The Newspaper of the Future

June 26, 2005
By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN
Lawrence, Kan.

EVERY Little League player in this town of about 85,000 people can be a star. Regardless of how he or she hits or fields, each tyke and teenager is eligible for a personalized electronic trading card - replete with a picture, biography, statistics and an audio clip of the player philosophizing about the game - that can be posted on the Web site of the local newspaper, The Lawrence Journal-World.
Lawrencians buying tickets for University of Kansas football games can visit the same site, LJWorld.com, and find photographs offering sightlines from each of Memorial Stadium's 50,000 seats. Law aficionados can find transcripts of locally significant court cases posted on the site and participate in live, online chats debating the pros or cons of some cases - sometimes with experts who are involved in the proceedings.
A related Web site, lawrence.com, is aimed at college readers. It allows visitors to download tunes from the Wakarusa Music Festival, find spirited reviews of local bars and restaurants and plunge into a vast trove of blogs, including the Gay Kansan in China Blogger, who recently had his first "disgusting" experience with a woman, to the Born-Again Christian Blogger, who offers videotaped huzzahs to the Nascar legend Dale Earnhardt Sr.
The steward of this online smorgasbord is Dolph C. Simons Jr., a politically conservative, 75-year-old who corresponds via a vintage Royal typewriter and red grease pencil while eschewing e-mail and personal computers. "I don't think of us as being in the newspaper business," said Mr. Simons, the editor and publisher of The Journal-World and the chairman of the World Company, the newspaper's parent. "Information is our business and we're trying to provide information, in one form or another, however the consumer wants it and wherever the consumer wants it, in the most complete and useful way possible."
Owned by the Simons family since 1891, The Journal-World is a small-town paper emphasizing small-town news, but it is hardly restrained by a small-town mentality. Indeed, at a time when newspapers big and small are facing financial and journalistic crossroads, media analysts say The Journal-World, with a circulation of just 20,000, offers guidelines for moving forward.
The Simons family, through the World Company, enjoys an unfettered and often-criticized media monopoly in Lawrence. But the family has used that advantage to cross-pollinate its properties, ranging from cable to telephone service to newspaper and online publishing, and to take technological and financial risks that other owners might have avoided.
Mr. Simons and his associates describe their overall goals as a shared belief in quality, a deep attachment to Lawrence as a community and a constant reinvention of their business's relationship with readers, viewers and advertisers.
"We believe that journalism has been a monologue for so long and now is the perfect time for it to become a dialogue with our readers," said Rob Curley, 34, the World Company's director of new media. "We want readers to think of this as their paper, not our paper."
LAWRENCE has a long history as an independent, contrarian town. Founded in 1854 by New England abolitionists, it became one of the most violent, bloody battlegrounds in the slavery debate and was burned to the ground by pro-slavery raiders in 1861.
The University of Kansas opened its doors here just after the Civil War; women made up almost half of its first class. Haskell Indian Nations University, a college for Native Americans, opened here in 1884. After Mr. Simons's grandfather arrived in town more than a century ago, he bought the local paper for $50.
Today, Lawrence is a regional anomaly, anchoring a Democratic county in a solidly Republican state. Its large student population brings spunk to Lawrence, the university adds academic sophistication and sports fanaticism, and the town, dotted with funky restaurants and boutiques, has become a favorite of artists and activists.
Lawrence is also peppered with tidy, attractive homes and schools that draw middle- and upper-class families headed by professionals who commute to work in Topeka and Kansas City. "It's a real town with a real soul where people like to get involved," said Paul Carttar, a Lawrence native who is executive vice chancellor for external affairs at the University of Kansas. "People here care about what Lawrence will become."
Mr. Simons says his family takes its Lawrence roots seriously. "My dad told me that if you take care of Lawrence, Lawrence will take care of you," he said.
To that end, Mr. Simons has been an aggressive consolidator of local news and information services while resisting what he described as repeated offers over the years from larger companies wanting to buy him out. He has also been an early adopter of new technologies. The World Company began laying cable in 1968 and offered cable programming to residents in 1971, paying for the expansion with profits from The Journal-World - long before most larger media companies would embrace cable.
Today, about 80 percent of homes in Lawrence have cable connections. The Journal-World began publishing on the Internet in 1995, the same year that Sunflower, the broadband subsidiary of the World Company, first offered cable modems to customers. In 1999, the newspaper and its television station began sharing talent, using reporters to write for The Journal-World and appear on the company's news stations.
"We're not afraid to jump outside of the box, and that's because of who our owners are," said Patrick Knorr, 32, Sunflower's general manager, who also oversees strategic planning for the World Company. "They're determined not to lose because they were asleep at the switch."
Mr. Knorr said that World, which employs a total of about 600 people, did not try to offer new content to broadband subscribers until it had solid relationships with its customers and a robust pipeline through which it could pump media offerings.
"Content is absolutely critical and king," Mr. Knorr said. "But consumers have more power than ever over who gets crowned."
On a sweltering midsummer morning in 2001, Mr. Simons convened most of his media staff in the basement of a handsomely restored former post office at the corner of New Hampshire and Seventh Streets. The building was World's new "converged news center," where the company's television, newspaper and online staffs would all be housed.
Mr. Simons told his editors and reporters that they were going to do more than merely work shoulder to shoulder; they were going to share reporting assignments, tasks and scoops - whether they liked it or not.
Many did not like it at all, and some World reporters say they sometimes still feel taken advantage of - when they are asked to squeeze multiple print, television and online duties into the course of a single day. Print reporters and their editors have, at times, been reluctant to share scoops or ideas with their television counterparts, and vice versa. But many reporters also said that, over time, they have adapted.
"You can really teeter on the edge of, 'I'm not enjoying this and it's not fair,' to, 'This is one of the coolest things I've ever done,' " said Deanna Richards, a television reporter who works in World's converged newsroom. The company currently has 81 news employees, an unusually large number for an operation of its size.
In 1993, Mr. Simons recruited Bill Snead, an award-winning photographer from The Washington Post, to oversee the Journal-World newsroom. Now a senior editor, Mr. Snead, 67, has written, photographed and shot video for feature assignments on topics such as farm strife, cheerleaders and cowboys. He said that while he had never shot video before arriving at The Journal-World, he had no trouble adapting.
"Technology is our servant; it's our valet; it gets our stuff out there - but it's still about the content," he said, adding that his company's online and cable properties have helped to forge a closer relationship with readers. "If you show people respect and don't treat them like a novelty, you'll have free rein. That's what we're doing here."
For as ambitious and creative as the Journal-World team is, the newspaper still offers a menu of stories that is relentlessly, sometimes numbingly, local. Weather, local trials, local sports and other local comings and goings dominate. Some critics say that controversial topics, like divisive land-use debates, are soft-pedaled in the paper's pages.
"They control the dialogue on local news," said Charles Goff III, 46, a political activist and artist in Lawrence. "Every viewpoint goes through their filter and is tied to the Chamber of Commerce and the moneyed elite."
Mr. Goff conceded, however, that he was unaware of the depth of offerings on the Web site of The Journal-World. He also said that while he felt that the paper's editorial and opinion pages were staunchly and unsparingly conservative, he thought that the news pages usually offered more balanced viewpoints.
Mr. Simons and his news staff vehemently deny that controversial topics are sidestepped.
And while some residents bemoan The Journal-World's local navel-gazing, those overseeing the publication are unapologetic and enthusiastic examiners of all things Lawrence. "When the space shuttle blew up, we didn't have it on our home page; when the war in Iraq started, we didn't have it on our home page," Mr. Curley said. "It's focusing entirely on local stories that we think made our Web traffic go crazy."
Mr. Simons recruited Mr. Curley to the World Company three years ago, when The Journal-World's Web site snared about 500,000 page views a month. Mr. Curley says the number is now about seven million. The company said its online operation was losing about $15,000 a month when Mr. Curley arrived; it expects the online business to become profitable this year.
Ralph Gage, World's chief operating officer, is a no-nonsense taskmaster whom Mr. Simons deputized to make sure the company's trains ran on time. Online revenue comprises only about 1.5 percent of World's total revenue, he said, while the bulk comes from broadband, at 53 percent, and the newspaper operation, at 37 percent.
But Mr. Gage says the company expects newspaper revenue to slacken over time, with online ventures eventually being a much more significant source of sales. For that reason, World has been willing to use its broadband funds to underwrite its online ventures until the online profits become more meaningful, probably by the end of the decade.
ACCORDING to a recent survey by Nielsen/NetRatings, newspaper Web sites nationwide had a 12 percent increase in unique visitors from May 2004 to May 2005, with a significant portion of readers aged 35 to 44 switching from a newspaper to the same paper's Web edition for their daily read.
"Newspaper circulation has been tanking since the 60's and now we're finally growing our audience online, so when I hear people complain about having to give their content away for free on the Internet I think they just don't get it," Mr. Curley said. "I'm a capitalist, and I respect people who want to make a ton of money, but, dude, I'm a journalist and I want to build cool things."
Of course, building cool things simply for the sake of building cool things suffered a notable national flameout during the dot-com bust. But through the newspaper Web site and lawrence.com, Lawrence comes alive in a fashion rare for a town of its size. (Lawrence.com is also published as a print weekly.)
The town, once home to the poet Langston Hughes and the novelist William S. Burroughs, has a rich literary tradition. Journalists at World are assembling a lushly embroidered Web site devoted to Mr. Burroughs that includes rare letters, photographs and other archival material.
During a local election, a list of questions reporters had asked of all candidates as part of a voter's guide were posted online. That allowed voters to answer the same questions themselves. Then they could use an online tool to find the candidates whose answers most closely matched their own - an example of civic journalism on steroids.
The paper also routinely files local freedom-of-information requests and uploads piles of public records to its Web site. In 2003, World installed about 30 wireless hot spots around Lawrence. That same year, it began sending daily content to cellphones. For example, subscribers can have real-time scores and statistics from the University of Kansas's football and basketball games delivered on demand.
The company has begun offering daily "podcasts" of news and other information to Apple iPod owners or anyone else carrying an MP3 player. It plans to offer a service that automatically loads information onto a docked MP3 player in the early-morning hours before students head to school.
About a third of the 18 employees in the online operation are interns, and their presence allows Mr. Curley to have data, video, photos and other material collected and uploaded at little cost, a process he grinningly refers to as "internology."
"People come here from thousands of miles away expecting to see something very high tech and expensive, but a lot of what we do we do on the cheap," Mr. Curley said. "So it just amazes me when people say they can't do what we do because they don't have the resources."
Still, it is financial resources, not content, that is behind the handwringing in newspaper circles everywhere.
While print advertising stagnates or slips, it is not yet being replaced in a meaningful way by online advertising revenue - especially at companies that lack a source of bridge financing like World's broadband operation. Although journalists may cringe to hear it, the near-term battle for corporate survival is likely to be waged and won primarily by inventive business and advertising teams at media companies.
The World Company's advertising staff said that its sales force had embraced convergence enthusiastically and that offering customers multiple advertising platforms - on TV, on the Internet and in print - has become a strong pitch.
But the company is still finding it difficult to persuade readers to interact with online display ads. And, while willing to adapt to news advertising demands, the company refuses to turn its Web site into an advertising billboard, believing that the clutter would undermine the quality and integrity of its journalism.
"I think as we've converged the content we're going to converge the advertising," said Dan Simons, president of the company's broadband operations and a son of the chairman. "I think you'll have to adapt to how buyers want to convey their messages so we're not just sellers of space and time. We have to be both advertisers and public relations advisers so we can help companies create their messages."
As effervescent as the new media are in Lawrence, analysts balk at making grand extrapolations from World's efforts.
"It's a market dominated by one company so you have to be very careful when holding them up as a paragon," said Howard Finberg, director of interactive learning at the Poynter Institute, which operates a Web site devoted to journalism. "Are they creative? Without a doubt, but I'm cautious about it being seen as a single solution or a model."
Others are more laudatory but equally cautious about Lawrence's online innovations. "Nobody else is close to doing what they've done," said David Card, a new-media analyst at Jupiter Research. "But you also wouldn't necessarily be able to duplicate what they're doing in towns like San Francisco or New York."
Dolph Simons, who writes a cantankerous Saturday column that draws barbs from Lawrence's liberals, is a gentle, self-effacing man who still serves Thanksgiving turkey to his newsroom employees. He says he considers himself a "little fish in a big pond" and is reluctant to be seen as a know-it-all by colleagues and competitors in the news business.
Even so, his opinion about the future of the news business is clear.
"I'm terribly concerned about readership in the country and I think we all have to learn new things as fast as we can. Otherwise other people are going to beat us to it," he said. "We need to be driving with our brights, because if we're driving with our dims somebody's going to come in from the side of the road and knock us off."

