Wednesday, April 2, 2008
US: Olympic Host China Lacks Freedoms
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=4429558US Lists Rights Abuses in China, Russia, Iraq, Others in Annual Report
By ANNE GEARAN AP Diplomatic WriterWASHINGTON Mar 11, 2008 (AP)
The United States branded China an authoritarian human rights abuser Tuesday, citing alleged torture, state control of basic aspects of daily life, tight controls on religion and harassment of foreign charities.
China, host of the summer Olympics, has rampant and chronic human rights problems despite rapid economic growth that has transformed large parts of Chinese society, the State Department said in its annual accounting of human rights practices around the world.
The world's most populous nation, China is an increasingly important U.S. trade partner and a chief competitor with the United States for energy and shrinking natural resources. It is the object of broad U.S. economic and diplomatic outreach, with mixed results.
The United States, other nations and outside advocacy groups have tried to use the world media attention and prestige associated with the Olympics to leverage internal change and diplomatic cooperation from China, but the games are barely mentioned in the human rights report.
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"The government tightened restrictions on freedom of speech and the press, particularly in anticipation of and during sensitive events, including increased efforts to control and censor the Internet," the report said.
Forced relocations went up last year, the report said. It noted claims that people were forced from their homes to make way for Olympic projects in Beijing.
President Bush plans to attend the Olympics this year. Visiting U.S. lawmakers would get help from the U.S. Embassy for a "safe, memorable and enjoyable experience," the U.S. ambassador in Beijing wrote in a letter last year.
The report detailed the lengths some Chinese officials have taken to enforce their country's well-known "one child" policy, and gave a chilling account of alleged torture in China, including the use of electric shocks, beatings, shackles, and other forms of abuse. It includes an account of a prisoner strapped to a "tiger bench," a device that forces the legs to bend sometimes until they break.
Lydia's commentary:
Ever since winning the bid to host the Olympics 2008, China has been receiving much scrutiny under worldwide press regarding its efforts to spruce up the city for this event. Yes, I do agree that it has made China more well-known and recognised on the international platform on its every move, yet, this has proven to be a double-edged sword. The state has been criticized by the West on its dirty history of human rights abuse during the draconian One-Child Policy and political experiments Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Much of the stories have been laid out right in fron of the world to comment and I believe it has been hard on the government to justify for its past leaders actions. While I do believe that China has earned itseld as a country worthy of mention with its significant economical changes, it is hard for them to stay away from its haunted and tainted past.
Labels: 07S501, Administrative, air pollution, Biotech industry, blogs, China's Environmental Issues, chinese society
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China Snow Crisis Shows Vulnerability
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Business/BusinessTravel/wireStory?id=4214252Impact of China's Snow Crisis Spreads, Highlighting Weaknesses of Booming Economy
By ELAINE KURTENBACH and WILLIAM FOREMAN Associated Press WritersSHANGHAI, China Jan 30, 2008 (AP)
China's worst winter storms in five decades have highlighted the vulnerabilities of the country's booming economy, bringing transportation and much industry to a halt and prompting the government to deploy nearly 500,000 army troops to assist troubled areas Wednesday.
The remains of an outdoor market are seen after it collapsed following a heavy snowfall in Loudi, in central China's Hunan province, Tuesday Jan. 29, 2008. China struggled Wednesday to cope with its worst winter storms in five decades, with transportation snarled and cities paralyzed, and more bad weather forecast. Snow and ice storms have struck east, central and southern China for more than two weeks, causing dozens of deaths, collapsing buildings and forcing the closure of highways and airports. (AP Photo/EyePress)
Snow and ice storms in east, central and southern China at no more than a foot of snow overall in some places have overloaded businesses, the electricity grid and other systems that normally keep the economy ticking at double-digit rates. The weather was unusual for those regions, and they were ill-equipped to handle it.
China's already overburdened railways, coupled with an incomplete road system, buckled under the added pressure as tens of millions of Chinese were on the move for the Lunar New Year one of the world's biggest annual mass movements of humanity.
Before the storms, railway officials estimated a record 178.6 million people more than the population of Russia would travel by train for the holiday, which begins Feb. 7.
The complications illustrate the limitations China faces, despite 30 years of economic reforms that have turned it into an export juggernaut, with economic growth forecast at more than 10 percent this year.
China's antiquated and inefficient power grid, which is powered largely by coal, ground to a near halt, plunging many cities into darknessTop of Form
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Dozens of factories were closed, with mining and metals companies suffering from severe power shortages. The storms have caused economic losses of $3 billion since they began Jan. 10, the Civil Affairs Ministry said Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the China Meteorological Administration said the bad weather, including more snow, would continue for at least the next three days in parts of eastern and southern China.
China's leaders, who held an emergency meeting Tuesday, deployed more than 450,000 army troops and extra units of police to clear roads and help provide emergency supplies to the millions of travelers stranded by the weather, state-run media reported, saying authorities had declared an "all out war" on the crisis.
Lydia's Commentary:
This article highlights the detrimental impacts brought about by the most disastrous snowstorm to ever hit China in 50 years. It only made it more apparent that China, despite its booming economy, is ultimately vulnerable to the forces of nature. Millions of people have staged unrest as they are frustrated by the lack of efficiency by the government, as well as the desire to be with their loved ones over the Spring Festival. I feel that the government should treat this as a wake-up call that the country do have to repair the loopholes such as poor transportation sytem that has been neglected and glossed over by the them. This is also a good time for major countries to improve thier strained realtions with China by extending a helping hand as it seems too exaggerated a problem to be handled alone.
