中国时报/大陆领导人随扈驱赶媒体的粗鲁作为，台湾媒体已经有多次经验，而同样的戏码，昨天更出现在大陆国家主席糊绵踌会见墨西哥总统卡德隆的场合。当着卡德隆的面，糊绵踌随扈一样强势驱赶媒体，粗鲁拉扯之间，墨西哥记者高声抗议，甚至造成一名墨国记者嘴唇受伤。
随着奥运保安措施的逐步升级，负责中国国家领导人安全维护的中央警卫局，近来对国家领导人的保护措施与近身防卫行动愈趋严密，糊绵踌与主管宣传中共政治局常委李伥蝽的贴身随扈，近日即相继传出曾粗鲁地对待境外媒体记者的争议事件。
粗鲁对待境外记者争议频传
据《法新社》引述目击者的说法，中国国家主席糊绵踌十一日在会见墨西哥总统卡德隆后不久，由于中央警卫局的随扈要求随团採访的约廿名墨国记者离开会场，双方出现争吵，结果当着卡德隆的面，糊绵踌的随扈便粗鲁地将墨国记者强行推出会场。
目击者告诉《法新社》说，在糊绵踌与卡德隆会面后不久，现场的警卫局人员即要求记者离开，但事前并未被告知必须在双方进入正式会谈后离场的墨西哥记者，当场拒绝，导致双方出现争执，并干扰到两国元首的会面气氛。
目击者并说：「在卡德隆总统面前，墨国记者开始提高声调」。在被警卫粗鲁推出会场后，一名墨国记者说，他的嘴唇被中方警卫人员打伤了。这样的行为，在外交上是非常失礼的。据墨国记者指称，墨国总统新闻办公室事前告知，媒体记者可以採访这场会面活动。
中央警卫局因担任国家领导人的安全维护，执行勤务向来强势，即使是两国元首会面的外交场合，警卫对近身採访国家领导人的境外记者，警戒特别「敏感」。十日在北京国际新闻中心，也曾上演警卫粗鲁对待记者的相同戏码。
主管中共文宣业务的政治局常委李伥蝽十日考察北京国际新闻中心时，李伥蝽虽主动和港台记者寒暄，并对台湾媒体记者预祝台湾运动员在奥运会多拿奖牌，但李长春的随扈硬是将记者强势隔离，不让记者与李伥蝽接近。
据目击者说，李伥蝽不仅主动和记者寒暄，还问及採访奥运会的情况，并表示会提供採访便利。见他准备要讲话，记者群立即近身递出麦克风，但遭到警卫粗鲁的拉扯与推离，现场顿时陷入溷乱，还有多名记者遭到警卫粗暴对待。
2008年7月11日 星期五
糊绵踌随扈动粗墨记者受伤
Digital China: Ten Things Worth Knowing about the Chinese Internet
Posted July 7, 2008 06:19 PM (EST)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-wasserstrom-and-kate-merkelhess/digital-china-ten-things_b_111302.html
Thanks largely to the Olympics, 2008 will go down in history as a turning point year for China -- or, rather, one when the country passed several milestones. It'll be remembered as a turning point year in Chinese sports history, due to the country getting its first chance to host the Games, and the history of Beijing's redevelopment, due to all of that has been torn down and built up to ready the city to play host. 2008 will go down as a turning point year in the history of cross-strait relations as well, thanks to the resumption today, after over half-a-century, of regularly scheduled Taiwan-mainland flights. Here, though, we focus on still another thing that 2008 is likely to be remembered as: a turning point year for the Chinese Internet.
Consider how many Internet-related developments have already taken place. In January, YouTube videos helped publicize Shanghai protests against extensions of a high-speed train line. In February, China replaced America as the country with the most Internet users. In March and April, bloggers and hackers made headlines, as the furor over the Tibet riots and the roughing up of a Chinese torchbearer in Paris played out in cyberspace as well as on the ground. In May, Wen Jiabao became China's first leader with a Facebook page. In June, Hu Jintao became China's first leader to respond to questions online.
And throughout 2008, news and views about the Olympics have shown up on the Chinese Internet, thanks to everything from the official Beijing Games website that features non-stop promotion of and updates about the event, to a flurry of unofficial postings, such as ones by angry netizens who complained right after the May earthquake government television was still showing triumphant images of the torch relay when the time had come to focus on the suffering of the people of Sichuan.
By now, in the wake of these and other digital events, news-savvy Americans all know the Internet has become an important force in Chinese life -- but not necessarily what kind of force. Here are ten things to keep in mind whenever the Chinese Internet makes headlines.
