A Chinese Regulator Sentenced to Die 郑筱萸

A Chinese Regulator Sentenced to Die
By Simon Elegant / Beijing

For a Vice-Minister accustomed to running a branch of China's government as his own virtual fiefdom (an estate of land, especially one held on condition of feudal service), the sentence must have come as a surprise. On Tuesday, a Beijing court handed down a death penalty for Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), after he was convicted of dereliction of duty(shameful failure to fulfil one's obligations.) and accepting some $850,000 in bribes, according to local media reports. But while the severity of the sentence wasn't completely unprecedented(never having happened before)・several senior officials have been executed for corruption in recent years including a deputy minister in 2000・it was still a shocking illustration of how seriously Beijing took his crimes. While Beijing has cracked down on official corruption over the past 18 months, with several other senior officials caught up in the dragnet(a systematic search for criminals ), all of those arrested so far have received prison terms or still await sentencing. Hao Heping, another former official at the Food and Drug Administration, only received 15 years in prison for bribery in November last year.
Zheng, who was arrested in December, may to some extent be a victim of bad timing: Beijing is being bombarded( to attack sb. for a long time ) with criticism at home and abroad for its sometimes-fatal inability to regulate its food and medical industries. Chinese citizens have been inundated (to receive so much of something that you cannot easily deal with it all) with news stories about fake drugs and poisoned food products in recent years. In 2006, six people died and scores of others became ill after taking a contaminated antibiotic. Several years earlier, 300 babies fell gravely ill and more than a dozen died of malnutrition after being fed fake milk powder which had found its way onto market shelves. Indeed, the same day Zheng's verdict was announced, China's main quality control agency, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, announced it was launching its first recall system for unsafe food products, expected to be up and running by the end of the year.
Even worse for Zheng, China's regulatory problems have extended beyond the country's borders. More than 100 people in Panama were killed by Chinese-made cough medicine last year; in March, Chinese-made pet food ingredients containing the chemical melamine sickened or killed an untold number of animals and led to the recall of some 100 brands of pet food. With the world's spotlight is on Chinese efforts to improve its record on food safety, there's little doubt that the pressure of international embarrassment and death and illness at home added to the severity of Zheng's sentence.
But before you start feeling too sorry for Zheng, it's worth remembering that even in a country inured (to make someone become used to something unpleasant) to reports of official venality (corruption ), his case is particularly egregious(extremely bad and noticeable). Zheng almost singlehandedly supervised China's drug industry for over a decade before his retirement in 2005. Through astute (＝ clever) bureaucratic maneuvering(use strategy to gain an objective), he managed to have the SFDA removed from the supervision of the Ministry of Health in 2003, after which it became a powerful agency in its own right・leaving it effectively under his sole control. According to Xinhua, the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court said Zheng "sought benefits" for eight pharmaceutical companies by approving their drugs and medical devices. His actions "greatly undermined the integrity and the efficiency of China's drug monitoring and supervision, endangered public life and health and had a very negative social impact," the report quoted the court as saying. (It's unclear if Zheng will appeal.) Officials say the country's pharmaceutical industry is now in disarray(lack of order); many of the SFDA's senior officials are under arrest or investigation and virtually all previous decisions are being reviewed, leading to confusion and paralysis (the loss of the ability to move ). It may take years to sort out the mess created during Zheng's long tenure・and there will no doubt be further illnesses and deaths from tainted food and contaminated drugs in the meantime.



My comment:
It is really both good and bad news for me. The negative fact is there are still many officials corrupting to the core, and the sentence of Zheng may have very limited effects for them who are ignoring all laws and rules. Though Zheng’s sentence is a positive sign for the government to really be aware of the situation and deal it properly. The biggest challenge is how to handle millions of cases of venality and dereliction of duty and try to gain back the trust and confidences of normal citizens. According to conficus, the most respected Chinese philosopher, there are two aspects to achieve success in managing a country, good economy, strong defense, and the confidence of people. (足食，足兵，民信 -论语·颜渊)

Maybe, the problem is inherent in the initial developing stage of every country. The transformation of last 30 years in China took more than 100 year somewhere else. The speed of social economic transformation outpaces the regulatory system. The problem will go away naturally after the mature of economic and political system. I still don’t know the answer of the Chinese government yet. However, I believe Beijing will take the effective strategy to handle the crisis, as it also did for the last 50 years, during which we faced much more severe crisis coming from home and outside.

