labour unrest as workers gamble on overseas companies responding to their demands and government officials supporting their actions.

Production at Toyota’s assembly plant in southern China had to be suspended last month after a strike at an affiliated auto parts supplier in the country.

The unrest has sparked fears that the days of cheap Chinese labour could soon be over for foreign investors forced to offer pay rises to placate workers — and for consumers accustomed to inexpensive goods.

However, Toyota vice president Atsushi Niimi told journalists in Tokyo that he saw current events as a natural stage in China’s economic evolution.

“Japan had a period when (the government) sought to double incomes in the 1960s. At that time, strikes occurred frequently in Japan,” he said.

“It’s better for us to seek solutions by dialogue with employees, but before we are able to do this strikes occur. In a sense, it’s inevitable.

“If we change our suppliers, it would not provide a fundamental solution. What’s important is how well we communicate with employees.”

On the prospect of Toyota’s growth this financial year onward, Niimi said building more production capacity in emerging markets was key.

Despite the yen’s current strength, the company said it was not considering importing vehicles to Japan from its lower-cost plants overseas but would instead focus on making domestic plants more cost-effective.

“I believe there are still many things we can do to innovate ways of manufacturing in Japan,” he said.

“As Toyota is based in Japan,… we think it’s important to keep our competitiveness in manufacturing in Japan,” he said.

July 27. AP
Hundreds of troops were on alert for further unrest in a manufacturing district in eastern China on Tuesday, following sustained protests by residents demanding more compensation for farms given up years ago to make way for factories, residents said.

Paramilitary police and SWAT teams rolled into Huqiu district of Suzhou city, home of many foreign-invested factories, on Sunday following protests that have flared sporadically since July 15, said a man surnamed Wang who lives in the district’s Tongan township and refused to give his full name.

“We’re just ordinary people claiming our rights. And the government arrested us and beat us,” Wang said, adding there have been no new protests since security forces arrived to reinforce local police.

Such disputes are common in China as swaths of farmland are razed to make way for factories, office parks, golf courses and other urban sprawl. Government officials involved in such projects are frequently accused of corruption, which the Communist Party recognises is a threat to its rule.

Following the protests, Tongan township suspended demolitions and fired two top local officials, party secretary Wang Jun and deputy party secretary Meng Xiaoyu, who was also the mayor, according to a report last week by the official Modern Express newspaper.

The two were fired for poor handling of compensation policies and public demands, the report said, without elaborating on whether they had been accused of corruption.

Hundreds were involved in protests over changes in government policy that now gives much higher payouts than what was allowed when many residents lost their farms in 2003, Wang said. He received 200,000 yuan ($US29,500) in compensation, but now people can get 600,000 ($US88,500) for homes in the area that was once covered in rice paddies, Wang said.

Photos of the protests posted online showed large crowds gathered on roads and in government offices amid heavy security, including police with riotgear. There were no clashes shown in the photographs, but Wang said he and others were beaten by police for trying to force their way into the local government building.

He said he also saw a woman being beaten by four or five local police officers, and that some people taken into police custody have not yet been released.

A resident in Huqiu district’s Dongzhu township confirmed Wang’s account of the protests and security presence. Police were guarding roads in his town, with paramilitary and SWAT teams stationed at the local middle school, said the man, who refused to give his name as is common among media-shy Chinese.

He added that the local government has failed to deliver on a promise to resolve residents’ grievances by Sunday.

An official surnamed Mu in the Suzhou city propaganda department disputed that, saying authorities had provided a “satisfactory response”, but refused to give any details. He added that the situation in Huqiu district was stable but acknowledged paramilitary police were currently posted there.

“They’re there to ensure the social security,” said Mu, who like many Chinese bureaucrats would only gave his surname.

Residents said they were afraid to launch more protests with so many police in the area. Notices were also given to parents with children at Tongan Middle School that included veiled threats of repercussions if there were further disturbances, according to Boxun.com, a Chinese-language site banned in China that is based in the US and carries reports on issues rarely reported in state media.

