China Chronicles January 21, 2013
- People's Square Shanghai
- 西湖边的美人
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- Privacy rules putting paid to private eyes
PRIVATE detective agencies, once members of a booming industry, are on the verge of collapse after China passed new rules that outlawed the ways they obtained information.
Many agencies have closed down after police launched a nationwide campaign against trading in personal information in December last year.
Police said that they had arrested 89 private detectives in Hubei Province during raids last Monday, and 74 in recent raids in Chongqing.
The detectives are accused of illegally obtaining or providing personal information after lawmakers passed new rules on December 28 to tighten online security and protect Internet users' privacy.
According to the rules, the country should protect digital information that could be used to determine the identity of a user or that concerns a user's privacy.
The rules ban organizations and individuals from illegally obtaining personal information, as well as prohibiting them from selling or providing the information to others. Violations can lead to confiscation of illegal gains, the loss of licenses and website closures.
In Shanghai, many agencies could not be reached on the phone numbers provided online while others announced that they had quit the business.
A Shanghai Daily reporter posing as a client called several companies, asking them to check his father's bank account details, but most said they could not. "It's not that we cannot get the information for you, but we dare not do that at this time point," said an official surnamed Xu with Shanghai Anbang Investigation Co.
A manager surnamed Chen with 007 Private Detective Co said it could do the job for a higher fee, about 5,000 yuan compared to the 2,000 yuan stated on its online price list.
But Chen said they could only track accounts from several specific banks as some sources had quit the business.
Last March, Shanghai Daily reported an increase in the number of detective agencies in the city offering "mistress-hunting" services for ! suspicious wives or husbands.
Those agencies were registered as consulting companies and due to the absence of laws to regulate them at that time, they traded in personal information.
An insider told the Wuhan Evening News that detective agencies were collapsing because police had cracked down on their information sources.
The man, surnamed Hu, told the newspaper the detectives had an online chat group where they could ask for anyone's private information and where sellers would state price.
"Those sellers are usually workers in the industries of telecom, real estate, banking or even government administrations. Some are even senior officials who can provide more detailed information," said Hu.
He said police had cracked down on the chat group and arrested some of the information sellers, which had caused the detection business to crash.
- Lanterns fly from low to high
People fly sky lanterns, also known as Kongming lanterns, at the Ayding Lake area in the Turpan basin in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region to celebrate the upcoming Spring Festival, which falls on February 10. The dry lakebed is about 155 meters below sea level, which makes it the world's second lowest point after the Dead Sea.
- Mainland treasures for Taiwan exhibition
CHINA'S mainland has agreed to lend exhibits for a major art exhibition in Taipei, the head of Taiwan's top museum said yesterday.
Feng Ming-chu, director of Taipei's Palace Museum, is flying to Beijing today, the first such trip since 2009 when the chiefs of the museum and of Beijing's Palace Museum made landmark exchange visits.
Feng will meet her mainland counterpart Shan Jixiang to discuss the loan of more than 30 artifacts from the museum, also known as the Forbidden City, for the October exhibition in Taipei.
"The Palace Museum in Beijing has agreed to our proposal for loaning artifacts," she said.
The exhibition, which will also include items from the Taipei museum, features the artistic tastes of Qianlong (1735-1796), an emperor in China's final Qing Dynasty.
"Hopefully the cooperation between the two museums will be further enhanced through the visit, following the 2009 ice-breaking exchange of visits by the curators of the two sides," Feng said.
The 2009 visits resulted in the loan of 37 works from the Beijing museum to the Taipei museum later that year.
It was the first joint exhibition by the two museums, highlighting warming relations between the mainland and Taiwan.
But the Taipei museum still has no plans to lend artifacts which were originally shipped from the mainland, fearing they would not be returned, Feng said.
The Taipei museum boasts more than 655,000 Chinese artifacts spanning 7,000 years from the prehistoric Neolithic period to the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.
They were removed from the Beijing museum in the 1930s by the then Nationalist government to prevent them falling into the hands of invading Japanese troops.
The collection was transported to Taiwan by the Nationalists more than 60 years ago after they were defeated by communist forces and fled the mainland.
Ties have improved markedly since 2008 when Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan's Kuomintang party came to power on a platform of strengthening trad! e and tourism links. He was re-elected last year for a second four-year term.
- Poor man kept alive by own dialysis invention
THREE times a week, Hu Songwen sits on a small toilet in his home in a rural east China town and fires up his homemade dialysis machine.
Hu, who has had kidney disease requiring dialysis for 20 years, built his own dialysis machine with medical equipment, such as a blood pump and plastic tubing. The crude device has sustained his life since he stopped going to the hospital 13 years ago. The machine removes waste products from his blood that aren't removed by his kidneys.
Hu was a college junior when he was diagnosed in 1993. After 6 years of treatment, hefty hospital bills depleted his family's savings.
"The cost for each home treatment is only 60 yuan (US$9.60), which is 12 percent of the hospital charge for dialysis," Hu said.
He mixes potassium chloride, sodium chloride and sodium hydrogen carbonate into purified water to make dialysis fluid before undergoing the procedure. The single man lives with his 81-year-old mother in Qutang township of Jiangsu Province.
