Death of Yangtze giant softshell turtle came a day after artificial insemination attempt
The world’s rarest turtle has moved closer to extinction after a female died in a Chinese zoo, leaving just three known members of the species.
The Yangtze giant softshell turtle, believed to be more than 90 years old, died in Suzhou zoo on Saturday, according to the Suzhou Daily.
Continue reading...Staff at Alibaba, Huawei and other well-known companies have shared evidence of unpaid compulsory overtime
Chinese tech employees have pushed back against a wave of protest over the industry’s notoriously long hours, known as the “996” schedule of working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.
For months, former and current employees of some of the country’s most well-known companies had been posting evidence of unpaid, often compulsory or heavily encouraged overtime on the code-sharing platform Github.
Continue reading...The post said the Zaha Hadid-designed buildings brought bad luck to tenants
A blog operator must pay $29,000 to a real estate developer for “defamation”, a Chinese court has ruled after alleging a building complex had bad energy.
Published on the WeChat social network in November, the text said an office complex in Beijing brought bad luck to its business tenants because it does not respect feng shui principles.
Continue reading...Mixed picture shows rebound in country’s exports, creating $32bn trade surplus in March
Chinese imports slumped in March, driven by a slowdown in US trade amid the tense standoff between Washington and Beijing, raising renewed questions over the strength of the Chinese economy.
Imports fell by 7.6% in March compared with a year earlier, worse than City economists’ forecasts for the volume of goods bought from abroad to grow by 0.2%.
Continue reading...Communist Youth League students to ‘spread civilisation’ in countryside and ‘promote technology’
China is planning to send millions of youth “volunteers” back to villages, raising fears of a return to the methods of Chairman Mao’s brutal Cultural Revolution of 50 years ago.
The Communist Youth League (CYL) has promised to despatch more than 10 million students to “rural zones” by 2022 in order to “increase their skills, spread civilisation and promote science and technology”, according to a Communist party document.
Continue reading...Photographer Zhang Kechun travelled across China to document how urbanisation is reshaping the country’s natural landscapes. The often dreamlike images of his series Between the Mountains and Water depict tiny figures dwarfed by the immense scale of China’s economic development
Continue reading...Cryptocurrency mining added to list of industrial activities Beijing wants to phase out
Related: Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies – what digital money really means for our future
China’s state planner wants to eliminate bitcoin mining in the country, according to a draft list of industrial activities the agency is seeking to stop in a sign of growing government pressure on the cryptocurrency sector.
Continue reading...Children, aged between one and six, are all Australian citizens and are separated from at least one of their parents
At least five Australian children are trapped in China, unable to return home because of the Chinese government’s crackdown on Uighur Muslims, the Guardian can reveal.
The children, who range in age from one to six, are all Australian citizens and come from three different families. They have been stuck in China for up to two years, and are all separated from at least one of their parents.
Continue reading...Forty MPs back effort before inquiry into allegations of forced organ harvesting
UK patients should be banned from travelling to China for transplant surgery, the government has been told, before an inquiry into allegations of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience.
The call has so far been backed by 40 MPs from all parties before the next session of the independent China tribunal, which is investigating claims that detainees are being targeted by the regime. China dismisses the allegations as malicious rumours and insists that it adheres to international medical standards that require organ donations to be made by consent and without any financial charges.
Opening a Westminster Hall debate last week, the DUP MP Jim Shannon urged the UK government to consider imposing an organ tourism ban like those already enacted by Italy, Spain, Israel and Taiwan.
“It is wrong that people should travel from here to China for what is almost a live organ on demand to suit themselves,” Shannon, the MP for Strangford in Northern Ireland, said. “It is hard to take in what that means – it leaves one incredulous.
“It means someone can sit in London or in Newtownards and order an organ to be provided on demand. Within a month they can have the operation.
“We need to control that structurally, as other countries have, not simply because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is necessary to protect UK citizens from unwittingly playing a role in the horrifying suffering of religious or belief groups in China.”
