China's Education Obsession

The last few weeks have seen some disturbing news reports coming from China with one common theme: education.

A student sues his own father for being unable to provide tuition fees.  Another father with sky-high medical bills kills himself so that his son can go to college. Most recently, a father has refused to pay his daughter's tuition fees because he thinks that a degree in modern China is worthless.  Events took are more worrying turn this week when an explosion outside a school in Guilin that killed two was a reportedly a suicide bomb detonated by a parent whose child had his application turned down.

The Chinese education system in it's current state is woefully inadequate.  Parents put their children under enormous pressure to do well at school, spending money on private tutors, coaching sons and daughter with mock exams and spending a small fortune relocating closer to the school when exam time roll around.  The reasons that parents are so obsessed with getting their child through the best schools and university is a mixture of social and economic pressures.

The one child policy certainly heaps on the pressures for the child.  With little in the way of social security, parents rely on their children to support them in their dotage.  Previously, the financial burden was shared among three or four children, is now the responsibility of a solitary son or daughter.  The parents themselves more than likely had their own education cut short during the late sixties during The Cultural Revolution when schools and universities closed so that the masses could dedicate themselves to studying Mao Zedong Thought.

Routinely told that the only way out of poverty is through education, the industry is a cash cow for those who can scrape together the tuition fees.  Those who don't score enough on their gaokao to be rewarded with a place at a state subsidized university have to take their chances with the many fly-by-night schools that have been set up by dodgy operators who sell worthless qualifications to the uneducated rural population.

"The simpler they are, the more likely they would be fooled by us. The clever ones don't fall for it so easily," he said.

"We are a private enterprise and not really a college. Strictly speaking, it is a company. We attract the students and get their fees and send them on their way. We don't teach them anything and the college doesn't really care.

"The pressure on these kids is huge. Families would sell their cows and pigs, even their houses. That's the price of education. The city kids won't fall for this. They are more informed and know what's going on.

"Some of the rural kids don't even know what a computer looks like. You think they could learn software programming and desktop publishing? The teachers aren't interested and the college doesn't care about them."

Filmmaker Weijun Chen also followed the fortunes of a recent graduate, Wan Chao as he tries to make it in the big city.  Freshly graduated, he trawls the job fairs in Wuhan, taking a number of menial offices positions.  In one job interview, he says that his ambition in life is just to survive in the city.  Wan is one of the 7 million graduates that enter the job market every year, with only 35% managing to find a job in their final year of study.  The postgraduates do even worse, with only 26% signing a contract before they graduate.

Complicating matters further is the messy hukou system that prevents many economic migrants to first tier cities from access to social benefits that their Beijing or Shanghai born compatriots enjoy.  With many graduate pinning their hopes on securing a job with a state owned company, discrimination by the SEO's favours the Han Chinese more than any other ethnic group.

The problem of finding graduates a job has attracted the attention of Xi Jin Ping, without jobs and without enough income to provide for the families, there's a strong possibility of more "social instability".  At a job fair in Tianjin in May, he chatted with a number of students, helpfully shifting blame from the central government by reminding everyone that unemployment was a global problem, and that only economic development could provide graduates with the jobs they demand.

Attempts at reform have been made and shelved, guidelines are issued and then never followed.  The education system, and those that profit from it are understandably reluctant to instigate any real change for the time being.  When plans were announced in August that the amount of homework pupils would have to do would be officially restricted to allow students develop more practical skills, howls of derision collected on Weibo.  People reflected that they heard the same thing when they were at school, and there were calls from celebrities for the education ministry to stop micromanaging education, and let the teachers decide what was best for their students.

Corruption, like most industries in China, is rife - to the extent that officials in Shanghai warned high school teachers that they shouldn't even accept gifts from parents on Teacher's Day.  Even to get a place in an elementary school needs a couple of backhanders here and there, as a piece in the New York Times illustrated last year

Zhao Hua, a migrant from Hebei Province who owns a small electronics business here, said she was forced to deposit $4,800 into a bank account to enroll her daughter in a Beijing elementary school. At the bank, she said, she was stunned to encounter officials from the district education committee armed with a list of students and how much each family had to pay. Later, school officials made her sign a document saying the fee was a voluntary “donation.”

For one reason or another, the poor end up getting the roughest deal, let down by a system purportedly set up to level the playing field for every student.  As more and more parents shun the Chines system, preferring to have their children take SATs to send their kids overseas, there's growing disillusionment with what the education system can provide the next generation.  Top graduates at Peking University are going one better and pulling their children out of state high school, opting to homeschool instead.  Once the flagship of Communist meritocracy, education in China today has little to show for itself, except an impressive list of statistics.  The education system as it stands teaches children little, except to put their faith in bribery and graft.

Bo Xi Lai: Optimism on Trial

Cynics get a bad press, and nowhere is cynicism more prevalent than in China.

Almost daily, stories of some government official or other taking backhanders in a property development, giving his son or daughter a job they’re woefully underqualfied to do, endless tales of sexual abuse, impropriety and an assortment of other scandals could wear down even the sunniest of optimists.

The brazen twofacedness of Chinese politicians could break the spirit of Lei Feng himself, the passive aggressiveness of Chinese foreign policy apparently does more to contribute to Chinese development that global development and does nothing to secure China as a the world power that it pretends it is.

China is a country with problems, it's very true, and the Party has done much to make sure that the idea that the Communist Party and only the Communist Party can solve these problems (given enough time) has become firmly ingrained in the psyche of the average Zhou.

Thus the message of the leadership is that Chinese people should be optimistic about their future, and the future of their country, because the Chinese Communist Party is doing everything it can to improve the country, raise the people out of poverty, and put them on the right path to a socialist Shangri-La. And it’s the mindless optimism is exactly what China's problem is.

During The Cultural Revolution, everyone was paid a set amount of money regardless of the work that they did, and farmers dutifully went out into the fields and did absolutely no work, leaving the crops to fail and being paid for the privilege. These days the Chinese have more food than they can stomach, but it’s a famine of innovation that is plaguing the country. Copyright laws are flaunted, and opportunistic snake oilers copy Western ideas and products, knocking them out under substandard quality control, selling them for half the price of their western counterparts, and running off with the cash.

Confident that things will improve by themselves, the optimist contributes little, relies on the status-quo, and retires, happy that a days work has meant a days pay, and that the family has been provided for. The cynic recognizes the problems, the delays and the obstacles and work hard to overcome them, confident that at the end of it, there’ll be a bigger pay off that the optimist could ever dream of.