Can Yi JIanlian Learn to Love Brauts and Beer?

Posted by Bill Powell Comments (4) Permalink Trackbacks (0) Email This
I don't want to say I feel sorry for Yi Jiianlian, the Chinese basketball star who was just the sixth pick in the NBA draft--the guy after all will soon be a multi, multi millionaire--but he's obviously depressed at the thought of playing in Milwaukee for the Bucks, the team that picked him. There are apparently just 27,500 Asian Americans who live in the metro area. The NBA rumor mill has Yi's agent already working on a deal that would send him to the Golden State Warriors, which would obviously make him MUCH happier, or perhaps to the Philadelphia 76ers. Anyway, here's Yi responding to a question at a post draft press conference about where he was drafted. The lack of enthusiasm couldn't be more obvious.
Q: There have been media reports saying you’re not too interested in the Milwaukee Bucks, but with this outcome what do you think you’re going to do. Are you going to request being traded off or are you going to stay on with this team?
A: I don’t really know much about the Milwaukee Bucks, I didn’t get to see a lot of their games in China, neither have I been to their city, which is why I don’t really know much about this team. I haven’t seen their training nor have we been in contact, so I’m not too sure yet. I will certainly be focusing on the China National Team.

Viewing the Anniversary Party From Afar

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A scholar in Guangzhou recently told me that 30 years ago journalists went to Hong Kong to try to figure out what was happening in Beijing, now you go to Beijing to figure out what's happening in Hong Kong. I moved to Beijing last week, and I can say that that statement is far from true. But it does point to some realities, like how much more important a role Beijing plays in determining Hong Kong's future. So what was the message one gets in Beijing after watching Sunday's celebrations of the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to China? Perhaps it is best summed up in the line that Hong Kong pop star Andy Lau sang: "Let the world know we are all Chinese." Of course, if you ask a Hong Konger traveling abroad where he or she is from, the first response will most likely be Hong Kong, not China. And Hong Kong people traveling to the mainland still say they are "going to China." A series of polls by Hong Kong University points to that complicated sense of identity. It doesn't seem like such a bad thing; such a distinct town is bound to have a distinct identity. But even from Beijing it's clear the government is concerned about making China not just a tag on Hong Kong's address, but the core of its mindset. That was the point Yan Xuetong, director of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, made in TIME's recent coverage of the handover anniversary. "Hong Kong is still regarded as a special place of China, still regarded as a foreign country," he says. "Hong Kong has returned in name, but not in substance."
On a related note, this week's TIME has one more piece on the anniversary, a viewpoint by Next Media boss Jimmy Lai considering the past 10 years and looking forward to the next 10.

English Spoken Here (Sort Of)

Posted by Liam Fitzpatrick Comments (58) Permalink Trackbacks (0) Email This
Last week, Hong Kong’s main English-language paper ran a story on the declining pass rates of senior high school English exams, which have hit a 12-year low, even if they are still in the region of 75%. It considered this news important enough for a front-page lead.Whenever evidence has emerged of the declining use of English in Hong Kong since the end of British rule, there have been plenty of people – wealthy, Anglophone expatriates mostly – unable to deal with the fact. Around the breakfast tables of Southside homes, on the decks of weekend pleasure cruisers, they will say, condescendingly, that if the Hong Kong Chinese lose the ability to speak English well, Hong Kong will lose its “international competitiveness” and become – the horror! – “just another Chinese city.” I’m sure the last Romans had similar attitudes, as they watched the ragged hordes swarm through the gates uttering barbarous vernaculars (or, in our case, Cantonese and Mandarin). Don’t misunderstand me. I love the English language, I make my living by writing it. I’m not criticizing it as a language. But any attempt to interpret its declining use in Hong Kong as a sign of cultural, social or economic decay is plainly insulting.Does anyone say that Tokyo’s future is gravely imperiled because few Japanese speak English? Are Bangkok or Seoul living in some sort of irreversible isolation because the locals aren’t walking around quoting Byron and Keats?Hong Kong people are tired of speaking English. To many here, it has simply been the colonizer’s language and they greet its declining importance with unrestrained joy. Being a mercantile sort of place, Hong Kong will continue to speak enough English for the purposes of foreign trade, but why should it speak more? And besides, most trade these days is carried out with China.After 150-odd years of colonial rule, Anglophones are unhappy with the fact that they can no longer use English to address the shop assistant, the electrician, the caddy or whichever menial it is, and expect to be understood in every case. Only they can’t decently complain about a thing like that. So instead, they complain about Hong Kong’s declining “international competitiveness,” when what they really should be doing is signing up for Chinese classes.

