People in China and other countries around the world are worried what will become of their own health and the health of their loved ones with revelations of tainted food produced in China hit the news with each passing week.

Meanwhile. . .

While China grapples with its latest tainted food crisis, the political elite are served the choicest, safest delicacies. They get hormone-free beef from the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, organic tea from the foothills of Tibet and rice watered by melted mountain snow.

And it’s all supplied by a special government outfit that provides all-organic goods from farms working under the strictest guidelines.

I wonder whether it will be revelations such as these that will lead to revolution in China.

China’ s poison milk scandal is spreading both in China and Japan. A Chinese government food safety agency has announced that 10 per cent of the liquid milk it has tested is contaminated, as well as 14 per cent of the baby formula. Hong Kong is reporting pollutants in ice cream and yogurt from China as well.

More than 6000 babies so far have developed kidney stones as a result of drinking the poisoned powder. Four of them have died.

Hundreds of parents streamed into the offices of the Sanlu dairy company at the heart of the scandal yesterday, demanding refunds and worrying over what was still safe to feed their children. “Now we have no idea what kind of milk to give the baby. They all have problems,” said the mother of a one-year-old who had been drinking Sanlu formula for two months.

I saw a report on the TV today that said powdered milk and other processed food products from China are currently in wide use in Japan.

Check out this surreal story over at Danwei about a Chinese writer who visited North Korea, returned to China, and published a book about what he saw there, only to have the book banned from bookstores and wiped from the Web after the NORKS complained to the CHICOMS.

The first “trouble” it ran into was when a retired Chinese Foreign Ministry official called up the Foreign Ministry to report that The Real DPRK had “problems.” This individual had not read the book and did not go online; he had heard the audio version on Beijing Radio. When the Foreign Ministry received this old cadre’s report, it immediately telephoned Xinhua Lipin Book Co. to request a copy of the book for review. Xinhua Lipin couldn’t ignore this request, so it sent off a copy of The Real DPRK by courier to the Foreign Ministry. The company was quite nervous at the time, but then more than a month passed without the Foreign Ministry making any movements. This indicated that the book had its approval.

The real “trouble” for The Real DPRK began in the first part of July, 2008. The embassy of the DPRK in China sent a letter to the Chinese Foreign Ministry demanding that it halt circulation of The Real DPRK. The Foreign Ministry handed this matter over to GAPP, which issued an order banning the book.

However, “banning a book” is ultimately a process. At first, The Real DPRK was only taken off the shelves of major book stores. On 17 July, the DPRK embassy sent another letter to the Foreign Ministry, under the impression that many places in China were still selling The Real DPRK. So GAPP pressed bookstores across the country to remove book from their shelves.

“Quite a few of your English students are prostitutes,” a friend told me today as she recounted a conversation that she had with her hair stylist recently. “The guy who cut my hair told me that many of your training center’s female students come to him two or three times a week to get their hair done before they go to work.” She went on to explain that according to the hair stylist, some of my students sell their bodies at night in local hotels where there might be as many as 200 prostitutes gathered in one establishment. Other students work as “high class” prostitutes providing sexual services to just one or two likely married men in exchange for a place to live and a monthly stipend.

Read the whole thing here.

Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times is back with another interesting article, this time on foreign workers in Japan. One thing I have noticed in my time in Japan is the consternation many Japanese feel towards foreigners. My wife trains foreign workers (largely in Japanese language and culture) who are employed by Japanese companies both here and abroad and it opens a window for me into these attitudes. Soon her organization will be training a large group (50 +/-) of Indonesian nurses and the hand wringing continues…

With one of the world’s most rapidly aging populations and lowest birthrates, Japan is facing acute labor shortages not only in farming towns but also in fishing villages, factories, restaurants and nursing homes, and on construction sites. Closed to immigration, Japan has admitted foreign workers through various loopholes, including employing growing numbers of foreign students as part-timers and temporary workers, like the Chinese here, as so-called foreign trainees.