Writing in The Guardian, Julian Bagnini espoused the virtues of the cynical,

Perhaps the greatest slur against cynicism is that it nurtures a fatalistic pessimism, a belief that nothing can ever be improved. There are lazy forms of cynicism of which this is certainly true. But at its best, cynicism is a greater force for progress than optimism. The optimist underestimates how difficult it is to achieve real change, believing that anything is possible and it's possible now. Only by confronting head-on the reality that all progress is going to be obstructed by vested interests and corrupted by human venality can we create realistic programmes that actually have a chance of success. Progress is more of a challenge for the cynic but also more important and urgent, since for the optimist things aren't that bad and are bound to get better anyway.

China watchers have gotten a bad press during the trial of Bo Xi Lai, dismissing the whole thing as a scripted show trial that nothing good will come off.  It's easy to take the side of cynic with this one.  After writing a few self-criticisms and saying that they were really quite sorry for what happened, many of them have been let off the hook.  A few token sackings have been issued to keep the junior officials on their toes, but, by and large, the scandal has been limited to a few key players, with nothing of the reform that many believed would take place under Xi Jin Ping's governance.

One of the key factors in this almost universal dismissal is that the trial really isn't aimed at Chinese people.  To a certain degree, the whole thing is a PR event, you would be something of an optimist to believe that anyone is getting a fair trial in China, one just has to look at the ongoing debacle surrounding Li Tianyi's rape case to see that.

Bo's trial serves the Party in two ways.  In the first, it is intended to show-off the transparent nature of the usually opaque Chinese legal system to the outside world.  News coverage has been to tightly controlled to allow anything beyond the terse courtroom transcripts being published in the Chinese media.  Even though the proceedings were being tweeted via the Jinan court's Weibo account, no discussion was allowed, and comments on the news feed have been disabled.  Rule of law has been notoriously difficult to come by in China, and foreign companies love complaining about how difficult it is to do business.

By showing that not even high level officials like Bo are above the law (although when news broke of Wen Jia Bao's wealth in the New York Times, the newspapers website was promptly blocked in the mainland) the Chinese government seeks to placate investors wary of ploughing money into something that might get spirited away in some dodgy pyramid scheme involving property in Monaco.  Venture capitalists take risks for a living, but in a place that seems to offer no legal protection, not a penny will be spent on expanding a western brand into China.

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Secondly, the trial is intended to send the message to party cadres that corruption is a problem, and if you're in the wrong place at the right time, then you could end up in the dock.

Editorials from state-run media in China have been suggesting that eradicating graft entirely isn't possible, promoting the idea that the "level of corruption" should be brought down to a level acceptable to the public.  The Global Times editorial that drew most fire from China watchers was called (after a couple of revision by QQ.com to sex it up a little) The Public Should Understand that China Must Permit Moderate Corruption:

There is no way in any country to “root out” corruption. Most critical is containing it to a level acceptable to the public. And to do this is, for China, especially difficult.…  The public must also understand … the objective fact and reality that China has no way of entirely suppressing corruption without sending the whole country into pain and confusion. Fighting corruption is a difficult task in China’s social development. But its victory relies at the same time on the elimination of other obstructions in other areas of battle. China can’t conceivably be in a situation where it is a country behind in all other areas, but where its officials are really clean. Even if that were possible, it would not be sustainable.

Threatening the general public with the idea that graft is the lifeblood of China, and without it a return to the bad old days of civil war, famine and rule by warlords didn't win any popularity competitions with the Chinese people on Weibo either. Some users wryly noted that after moderate corruption receives the stamp of approval from the Politburo, moderate murder will be next.

Shanghai based journalist Adam Minter ended his analysis of the furor that followed the publication of the editorial by pointing out that no one had actually defined what "moderate corruption" was, leaving plenty of wiggle room for any politicians unfortunate enough to have people like Wang Li Jun as friends.

That the trial has apparently drawn so much in the way of cynical coverage is a testament to the international misfires of the Chinese government when it comes to promoting itself overseas.  While they've had plenty of practice selling the idea of Communist leadership pretty successfully to the Chinese, by their nature, western journalists are cynical.

Given enough prodding, some politicians will end up in front of a judge, there are a myriad other failings that the Chinese government is yet to even admit to.  Getting a politician like Bo Xi Lai to admit to taking backhanders while parents in Sichaun and still trying to get a straight answer out of officials who sanctioned the tofu building that so quickly collapsed with a massive earthquake hit the province in 2008 is quite simply too little, too late.  The failures of leadership and and the repeated lack of accountability by the CCP, accompanied by Soviet-era references to Marxism, Maoism and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics has done little to engender trust between foreign journalists and Chinese officials, and even less to bolster the image of the Chinese abroad.

The Chinese are past masters as manipulating fears and propagating their own noble crusades against unseen enemies that, according to them, seek to destroy the core values that every patriotic Chinese person holds dear.

Previously, the CCP has sought legitimacy by reminding people that things are much better these days than they were before.  Exploiting the bitter memories many have of the invasion by the Japanese and other foreign powers, while at the same time, making sure that everyone knows who it was that lifted the Chinese people out of abject poverty to become the world's second largest economy.  Embracing propaganda campaigns that are more borrowed from George Bush and his neoconservatives than from Mao, represent a more cynical move forward than the pessimistic step backward that many of Bo Xi Lai's supporters would've approved of.

 

Rough Justice for China's Migrant Workers

China's migrant workers power the country's economy - working in shopping malls, factory production lines, expat bars and a myriad other diverse, low paid occupations. They help increase urbanization, seen by the government as a key factor in economic growth. Typically moving from villages and small towns outside the major cities, they travel to major cities, taking menial jobs and sending their wages back home. Recently, however, it's become apparent that these much-needed workers are on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, and seemingly are regarded as second class citizens in China's emerging class system.. Lacking any qualifications, and often  naive to the power-plays that have evolved in China's major economic and political hubs.

Earlier this year, Yuan Li Ya fell, or as some would have it, was pushed off the roof of a shopping mall in Beijing's Fengtai district. Officially recorded as a suicide, video footage emerged, along with accusations that the 22-year-old had been gang raped by six or seven security guards working at the mall.

Accusations of a police coverup, and general discontent stemming from the less than stellar treatment that migrant workers receive in the cities, culminated in a protest by workers from outside the city demanding answers from the Beijing authorities that brought the south of the city to a standstill. No answers were forthcoming, the local media doing little more than posting police briefings. The girl's family was eventually paid off with 40,000rmb, little consolation to Li Ya's cancer stricken father for the loss of his daughter.