“The Tongan incident has already been infiltrated by foreign hostile forces,” it cited the notice as saying, though there has been no evidence of it. It said residents should avoid participating in protests and spreading news of it “to avoid giving yourself and your children a disappointment”.

Jul 24, 2010

According to uighurbiz.net, Uighur reporter and blogger Gheyret Niyaz(???.???)has been sentenced to 15 year imprisonment on July 23 under the charge of “endangering national security” In Urumqi, Xinjiang. The main reason for the prosecution was his interview with overseas media outlet on the Xinjiang 7.5 riot last year. He was arrested and has been detained since October 1, 2009.

Gheyret Niyaz insisted that he is innocent and that he talked to the oversea media outlet as a citizen and a reporter without any bad intention. He will file an appeal.

In July 2009, he told the reporter in the Asia Weekly or Ya Zhou Zhou Kan that he urged the Xinjiang government to take precautions on the 7.5 riot. His suggestions were:

1. The governor, Nur Bekri, shall give a public speech in order to calm people down, before noon on july 5?
2. The government shall ask Han shops to close up on the day.?
3. As many police and troops shall be sent in to seal off the Uighur areas.

He also pointed out that the riot was related to the introduction of two policies – bi-lingual education and the exportation of Uighur workers to southern China. And the organization behind the incident is Hizb ut-Tahrir, a global Islamist organization.

In an interview with Deutsche Welle, Ilham Tohti, a famous Uighur scholar and webmaster of Uighurbiz.net, pointed out that Gheyret Niyaz is a member of CCP and his position in the Xinjiang Economic Daily is equal to that of a Department head. He is critical of both Rabiye Qadir, the Chair of World Uyghur Congress and Wang Lequan, the party chief of Xinjiang in his writings.

Although he is a web manager in Uighurbiz, he is not popular among the Uighur – many consider his opinion too pro-Han. Ilham believes that any harsh sentence would further antagonize the relation between Han and Uighur.

GUANGZHOU, China, July 21 (Reuters) – Workers at Japanese electronics maker Omron’s (6645.OS) southern China factory have gone on strike, the latest disruption in the manufacturing hub over demands for better wages and working conditions.

The burst of disputes that started in May has since affected more than a dozen mostly foreign-owned factories, raising questions about the region’s future as a low-cost manufacturing base.

The Omron strikers, who walked off the job on Wednesday morning, are demanding a pay raise of at least 40 percent from their current salary of 1,270 yuan, with some workers saying they want an increase of 500 yuan ($74) per month and another saying the demand is for 800 yuan more.

One of the strikers, who declined to give their names because of concerns about retribution, said the factory makes mainly switches and ignition keys for Honda Motor (7267.T), Ford (F.N), BMW (BMWG.DE) and other car makers.

A spokesman from Omron said 200-300 of its 800 workers had gone on strike at its Guangzhou plant, while workers said the number of strikers was more like 400-500.

Jul 22

BEIJING – THE Chinese government has sacked two officials and suspended relocation work after up to 1,000 people protested in a wealthy eastern province last week, angry at compensation for land seizures, state media said.

The protests lasted for four days in part of Suzhou, a manufacturing hub close to Shanghai in the eastern province of Jiangsu, the official Xinhua news agency said late on Wednesday. Residents fought with government workers and smashed equipment including chairs, desks and windows in government headquarters in Tongan town, part of Suzhou, it said.

‘Protesters also assembled on a highway and blocked traffic, but were later dispersed by police,’ the report added. They were demanding higher compensation for their land, which had been confiscated by the government for several industrial parks, Xinhua quoted a government statement as saying. Some protesters also said they suspected some officials had taken compensation money owed them.

Two officials were removed from their posts for ‘mishandling public appeals and dereliction of duty when following land compensation standards’, Xinhua said. ‘The district’s government vowed in the statement to raise the living standards of villagers who had been relocated since 2003 and lost their farmland when the project began,’ it added.

