Archive for the Reporting category
July 6th, 2010
By Kathleen E. McLaughlin
Nearly a year after violent riots engulfed Urumqi, the capital city of China’s restive Xinjiang region, major questions about China’s deadliest ethnic unrest in decades remain unanswered.
Key facts remain unknown or in dispute.
First, how many Uighurs were killed at a southern China toy factory in late June, an event that helped trigger the Urumqi riots hundreds of miles away? Chinese officials say two Uighurs were killed in a fight with Han Chinese workers; several eyewitnesses and Uighur leaders say many more Uighurs were beaten to death in an unprovoked attack.
Second, how were the riots in Xinjiang organized? The government insists they were preplanned and instigated by outside forces, including exiled Uighur businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer. Kadeer and others have said the protests were grassroots in origin, spurred largely by the lack of arrests in the Shaoguan toy factory murders.
Finally, what was the ethnic divide of those killed in the riots? The Chinese government says most victims were Han Chinese, while Uighur rights groups insist that more Uighurs were killed than has been acknowledged.
Advocacy groups like Human Rights Watch have attempted to uncover answers to these questions, but controls on journalists and pressure on sources have limited independent investigations.
These significant looming questions are all the more galling when you consider that Xinjiang was supposed to have been open to foreign journalists. On the heels of last year’s deadly riots in Urumqi, the Chinese government made the surprising decision to allow foreign journalists access to the city to cover the mayhem.
Read the rest at FP:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/24/beijing_s_fake_media_reform
April 1st, 2010
By Kathleen E. McLaughlin - GlobalPost
Published: March 17, 2010
Editor’s note: This story is part of our series Silicon Sweatshops, an ongoing GlobalPost investigation into the supply chains that make some of your favorite electronic gadgets. In this installment, GlobalPost examined the fallout after a factory that supplies Apple and Nokia used the toxic solvent n-hexane in violation of local codes and without proper safety equipment. Though seven current and former workers said the chemical was used on Apple touch screens, Apple refused to comment.
SUZHOU, China — The mysterious illness began with an odd tingling of the fingers one week, a creeping numbness in the feet the next.
Sometimes, deep and painful muscle cramps would wake the factory workers from their dorm beds. Weeks later, many of the workers simply couldn’t walk right, staggering across the factory grounds, and struggling with once-nimble fingers to clean the delicate touch screens used in trendy gadgets. They had no idea that as they worked, the solvent they used to clean the screens was attacking their peripheral nerves. Unseen damage left them weak, shaky and often in pain. Sometimes their vision would blur. Headaches were common.
GlobalPost recently visited a hospital ward where more than two dozen sick workers remain under care for nerve damage sustained last summer at Wintek’s factory in Suzhou. After interviewing seven former and current workers, as well as families, friends and labor activists, plus reviewing medical records and corporate documents, we’ve learned the health damage done to workers is more severe than portrayed in previous accounts.
All the workers interviewed said n-hexane — the chemical that made people sick — was used in making touch screens for Apple, particularly the iPhone and iTouch. Apple rejected repeated interview requests, refused to confirm whether its products were involved and directed questions to its 2010 Supplier Responsibility audit, which does not address chemical poisoning.
In a highly competitive industry where consumer demand drives companies to squeeze costs out of complex supply chains, the Suzhou case raises broad questions in China about labor rights, worker safety and the thorny issue of compensation.
In a quiet wing of the Suzhou No. 5 Hospital, the rooms have taken on the look of a cheerful factory dorm. Dozens of young workers from around China have taken over the floor, and tried to make it homier with simple decorations, their laundry hanging from the balconies and crafting projects splayed across the beds. The wing is cheerful, the air of fear and uncertainty having lifted somewhat since the workers arrived last summer. Their health has improved, but they won’t be leaving for a while.
“At first I thought I was getting tired and weak because I was working so much,” recalled one 24-year-old woman, describing how she worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week before she got sick. “After some weeks, I knew I needed to see a doctor.”
(Read the rest at Global Post:) http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/100312/apple-news-iPhone-asia-illness
April 1st, 2010
By Kathleen E. McLaughlin - GlobalPost
Published: March 17, 2010
Editor’s note: This story is part of our series Silicon Sweatshops, an ongoing GlobalPost investigation into the supply chains that make some of your favorite electronic gadgets. In this installment, GlobalPost examined the fallout after a factory that supplies Apple and Nokia used the toxic solvent n-hexane in violation of local codes and without proper safety equipment. Though seven current and former workers said the chemical was used on Apple touch screens, Apple refused to comment.