NYT : Chinese Strength, U.S. Weakness Chinese Strength, U.S. Weakness

June 26, 2005
NYT Editorial

If China's attempt to buy an American oil company does nothing else, it should, at long last, force the United States to decide how it plans to protect its economy, husband its resources and grow in a world where it is no longer the only economic powerhouse.
With China on a buying binge for raw materials to feed its ever-expanding economy, it was inevitable that it would eventually go beyond the more modest corporate purchases it has already begun and make a grab for something the United States really cares about. Last week, history's biggest Communist country made the ultimate capitalist play: an $18.5 billion all-cash takeover bid by the state-controlled China National Offshore Oil Corporation for the American oil company Unocal.
The bid landed with the impact of an unexploded missile in Washington, where anti-China sentiment has been running high. From both sides of the aisle, members of Congress sounded the alarm that China was threatening to gobble up world energy resources. There is politics in that: Congress has an election next year and gasoline prices are already high. But whatever happens to the deal, Americans should be glad China reminded them that it is time to examine this country's economic strategy.
China's New Power
The chairman and chief executive of the Chinese company, Fu Chengyu, insisted that American national security was not an issue and called the unsolicited bid friendly. "This transaction is purely a commercial transaction," he told reporters. That's a bit disingenuous considering the money he is using is mostly from the Chinese government and his company owes its first allegiance to Beijing authorities, not world markets. And it raises the interesting question of whether the China National Offshore Oil Corporation can have it both ways: playing by Chinese rules at home while taking advantage of American rules abroad to buy an American business. After all, this is a government-owned company operating in an authoritarian state that limits the ability of foreign companies to take their profits out of China.
"Does anybody honestly believe that the Chinese would ever let an American company take over a Chinese company?" asked Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York. Actually, they have, although on a scale that hardly raised national security issues. Last year, Anheuser-Busch won a takeover battle for the Harbin Brewery Group.
The CNOOC bid is of a much higher order and deserves examination above and beyond the regulatory scrutiny normally given to corporate mergers and acquisitions. But Mr. Schumer's question ignores the way American companies have been buying up stakes in Chinese companies. Bank of America just agreed to pay $2.5 billion for a 9 percent stake in the state-run China Construction Bank. According to The Wall Street Journal, even Chevron, the rival bidder for Unocal, has a stake in a chemical plant in China and is exploring for oil in China.
So in some ways, the opposition to the CNOOC bid is the latest installment in the anti-China fervor already gripping Washington. There are a half-dozen proposals in Congress for across-the-board tariffs against Chinese imports, spurred in part by American manufacturers who complain that China's currency, the yuan, is undervalued, which results in cheaper Chinese goods coming into America and hurting American jobs. This comes on top of moves by the administration - urged on by Congress and a huge trade deficit - to forcibly stem the importing of Chinese textiles this year.
Beating up on the Chinese is fine for sound bites to convince voters that politicians care. But the real problem has less to do with China's current strength than America's current weakness. A far more rational approach to China's economic ascendancy would be to consider what steps the United States should be taking to protect itself and to grow.
America's Energy Policies
The national security of the United States is already at risk because the nation depends on imported oil for nearly 60 percent of its daily needs. That will only grow as demand increases and domestic supplies dwindle. Much of that oil comes from volatile countries in the Persian Gulf region, and the American money flowing there does nothing to encourage either more-balanced economic development or democracy. The rest comes from other parts of the world - often the most unstable parts. In any case, it all contributes to America's monstrous trade deficit and worries about what would happen to the economy if some international crisis disrupted the supply.
The antidotes are simple. Americans need to use far less oil than they do now, which means requiring more fuel-efficient vehicles and finding an alternative to refined oil to power cars and trucks.
Beijing's desire for Unocal is fueled in part by the company's natural gas reserves, most of which are in Asia. The United States cannot claim much of a national security threat from that. North American gas supplies are still fairly robust if you count Canada, and the United States can always fall back on coal to keep the lights on. Coal now provides more than half of the country's electricity anyway.
But none of that should lead to complacency. The United States needs open, accessible markets. And no fuel source is free from the effects of rising demand around the world. Natural gas prices are rising rapidly, and Americans need more-efficient power plants and more-efficient appliances to reduce demand, just as we need to develop more-efficient transportation to reduce dependency on oil.
Trade, Currencies and Debt
Congress's fixation with devaluing China's yuan to help cut American job losses is another example of blaming China for what the United States is not doing. There is no reason to think that revaluing the yuan would lead to American job growth. Indeed, Alan Greenspan said Thursday that he saw no credible evidence that a stronger yuan would increase American manufacturing activity and jobs.
Instead of bashing China, Congress and the Bush administration should be putting money into bolstering retraining programs to help American workers whose jobs migrate overseas. American school systems, American parents and American students are going to have to focus on the fact that young people with mediocre educations are not going to be able to compete with energetic, educated young people in places like China.
The United States also cannot blame the Chinese government for the weak position that its own policies have created. The Bush administration's damaging practice of combining profligate deficit spending with huge tax cuts for the rich feeds the need for Washington to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars a year just to keep things going. China has become a major buyer of the Treasury bonds that finance that debt, and because of that, the American economy depends more and more on the willingness of our Chinese underwriters to buy and hold our Treasuries. A sudden decision by China to invest elsewhere would very likely have a far more devastating effect on the country than a withdrawal of Unocal's resources.
But the solution is not to blame China. It is to institute more sensible economic policies, including revoking the unnecessary gifts that President Bush has given to very wealthy Americans at tax time.•
Despite Mr. Fu's claim about China's friendly bid, it is a contested one, coming two months after Unocal agreed to be sold to Chevron for $16.4 billion. There are many shots that remain to be fired in the trench warfare of this corporate takeover battle. China may or may not come out on top. But even if China loses this skirmish, it is part of a longer struggle, and those charged with leading America would do well to spend this time strengthening America from within. No matter how big and powerful China becomes, it is no match for the United States when this country is at its best.

