Very interesting, and very encouraging (if, of course, they don’t get into trouble for it).

A 50-mile stew of toxic benzene floated up the Songhua River for 10 days before Chinese authorities acknowledged the severity of what has been the most serious river pollution in recent memory here. Not until the dense mess hit the major city of Harbin last week was it no longer possible to cover up the catastrophe – highlighting a penchant for secrecy that has characterized political behavior here for decades.

Yet in a twist whose significance is still unclear, once the crisis was public, Chinese state media roundly and sharply attacked the fear, sloth, and mendacity that lay behind the coverup.

While no culprits were named in newspapers from Beijing to Shanghai and Hong Kong – pending an investigation by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao – the language was, in Chinese terms, severe. Lies, failure of public trust, unjustifiable – are words and phrases rarely used in state-run media here regarding business and leadership issues. One Shanghai paper even called for a “transparent public information system.” A Beijing journal declared, “Those who have lied irresponsibly will certainly be punished severely.”

Is it a turning point? Another pseudo-turning point, like SARS? Just a one-time fluke? Or maybe a prelude to scapegoating some lowly officials while the higher-ups walk away? As always, we’ll have to wait and see. But once more, it’s good to see the media expressing outrage over the incompetence of their boss, the government.

Wow, this is so cool. Finally, I feel like somebody.

Link is via LGF Watch, which is burning with jealousy because they didn’t make the list!

A huge artice in today’s Times tells how a judge’s seemingly minor decision has rocked China’s judicial system, upsetting tradional norms (i.e., that the government has the final say in the courts) and becoming a lightning rod for judicial reform.

Judge Li Huijuan happened to be in the courthouse file room when clerks, acting on urgent orders, began searching for a ruling on a mundane case about seed prices. “I handled that case,” Judge Li told the clerks, surprised that anyone would be interested.

A dispute between two local companies over the price of seeds, like those sold at a seed store in Luoyang, turned into a conflict between the law of Henan Province and the national law of China.

Li Huijuan, then an idealistic student, received a master’s from the University of Politics and Law in Beijing in 2001.

But within days, the Luoyang Middle Court’s discipline committee contacted her. Provincial officials had angrily complained that the ruling contained a serious political error. Faced with a conflict between national and provincial law, Judge Li had declared the provincial law invalid. In doing so, she unwittingly made legal history, setting in motion a national debate about judicial independence in China’s closed political system.

In many countries, including the United States, a judge tossing out a lower-level law would scarcely merit attention. But in China, the government, not a court, is the final arbiter of law. What Judge Li had considered judicial common sense, provincial legislators considered a judicial revolt. Their initial response was to try to crush it. Judge Li, who had on the bench less than three years, feared her career might be finished.

“An order by those in power has forced local leaders, none of whom dared to stand on principle, to sacrifice me,” she wrote in rebuttal. “I’m just an ordinary person, a female judge who tried to protect the law. Who is going to protect my rights?”

Faced with the complex demands of governing a chaotic, modernizing country, China’s leaders have embraced the rule of law as the most efficient means of regulating society. But a central requirement in fulfilling that promise lies unresolved – whether the governing Communist Party intends to allow an independent judiciary.

There’s no fairy tale ending. The system remains intact and Judge Li was persected and nearly had her career destroyed. The positive side is that the story received so much attention from the Chinese media and legal scholars, who brought the issue into the forefront. It says there’s a lot of dissatisfaction with the Party’s version of rule of law. A lot of people are mad as hell and don’t want to take it anymore.

Workers relax on a Kunming bench.

According to the latest Japanese opinion poll, Prime Minister Koizumi is winning the war of words over the Yasukuni Shrine visits and gaining public support – at the expense of China and South Korea.

An opinion poll taken by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper immediately after the last Yasukuni visit showed that 42% of respondents supported the vists and 41% did not. A similar poll taken in June recorded 36% for and 52% against. According to The Japan Times, this remarkable reversal was due to several important differences during Prime Minister Koizumi’s last visit. Unlike the previous 4 visits when Koizumi dressed in traditional garb, prayed in the inner chamber, purchased flower offerings and and signed the guest book “Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi” the Japanese public felt that he made some major concessions by dressing in a buisiness suit, only paying his respects outside the shrine and generally trying to emphasise that the visit was carried out in a private capacity.