1. Optimists have long forecast -- inaccurately -- that the Internet will swiftly transform China into a completely open society.
Among others, George Will, Thomas Friedman, and Bill Clinton all predicted around the millennium's turn that the arrival of the Internet would inevitably and swiftly set China free. This hasn't happened. China's still run by a Communist Party that takes harsh measures against organizations that threaten its hold on power.
2. Pessimists continue to suggest -- also inaccurately -- that Chinese political life hasn't really changed and cannot be said to have changed until the Communist Party falls. This ignores shifts in which the Internet has figured centrally.
China's leaders may not have to stand for re-election and certainly limit some forms of dissent, but the Chinese public sphere has become a more freewheeling, interesting and chaotic arena for expressions of opinion than it was. This isn't all due to the Internet (crusading print journalists and activists have also done their part), but bloggers calling attention to official corruption or mocking government policies have definitely helped alter the political landscape. It's misleading to suggest -- as the New Republic does in its latest special issue, "Meet the New China (Same as the Old One)" --that the realm of Chinese politics has remained static.
3. It's misleading to imagine that the only Chinese Internet activity that matters politically involves "dissidents" and collective acts of protest.
Often, the politically significant things happening online involve forms of communication, such as efforts to call attention to corrupt acts by local officials, that dovetail with policies that are promoted or at least given lip service by the central authorities. In many cases, these take the form of satirical discussions, which only gradually move toward anything like a "dissident" position. A recent illustration involved reports that pigs raised to be eaten by Olympic competitors are fed a special organic diet to ensure that pork-consuming athletes won't get so full of chemicals they'll fail drug tests. This led to a flurry of Internet postings about the health risks ordinary Chinese face when eating "normal" pigs. First one and then scores of bloggers connected the dots between the regime's attentiveness to the well being of athletes and seeming lack of concern for other groups, like miners. (There are scores of coal mining accidents each year, only some of which are officially acknowledged.) Many corners of the Chinese blogosphere were suddenly plastered with variations on the line: "I'd rather be an Olympic pig than a man in a coal mine!"
4. The political uses of the Chinese Internet that draw attention here and in China often differ.
Take, for example, Zeng Jingyan, wife of AIDS activist Hu Jia. After blogging about her experiences trying to free Hu from detention, she and her husband made Time's list of the 100 most influential people. But her actions haven't gained the kind of traction in her own country as, say, the Olympic pig stories did.
5. A lot of what happens on the Chinese Internet isn't political.
Increasingly, Chinese Internet usage reflects the broad range of online activities happening in the US, Europe, Japan, and other wired countries. Most Chinese Internet cafes are packed with students playing online video games, not checking out political websites. Online chat rooms are packed. Online commerce is growing rapidly. Online stock trading has taken off. And after the Sichuan earthquake, Chinese donated millions of dollars online.
6. Though the Internet is thought of as an "international space," postings on it can be intensely patriotic, even jingoistic (in China and elsewhere).
Early Internet pioneers opined that the Internet would increasingly make national boundaries and identities irrelevant, especially among the wired young. But Chinese netizens can be nationalistic as well as cosmopolitan. In the spring, after the Tibet and Paris incident, for example, fenqing ("angry youths") took to the net , creating YouTube videos and blog posts that denigrated Tibetan rioters and railed against the French.
7. Self-styled patriotic postings can make the government uneasy.
Unrestrained nationalism has often been a problem for the Chinese government. So officials are understandably wary when young people start to toss about nationalist slogans on the Internet and sometimes act quickly to rein things in. For instance, in April 2005, when anti-Japanese protests broke out across China in response to debates over the content of Japanese history textbooks (and their portrayal of World War II events), internet censors quickly added the word "demonstration" to their list of banned words at QQ, China's most popular internet messaging service. This spring, the government initially allowed anti-French sentiment to build, but soon was moving to tamp it down as online activists began calling for boycotts of international companies whose investment money Beijng has courted.
8. Censorship is more complex than just "Big Brother" blocking sites or the "Great Firewall of China" keeping things out.
While Chinese Internet censorship is widespread, it's not a single unified system. There is some meta-level screening of taboo words and images (like the Dalai Lama's name and face), but the "firewall" is actually a series of blocks -- some at the national level, some at the local level. Universities, schools, and companies monitor and screen Internet traffic, as do Internet service providers and even individual websites. At the Chinese news blog Danwei, they've coined the catchy phrase "Net Nanny" to better reflect the Chinese government efforts to prevent its citizens from being exposed to the wrong kinds of things. Some observers, like Rebecca MacKinnon, have noted the playful language games netizens use to circumvent the filters, but other discussions simply never take place, due not just to ham-handed interference but also self-censorship.