Hu kept his home treatments a secret until July of last year, when he put a video of his procedure on the Internet. The footage became an online sensation after Hu's story was reported by the Southern Weekly last week.
Hu said the video was not intended to showcase his invention, but to get more suitable treatment. Hu said his machine can be dangerous. Two of his friends died after building and using similar machines.
Hu made the video after learning a nationwide rural cooperative medical insurance and a medical aid system are covering kidney disease.
The local government included him in October and the cost of each treatment should be 60 yuan, the same as his home treatment. Yet he is reluctant to switch, saying the nearest hospital is distant and very crowded.
- Beijing to release inequality index
BEIJING is the first city in China that plans to release its own income inequality index, a figure that for the nation exceeds the warning level set by the United Nations.
The city plans to release the figure, called a Gini coefficient, for 2012, a National Bureau of Statistics Beijing survey branch spokesman said yesterday.
Gini coefficient, or Gini index, uses a figure of 0 to represent equality and 1 inequality.
Xing Zhihong, the Beijing spokesman, said that China's statistics departments used to publish two indexes - the per capita disposable income of urban residents and the per capita net income of rural residents - to reflect income distribution.
"However, we will act according to the schedule of relevant departments and carry out a unified investigation into the income of both urban and rural residents, and publish the Gini number in a timely manner," Xing said.
According to original indexes, in 2012, per capita disposable income of urban residents in Beijing was 36,469 yuan (US$5,864). Per capita net income of rural residents was 16,476 yuan (US$2,650).
On Friday, China released the national index for 2012, saying that the Gini coefficient reached 0.474, higher than the warning level of 0.4 set by the United Nations. The national index has retreated gradually since peaking at 0.491 in 2008, dropping to 0.49 in 2009, 0.481 in 2010 and 0.477 in 2011.
"The statistics highlight the urgency for our country to speed up income distribution reforms to narrow the gap," Ma Jiantang, NBS director, said.
- Evidence may clear inmates jailed 16 years
FIVE people who have been in prison for 16 years will have their convictions reviewed in two robbery cases - one of which resulted in a death - after the discovery of new evidence.
The five inmates are serving sentences of life or death with reprieve in the robberies. A taxi driver was killed in 1995 in one of the cases.
The Zhejiang Province Higher People's Court said on its website on Saturday that five may have been wrongly convicted, and "the wrongs must be corrected."
Four people - Chen Jianyang, Tian Weidong, Wang Jianping and Zhu Youping - were sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve and the fifth, Tian Xiaoping, was jailed for life under a ruling of the higher court on December 29, 1997.
While the court didn't describe the new evidence, a law school deputy dean posted on Weibo that a bloody fingerprint found on the scene in 1995 has been matched to a sixth person who has been caught by police.
The information posted on Saturday by He Bing, deputy dean of the Law School of China University of Political Science and Law, sparked heated discussion online and national attention.
The court, which has not confirmed He's account, said it decided on January 4 to reinvestigate the cases.
It has organized a panel of judges to review the case files, investigate evidence and question the five inmates again. The result will be made public in a timely fashion, the court said.
The robbery of the taxi driver occurred in the Xiaoshan area of Hangzhou, capital city of eastern Zhejiang Province. The robberies happened on March 20 and August 12 of 1995.
The court said the new clue was related to the robbery case on March 20, 1995.
Also, two of them were convicted of stealing properties worth 1,600 yuan (US$257) the same year.
Many Internet users said if it turns out the five were wrongly imprisoned, it would be a serious case of injustice. "Who is to pay for the 16 years they were treated unjustly and unfairly," said Chen Yi, a Shanghai c! ollege student.
- what goes up, must come down
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Film wide : 9.30mm - China opposes US comments about Diaoyu Islands
China is firmly opposed to comments made by the United States about the Diaoyu Islands, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said today.
Qin was answering media questions relating to comments US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made on Friday.
Qin said, "We urge the US side to adopt a responsible attitude in regard to the issue of the Diaoyu Islands. It should be careful with its words, and act and maintain regional peace, stability and the general situation of China-US relations with practical actions and build credit with the Chinese people."
At a joint news conference with Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida in Washington, Clinton said the United States does not take a position on the ultimate sovereignty of the Diaoyu Islands.
However, she admitted that the Diaoyu Islands was under the administrative authority of Japan, saying the United States opposes any unilateral actions to undermine Japanese authority over the islands.
"The comments by the US side are ignorant of facts and indiscriminate of rights and wrongs," Qin said.
The United States cannot deny its historical responsibility on the issue of the Diaoyu Islands, Qin said, referring to the fact that despite opposition from China, the United States put the islands under the control of Japan after the World War II.
Qin said the Diaoyu Island and its affiliated islets have been the inherent territories of China, which is an undeniable fact backed up by historical records and international laws.
Qin said the primary source of persistent tension over the Diaoyu Islands lies with the Japanese government. He said Japan insisted on carrying out the wrongful action of purchasing some of the islands and continued to adopt escalating moves.
"This is yet another fact that cannot be covered up by any people," Qin said. - Zhengzhou airport departure
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