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Did Chinese secret police murder a German Christian?
Questions are being raised concerning the death of twenty-four-year-old Bernhard Wilden in China in December 2006, which was ruled a suicide at the time. A German newspaper is now suggesting that the visiting student was murdered by Chinese secret police over his association with an unauthorised house church.
Days before his death, the young man phoned his parents and sent an e-mail saying that he felt “threatened” and was being “monitored by Chinese secret police”. He also said he wanted to come home.
It [Welt am Sonntag “World on Sunday”] quoted his parents, Regina and Gerhard Wilden, as saying they doubt he committed suicide as suggested by Chinese police investigators. Officials said at the time that Bernhard, who studied Sinology, or 'Chinese Studies', died because he jumped from a fire staircase of a high building in Haidian, Beijing's main student district.
. . .
His parents described their son as someone for whom "suicide was unthinkable because of his faith" in Christ. "Our son was a balanced person with excellent study results," they told Welt am Sonntag. They said he was apparently killed because of his close ties with an underground Chinese house church, which was not recognized by authorities. Gerhard Wilden claimed he only found out about his son's church activities last month during a visit to China to investigate Bernhard's death.
His investigation turned up contradictions and implausibilities in the official finding of suicide.
China has recently stepped up persecution and intimidation of Christians in advance of the upcoming Olympic Games.
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Christian refugee quizzed about biblical “parabolas”
Canadian Immigration officials did not believe Chinese refugee Pin Xian Xin was a Christian because she was confused by questions about biblical “parabolas”.
"What is your favourite parabola?" Ms. Xin was asked by Ms. [Lily] Oddie, the IRB [Immigration Review Board] adjudicator, according to the certified transcript of her refugee admission hearing."I beg your pardon?" Ms. Xin replied, through a Cantonese interpreter.
"What is your favourite parabola?" Ms. Oddie repeated. "There are parabolas in the Bible. Have you read about them?"
For that reason, Ms Oddie ordered her returned to China despite credible fears of persecution. Fortunately, a federal appeals court judge, who knows the difference between “parabola” and “parable”, sided with Ms Xin.
"I find the board's reasons for finding that the applicant was not credible and concluding that she had not been a member of the underground church nor was a Christian to be patently unreasonable," Judge [Leonard] Mandamin wrote in his recent decision.
The IRB adjudicator’s lack of knowledge about Christianity is laughable; however, it also endangered the welfare of an apparently legitimate claimant.
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China’s emissions expected to rise over 10% per year
An in-depth investigation by two University of California researchers using province-level data has found that China’s CO2 emissions increased dramatically in the past five years, and are projected to grow by between 11.05% and 13.19% annually through 2010.
What does this mean? I hope you are sitting down because you won’t believe this.
In 2006 China’s carbon dioxide emissions contained about 1.70 gigatons of carbon (GtC) (source). By 2010, at the growth rates projected by these researchers the annual emissions from China will be between 2.6 and 2.8 GtC. The growth in China's emissions from 2006-2010 is equivalent to adding the 2004 emissions of Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia to China's 2006 total (source). The emissions growth in China at these rates is like adding another Germany every year, or a UK and Australia together, to global emissions.
The study projects that the increase in China’s CO2 emissions between 2006 and 2010 will match the total 2004 emissions of Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and Japan combined.
h/t: Greenie Watch
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More dangerously defective Chinese products recalled
In the past few months, safety concerns have prompted recalls of many Chinese-made products, including pet food, toothpaste, tires, and Mattel toys. Today Starbucks issued a recall of 167,000 Chinese-made coffee mugs because the handles can break off when the mug is full of hot liquid.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said Starbucks has received 23 reports of the handles detaching, including nine that resulted in minor burns.
The recalled mugs are 14-ounce Fusion Coffee Mugs with a ”Starbucks Coffee” stamp on them. They were sold at Starbucks stores nationwide from February 2007 through November 2007 for about $11.
The Fusion mugs (at right) were sold in the US and Canada.
In October, Starbucks recalled 250,000 Chinese-made children’s plastic cups because of choking and laceration hazards.
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Yahoo agrees to pay families of Chinese dissidents
Only days after Yahoo executives were excoriated by members of Congress for moral corruption, the internet services company has settled a lawsuit with families of imprisoned Chinese dissidents. The families charged Yahoo with helping the Chinese government identify and apprehend the pro-democracy activists.