‘It also promised to provide villagers with at least 1,000 jobs each year.’ Land rights and property seizures have becoming a leading cause of discontent in a country seething over a growing rich-poor gap, worrying stability-obsessed leaders in Beijing. In 2007, China had over 80,000 ‘mass incidents’ – or riots and protest – up from over 60,000 in 2006, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The government has not given updated figures.

Many involved no more than dozens of participants protesting against local officials over complaints about corruption, abuse of power, pollution or poor wages. But some small-town protests in the past couple of years have snowballed into violent confrontations involving thousands of residents. Many heard of the unrest through mobile phone messages or over the Internet. — REUTERS

Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Thousands of ethnic Zhuang villagers in Jingxi County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, took to the street to protest over an aluminium plant that they say released sewage that poisoned drinking water in dozens of villages.

On Sunday, several thousand angry Zhuang burst into the plant, smashing equipment at the aluminium plant. On Tuesday, they blocked roads and a railway line, surrounded the county government’s headquarters where they faced off about a thousand riot police.

“The road leading to the County government building, which is several kilometres long, was packed with villagers holding slogans, and armed policemen fired into the air to warn the furious protesters,” said Huang An, a Zhuang from Lingwan village.

The protesters even painted slogans on their clothes.

More than 100 people were injured in the riot and at least 10 vehicles, including a police car and an armoured vehicle, were set on fire by angry villagers in the protest.

The riot continued yesterday morning, with more protesters injured.

“The water is red and heavily polluted by untreated industrial sewage discharged from the plant. We don’t dare drink water from it,” one villager said.

An exceptional drought in the region has further complicated the situation, affecting more than 2.2 million people and 1.1 million head of livestock short of water and 740,000 hectares of farmland too dry to plant.

Jinxi authorities and state news agency Xinhua have a different spin of events. They claim that residents simply opposed the construction of a new road going to the aluminium plant, but did not mention the pollution problem.

A County official confirmed that clashes first broke out when plant workers tried to rebuild a road running close to Lingwan village, which sparked local opposition. This was followed by protests.

However, peaceful demonstrations outside the plant turned into violent clashes when company’s security guards began beating villagers outside the plan.

Making matters worse, homes near plant were suddenly flooded, causing millions of yuan in damages.

The authorities blamed flooding on a minor earthquake, but residents believe the plant sealed off the underground river by mistake after it had tried to flatten a mountain during a construction project.

According to official figures, there were about 87,000 episodes of social unrest in 2008 across China, due to economic factors, pollution, forced seizure of land and houses, unpaid salaries and much more.

Police have often come down on the part of the authorities and business interest, sometimes provoking violent clashes.

More than 96 per cent of people in Jingxi County are Zhuang, one of China’s largest ethnic minorities. Social unrest in this region can easily take on ethnic connotations, as it does in Xinjiang and Tibet.

FOSHAN, China, July 16 (Reuters) – Striking workers at a plant supplying parts to Honda Motors’ (7267.T) China operations have issued a long list of demands for returning to work, aiming to win better conditions commensurate with China’s rising economic clout.

Stoppages at foreign-run factories across China by workers demanding pay increases disrupted operations for several weeks in May and June, but the wave of unrest tapered off by the end of last month.

The latest strike began on Monday when the plant operated by Atsumitec Co tried to fire 90 workers demanding better pay and conditions.

They also asked Japanese management to apologise to Chinese workers for its conduct during the standoff, and to promise not to lay off any employees for the next two years.

The workers are also seeking an increase of about 500 yuan ($74) per month. Wages currently stand at about 980 yuan.

One worker said the two sides talked for about 20 minutes on Thursday, but that management failed to respond to their demands. No talks were set for Friday.

On Friday morning, roughly half of the 200-person workforce was milling about the grounds of the plant, which makes car gear sticks in the south China city of Foshan.

Three police cars were parked outside the plant at a distance monitoring the workers, but there were no signs of trouble.

