The Daily Blog

May 8

Peng Zhimin, Chinese Hilton Hotel Exec, Gets Life in Prison For Organized Crime.

A top shareholder of the Hilton hotel in Chongqing, China was sentenced to life in prison Wednesday for his connections with organized crime.

Peng Zhimin was convicted of bribery, prostitution, intentional injury, assault and other charges relating to organized crime, Agence France Presse reports.

Peng headed the Qinglong Property Development Companu, which owned the Chongqing Hilton Hotel in southwestern China.

Last year, the hotel was closed as authorities investigated an alleged prostitution ring being run out of the hotel.

Peng was arrested last July and his charges are connected to that investigation. Thirty-one others tied to Peng’s ring were sentenced to various terms of several years to life in prison.

The Hilton Hotel Group was reportedly fully cooperating with authorities.

After the raid, the Hilton was forced to close for a week and was stripped of its fifth star. The incident also prompted China to speed up an overhaul of its hotel star rating system, reports USA TODAY.

Chongqing, a city of 30 million people, is known for being a haven for underworld criminals. A crackdown on organized crime has led to more than 3,300 detentions and hundreds of prosecutions.

Nov 29

US and South Korea Start War Games.

YEONPYEONG ISLAND, South Korea (Nov. 27) — The U.S. and South Korea launched joint war games Sunday as a top official from North Korea’s ally China met South Korea’s president in a bid to calm tensions after a deadly North Korean artillery attack last week.

Hours after the drills began, residents of the South Korean island targeted by last week’s barrage were ordered to evacuate to shelters after the military heard fresh artillery fire north of the disputed western sea border. None of the rounds landed on the island, and authorities later lifted the evacuation order.Four South Koreans were killed last Tuesday when the North rained artillery on Yeonpyeong Island, home to both fishing communities and military bases, in one of the worst assaults on South Korean territory since the 1950-53 Korean War.

China’s State Councilor Dai Bingguo, a senior foreign policy adviser, met with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak in Seoul, according to Lee’s office, which provided no details. South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said they discussed the North Korean attack and how to ease tensions.The meeting followed similar discussions Saturday between Dai and South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan, according to Seoul’s Foreign Ministry.

The war games in the Yellow Sea, south of the targeted island involve the USS George Washington supercarrier and display resolve by Korean War allies Washington and Seoul to respond strongly to any future North Korean aggression. However, Washington has insisted the drills are routine and were planned well before last Tuesday’s attack.

The drills kicked off Sunday morning when ships from both countries entered the exercise zone, an official with South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said on condition of anonymity, citing office rules.

However, a spokesman for the U.S. military in South Korea said U.S. ships were still steaming toward the area and that the drills would not officially begin until later in the day.Earlier Sunday, North Korea issued a fresh threat to launch attacks against South Korea if provoked.

“We will launch merciless counter-military strikes against any provocative moves that infringe upon our country’s territoritorial waters,” the North’s main Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

South Korea was investigating the exact location of Sunday’s artillery fire and whether it was part of North Korean exercises, an official with South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said. He spoke on condition of anonymity, citing office rules.

Oct 8

UFO sightings have occurred across China from Xiaoshan Airport in Hangzhou to Baotou Airport in Inner Mongolia.

Witnesses in Baotou reported seeing a bright light circle the airport before flying away. The September 11 disruption kept three planes in the air as ground control diverted flights to prevent a collision.

Conspiracy theorists and UFO experts are excited about the latest report. Earlier UFO sightings were dismissed as military training exercises but the government has not been forthcoming about the most recent incident.

Sep 24

Amid Tension, Japan Is Releasing Chinese Captain.

TOKYO — Japanese authorities said on Friday that they will release the captain of a Chinese trawler whose arrest two weeks ago near islands claimed by China and Japan had caused growing tensions between the two Asian powers. Japanese prosecutors said they decided not to press charges against the captain, identified as Zhan Qixiong, 41, who was detained on Sept. 8 after his boat collided with Japanese Coast

The arrest had sent Japan’s ties with China to their lowest point in years. China reacted angrily to the arrest by cutting off ministerial-level talks, with Premier Wen Jiabao threatening further unspecified actions if he was not released.

While appealing for calm, Japanese leaders had initially stood firm in saying that their country’s laws applied to the captain, who was detained in waters administered by Japan but claimed by China and also Taiwan.