The announcement came a week after lawmakers called Yahoo executives moral "pygmies" for not assisting the families of Chinese prisoners Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning. Both men were sentenced to 10-year terms for crimes against the state after Yahoo handed over their e-mail records to Chinese officials. Their families sued Yahoo in April in U.S. federal court."The pressures by Congress on (Yahoo chief executive) Jerry Yang were of tremendous importance to making this settlement happen," said Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, which is representing the families. He said a recent court decision requiring Yahoo to disclose proprietary information about its operations in China likely also sped up the process, as did Yahoo's interest in being seen as a company that promotes human rights.
Yahoo did not disclose the terms of the settlement, nor did it not admit any fault, even though Mr Yang apologised to the families at last week’s hearing.
The tongue-lashing from Congressional representatives was an enormous public-relations disaster for Yahoo.
h/t: Macworld UK
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China: Our economic growth is more important than Kyoto
Chinese president Hu Jintao has told the Communist Party National Congress that he wants to double per capita income by 2020, and he’ll burn as much as coal as necessary to make that happen. Bye-bye, Kyoto.
The president needs more copper, iron ore, zinc and natural gas. Above all, he needs more coal to keep the power stations humming nicely and more oil for Chinese cars and lorries. China accounts for more than a third of world demand for coal and the price in Australia soared this year as the People’s Republic switched from being an exporter to being an importer. If Mr Hu had a message for the world in his address to the Communist Party National Congress, it was this: we will burn our coal and, if we have to, we will burn yours, too.What does this mean? Put bluntly, it means that the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gas emissions is dead and so is any prospect of persuading Beijing to bind itself to other curbs on carbon emissions. We can stop kidding ourselves that China will sign up to any green thingy that hinders his party’s ten-year plan to get rich quick.
Economic growth in China is already putting upward pressure on resource prices. Coal has doubled to $100 per tonne in Europe. To ensure continued supplies of energy, Western countries need to step up investments in oil and gas extraction and expand nuclear power production. "Alternative" energy technologies will not do the job.
h/t: Global Warming Politics: A Hot Topic Blog
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Most Canadians have unfavourable view of Chinese products
A poll conducted last week indicates that three of every four Canadians have an unfavourable opinion of Chinese-made goods. 35% have a "somewhat unfavourable" view, while 40% hold a "very unfavourable" view.
From Aug. 23-27, the Innovative Research Group polled 1,704 Canadians across the country for Embassy, with 75 per cent saying they had an unfavourable impression of Chinese-made products. Only six per cent said they had a favourable view, while 17 per cent were neutral. The results are accurate to within 2.4 per cent, 19 times out of 20.
Over the past few months, Canadian consumers have seen a variety of Chinese-made products, including toothpaste, pet food and tires, recalled over safety concerns. The most recent recall involved 18.2 million Mattel toys—including more than 900,000 in Canada—that had magnets that could fall off and become ingested by children, or contained paint with unacceptable levels of lead.
A “counsellor” at the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa, Sun Lushan, answered questions about the implications of the survey.
The counsellor said his government has instigated a number of measures to ensure safety problems are eliminated.
. . .
"The Chinese government has attached great importance to product safety and food safety," Mr. Sun said.
Right! That’s why China exported poisoned pet food and contaminated toothpaste.
It gets worse: He comes out with the “it’s-your-own-fault” defence that China pitched earlier.
However, the diplomat said the countries importing the products, and especially the companies that design and sell the goods, bear responsibility for ensuring product safety and that standards are being met. He said Chinese manufacturers are simply following orders from the large companies like Mattel.
Is he really claiming Mattel ordered Chinese companies to manufacture toys with small parts that could break off and choke children?
Mr Sun also said that he doesn’t think the image of China’s products will be damaged by recent scandals. According to this new poll, it already has—big-time.
This seems like an appropriate spot to re-run Steve Janke’s no-China graphic.
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Microsoft, Yahoo support Chinese oppression “self-discipline”
Yahoo and Microsoft-owned MSN are co-operating with new efforts to restrain online speech in China. The two internet multinationals have agreed to sign the Chinese government’s "Public Pledge of Self-Regulation and Professional Ethics for China Internet Industry", a "self-regulation" agreement that calls for storing information on users and deleting "illegal or bad messages".
[Yahoo and MSN] have to conform to strict Chinese laws controlling freedom of speech, which include employing their own “monitors” to carry out government censorship orders and committing to remove any web pages that are considered politically sensitive.
In addition, along with domestic firms they have now both had to sign up to a new government code on blogging, which both companies admitted in statements without giving further details.
Information obtained on users must be stored in case the authorities should seek to obtain it – as they did with Shi Tao, a journalist jailed for ten years two years ago for sending information to a human rights group by email after his details were passed on to police by Yahoo.
Only ten days ago, a Chinese court jailed dissident writer Chen Shuqing for four years on charges of subversion for his online postings. It is supremely—and tragically—ironic that the source of that last tidbit is Yahoo News.