“We had no choice (but) to strike,” one line manager told Reuters. “Otherwise 90 workers would be fired. That would be too miserable.”

Atsumitec informed Honda that some production had resumed at the plant on Thursday evening, a Honda spokesman in Japan said. He added that the strike had not impacted Honda’s China car-making operations.

A factory worker confirmed that some production had restarted after the company brought in outsiders to work. Meantime, the factory had ceased providing drinking water to strikers, he added.

The factory supplies parts to Dongfeng Honda, a tie-up with Dongfeng Motor Group Co (0489.HK) and Guangqi Honda, Honda’s joint venture with Guangzhou Automobile, a worker told Reuters.

TOLERANCE FROM BEIJING

The wave of labour unrest at foreign-fun companies hit a peak in June, but reports tapered off at the end of the month. The last reported stoppage, at Japanese-owned Tianjin Mitsumi Electric Co, ended on July 3.

Labour costs in China have been rising, partly encouraged by a government that wants to turn farmers and workers into more confident consumers, even as it tries to keep a lid on strikes.

Experts said Beijing — which fears social unrest — is likely to continue tolerating some level of strikes and other unauthorised worker action as a way to allow wages to rise and let workers vent steam over the issue.

Other signs have emerged that the government would like to see its lone officially sanctioned labour union, the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), as well as local officials, take a more active role in helping to mediate between workers and employers, said Geoffrey Crothall of the China Labour Bulletin.

A recent article in the China Daily, China’s official English language newspaper, cited the ACFTU, often derided by workers as ineffective, as saying collective bargaining would give workers greater power in seeking higher wages and protecting their rights.

“The push seems to be for the official trade union to try and do more collective wage agreements in the factories. I think you’re going to see a big push for that in next six months,” said Crothall, who added that those agreements would probably yield pay increases of 10 to 20 percent at many factories.

“If those agreements go through by the end of the year and workers are still demanding more, then you might see the government starting to take a harder line (toward strikes). The argument being, ‘Look we’ve gone the extra mile for you, just be happy with what you’ve got and don’t rock the boat anymore.’”

TOKYO (Reuters) — Confronted with rising wages and a shortage of labor, a supplier of car body frames to Honda Motor Co. last month earmarked the equivalent of a half year’s profit to triple the number of robots at its three Chinese plants.

The $22 million investment by Japan-based H-One is part of a push to automate factories across China that is expected to gather pace in the wake of the recent burst of strikes and expected appreciation of the yuan.

“The automation equipment industry is growing very, very fast. Sensors, frequency converters, conveyor belts, pneumatic systems, power tools — you name it,” said Raymond Tsang, head of consultancy Bain & Co.’s Greater China industrial practice.

“We’re seeing anywhere between 20 to 30 percent growth in those sectors year over year.”

The series of high-profile strikes in recent months has affected mostly Japanese-owned auto and parts factories including Honda and Toyota Motor Co. in southern China. It has put a spotlight on growing unrest among China’s massive migrant worker population wanting a greater share of the country’s growing wealth.

Although labor remains a small portion of overall Chinese manufacturing costs, some see the worker unrest as further spurring a move to mechanization.

With China now accounting for 15.6 percent of the world’s manufactured goods — having last year surpassed Japan to become the second largest after the United States — the automation trend holds the promise of big profits for equipment suppliers such as Japan’s Fanuc Ltd., Germany’s Siemens AG, and U.S.-based Rockwell Automation.

Investors have taken notice. Shares of Fanuc, the world’s top maker of equipment that numerically controls machine tools, have jumped 16 percent over the past month as the strikes began getting wide media coverage. Sensor maker Omron Corp. has shot up 13 percent.

But analysts argue the growth potential of this trend is far from factored into share prices. The prospect for rapid automation is likely as wages rise and manufacturers look to move up the value chain and produce higher quality goods.

According to Nomura Securities, the ratio of machine tools in China that use numerical controls, a good measure of the level of automation, climbed to 27 percent in the quarter to May, up from 22 percent in 2009 and 19 percent in 2008.