Laws and the Real World

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Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty
Two events last Friday worth mentioning. The the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, passed a new labor law whose aim, in part, was to improve conditions faced by the country's 100 (or up to 150 depending on who's counting) million migrant workers. roughly at the same time, a mob of hired thugs attacked a group of 300 striking migrant workers in Guangdong province. The workers had been protesting at the Dongyuan County Lankou Hydropower Station construction site over 5 million renminbi (about $800,000) in unpaid salary. This was no minor roughing up, either. The attack left one worker fighting for survival, two missing, and six remaining in serious situation in the hospital. "The first batch of about 50 gangsters came with spades in their hands, and the second batch had axes, steel pipes and sabres, and there were more behind them," the Chongqing Morning Post quoted Liu Gangqing, one of the migrant workers, as saying. "They didn't stop lashing out at us even when the police arrived," said another migrant worker Li Chuanbing. For mirgant workers this sort of incident is all too common --as is the withholding of wages. China's construction minister apparently only learnt about the incident from the internet, which is a sad but accurate commentary on the state of supervision of workers rights by the government. It also underlines that, unfortunately, these sorts of attacks probably won't be affected at all by the new law. It's about enforcement, not legislation.

Sorry, I Can't Find Your Continent on This List

Posted by Liam Fitzpatrick
We were sitting on a friend’s rooftop the other night, sipping wine and celebrating her 30th, when David, a fellow guest, and co-owner of a fabulous Hong Kong restaurant called Aqua, told me that he’d hired a chef who used to work at Tetsuya’s in Sydney. David seemed quite proud of this, but I didn’t know how to receive the news because any of David’s chefs could – in the lovely parlance of the English streets – “have” any of Tetsuya’s boys any day, and I told him so. He probably thought I was high, or being polite, because Tetsuya’s is desirably foreign and Aqua is merely local, and because the person of chef Tetsuya Wakuda is cloaked in the mantle of minor celebrity and David’s chefs are not. Or then again, perhaps it’s because Tetsuya’s is currently at number five on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants List, and David’s isn't even in the footnotes.But that’s my point. Have you seen this list? Does it seem strange to you that the only Asian restaurant to have made it this year is that stuffy old tandoori place in the New Delhi Sheraton, which, for some deeply messed-up reason only known to the compilers, was adjudged the best restaurant in Asia? A Sheraton hotel restaurant is the very best this entire continent – with its ancient and multifarious culinary traditions and two-thirds of humanity – can do? This is from a list that is billed as “the most credible indicator of the best places to eat on Earth.”Ever get the feeling you’re being patronized?The world’s best restaurants do not, apparently, include any Japanese restaurant in Japan. There’s rien in mainland China, nyet nichevo in the culinary capitals of Hong Kong and Singapore. Sweet f.a. in Bangkok, Saigon, Seoul and KL. So sorry, Asian people. Excusez-moi, Monsieur petit Asian Chef.Which restaurants are on the list? Well, what a surprise, there’s a dozen from France (tired looking places with names like Les Ambassadeurs and Troisgros); seven from the UK (the gouty Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, the counterfeit Chinese Hakkasan); eight from the U.S. and there’s even one from Belgium. Pause to take that in for a moment. Belgium out-cooks East Asia.A fatwa upon the publishers of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants List. May they meet with raving Chinese waiters, chopper-wielding sushi chefs and fistfuls of msg everywhere they go.

