The All-China Environmental Federation (ACEF), a government-backed NGO, is being urged to take legal action against the Shenhua group, one of China’s largest energy companies and also a member of the ACEF.
A subsidiary of the Shenhua group in Inner Mongolia has reportedly been discharging industrial wastewater into the Yellow River, threatening the water supply of Baotou City.
This special report is based on the 2013 China chapter of Freedom House’s annual Freedom on the Net survey. As the home of one of the most systematically controlled and monitored online environments in the world, China will no doubt retain its place among countries where Freedom House categorizes the Internet as Not Free. As the “Freedom on the Net 2012” survey noted, China increasingly serves as an incubator for sophisticated new types of Internet restrictions, providing a model for other authoritarian countries. Like all Freedom on the Net narratives, this report offers a comprehensive examination of three aspects of internet freedom: What prevents users from getting online? What can Internet users say and do? What are the repercussions for online activity?
The Chinese Communist Party’s commitment to curtailing Internet freedom was unwavering over the course of the leadership change that took place during the coverage period for this report, May 1, 2012, to April 30, 2013. If anything, the high-level meetings at which the handover was announced served as catalysts for tighter controls on content, measures to deliberately slow Internet traffic, and intensified harassment of dissidents, as the party’s propaganda and security agencies worked to eliminate any nascent political challenge. The Internet restrictions Freedom House documented this year were faster and more nuanced than ever before.
In a new report titled As Long As They Let Us Stay in Class: Barriers to Education for Persons with Disabilities in China, the New York-based non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) outlines systemic discrimination against students with disabilities in China’s schools and calls on the Chinese government to revise existing laws and regulations to make education accessible to all.
Barry Naughton:
The report, the first by Greenpeace to single out and publicly challenge one of China’s powerful state-owned companies, comes as the country’s new leadership steps up its focus on pollution amid growing protests over environmental degradation.
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“Nationalism is a very old concept, and it has become weaker during globalisation,” Ai told ARTINFO. “But from the Snowden incident, we can see that even if nationalism is weak, its power structures still exist.”
About 123,000 people were affected by the quake, with 31,600 moved to temporary shelters, the provincial earthquake administration said on its website. Almost 2,000 homes were completely destroyed, and about 22,500 damaged.
The new leadership has signalled it is prepared to tolerate slower growth to move the economy away from export-led growth and towards one driven by domestic demand, with 7 percent annual expansion seen as the bottom line.
A leaked document related to the recent G.S.K. scandal underscores the problems that can arise when major drug companies export their scientific development to emerging markets like China.
