I am going to sleep and can’t find the strength to expound on this extraordinary article. But I don’t think there’s much I could add anyway.

Clothes and toys on sale in Britain’s high streets are made by Chinese workers forced to endure illegal, exhausting and dangerous conditions, according to a new study. It will increase the pressure on retailers to monitor the conditions in which their products are made.

A three-year investigation into booming export factories for companies such as Marks & Spencer and Ikea discovered the human cost of China’s “economic miracle”. It found an army of powerless rural migrants toiling up to 14 hours a day, almost every day. Many were allowed just one day off a month and paid less than £50 a month for shifts that breached Chinese law and International Labour Organisation rules. Despite evidence of the shocking working conditions, cheap clothes, toys and increasingly electronic goods from the sweatshops are on sale in British shops with household names, including those with ethical buying policies.

Ethical trading consultants for Impactt, which works with businesses to improve their social impact around the world, were allowed into 100 factories supplying 11 British retailers.

They found that “ethical audits” – the conventional method of checking conditions – were ineffective because of falsification of records. Instead, working hours were cut by improving efficiency, said their report, Changing Over Time, sponsored by the Co-operative Insurance Society. But even these reduced working hours still exceeded Chinese labour limits, said Rosey Hurst, Impactt’s director. She added: “What has surprised and depressed us since 1998 when we started working in China is that all the efforts of the … companies have made very little difference to the working standards. The response by Chinese factories is to work out how better to cook the books.”

Companies are attracted to doing business in the People’s Republic of China because of its low-tax development zones, cut-price abundant workforce, and totalitarianism. Independent trade unions are banned by the Communist Party. Assembly-line personnel in free-trade zones in south China operate machinery without safety guards and spray paint with inadequate face masks. They often die in industrial accidents or fromgulaosi, the Chinese term for death from overwork. Workplace death rates in China are at least 12 times those of Britain and 13 factory workers a day lose a finger or an arm in the boom city of Shenzhen. In a sign of official disquiet, the state-owned China Daily reported in November that a 30-year-old woman, He Chunmei, died from exhaustion after working 24-hours non-stop at a handicraft factory.

There’s more, much more. Thanks to the commenter who left the link. It goes back to the issue of limits, to the point at which you say no, even when it means you may have to pay more for or a product or lose some business.

Remember, this is the liberal Independent. And they refer to the nation’s totalitarianism. If the shoe fits…?

It could well be. I wouldn’t be at all surprised, considering how magnificent their culture and intellect were, not to mention their skills in shipping and exploration, before they decided to look inward. So what happened?

Disgusting.

Having ascended to the national stage as one of the most vocal critics of President Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq, Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman John Murtha has long downplayed the controversy and the bitterness surrounding the two Purple Hearts he was awarded for military service in Vietnam.

Murtha is a retired marine and was the first Vietnam combat veteran elected to Congress. Since 1967, there have been at least three different accounts of the injuries that purportedly earned Murtha his Purple Hearts. Those accounts also appear to conflict with the limited military records that are available, and Murtha has thus far refused to release his own military records.

Refused to release his military records?? Is he running for president? Why on earth are we asking for someone’s military records of 40 years ago(!)? Maybe someone’s fishing for dirt? No, perish the thought.

No wonder Atrios always calls it “journamalism.” I know, CNS is a BS right-wing hate network, but not everyone is as smart as we are, and this will be all over the Net come tomorrow morning. Bastards.

Unlinkable, from Times Select.

Oprah! How Could Ya?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 14, 2006

The day we mourned a man whose life was devoted to clarity, this city was hidden in fog. You couldn’t see the Potomac, even on its bank.

There were many things to love about David Rosenbaum. He had a grin that always improved the weather. He was uncommonly generous to reporters he worked with and competed against. He was an exemplary husband, father, brother, uncle and grandfather.

But the truly astonishing thing about David, the Times reporter who was killed in a random robbery a week ago, was his unglamorous, unsanctimonious, unvain sort of goodness. He had a black-and-white

(more…)

Only it’s not working, because Taiwan doesn’t hate Japan with the all-consuming passion of the Mainlanders (a passion that’s been carefully nurtured by the state). Here’s how it works.