On August 7th, a similar case was reported in Shenzhen, where a 13-year-old child had all allegedly fallen by accident from the roof of a factory dorm where she was apparently living with four other men. Since the legal working age in China is 16, questions were almost immediately being asked about what exactly the girl was doing sharing a dorm with four other men in a factory complex.

Local police have said that there had been no evidence of sexual assault, but questions still remain as to how the girl ended up in the factory, since she wasn't visiting friends, and how she came to fall out of the window to her death. Her father said that she had argued with a couple of other girls in the complex over laundry, there was nothing to indicated that the girl was suicidal.

Suicides aside, other cases, including the fire at a Jinan poultry factory highlight the low regard in which rural workers are held in. The fire, China's worst since 2000, claimed 119 lives, and injured over sixty other workers, who said that the emergency fire doors had been securely locked, leaving people on the factory floor no escape route. While accidents like this are on the decline, when they do happen, factory owners are often left unpunished.

Bar staff are particularly at risk from abuse, let alone the girls who find work as prostitutes in the pricey bars favoured by the sons of Beijing's elite. Commenting, like everyone else in the Chinese blogosphere, on Li Tian Yi, currently standing trial in Beijing for in yet another high-profile gang rape trial, Tsinghua University law professor Yi Yan You drew the wrath of Weibo by saying it was better to rape a bar girl than it would be to rape "a good woman". Presumably, a good woman being one who doesn't work for a living or get married to money. According to Yi, girls who work in bars area more likely to consent to sex than those fine, upstanding women like Gu Kai Lai, who probably don't get laid nearly as often, but definitely spend more time in prison.

Often both parents leave their rural home town in order to provide for their families, traditionally leaving their children in the care of their grandparents. Charity organizations estimate that 37% of all children living rural areas have parents working in a major city away from home. Reports have emerged of the sexual abuse that these "left behind children" suffer.

One such case in Ruichang, Jiangxi provoke national outrage in the press and in social media around the country. A teacher was arrested for molested seven pupils in his class, leaving them with STDs. In May this year, eight cases of sexual abuse were reported in a space of 20 days. Lack of any kind of sex education compounds the problem.

Speaking to the BBC, Wang Xingjuan, founder of the Maple Women's Psychological Counselling Centre said that "Some children are molested when they are about seven or eight, but they don't realise that they have been abused", observes. They are not comfortable with the situation; they are afraid and they know there is something wrong, but they put up with it". When faced with giving a sex ed class, many teachers do the bare minimum, and some even ask the students just to read their textbook at home. The legal code as it stands is far too lenient, providing little in the way of deterrent for would-be offenders. Having been found guilty of molesting four girls, a school principal recently had his sentence increased by six months to three years.

Numbering 262.6 million, the migrant worker population is something that the Politburo can ill-afford to ignore. The government has tried to placate them by announcing changes to make the draconian hukou system a little more flexible to allow people to work outside their home province and enjoy some social benefits.  In truth, the hukou is merely a membership card to a less than exclusive club.

It is, to say the least, not the most ideal of situations, especially considering the amount of blood that was shed supposedly in the name of the Chinese rural poor.  The communist system ideologically set out to ensure that all men are born equal, but the downtrodden migrant worker class in China is quickly finding out the hard way that some are born more equal than others.

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Human Traffic: China's Baby Sellers

A short sighted attempt at curbing China's exploding population has seemingly had more disastrous side effects than actual benefits.  Officially, the child trafficking problem in China is under control, and while there's patchy data to back that claim up, cases that outrage Chinese netizens emerge on a disturbingly regular basis.

Since the news broke of a Chinese doctor selling babies from her own maternity department there have been reports of nearly 55 similar cases, half of which involved the same doctor.  Her clients were willing to make just over three and a half thousand dollars for a child - she would dupe to parents into believe that their unborn children had serious health issues, congenital birth defects before passing the newborns to their new parents.

Despite repeated government crackdowns, the crime still persists, and in a testament to the size of the problem, more than 54,000 children have been rescued and 11,000 trafficking gangs “smashed” since 2009.  Previously, criminal gangs would focus on snatching young children, usually boys, from their homes and selling them on.  The new scandal, which implicates Zhang Shu Xia, the deputy head of the maternity department, compounds the distrust that Chinese people already have for the medical establishment.

The meager wages that government officials, including doctors, earn pushes the people who, in other countries, would be respected pillars of the community to commit such crimes.

Local family planning organization have been known to keep tabs on families that already have one child, and are rumored to be expecting another, snatching the babies soon after they are born - the profits raised help to fill the coffers that the officials plunder.  Spending most of their times wandering around neighborhoods looking for baby clothes hanging on washing lines, and checking for unregistered newborns, the baby trade is a lucrative one, and one that down on their luck local officials can't resist.  The government crackdowns have forced up the prices for illegally traded children, the going rate being about 90,000rmb.

The high prices and almost limitless supply and demand often means that the gangs, usually based in rural areas enjoy the protection of the officials whose nests they feather.  It's in such areas where the flow of babies for sale is difficult to stem. Orphanages rarely check where the children come from, and DNA samples aren't routinely taken.

A useful revenue stream for the orphanage, traffickers make good money selling through for illegal international adoptions. Scott Tong reported on the moneymaking scheme for Marketplace.org: "To meet the demand, Duan says he enlisted his wife and sisters to locate more babies. They started buying infants from a supplier in Guangdong province 600 miles away. They say this woman systematically collected unwanted babies from local hospitals."

This weekend, Chinese police succeeded in tracking down and rescuing twin girls, allegedly sold by Zhang to traffickers. The People's Daily, a state-run organ has been keen to play up the faultless efforts of the Chinese police, providing emotive, wall-to-wall coverage of the moment the couple were reunited with their newborn daughters - puffing up the official line from the Chinese government that the problem is now less rampant.  Parents wept and fell to the knees in front of the police officers who confirmed the child's identity by way of a DNA test.  At the time of writing, two senior officials have been fired at the hospital

Strangely for the typically publicity-shy police in China, embracing the Internet is helping bring the numbers of trafficked babies down.  Turning to the massively popular social media platforms, parents and activists have access to resources that they previously could only dream about utilizing.  The  police official who heads the anti-trafficking division, Chen Shiqu, has his own account, with close to three and a half million followers.  Initially using a pseudonym, Chen expertise on the topic soon led to his real identity being revealed online. By retweeting stories and leads from amateur activists and charity organizations, Chen hopes to raise public awareness of the problem, and help return stolen children to their rightful homes.