The labor shortage has grown serious enough that a group of influential politicians in the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party recently released a report calling for the admission of 10 million immigrants in the next 50 years.

The foreign work force in Japan rose to more than one million in 2006 from fewer than 700,000 in 1996. But experts say that it will have to increase by significantly more to make up for the expected decline in the Japanese population. The government projects that Japan’s population, 127 million, will fall to between 82 million and 99 million by 2055. Moreover, because the population is graying, the share that is of working age is expected to shrink even faster.

The large presence of the Chinese workers has unsettled some Japanese here even as they have become increasingly dependent on them. Some vaguely mentioned the fear of crime, though they acknowledged that crime rates had not risen. No Japanese interviewed welcomed the idea of immigrants here or elsewhere in Japan.

“I feel a strange sense of oppression,” Toshimitsu Ide, 28, a lettuce farmer who had not hired any Chinese workers, said of seeing large groups of Chinese hanging around town. “They seem hard to approach.”

Perhaps because of the Japanese unease, the Chinese workers were given directives apparently aimed at curbing their movements, even before they arrived. They said they were told to go home by 8 p.m. and not to ride bicycles except for work. Some even said they had been instructed not to talk to young Japanese women.

“Though I’m in Japan,” said Toshimitsu Yui, 57, who works in construction, “I feel this is not Japan anymore.”

Check out this great video of an American guy and his Chinese girlfriend interviewing each other.

Via Danwei

The Onion seems to think so. . . Be sure to watch past the ad at the end for a bonus clip.

The Beijing Olympics: Are They A Trap?

The New York Times recently reported on a new trend in Japanese tourism, both those visiting Japan and Japanese going abroad. While fewer Japanese are traveling outside the country, more foreigners are visiting; most of whom are coming from Asian countries.

Once prohibitively expensive, Japan is suddenly drawing soaring numbers of Asian tourists who splurge at the nation’s department stores, lounge in its hot spring resorts or explore remote corners, like this stretch of pristine mountains and forests on Japan’s northernmost tip.

Japan itself was once known for its free-spending tourists, who flocked to boutiques from Hong Kong to Fifth Avenue. But as Japan’s economy stalled for the last dozen or so years, rapid development in countries like China and South Korea raised living standards there.

At the same time, there has been a decline in the number of people going abroad from Japan. The number of Japanese traveling abroad has fallen 3 percent from the peak in 2000 of 17.8 million, the government-run Japan National Tourist Organization said.

By contrast, the number of visitors to Japan from South Korea, Taiwan, China and Hong Kong almost doubled last year from five years earlier, to 5.36 million, according to the tourist group. Those four regions alone accounted for nearly two-thirds of all foreign visitors to Japan last year, the organization said.

Many Asian tourists interviewed said they liked to shop here because Japan has the latest fashions first, and at prices way below those in many other Asian countries, where tariffs are steep. They also said they liked visiting Japan because it was close, safe and cleaner than much of the rest of Asia.

During the 1980s, Americans were the largest group of overseas visitors to Japan, but have now fallen to fourth behind South Korea, Taiwan and China. Surveys also showed Asian tourists came to Japan for different reasons than Westerners. While Americans said they came to see cultural attractions like temples, Asians cited shopping, followed by hot springs and nature. Visits to factories are also popular, he said.

We all have heard of how foot binding was (and apparently still is in some areas) practiced in China, but these are the first photos I have ever seen of this gruesome practice.

More here.

Check out this video in which Oiwan Lam talks about how China pays people to go onto blogs and into chatrooms to tout the party line.

Via Danwei

More on this story here.

By some estimates, these commentary teams now comprise as many as 280,000 members nationwide, and they show just how serious China’s leaders are about the political challenges posed by the Web. More importantly, they offer tangible clues about China’s next generation of information controls—what President Hu Jintao last month called “a new pattern of public-opinion guidance.”

The New York Times has a report about Huang Qi, a Chinese human rights advocate who, ironically told National Public Radio recently that there have been great improvements in the human rights situation in China.