The China Tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC who was formerly a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, has been taking evidence about alleged mispractices from medical experts, human rights investigators and others.
It will hold a second round of hearings on 6 and 7 April in London. Its final judgment will be published on 13 June. China has been asked to participate but has declined to do so.
In an interim judgment released last December, the tribunal said: “In China forced-organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practised for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims … It is beyond doubt on the evidence presently received that forced harvesting of organs has happened on a substantial scale by state-supported or approved organisations and individuals.”
Among those killed, it has been alleged, are members of religious minorities such as Falun Gong, Tibetans, Uighur Muslims and some Christian sects. In 2014, China announced that it would stop removing organs for transplantation from executed prisoners.
It is not clear how many UK citizens have travelled to China for transplants. Waiting times for operations are said to be far shorter than in the west. One inquiry suggested that a liver transplant could be arranged privately at a Chinese hospital for $100,000.
Fiona Bruce, the Conservative MP for Congleton, who is also leading the campaign for a ban said during the Westminster debate: “Our government could inquire about the numbers of organ removals and their sources … They could reduce demand by banning organ tourism … This is not a case of a few voluntary organ transplants; it is a case of alleged mass killings through forced organ removal, of religious persecution, of grave allegations of crimes against humanity.”
Mark Field, the Foreign Office minister, acknowledged that there was a growing body of research, much of which was “very worrying” but he believed relatively few people in the UK chose to travel to China for organ transplants.
Introducing a travel ban, he said, would be difficult to police since it would be hard to establish whether people had travelled there for that purpose. Field said: “But, it is important that we make them aware that other countries may have poorer medical and ethical safeguards than the UK, and that travelling abroad for treatments, including organ transplants, carries fundamental risks.”
The Chinese embassy told the Guardian: “The Chinese government always follows the World Health Organization’s guiding principles on human organ transplant, and has strengthened its management on organ transplant in recent years. On 21 March 2007, the Chinese state council enacted the regulation on human organ transplant, providing that human organ donation must be done voluntarily and gratis. We hope that the British people will not be misled by rumours.”
It cited article 7 of its regulation on human organ ransplant, which says: “The donation of human organs shall be made under the principle of free will and free of charge. A citizen shall be entitled to donate or not to donate his or her human organ; and any organisation or person shall not force, cheat or entice others into donating their human organs.”
Article 8 of the regulation states: “The citizen donating his or her human organ shall have full competency in civil act … Any organisation or person shall not donate or remove any human organ of a citizen who has disagreed with the donation of any of his or her human organs while alive.”
China’s leaders have championed milk as the emblem of a modern, affluent society – but their radical plan to triple the nation’s consumption will have a huge environmental cost.
By Felicity Lawrence
Beijing-based film-maker Jian Yi, now 43, clearly remembers the arrival of fresh milk in his life. It was an image of it, not the real thing. “It was the 1990s, and I first saw it in an advert on TV. The ad said explicitly that drinking milk would save the nation. It would make China stronger and better able to survive competition from other nations.”
Like most ethnic Han, who make up about 95% of the population, Jian was congenitally lactose-intolerant, meaning milk was hard to digest. His parents did not consume dairy at all when they were growing up; China’s economy was closed to the global market and its own production very limited. Throughout the Mao era, milk was in short supply and rationed to those deemed to have a special need: infants and the elderly, athletes and party cadres above a certain grade. Through most of the imperial dynasties until the 20th century, milk was generally shunned as the slightly disgusting food of the barbarian invaders. Foreigners brought cows to the port cities that had been ceded to them by the Chinese in the opium wars of the 19th century, and a few groups such as Mongolian pastoralists used milk that was fermented, but it was not part of the typical Chinese diet.
Continue reading...Study suggests Brazil likely to rush to fill China’s sudden soy shortfall by boosting farming
The Amazon rainforest could be the greatest casualty of the trade war between the United States and China, warns a new study showing how deforestation pressures have surged as a result of the geopolitical jolt in global soy markets.
