Archive for the Reporting category
July 14th, 2008
Changgucheng, China – Three years ago, local government officials told farmers in this village of 7,00 residents to stop using water from a reservoir near their wheat and corn fields. If they needed water, the farmers were told, they would have to dig a well.
“They said there wasn’t enough water,’’ Jia Jianguo, 60, recalled.
At their own expense, the farmers dug a 90-foot well. But even though the new irrigation system worked fine, the locals have been forced to pool their meager resources each year that the water recedes to keep their crops alive. The well is now 135 feet deep and the groundwater is seeping away as fast as the province’s increasingly scarce water supplies are being channeled some 100 miles southwest to the thirsty capital of 15 million, Beijing.
Read more at Sfgate.com
June 1st, 2008
Death threats against foreign reporters, government condemnation of international media, increasing political pressure on Chinese sources: This is not the free, open reporting climate the Chinese government promised for the 2008 Olympics.
Yet it is reality in the months leading up to the Summer Games in August, following the March eruption of violent protests in Tibet, the subsequent world outcry over the Chinese government’s treatment of Tibetans and the ensuing public relations fiasco that was the global Olympic torch relay. As international criticism of China for human rights abuses grows louder, nationalists and government officials have singled out outsiders for scorn, blaming them for inciting the world’s displeasure with China. Joining the French on the hot seat of derision are the international media.
Early in April, after returning from a government-chaperoned reporting trip to the aftermath of demonstrations in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, Associated Press Beijing Bureau Chief Charles Hutzler started getting harassing calls on his mobile phone. For five or six days, 20 to 30 calls rolled in every hour (except during lunch and dinner and late at night), with a nearly equal number of text messages. Most passed on petty insults and patriotic curses; some threatened to kill him. Though he stopped answering his cell phone and switched to a backup line, Hutzler says the several callers he did talk to shared one thing: They hadn’t read anything he had written.
Read More at American Journalism Review
May 30th, 2008
BEIJING — Sharon Stone may have apologized for her controversial remarks on China’s massive earthquake, but it’s not stopping the actress from getting her own dose of bad karma.
Reacting to the rising furor over Stone’s comments at the Cannes Film Festival, Dior China said Thursday that it is removing and recalling all advertisements featuring Stone. Meanwhile, local press reported that citizens were ripping down billboards in several locations.
Read more at WWD
May 28th, 2008
Chengdu, China — Hu Shaoyu left his family in Sichuan in February, expecting to see them again next Chinese New Year when he returned for his annual visit home from the clothing factory on the other side of the country where he works.
Instead, news of the devastating earthquake that struck near here, flattening cities and towns and killing as many as 80,000 people, brought him back just two months later, struggling to pick up the pieces of his fractured family. Before he boarded the train in Guangzhou for his two-day journey across China’s interior back to Sichuan, Hu already knew his elder sister had been killed and his five-year-old nephew was missing somewhere in the rubble. He hoped to return home and break the news gently to his elderly parents, and help his brother-in-law recover and rebuild.
Read More at WWD
March 24th, 2008
Beijing — There was never much doubt that China’s critics would come together to air their grievances - the nation’s first Olympic Games this summer provided too tempting a global spotlight.
What remained largely up to speculation, until now, was how the government would react to internal dissent and outside criticism .The military crackdown on Tibetan protesters in three provinces has shown that, if nothing else, China does not intend to appear weak before its critics.
Read more on sfgate.com
February 25th, 2008
Beijing - — Some 15 years after a failed bid to host the Olympics, China is less than 200 days away from its global coming-out party at the 2008 Beijing Summer Games.
China’s first-ever Olympics are a fairly safe gamble in the realm of world politics. Although the risk of overwhelming pollution, political protests and traffic gridlock could mar the August event, the rewards - namely China assuming its place in the world’s collective conscience as a global power - are apt to win out in the end, many China watchers say.
Read more on sfgate.com
August 6th, 2007
Yuanmou, — China - This is a rare place in today’s China. With no industrial pollution and a temperate climate, farms here produce some of the country’s best fruits and vegetables - famous not only for their taste, but mainly because they are uncontaminated.
There are no chemical-belching factories in this remote part of Yunnan province - no hastily erected cement plants, no brick kilns, and none of the air, water and soil pollution that blight the rural landscape elsewhere. The local rules about pesticides are a little tougher than other places, and farmers perhaps a bit more careful.
One large farm on the outskirts of the city exports its produce to several countries, but its finest is reserved for an in-country destination. A patch of golden melons, reputed to be the sweetest in the county and untouched by the chemical pesticides used on the rest of the farm, are flown 2,000 miles at their peak ripeness to Beijing’s Zhongnanhai, the walled compound where China’s central government leaders live and work. Nearby, at another large farm that develops hybrid seeds sold around China and Europe, the best beans, tomatoes and onions are reserved for delivery to the central government.
Read more on sfgate.com
June 23rd, 2006
LEIFENG, CHINA – Zhang Guanghui, an 11-year-old orphan, rises from the kang, a heated brick bed that he shares with an older cousin. He scurries through his barren four-room concrete home, washing his face and hands, brushing his teeth, and preparing food.
At the center of all his actions is dirty water that he pumps from a well beneath the home. The untreated water was never purged of the toxins that almost certainly killed his mother, severely stunted his growth and left at least 500 people in this farming community of 1,00 families in northeast China ill and desperate. Still, he drinks the water – which develops an oily film just seconds after it’s pumped.
Read more at the Christian Science Monitor