Perhaps emboldened by this change in public opinion, Foreign Minister Taro Aso, one of the more vocal and controversial members of Koizumi’s new post-election (and right-wing) cabinet, went onto the offensive over the weekend by saying that Japan should not worry about how it is viewed by other countries or whether it becomes isolated, “The only countries in the world that talk about Yasukuni are China and South Korea. We don’t have to worry about whether Japan is isolated or is not being liked.”

Also in the news, a new film will be released in Japan next month, Men of the Yamato, which will no doubt raise a few eyebrows in Beijing. Making movies in Japan concerning World War II was perhaps inconceivable in the past, but the film graphically portrays the sinking of the Japanese Imperial Navy vessel ‘Yamato’. At the time, it was the largest battleship ever built, but was attacked and sunk by the U.S. Navy near Okinawa in 1945. Already, (and inevitably) some media reports have accused the film of glossing over Japan’s wartime aggression and focusing instead on Japanese suffering because the story concentrates on the bravery and comradeship of the men who fought. However, the film and also the replica of the Yamato built by the studio are already proving to be a huge hit.

An unquenchable thirst for power (as in fuel) combined with a corrupt system in which local officials are payed to ignore hazardous working conditions once again brings catastrophe to Chinese miners.

Coal dust caught fire in a mine in northeast China, sparking an explosion that killed at least 68 people and left 79 missing, the government said Monday, as the country’s leadership called for tighter work safety measures.

Some 221 miners were underground when the blast occurred late Sunday at the Dongfeng Coal mine in Qitaihe, a city in Heilongjiang province, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Seventy-four miners had been rescued by Monday, it said.

Xinhua said a 269-member rescue team was searching for the trapped miners and that Li Yizhong, minister of the State Administration of Work Safety, told them to “spare no efforts” to save the workers.

China’s coal mines are the world’s deadliest. Fires, floods, cave-ins and explosions are reported almost daily, and thousands of miners are killed every year despite the government’s repeated attempts to improve its record amid lax safety rules and poor equipment.

Whether this was an unsafe or illegal mine or a safe mine that was the victim of an unlucky acident I don’t know for sure. But it got me thinking…

I’ve brought up this topic of unsafe mines before, and some argued that the unsafe, illegal mines are important for the local population – that without them, they couldn’t find work, and in fact the men want to work in these mines even though they know they are unsafe. This strikes me as one of those unresolvable ethical dilemmas, the kind where you just can’t come up with a solution. Like families in rural Thailand who depend on their 17-year-old daughter’s work as a prostitute in Bangkok. Like workers in southern China factories who risk having their fingers sliced off every day, but want to work there nevertheless because it’s better than the alternative. What’s the answer? In Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, the whistleblower is perceived as the villain, as the “enemy” because his uncovering the truth will threaten local business and jobs. Is he a hero or a villain? Just food for thought…

In These Times offers a very decent overview of how and why China is cracking down hard on the media, including silencing and imprisoning journalists and, as we all know, filtering and manipulating information in the Internet. It causes one to wonder, can a country that is dedicated to silencing its own people’s voices really be heading toward democracy?

Though China is the fastest growing economy in the world, censorship and limits on freedom of expression are on the increase as the government struggles to contain growing unrest across the country.

New regulations issued by China’s State Council in late July prevent theater companies and artists from performing works that “oppose the basic principles of the constitution that place the Communist Party as the ruling party.”

According to the new rules, commercial performances should also refrain from performances that “are deemed harmful to the state … endanger state unity, sovereignty or territorial integrity, [or] endanger state security or the honor or interests of the state,” reported the official newspaper of China’s Communist Party, The People’s Daily….

