Wednesday, April 2, 2008
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
Bottom of Form
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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Tuesday, April 1, 2008
China Embassy: Rural social security in China "to be ensured"http://www.china-embassy.org/The State Council will release guidelines on a basic national social security system next month that for the first time will cover the neglected rural areas, the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) said on May 28.
Sun Yang, an official with MCA's department of subsistence security, said the State Council would hold a special meeting next month to discuss the implementation of the national rural basic social security system and issue guidelines for local governments to set up the system across the country.
The guidelines will formally establish China's rural basic social security system, although it might take the central and local governments another six months to implement it at the grass-roots level in the country, Sun said.
So far, almost all the provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions have set up a rural basic social security system, benefiting 18.15 million rural residents. Only Yunnan and Guizhou provinces and the Tibet and Xinjiang Uygur autonomous regions are yet to do so.
In the rural areas without the system, 5.623 million poor people are getting regular subsidy from local governments, the ministry said.
Civil Affairs Vice-Minister Li Liguo had said in March that the national rural social security system, expected to benefit about 3.5 percent of the rural population, would be in place by June. Currently, 27 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions have their own rural social security systems.
But the new policy will help establish a uniform system across the country, with the central government earmarking funds for rural social security for the first time. The central government now provides funds for such a system only in urban areas.
"The central government will grant subsidies according to the needs and development levels of the areas, with western regions receiving more," Li said.
Local governments, too, will have to allocate funds to operate the system and set their own eligibility criteria for aid. "The eligibility criteria will be determined on the basis of the national poverty line, that is, an annual income of 693 yuan ($90)," she said.
Different parts of the country will be allowed to set their own eligibility criteria.
Li said the system would accord priority to rural residents who are poor and ill, physically disabled or aged, or live in a harsh environment.
At present, the eligibility criteria for rural basic social security system is an income of 600 to 800 yuan (78 U.S. dollars to 104 dollars) a year in the central and western areas and 1,000 to 1,200 (130 dollars to 156 dollars) a year in the eastern areas.
For example, in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, farmers who earn less than 625 yuan (80 dollars) and herdsmen who make less than 825 yuan (106 dollars) a year are entitled to the minimum social security. In contrast, Fujian Province draws the line at 1,200 yuan (156 dollars).
Though Li didn't say how much money the central government would spend on the system, the Ministry of Finance will draw up a plan to decide how much funds should be allocated to different areas.
Posted by: sarah quek
Labels: Sarah 07A201, Social, Social security
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Earth Policy Institute :
China Losing War With Advancing DesertsChina is now at war. It is not invading armies that are claiming its territory, but expanding deserts. Old deserts are advancing and new ones are forming, like guerrilla forces striking unexpectedly, forcing Beijing to fight on several fronts. And worse, the growing deserts are gaining momentum, occupying an ever-larger piece of China's territory each year. Desert expansion has accelerated with each successive decade since 1950. China's Environmental Protection Agency reports that the Gobi Desert expanded by 52,400 square kilometers (20,240 square miles) from 1994 to 1999, an area half the size of Pennsylvania. With the advancing Gobi now within 150 miles of Beijing, China's leaders are beginning to sense the gravity of the situation. Overplowing and overgrazing are converging to create a dust bowl of historic dimensions. With little vegetation remaining in parts of northern and western China, the strong winds of late winter and early spring can remove literally millions of tons of topsoil in a single day—soil that can take centuries to replace. For the outside world, it is these dust storms that draw attention to the deserts that are forming in China. On April 12, 2002, for instance, South Korea was engulfed by a huge dust storm from China that left people in Seoul literally gasping for breath. Schools were closed, airline flights were cancelled, and clinics were overrun with patients having difficulty breathing. Retail sales fell. Koreans have come to dread the arrival of what they now call "the fifth season"—the dust storms of late winter and early spring. Japan also suffers from dust storms originating in China. Although not as directly exposed as Koreans are, the Japanese complain about the dust and the brown rain that streaks their windshields and windows. Each year, residents of eastern Chinese cities such as Beijing and Tianjin hunker down as the dust storms begin. In addition to having problems with breathing and the dust that stings the eyes, people are constantly working to keep dust out of homes and to clean doorways and sidewalks of dust and sand. Farmers and herders, whose livelihoods are blowing away, are paying an even heavier price. A report by a U.S. embassy official in May 2001 after a visit to Xilingol Prefecture in Inner Mongolia (Nei Monggol) notes that although 97 percent of the region is