As one might expect in black market trading, the safety of the people being trafficked is not one of the major concerns.  In 2004, one the first cases to come to massive public attention featured the deaths of several babies.  Guangxi police discovered no more than 28 baby girls in the back of bus, all were less than 3 months old, and all had been drugged to keep them quiet.  At least one of them died from suffocation, and the others had turned blue die to lack of oxygen - they were all to be sold in Anhui province for the princely sum of $24 each.  In 2005, the first convicted child traffickers were executed in China.

With so many cases being reported, couple who legitimately adopt children are being forced to ask themselves some searching questions - often having to entertaining the idea that their child may have been traded on the black market.  Papers are falsified and certificates are forged, on an industrial scale.  With adoptions of Chinese children by American couples in decline, it may become much cheaper for Chinese parents to get the male heir, by hook or by crook, that their families demand.

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Total Recall: How Smearing Foreign Brands Could Backfire for China

Using product recalls to smear foreign companies and brands might not be working in quite the way that the Chinese government hopes for.

China is getting all het up about product recalls in China.  In an effort to show the Chinese people that shoddy goods produced domestically aren’t limited to domestically produced chopsticks, napkins, cooking oil...the air, reports of imported luxury goods being recalled over safety fears are turning in headline news.

After a humiliating scandal when it was discovered that farmers had been adding melamine to batches of milk formula in 2008, eight babies died and some 300,000 were left seriously ill.  Milk tamperers struck again in 2011, and then again 2012 after dangerously high levels of the fungal poison aflotoxin was discovered in the formula.  Last year another company issued a product recall after unacceptable levels of mercury were found in it’s milk powder.

So it’s no surprise that Chinese parents and grandparents, who are often the ones who care for young children in the family, are wary of buy Chinese baby milk.  Chinese consumers switched in their thousands to foreign brands, causing product shortages in Hong Kong and forcing the government to impose strict limits on how much consumers could bring into the country.  With profits of Chinese milk producers in the toilet, some kind of PR offensive was needed, if not to encourage the idea that foreign products aren’t as good (the prices of foreign branded milk powder are rising, despite global supplies increasing) as domestically produced formula, then high profile recalls will serve to remind people that milk powder bought in Hong Kong is just a susceptible to product tampering as that produced in mainland China.

The first attempt to demonize foreign companies came in early July with  The National Development and Reform Commission launching an anti-trust probe to investigate the possibility of price fixing.  After the investigation was announced, Nestle and Danone slashed their prices by 20%.  Despite the high prices, sales remained strong simply because Chinese consumers don’t trust the Chinese companies to make products safe for human consumption.  Speaking to the South China Morning Post, Wendy Ma, a new mother in Guangzhou said "It's HK$210, I don't know how much it costs on the mainland. I didn't even bother to check. It's not an option for me to consider. Most mothers who I know have done their research either buy from Hong Kong or go to the trouble of getting shopping agents from overseas to source infant formula.”

In 2008, when the melamine scandal was uncovered, the government, embarrassed by the number of deaths involved decided that "because it is not an infectious disease, so it's not absolutely necessary for us to announce it to the public.".  And while it’s been left to Fonterra to explain why it took a year to report that contamination of it’s milk, kidney stones in infants fed Chinese brands were found up to two years before the whistle was blown, and then only after several months did the story break in the newspapers.

Sanlu itself received complaints from parents of sick children as early as December 2007, but no tests were carried out until much later in June 2008.  Three months later, the Chinese authorities were later alerted by the New Zealand government.  Additionally, the company offered search engine giant Baidu a three million yuan to play down negative coverage of the scandal.  Not something that their PR company Teller International had in mind when they suggested “cooperation” with Internet news outlets.

While the health concerns are genuine, and getting news out to people who may be affected by the taints, the signal to noise ration in coverage of these types of stories in the Chinese soon descends into parody.  Bellicose editorials and selective amnesia seek to give the slightest slip up by a foreign company or government a pro-Chinese spin.  Using the product recall to try to win back consumers to buying Chinese milk powder, despite the terrible track record, a People’s Daily editorial warned consumers not to “blindly trust” foreign products.  Obviously, it’s better to wait and see if infants will be struck down with aflotoxin poisoning or melamine overdoses before consumers distrust a food company.  The transparent attempts to coax consumers back to Chinese products don’t go down well on Weibo:  "Model Brother II" said: "Foreign milk products get contaminated due to negligence, which is equivalent to 'manslaughter'. Domestic producers intentionally add melamine to milk powder, which is 'intentional murder'."  Some went further suggesting that the pre-emptive recall showed Fonterra’s sense of corporate responsibility, especially when compared to the efforts of Sanlu, which produced the melamine laced milk in 2008.

Aggressive PR campaigns against non-Chinese companies that outsell and outperform their Chinese rivals aren’t new inventions.  State television has used it’s “Consumer Rights Day Gala” to single out companies that have done particularly well in the mainland, and have left Chinese companies with shelves full of stock and empty bank account.  Apple and Volkswagen have both run afoul of CCTV “investigations”.  Small problems concerning warranties and dodgy gearboxes were spun out into the old story of foreign companies trying to pass off inferior products to gullible Chinese consumers.

The whole thing fell apart when it became apparent that Weibo users of influential accounts had been bribed by producers of the program.  Although participants claimed that their accounts had been hacked, the fact that the feckless tweeters hadn’t edited out CCTV’s instructions in the messages that they wanted to go out sealed the fate of the microbloggers.  Ironically, the show that promoted itself as protecting consumer trust had irreversibly damaged it’s own reputation with Chinese consumers.  Sales of Apple products don’t appear to have suffered any because of the “expose”, and some suggest that the tech company may have actually benefited from the coverage.

Luxury cars, a favorite of China’s new middle class are also a target for China’s questionable General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.  This month, BMW floated into the governments crosshairs, forced this week to recall 140,000 vehicles because of a faulty seal that could cause water corrosion.  “In terms of financial impact it’s basically zero,” said Robin Zhu, automotive analyst at Bernstein Research. “In terms of brand damage it’s also negligible.”

Leveraging minor faults in the final product and BMW’s “environmental standards” (the joke of being that the government is accusing a foreign car brand of contributing to the infamous air quality in China), an application by BMW and it’s Chinese partner Brilliance to double production at their plant in Shenyang was denied.  Again, the reaction on the Chinese Internet boards has been mostly praise, since the company is seen as being responsible in it’s efforts to provide safe products.  “At least a large corporation like this is willing to put customer’s safety first. I’ve never heard of a recall initiated by a local auto manufacturer, let alone a large-scale recall like this,” wrote one blogger.  The ghosts of Sanlu have yet to be laid to rest.

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Why Are the Chinese Interested In Tonga?

