China Fires 8 Top Regulators Over Milk Scandal

SHANGHAI — China said Friday that eight senior regulators were fired last week for “slack supervision” in a tainted milk scandal that killed at least six children and sickened over 300,000 last year.

The government said high-ranking regulators in the country’s major food supervisory agencies, including the ministries of health and agriculture and the top food safety watchdog, were stripped of their positions and their membership in the Communist Party.

One of the highest officials to lose his job was Wang Bubu, chief of the law enforcement division of the General Administration of Quality Supervision and Quarantine.

The dismissals were Beijing’s latest efforts to strengthen food safety practices and hold government officials accountable after the worst food safety crisis here in decades.

The scandal dealt a huge blow to China’s dairy industry last year and also led to global recalls of Chinese-made food products, damaging international trade and further shaking confidence in this nation’s ability to monitor its food producers.

China arrested dozens of farmers, middlemen and dairy company executives last year, accusing them of violating the public trust. Some middlemen were accused of intentionally spiking milk supplies with melamine to save money, essentially using the toxic chemical as filler.

One major dairy company, the Sanlu Company, was forced into bankruptcy. Two men were sentenced to death for their role in the scandal earlier this year and several other people, including the 66-year-old chief executive of Sanlu, were sentenced to life in prison.

The punishments announced late Friday were handed down by the Communist Party watchdog, the Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection.

Regulators in the State Administration for Industry and Commerce and the State Food and Drug Administration were also punished. Last September, the chief of the General Administration of Quality Supervision and Quarantine and two high ranking officials in the city of Shijiazhuang, where Sanluwas based, were dismissed or stepped down.

Beijing has struggled to demonstrate that it is taking strong steps to improve food safety. But a four-month nationwide food safety campaign in late 2007 failed to prevent the milk scandal.

(NYT)

China's Red Cross funds NGOs

BEIJING, March 7 - China's Red Cross for the first time disbursed money to non-governmental organisations after a major 2008 earthquake, making a successful departure from solely state-sponsored action, a top official said in a rare interview.

Individuals, corporations and overseas chapters donated 19.05 billion yuan ($2.79 billion) to the Red Cross Society of China to help rebuild after the May 12 earthquake killed more than 80,000 people and left at least 5 million homeless in Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi provinces.

The Red Cross in turn disbursed 20 million yuan to non-government organisations in an unprecedented recognition that government alone could not solve all of society's problems.

"It was a real change for us. Before, we tried to do everything ourselves, but we didn't have enough people," executive vice president Jiang Yiman told Reuters in an interview at China's annual legislative meeting.

"Besides, we are founded on the volunteer principle and we need to leverage that in society."

The earthquake that shook China galvanized civil society, as volunteers rushed to bring food and water and dig out victims, while common people opened their wallets like never before.

The central government moved to restore control after the quake, limiting volunteers' access to the disaster zone and mandating that all donations had to go through the Red Cross Society of China and other approved organisations.

By November, however, the tide had reversed again. The Red Cross disbursed money for specific projects to private foundations and groups that had proven their worth in Sichuan.

"The results have been very good," Jiang said.

TRANSPARENCY

The need to assure Chinese citizens that their money was well used drove the Red Cross to publish the donations it received, followed by a second report on where donations of goods had gone.

A final report, due out before the first anniversary of the earthquake, will detail where the money has been spent. That could help answer Chinese citizens' concerns about transparency, and aid organisations' questions about how money is disbursed.

The Red Cross Society of China collected about a quarter of the 76 billion yuan in donations for earthquake relief.

The majority, or about 11 billion yuan, is managed by local chapters that are working with local governments on rebuilding a particular area. China has paired each quake-hit city or county with a province that is responsible for its reconstruction.

The national Red Cross received 7.9 billion yuan in earthquake funds, about one-third of which came from Red Cross chapters overseas, in Taiwan or in Hong Kong.

It has disbursed about 4 billion yuan to rebuild homes, rural schools and clinics, Jiang said. The Red Cross also helped supply tents, quilts and food in the immediate aftermath.

Jiang could not give a figure for how much the local chapters have disbursed.

The National Audit Office, which was recruited to ensure propriety in earthquake relief, said on Dec. 31 that the Red Cross "seriously reformed disaster relief funds and materials management based on the audit recommendations," and called the overall situation "generally good."

Nine months later, the Red Cross thinks it could be better prepared for future disasters by improving contingency plans, building better emergency stockpiles and improving rescue skills and expertise among its volunteers.

"We discovered that the international assistance included equipment and skills that we just didn't have," Jiang said.

"Also, we need to be better able to handle such a huge inflow of money. Right now it's all done by hand. As each donation comes in we write the receipt by hand."

The organisation's ranks of registered volunteers have nearly doubled since the earthquake, to 1.13 million.

"We hope that after this, the government will give greater recognition to civic organisations," Jiang said.

(Reuters)

Beijing moves to stifle reform calls

The Chinese government is moving to crush a group of prominent dissidents and intellectuals that has released a rallying call for democracy, human rights and rule of law.

The group of about 300 writers, peasant farmers, students, professors, journalists, economists, and political activists from across the country all signed a document, known as Charter 08, that provides a detailed and wide-ranging blueprint for peaceful political, legal and economic reform in China.

Since then, nearly 7,000 Chinese and foreign intellectuals inside and outside the country have signed Charter 08, which warns of “the possibility of a violent conflict of disastrous proportions” if Beijing does not quickly move to reform the one-party authoritarian state.

Chinese intellectuals and dissidents are calling the document the most significant of its kind for at least a decade and possibly since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Its name is a reference to Charter 77, the 1977 call for human rights issued by dissidents in former Czechoslovakia.