It was unclear if Tokyo had decided to give in to China’s demands, or even if central government officials had any hand in the captain’s release. However, prosecutors on Ishigaki island, where the captain was being held, did cite diplomatic considerations in their decision not to indict him on charges of obstructing officials on duty.

“Considering the effect on the people of our nation and on China-Japan relations, we decided that it was not appropriate to continue the investigation,” the prosecutors said in a statement. Guard vessels that were pursuing him near the disputed islands in the East China Sea.

Facing growing nationalist outrage at the arrest, authorities in Beijing had been raising the pressure on Tokyo for the captain’s unconditional release. Earlier this week, Chinese officials said Mr. Wen would probably not meet Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, during a United Nations development conference in New York.

China has argued that the issue is one for diplomacy, not Japan’s legal system. Known as Senkaku in Japanese or Diaoyu in Chinese, the islands have been in dispute for decades, but until now Japan has usually turned back Chinese vessels that approached too closely.

Sentiment in Japan, however, has hardened against China in recent years, as Chinese warships have made more frequent forays into Japanese waters, including an incident in April when a Chinese helicopter buzzed a Japanese warship.

Shortly after the release was announced, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said it would send a chartered plane to bring captain Zhan Qixiong back home. “I reiterate that any kind of so-called legal proceedings taken against the Chinese captain are illegal and invalid,” a spokeswoman said, according to a report on the ministry’s Web site.

In a commentary on the release, the official Xinhua news agency quoted experts saying that releasing the captain “is the precondition for Sino-Japanese relations to return to normal.”

Chinese analysts said the move could help ease tension between the two economic partners. Wang Xiangsui, a foreign policy analyst at the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said China especially objected to Japan using its domestic laws to deal with the captain. This implied that the territories were Japanese and not subject to negotiation.

“This was a move that Japan had to make or China would have taken further steps,” Mr. Wang said. “Now the two sides can discuss this more calmly.”

The most recent flare-up comes as China faces disputes with its neighbors to the south over control of islands in the South China Sea. It has also objected to American military exercises in waters near Korea.

The Japanese prosecutors’ decision followed news in Beijing on Thursday that four Japanese citizens had been arrested for videotaping military installations.

The report by the official Xinhua news agency said four Japanese citizens were detained at a military base near the city of Shijiazhuang, about 190 miles southwest of Beijing.

“Currently, the case is being investigated,” said a statement issued by authorities and carried on the Web site of China Daily, a government-controlled newspaper. Japan’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that four of its citizens were being held.

The four being detained are employees of the Fujita construction firm, a spokesman for the company said.

It was unclear whether those arrests were linked to the detention of the captain.

The last communication Fujita had with the workers was a cell phone text message from one of them on Tuesday that read, “help,” said a company spokesman, Yoshiaki Onodera.

The employees and their interpreter, a Chinese national, were in Hebei to research possible sites to excavate for weapons left behind by the Japanese army during World War II, Mr. Onodera said. The Japanese government has been funding a program to remove such weapons in China and Fujita is one of the contractors.

Economic ties between the countries — the world’s second- and third-largest economies — appeared to be fraying over the matter. Some metals traders say China has halted sales of rare earth metals to Japan, although China denies this.

Sep 9

TAIPEI, Taiwan (Sept. 8) — A government probe has found that at least 170 Chinese pilots have falsified their flight histories, renewing concerns over China’s air safety in the wake of an Aug. 24 crash that killed 42.

That crash of a Henan Airlines flight, during a landing at a foggy airport in northeastern China, was the country’s first major air accident in six years.But the finding highlights how administrative overload, corruption and nepotism are plaguing China’s commercial aviation industry as rapid growth outpaces regulators’ ability to properly screen personnel and ensure better air safety.

Regulators’ inability to keep up with roaring growth in today’s go-go China has resulted in a proliferation of fraud, quackery and graft by individuals and companies.China’s freight turnover and passenger numbers hit new records in July, as aviation sector profits grew to $950 million, a 364 percent year-on-year increase, according to a China Business News report cited by the People’s Daily Online.

Passenger volume totaled 126 million in the first half of this year, up nearly 18 percent year-on-year, according to a Xinhua report.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) announced the findings on pilots’ padded resumes at an Aug. 26 conference, but it was first reported by the China Business News on Sept. 6. The CAAC began looking more broadly into the issue of pilots’ qualifications in its probe of the Aug. 24 crash.The Global Times, citing that report, said that more than half of the pilots who inflated resumes in 2008 and 2009 were from Shenzhen Airlines, which holds a 51 percent stake in Henan Airlines.