NYT : Thousands Riot in China, Attack Police, Burn Cars

June 29, 2005
By REUTERS Filed at 9:52 a.m. ET

BEIJING (Reuters) - Thousands of Chinese rioted in a dispute sparked by a lopsided roadside brawl, set fire to cars and wounded six police officers in an outburst likely to worry communist leaders in Beijing desperate to cling on to power.
The official Xinhua news agency, in a rare report on a local disturbance, blamed Sunday's riot in Chizhou in dirt-poor eastern Anhui province on a few criminals who led the ``unwitting masses'' astray.
The violence was the latest in a series of protests which the Communist Party, in power since 1949, fears could spin out of control and become a channel for anger over corruption and a growing gap between rich and poor.
It started before 3 p.m. when a Toyota sedan grazed a middle school student crossing the street and the teen and the driver quarreled. A few men emerged from the car and set on the student, a local store manager surnamed Wu who saw the clash told Reuters by telephone.
The men were taken to a police station and a crowd that had been watching the fight swarmed around the building, Wu said, demanding that the men be handed over to them as their numbers swelled by the minute.
Some among the growing mob focused their anger on the men's Toyota, smashing it, flipping it over and torching it, Wu said.
``The fire fighters drove up, but when they saw what was going on, they fled,'' the store manager said.
Armed police tried to quell the disturbance but were driven back by a hail of rocks and lit firecrackers, he said.
The local Chizhou Daily newspaper reported six policemen were injured by stones, news Web site www.sina.com.cn said.
``The crowd also attacked reporters, one of whom was burned by a firecracker, and they grabbed cameras out of the hands of anyone taking pictures,'' Wu said.
Around 7.30 p.m., power to the police station was cut and ``criminals'' started throwing fireworks inside, the Chizhou Daily report said.
The crowd, now numbering as many as 10,000, also flipped three parked police cars and set them ablaze.
The mob crashed through the windows of Wu's store, located just down the street from the police station, and began grabbing anything they could get their hands on.
``We called the police immediately, but none came. Four hours later, the provincial police chief arrived with a large group of police, but by that time, my store was already stripped bare,'' Wu said.
``It was raining hard that day. Otherwise, more stores might have been looted.''
Hundreds of armed police in full riot gear managed to restore order in Chizhou around midnight on Sunday.
The men from the Toyota were being held in detention and police had apprehended 10 ``criminals'' suspected of involvement in the riot, Xinhua said, adding an investigation of the incident was under way.
The riot closely echoed one that erupted in Chongqing in western China last October when a quarrel between residents, in which one man passed himself off as an official, enraged bystanders with the attempted abuse of privilege.
Thousands took to the streets, burning police cars and looting government buildings.
Protests have become increasingly common in China, fueled by corruption and the widening wealth gap, but authorities are keen to quickly quash dissent and preserve stability.
There were more than 58,000 protests, many of them over land rights disputes, across the country in 2003, a Communist Party-backed magazine, Outlook, has reported.
This month, villagers in northern Hebei province protesting to keep their land were attacked by a group of armed hired toughs. Six farmers were killed and 48 injured in the ensuing battle.

China's New Frontiers: Tests of Democracy and Dissent

June 19, 2005

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

ZEGUO, China - With his smart clothes, blow-dried hair and speech peppered with references to Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu, Jiang Zhaohua, the young Communist Party secretary for this prosperous township, bears little resemblance to the usual Chinese politician.
Under his leadership, Mr. Jiang's township of 110,000 people recently embarked on a novel experiment in governance, allowing citizens' preferences to determine, after detailed consultations over the pros and cons, which major projects will go ahead, and how their money will be spent.
"Our original manner was the government deciding everything, only announcing the results afterward to the people," Mr. Jiang said candidly, with a sharp sweep of his arm to suggest official high-handedness. "We never got to know the public's opinion. It was 20 people sitting in a room who decided everything."
The downside of that method, common in China, has been a lack of transparency, runaway corruption and in recent years an explosion of sometimes violent unrest in townships and villages. Angered by abuses of power, rural Chinese, networking even in the countryside via cellphone and computer, have been taking matters into their own hands.
In fact, the starkest contrast to Zeguo might be Dongyang, a city a few hours down the road in the same coastal province, Zhejiang.
This spring, after local officials simply handed 163 acres of land to 13 private and state-owned chemical plants, the displaced farmer-tenants set up roadblocks around the plants. An estimated 30,000 villagers fought off more than 1,000 riot policemen. Many people were injured; the plants were idled.
[In the most recent dispute over land use, 22 people were arrested over an attack on village residents in Dingzhou, a city in Hebei Province, Agence France-Presse said, quoting state press reports on Saturday. On June 11, up to 300 thugs had descended there to force out villagers who refused to make way for a new power plant. Six farmers were killed and 51 wounded in the clash.]
Although he would not discuss Dongyang's problems, Mr. Jiang said he had drawn a firm conclusion from the spread of violent conflicts. And although he insisted he was not meaning to lecture, his words sounded like a neat coda to the last century in China, a period marked by catastrophic policy blunders like the Great Leap Forward.
"No matter how smart we are, we officials have limited information," he said. "The easiest way to avoid mistakes is by having more democratic decisions."
Zeguo's political experiment involved the polling of 257 randomly chosen people, and was conducted in large part on the advice of a Stanford University political scientist, James S. Fishkin, who was brought in as a consultant. After lengthy briefings on the pros and cons of a long list of potential municipal projects, the electors showed a decided preference for environmental works, including sewage treatment plants and public parks.
If unique in form, Zeguo's experiment takes place against a backdrop of a broad effervescence of democratic ideas bubbling up into local politics all over China.
By one estimate, there will be 300,000 village committee elections in China's 18 provinces this year alone. In many areas, officials are making efforts to involve ordinary citizens in local decision making.
"The experiments taking place here and there are very meaningful, because China's economic reforms began the same way," said Li Fan, director of the World and China Institute, a nongovernmental institute in Beijing that studies electoral reform. "The central government didn't know how to carry them out, so it relied on local governments."
Mr. Li said, however, that the most important breakthrough would come when the already existing assemblies - local, provincial and national groups known as people's congresses - were given a real say, instead of meeting one day a year, as is typical, to endorse the government's decisions. "The Communist Party doesn't want this, because they are afraid the congresses will criticize the government," Mr. Li said. "They prefer a rubber stamp."
In Dongyang today, the villagers would seem to have prevailed against the chemical factories, which they say have ruined the area's land and water. They smashed 14 government cars and 40 buses by one account; as many as 30 policemen were reported hospitalized and a handful of villagers were injured.
Most of the villagers who took part were older. The younger people, fearing arrest, stayed away, and today go about their lives. It is the older villagers who continue to man their makeshift roadblocks, preventing access to the plants.
"We have no other means," said a man in his 70's, dressed in rough blue farmer's breeches and standing guard recently under the straw and bamboo roadblock. He declined to give his name. The government, he said, "wants tax revenue, and if the money is big enough, people's health can be ignored."
Another man, in his 60's and wearing an old brown suit, offered this assessment: "The government always deceives us. They say they'll move the factories away today; tomorrow they say they'll close them. Ordinary folks don't believe in government."