SUZHOU, China — The value of a Chinese factory worker’s life can be neatly calculated with a simple mathematical formula.
The actual number varies by city and a few other particulars, but the total amount is never very much. In Suzhou, where dozens of workers have fallen seriously ill with nerve damage in the past year from chemical poisoning, a factory worker’s health is worth about 130,000 yuan ($19,046) by the government’s calculation.
The number is derived in part by subtracting the worker’s age (usually 21) from the average life expectancy (79), then multiplying by a series of precise percentages, including one to designate the severity of illness, carefully prescribed in the government’s labor regulations. It is cold, calculated business.
Suzhou lawyer Wang Luyuan knows the formulas inside and out. In a cabinet near his desk, he stores a stack of slim brown folders containing the mathematical worth and medical details of 32 factory workers sickened by exposure to n-hexane — the toxic solvent Wintek illegally used in making electronic touch screens. The company has admitted that more than 60 workers were sickened by hexane exposure. Wang now represents about half of them.
Apple has rejected interview requests, but workers say they were using hexane primarily to clean touch screens for products made by the U.S. tech giant.
For months, the lawyer Wang has methodically worked through the steps required to get every yuan owed the factory workers, proving they got sick on the job and that they can’t return to the factory lines.
Wang’s role is nothing like that of the trial lawyer often glamorized in Hollywood portrayals as the defender of victims of irresponsible corporations. The way Chinese law works, these workers cannot file a class-action lawsuit or ask for damages beyond exactly what is laid out in the rule books. Factories can, if they’re so inclined, plan in advance what it would cost if they made a worker sick.
(Read the rest):
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/100312/apple-news-iPhone-asia-workers
April 1st, 2010
By Kathleen E. McLaughlin - GlobalPost
Published: March 17, 2010
SUZHOU, China — The only certainty about factory worker Li Liang’s death is that nobody will ever know for sure what killed him. What is certain is that Li’s death unleashed a wave of fear, anger and protest over chemical exposure tied to the complex supply chains that make some of the world’s best-selling high tech gadgets.
In December, the 26-year-old engineer collapsed on the factory bus on his way to work and died later in a local hospital. Family friends say his father was discouraged from seeking an autopsy, talked out of bringing a case with the labor bureau and pressed to cremate his son’s body quickly. Coworkers were told he had a heart attack.
Li’s family is bound by contract not to talk about it. With his young body now just ashes, any evidence is gone.
On Dec. 25, a week after he died, Li’s father signed a contract with Wintek’s Chinese subsidiary. In it, the company agreed to give Li’s family 268,000 yuan ($39,260) in medical expenses and humanitarian aid, some of which came from coworker donations. In exchange, Li’s father agreed not to speak to the media and not to press the case forward. Payment was to be made after the body was cremated.
Li Liang’s death and his employer’s quick payment to the family while demanding they keep quiet are at the center of a controversy that has raged since he died, on the internet and amid a violent strike that shook the Wintek factory in January. Yet there is little indication that Li died of anything but a heart attack. Prolonged exposure to n-hexane — the solvent that landed dozens of Wintek workers in local hospitals — is known to damage nerves to the point of paralysis, but is not so clearly linked to death.
In January, questions over his death helped ignite a firestorm over factory conditions that blew up into a violent strike at the factory, when 2,000 people walked off the job. China’s typically staid, state-run media took up the issue, with the English-language China Daily amid others reporting on Li Liang’s strange death and interviewing colleagues who blamed it on the chemical.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/100312/apple-news-iPhone-asia-death
August 16th, 2009
GEJIU, China — Xin Deming’s family has been decimated by AIDS and he is adamant the disease not ruin the life of his 10-year-old niece. Yet despite his best efforts, she is at the mercy of erratic treatment, massive social stigma and overwhelming uncertainty about the future.
In Xin’s family, three of four sons used heroin, turning to needles at the beginning of an AIDS epidemic that sprouted more than a decade ago near the Chinese border with Vietnam in Yunnan province. A growing drug problem and burgeoning sex-work industry on the drug trafficking route created a fertile environment for AIDS to spread in Gejiu, a tin-mining town of 300,000 people on China’s Red River. International agencies say Gejiu has more cases of AIDS and HIV infection than any other city in China.