9. China isn't always just following trends when it comes to Internet usage, as it sometimes set them.
This is true of software and technology developments for Internet censorship. It's also true of some creative areas. For instance, before the final installment of Harry Potter's adventures hit bookshelves last year, Chinese fans were able to read multiple versions online -- written by Chinese authors riffing on J.K. Rowling's popular series -- as well as several unauthorized translations of the real deal. Another example is that books made up of posting from popular blogs began making regular appearances on Chinese bestseller lists back in 2006 when these were still very rarely published in the West.
10. You don't have to read Chinese to know what Chinese bloggers are saying.
You can go to "Blog for China," a site started by a group of American-based Chinese students during the recent firestorm over alleged Western bias in media coverage of China, Or visit sites like China Digital Times, Danwei, EastSouthWestNorth, Shanghaiist, and RConversation, all of which regularly translate posts from and track development relating to the Chinese Internet. We depend heavily on them in our work for "The China Beat: Blogging How the East is Read" a site launched by academics and freelance writers interested in Chinese affairs. And as anyone who has gone to the links we've provided above will know by now, we've relied upon them in creating this top ten list on the challenging, important topic of making sense of an increasingly wired and ever-changing China.
"Made in China" proves false economy for some
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/07/11/europe/OUKWD-UK-GERMANY-CHINA-MANUFACTURERS.php?page=1
By Sylvia Westall Reuters
Published: July 11, 2008
GIENGEN AN DER BRENZ, Germany: Wafts of golden fluff whirl in the air as Irene Basan wedges a bundle of material onto a spike and gently turns it inside-out, right ear, left ear, then a snout, to reveal a Steiff teddy bear head.
She has been hand-making Steiff toys for 18 years in Giengen, the tiny south German town where the maker of collectible teddy bears -- some worth hundreds of thousands of euros -- was founded over 125 years ago.
Chasing lower costs, Steiff outsourced around a fifth of its production to China in 2003 but has now decided to come back because of concerns about quality and staff turnover.
Steiff is one of a small number of German firms which are swimming against the tide and leaving China, despite its cheaper workforce and a burgeoning consumer population. With fuel at record highs, some cite mounting transport costs.
Production of Steiff toys, which include a distinctive long-limbed bear with a melancholy growl, will come back to Germany and other countries in Europe by the end of 2009.
"A Steiff animal has to look cute, it has to look at you and say, 'take me in your arms and hug me, I'm here for you, I'm your friend,'" Steiff Managing Director Martin Frechen told Reuters.
"If the symmetry is off and if it looks like it's been run over by a car, it's not what we want. People don't pay for that."
Consisting of around 35 parts and with an average price of 40 to 70 euros (32 - 56 pounds), the toys take up to a year to learn to make and around 80 percent of the work is done by hand.
But with twisted legs, bald patches and open seams, a "cumbersome" number of the Steiff toys made in China had to be rejected, Frechen said, because high staff turnover in a fast-growing economy meant workers did not have long enough to train.
"We don't really fit in over there," he said, pointing out that Steiff's typical orders of around 500 lots were also too small to reap good cost savings in factories more accustomed to mass production.
QUALITY CONTROL
Germany has been the world's largest exporter of goods since 2003, but China has been snapping at its heels for the top spot -- even though Chinese manufacturing was cast in a poor light last year after U.S. toymaker Mattel had to recall over 20 million Chinese-made toys, costing it around $110 million (56 million pounds).
The world's leading toymaker, which produces over half its products in China, has since stood by its Chinese partners and ramped up quality checks.
But for smaller companies, such quality control is difficult to implement, said Harald Kayser, head of the China Business Group at auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
"If you don't have people from your own head office in China then it is very difficult to manage the process," he said. "Smaller companies have more problems in this area."
A PwC study shows that companies can save up to 50 percent making their goods in China instead of Germany, but that firms often underestimate logistics costs.
Around a third of companies actually incurred losses by moving production east, the study showed.
German trampoline maker Bellicon, with an annual turnover of 2 million euros, also says it regretted moving some production to China and has now brought it home.
"We had to do so much extra follow-up work in Germany, such as dealing with customer returns, that when we calculated it we had barely saved anything," said manager Heiko Schmauck.
He said the company had frequently visited its Chinese partner to try to build up a good relationship. However, once during a six-month gap between visits almost the entire workforce at one factory had changed.
"It was no surprise the quality varied so much. New people came, the quality dropped, then they improved their skills and left," he said, adding that the Chinese-made trampoline parts did not reach high enough endurance standards.