officially classified as grasslands, a third of the terrain now appears to be desert. The report says the prefecture's livestock population climbed from 2 million as recently as 1977 to 18 million in 2000. A Chinese scientist doing grassland research in the prefecture says that if recent desertification trends continue, Xilingol will be uninhabitable in 15 years. A more recent U.S. embassy report entitled "Desert Mergers and Acquisitions" says satellite images show two deserts in north-central China expanding and merging to form a single, larger desert overlapping Inner Mongolia and Gansu provinces. To the west in Xinjiang Province, two even larger deserts—the Taklimakan and Kumtag—are also heading for a merger. Highways there are regularly inundated by sand dunes. In the deteriorating relationship between the global economy and the earth's ecosystem, China is on the leading edge. A human population of 1.3 billion and a livestock population of just over 400 million are weighing heavily on the land. Huge flocks of sheep and goats in the northwest are stripping the land of its protective vegetation, creating a dust bowl on a scale not seen before. Northwestern China is on the verge of a massive ecological meltdown. While overplowing is now being partly remedied by paying farmers to plant their grainland in trees, overgrazing continues largely unabated. China's cattle, sheep, and goat population tripled from 1950 to 2002. The United States, a country with comparable grazing capacity, has 97 million cattle. China has 106 million. But for sheep and goats, the figures are 8 million versus 298 million. Concentrated in the western and northern provinces, sheep and goats are destroying the land's protective vegetation. The wind then does the rest, removing the soil and converting productive rangeland into desert. (See
data.) The fallout from the dust storms is social as well as economic. Millions of rural Chinese may be uprooted and forced to migrate eastward as the drifting sand covers their land. Expanding deserts are driving villagers from their homes in Gansu, Inner Mongolia, and Ningxia provinces. An Asian Development Bank assessment of desertification in Gansu Province reports that 4,000 villages risk being overrun by drifting sands. The U.S. Dust Bowl of the 1930s forced some 2.5 million "Okies" and other refugees to leave the land, many of them heading from Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas to California. But the dust bowl forming in China is much larger, and during the 1930s the U.S. population was only 150 million—compared with 1.3 billion in China today. Whereas the U.S. migration was measured in the millions, China's may eventually measure in the tens of millions. And as a U.S. embassy report entitled "The Grapes of Wrath in Inner Mongolia" noted, "unfortunately, China's twenty-first century 'Okies' have no California to escape to—at least not in China." Planting marginal cropland in trees helps correct some of the mistakes of overplowing, but it does not deal with the overgrazing issue. Arresting desertification may depend more on grass than trees—on both permitting existing grasses to recover and planting grass in denuded areas. Beijing is trying to arrest the spread of deserts by encouraging pastoralists to reduce their flocks of sheep and goats by 40 percent, but in communities where wealth is measured not in income but in the number of livestock owned and where most families are living under the poverty line, such cuts are not easy. Some local governments are requiring stall-feeding of livestock with forage gathered by hand, hoping that this confinement measure will permit grasslands to recover. China is taking some of the right steps to halt the advancing desert, but it has a long way to go to reduce livestock numbers to a sustainable level. At this point, there is no plan in place or on the drawing board that will halt the advancing deserts. The entire world has a stake in China's winning the war with the advancing deserts given its economic leadership role. But winning will not be easy. Qu Geping, the Chairman of the Environment and Resources Committee of the National People's Congress, estimates that the remediation of land in the areas where it is technically feasible would cost $28.3 billion. Halting the advancing deserts will require a massive commitment of financial and human resources, one that may force the government to make a hard choice: either build costly proposed south-north water diversion projects or battle the advancing deserts that are marching eastward and could eventually occupy Beijing.
Posted by: sarah quek
Sarah's commentary:
The never expansion of china's deserts pose a serious theat to the livelihoods of millions of people , the majority of them being the rural population. The expanding desert threatens the survival of China because as the desert "eats" up arable farmland,there is less farm produce for the people of Chnia. The farmers who have lost their farmland cannot move to the city because of the restricting hukou system. Even with the slight relaxation of this policy, they will still face discrimation and are not allowed accesss to healthcare and social security. With more people moving into the cities, it could lead to massive overcrowding in already very crowded cities. Peolple have also been moving into Inner Mongolia because of the desertification and this may be seen as an attempt to "invade" into their territory by the mongolians. thus it could also lead to social tensions as seen in the Xinjiang issue of "invading" Han migrants. Thus, the loss of arable land may lead to many issues that may rock social stability in China.
Sarah 07A201
Labels: China's Environmental Issues, loss of arable land, Political, Sarah 07A201
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China: Beijing’s Migrant Construction Workers Abused
hrw.org
Builders of the new Beijing? Cheated of Wages, Denied Essential Services?