Up to 13m hectares of forest and savannah – an area the size of Greece – would have to be cleared if Brazil and other exporters were to fill the huge shortfall in soy supply to China that has suddenly appeared since Donald Trump imposed hefty tariffs, according to the paper published in Nature.
US exports of the commodity, primarily used to feed livestock, to China plummeted by 50% last year, which the authors say is an unusually sharp level of decline between two trading partners outside wartime.
The 22-year-old located with minor injuries a 90-minute drive from site of his abduction near Toronto
Canadian police have safely located a missing Chinese student, three days after he became the victim of a brazen stun-gun kidnapping at the hands of a violent gang.
Wanzhen Lu, 22, was found with minor injuries by police in Gravenhurst, Ontario, a city 180km (110 miles) north of Toronto on Tuesday evening.
Continue reading...European leaders and China’s Xi Jinping put on a show of unity in the face of US tariffs
Donald Trump was not on the guest list for Emmanuel Macron’s mini-summit in Paris, but the presence of the US president was still very much felt as Europe’s leaders sat down to talk trade, business deals and geopolitics with China’s Xi Jinping.
At one level, the message from the meeting of China’s leader with Macron, the German chancellor Angela Merkel and the European commission president Jean-Claude Juncker was obvious: this was a show of unity in the face of Trump’s tariffs aimed across both the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Continue reading...French president invited Angela Merkel to talks with Chinese leader in Paris
Emmanuel Macron has launched a charm offensive towards his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, talking of multilateralism and cooperation while tiptoeing around subjects such as human rights.
In a meeting during a bilateral three-day state visit to France, the French president took the unprecedented step of inviting the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, to Paris for the talks.
Continue reading...Police in Canada have made their first arrest in the case of a missing Chinese student, who was abducted in an armed kidnapping at the weekend.
Wanzhen Lu, 22, has not been seen since Saturday when three masked attackers attacked him with a stun gun in the city of Markham, Ontario, north of Toronto. A fourth person waited in a nearby vehicle.
Continue reading...Xi Jinping visits Rome as Italy becomes first G7 country to back Belt and Road initiative
Italy has become the first G7 country to endorse a contentious plan by China to build a Silk Road-style global trade network, irking its EU and US allies.
The prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MoU) that could lead to Italy’s participation in China’s Belt and Road initiative (BRI), an ambitious project that envisages Chinese investment in a network of infrastructure projects connecting Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
Continue reading...Donald Trump has announced that he is ordering the withdrawal of recently announced North Korea-related sanctions imposed by the US treasury department.
Related: North Korea warns US sanctions could derail plans to denuclearise
Continue reading...Bocelli to sing for China’s president as Italy becomes first G7 nation to back ‘Silk Road’ plan
Rome gave a lavish welcome to the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, his wife and entourage on Friday as Italy and China controversially pledged to strengthen trade and investment ties.
Xi is in the Italian capital on a two-day state visit, along with about 200 officials. He is expected to strike a range of deals worth up to €7bn and attend a gala dinner, where the tenor Andrea Bocelli will perform, during his visit.
Continue reading...Thousands of fossils date back to huge burst in diversity of life on Earth known as Cambrian explosion
A “mindblowing” haul of fossils that captures the riot of evolution that kickstarted the diversity of life on Earth more than half a billion years ago has been discovered by researchers in China.
Paleontologists found thousands of fossils in rocks on the bank of the Danshui river in Hubei province in southern China, where primitive forms of jellyfish, sponges, algae, anemones, worms and arthropods with thin whip-like feelers were entombed in an ancient underwater mudslide.
Continue reading...Women from Kachin minority are allowed to go home only if they leave baby behind, says HRW report
Burmese and Chinese authorities are turning a blind eye to a growing trade in women from Myanmar’s Kachin minority, who are taken across the border, sold as wives to Chinese men and raped until they become pregnant, a report claims.
Some of the women are allowed to return home after they have given birth, but are forced to leave their children, according to an investigation by Human Rights Watch, titled Give Us a Baby and We’ll Let You Go.
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