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"] Embassy of China in the Kingdom of Tonga (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption]

It’s well known that the Chinese, and the Indians are investing heavily in Africa.  But what are the Chinese doing in the South Pacific island of Tonga?

Early last month, the New Zealand government suspended aid to the small South Pacific island of Tonga.  The spat is apparently over a plane, a “gift” from the Chinese

government that is yet to meet international safety standards.  Despite the fact the plane isn’t in service, a New Zealand-based company that had been operating domestic flights in Tonga shut down operations, claiming that it couldn’t compete with an airline that was receiving free planes from a foreign government interested in leasing land from the Tongan government.  The suspension of aid, mostly aimed at developing infrastructure to help the ailing tourist industry comes at a particularly inconvenient time.  The whale watching season is getting underway, and the lack of any planes to ferry tourists around is bound to play havoc with local economies.

Concern over the aircraft that was donated to RealTonga, the rival homegrown passenger service was not unfounded.  Since 2009, that particular model has been involved in seven “incidents”, three so serious that the aircraft concerned had be written off.  In a statement, Foreign Affairs Minster, Murray McCully said "Significant safety issues have been raised regarding the plans of the new air service operator [to use the Xian MA60]. Our tourism support will remain on hold until safety issues are resolved to the satisfaction of respected international aviation experts,"

Unsurprisingly, given the quality of Chinese buildings, and the general behavior of Chinese tourists abroad some Tongans are underwhelmed by what the Chinese have done so far.  When the BBC’s John Pickford visited the island, he met with cabinet minister Clive Edwards, who diplomatically described some of the Chinese built buildings as “a disappointment”.  Chinese made roads lack the proper drainage systems, so when the rainy season hits, roads become impassable.  Massive, government buildings, built in the typical grandiose Chinese style aren’t designed to cope with the tropical heat and they’re impossible to keep cool in the summer.

The Chinese invasion of Tonga hasn’t gone smoothly.  In 2001, 600 of them were given a years grace to leave after the Chinese government expressed concerns over the high number of robberies that targeted Chinese businesses.  Tensions between the Chinese and Tongans came to a head again in 2006, when rioters looted Chinese owned shops and left 8 people dead.  Much of the central business district was destroyed, prompting New Zealand and Australia to send in troops.  China has been working hard to improve it’s image with the locals.  More than 300 Chinese fled the country, fearing that riots were racially motivated.

In a small poll conducted in 2011 by the Pacific Institute of Public Policy, China came out ahead, perceived as a more important trading partner than Australia or New Zealand, but the negative sentiment towards droves of Chinese immigrating to the country was apparent.  Speaking to AFP, Derek Brien, head of the organization that conducted the survey said "there's this disconnect between a perception that China aid, China diplomacy, is good and better than say Australia and New Zealand because the Chinese aid and development comes without strings attached to it.  And yet there is this backlash going on about the rise in migration. It's something we need to understand more."

China is investing in South Pacific islands in the same way that it invests in African republics, extending it’s influence in an irresistible mix of aid, loans and equipment.  At the time of writing, China had taken over 60% of Tongan state debt, with the government owning nearly $108million to the Chinese Import-Export Bank.

In return for muscling in on the previous relationship Tonga had with New Zealand, the Chinese hope for subsidies on Tongan fish stocks, helpful support in the UN and first refusal on their potential vast mineral resources to shore up the rare earth mineral industry back in the mainland.  Unfortunately, the gifts, like the MA60 turboprop, without western safety approval remain useless white elephants that the Tongans are stuck with as the Chinese move over in droves to capitalise on the growing demand for cheap everyday goods that Chinese factories turn out by the million.  Batteries and toothpaste are most sought after, and if local Chinese store owners don’t have it, they know someone who has it.

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The Unlikey Rise of Chinese Cricket

If there’s one thing that Chinese do badly, it’s sports.  It’s not the Olympics, were children are put through tortuous Soviet style training in order to ensure China is at the top of the medal leader board, we’re talking about that most revered and lucrative of games, football.

Basketball does really well in China, it’s cool, it’s American, and it’s pretty easy to set up a basketball court almost anywhere, especially in the overcrowded cities were urban space is at a premium.  Football, however, is another story.  You need a pitch, you need grass, and mostly it’s played outside, and given China’s appalling air quality, you don’t want to be spending a huge amount of time outside, and then there’s all that running about and the risk of getting injured.  All of which go some way to explaining why there’s little love lost between the national football team, and the Chinese fans.  And when we use the word “fans”, we of course mean Chinese people who are fans of football, not Chinese people who are fans of the Chinese team - kind of like the way that pop music fans hate Justin Beiber.

When the men’s football team played Thailand in June, there were no fans waiting at the hotel for autographs, and when they lost, enraged fans blocked the team coach from leaving and started a riot that injured 100 people.  The team’s official Weibo account is replete with apologies and excuses for their poor performances, but they find little sympathy online.  The English language coverage of the match didn’t do them any favours either, saying that “Poor possession, poor team work and most of all no fighting spirit resulted in the most humiliating defeat for years for China’s national soccer team.”  They managed to make it to the World Cup once, have been knocked out by Iraq for the 2014 competition.

Desperate to prove themselves better than the Koreans and the Japanese - football is one sport among many that the Chinese must prove themselves to be the best at so everyone will love them...or something - China has spent a lot of money on upping their game, but nothing seems to work.

Expensive foreign coaches have been lured to Beijing, corrupt elements in the sport have been tracked down and punished and players have been imported from overseas - still the Chinese seethe with anger when their team inevitably suffers another humiliating defeat.  The problem is that the people who actually play in the national side have little in the way of actual sporting talent, and, as always, are more interested in making as much money as possible while their knees are in proper working order.

With the problems plaguing the football squad, it might not be the best time for the Chinese government to think about launching a national cricket squad.  Which they have.  In Shenyang, which is, apparently, the new home of cricket in China, and, in contrast to the talentless poster boys in the football team, they’re pretty good.  Well, the women are at least.

Interest might be growing the game domestically, but they still have only one grass wicket, which was proudly used in the 2010 Asian Games.  With little in the way of cricketing tradition, and the apparent disinterest in partaking in team games, lack of equipment is the least of their worries.  China isn’t exactly known for it’s vast expanses of greenery, that the game demands - concrete cricket pitches just aren’t the done thing.  If the Chinese urban sprawl can push the the panda, China’s national animal, to the brink of extinction, there’s little hope for the enthusiastic, but cash strapped amateur cricket teams.

The problem for competitive sports in China is that while children have PE lessons in primary school, as soon as students hit the age at which they should start studying for the dreaded gaokao, the cramming sessions leave little room for sports.  But we shouldn’t count the Chinese out of making waves on the international cricket scene just yet.