Migrant construction workers in Beijing are routinely exploited by being denied proper wages, under dangerous conditions with neither accident insurance nor access to medical and other social services, Human Rights Watch said in a new
report released today.
“The Chinese government is all talk and no action when it comes to delivering meaningful protection and social services for migrant construction workers,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. Despite years of government rhetoric, employers still cheat migrant construction workers of hard-earned wages. And when it comes to basic social services, the government still discriminates against migrants. The Human Rights Watch report documents how employers routinely force migrants to work, withhold wages for up to a year, then offer a lump sum payment which is considerably below the agreed wage rate and Beijing’s minimum wage rate. Some employers refuse to pay anything at all. One worker told Human Rights Watch: “Since I first arrived at the work site, every day I have worked, I don’t have any money and I have never left [the work site] for relaxation.” Another migrant worker explained how he was paid nothing, despite an oral agreement that his seven months wages would be paid in full at the completion of the project. The worker told Human Rights Watch: “The company representative) said the money hasn’t arrived yet (or) the boss isn’t here (or) the boss is busy, and so on, with such excuses for the delay.” The Chinese hukou system of household registration, designed to prevent and control the mass influx of rural inhabitants to China’s cities, bars Beijing’s migrant construction workers from social welfare benefits such as medical care, which are only available to legally registered urban residents. One migrant worker was required to submit copies of a Beijing hukou in order to file an insurance claim for medical fees related to an industrial accident. He had never had a Beijing hukou. The worker said to Human Rights Watch: I thought to myself, once again, the doors to legal protection are being slammed in my face. Likewise, other workers interviewed by Human Rights Watch explained how they could not file complaints against their employers for wage violations because they lacked Beijing residence permits. Human Rights Watch said that employers continue to ignore labor laws with impunity, and calls by the Chinese leadership to protect migrant workers are undermined by the hukou system that discriminates against migrant workers. Instead of abolishing the household registration system, the government has begun granting migrant workers temporary urban residence permits, thus perpetuating a discriminatory system. ”If the Chinese government really wants to protect the migrant workers’ rights, it should start by scrapping the hukou system”, Richardson said. “That alone would make it easier for workers to file complaints and for authorities to prosecute employers who violate labor laws.” China is a party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and as such has undertaken to guarantee its workers just and favorable conditions of work, including fair wages, a safe and healthy work environment, and reasonable limitations on working hours. Despite these obligations and similar standards in Chinese law, Human Rights Watch research has documented numerous abuses including:
Denial of regular monthly wage payments. Employers routinely flout Article 50 of the Labor Law, which stipulates wages are to be paid monthly, by offering annual lump sum payments, severely depriving migrant workers and their families of year-round security.
Non-payment or underpayment of wages. Employers frequently pay workers below the minimum wage, and some employers do not pay their workers at all. One group of workers told Human Rights Watch their employer refused to pay for work performed between April 2006 and November 2006. In March 2007, the workers still had not been paid.
Employers also routinely deny migrant construction workers legally stipulated contracts, accident and medical insurance, and expose workers to illness and injury through hazardous working conditions.
Adding insult to injury, a dysfunctional government redress system prevents workers from claiming their legally protected rights. Those who protest face threats of sometimes deadly violence. In July 2007, hoodlums hired as strike breakers murdered a migrant construction worker at a building site in Guangdong province where the striking workers had remained unpaid for months.
“It’s unacceptable for workers to risk death and injury merely for pursuing their legal right to fair wages paid punctually and in full”, Richardson said. “More empty government rhetoric will only guarantee more risks, more injuries, and more deaths”.
The 2008 Olympic Games certainly have helped to spur the city’s construction boom. The International Olympic Committee (IOC), which selected Beijing to host the games, should seek independent certification that all workers employed at Olympic construction sites are being paid lawfully and adequately, in a safe working environment and protected from other work-related abuses. The need for such certification is particularly urgent since the January 2008 admission by the Chinese government that six workers had died in workplace accidents at Olympics venues during the past three years. In January 2006, the Beijing city government announced that it had fined 12 unidentified companies contracted to build Olympics-related projects for the withholding of wages. While Human Rights Watch obtained no specific information about Olympic venues, consistent abuses reported across other construction projects in Beijing should raise concerns about exploitation on all building sites, including those for the Olympics.