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China: Third-largest Christian country in the world
According to the World Christian Database, China has 111 million Christians, about 90% of them Protestant, mostly Pentecostal—more than the 75 million that belong to the Communist Party. That would give China the world’s third highest number of Christians, behind only the United States and Brazil.
The Center projects that by 2050, there will be 218 million Christians in China, 16 percent of the population, enough to make China the world's second-largest Christian nation. According to the Center, there are 10,000 conversions in China every day.
If current growth trends continue, China could become the world’s largest Christian country well before the end of this century.
The growth of Christianity in China is even more remarkable in view of state discouragement and frequent persecution of religious activity. Foreign missionaries were expelled after Mao Zedong led the Communists to power in 1949, so virtually all Christian growth is attributable to home-grown evangelism.
Asia Times columnist Spengler thinks that East Asian Christianity could overwhelm even Islam.
China may be for the 21st century what Europe was during the 8th-11th centuries, and America has been during the past 200 years: the natural ground for mass evangelization. If this occurs, the world will change beyond our capacity to recognize it. Islam might defeat the western Europeans, simply by replacing their diminishing numbers with immigrants, but it will crumble beneath the challenge from the East.
In the meantime, official persecution remains a constant threat for China’s Christians. A recent instance: The military raided a house church in Xinjiang province, north-western China, detained several believers and their relatives, and confiscated Bibles and other religious materials. China Aid has obtained a government document that holds families responsible for trying to “reform” Christian relatives and ensuring that they do not engage in religious activities or meet with other believers.
The document issued by agencies under Division 49 of 3rd Agricultural Division of Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps holding relatives of Christians responsible if these Christians are found to be in a gathering, sharing Gospel materials, Bible studies, or other activities. According to this document, the relatives of Christians have the obligation to help the Christians reform; they must always be watchful of the activities of the Christians; they must make sure these Christians don’t meet in a gathering and prevent them from establishing ties with each, sharing Christian literature, and materials, etc.
Employed family members who fail to fulfill those duties can be suspended from their jobs so they have more time to “educate their relatives until they become good citizens again”.
h/t for Asia Times link: Transfigurations
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China harvests organs from executed prisoners
Wealthy patients from Canada and other countries travel to China to receive transplants of organs taken from executed prison inmates. McGill University bioethics professor Leigh Turner rejects China’s claim that prisoners voluntarily donate their organs.
Chinese transplant physicians are estimated to have performed more than 60,000 organ transplants. These transplants were performed in a country with no legislation establishing brain-death criteria for determination of death, no organized national system of organ donation by informed, consenting donors, and widespread cultural and religious norms that make the concept of organ donation alien to many individuals.The canard that prisoners in China provide informed, voluntary consent to organ donation must be dismissed. Imprisoned individuals can easily be intimidated with violence or hints of repercussions for family members, or reassured with false promises. Physicians, police officers, prison officials and prisoners who have left China dismiss the claim that informed consent is sought from prisoners. Huang Peng, a former prison official at Shenyang No. 2 Prison in the province of Liaoning, says: "There is no family willing to have their loved ones' organs taken. And there is no such thing as a prisoner who volunteers."
At least a dozen agencies that market transplant operations in China promise international customers that organs will become available within days or weeks of ordering. This creates a huge incentive for premature, if not illegal, execution of prisoners. It has also given rise to the unpleasant phenomenon of “transplant tourism”.
Prof Turner has a good question: Given that the World Medical Association condemns China’s policy of harvesting organs from executed prisoners, why is the Chinese Medical Association permitted to remain a member of the WMA?
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UPDATE (19 Jul.): A commenter speaking on behalf of the WMA says that discussions between the WMA and the Chinese Medical Association on this issue are ongoing.
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Mao’s revolution reduced to a marketing exercise
Ever since Mao Zedong conquered China in 1949, the Communist government has followed a brutally hard line against pro-democracy dissidents. In a new twist, the regime has begun executing state functionaries who jeopardise the nation’s foreign exchange earnings. Bureaucrats are now expected to be good capitalists.
Zheng Xiaoyu was put to death the other day not only for multitudinous sins but also to reassure foreign markets that China's manufacturing industry will no longer mindlessly poison some of its customers. With Zheng's execution, Mao Zedong's revolution has reached the stage of becoming a focused exercise in marketing — skillfully gathering profits abroad to make the party rich and powerful at home.
At one time, Maoism was dedicated to abolishing the decadent capitalist institution of money. Now bureaucrats who stand in the way of the state’s pursuit of cash are unceremoniously dispatched.
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