After years of being banned in the People’s Republic, insanely young Chinese golfing prodigies dazzled in last years US Open.  Parents desperate to turn their children into the next Tiger Woods, spare no expense in providing the best trainers, equipment and opportunities to transform them into sporting superstars, and their parents into multi-millionaires.  If the likes of Sachin Tendulkar could inspire Chinese parents that there’s money in them thar cricket cricket whites, then there’d be no stopping them.  In the same way the Indian super-rich aspire to London properties, the Chinese super-super-rich could learn to aspire to appreciating the intricacies of a medium paced leg spinner.

The Chinese have set their sights on the 2014 World T20 to be played in Bangladesh, but government officials have confided that their real goal would be the 2019 Cricket World Cup.  Money has poured into help support China’s most promising players, with a select few being sent overseas to play in English and Australian clubs, where their enthusiasm for the sport has impressed many professional players.

Famously, failure is not an option for those representing China on the international sporting stage.  In search of the next Olympic gold medal machines, children as young as five years old are put through training courses that would make western social workers weep - all of the glory of being the best.  If cricket became an Olympic sport, there would be no shortage of Chinese cricketers willing to represent their country - given China’s population, if only 1 in 10,000 made the grade, that would mean that there would be 100,000 potential players.  Let’s just hope that they don’t get the same kind of attention from their domestic fans as the football team does.

Chinese Brain Drain Not Likely to Improve

The Chinese brain drain, according to the China Daily, is one of the worlds worst. It’s not good news for a country that is desperate to establish itself as a world leader in science and technology.

The Chinese love modern drugs. Antibiotics are especially popular, with Chinese patients popping ten times the number of pills that Americans do - nearly 140g a year per capita. GlaxoSmithKline’s bribery scandal shows how much money can be made by pointlessly prescribing useless drugs. Accused of bribing doctors to prescribe more of GSK’s own products, the Chinese entity stands accused of spending nearly £320m to cater to the whims of doctors.

The ease of which doctors can dole out antibiotics also highlights the low penetration of even basic scientific understanding in China. While the cash-strapped doctors who are told to prescribe more expensive drugs for minor ailments certainly bear most of the blame, the patients that demand better care (that is, more drugs with impressively complicated names) aren’t entirely innocent either.

While it’s easy to paint the underpaid doctors as the bad guys and point out that patients are just following the directions of their physician, a study from the Ministry of Health, showed that patients who knew the basic ideas behind what works for a viral infection, or what won’t work for a bacterial infection were less likely to be incorrectly prescribed antibiotics. "A simple intervention in which patient's display of knowledge about appropriate antibiotic use can dramatically reduce the abuse of antibiotics," the report found, also noting that if patients asked if they really needed the medicine they were being prescribed, the relationship they had with their doctor rapidly “deteriorated”.

The Chinese government is desperate to promote scientific theory across the country. It’s no small challenge by any stretch of the imagination, especially considering that during the Cultural Revolution academics - including scientists - were attacked as being bourgeois and were sent to labour camps. For almost a decade, no new scientists were trained and all academic research ground to a halt. It’s this 10 year period that partly explains the desperate measures some Chinese parents go to when the gaokao rolls around every year - it’s the only chance to guarantee an education for the child that their parents never had the chance to get.

Forty years on, China has the money and the equipment, but still lacks when it comes to the actual talent. The outcome-oriented culture has given rise to a situation where highly qualified scientists are reduced to operating equipment making medicines that right now are selling like hotcakes, but, given the alarming rate of the spread of drug-resistant bacterias, might not be so red-hot in the next ten or fifteen years.

At the end of July, the Chinese scientific community could hardly contain itself when news came from Guangzhou that a team of researchers had manage to create teeth from stem cells collected from urine. Buried at the bottom of the press release, the team also pointed out that the teeth were about 1/3 the hardness of real teeth. Professor Chris Mason of University College London was underwhelmed by the development, telling the BBC "It is probably one of the worst sources [of stem cells], there are very few cells in the first place and the efficiency of turning them into stem cells is very low. You just wouldn't do it in this way.” A damning critique that shows Chinese researchers aren’t even doing it wrong.

It’s the closed system, boring work and relentless pursuit of profits that has made many scientists are researchers shy away from professional life in China. When asked, an alarming 87% of Chinese graduates said that they had no plans to return to China in the future.

By contrast, in Denmark, where 1 in 10 scientists at the Technical University of Denmark, the dean, Martin Bendsøe, is under no illusions as to what attracts top flight Chinese talent out of their homeland. Speaking in an interview with ScandAsia, he said ”They come here because we are often cited in international scientific articles. After some time many open their eyes to the advantages of the democratic Danish management structure and the work environment,” said Dean of the Technical University of Denmark, Martin Bendsøe. Chinese scientists make up the third largest demographic after Germans and Americans.

The story is the same the US. Speaking to the China Daily, Joseph Jen, former undersecretary for research, education and economics for the US Department of Agriculture, said “Chinese institutions have new research equipment, much of it better than at places in the US” but that many Chinese “choose to stay in the US is because of the scientific culture ... (in which) scientists have bigger freedoms to pursue research of their choice.”

When it first started allowing students to travel abroad to study, many high-ups in the Chinese government were afraid that the end result would be that once exposed to the high life in the US and other western countries, they would never want to come back home again. For once, their foresight is pretty much bang on the money - not many want to leave the dynamic world of American research. Showing their trademark two dimensional thinking, a plan to lure back scientists was unveiled in the 1994 that promised tax breaks for returning academics. In the 20 years since, a mere 1568 have taken advantage of that particular carrot, this project being only one of seven misfires that have woefully missed their targets.

Once back in China, Chinese scientists face major roadblocks to developing their research into functioning businesses. An underdeveloped credit system and reliance on the “it’s not what you know, but who you know” guanxi system as well as hobbled and patchy small business framework simply doesn't give anyone the confidence to innovate or invest in Chinese startups that focus on risky new ideas rather than copying the ones that are already successful - exactly what the Chinese government wanted to avoid by sending students abroad in the first place. As Nixon’s War on Cancer showed, nothing much comes of top-down directed research, but since the Chinese government is averse to anything resembling real market competition, it will be a long time before we see anything of great interest emerge from Chinese research labs.

The Good Samaritan: Legislating Civility

When video footage came to light last year of 2 year old Yue Yue, who lay dying the street after being run over twice, Chinese netizen erupted in outrage over the moral vacancy in modern Chinese society. When the two different vehicles struck her, neither stopped, and CCTV cameras caught 18 people walking past her, apparently unconcerned about what had befallen the toddler. Eventually a scrap metal collector picked her up and took her to hospital, where she later died.