China has about 13,000 commercial pilots, the report said. The Global Times quoted an anonymous employee at Shenzhen Airlines who said pilots bribed officials and tapped relatives in order to avoid scrutiny and get good posts.

The source said that some 170 pilots had fudged their flying histories, “But only three pilots were punished and suspended from flying, as Shenzhen Airlines was in desperate need of pilots in its developing period.”In a recent commentary, the Institute of Chinese Economics’ Justin Li said several high-profile scandals in China’s aviation sector showed that “endemic corruption within the aviation industry exposes the Achilles’ heel of China’s economic reform and development.”

Li Jiaxiang, the director of the CAAC, said at the conference that the lack of qualifications of the pilot and captain were to blame for the Henan Airlines crash, Global Times reported.

The China Daily quoted one aviation expert saying that aviation officials had to do a better job of checking pilots’ credentials.”The civil aviation administration should have stopped those who falsified their flying histories. If not, they are also to be blamed for their relaxed inner controls and lack of supervision over the airlines,” said Liu Weimin, aviation expert with the Civil Aviation Management Institute of China.

“The pilot’s documentations to apply for a certificate to pilot commercial planes should be strictly audited by the administration. Random checks should be carried out by the authority to check on these pilots,” he said.

A pilot who only gave his surname, Xu, told the China Daily that falsification of flying history was rampant, especially by former military pilots hoping to land cushy jobs in the commercial sector.”The rapid expansion of China’s civil aviation requires more commercial pilots, and the gap was usually filled up by those pilots who drive military aircrafts but transferred to commercial flights,” he said, according to the China Daily.

“These pilots were very likely to falsify their flying history in the military since it is hard to track and verify. By doing this, they can get promoted more quickly in flying commercial airplanes,” he told the Daily.

“The airline companies only keep half an eye on this since they are happy to see more pilots certified by the administrative agency,” he said.

The problem of inflating or faking credentials is hardly unique to China’s aviation sector. The Xinhua Daily Telegraph recently reported on a well-known Beijing proctology clinic that the report alleges misrepresented itself in advertisements, falsified the resume of its head proctologist, and made other fraudulent claims. The Telegraph’s report was translated at danwei.org.

Individuals who “out” fraudsters run the risk of retaliation. In July, thugs wielding a hammer and antiseptic spray attacked popular blogger Fang Zhouzi, who became famous for exposing academic and scientific fraud.

Fang’s most high-profile achievements were exposing a sham “cancer preventation” drug and debunking a former president of Microsoft China’s claim that he held a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology.

The former Microsoft official later admitted his degree was actually from Pacific Western University in California, which the Christian Science Monitor described as “a diploma mill that sold academic credentials and required no classroom instruction,” citing a 2004 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

In a bizarre twist, a doctor recently came forward alleging that Fang himself faked the hammer and antiseptic attack in order to promote himself and his books, according to a report in Global Times.

Aug 24

A 9-Day Traffic Jam in China and No Road Rage?

(Aug. 23) — Nine days of idling and no end in sight: The epic traffic jam outside Beijing extends for 62 miles, from the capital to the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. There are conflicting reports as to whether it was caused by construction on the Beijing-Tibet Expressway that forced motorists onto National Expressway 110 or vice versa. No matter, the main point regarding the motorists, most of whom are refusing to take detours (that include tolls), is that it must be awful to be them.

True, traffic is bad in Moscow. And even Atlanta. But nine days? One could take a leisurely drive across the United States in less time. Imagine what would happen if a similar jam occurred on a Los Angeles freeway. Suddenly, Joel Schumacher’s “Falling Down,” in which Michael Douglas’ character’s violence spree is precipitated by gridlock, doesn’t seem as far fetched.

But as of yet, there have been no reports of violence relating to the traffic jam. And indeed that appears to be true of driving in China in general. It’s not that driving in China is orderly — just the opposite. But in general the chaos is commonly suffered and rarely leads to the everyday road-rage violence that dominates media coverage in the United States.

There are probably many reasons for this, but surely one is that the Chinese populace is used to such indignities. After all, the central government has relocated more than a million people to make way for the Three Gorges dam, an eminent domain grab that dwarfs anything ever contemplated by Robert Moses. At least the people heading to Beijing have homes to return to, though it remains to be seen if they’ll ever reach them.

