Stories and Commentaries

Nine Dragons Paper

Nine Dragons Paper has been listed in Hong Kong Stock market since 2006, its peak market value was worth of HKD$100 billions. The corporate has two factory campuses in China, one in Dongguan, Guangdong province, one in Taichang, Jiangsu province, with 9,000 and 6,000 workers respectively. It has planned to develop its third and fourth manufacturing campuses in Zongqing and Tianjin. The corporate is listed the top in China, the second in Asia and the eighth in the world in paper manufacturing. In 2006, the corporate chair Zhang Yin was listed the richest woman tycoon in China, she is also a member of National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). In the past few months, Zhang has been very high sounding in attacking the national policy for labour protection, she explicitly stated that “from a developmental perspective, a nation cannot be rich without the polarization between rich and poor”, “if the law over protects the labour, corporate cannot function”.

The Shijou Community (溪洲部落), located by the Hsindien River in Taipei County, is close by Bi-Tan (碧潭), a tourist attraction. Since the 1970s, aboriginal laborers have began to build simple shafts and lived on this high ground. Over time an aboriginal community was established, of Amis construction workers and miners from Hualien and Taitung.

The emergence of Shijou Community is the testimony of the structural problem of Taiwanese aboriginal people: becoming cheap and disposable labour as a result of land and economic exploitation. The lack of steady employment kept them from purchasing apartments, and forced them to make do with makeshift homes on riverside high grounds, even grow vegetables or raise animals to avoid dependence on markets and currency. Therefore, this kind of riverside communities can be seen all over Taiwan.

On Jan 28, protesters gathered round the CLA (Council of Labor Affairs); instead of angry unemployed laborers, they were brokers who have made bucks by "importing" migrant labors into Taiwan, protesting for their tarnished business by the "direct employment" policy implemented by the CLA.

"Direct employment" is a policy that labor NGOs have demanded for years. Taiwan has been using migrant workers for 18 years, for as long its society somehow has held discrimination against them, regarding them as highly replaceable workforces. Foreign labor policy is one of the major exploiters of the migrant workers.

(This article is written by Ip Iam-chong on April 6 published by Ming pao daily. Translated by Oiwan)

Watching the Olympic new on T.V, I laughed until tears came out.

The news about the Olympic torch is never ending. Details like whether our chief executive Donald Tsang’s arm is strong enough to hold the torch and run for 200km are reported in length. As for Hu Jia, who has been sentenced to 3.5 years imprisonment because of “sedition of the state power”, has been sidelined by piles of Olympic public relation news. The International Olympic Committee and T.V station want us to see a colourful Beijing, with grand spectacles. I looked at the smiling face of the news anchor, it looked like the Olympic symbols – Fu Wa.

written by S.Arutchelvan
Banting, 10 February 2008

It was a victory long over-due. The Corporate Giant - Lion Group could have sealed and resolved the issue a decade ago, but they choose the part of arrogance and sheer disregard to their toiling workers. The workers then took them to a protracted war which took 12 years to complete with the workers emerging victorious.

The victory parade started at a critical junction of this plantation. With drums and banners, they marched to the estate field, where a decorated stage was awaiting for the victory celebration to role on.

The darkest day

It is cold and dark, not only because of the weather but because of the crazy crack down of internet and massive arrest of netizens.

Hong Kong Police has gained the permit for moral patrolling in the Internet via a scandal which involved 4 prominent popular stars private photos on love making.

The photos were posted in an overseas forum and then linked to popular forums in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan. The story had made into the front page of local newspapers in Jan 29 and stirred the hottest debate in town about whether or not the photos are fake? Who else will appear? And how to control the Internet from further distribution?

On Dec. 8th, 1995, a sodium leak and fire at the Monju fast-breeder reactor in Fukui prefecture, Japan, threatened to spark an explosion which could have sent deadly plutonium into the local environment. The original incident and a subsequent attempted cover up by the operator in charge of Monju, the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC), left a lasting trace on the nuclear power industry in Japan.

On Friday of last week, a video (the so-called "2 o'clock video") taken the morning after the leak and fire -- and subsequently covered up by the PNC -- finally made its way onto YouTube (with subtitles at dotSUB), posted more than 12 years after the original incident by Japanese blogger tokyodo-2005. Described in a February 1996 New York Times article as "show[ing] men in silver space suits exploring the room in which sodium compounds hung from the air ducts like icicles", the raw video reveals the full extent of the leak in a way never before seen.

Decadence of an ideal

Since the nationwide lift of Martial Laws in 1987, the voices for reform that came from "outside the party" had surged in coalition for the establishment of the "Democratic Progressive Party." For quite some time, the DPP was not only a party demanding political democracy, it had also allied itself with numerous social movements, from whose support the party gradually thrived.

In the following years, the demand for openness and freedom of opinion was closely connected with the demand for Taiwan independence. In the last few years when KMT's Li Teng-Hui was president, he raised the issue of de jure independence in order to compete with the DPP. Since then, the DPP has alienated its ideals for democracy and social justice in social movements; instead, it opted for a radically nationalist as well as populist approach.

During the weekend, Hong Kong In-Media organized an off-line salon on “Noise amidst of the Politics of Harmony – bloggers who eat river crabs”. [和諧政治中的雜音--吃河蟹的博客們] (The Chinese pronunciation of river crab is similar to Harmony.) We have invited Beifeng from Guangzhou and Roland Soong for sharing their experiences in the Chinese blogosphere. Beifeng applied mobile SMS to report on the Xiamen Anti PX demonstration. Roland is a most awesome translator of Chinese internet discussion and a major news source for foreign reporters.

Time Race

Beifeng has a most systematic account of the censorship of traditional media and internet media. As the traditional media has a strong control in the editorial room, some of the news, such as mass incidents or social unrest would be banned from publishing, whereas in the internet BBS and blog, censorship only happens when the news or information sources have been published and taken effect in the public. Usually a nationwide censorship would only take place 2 to 3 days after the publication of the first post; netizens can use the time gap to disseminate information as wide as possible. The tactic is to write the story without spelling out the political implications and to wait for the politics to reveal itself in the dissemination process.

2008-1-7
Translation by China Information Center

At 3:00 on the afternoon of December 27, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau placed well-known Beijing-based rights defender Hu Jia under criminal detention on "suspicion of incitement to subvert state power."

Hu Jia has long contributed great effort to the causes of environmental protection, AIDS prevention and rights protection, and more recently has come under political pressure for his rights defense activities, as a result of which he was forced to discontinue his work in the AIDS field and lost his source of regular income. Although as a human rights activist and freelance writer Hu Jia has been subjected to long-term house arrest because of his repeated issuing of statements and reports regarding China's human rights situation and his criticism of the government and its officials, all of his statements and his actions have remained within the boundaries of the rights protected under the PRC Constitution, and have not in any instance constituted an incitement to subvert state power. For this reason, we feel that the Beijing Public Security Bureau's criminal detention of Hu Jia is unacceptable.