Companies fail to take account of total cost of business in China, including training, time delays and monitoring of production systems, said Paul Midler, president of business consultants China Advantage.
"For every foreign company that is honest with itself and admits that manufacturing in China comes with a higher cost, there are countless others that will fool themselves into thinking that they can manage it with fewer resources than it actually requires," he said.
He said Chinese manufacturing has advantages such as speed and the "clustering phenomenon" where companies at all stages of supply chain are based together, giving ready access to a network of sub-suppliers.
MADE IN GERMANY
But some companies say higher shipping and fuel costs mean producing goods in China no longer makes good business sense.
Global oil prices have doubled in the past year: a study by Jeff Rubin and Benjamin Tal of CIBC World Markets found that over the last three years, every $1 rise in world oil prices has fed directly into a 1 percent rise in transport costs.
German automation company Hirschmann said in a statement it moved back production of some its electrical components to Germany from China to cut down on the distance its goods travel, but added China still remains an important consumer market.
A study by the German engineers' association (VDI) shows one in five German firms returns to Germany after a brief foray abroad.
"This figure shows us that the 'Made in Germany' label remains a mark of quality," VDI President Bruno Braun said in a statement.
Analysts have queried the VDI figures and say there is little evidence to suggest companies are quitting China or other emerging market countries en masse for Germany.
The German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK), which surveyed 8,000 German firms, says only around 3-5 percent of companies come back to Germany each year and around a third have ambitions to grow in China.
"It is absolutely normal that some companies fail," said DIHK chief economist Volker Treier.
Given a lack of resources for proper research, companies sometimes have to "jump into cold water" and see if they can swim, he said. "For a small company with an emphasis on very high quality, it is very difficult."
He pointed to successes in the automotive sector, where production has been switched to China from Germany, allowing carmakers also to make inroads into China's home market of 1.3 billion potential consumers.
But he added there could be some evidence that Germany is becoming increasingly attractive as a production centre, for companies which are not driven by cost savings alone. From 2003-2007, the importance awarded to production cost savings by German companies in DIHK surveys fell.
"But we have to wait and see whether this 'new love' endures," he said.
(Additional reporting by Simon Rabinovitch in Beijing; Editing by Sara Ledwith)
NYTimes : Voice Seeking Answers for Parents About a School Collapse Is Silenced
Diego Azubel/European Pressphoto Agency
Relatives and loved ones of the children who died in a school
collapse after the May 12 earthquake staged a protest on June 1 in Mianzhu,
China.
Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
the police on May 25. There is no official death toll for students.
By JAKE HOOKER
Published: July 11, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/world/asia/11china.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
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.”
In the days after the earthquake, the authorities allowed reporters and volunteers to travel freely in the disaster zone. Some commentators even saw the dawning of a Chinese glasnost. In an interview with National Public Radio that aired in May, Mr. Huang said he believed that the human rights situation in China had greatly improved.
“He actually thought things were heading in the right direction,” said John Kamm, who is pressing for Mr. Huang’s release and is the executive director of the Dui Hua Foundation, which has helped free prominent Chinese political prisoners. “That’s one of the tragedies of his detention.”
A volunteer at the Tianwang center, Pu Fei, 27, was detained minutes after Mr. Huang. He said that the officers who interrogated him demanded that he hand over the password needed to post information on their Web site. They also wanted to know whom Mr. Huang had met and where he had gone in the disaster zone. Mr. Pu was detained in a hotel for two weeks and then released.
Mr. Pu and other volunteers said the authorities might have singled out Mr. Huang because he disseminated information about parents whose children had died in collapsed schools — a group whose protests began to snowball into something like a movement in early June.
There is no official figure on how many children died in schools during the powerful May 12 earthquake. Seven thousand schoolrooms collapsed, according to Chinese government estimates. Thousands of students may have died, if not more, leaving behind bereft parents looking for answers.
During the brief period of openness in late May and early June, parents marched with photos of their children and gathered at the wreckage of schools to hold memorial services. They held sit-ins outside government buildings. In one town, the top Communist Party leader got down on his knees and begged parents to stop a march, but they refused.
But with the Olympic Games in Beijing approaching, the issue increasingly looked like a time bomb for the authorities, and they scurried to defuse it. The Propaganda Department banned coverage of destroyed schools in the domestic press. Paramilitary police officers blocked foreign reporters from demonstrations. Activists who tried to gather and publish information about school construction were detained.
