March 13:
Police in Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei are jointly investigating “three internal forces” that threaten social stability: “workers, farmers, and retired military personnel." The Central Commission of Political Science and Law in Beijing identified these three types of organizations in a recent report. Underground labor unions in the northwest and northeast are often behind worker unrest including the "Tonghua Iron and Steel incident" in Jilin where thousands of rioting workers killed a manager, Yazhou Zhoukan reports. Farmers' groups regularly appeal to local officials and are organizing peasants to petition Beijing about land disputes and grassroots-level official corruption. Organizations that protect the rights of retired military personnel are negatively influencing the morale of those currently serving. Every year on the "1 August" commemoration of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army, veterans groups protest and submit a petition of grievances. In the past they have surrounded the compound of the General Political Department and the Military Commission building. “The analysis of the authorities is that if the ‘internal three forces’ were to join forces or if they were exploited by hostile forces, their destructive potential would be too terrible to contemplate,” Ming Pao reports.
Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai's high-profile war on organized crime did not receive a public endorsement from either President Hu Jintao or Premier Wen Jiabao at this year’s National People’s Congress. Only Zhou Yongkang, the mainland's top law and order official and a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, joined a group discussion with Chongqing delegates yesterday. Zhou called for improvements in the judicial system but did not mention Bo's anti-mafia crusade, which, the South China Morning Post reports, was the topic of the gathering. Nine months after it was launched He Guoqiang, the mainland's top anti-graft official and the eighth most senior leader, endorsed the crackdown in an informal meeting with the Chongqing delegation, but all top leaders, particularly Hu and Wen, have avoided commenting on Bo’s anti-triad initiative, which has netted several senior CPC cadre in Chongqing.
March 14:
China is constructing three primary high-speed rail lines: a southern line through Southeast Asia to Singapore; a western line from Xinjiang through Central Asia; and a northern line through Russia’s gas fields to Europe. A proposed South Asia branch will start in Kunming and run through Burma to New Delhi, Lahore and on to Tehran to join the Central Asia line. Beijing has concluded agreements with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan and negotiations with over a dozen countries are underway. Construction has begun on the southern line, running from Kunming to Singapore. In the best-case scenario the rail link will be completed by 2025, when a train from Beijing to London will take only two days. But differences in countries’ track gages and poor track quality in some areas hinder the project. In Cambodia, over 650 km of track needs renovation and Burma’s track is below the required standards, The Hindu reports.
[Editor’s Note: In December, China opened the world's fastest rail link between Wuhan and Guangzhou, where a 350 kmph-speed train covers the 1,068 km journey in three hours. By 2012, China will have the world's largest high-speed domestic railway network including 42 high-speed lines running 13,000 km.]
March 15:
The official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) has denied reports that Riyadh had agreed during talks with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, to push China to support a new round of sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. “This issue [about Iran sanctions] is not true, it was not discussed during the visit of the Secretary of Defense who was in the kingdom recently,” said SPA citing an official source. China continues to push for negotiations with Iran about its nuclear program instead of sanctions. On the sidelines of China's National People's Congress, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said: “Pressure and sanctions are not the fundamental way forward to resolving the Iran nuclear issue, and cannot fundamentally solve this issue,” The Hindu reports.
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