In recent months, hundreds of riots by groups as diverse as retirees demanding withheld pensions, farmers protesting land seizures, citizens incensed by government corruption and ethnic minorities inflamed by prejudice have rocked different parts of China. The worst trouble came on June 16, when thugs in Shenyou, about 50 miles from Beijing, attacked locals resisting a forced buyout of their land, killing six people and injuring about 50.

Authorities had tried to censor news of the unrest by sealing off the affected areas and detaining journalists trying to cover the situation. But with 100 million people in China now connected to the Internet and more than 330 million owning cell phones, news of the violence spread quickly across the country.

In response, existing controls on the Internet, such as intrusive monitoring of chat rooms by human censors and advanced filtering techniques developed with help from U.S. corporations such as Cisco, are being stepped up, especially during sensitive times. The government is so blasé about the censorship that it uses state-controlled media to spread word of it.

Some of the stuff in this article is sinister, like translators who work with foreign reporters being called in for “debriefings,” and paid chat room “Netizens” boasting of how they will manipulate public opinion. Nothing very new to us China watchers, but it’s good to see the story getting so much mainstream attention.

Via Bingfeng.

So you know how I’m always pontificating about how a grassroots environmental movement has the potential to be a d3mocr@tizing force in China? Newsweek thinks so too:

In China, where the ruling Communist Party discourages or outright crushes any attempts at grass-roots movements, environmental protection is one of the only areas of activism that is thriving. Led by an increasingly feisty domestic media, some crusading lawyers and a few maverick bureaucrats, the Chinese are beginning to demand information from corporations and their government about the harmful effects of rapid economic development on the environment. In some cases, the public pressure has worked; in a few cases, even the state agency that regulates the environment has joined sides with environmentalists.

More notably, the Newsweek account contains a fascinating chronology of who knew what when, and just how important the role of China’s press was in exposing the disaster:

On Monday afternoon, Nov. 21, an editor at one of China’s most aggressive magazines, China Newsweek (not related to this publication), spotted a curious headline on the Internet. Harbin officials had announced they were cutting off water to residents for four days to make repairs. Finding it odd that an entire city’s water supply would be shut down at once, the editor called her boss to brainstorm. Rumors that an imminent earthquake was behind the mysterious “repairs” had been circulating on the Internet, but the two editors’ suspected the recent chemical plant explosion in Jilin was behind the mysterious shutdown. When they consulted maps of the two provinces and the location of the plant, they agreed the two events must be related.

With only 24 hours to press time, China Newsweek called a well-placed source in Harbin, who all but confirmed their suspicions. “He said the river had been contaminated, but the government had not publicized this,” the editor told NEWSWEEK. At dawn, the magazine sent three reporters to Jilin and Harbin to get the story, before the government intervened to stop them. “We knew that if we didn’t do the story then, we might not be able to do it the next week,” said an editor, who asked that she not be named because of the sensitive nature of the situation. “The seriousness of this incident could affect the future of a lot of officials in the Northeast.”

The China Newsweek story came out Nov. 24, about one day after the country’s environmental regulators finally owned up to the contamination that had left more than three million people who lived in and around Harbin without running water. The story provided details about which government officials knew what and when. It reported that the governor of Heilongjiang province had told 400 officials in a closed meeting that the city of Harbin had lied about the water-supply shutdown because it was waiting for permission from higher authorities to disclose the spill and didn’t want to contradict Jilin official reports. And it said that the cover-up ended only after provincial officials in Heilongjiang sent a desperate request for guidance to the central government. The editor of China Newsweek said she hoped the story would show people the harm done by “the conflicting interests of government officials from neighboring parts of the river.”