Labels: 07S501, Administrative, Biotech industry, Justice System, Sarah 07A201, short march, trade with the EU
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Monday, March 31, 2008
The sleeping giant of biotech?January 8, 2008, CHINAdaily
Taken from:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-01/08/content_6377929.htmPARIS - China's biotech sector accounts for just a sliver of its pharmaceutical industry and operates under the cloud of a massive review of licenses issued under a regulator executed last year for accepting bribes.
Even so, experts say, Chinese purveyors of genetically engineered drugs and vaccines -- targeting everything from cancer to Alzheimer's -- are growing at a frenzied pace and are likely to become major actors on the world stage.
"There is no question that the sector is established," said Peter Singer of the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health in Toronto who was lead researcher of a study published Monday in Nature Biotechnology.
"What we found really surprising is that in an industry that's only 10 years old, China has innovative products on the market," he said.
For their study, Singer and his colleagues selected 22 small- and medium-sized biotech firms from literally thousands operating in the health sector for close scrutiny. They looked for companies that were innovative, both scientifically and in business.
The portrait that emerged is of a dynamic sector that has been growing 30 percent annually over the past decade, reaching a turnover of three billion dollars in the domestic market in 2005.
Yet its activity is dominated by a few big stars and remains dogged by doubts as to its integrity.
It is also a sector led in large measure by "sea turtles" ("hai gui") -- Chinese-born scientists with a decade or two of US or European lab experience under their belts who have come home to found Chinese companies, often with generous backing from the government.
In a market of one billion potential patients, 15 biotech products for health are already on the market, with another 60 in the pipeline, Singer said.
Exhibit A: Gendicine, the first gene therapy product approved after clinical trials anywhere in the world.
A recombinant human adenovirus, Gendicine carries the p53 gene and is administered by injection directly into cancerous tumours in the head and neck, including nasopharyngeal carcinoma.
More than 5,000 patients have received the treatment in combination with radiotherapy, including 400 foreign patients from outside China.
The company became profitable shortly after the launch of the product, approved in 2005 by China's State Drug and Food Administration (SDFA).
That, as it turns out, was not an unimpeachable recommendation.
The SDFA's former director, Zheng Xiaoyu, was executed in July 2007 for accepting bribes in return for issuing drug approvals without proper review.
As a result, a staggering 170,000 licenses granted by the SDFA, especially between 1999 and 2002, are currently under review.
Another company, Shenzhen Beike Technologies, provides a treatment based on umbilical cord and bone marrow stem cells for Alzheimer's, autism, brain trauma, cerebral palsy and spinal cord injury, as well as a dozen other diseases and conditions. The medication is injected directly into the spinal cord of patients.
"There is no need to do clinical trials for this kind of procedure in China," said the study's lead author, Sarah Frew, also a researcher at McLaughlin-Rotman.
"The approach this company is taking is trying the thing on patients rather than doing scientific research," added Singer.
The product has nonetheless been a commercial success, first with Chinese patients and more recently with international patients. When Frew visited the clinic a year ago, there were a dozen foreigners present.
The company's website is filled with glowing testimonials on the effectiveness of the treatment, which costs tens of thousands of dollars.
In most cases the therapies and vaccines developed in China are far less controversial. Indeed, more than 90 percent of products produced in the health biotech sector are biogenerics, with novel products accounting for 3-to-5 percent of the total.
A more recent development are international joint ventures and investment. Shenzhen Chipscreen Biosciences, for example, has developed an anti-cancer drug in cooperation with Huya Bioscience, based in San Diego, California. Once the medication is on the market, the Chinese partner will hold the rights for China, while Huya can lay claim to the rest of the world.
WuXi PharmaTech, which was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in the summer of 2007, is the first biotech service company in China with major foreign clients, including US pharmaceutical giant Merck and Britain's AstraZeneca.
The fact that WuXi has attracted such companies "punctures a little bit the legend that there is no intellectual property in China," said Singer.
Another myth that may soon fall by the wayside is that China can only reproduce what other have done already.
"There is no longer a hegemony on the part of industrialised countries in global biotech innovation," Singer said.
INSIGHTS
Biotechnology industry is a very lucrative industry that is being pursued by countries like Singapore and had produced remarkable results in the past few years. This is also due to Singapore’s credibility in producing high-end quality products. However, could China do the same? Its credibility has been tarnished by the massive reporting of its production of shoddy products. But should we be sceptical about the potential of the biotech industry in China? I feel that the western media has been rather bias towards China and such reports are often being exaggerated. Mass media is also an industry and it has to be profitable in order to survive thus creating sensational stories to grab people’s attention. Although some are true but many are often fabricated. Examples would be China’s pork buns that are made from cardboard and the brutality of the Chinese police in the recent Tibetan protests. I believe that China’s biotech industry had the potential to thrive and be successful in the future but it needs the help of the government. With the joining of the WTO, China’s legal structure has improved but more has to be done such as stricter enforcement of laws and the crackdown on corruption. Some companies, as seen in the article have made it big in the international market but i feel that their reputation might be affected if other China biotech companies make the headlines for the wrong reasons.
Labels: articles, Biotech industry, posted by Thomas
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