It has provoked increasing concern among China’s leaders. Since it began circulating one of the organisers has been detained without charge and friends and relatives had no word of his whereabouts until Friday.

At least 70 of the Charter’s 303 original signatories have been summoned or interrogated by police and China’s powerful Central Propaganda Department has warned all domestic media not to interview or carry articles by anyone who signs the charter.

The interrogations gathered momentum this week and all those called in have been ordered to retract their support for the Charter. The government appears to be concerned by the heady language and the prominence of many of the signatories, who include mid-level government officials and Communist party academics.

The charter was made public through the internet on December 10 to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and comes on the eve of the 20th anniversary, on June 4, of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which it explicitly mentions.

Senior officials have shown increasing public concern over the potential for unrest as a result of lay-offs and crumbling growth. The charter could serve as a rallying call for up to 1.5m unemployed recent graduates.

Liu Xiaobo, a prominent literary critic, dissident and apparently one of the organisers of Charter 08, was detained by state security officers on December 8.

After nearly a month without word of his whereabouts and no formal charges, Mr Liu’s wife was allowed to meet him on the outskirts of Beijing on Friday and was told he was being held under house arrest at an undisclosed location, according to rights groups.

His detention appears to be a violation of China’s own criminal law, which states that a suspect subjected to “residential surveillance” must be held in their own home, say to rights activists.

(FT)

Parents of Schoolchildren Killed in China Quake Confirm Lawsuit

DEYANG, China — A group of parents whose children were among the 127 killed in the collapse of an elementary school during the May earthquake that devastated western China have confirmed that they filed a lawsuit against government officials and a construction contractor. The lawsuit is the first filed by grieving and angry parents who say shoddy construction cost the children their lives.

Radio Free Asia reported the lawsuit in early December, but China’s official news media have not mentioned it. This weekend, the parents confirmed the filing in telephone interviews. They said the court has yet to tell them whether it will hear the case.

The lawsuit was filed on Dec. 1 in a court here in the city of Deyang, in Sichuan Province, the region hit hardest by the May 12 earthquake, which left 88,000 people dead or missing. Up to 10,000 schoolchildren were killed as some 7,000 classrooms and dormitory rooms collapsed across the quake zone, according to government estimates.

In the following weeks, parents took to the streets in towns across Sichuan to demand that local officials investigate the construction of the schools.

In some cases, crying parents were taken away by riot police officers. Later in the summer, local governments promised compensation payments to parents if they signed agreements stating they would no longer demand investigations or complain about school construction.

The parents who filed the lawsuit on Dec. 1 are the fathers and mothers of children who died in the collapse of No. 2 Primary School in the town of Fuxin, where at least 127 students were killed. Many of the parents signed the compensation agreements, but some decided in the fall to go ahead with the lawsuit. The lawsuit names as defendants the town government of Fuxin; the education department of the nearby city of Mianzhu; the school principal; and the company that built the school.

Chen Xuefang, one of the plaintiffs, said that the parents were demanding compensation equivalent to $19,000 per child. Over the summer, the local government had offered parents the equivalent of $8,800 in cash and several thousand more dollars in post-retirement pension payments if they agreed to drop the issue of the collapsed schools.

Zheng Rongqiong, whose 10-year-old daughter was among those killed at Fuxin No. 2, said that parents of 57 children were taking part in the lawsuit.

Officials from the city of Deyang, which oversees the administration of Mianzhu, have been pressing the parents to drop the lawsuit, she said, but the parents have refused.

Some parents have declined to join the lawsuit because they believe there is little or no chance of winning, and money spent on lawyers will be wasted, said Ms. Zheng, 35. The plaintiffs have contributed nearly $150 each to help pay for the travel expenses of a lawyer from Shanghai who has agreed to represent them.

Over the summer, many and possibly all of the parents now involved in the lawsuit signed the local government’s agreement demanding silence in exchange for compensation payments, Ms. Zheng said. At the time, some parents expressed dissatisfaction with the outcome and said they might file a formal petition with the central government in Beijing despite having signed the agreement.

“We hope that once we win this lawsuit, it will point out all the people responsible for the deaths of our children,” Ms. Zheng said.

An official at the Mianzhu Education Department said Monday that he was aware of the lawsuit, but declined to discuss it over the telephone. A woman at the offices of the town government of Fuxin said by telephone that she had no immediate response to the suit.

In legal cases that involve politically sensitive issues, judges and lawyers in China often come under great pressure from government officials to keep the cases from going forward.

One parent said a court official met with several parents on Dec. 8 to say that the court would not accept the case. But the court has yet to give a formal answer.

In similar legal action, parents in three provinces filed lawsuits this fall against dairy companies after tens of thousands of children across China fell ill and at least four died from drinking milk and baby formula tainted with a toxic chemical called melamine. Local officials had been involved in covering up the poisonings, and judges have so far declined to hear any lawsuits.

After the earthquake, the central government assigned a committee of experts to look into the school collapses, but the committee has yet to issue a final report. In September, an official from the committee, Ma Zongjin, said at a news conference in Beijing that a rush to build schools during the Chinese economic boom might have led to shoddy construction that resulted in the student deaths. He said more than 1,000 schools had one of two major flaws — they were built on the earthquake fault line or they were poorly constructed.

Government officials at all levels have tried to suppress discussion of the school collapses. A documentary that asks tough questions about a school collapse in the rural town of Muyu, in northern Sichuan, has attracted intense scrutiny from the central government.

The director, Pan Jianlin, showed the film, “Who Killed Our Children?” at the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea in late October. Afterward, he told Reuters, people contacted his relatives and friends to urge that they press him to stop his work.

(New York Times)