Rape in China: A Nightmare for 26 Pupils

June 21, 2005

By JIM YARDLEY

XINJI, China - The teacher always sent a girl to buy his cigarettes. He left the class unsupervised and waited in his office. When the girl returned to class with flushed cheeks and tousled hair, the other students said nothing.
For nearly three months the teacher, Li Guang, raped 26 fourth- and fifth-grade girls in this rural village, parents and court officials say. Some girls were raped more than once as Mr. Li attacked them in a daily rotation. He was found out when a 14year-old refused to go to school for fear that the next morning would be her "turn." She did not want to be raped a third time.
"School is where our children learn," said Cheng Junyin, the mother of the 14-year-old. "We thought it was the safest place for them."
It is the sort of horrific case that in many countries would be a national scandal but in China has disappeared into the muffled silence of state censorship. That silence matches the silence at the heart of the case: the fact that students considered a teacher so powerful that they did not dare speak out.
Indeed, even as the conventions of Chinese society are being shaken by the tumult of modernization, the Confucian reverence of teachers remains strong, particularly in isolated areas like this farming village in Gansu Province in western China. Parents grant teachers carte blanche, some even condoning beatings, while students are trained to honor and obey teachers, never challenge them.
"The absolute authority of teachers in schools is one of the cultural reasons that teachers are so fearless in doing what they want," said Yang Dongping, a leading expert on China's education system.
Yet modernization has helped drive many teachers away from the poorest areas like Gansu. Low pay in rural areas and better opportunities in cities have caused teacher shortages in many poor areas. One study found that 35 percent of village teachers leave within three years.
Poorer schools are left to hire cheaper teachers, many of them only marginally qualified, a trend that has coincided with a string of sexual abuse cases. Mr. Yang believes that rapes are rare, far less common than beatings, but he noted that in 2003 the Education Ministry published a list of 10 cases in which teachers had raped students.
In December 2003 a teacher in rural Shaanxi Province was executed for raping 58 girls in 15 years. Last October a teenage girl in rural central China tried to commit suicide after a teacher forced her to watch him rape her cousin.
Mr. Li, 28, may go on trial by the end of June, according to a court official in Dingxi, the city where the case will be heard. If he is convicted he will face a prison term of at least 10 years, or possibly the death penalty.
Local education officials as well as prosecutors refused to be interviewed about the case, other than to confirm that the trial would be forthcoming. China's state-controlled news media have remained silent, except for a short initial newspaper article that reported Mr. Li's arrest.
But a visit to this village found families who vented their anger at such a violation of trust. The village is nearly six hours from the provincial capital, Lanzhou, the last three hours on a dirt road through the mountains. The hilltop ruins of old fortifications are reminders that clans once ruled this remote land. .
Farming is the primary livelihood, although it provides only subsistence for some families, who often delay sending a child to school to avoid the fees. Girls are usually the first to be kept home, and some do not start school until age 9 or 10. Mr. Li's fourth-grade class had about 50 pupils, of whom about 26 were girls, with ages ranging from 10 to 14. In all, the school has more than 900 students, drawn from nearby villages.
Zhang Shengxia, at 10, was one of the youngest girls in Mr. Li's fourth-grade class and, as it happened, one of the luckiest. She said the rapes began last fall as the teacher selected girls, one after the other. The girls talked to one another about what was happening but did not dare tell anyone else.
Inside the classroom, Shengxia said, Mr. Li would sometimes physically abuse male and female students by ordering them to pile atop one another on his desk. "Even then," she said, "we were afraid to cry."
As the weeks wore on, Mr. Li either sent girls out for cigarettes or simply called them to his office every day. "When the teacher would ask a student, they would try to run away or yell out," Shengxia recalled. On the day he called out her name, she said, "He told me, 'Don't listen to all the bad things the other students say about me.' " He sent her outside for cigarettes, and she sprinted from school to her home. She was never raped.
"I was scared," she said. "I hate him."
"I hate the school," said Zheng Gaiguo, 40, the mother of a girl in the fifth-grade class. Her daughter is 14 and was raped once. "The teacher took my daughter to the office and told her: 'Do not be afraid. Your mother and your father are doing this.' "
The rapes lasted for almost three months, until the morning that Cheng Junyin's 14-year-old daughter refused to go to school. Word began to spread through the village, and other mothers began to hear horrible stories. Jiao Zhencai, 35, said her 12-year-old had been raped twice. Yet she said the girls had been too frightened to confront the teacher. Instead, Ms. Jiao said, some of the girls would share tips on how to escape from the teacher's office by picking the lock.
The precise details of Mr. Li's background remain uncertain. He grew up in Xinji and took his first teaching job in the village of Qingpu, a few hours away. He later returned to his hometown for a job at the local primary school. Villagers say his cousin worked as director of instruction, a connection they say was essential in helping him land the job.
"Anybody who has connections in the government can become a teacher, whether they go to college or just some vocational school," said Tian Ziming, 40, an uncle of the young girl, Shengxia, who was not raped. "It is not difficult to get a certificate."
The authorities will not release information about Mr. Li, but some villagers say he is also being investigated for possible rapes at his school in Qingpu. Nine other teachers were removed from the village school here, including Mr. Li's cousin and the headmaster. No explanation was given as to why so many teachers were removed.
In the conservative culture of rural China, the shame of rape has been devastating for many families. Some have refused to talk to prosecutors or get involved in the case. Others fear that their daughters will be forever damaged, not the least when they reach marrying age and may be stigmatized.
Ms. Jiao, the mother whose daughter was raped twice, may have the most difficult time forgetting what has happened. Her neighbors are Mr. Li's parents. She said they had gone to her home after their son had been arrested and warned her not to talk about the case.
"His parents came here and asked me, 'How many people know about this?' " Ms. Jiao. "I said, 'All the kids in school know about this.' "
She said she then told them: "Everybody has children. What if this had happened to you?"

Poll: China Image Scores Better Than U.S.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS June 23, 2005

Pew Global Attitudes Survey: http://pewglobal.org

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States' popularity in many countries -- including longtime allies in Europe -- is lagging behind even communist China.
The image of the U.S. slipped sharply in 2003, after its invasion of Iraq, and two years later has shown few signs of rebounding either in Western Europe or the Muslim world, an international poll found.
''The U.S. image has improved slightly, but is still broadly negative,'' said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. ''It's amazing when you see the European public rating the United States so poorly, especially in comparison with China.''
In Britain, which prides itself on its ''special relationship'' with Washington, almost two-thirds of Britons, 65 percent, saw China favorably, compared with 55 percent who held a positive view of the United States. In France, 58 percent had an upbeat view of China, compared with 43 percent who felt that way about the U.S. The results were nearly the same in Spain and the Netherlands, the Pew poll found.
The United States' favorability rating was lowest among three Muslim nations that are also U.S. allies -- Turkey, Pakistan and Jordan -- where only about one-fifth of those polled viewed the U.S. in a positive light. Only India and Poland viewed the U.S. more positively than they viewed China.
''Clearly, with or without this poll we know we have a public diplomacy challenge, and that challenge is not lessening by the day,'' said State Department spokesman Adam Ereli.
He said the United States is trying to combat that image problem, citing the frequent travels of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was ending a six-day swing through the Middle East and Europe on Thursday.
The poll found suspicion of the United States in many countries where people question the war in Iraq and are growing leery of the U.S.-led war on terror.
''The Iraq war has left an enduring impression on the minds of people around the world in ways that make them very suspicious of U.S. intentions and makes the effort to win hearts and minds far more difficult,'' said Shibley Telhami, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Support for the U.S.-led war on terror has dipped in European countries like Britain, France, Germany and Spain as well as in Canada, while it remains low in the Muslim countries surveyed, such as Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey.
''The position of the United States as the one surviving superpower is to be assertive in responding in a world of terrorism. But in the rest of the world, there is a great wariness about that,'' said John Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri and a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
The poll found a positive reaction in European countries to President Bush's campaign for more democracy in countries around the world. People in Muslim countries were cautious about the U.S. campaign, but supportive of the idea of democracy in their own countries.
Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under President Clinton, said the poll results are troubling because leaders of democracies allied to the U.S. have to rally the public in their countries when supporting U.S. policies.
But she said a bright spot in the poll is the improvement in attitudes about the U.S. in countries like India, Indonesia and Russia. That shows how attitudes can be changed if the U.S. shows respect for countries or helps with crises like the tsunami that hit Indonesia, she said.
The polls were taken in various countries from late April to the end of May with samples of about 1,000 in most countries, with more interviews in India and China and slightly fewer than 1,000 in the European countries. The margin of sampling error ranged from 2 percentage points to 4 percentage points, depending on the sample size.