Stories concerning the apparent lack of any moral fibre among the Chinese have become increasingly common in the last few years, not least because they spread like wildlife on the country’s microblogging platforms, where they garner endless comments and retweets. Tania Branigan wrote in The Guardian about a number of tragic cases of child abuse, and, most recently, ex-pat sex offenders have be caught in foreign-run schools and English training centers who administrators obviously are more focused on the profits they turn than the characters of the people they employ.

As has been remarked before, it’s not so much the frequency of these kinds of stories of abuse and mistreatment, but the amplitude. To foreign observers, it seems incredulous that a child sex offender on the run from Scotland Yard could ever be employed in a French school, and the idea of a father so tired of his daughter’s voice could sew up the child’s mouth sounds like something cut out of a low budget schlock horror.

The fear of litigation forms the basis of the logic behind the reluctance of members of the public to help others in need. People who have helped, or in the recent case of a couple of boys who failed to act to save two girls from drowning and were fined 50,000rmb each, people who don’t help get sued equally. The lack of moral decency extends to those who help themselves, especially if it involves an easy way of making a lot of money.

While true that people’s distrust of others and institutions was eroded during the harshest years of Mao’s rule, scandals involving charitable organizations have done little to bolster confidence that money donated in good faith will actually end up with the people who need it, creating a downward spiral of mocking cynicism. The last sixty-odd years may have created unprecedented wealth for people in China, but it hasn’t done anything to inspire it’s citizens to stick their necks out.

Nearly a year on after Yue Yue’s death, and China’s first Good Samaritan law, snappily entitled the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone Good Samaritans' Right Protection Regulation, comes into effect in the south of China. Initially effective only in the south of China, there are plans to roll the law out across the country in a desperate bid to make people that little bit more civilized. Only in China, do good manners have to be legislated. Typical of these new breed of laws aimed at leveling the playing field for the rich and poor alike, the law makes a big thing about compensation. In order to encourage people to help strangers, the law explicitly says that there will be no repercussions if the efforts to help are unsuccessful, and if someone is accused of causing the accident, there’s the opportunity to sue and claim compensation.

The good news is that, especially among the richer, younger classes, philanthropy and charitable works are actually on the increase. It’s not so much following in the footsteps of Lei Fang, but it does represent the level of financial comfort that the younger generation now find themselves. It’s the very gap between the rich and the poor that has created an “us and them” situation, the anonymous migrant workers don’t rub shoulders in Starbucks with the recent Harvard graduates returning to the Motherland. The graduates are a sign of a changing attitude towards money - as the pursuit of economic growth becomes a secondary concern, so might the reluctance of Chinese to offer a helping hand - especially when there’s no security cameras watching them.

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Exporting Censorship

It seems sometimes like the Internet can do no good. If you believe the writers of the Daily Mail, a popular British conservative daily, it’s responsible for almost all the ills that are inflicted on the struggling middle classes of the UK - immigrants stealing the jobs of Oxbridge graduates, immigrants moving in next door and lowering house prices. The latest wheeze is the tale of the immigrant who moved in next door after stealing the job of an Oxbridge graduate and then set about sexually abusing and murdering young innocent children. And it’s all the Internet’s fault.

Last week David Cameron announced plans to police the Internet, after meeting with the mother of a child who was murdered by pedophile. Accordingly, there are now two types of porn on the Internet: the legal type, where the risk is that children will accidentally type in “Britney Spears donkey act” into a search engine and come up with all kinds of nastiness, and the illegal kind that involves the abuse of children. Google, which hasn’t made many friends since it provided details of how it “maximizes it’s profits”, is to blame, and Cameron has threatened legal action if it doesn't comply with the new laws, which involve Google returning no search results for pornographic material that is illegal in the UK. He stopped short of using the actual words “according to relevant laws and regulations”, but you get the general idea.

Like most politicians, Cameron appears to have selective amnesia when it comes to what laws were passed during the tenure of the opposition Labour government when toothless extreme porn laws were passed, and a number of suspect arrested under the laws were promptly acquitted when the case came to trial. It’s the The Leveson Effect, whereby laws are proposed to make things that were previously illegal even more illegal in response to something that everyone has seen on new reports.

Regardless of whether new laws are really going to help curb child murders by sex fiends remains to be seen, what has made fewer headlines is that Chinese technology firm Huawei is building the censoring engine that will protect the masses from nasty blue movies. The problem is that no-one really knows what Huawei is up to, and since they’re a state owned company, there are some suspicions that not all of it’s intentions are honorable. Indeed, they’ve already been banned from providing Internet tech in Australia, and they’ve not gone unnoticed in the UK either. An independent security review of Huawei’s activities criticized the “lack of ministerial oversight” of the company’s rapid expansion in the UK.

This has led to an odd situation whereby the UK is actively investigating a company that already has won a contract with the UK government. The good news is that while many might be bemoaning the lack of innovation and the reliance on manufacturing to bolster the economy, censorship and Internet control might be the one service industry that China can successfully export.

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Soft Power and Chinese Cinema

Someone, somewhere in the Beijing higher ups has decided that The Thing that’ll get China onto the world map is making a load of really, really cool movies that show the country in the best possible light.  In the same way that (I’m told) Hollywood and it’s related nonsensical chic is lusted after in the west.  To really complete the PR package, China needs to be seen on the big screen.

While speeches that go on for hours and endless meetings are winners if you want to get ahead in Chinese society, the movers and shakers in China’s recent soft-power drive have realized that promoting China just by putting a few very old things in a museum doesn’t actually resonate with your average foreigner.  To really win the foreign hearts and minds, you need to find something that’s the equivalent of Bruce Willis running around in a dirty vest.

Chinese movies don’t do well overseas - at least when they don’t follow the Zhang Yimou schtick of brightly coloured action sequences filmed at varying speeds.  Recent exports from China have produced nothing more than a whimper at the US box office.  When the low-budget sleeper hit Lost in Thailand debuted in America, it didn’t even come close replicating it’s runaway success that it had in China.  The film, a feel-good comedy about an ambitious executive trying to negotiate and important deal with his boss in Thailand, proved that dealing with contemporary issues in Chinese cinema can be both censor and box-office friendly - the film managed to beat out James Cameron’s Avatar in ticket sales, taking $200 million on it’s $2.2 million budget.  Conversely, proving the adage that comedy never travels well, the film bombed in the US, managing a paltry $88000 upon it’s release.