In Xin’s family, two of three drug-addicted brothers died. Xin, 41, is off drugs and now works for a local non-governmental organization devoted to AIDS education. He is strong and outspoken, but at the mercy of a health care system plagued with problems. His niece, the orphaned daughter of his elder brother, must be protected, he insists, even if it means keeping her in the dark about her own health. She attends school in a rural area where the city health committee, prone to gossip and leaks of private information, is not privy to her health records.
“She told me she knows she’s different,” Xin said. “I asked what she meant, and she said, ‘I don’t know why, I just know I’m different from the other kids.’”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/090420/chinas-youngest-aids-victims-kept-the-dark
August 5th, 2009
Editor’s note: While the health care reform battle rages in Washington, D.C., China has been quietly revamping its own massive health care system — with decidely mixed results. In this three-part special report, Kathleen E. McLaughlin and photographer Sharron Lovell tracked the results on both urban and rural residents.
BEIJING — The price list at a top Beijing hospital explains a lot about what is wrong with China’s health care system: An appendectomy by a leading surgeon, available to any Chinese citizen, costs only $34.
This is not because the doctors or the equipment come cheap — Peking University People’s Hospital attracts the top medical talent in the country. It has the seventh highest-paid doctors in China and imports cutting edge technology from around the world. The low cost of surgery is not because the communist government makes up the funding gap between patient prices and the actual cost of care.
Instead, it is simply because the central government set a maximum hospital rate 20 years ago in an attempt to guarantee health care access to all citizens. It hasn’t allowed them to be raised since, despite China’s massive economic growth, increased personal income and rising inflation. In short, that $34 doesn’t cover much and the costs are made up in other ways.
Read the series at Global Post:
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/090728/rural-health-care
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/090728/china-urban-health-care
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/090804/china-health-care-reform
July 17th, 2009
Shaoguan, China – When the local government in Xinjiang province dispatched more than 800 Uighur workers to a toy factory here in May, they couldn’t have predicted their fate would blow up into a national crisis. Today, police say two of the Uighur workers were killed and scores more injured in the June 26 events that ignited a firestorm of protest in restive Xinjiang. More mysteriously, some 700 of the original Uighur workers of Shaoguan’s massive electronic toy factory are being held out of sight behind locked gates roughly 10 miles away in an abandoned factory. Their plight, and the lack of quick police action on the initial murders, sparked mass protests and killings on July 5 in the Urumqi, adding the latest cracks in China’s façade of ethnic harmony.
http://www.feer.com/politics/2009/july58/Fear-Grips-Shaoguans-Uighurs
July 15th, 2009
SHAOGUAN, China — At the heart of a deadly June toy factory clash that sparked mass protests and killings 2,000 miles away in China’s far west lies a government policy that sends thousands of young Muslim Uighurs to fill labor gaps in the southeast.
Experts say despite yawning cultural differences and communication problems between Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese, there typically is little language training or other preparation for young Uighurs before they arrive in Guangdong province for factory jobs. Most come straight off the farm, far even from the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi, and are dropped directly into an atmosphere that might as well be a different planet.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/uighur-labor-policy
July 13th, 2009
HUIZHOU, China — Blind luck sent hundreds of Muslim Uighurs to a factory here last year to make Nike shoes, instead of five hours north, where their friends and neighbors from the same rural patch of China’s far northwest went to make toys.
Though they aren’t there, the Shaoguan toy factory is heavy on the minds of Uighurs here, as they wait for news of loved ones and friends who have had little contact with the outside since the June 26 toy factory brawl and murder of Uighurs in their factory dorms — the incident that helped ignite mass protests and 184 deaths in Xinjiang province July 5.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/090713/uighur-workers-guangdong
July 10th, 2009
SHAOGUAN, China — Three weeks after simmering racial tension escalated to mayhem and a double murder at a toy factory here, about 750 Uighur workers remain largely out of sight, behind locked gates and guarded doors — perhaps because they are at the center of a storm that has brought international attention to a remote Chinese province.
Most of the Xinjiang migrants who arrived at the massive factory in northern Guangdong province in May are apparently being held in a branch workshop 15 miles up the road, after the fight here led to mass protests and killings 2,000 miles away in their home province. Their tightly guarded new home and workshop is sealed off, and requests to visit inside and interview the Uighur men playing pool behind the gates after dark were refused by guards without explanation.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china/uighurs/xinjiang/guangdong-factory