What's Chinese For 'Snake Eyes'?

Asia's Casinos Are a Risky Business

By Joshua Kurlantzick [Special correspondent for the New Republicand a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.]

Sunday, June 12, 2005; Page B02

On an average spring Tuesday evening inside the Sands, a shiny, gold-colored casino that resembles a cross between a palace and a windowless Masonic temple, crowds are lined up three-deep at the gambling tables. When one blackjack player folds for the evening, others scuffle to take his place, jostling to grab a seat and quickly smacking down huge piles of chips. On other levels of the casino, guests scarf down buffet food, and high rollers drop their cash in luxurious private rooms.
Fighting for a chance to gamble is not unusual at this casino. When it opened last year, its security force had to hold back a throng of thousands of would-be gamblers. Frantic to get inside, the mob tore the hinges off the massive glass-plated doors, knocking fellow bettors to the ground.
This was not Las Vegas or Atlantic City. It was Macau, a tiny former Portuguese colony in southern China and the only place in China where gambling is legal.
Since 2002, when Beijing ended the monopoly on Macau gambling that was held for decades by one local businessman, the city's economy has exploded as Vegas tycoons have descended en masse and embarked upon an orgy of construction. The first foreign-operated casino to open in Macau, the Sands has helped its U.S. parent company nearly double its revenues in the first quarter of 2005 from last year's first quarter. These profits undoubtedly please Sands head Sheldon Adelson, who founded Vegas's famous Venetian hotel-casino. Next year, Bellagio founder Steve Wynn will open his own Macau property, a behemoth featuring a 100,000-square-foot casino. American operators also are planning to open a Macau version of the Vegas strip, a string of gambling resorts -- possibly including an underwater casino -- that might eventually include 60,000 hotel rooms and cost more than $10 billion to build.
The arrival of the American gaming industry, however, augurs a clash that's not about culture alone. It may bring wealth and luxury and bright lights, but it also threatens to bring corruption, money laundering and other law enforcement problems that a place like Macau, or China, is ill-prepared to face.
For now, the attention here is focused on the windfall. Flush with casino loot, Macau saw its gross domestic product grow last year by more than 25 percent. Read that figure again -- it's not a mistake. Tourist arrivals rose by nearly 40 percent in 2004, and Deutsche Bank gambling analyst Marc Falcone believes Macau's gambling revenues will top those of the Las Vegas strip this year.
Already, the former Portuguese enclave of some 450,000 people has changed immeasurably. When I visited Macau before the colony was returned to China in 1999, it was hard to find signs of life on its streets, in its gambling halls, or even in the central business district, a stunning melange of pastel Iberian-style buildings. Empty, rusting structures blighted the low-rise skyline. Inside the tiny, seedy casinos, small groups of gamblers huddled over their chips, chain-smoking and spitting. In the halls outside the gambling rooms, prostitutes dressed like baby dolls grabbed my arm and tried to pull me into a bathroom.
This spring, Macau looked far different. Gamblers flocked to the Sands and other new casinos, and across the territory, now a special administrative region of China, frenzied construction crews poured concrete through the night. Young Macau residents dressed in designer clothes sipped drinks at bistros inside restored colonial villas. Stocks of companies with links to Macau were skyrocketing, while residential property prices were rising. Residents I met seemed shocked by how quickly their once-sleepy city had changed.
The lure of lady luck is not limited to Macau. For decades, Asian nations banned or severely restricted gambling, but in recent years East and South Asia have witnessed a betting boom. This spring, famously conservative Singapore dropped its ban on casino gambling; the city-state plans to build casinos on two prime sites. Announcing the decision, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said, "We want Singapore to have the X-factor, that buzz you get in London, Paris or New York" -- though he failed to mention that none of those cities, all vastly more cosmopolitan than staid Singapore, actually have casinos (not counting a few tiny ones in London).
Others are following suit. In Thailand, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has suggested calling a national vote to create legalized casinos. India has launched casinos in Goa, South Korea now has more than 10 casinos, some Indonesian leaders have urged the nation to consider building casinos, and powerful Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara has pushed for casino construction in the Japanese capital. The governments of Cambodia and Burma have permitted casinos to open in remote border regions, where Chinese gamblers stream across the border to wager and watch transvestite shows. Malaysia and the Philippines have casinos. And even reclusive North Korea and Laos are getting in on the action; the former has opened a gambling hall near the Chinese border, while the latter has inaugurated a casino at a mountain resort.
For casino operators, winning support from China's government would be the ultimate prize. Though Beijing banned gambling and many other forms of "moral corruption" after the Communist Party took power in 1949, underground betting, and recently online betting, has continued to flourish in China. So, in typically Chinese bureaucratic style, last December Beijing University held a conference on gambling, at which several Chinese experts urged the party to legalize it on the mainland.
Gambling has suddenly gone legit in East and South Asia for several reasons. Across the region, disposable incomes are rising and governments and casino operators are chasing this new loose change. Countries like Singapore, struggling to keep up growth rates in an era where China increasingly dominates both high- and low-end manufacturing, see casinos as potential cash cows.
The main target audience is the Chinese. In the first quarter of 2005, Chinese urban disposable income per capita rose some 11 percent, and today many Chinese city-dwellers have money to spare. Luxury carmakers, real estate developers and fashion houses have charged into the mainland's cities. (Time magazine reports that one newly rich Chinese businessman built a $10 million replica of the White House, as well as replicas of Mount Rushmore and the Washington Monument.) And even though gambling is forbidden in China, a combination of prosperity, political liberalization and a new employment culture in which workers actually get vacation has helped foster mobility, and not just the social class-climbing kind. The number of Chinese going overseas is rising by about 40 percent a year, and the World Tourism Organization predicts that by 2020 there will be 100 million outbound Chinese tourists.
Meanwhile, loosening social mores in traditionally conservative Asian societies allows gambling to be viewed as a more legitimate activity. Divorce, remarriage, homosexuality -- all these former taboos have become more common across Asia. China has even developed a culture of rebellious young men and women, who go by the moniker linglei , or young rebels.
Yet while this influx of casinos may have some beneficial effects -- in Macau, unemployment is so low that casinos are having difficulty hiring enough workers -- in the long run it could prove disastrous. The expansion of casinos in Macau and, potentially, in mainland China itself, could highlight perhaps the biggest problem in the Middle Kingdom: As wealthy urbanites have gotten rich from the economic opening, most Chinese have barely prospered. China has developed worse income inequality than India and other historically lopsided developing nations. This inequality threatens social stability. Public protests have been spreading. Word of wealthy Chinese gambling away large sums could spark anger among ordinary Chinese, the government in Beijing has cautioned officials to avoid extravagant displays of wealth, including gambling.
The Asian casino boom could bring other problems. U.S. casinos maintain tight controls on money laundering, yet even with America's strong rule of law, keeping casinos from becoming hubs of illegal activity has sometimes been a battle. While Singapore is famed for its tough rule of law, introducing massive numbers of casinos in Macau, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, China or other countries where the good governance remains weak is a dangerous proposition.
Beijing already faces a serious problem of party officials looting state coffers and taking the money to Macau, North Korea and other places to gamble and launder the cash. An official from the northeastern province of Jilin vanished in 2004 and was accused of losing more than $300,000 in state money at a casino in North Korea; and the deputy mayor of the large northeastern city of Shenyang allegedly was caught gambling millions in state money in Macau and other locales. Beijing has launched a crackdown on illegal gambling by officials and others, and in February, the Communist Party has made it much tougher for senior officials to bet overseas -- though this prohibition is unlikely to stop those most determined.
The fact that Macau has no laws on reporting large transactions makes it easier for money to be illegally funneled through casinos. The State Department has classified Macau as a "major money laundering country" and reports that "The gaming industry in particular provides an avenue for the laundering of illicit funds." State also notes that Macau's enforcement of foreign exchange control laws"has been weak." I-OnAsia, a consulting group studying Macau, believes there actually has been less recent violence in Macau among organized crime groups known as triads because the gangs are too busy laundering money and providing prostitutes these days.
And Macau actually has a stronger rule of law than some other parts of Asia. Casinos in Wild West-like Burma, Laos and Cambodia operate with virtually no controls on money flowing in and out, and could be prime targets for triads, narcotics traffickers and other criminal elements. Perhaps, if Asian nations implemented their casino planning slowly, while simultaneously building stronger cross-border institutions for combating crime, this lawless atmosphere could be avoided. But judging by the excitement stirred by casino plans in Singapore and elsewhere in Asia, that's an unlikely bet.