This brings China to the level of Japan in the 1980s when it was in still in a phase of strong economic growth. Japan’s numerical control ratio has since risen to a world-leading 82 percent, offering a glimpse of where China may be headed as its economy develops.

Yaskawa Electric says China demand helped it log record orders overseas for its industrial robots in May, and it reckons the prospect for further growth is strong with the ratio of China plants using robots at just one-fourth the level of Japan.

“The pace of automation in Chinese factories is faster than Japan in the 1980s,” said Wenjie Ge, an analyst at Nomura Securities, which forecasts wages to double in China in five years.

“Rising labor costs would not only lead to an automation of Chinese factories but also increase personal incomes, which is spurring the spread of cars and electronics, and this is again favourable for machinery demand.”

Huge wave

The surge in wages and impending revaluation of the yuan will undoubtedly prompt some companies to move factories to countries with lower labor costs such as Vietnam.

One example is the retail industry. Nitori, which owns a chain of interior goods stores in Japan and imports about 60 percent of its products from Chinese factories, said last week it would consider shifting some production outside China.

Bain’s Tsang says not all production will go the way of automation given that wages, while rising, are still in most cases a fraction of what they are in the West. It also makes little sense to automate when a manufacturer’s business model is based on being flexible to deliver volumes based on demand.

“Further automating their factories is something that most of them are thinking about doing. But they may not do it in same way as we see in Germany or in the U.S. where production lines are 100 percent automated with robotics,” Tsang said.

But the overall momentum behind automation is strong and there is little chance that manufacturures will ditch China as a production base. Among other things, producing in China keeps a maker close to the massive and fast-growing market there.

Shin-Etsu Chemical, which had been reluctant to place a factory in China due to the difficulty of procuring a stable supply of raw materials, said today it would build a silicon plant in Jiangsu Province in response to rising demand.

The Japanese chemical firm plans to invest about $95 million, its first major investment in China, to boost its annual silicon output by about 30 percent.

Electronics parts maker TDK Corp. is also planning to add new machinery at its Chinese factories.

THK Co., which makes linear motion guides for machine tools, received orders of 274 million yuan ($40.35 million) in the quarter to March in China, a record high for a second straight quarter.

Records for robots

Fanuc, which is also a top maker of industrial robots, plans to lift its monthly output of robots to a record high by this fall to meet surging demand in China and India.

“Japanese automation-related makers such as Fanuc have been in a better position than European rivals to benefit from the trend as their products are generally cheaper,” said Mitsushige Akino of Ichiyoshi Investment Management.

“But the recent weak euro is supporting European makers such as Siemens to gain momentum. Japanese and European makers are even in their product quality, and thus the real game is going to start now.”

SHENZHEN(CHINA): Last month, while enthusiastic consumers were playing with their new Apple iPhone 4, researchers in Silicon Valley were engaged in something more serious.

They cracked open the phone’s black plastic shell and started analyzing the new model’s components, trying to unmask the identity of Apple’s main suppliers. These “teardown reports” provide a glimpse into a company’s manufacturing.

What the latest analysis shows is that the smallest part of Apple’s costs are here in Shenzhen, where assembly-line workers snap together things like microchips from Germany and Korea, American-made chips that pull in Wi-Fi or cell phone signals, a touch-screen module from Taiwan and more than 100 other components.

But what it does not reveal is that manufacturing in China is about to get far more expensive. Soaring labor costs caused by worker shortages and unrest, a strengthening Chinese currency that makes exports more expensive, and inflation and rising housing costs are all threatening to sharply increase the cost of making devices like notebook computers, digital cameras and smart phones.

Desperate factory owners are already shifting production away from this country’s dominant electronics manufacturing center in Shenzhen toward lower-cost regions far west of here, even deep in China’s mountainous interior.