The New Chinese Dialectic

Posted by Simon Elegant
Xinhua News Agency
Our Beijing Bureau colleague Jodi Xu writes:
China's National Tourism Administration published a list last week of the "most disgusting habits of Chinese tourists." The list was compiled after an online poll, during which as many as 3 million Chinese visited the webpage and contributed their ideas. The result (with accompanying cartoons) read like this:
1. Spitting and nose blowing in public;
2. Smoking in non-smoking areas; coughing in public without covering their mouths;
3. Cutting in line and pushing past the elderly the handicapped and pregnant women;
4. Speaking loudly on phone in public;
5. Graffiti and other marking of historical sites and public facilities;
6. Throwing things at animals in zoos or feeding animals with unsuitable food;
7. Inappropriate public dress (yes, this does mean pajamas, but also singlets and bare chests)
No great surprises, but it does make for an interesting --and surprisingly frank-- self-assessment. Of course, this kind of self-criticism is all too familiar to Chinese, especially the older generation. Chairman Mao started the idea of “Criticism and Self-criticism” at the Communist Party’s 7th National Congress in 1945 and after more than half a century, Chinese have become pretty good at it. There is another familiar phrase in the Communist lexicon, Guanche Luoshi (贯彻落实), which means "to put into practice and carry out." We'll have to see whether that one proves quite as popular.

What's Needed to Solve China's Safety Crisis

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Joe Kahn of the New York Times has an interesting piece in today's newspaper about the safety of Chinese products. He compares China today to the U.S. at the turn of the century, noting that the Food and Drug Administration was created in 1906 in response to a series of scandals over shoddy and dangerous products. The focus of the Made in China story (see here for our most recent and relatively U.S.-centric take) is now shifting to the measures China is taking to address its regulatory problems. I spoke to a number of people recently about this issue and they all repeatedly stressed that they believed the government was extremely eager to address this issue and doing its best to put the right regulations in place. They were equally unanimous in their opinion that the process will take time. One of the strangest things about China's transformation in the last two decades has been the way processes that took centuries elsewhere were telescoped by the unprecedented speed of change and sometimes seemed to happen overnight. That's not going to happen with the government's attempts to striaghten out China's regulatory mess. Listen to Henk Bekedam, who heads the World Health Organization office in China. Bekedam says that reform of the regulatory system has been underway for some time but that there is still a long way to go. China will "get it right at the central level but it will take a while before things get better for the country as a whole."He says many of the safety issues that plague both China's food and pharmaceutical industries arise from institutional problems and institutions take notoriously long time to change.
"There is no government in the world that can be present at every step along the way where things are being produced. The most important thing is to strengthen the whole system, the suppliers must be certified, the workers and inspectors must be qualified. It's the same with manufacturing. The distributors and wholesalers and even the outlets must have basic qualifications. China now has bits and pieces of that system but it is not consistent and that makes the system very vulnerable." Bekedam, a genial Dutch physician, says the sheer number of small manufacturers in China that have grown up during the last two boom decades make the problem much worse. In the pharmaceutical sector, for example, there are about 5000 small companies making drugs, which is "far too many. China has pretty good laws but it's troublesome to follow them up" with so many companies out there. "It's one thing to have a law, another to enforce it," particularly in rural areas, where the central government's say is weakest.
The WHO official also cites a problem that seems to be regularly mentioned in this blog: lack of transparency. It's better to acknowledge the problems exist "even if you have to go through a rough time and admit things were wrong." Take counterfeit drugs for example. "When they get these accusations, (the government) I know they really investigate them and go for the culprit." But in one case he is familiar with, the initial response despite successfully identifying the guilty parties was "don't talk about it. It was like pulling teeth getting it out of them. And this was something they should have come out and said themselves."
As noted here earlier, the government is deeply conflicted about how to handle the useful but too often peskily independent media. Obviously, if they let Chinese reporters do their job and dig up the details about who is behind the factories manufacturing the poisonous toys/drugs/food etc they'd make a big, big start towards attacking the problem. But then, who knows what else might turn up in the process? Better to stay silent....