On June 2, The Sichuan Economic Daily published an article saying that substandard construction methods contributed to the deaths of 82 students at a middle school in Yinghua Township. Afterward, an editor at the paper said, two reporters and an editor who worked on that article were fired.
Two fathers of children killed in schools said in separate interviews that officials had told them public gatherings and petitioning the government were no longer permitted. Zeng Hongling, a local crusader who wrote three articles lashing out at the government’s earthquake response, was detained on suspicion of inciting subversion, according to the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, a group based in Hong Kong.
Mr. Huang, who was detained on June 10, has not yet been formally charged with any crime. But if he is convicted on the murky charge of holding state secrets, it will not be his first time being jailed for a political crime.
In 1998, he and his wife, Zeng Li, founded the Tianwang Center for Missing Persons, an organization that focused on cases of human trafficking. Its name later changed to Tianwang Human Rights Center as its mission expanded.
In 1999, she and Mr. Huang helped the police rescue seven girls who had been sold into prostitution. The case gained the Tianwang center favorable attention in the state-run news media.
Mr. Huang also exposed a racket through which thousands of migrant workers sent to work on ocean-going fishing boats had been forced to pay for mandatory appendectomies at a government-run clinic. He published an article on his Web site. His wife said that Mr. Huang’s report stepped on the toes of high-ranking local officials who profited from the arrangement.
Mr. Huang continued to post articles about other taboo topics.
In March 2000, he wrote about a practitioner of the banned spiritual group Falun Gong who was beaten to death in police custody. The Chengdu police shut down his Web site days later, so Mr. Huang moved its content to a server in the United States.
Later that year, he posted an account of a 15-year-old boy who was detained in Chengdu during the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing. The boy later died in police custody.
The police arrested Mr. Huang shortly thereafter. He was held for an extended period without trial, and he was ultimately convicted on charges of inciting subversion and was sentenced to five years in prison. Ms. Zeng, who has lived apart from Mr. Huang since 2006, said the experience changed him.
“When he came out, you could see scars on his head,” she said. “He became irritable, and he would forget things.”
To the surprise of some friends, Mr. Huang took up where he had left off when he got out of prison. He revived his dormant Web site, found citizen journalists throughout China to contribute articles and resumed his role as an activist. “He started helping petitioners — people who had been harmed, people whose homes has been demolished, people whose rights had been abused,” Ms. Zeng said.
State security agents watched him, Ms. Zeng said, but they did not interfere with his work.
Then the earthquake hit, and foreign reporters flooded the devastated towns. Mr. Huang knew the terrain of Sichuan well and did his best to help. He accepted interviews with the foreign press. He and his volunteers rented a truck and handed out bottled water, instant noodles and crackers to refugees. In June, he helped reporters from a British television channel contact parents whose children had been killed in schools destroyed by the earthquake. And he began acting as a clearinghouse of information for reporters.
Mr. Huang kept in touch with the five fathers whose children had died at Dongqi Middle School. They joined a group of experts to investigate the wreckage for clues as to why the building crumbled. Mr. Huang posted a short article on his Web site saying that, according to the experts, the school was structurally unsafe.
It was one of his last postings before his detention. Mr. Huang’s lawyers and family said that the Chengdu police have denied their requests to meet with him on the grounds that his case involves state secrets. Officers with the Wuhou District Public Security Bureau declined to comment, saying they were not authorized to speak with the media.
A conviction for the crime of possessing state secrets can carry up to three years in prison.
It is unclear whether the pressure to arrest him came from central authorities in Beijing or from local officials, who regarded his criticism of the collapsed schools as threatening. Mr. Pu said that some of the officers who interrogated him spoke with a northern Beijing accent, which is unusual in Sichuan, an area with a strong dialect.
Huang Qi, a human rights activist, was detained on June 10.
一切反动派都是纸老虎，一切独裁者都是周老虎
有一个国家叫伊朗，美帝国主义很讨厌的国家。
最近这个国家进行了一次导弹发射，
西亚轰隆一响，美国人就跟着肝颤。
伊朗Sepah News首发导弹发射照片，
蔚为壮观。
之后，法新社转载。
然后，美国各大媒体都头条报道这次导弹发射。
所以说，一切反动派都是周老虎纸老虎。
只要你吓唬他们一下，他们就害怕了。
But…
美国人第二天一觉醒来，
发现这张照片看着怎么这么散光呢？
哦，克隆的。
西方人虚惊一场。
一切反动派都是纸老虎，
一切独裁者都是周老虎。
所以说，各种老虎都不可怕，
老虎的屁股和乳房都随便摸。
英文好的同学请移步。
（沐头同学亦有贡献）