So alienated are audiences from the Chinese propaganda machine that a recent biopic of idolized revolutionary soldier Lei Feng failed to sell one single ticket in it’s opening weekend.  When a film celebrating the founding of the People’s Republic was released, mandarins put all other releases on hold, and even resorted to faking ticket returns in order to generate buzz.  Needless to say that with all the Iron Mans and Kung Fu Pandas, both of these expensive failures by the Chinese government have sunk without a trace to the bargain DVD bin.

Which is the reason, you may have noticed, that you’ve been finding bits of China in your blockbuster.  Hollywood pap is the quite possibly the best vehicle for promoting Chinese pap, mostly because they don’t do things like contemplate human rights, or civil liberties, and they focus on pleasing as many people as possible in order to extract as much money as possible from people who enjoy watching famous people walking away from big explosions.

The big draw for American movie producers is that while Chinese people have a lot of money, or, at the very least, there’s a lot of Chinese people will little bits of money that add up to one big bit of money.  The problem is that the movie industry is pretty much monopolized by the government, so it’s prudent business sense that no one tries to market a movie that will hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.  Of course, you could argue that Chinese people complaining about how Chinese people always seem to be the bad guys in movies is kind of like Auschwitz prisoners complaining about pickpockets in the shower room, this is soft power we’re talking about here.

Sucking up the Chinese government so that your movie gets approved for distribution is one way of trying to get your hands on the slice of entertainment pie - only 34 foreign movies are approved every year and your movie has to be the suckiest in order to get a screen at the local multiplex.  Another way of getting seen in the mainland would be to do the co-investment thing, whereupon a state-run Chinese film production company gives you money in exchange for positive exposure on the big screen.  This second option has the added benefit of side-stepping the quota, since it’s a co-production, it’s no longer seen as being a foreign import.

Selling out artistic credibility in order to please shareholders is never going to go down well with the libertarian lefties, even when you pull out a Powerpoint presentation and try to explain in simple language that Iron Man 3 isn’t really about artistic credibility, it’s about getting Robert Downey, Jr’s kids through college.  The movie industry has been called out for pandering to the whims of the Chinese government, without grasping the idea that American movies are doing pretty badly in the Chinese marketplace.  On it’s release in China, Mission Impossible 3 held the number one spot for a mighty 23 weeks, yet in the past year, the market share for American movies has dropped 65%, with domestically produced romantic comedies and feel-good buddy flicks trouncing Hollywood efforts at the box office.

In a final testament to the place that cinema holds in the push for soft-power, the Chinese government recently spend $13 million turning swampland outside Tianjin into a square kilometer of housing, office space, state-of-the-art computer facilities for CG animation and special effects and a cavernous complex of film studios.  The rebound in Chinese cinema removes a multitude of headaches for the government.  The stars are less likely to go on human rights crusades, like our dear friend Christian Bale did, fighting his way to see dissident lawyer Chen Guang Chen in his village, and the films are more likely to promote the China and the values that the Chinese government desperately wants promoted.

 

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The Plight of North Korean Women in China

70% of the North Korean refugees that make the perilous journey across the Tumen River to China are women. Once in China refugees are targeted by pimps and brokers specializing in human trafficking. The trade in human trafficking of North Korean sex workers starts with brokers who patrol the Tumen River - and the North Koreans who end up living sham marriages with Chinese-Koreans are well aware of the fate that awaits them    When interviewed for a report by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, many women did not only confirm that they knew of what would probably happen to them once they reached China, but were able to quote current prices that marriage and labor brokers were going to sell them for.

In this series of remarkable interviews with North Korean women, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has gathered together first hand accounts of the rampant human trafficking network that is operating along the Chinese border. Ms Lee tells of her not untypical story of how she ended up in China: “One day in August 2003, I was deceived by a North Korean woman who later turned out to be a trafficker. She told me she would find a decent job in China for me. We crossed the border together and she took me to a house near the Tumen River. After staying in the city of Tumen in Yanbian for one week, I was sold to a Han Chinese man in Qitaihe for the price of 1,000 yuan”

The demand for North Korean brides is fueled by the growing gender gap in China. In rural China, the male-female ration can be as high as 14-1, China’s one child policy and the traditional preference for a male heir creating intense competition and a gap in the market for those seeking a better life across the border. Those who do make the journey, however, rarely find safety in China - thanks to legal twilight that the refugees find themselves trapped in.

Under two secret agreements brokered between China and North Korea, any North Korean refugees are sent back to their home country. Normally, under international law, such refugees would be considered refugee sur place, but the Chinese government has refused the UN to officially designate them as such - openly defying the treaties that it signed up to when China joined the UN. In North Korea, the “reformed” penal code means that forced abortions are often performed on women pregnant with the children of Chinese fathers - why should precious resources should be wasted on the children of fathers who aren’t even Korean?

The Chinese government treats the North Koreans and economic refugees, but once they have been sent back home to face trial, the refugees are treated as political prisoners, and are tried as such. Because of their lack of legal protection in China, the North Korean women are often physically and sexually abused with absolutely no legal protection - except what can be bought with bribes to the local authorities. Chinese law says that to even provide food and shelter to a North Korean is punishable by heavy fines, so even those sympathetic to their plight cannot provide protection for long.

“After I lived with the Chinese man for about one month, I realized that he was trying to re-sell me to someone else,” a refugee only identified as “Ms. Lee” told Human Rights Watch North Korea, “He complained that I couldn’t speak any Chinese. I ran away from the house, not knowing where to go. Within a few hours, I was caught and brought back by the Chinese man. He took out his leather belt and whipped me on my back for about an hour. I got bruises and blood on my back and had severe pain. Later I cried in front of this man’s mother and opened a drawing book, pointing to an image of a bus. I tried to ask her to give me some money so that I could take a bus to leave the place”

Lack of any kind of sex education means that STDs and unwanted pregnancies are rife, due to their economic situations in the rural areas of Jilin, little can be done to treat infections, and back-alley abortions are common. “After moving in with the second man, I realized that I was pregnant from the previous one,” Ms Seok told an interviewer for the CHRNK report, “When my current husband and his family members found it out, they asked me to get an abortion. Even though I was already eight months pregnant, I was made to go through an operation at the hospital. I even saw the dead face of my baby when it was taken out of my womb”

The personal accounts that have been compiled show significant failings of two countries that conspire the diminish the basic human rights of North Korean women, and their families. It is telling indication of how far into nightmarish free-fall that North Korea as a country is. That working as a prostitute in the poorest areas of China, often suffering in a sham marriage, the North Koreans would consider this an improvement in their quality of life - prostitution and abuse being a necessary evil, preferable to their future in the hermit kingdom.