At the end of June, a manager at Foxconn Technology – one of Apple’s major contract manufacturers – said the company planned to reduce costs by moving hundreds of thousands of workers to other parts of China, including the impoverished Henan province.

While the labor involved in the final assembly of an iPhone accounts for a small part of the overall cost – about 7 percent by some estimates – analysts say most companies in Apple’s supply chain – the chip makers and battery suppliers and those making plastic moldings and printed circuit boards – depend on Chinese factories to hold down prices. And those factories now seem likely to pass along their cost increases.

“Electronics companies are trying to figure out how to deal with the higher costs,” says Jenny Lai, a technology analyst at CLSA, an investment bank based in Hong Kong. “They’re already squeezed, so squeezing more costs out of the system won’t be easy.”

Apple can cope better than most companies because it has fat profit margins of as much as 60 percent and pricing power to absorb some of those costs. But makers of personal computers, cell phones and other electronics – including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and LG – deal with much slimmer profit margins, according to several analysts. “The challenges are going to be much bigger for them,” Lai said. Most other industries, from textiles and toys to furniture, are under considerably more pressure.

One way to understand the changes taking shape in southern China is to follow the supply chain of the iPhone 4, which was designed by Apple engineers in the United States, sourced with high-tech components from around the world and assembled in China. Shipped back to the United States, the iPhone is priced at $600, though the cost to consumers is less, subsidized by AT&T in exchange for service contracts. “China makes very little money on these things,” said Jason Dedrick, a professor at Syracuse University and co-author of several studies of Apple’s supply chain. Much of the value in high-end products is captured at the beginning and end of the process, by the brand and the distributors and retailers.
According to the latest teardown report compiled by iSuppli, a market research firm in El Segundo, California, the bulk of what Apple pays for the iPhone 4’s parts goes to its chip suppliers, like Samsung, Toshiba and Broadcom, which supply crucial components, like processors and the device’s flash-memory chip.

In the iPhone 4, more than a dozen integrated circuit chips account for about two-thirds of the cost of producing a single device, according to iSuppli.

Apple, for instance, pays Samsung about $27 for flash memory and $10.75 to make its (Apple-designed) applications processor; and a German chip maker called Infineon gets $11.72 a phone for chips that send and receive phone calls and data. Most of the electronics cost much less. The gyroscope, new to the iPhone 4, was made by STMicroelectronics, based in Geneva, and added $2.60 to the cost.

The total bill of materials on a $600 iPhone – the supplies that go into final assembly – is $187.51, according to iSuppli.

The least expensive part of the process is manufacturing and assembly. And that often takes place here in southern China, where workers are paid less than a dollar an hour to solder, assemble and package products for the world’s best-known brands.

No company does more of it than Foxconn, a division of the Hon Hai Group of Taiwan, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer.

With 800,000 workers in China alone and contracts to supply Apple, Dell and HP, Foxconn is an electronics goliath that also sources supplies, designs parts and uses its enormous size and military-style efficiency to assemble and speed a wide range of products to market.

“They’re like Walmart stores,” Dedrick said. “They’re low-margin, high-volume. They survive by being efficient.”

The world of contract manufacturers is invisible to consumers. But it’s a $250 billion industry, with just a handful of companies like Foxconn, Flextronics and Jabil Circuit manufacturing and assembling for all the global electronics brands.

They compete fiercely on price to earn small profit margins, analysts say. And they seek to benefit from tiny operational changes.

When a company is operating on the slimmest of profit margins as contract manufacturers are, soaring labor costs pose a serious problem. Wages in China have risen by more than 50 percent since 2005, analysts say, and this year many factories, under pressure from local governments and workers who feel they have been underpaid for too long, have raised wages by an extra 20 to 30 percent.

China’s currency has also appreciated sharply against the U.S. dollar since 2005, and after a two-year pause by Beijing, economists expect the renminbi to rise about 3 to 5 percent a year for the next several years.

“It takes 3,000 procedures to assemble an HP computer,” says Isaac Wang, an iSuppli analyst based in China. “If a contract manufacturer can find a way to save 10 percent of the procedures, then it gets a real good deal.”