Chinese Target Web's 'Prohibited Language'

By ELAINE KURTENBACH

The Associated Press

Tuesday, June 14, 2005; 10:00 PM

SHANGHAI, China -- Chinese bloggers, even on foreign-sponsored sites, had better choose their words carefully _ the censors are watching.
Users of the MSN Spaces section of Microsoft Corp.'s new China-based Web portal get a scolding message each time they input words deemed taboo by the communist authorities _ such as democracy, freedom and human rights.
"Prohibited language in text, please delete," the message says.
However, the restrictions appear to apply only to the subject line of such entries. Writing them into the text, with a more innocuous subject heading, seems to be no problem.
Microsoft's Chinese staff could not be reached immediately for comment. However, a spokesman at the tech giant's headquarters in Seattle acknowledged that the company is cooperating with the Chinese government to censor its Chinese-language Web portal.
Microsoft and its Chinese business partner, government-funded Shanghai Alliance Investment, work with authorities to omit certain forbidden language, said Adam Sohn, a global sales and marketing director for MSN.
But he added, "I don't have access to the list at this point so I can't really comment specifically on what's there."
Online tests found that apart from politically sensitive words, obscenities and sexual references also are banned.
MSN Spaces, which offers free blog space, is connected to Microsoft's MSN China portal. The portal was launched on May 26, and some 5 million blogs have since been created, Microsoft said.
The Chinese government encourages Internet use for business and education but tries to ban access to material deemed subversive.
Although details of the authorities' efforts are kept secret, users of many China-based Web portals are prevented from accessing sites deemed subversive by the government.
A search on Google for such topics as Taiwan or Tibetan independence, the banned group Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama or the China Democracy Party inevitably leads to a "site cannot be found" message.
Internet-related companies are obliged to accept such limitations as a condition of doing business in China. And government-installed filtering tools, registration requirements and other surveillance are in place to ensure the rules are enforced.
Recently, the government demanded that Web site owners register with authorities by June 30 or face fines.
Sohn said heavy government censorship is accepted as part of the regulatory landscape in China, and the world's largest software company believes its services still can foster expression in the country.
"We're in business in lots of countries. I think every time you go into a market you are faced with a different regulatory environment and you have to go make a choice as a business," he said. "Even with the filters, we're helping millions of people communicate, share stories, share photographs and build relationships. For us, that is the key point here."
The consequences of defying government limits can be severe: at least 54 people have been jailed for posting essays or other content deemed subversive online.
The international media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders has protested the online limits, sending letters to top executives of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and other companies urging them to lobby Beijing for greater freedom of expression.
"In terms of the reality of the situation, those business deals are going to continue as globalization expands," said Tala Dowlatshahi, a spokeswoman for the group. "But we want to make sure that pressure is being put on the companies to pressure the Chinese government to ensure a more democratic process."

Washington Post : Chinese Peasants Attacked in Land Dispute

At Least 6 Die as Armed Thugs Assault Villagers Opposed to Seizure of Property

By Philip P. Pan

Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, June 15, 2005; Page A12

SHENGYOU, China -- Hundreds of men armed with shotguns, clubs and pipes on Saturday attacked a group of farmers who were resisting official demands to surrender land to a state-owned power plant, witnesses said. Six farmers were killed and as many as 100 others were seriously injured in one of China's deadliest incidents of rural unrest in years.
The farmers, who had pitched tents and dug foxholes and trenches on the disputed land to prevent the authorities from seizing it, said they suspected the assailants were hired by corrupt local officials. They said scores of villagers were beaten or stabbed and several were shot in the back while fleeing.

[Niu Zhanzong, 50, right, recorded a portion of the clash with a digital video camera before he was attacked. Video : Shengyou Attack Editor's Note: This video contains violent content. washingtonpost.com presents the original, unedited version as it was received. A farmer in Shengyou, China, videotaped hundreds of armed men attacking a group of local farmers. According to witness accounts, the group was resisting government demands to surrender land to a state-owned power plant.]

Reached by telephone, a spokesman for the provincial government said he could not confirm or discuss the incident. "So far, we've been ordered not to issue any information about it," he said.
Large contingents of police have been posted around Shengyou, about 100 miles southwest of Beijing, but bruised and bandaged residents smuggled a reporter into the village Monday and led him to a vast field littered with abandoned weapons, spent shell casings and bloody rags. They also provided footage of the melee made with a digital video camera.
Despite the attack, the farmers remained defiant and in control of the disputed land. They also occupied the local headquarters of the ruling Communist Party, where they placed the bodies of six of their slain compatriots. A crowd of emotional mourners filled the courtyard outside; hanging over the front gate was a white flag with a word scrawled in black ink: "Injustice."
Residents said party officials abandoned the building and fled town, apparently because they feared they would be blamed for the killings.
"We want to know who gave the orders, who sent them to attack us," said Niu Zhanzong, 50, a bald, wiry farmer who made a video of part of the battle before men knocked him down, smashed his camera and broke his arm. "We hope the central government will come and investigate. We believe in party central, but we don't believe in the local police."
The seizure of farmland by local officials to build roads, dams, factories and other projects, often for personal profit, has emerged as an increasingly volatile issue in the Chinese countryside, where the government owns all land and gives farmers only long-term leases. Peasants often complain they are unfairly compensated when officials confiscate their plots, and have staged hundreds of protests over the issue in recent years.
The incident in Shengyou, a wheat- and peanut-farming village in central Hebei province, was unusual because the men sent to suppress the peasants appeared to be hired thugs rather than police, and because the conflict resulted in so many casualties.
Residents said the men arrived in six white buses before dawn, most of them wearing hard hats and combat fatigues, and they struck without warning, repeatedly shouting "Kill!" and "Attack!" Police failed to respond to calls for help until nearly six hours later, residents said, long after the assailants had departed.
Access to firearms is strictly regulated in China, but villagers said the men fired on them with hunting shotguns and flare guns. They also wielded metal pipes fitted with sharp hooks on the end. Because of the preparation, residents suggested the men might have ties to organized crime groups working with local officials.
The attack was first reported Monday in the Beijing News, a state-run tabloid known for testing party censors. The paper said one of the assailants died in the clash, and reported that authorities have already dismissed the party chief and mayor of the nearby city of Dingzhou, which governs Shengyou.
Officials in Dingzhou declined to answer questions, and managers of the Hebei Guohua Dingzhou Power Plant did not return phone calls.
Villagers said they began camping on the disputed land in the fall of 2003, after the plant announced that it would build a facility there for storing coal ash. Twelve villages surrendered land for the project, but peasants in Shengyou refused to give up their 67 acres. The plant agreed to pay them about $1,800 per acre, but residents said the offer did not meet national guidelines. They also accused local officials of stealing some of the money and demanded a full accounting.
Instead, Dingzhou police began harassing the village, detaining its leaders and once going so far as to surround the town in what residents said was an attempt to cut off food and water shipments. The farmers responded by digging in to block construction and keeping a 24-hour watch on the land, even through the winter.
The standoff appears to have to caused serious problems for the power plant, which the provincial government describes as one of its most important projects. A party newspaper said last year that the land dispute could force parts of the plant to shut down.
Two months ago, a group of 20 young toughs attempted to chase the farmers off the land, but the villagers fought back, captured one of the men and refused orders from party officials to hand him over to local police, residents said. Instead, they kept him in a pit.
During Saturday's attack, some of the assailants appeared to be searching for the man, witnesses said. Farmers later moved him to a shed in the party headquarters and allowed a reporter to speak to him.
The man, Zhu Xiaorui, 23, appeared frightened but healthy, although his ankles were shackled. He said he had been recruited by a man he met at the Beijing nightclub where he worked. He said he was taken to the village, given a metal pipe and told to "teach a lesson" to the farmers, and was promised $12 for the job.
"The villagers have treated me kindly," Zhu said, tears in his eyes. He added that he did not want to be turned over to Dingzhou police because he was afraid they would kill him for confessing to the farmers.
Across from Zhu's cell, the bodies of the slain villagers lay in separate rooms with shrines of candles and incense in front of their coffins. Occasionally, family members in the courtyard rushed forward, wailing, and the crowd struggled to hold them back.
Relatives identified the victims as Niu Zhanbao, 46, a pig farmer who suffered a fatal gunshot wound to his back; Hou Tongshun, 56, a father of three who was struck in the chest by a hook; Niu Shunlin, 26, a migrant worker who was both shot and stabbed; Niu Chengshe, 49, who suffered a fatal blow to the head; and Zhao Yingzhi, 50, who suffered multiple wounds.
Niu Tongyin, 62, one of the leaders of the farmers' movement, bled to death from a stab wound. His body lay in the Party Members' Activity Room, under portraits of Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Marx and Engels.
Researcher Vivian Zhang in Beijing contributed to this report.