In a World War II anniversary speech to 6,000 dignitaries in Beijing last September, Chinese President Hu Jintao recalled the anti-Japan alliance between the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Party (KMT) before it fled to Taiwan, saying he would not tolerate Taiwan independence from China.

In October, Jia Qinglin, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, blamed Japanese rightwing forces for inciting current efforts to separate self-ruled, democratic Taiwan from China.

Jia claimed that people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should “feel proud” of the “exalted victory” that secured Taiwan’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule.

On Oct. 25, thousands of people attended a China National Museum exhibit marking the 60th anniversary of Taiwan’s return to China after 50 years of Japanese rule. Some museum visitors confessed they did not know China blames Japan for Taiwan’s current self-rule and hostilities toward Beijing.

China, in its push for China-Taiwan reunification, is increasingly attempting to win over Chinese citizens as well as Taiwan leaders by portraying Japan as a common enemy, Asia scholars say.

“Reminding the public on both sides of the strait about wartime history could perhaps be a way of reinforcing the view of Taiwan as an inalienable part of China that has been wrongly and forcefully kept separate from the motherland by Machiavellian foreign powers,” said William Hurst, a Chinese studies fellow at Oxford University.

The article looks at how Taiwan’s history with Japan differes from the PRC, and how the Taiwanese aren’t being won over. China is investing all this tike and effort into its campaign because it fears Taiwan will strengthen ties with Japan and the US, making life more difficult for the PRC.

One of my least favorite right-wing pundits gets the comeuppance he deserves. Sweet.

This could raise the discussion to a whole new level. I’m reserving judgement because no one knows what these laws will end up looking like, and whether they’ll be used as political ammunition to pump up the “China Threat” argument.

After hearing reports that American tech giants like Microsoft and Yahoo are abiding by Chinese law mandating Internet censorship, some irritated U.S. politicians are threatening to pass laws restricting such cooperation.

Rep. Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican, said Thursday that the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Human Rights, which he heads, will hold a hearing in early to mid- February. Smith has invited representatives from the U.S. State Department, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Google, and the international watchdog group Reporters Without Borders to speak.

The effort is designed to determine what can be done, either by legislative mandate or on a voluntary basis, to “dissociate a company from working hand-in-glove with a dictatorship,” Smith said in a telephone interview with CNET News.com.

A similar hearing is planned for Feb. 1 in the Congressional Human Rights Caucus said Ryan Keating, communications director for Rep. Tim Ryan, the Ohio Democrat leading the parallel effort. The caucus, unlike the human rights subcommittee, is an “informal” committee that is overseen by about 30 House members and includes a few hundred others, Smith among them, as supporting members.

As first reported by the Boston Globe, both Ryan and Smith are in the process of concocting new laws. These will likely take cues from recommendations issued by Reporters Without Borders and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a 12-member, congressionally-selected governmental panel.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders this week backed a law banning an American company from hosting an e-mail server in any “repressive” country. It’s also suggested that American corporations come up with a joint plan for how to handle censorship requests from foreign governments, including refusal to censor terms like “democracy” and “human rights.”

I’m for free trade and all. But we’re back to the question of limits – just how far do we go in “cooperating” with repellent regulations that go against our national principles? It’s going to be an emotional argument.

“If Yahoo isn’t doing business in China, someone else will,” said Sonia Arrison, director of technology studies at the free-market Pacific Research Institute. “It’s putting American businesses at a disadvantage in the world marketplace.” Arrison suggested that instead U.S. companies join together to present a unified front to the Chinese government.

[Rep. Christopher] Smith said there’s reason to worry about other countries as well. He recently traveled to Vietnam, where he had an emotional meeting with the family of a man serving a 13-year prison sentence. His crime? Translating an American document about democracy that he had downloaded from the Web.

U.S. companies should want no part in such behavior, he said: “The crime, I would submit, is committed by the countries themselves.”

This should be quite a show.