Contract manufacturers like Foxconn are now searching for ways to reduce costs. Foxconn is considering moving inland, where wages are 20 to 30 percent lower. The company is also spending heavily on manufacturing many of the parts, molds and metals that are used in computers and handsets, even trying to find larger and cheaper sources of raw material.

“We either outsource the components manufacturing to other suppliers, or we can research and manufacture our own components,” says Arthur Huang, a Foxconn spokesman. “We even have contracts with mines which are located near our factories.”

Many analysts are optimistic the big brands will find new innovations to improve profitability. But within the crowd, there is growing skepticism about China’s manufacturing model after years of pressing workers to toil six or seven days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day.

“We’ve concluded Hon Hai’s labor-intensive model is not sustainable,” says Wang at iSuppli Research. “Though it can keep hiring 800,000 to 1 million workers, the problem is these workers can’t keep working like screws in an inhuman system.”

This type of low-end assembly work is also no longer favored in China, analysts say, because it does not produce big returns for the companies or the country. “China doesn’t want to be the workshop of the world anymore,” says Pietra Rivoli, a professor of international business at Georgetown University and author of “The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy.”

“The value goes to where the knowledge is.”

The Chinese Communist party called on employers to raise salaries and improve training for workers today, as Toyota became the latest foreign firm to be hit by a wave of high-profile strikes.

The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling party, warned that the country’s manufacturing model faced a turning point as demographic and social changes slowed the influx of low-cost labour from the countryside.

Coming a day after the premier, Wen Jiabao, made similar comments, the editorial suggests the authorities may be encouraging businesses to restructure the economy by putting less emphasis on cheap exports and more on higher-value goods and domestic consumption.

For most of the past 30 years, China’s economic growth has been fuelled by low-cost migrant labour. This has helped raise national competitiveness, attract foreign investors and keep consumer prices lower across the world. But members of a new generation of migrants are less willing to endure hardship and many have successfully gone on strike to demand better conditions.

Without mentioning strikes, the People’s Daily said China should adjust to a tighter labour market by improving skills, creating more service-sector jobs and giving workers more cash to spend. This echoed a speech a day earlier by Wen, who said a new generation of migrant workers should be given improved conditions .

“Your work is glorious and should be respected by society at large. Migrant workers should be cared for, protected and respected,” he told workers at the construction site for the No 6 subway in the capital. “The government and the public should be treating young migrant workers like their own children.”

According to labour activists, there have been numerous strikes in recent years, though few get reported in the media. Chang Kai, professor of labour relations and law at Renmin University, said the number had increased by 30% per year.

Their impact has grown as the “one-child” family planning policy starts to thin the bulge in the working-age population. This demographic change in the balance of labour supply and demand has added to improved worker organisation and greater activism at high-profile foreign firms.

Japanese firms have disproportionately been the focus of the reported strikes. The Toyoda Gosei car parts plant, in Tianjin, was shut down by a strike this week until the management promised to negotiate higher wages.

Three Honda plants in Guangdong have been affected, along with a Hyundai factory in Beijing and a Taiwanese rubber products manufacturer in Shanghai. According to Xinhua news agency, the fast food franchise KFC has conceded to a union demand for minimum monthly pay of 900 yuan (£90), up by 200 yuan.

In most cases, however, workers have organised outside the unions, which are seen as close to management and the party. This has sparked commentaries in local media urging unions to mediate more effectively between workers and employers.

Having seen how the Solidarity movement in Poland helped to overthrow a communist government that stopped representing its interests, China’s leaders do not want to alienate the labour force. So far, there is no sign of any mass, nationwide protests. This week’s statements of support for workers’ rights suggest the politburo wants to keep on the right side of the activists.

AFP
BEIJING — Police in southern China have detained nine people linked to a violent riot over a land dispute and issued an arrest warrant for the suspected ringleader, local authorities said Sunday.