CDT also links to a fascinating blog from a Chinese journalist, and Jilin native, who provides an insider’s look at the factory where the disaster originated. Here’s a taste:

The political rumors in Beijing these past few days are that the governor or party chief of Jilin Province and the CEO of CNPC will soon be sacked and replaced. Maybe not so fast. But one thing is for sure: for lower-level bureacrats, heads are going to roll. At least I hope so. Roll, roll, you stupid heads. There has been so many mayors of Jilin in recent years that even my parents lost count. And the local chief manager of CNPC’s Jilin subsidiary looks like dead meat. Workers were already complaining so much about this guy. Fascist, was the word the used the most. Apparently this guy, Yu Li, introduced draconian rules and is pathetically obsessed with appearnce: workers are fined when they don’t don their uniforms and masks neatly, when they forget to put on a name badge for work, when they don’t walk in a straight line on factory grouds — hell, sounds like first-years at Westpoint. All workers must put down whatever they are doing when there’s a snowstorm in the winter, to clean snow off the paths, or somebody will be find. “My first concern everyday was not safe production anymore,” a distant relative who works at 101st Factory told me. “It was making sure I look OK for the job. I had to check if I was wearing my badge properly when I rushed to the explosion site during the rescue — I was afaid I’d be fined even when I was trying to dillute toxic chemicals and save lives.”

Be sure to check out the Newsweek article and especially, the blog – there’s lots more.

Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt …

By FRANK RICH

GEORGE W. BUSH is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia’s contribution of some 160 soldiers to “the coalition of the willing.” Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in

(more…)

From the AP:

HARBIN, China – Visiting Premier Wen Jiabao ordered local leaders to clean up toxic benzene by Sunday night from the river that provides water for this northeast city, where residents spent a fourth day Saturday without supplies in freezing weather.

The foreign minister, meanwhile, delivered an unusual public apology to Moscow for possible damage from the spill on the Songhua River, which is flowing toward a city in the Russian Far East.

Beijing’s show of care and contrition was almost unprecedented and represented an effort to restore its damaged standing with both China’s public and Moscow, a key diplomatic partner…

…Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing’s apology to Russian Ambassador Sergei Razov was reported on the state television evening news, which is seen by hundreds of millions of Chinese.

“Li Zhaoxing expressed his sincere apology on behalf of the Chinese government for the possible harm that this major environmental pollution incident could bring to the Russian people downstream,” the report said.

It was an extraordinary step for the newscast, which usually carries only positive reports about China’s foreign relations…

Here’s one form of apology I wish corporate wrongdoers in the US would adopt:

The plant was run by a subsidiary of China’s biggest oil company, state-owned China National Petroleum Corp., which issued an apology this week and sent executives to help dig wells in Harbin.

Meanwhile, the UK Guardian reports on how the crisis has impacted Harbin’s poorest residents:

For the first time in her life Mrs Li is thinking of splashing out on a bottle of water. It may only cost 7p, but for the migrant mother living in one of the city of Harbin’s poorest neighbourhoods, anything but tap water has, until now, been an unthinkable extravagance.

Decision time is looming. Since China’s biggest recent pollution scare prompted the authorities to cut off water supplies two days ago, the 25-year-old has conserved every drop. She no longer washes the family’s hair and clothes. She eats only bread, buns and other food that does not require water for cooking. And, though it worries her immensely, she has stopped boiling her baby’s bottle to keep it sterile.

But her family’s supplies are already running out. Unlike most of the rest of the city’s 3.5 million residents, she had no bath or barrels to fill when the government warned everyone to prepare for a dry patch. Instead, the family of three drink and wash from three small buckets that are fast emptying.
“We can probably manage for a day or two more, but if it goes on much longer I’ll be very worried,” she said. “I never imagined this would happen when I came to live in the city.”…

…Despite freezing temperatures, people queue on the streets with kettles and flasks when the emergency water tanker, a converted street cleaning truck, pulls in once a day with fresh supplies. For some there is even an air of festivity. “It’s a bit like the war,” says one veteran. “Everyone pulling together and the [communist] party providing for us.”

But in the poorer parts of town there is resentment that the burden and the risk are not being equally shared. “It is all right for the rich and the communist cadres,” said Zhu Yuan Liang, a scrap collector. “But most people are poor and cannot afford to waste money on bottled water.”

The Guardian article also contains an interesting speculation::

The exposure of the cover-up may have been a ploy by central government to make companies and local authorities more responsible for the environment. According to Chinese journalists the order to go public came directly from the state council – led by prime minister Wen Jiabao. A day later Mr Wen held a meeting with ministers in which he emphasised the environmental woes facing China.