Plus, citing environmental concerns (the air pollution in China’s biggest cities is notoriously awful), the Chinese government has been taking grandiose steps toward alleviating some of the congestion, investing in electric and hybrid vehicles to the tune of $15 billion. One concept that’s attracted enormous international attention so far: the creative, albeit outlandish, solution of a hybrid bus that literally drives over smaller cars on the road. In any case, the fruition of those projects remains some months, if not years, away — offering scant comfort to those drivers currently mired in the gridlock. Although, at the rate they are going, maybe the new hybrid vehicles will catch up to them after all.

Aug 23

BEIJING (Aug. 22) — Flooding forced the evacuation of more than 250,000 people in the northern China along its border with North Korea, state media said Monday.

Heavy rains over the last several days caused the Yalu river, which marks the border, to breach its banks, although the water level had started to fall late Sunday, the official Xinhua News Agency state media said Monday.It said four people died, including a couple in their 70s and a mother and son, after their homes in Dandong were swept away by flash floods. Xinhua said 253,500 residents have been evacuated after the Yalu rose to its highest level in a decade.An official with the Water Resources Department in Liaoning province, where Dandong is located, confirmed that four people had died though he was unable to provide details. He refused to give his name because he was not authorized to speak with the media.
North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said torrential rain and water from the overflowing Yalu - or Amnok as it is known in Korean - swamped houses, public buildings and farmland in more than five villages near Sinuiju, the city opposite Dandong.

The report described Sinuiju and the surrounding area as having been “severely affected” by the flooding and said officials, the military and ordinary civilians were involved in rescue work. It said at least 5,150 people had been evacuated and residents were clambering on rooftops or taking shelter on hilltops.

Much of North Korea’s trade with the world passes through the city, forming a vital lifeline for the isolated, economically struggling country. Flooding in previous years has destroyed crops and pushed North Korea deeper into poverty, increasing its dependence on international food aid.

For China, the Dandong flooding is the latest disaster in the country’s worst flood season in over a decade. Landslides caused by heavy rains have smothered communities in western China and accounted for most of the more than 2,500 people killed.

Authorities in the northwestern province of Gansu on Sunday called off rescue efforts for 330 people still missing after an Aug. 8 mudslide tore through Zhouqu county, killing 1,435 people, Xinhua said. The Zhouqu government forbade digging in the debris, fearing that recovering corpses buried for two weeks would spread disease.

Aug 5

Four Killed in Another Attack at a Chinese School.

(Aug. 4) — A man waving a huge knife barged into a kindergarten in eastern China and stabbed to death three children and a teacher, Chinese media reported today. It’s the latest in a string of school killings that have frightened the nation and spurred communist officials to stifle news reports amid public outrage.

The rampage took place in the town of Zibo in Shandong Province and is believed to be the first major school stabbing since Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao pledged to end such attacks. In May, Wen ordered schools across China again to double security, and he promised to address social issues like mental illness and unemployment that might contribute to crime sprees.

Tuesday’s attack happened as parents were lining up to pick up their children from school. Many of the victims’ faces were slashed so badly that their parents couldn’t recognize them, the BBC quoted a local Zibo newspaper as saying. Screams reverberated through the schoolyard.

A 27-year-old man has turned himself in to police, The New York Times quoted Chinese websites as saying. Various accounts differed as to the number of attackers and those wounded. The China Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy put the casualty tolls at four children killed and 12 wounded, CNN reported.

The English language website of China’s official Xinhua news agency carried no mention today of the stabbings, but Bloomberg News said an earlier Xinhua report identified the suspect as a self-employed local man, Fang Jiantang. He reportedly confessed to using a nearly 2-foot-long knife to slash several children. Police have confiscated the murder weapon.

In the past, China’s government has tried to snuff out news coverage of school attacks, fearing copycat crimes or negative publicity. After Tuesday’s attack, the government imposed a news blackout in which all accounts of the incident were blocked from the Internet, and photos of the bloodshed banned, the Times reported.

Nearly 20 children, some as young as 3 years old, have been killed this year in bizarre and violent attacks on schools and kindergartens across China. Most have been blamed on personal grudges or insanity, and many have taken place on China’s densely populated east coast, where wealth disparity and social pressures are highest.

Zibo is a city of about 670,000 some 230 miles south of the capital Beijing.

Last weekend, a drunken tractor driver went on a rampage in Hebei province to the west of Zibo, killing 17 people by smashing homes, shops and cars with his digger machine.