Club-wielding rioters fearing forced evictions from their homes tossed petrol bombs and torched vehicles in a clash with police in Guangdong province’s Yangshan county on Tuesday last week.

Up to 10 people were injured in the clashes and several vehicles destroyed or damaged in the riot, state press reports said of the latest in a rash of violent incidents linked to land disputes.

Police have taken in nine people for questioning over the riot and issued an arrest warrant for Huang Qiusheng, the suspected ringleader, who remains at large, the county government said in a notice on its website.

Before the unrest erupted, police had gone to Tongru village to arrest Huang, who opposed the pending eviction and demolition of his home and was suspected of illegally manufacturing fire bombs, the government said.

During the riot, up to 40 villagers clashed with more than 100 police officers who responded with non-lethal “riot guns” and tear gas.

The government said items found in the village included a barrel of gasoline and several “sacks” of empty bottles, including 70 empty plastic water bottles. Police also confiscated two bullets and three bullet shells, it added.

China has seen a slew of violent clashes over land, many sparked by forced evictions as officials and property developers seek to cash in on a soaring real estate market.

Earlier this month, police in Guangxi province shot and wounded at least five demonstrators in clashes over a land dispute that also left 11 law enforcement officers injured, state media reports and a local official said.

And one person was killed and scores injured when police clashed with villagers in eastern China’s Jiangsu province over the forced eviction of farmers, residents and a human rights group said.

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-11-20 21:12

FUZHOU: Hundreds of taxi drivers have been in strike since Wednesday to protest against government plans to regulate the industry in Putian City, east China’s Fujian Province. Read more…

Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) — A coal-mine explosion in the northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang killed 42 miners and left 66 missing, Xinhua News Agency said on its Web site.

The explosion happened at 2:30 a.m. at Xinxing mine where 528 miners were working, the State Administration of Work Safety said on its Web site. Rescue efforts are under way, according to the statement.

The explosion destroyed the mine’s ventilation and communication system, making it difficult for rescue, China Central Television reported on its Web site.

China relies on coal to generate 80 percent of its electricity. A coal-mine explosion in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing on May 30 killed 30 workers and another coal- mine blast in Shanxi province on Feb. 22 left 74 miners dead, according to the government.

Xinxing mine, owned by Heilongjiang Longmei Mining Holding Group Co., has an annual production capacity of 1.45 million tons of coal, according to the statement.

China’s death toll from coal mine accidents fell 12 percent in the first seven months of this year from a year earlier after the government closed small pits to improve safety, according to Luo Lin, head of the State Administration of Work Safety.

–Jiang Jianguo. Editors: Sean Collins, John Chacko.

from: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aW2Vn7_VJ3eU&pos=9

BEIJING: China on Thursday sentenced six more people to death over bloody ethnic unrest in its far-western Xinjiang region in July, bringing the total to 12 as it delivered harsh retribution over the violence.
Read more…

At first the villagers could not understand why their bouncing babies turned into small children who refused their food and complained of feeling ill all the time, agitated one moment but listless the next.

Then, early this summer, so many of the youngsters began to sicken after playing in fields of corn around a giant lead smelter, that the puzzlement turned to foreboding.

Read more…

BEIJING — A Chinese dissident who tried to organize a national meeting of the banned China Democracy Party has been sentenced to 13 years in jail for subverting state power, his lawyer said Wednesday.

Read more…

BEIJING – Police clashed with residents of two neighboring villages in northern China where nearly all the children were poisoned by lead apparently from a nearby smelter, reports said Monday, the latest sign of growing anger over China’s rampant industrial pollution. Read more…

A twenty four-year-old university graduate working at a moldings factory in the Houjie district of Dongguan jumped to his death from his fourth floor dormitory after being refused time off work by management, the Guangzhou Daily reported. Read more…

BEIJING (AFP) – Armed police in central China have clashed with steel workers who were holding an official hostage in a protest over privatisation plans, state media reported Saturday. Read more…