This is a subject of tremendous interest because it’s a key factor in the rural unrest that keeps surfacing to shed an ugly shadow on China’s dazzling economic success. It rasies all sorts of questions, including fundamental issues of how a nation – especially one that aspires to superpower status – deals with its underprivileged citizens whose lives are at risk due to accidents or disease. Will only the wealthy have access to medical care while the poor are left to die?

When Jin Guilian’s family took him to a county hospital in this gritty industrial city after a jarring two-day bus ride during which he drifted in and out of consciousness, the doctors took one look at him and said: “How dare you do this to him? This man could die at any moment.”

The doctors’ next question, though, was about money. How much would the patient’s family of peasants and migrant workers be able to pay – up front – to care for Mr. Jin’s failing heart and a festering arm that had turned black?

The relatives scraped together enough money for four days in the hospital. But when Mr. Jin, 36, failed to improve, they were forced to move him to an unheated and scantily equipped clinic on the outskirts of Fuyang where stray dogs wandered the grimy, unlighted halls.

China’s economic reforms have turned an almost uniformly poor nation into an increasingly prosperous one in the space of a mere generation. But the collapse of socialized medicine and staggering cost increases have opened a yawning gap between health care in the cities and the rural areas, where the former system of free clinics has disintegrated.

That’s just the beginning. It lends credence, via statistics, to the argument that one of Mao’s few successful achievements was socialized medicine, primitive though the “barefoot doctor” system may have been (especially compared to today’s high-tech medical wizardry). The dismantling of this system has been nothing less than catastrophic for the poor – a catastrophe that ranks right up there with China’s contaminated water.

This is just one of several ticking time bombs that the PRC has to deal with. I don’t envy them their task and I sympathize with the difficulty in handling such an immense crisis. But my sympathy only goes so far, because there’s no denying that for years and years they made the crisis worse and allowed it to crescendo to its present level, just like the pollution.

Update: Interesting twist on this story.

This article needs to be read in its entirety. It’s one of those where I kept looking for the right grafs to snip, but every one was equally blogworthy. Here’s my choice (but again, read the article, which begins with an eerie description of a once-outspoken blogger whom the state turned into an android-like jellyfish capable only of reciting Party talking points).

In today’s world, the effort to corral 1.3 billion Chinese and to sharply restrict their freedom of expression is a fool’s game. The best that can be said about it is that it is an enormous waste of energy. The worst is that the increasingly desperate efforts of censors are deeply harmful to China itself, not because they are a setback to any American pipe dream that China will become Westernized through the magic of capitalism, but harmful to China in an absolute sense, in the country’s own terms. By now almost everyone knows the theory that like many places before it, as China grows richer and per capita incomes rise, its citizens will demand a greater say in how they are governed, including first of all the freedom to speak and associate freely.

Nobody knows how or even whether this theory will be borne out, as it already has in countries all around China’s perimeter, like South Korea and Taiwan. What can safely be said is that in China a lively frontier of social and intellectual ferment that foreshadows the direction of the society as a whole is presently occupied by journalists and other kinds of commentators in the new media, and their numbers only stand to grow.

I still have powerful memories from the discovery as a child of the tyranny of literacy. Riding in the back of the family car on trips, once I had learned how to I found there was no way to avoid reading billboards and road signs that popped into view.

In the end, Beijing will not prove any more capable of stopping people from thinking and communicating their thoughts in real time about matters that are important to them, especially not in the age of the Internet. One small caveat: if somehow they can, they’ll destroy the country in the process, and gut much of the breathtaking progress made here in the last generation. Smart and talented people will always prefer to live in and wager their futures on places where they can think and speak freely. But just because emigration represents the ultimate option to China’s best and brightest, who will always be welcome in the universities and corporate labs and boardrooms of the world, does not mean resistance here will fizzle. For whatever the bad news of the week or month in terms of civil liberties in China, Big Brother is actually already shrinking, and the space for personal expression is expanding — constantly. By the standards of just five years ago, the availability of information and commentary on the Internet here is mind-boggling.

Via ESWN.

Taiwanese pigs glow in the dark.