China Reform Monitor: No. 915

August 5:

Despite official central government objections, local officials continue to kidnap petitioners and lock them up for as many as 40 days in so-called “black jails” outside Beijing. On July 12, Beijing police raided one such secret jail on the city’s outskirts, freeing 13 people confined there for filing complaints against local officials in their home provinces. Local authorities track petitioners from their hometowns with the help of those running the jails. Over the last two years, mainland media has exposed several such detention centers in or around Beijing. Petitioners’ mobile phones and identity cards are taken by guards during their detention and returned only after they go back home, the South China Morning Post reports.

August 7:

China has rejected North Korea’s requests to hold a joint military exercise and to acquire J-type fighter aircraft. The first request, which was made in April, came in response to the U.S.-South Korea drill, but was refused on the grounds that it would provoke Washington and Seoul amid Beijing’s efforts to restart the six-party talks on North Korean denuclearization stalled since December 2008. Under the proposal, Pyongyang wanted China’s People’s Liberation Army to allow North Korean military personnel onto its submarines to gather intelligence on the U.S. Navy. Japan’s Kyodo News Agency reports that China appears to be limiting its military support to North Korea to personnel exchanges amid concerns that extending other types of support may complicate already tense inter-Korean relations. In response to China’s refusals, North Korea has limited Chinese military attaches’ access to North Korean military units, kept them under strict surveillance, and at times suspended such visits.

August 10:

The South China Morning Post reports that to protect children’s rights Beijing has issued a 10-year plan entitled “Outline for the Development of Chinese Children.” Highlights of the plan include a cross-departmental mechanism to end illegal ultrasound screenings and abortions without medical grounds. The goal is to end the selective abortion of female babies, which has caused a sex ratio imbalance of 118 boys to 100 girls. The plan also calls for monitoring and inspections to maintain safety standards for children’s food and other products and vows to protect children from abduction, abuse, and abandonment. It also aims to ensure compulsory education for disabled children and children of migrant workers, open “children’s house” centers in over 90 percent of communities to provide social services, increase the number of libraries in rural areas, and crack down on child-related crimes.

[Editor’s Note: The natural birth ratio should be about 103 to 107 males per 100 females. The gap widened after the one-child policy was introduced in China three decades ago to curb population growth. The sex ratio of newborns has climbed from 108.5 males per 100 females in 1982 to 118.08 males last year, according to official census figures.]

August 11:

Burma’s pro-democracy opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has issued a personal appeal to review the ongoing dam projects in Kachin State financed by China’s state-owned China Power Investment Corporation (CPI). In May 2007, the Burmese military regime and CPI signed an agreement to build seven large dams in Kachin State by 2017, the largest being the 6,000 megawatt Myitsone dam, which is being built at the source of the Irrawaddy River. Upon completion, the dams will produce 13,360 megawatts of electricity annually to feed China’s Yunnan Province expanding energy needs. A CPI funded environmental impact assessment conducted by a team of Burmese and Chinese scientists said that the dams would threaten the biodiversity of the local ecosystem and impact millions of people along the Irrawaddy. Another concern is that the site, which is located less than 100 km from a major fault line, could be damaged by an earthquake which might weaken its structure or cause landslides into the reservoir threatening basin residents. In July, a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman defended the dams as “in the interest of both countries' development and both countries’ people,” the Thailand-based Irrawaddy news outlet reports.