If the Olympic movement really prides itself on its dedication to fundamental universal ethical principles, then the International Olympics Committee must ensure that workers who help build Beijing’s Olympic venues are at least treated fairly and in accordance with Chinese law, and the fundamental international human rights standards that China has assumed and promised its citizens to respect.
Posted by: sarah quek
Sarah's Commentary:
The plight of the migrant workers arises mainly from the restricting hukuo system which denies workers access basic healthcare and also allows fo rthem to be exploited with no form of redress. This issue of unfairness and biased treatment of the rural migrant workers could spawn social upheaval. it can be said that the treatment of the workers is a sort of "betrayal" by the Chinese government to their "roots" because their power base was originally in the rural areas and from rural people. The lack of care for these rural migrant workers is a large cause of dissent among the rural people because they feel that the government is not doing anything to help their situation. I think that even though the government has taken to granting migrant workers temporary urban residence permits, it does not really help their situation. The workers are still discrimated against and they still have very little insurance for their well-being.
Sarah 07A201
Labels: Floating Population, Sarah 07A201, Social
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Economist Intelligence Unit ViewsWire: China's food safety
A new plan to improve standards of food and drugsWhen pet cats and dogs in the US started dying in April, few would have thought that the deaths would have much relevance for the Chinese export juggernaut. But the issue looks like spiralling into a major problem for international traders, and in an effort to cool the controversy China was forced to release on June 6th its first five-year plan to improve food-and-drug safety standards. The plan has a political as well as practical motive, as the government is keen to undo the reputational damage from scandals ranging from food contamination to the sale of fake antibiotics. However, implementation of the plan is likely to be difficult.
China is no stranger to quality problems, be it in food, drugs or toys. The US pet deaths—stemming from the contamination by melamine, a chemical toxin, of a vegetable protein used in animal foods—were not all that different from many other past cases in China. However, the massive scale of the pet-food recall, involving thousands of retail products, was unprecedented. The issue also touched on an unusually emotive subject at a time of rising Sino-US trade tensions. That was not all. The story was followed by a plethora of articles in the foreign media highlighting similar cases, ranging from a series of alleged deaths in Panama last year caused by the use of industrial toxins in cough medicine exported from China to the US Food and Drug Administration's warnings over chemicals in Chinese-made toothpaste. China was on the verge of a global PR disaster.
Investigations into such cases have thrown light on the tangled morass of the Chinese regulatory system. The State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine and other agencies have a tendency to pass the buck between each other, denying responsibility for mistakes. That allows producers and traders to get on with business as usual. In many cases a lack of regulatory clarity and co-ordination prevents the authorities from tackling abuses. In others, businesses simply buy the required documentation.
Deadly consequences
It has been an ironic coincidence that the latest furore has come as the former head of the SFDA, Zheng Xiaoyu, was on trial for accepting bribes in return for granting government approval for various medicines in 2005. Amid the international uproar over tainted Chinese products, there was little surprise when the court imposed the death sentence when he was found guilty. But for regulators still trying to save their necks, they now have the unenviable task of sifting through all the drugs and pharmaceutical firms approved for licences under Mr Zheng in an attempt to make sure they did not breach standards.
As Mr Zheng's case—which did not involve exports—showed, this is not purely a problem for foreigners who buy Chinese products. It is a safe to say that many more Chinese people than foreigners are harmed by ingesting toxic or substandard foods and drugs each year. In one particularly tragic case in Anhui in 2004, for example, several babies died of malnutrition after consuming fake baby-milk powder. Investigative programmes exposing factories, farms and restaurants engaged in various nefarious practices with food are a stomach-churning staple of Chinese television.
Yet Chinese officials' reflexive response to more serious cases remains the cover-up. The pet-food case saw a classic hash of a government PR job. First came denial: "The poisoning of American pets has nothing to do with China," claimed a report in the People's Daily. This was followed by a blustering counter-attack noting that food contamination occurred both within the US and with US exports to China. "No food-inspection system is foolproof," pointed out Li Yuanping, director general of the Import and Export Food Safety Bureau. "It's like an airplane. Flying is said to be the safest way to travel, but sometimes you have plane crashes".
Only later did officials start revealing more substantive measures to address the problem, including the release of the five-year food-and-drug safety plan. The plan calls for more inspections of food exports, improved procedures for recalling faulty or tainted products, more pollution monitoring in food-producing areas, as well as an improved structure for monitoring--and blacklisting--food trading companies. According to the Chinese state media, the plan also aims to implement a system of special inspections for 90% of food producers. It also calls for more stringent controls on the use of additives and pesticides, and for nationwide monitoring of the ill effects of medication. However, despite the plan's laudable aims, corruption and inefficiency will continue to leave doors wide open for companies wanting to cut corners.