Washington Post : An Unusual Sort of Democracy

Allegations of Party Vote-Buying Surround Village Election in China

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, June 20, 2005; A09

DANGXI, China Li Fuzeng was busy making pancakes, he recalled, when an acquaintance stopped by his little snack shop on the morning of May 19 and unexpectedly handed him the equivalent of $50.

The money was a significant sum in the economy of this farming village in eastern China, and Li knew something would be expected in exchange. He was right. The quid pro quo, Li recounted later, was his and his family's votes in village elections the next day.

"My friend said, 'Vote like this,' " Li said, "and he handed me a list of candidates."

Li's account of what happened that morning has become part of a bitter struggle between the local Communist Party apparatus and a group of discontented farmers who want new leadership for their village. The vote-buying at Li's pancake stand, the farmers allege, was but one episode in a campaign during which thousands of dollars were spent to make sure that people in tune with party leaders would be elected to the seven-member council.

The uproar in Dangxi, a village of 3,200 residents on the fringes of the city of Jinan, about 200 miles south of Beijing, is emblematic of the Communist Party's difficulty in retaining support among peasants as China makes economic development its main mission, often at the price of farmland. The conflict also dramatizes the limits on China's village elections, which the government depicts as grass-roots democracy but over which local Communist Party branches and traditional leaders often retain control.

Elections have been held in a growing number of China's 700,000 villages since the experiment began in 1987, and Dangxi joined the trend. Over the last decade, the village has elected several councils. But farmers here described an unusual kind of democracy. Voting, they said, was organized by the Communist Party secretary, Jin Yansi, and one of his followers carried the ballot box from home to home, handing villagers ballots to deposit in the slot.

Assured of a compliant village council, said Zhang Tingfu, leader of the dissident farmers, Jin helped arrange development deals that reduced Dangxi's cultivated land from more than 2,000 acres to around 400 as new buildings rose where crops once grew. More than 100 farming families lost their land during the 1990s, Zhang said, and in return received only $100 each in compensation. In place of their fields, he said, a stone quarry and a private high school were developed.

Zhang, 58, who plants corn and wheat on his own 1.2 acres, said he and a group of other farmers went to the quarry in the summer of 2000 and pulled down the walls to protest the loss of farmland. At the same time, Zhang said, he started a campaign to demand that village elections be organized by secret ballot so new leaders could be chosen who would, he hoped, close the quarry and return the fields to farmers who used to work them.

"We wanted to protect the land and they wanted to develop it," said Zhang, a peasant with short gray hair and a determined mien. "That's why Jin and his supporters did not want us in power."

Jin and his family had run the village for years. His cousin was party secretary for more than a decade, with Jin his deputy. Jin took over in 1996 after his cousin died, Zhang said, and was not used to any challenges to his authority.

In response to the agitation, however, the voting was moved to a meeting hall for elections in April 2002. County authorities said that this time the balloting would be secret, as required by law. But Zhang said he and other villagers found the ballot boxes half full before anyone had voted. In protest, most villagers boycotted the proceedings and the elections had to be declared invalid, he said.

"We have two groups in our village, one for Zhang and one for Jin," explained Cui Huanmei, 60, a farmer's wife whose brick home stands on a narrow lane full of fat black cows lounging in the dust.

Jin was replaced as party secretary in 2002 -- villagers were unsure why -- and a new election was organized the following March, Zhang said, with secret ballots and supervision by an elected committee. Zhang won with 1,514 votes out of 1,600 ballots and became head of the village council for a three-year term.

"They could not stop it," Zhang said. "Everyone knows the power of democracy."

Full of zeal, Zhang decided that his first step as village head would be to demand that the government of surrounding Dang Jiazheng county, which owned the quarry, return the land to the farmers who used to work it. His second step, he recalled, was to ask county officials for the village account books; villagers, he said, wanted an explanation for Jin's large green home and big black car.

For more than a year, he said, he pushed -- but got nowhere. The quarry was shut down, but the farmers did not get their land back, and the new village council never saw the account books. "Even now, we don't know where our account book is," Zhang said in an interview.

Two lawsuits were brought against the county; both were thrown out of court.

Then county officials announced that new elections would have to be held after less than two years. The reason for advancing the schedule, they said, was to synchronize voting among villages surrounding Jinan. Zhang and his followers believed, however, that the reason was to kick them out of power and prevent them from looking into the village accounts.

The new voting was held last December. But as villagers filed in to cast ballots at a local primary school, someone burst in and stole a ballot box. As a result, county authorities again were forced to invalidate the election.

Starting anew, Dangxi voted for yet another election organizing committee in April. As he had before, Zhang received the most votes, becoming head of the committee. He prepared to set up another election that he expected to win.

But as preparations were underway, Zhang said, he got reports that people were receiving money in return for pledging to vote against him. Several villagers said the going rate was $12 per vote. A number of people, including Li, the 42-year-old pancake seller, gave Zhang signed statements acknowledging they had accepted money in return for voting as they were told.

Armed with their testimony in a file folder, Zhang petitioned county authorities to put off the election until the allegations were investigated. But they ordered the voting to go ahead.

On May 20, when the election was held, Zhang was the lowest-ranking vote-getter, barely retaining a seat on the council and losing his post as village leader. The winner was Fa Zhonglei, a Communist Party member who worked at the quarry and whom many villagers regard as an associate of Jin and his successor, Li Lianzeng.

A month later, Zhang still refuses to hand over the village seal, a traditional symbol of power, and he has written an open letter to Civil Affairs Minister Li Xueju in Beijing demanding an investigation.

The minister has not responded. But Zhang said he was heartened by an article in the ministry's official newspaper headlined: "The vote-buying was obvious in Dangxi." Meanwhile, he has continued to rally his followers against the new council.

Jin, who villagers said still exercises quiet influence but keeps a low profile, could not be located for comment. Fa, the new village head, said in a telephone interview that Zhang and his supporters invented the vote-buying charges to explain their loss. Their accusations of corruption are also groundless, he said, and Jin was only trying to bring economic progress to Dangxi as Jinan sprawled into suburban land.

But Fa Jinming, 79, the patriarch of a large family in Dangxi that backs Zhang, said he got a call from Fa Zhonglei on June 5 seeking his family's cooperation with the new administration. In the conversation, the elderly farmer said with a smile, the new village head said he planned to model his tenure on Zhang's.

Many in U.S., Canada View China as a Threat

By WILL LESTER

The Associated PressSaturday, June 11, 2005; 2:52 AM

WASHINGTON -- China's growing political power and influence on the world economy has many people in North America concerned, polling suggests. Substantial numbers of people in Canada and the United States worry that China's emergence is a threat to world peace and worry about China's impact on the economy in their own countries.
Two-thirds of Americans and half of Canadians say they fear that "China is a serious threat" to jobs in their own countries, according to polling done by Ipsos-Reid. Just over half of Americans, 54 percent, and nearly half of Canadians say they are concerned about the level of Chinese investment in their countries.
Tensions have been increasing between various countries and China recently over its trade surplus, surging textile imports and problems with product piracy.
"It's clear that Americans are concerned about the emergence of China as a world power," said Darrell Bricker, Ipsos' president of public affairs for North America. "Canadians, on the other hand, see it as much an opportunity as a threat."
Bricker said Canadians view increased trade with China as a way of balancing Canada's current reliance on the United States.
Majorities in both Canada (61 percent) and the United States (71 percent) said they do not believe an increased global role for China will spur democratic reforms.
As China gains economic and political clout internationally, a sizable group of people in both Canada (42 percent) and the United States (31 percent) said they agreed with the statement that "China will soon dominate the world."
While most people in both countries see China's economic growth as an opportunity, they also don't think the nation's record of human rights abuses should be rewarded by pursuing expanded trade with it.
Seven in 10 Canadians said they thought expanding Canada's trade with China would be a good thing because it would reduce dependence on U.S. goods.
The polling was conducted April 5-7 of 1,000 adults in both Canada and the United States for the Canada Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center. Each poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Washington Post - China : Containment Won't Work

By Henry A. Kissinger [The writer, a former secretary of state, is chairman of Kissinger Associates.]