BEIJING — Three weeks after the earthquake in Sichuan Province, five bereaved fathers whose children died in collapsed schools sought help from a local human rights activist named Huang Qi.

The fathers visited Mr. Huang at the Tianwang Human Rights Center, an informal advocacy organization in the provincial capital of Chengdu, where he worked and lived. They told him how the four-story Dongqi Middle School had crumbled in an instant, burying their children alive.

Mr. Huang soon posted an article on his center’s Web site, 64tianwang.com, describing their demands. They wanted compensation, an investigation into the schools’ construction and for those responsible for the building’s collapse to be held accountable — if there indeed was negligence.

A week later, plainclothes officers intercepted Mr. Huang on the street outside his home and stuffed him into a car. The police have informed his wife and mother that they are holding him on suspicion of illegally possessing state secrets.

“They’ve been using this method for a long time,” said Zhang Jianping, a contributor to the Web site who has known Mr. Huang since 2005. Nobody knows the grounds for his arrest, but many people have the same idea. Mr. Zhang said, “It may be because the schools collapsed, and so many children died.”

There is no official death toll for the children who died in schools during the Shichuan Province earthquake on May 12. According to estimates by the Chinese government, seven thousand schoolrooms collapsed.

According to Danwei, the Beijing City Government Food Safety Office reportedly is sending out notices putting restrictions on the serving, transport and sale of dog meat during the Olympics.

The main thrust of the notice is that all meat transported into Beijing during the Olympics will be thoroughly checked, and that the 112 official Olympic restaurants will not be allowed to serve dog meat, whilst other restaurants in the capital (especially those which serve Korean, Yunnan and Guizhou cuisines) are strongly encouraged not to serve dog meat during the Games.

The following is from a Washington Post report on the cancellation of a trip to Seoul by U.S. President George Bush due to demonstrations against U.S. beef imports there. Emphasis is mine.

President Bush canceled plans Tuesday to visit Seoul next month amid protests over U.S. beef imports, and his administration made a key concession to North Korea by allowing it to exclude atomic bombs from a required disclosure of its nuclear activities.

You mean this whole exercise was intended to limit North Korea’s electrical power generation options!?!

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has assured Japan that The United States will continue to press for the release of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea.

Japan worries that the United States will remove North Korea from its list of nations sponsoring terrorism before a resolution of the issue.

“We have made very clear that the United States is not going to set aside or forget the Japanese abduction issue,” Rice told reporters on the plane to Berlin, where she will attend a conference on security in the Palestinian territories on the sidelines of a donors conference.

“We’re going to continue to press North Korea to make sure this issue is dealt with,” Rice said. “Japan is one of America’s strongest allies in Asia, I should say one of America’s strongest allies in the world and we recognize the sensitivity of this issue,” she said.

Right. . . Just about no one is falling for this in Japan, where the latest U.S.appeasement concession is being met with condemnation by people on both sides of the aisle.

A top LDP politician bitterly criticized Washington for repeating a past mistake. “The United States is doing the same thing over again.”

He was referring to the U.S. government’s failure to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons even though it promoted reconciliations with Pyongyang by dispatching then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang at the end of the Bill Clinton administration that stepped down in 2001.

“The Bush administration has become too lenient toward North Korea as its tenure is approaching an end,” he said.

Many politicians feel that the administration of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has supported the U.S. position even though there has been no tangible progress in the abduction issue because it places top priority on Japan’s ties with the United States.

However, some politicians expressed concern that the U.S. decision to remove North Korea from its list of terrorism-supporting countries could adversely affect Japan-U.S. relations.

WARNING

The video after the jump is very graphic.

One would think that China’s recent agreement with Japan to jointly develop gas fields in the East China Sea, which defuses a longstanding territorial dispute would be cause for happiness in both countries. But the history between the two nations being what it is has caused some Chinese to condemn the deal as surrendering national sovereignty to hated enemy.

Some messages left on message boards, which are normally tightly monitored and censored by the security services, have accused the authorities of “selling out” to Japan while others described those who made the deal as “traitors.”