Legal fallout?
For foreign businesses, the lack of quality control in China is not someone else's problem. Several lawyers have argued that, since Chinese regulatory bodies are demonstrably unfit for purpose, any company accepting Chinese exports with official quality or safety certificates could theoretically be held liable for problems that subsequently emerge. Once again, this dilemma highlights the importance for companies of detailed knowledge of their supply chains in China, and of not taking documentary or verbal assurances at face value. To help deal with such challenges, bigger companies should establish their own internal quality-control mechanisms. But for smaller traders, the costs of such systems could undermine their profitability. For many importers then, the best acid test may well be that if a product's price looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Posted by: sarah quek
Labels: Economy, Food safety, Political, Sarah 07A201
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The Associated Press: Officials fear tainted goods will harm China's stabilityBEIJING: China's fight against the production of shoddy food and drugs must be intensified or the country faces social unrest and a further tarnishing of its image abroad, senior party and regulatory officials said.
The toll exacted in the past year has been grim for victims in Panama and China who died after ingesting tainted Chinese-made pharmaceutical ingredients, and for the State Food and Drug Administration itself, with two high-level employees sentenced to death for corruption.
Attendees at a seminar in Beijing over the weekend were told to "draw profound lessons" from former SFDA director, Zheng Xiaoyu, who was sentenced to death in May for taking bribes to approve substandard medicines, including an antibiotic blamed for at least 10 deaths within China.
"We must face the fact that there are still some problems which cannot be ignored," SFDA Commissioner Shao Mingli was quoted as saying in a seminar transcript posted on the agency's Web site Monday.
"Some areas are not fully aware of the importance, hardship and complexity of this work. They fear the difficulties and suffer battle fatigue," Shao said.
China's pharmaceutical industry is lucrative but poorly regulated. Some companies try to cash in by substituting fake or substandard ingredients.
Fears abroad over Chinese-made items were sparked last year by the deaths of dozens of people in Panama who took products contaminated with diethylene glycol, a thickening agent in antifreeze, imported from China. It was passed off as harmless glycerin.
A top Panamanian prosecutor has said tests show at least 94 people have died from taking medicine contaminated with diethylene glycol since July 2006, and 293 more deaths are under investigation.
In North America earlier this year, pet food containing Chinese wheat gluten tainted with the chemical melamine was blamed for the deaths of dogs and cats.
Since then, U.S. authorities have turned away or recalled toxic fish, juice containing unsafe color additives and popular toy trains decorated with lead paint.
"Food security problems have impeded Chinese agri-products and food many times in international trade, and damaged our national credibility and image," Sun Xianze, a food supervision officer with the SFDA, told the conference in Beijing.
He cited a laundry list of domestic food scares from the past year, including drug-tainted fish, banned Sudan dye used to color egg yolks red, and pork tainted with clenbuterol, a banned feed additive.
He said more such cases would "not only affect the healthy development of the industry, but could also impact local economies and social stability."
Qu Wanxiang, the vice minister of supervision for the Communist Party's Central Commission for Discipline and Inspection, said the former SFDA director Zheng's corruption "shook the government's regulatory foundation and damaged the government's image."
Under Zheng's 1998-2005 tenure, his agency approved six medicines that turned out to be fake, and the drug makers used falsified documents to apply for approvals, state media have reported.
Zheng's death sentence was unusually heavy even for China, believed to carry out more court-ordered executions than all other nations combined, and likely indicates the leadership's determination to confront the country's dire product safety record.
On Friday, China sentenced another official, one of Zheng's former subordinates, to death for taking bribes.
By: sarah quek
Sarah's commentary:
The issue of sub-standard food and other products made in China has created a huge uproar form the public on food and product safety. It does make most of us wonder every time we buy something that says "Made in China" , whether or not we will be 'poisoned'. Seeing reports of tainted food products every few months is quite worrying because reports like these will inadvertently affect the world's perception of China's products. this could lead to massive banning of goods from China, like Japan banning the importation of gyoza dumplings from China. Not only that, this could lead to adverse effect on retailers worlwide as seen in the Mattel toy recall case where too much poisonous substances were found in children's toys. The repercussions of selling/producing sub-standard products can affect China's economy and political standing. As countries cut down imports from China, the Chinese government may not be able to sustain the rate of economic growth and as such, there could be social upheaval if there is massive unemployment resulting from a potential slowdown in economic growth.
Sarah 07A201
Labels: Political, Sarah 07A201, Social, Tainted Goods
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