China Reform Monitor: No. 1042

June 12 :

A private Chinese company, HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment, will not use Nicaragua’s San Juan River border with Costa Rica as the basis of a new interoceanic canal in Central America. Costa Rica’s Ambassador in China, Marco Vinicio Ruiz, said San Jose disputes the area surrounding the river and would not allow the canal in the border area for environmental reasons. “All Chinese companies have some relationship with the government. They buy or they sell to them or are partners in other things,” said Ruiz. “The government of China considered our concern.” Costa Rican authorities also pressed their concerns during President Xi Jinping’s recent visit, Costa Rica’s La Nacion reports.

June 14:

Last month Chinese scholars, analysts and military officials gathered at Renmin University in Beijing to argue for Chinese sovereignty over Japan’s southernmost island chain, which includes Okinawa, home to 1.3 million Japanese citizens, and 27,000 American troops. A Foreign Ministry-affiliated magazine recently published a four-page spread on the topic and in March an op-ed by two scholars at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences appeared in the official People’s Daily calling for Chinese sovereignty over Okinawa, followed by two more articles in the nationalist Global Times. The New York Times called it “a semiofficial campaign in China to question Japanese rule of the [Ryukyu] islands.” A week before the seminar, Major General Luo Yuan, argued that Japan does not have sovereignty over the Ryukyu Islands because its inhabitants paid tribute to China before Japan.

June 16:

Over the next decade China will move 250 million rural residents into new towns and cities. The goal is to urbanize 70 percent of the population – 900 million people – by 2025. “The government is replacing small rural homes with high-rises and paving over vast swaths of farmland. New urban schools and hospitals offer modern services, but often at the expense of the torn-down temples and open-air theaters of the countryside,” the New York Times reports. Beijing will spend over $600 billion a year on infrastructure and additional sums to pay for ex-farmers’ education, healthcare and pensions. Under the scheme the state still owns the land, but farmers are given cash, an apartment with a long-term lease, and shares in joint stock companies that administer the land and pays dividends.

June 19:

In its 2013 report on Trafficking in Persons (TIP) the State Department declared China among the worst countries for human trafficking, demoting it to a Tier 3. “The Chinese government’s birth limitation policy and a cultural preference for sons, create a skewed sex ratio of 118 boys to 100 girls in China, which served as a key source of demand for the trafficking of foreign women as brides for Chinese men and for forced prostitution,” the report states. Political considerations did not factor into the ratings, Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, the head of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, told The Daily Beast. “You follow the facts and the law to their logical conclusion. We are not going to flinch from looking at the results on the ground, applying the law, and applying the facts,” he said. People fighting the human trafficking problem in China are often sent to China’s infamous prison camps. “State-sponsored forced labor is part of a systematic form of repression known as ‘re-education through labor.’ The government reportedly profits from this forced labor, and many prisoners and detainees in at least 320 of these facilities were required to work, often with no remuneration,” the TIP report states.

[Editor’s Note: In response to the new designation, State must prepare a package of sanctions against China that could include cancelling cooperative programs. Over the summer the sanctions will be finalized and sent to President Obama, who can accept or waive them. “We’re going to hold the State Department to account as we ought to,” said Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Human Rights Subcommittee.]

June 23:

Iranian authorities have seized an illegal shipment from China of nearly 18 tons of acetic anhydride – a colorless and highly combustible chemical used in the acetylation of morphine to form heroin. An anti-narcotics unit near Iran’s eastern border with Afghanistan seized the container, the official Fars news agency reports.