A small demonstration against the agreement and Japan’s claims to disputed islands in the East China Sea was also held outside the Japanese Embassy in Beijing on Wednesday by Chinese nationalists.

Demonstrations against government policy are almost unheard of in China. To take place, the demonstration would have to have been approved by the security services.

In question is Japanese involvement in the Chunxaio (Shirakaba) gas field, which is west of the line up to which Japan claims as its territorial waters. Some Japanese media is reporting that China has agreed to allow Japan develop the Chunxiao field, but the Chinese government is claiming that Japanese involvement will be restricted to investment only.

Thanks to Rune.

China is hustling overtime to put the finishing touches on the the country in time for the Olympics, which are just around the corner. One big task has been trying to convert signs, menus, and other essential written messages into English, which, as reported by CNN, is not as simple as it first might seem.

[China] is proposing that restaurants change the names of exotic, but bizarrely named, delicacies to make them more delectable for the estimated 50,000 visitors arriving in August for the Summer Games.

The appetizer “Husband and wife’s lung slice” is taking on the more appetizing “Beef and ox tripe in chili sauce.”

“Chicken without sexual life” has been transformed into “Steamed pullet.”

Thanks to RTN.

And then there is this. . .

A Chinese woman claiming to be from the earthquake-devastated province of Sichuan and who goes under the name of Xiaoyun (Little Cloud) has been posting spicy photos of herself in a bid to encourage people to donate cash for earthquake relief.

Though there is no word concerning the effectiveness of the comely Xiaoyun’s fund raising efforts, they are getting mixed reviews from Chinese netizens: some are calling her a “shameless 90s generation girl”, while others are in awe of her altruistic spirit.

Make up your own mind by viewing more photos here and here.

Via Danwei

VBS.tv is running an 8 part interview/tour with former Super Girl contestant, Yang Lei. VBS went to Shanghai, China to meet Yang in order to learn about the phenomenon that was the Super Girl, and ends up learning lot about current day China.

Super Girl is the Chinese equivalent to American Idol or the UK’s Pop Idol, only it’s limited to female contestants. The final episode of the last edition had an audience of over 420 million people, making it the biggest TV show in the history of TV. Over 1.2 billion votes were cast during the last edition of the Super Girl competition, making it also the biggest exercise in democracy in China’s history.

During the show contestants compete and campaign to move forward in the competition and the audience gets to “choose” or “select” (they’re not allowed to use the term “vote”) their favorite contestants. After the large response to the ability to vote, the Chinese government banned the show from continuing to a fourth season.

The above is Part 1 of the series. You can view the other parts here.

The government in China reportedly is modifying the country’s birth control policy in Sichuan because of all the children lost in the recent tragic earthquake there. Because of China’s tough birth control policies, many of the young school students who died in the quake were only children.

Wang Xuegui is a 34-year-old villager who lived in the quake-stricken Yingxiu Town. Both of his two daughters were killed in the earthquake; their bodies were found under the rubble of their collapsed school building. Wang said he was still young and hoped to have children again. He hasn’t talked about this with his wife, who is recovering from a mental breakdown after the loss of their children.

Schools suffered disporportionally large damage in the earthquake, and because of China’s tough birth control policies, many of the students who died in the quake were only children. For many parents who lost a child, they lost all.

According to a new regulation issued by the Chengdu Population and Family Planning Commission, families like Wang Xuegui’s that lost their children or had children disabled in the earthquake are permitted to give birth again. Moreover, families of children who were killed or disabled in the quake and have at least one parent older than 50 will now receive an annual government subsidy of 600 yuan for each parent. Earthquake-impacted families (families that sustained injuries, deaths, or whose property was damaged) that have “illegal” children are no longer required to pay their “social rearing fee”, a fine imposed on families that have unauthorized children. Families that had illegal children of whom only one survived the earthquake can now qualify for the “Single Child Parents Privilege Certificate” and enjoy government subsidies reserved originally only for single-child-families.

Via Danwei

Via DanWei