Monday, June 13, 2005; A19

The relationship between the United States and China is beset by ambiguity. On the one hand, it represents perhaps the most consistent expression of a bipartisan, long-range American foreign policy. Starting with Richard Nixon, seven presidents have affirmed the importance of cooperative relations with China and the U.S. commitment to a one-China policy -- albeit with temporary detours at the beginning of the Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. President Bush and Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell have described relations with China as the best since the opening to Beijing in 1971. The two presidents, Bush and Hu Jintao, plan to make reciprocal visits and to meet several times at multilateral forums.
Nevertheless, ambivalence has suddenly reemerged. Various officials, members of Congress and the media are attacking China's policies, from the exchange rate to military buildup, much of it in a tone implying China is on some sort of probation. To many, China's rise has become the most significant challenge to U.S. security.
Before dealing with the need of keeping the relationship from becoming hostage to reciprocal pinpricks, I must point out that the consulting company I chair advises clients with business interests around the world, including China. Also, in early May I spent a week in China, much of it as a guest of the government.
The rise of China -- and of Asia -- will, over the next decades, bring about a substantial reordering of the international system. The center of gravity of world affairs is shifting from the Atlantic, where it was lodged for the past three centuries, to the Pacific. The most rapidly developing countries are in Asia, with a growing means to vindicate their perception of the national interest.
China's emerging role is often compared to that of imperial Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, the implication being that a strategic confrontation is inevitable and that the United States had best prepare for it. That assumption is as dangerous as it is wrong. The European system of the 19th century assumed that its major powers would, in the end, vindicate their interests by force. Each nation thought that a war would be short and that, at its end, its strategic position would have improved.
Only the reckless could make such calculations in a globalized world of nuclear weapons. War between major powers would be a catastrophe for all participants; there would be no winners; the task of reconstruction would dwarf the causes of the conflict. Which leader who entered World War I so insouciantly in 1914 would not have recoiled had he been able to imagine the world at its end in 1918?
Another special factor that a century ago drove the international system to confrontation was the provocative style of German diplomacy. In 1900 a combination of Russia, France and Britain would have seemed inconceivable given the conflicts among them. Fourteen years later, a bullying German diplomacy had brought it about, challenging Britain with a naval buildup and seeking to humiliate Russia over Bosnia in 1908 and France in two crises over Morocco in 1905 and 1911.
Military imperialism is not the Chinese style. Clausewitz, the leading Western strategic theoretician, addresses the preparation and conduct of a central battle. Sun Tzu, his Chinese counterpart, focuses on the psychological weakening of the adversary. China seeks its objectives by careful study, patience and the accumulation of nuances -- only rarely does China risk a winner-take-all showdown.
It is unwise to substitute China for the Soviet Union in our thinking and to apply to it the policy of military containment of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was heir to an imperialist tradition, which, between Peter the Great and the end of World War II, projected Russia from the region around Moscow to the center of Europe. The Chinese state in its present dimensions has existed substantially for 2,000 years. The Russian empire was governed by force; the Chinese empire by cultural conformity with substantial force in the background. At the end of World War II, Russia found itself face to face with weak countries along all its borders and unwisely relied on a policy of occupation and intimidation beyond the long-term capacity of the Russian state.
The strategic equation in Asia is altogether different. U.S. policy in Asia must not mesmerize itself with the Chinese military buildup. There is no doubt that China is increasing its military forces, which were neglected during the first phase of its economic reform. But even at its highest estimate, the Chinese military budget is less than 20 percent of America's; it is barely, if at all, ahead of that of Japan and, of course, much less than the combined military budgets of Japan, India and Russia, all bordering China -- not to speak of Taiwan's military modernization supported by American decisions made in 2001. Russia and India possess nuclear weapons. In a crisis threatening its survival, Japan could quickly acquire them and might do so formally if the North Korean nuclear problem is not solved. When China affirms its cooperative intentions and denies a military challenge, it expresses less a preference than the strategic realities. The challenge China poses for the medium-term future will, in all likelihood, be political and economic, not military.
The problem of Taiwan is an exception and is often invoked as a potential trigger. This could happen if either side abandons the restraint that has characterized U.S.-Chinese relations on the subject for over a generation. But it is far from inevitable. Almost all countries -- and all major ones -- have recognized China's claim that Taiwan is part of China. So have seven American presidents of both parties -- none more emphatically than George W. Bush. Both sides have managed the occasional incongruities of this state of affairs with some skill. In 1972 Beijing accepted a visit by President Nixon, even while the United States recognized Taipei as the capital of all of China, and by another president -- Gerald Ford -- under the same ground rules in 1975. Diplomatic relations were not established until 1979. Despite substantial U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, Sino-American relations have steadily improved based on three principles: American recognition of the one-China principle and opposition to an independent Taiwan; China's understanding that the United States requires the solution to be peaceful and is prepared to vindicate that principle; restraint by all parties in not exacerbating tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
The task now is to keep the Taiwan issue in a negotiating framework. The recent visits to Beijing by the heads of two of Taiwan's three major parties may be a forerunner. Talks on reducing the buildup in the Taiwan Strait seem feasible.
With respect to the overall balance, China's large and educated population, its vast markets, its growing role in the world economy and global financial system foreshadow an increasing capacity to pose an array of incentives and risks, the currency of international influence. Short of seeking to destroy China as a functioning entity, however, this capacity is inherent in the global economic and financial processes that the United States has been preeminent in fostering.
The test of China's intentions will be whether its growing capacity will be used to seek to exclude America from Asia or whether it will be part of a cooperative effort. Paradoxically, the best strategy for achieving anti-hegemonic objectives is to maintain close relations with all the major countries of Asia, including China. In that sense, Asia's rise will be a test of U.S. competitiveness in the world now emerging, especially in the countries of Asia. The historical American aim of opposing hegemony in Asia -- incorporated as a joint aim with China in the Shanghai Communique of 1972 -- remains valid. It will have to be pursued, however, primarily by political and economic measures -- albeit backed by U.S. power.
In a U.S. confrontation with China, the vast majority of nations will seek to avoid choosing sides. At the same time, they will generally have greater incentives to participate in a multilateral system with America than to adopt an exclusionary Asian nationalism. They will not want to be seen as pieces of an American design. India, for example, perceives ever closer common interests with the United States regarding opposition to radical Islam, some aspects of nuclear proliferation and the integrity of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. It sees no need to give these common purposes an ideological or anti-Chinese character. It finds no inconsistency between its dramatically improving relations with the United States and proclaiming a strategic partnership with China. American insistence on an ideological crusade and on a Cold War-type of containment might accelerate such gestures. And it would risk inflaming India's Muslim population.
China, in its own interest, is seeking cooperation with the United States for many reasons, including the need to close the gap between its own developed and developing regions; the imperative of adjusting its political institutions to the accelerating economic and technological revolutions; and the potentially catastrophic impact of a Cold War with the United States on the continued raising of the standard of living, on which the legitimacy of the government depends. But it does not follow from this that any damage to China caused by a Cold War would benefit America. We would have few followers anywhere in Asia. Asian countries would continue trading with China. Whatever happens, China will not disappear. The American interest in cooperative relations with China is for the pursuit of a stable international system.
Preemption is not a feasible policy toward a country of China's magnitude. It cannot be in our interest to have new generations in China grow up with a perception of a permanently and inherently hostile United States. It cannot be in China's interest to be perceived in America as being exclusively focused on its own narrow domestic or Asian interests.
The issue of nuclear weapons in North Korea is an important test case. It is often presented as an example of China's failure to fulfill all its possibilities. But anyone familiar with Chinese conduct over the past decade knows that China has come a long way in defining a parallel interest with respect to doing away with the nuclear arsenal in North Korea. Its patience in dealing with the problem is grating on some U.S. policymakers, but it partly reflects the reality that the North Korean problem is more complex for China than for the United States. America concentrates on nuclear weapons in North Korea; China is worried about the potential for chaos along its borders. These concerns are not incompatible; they may require enlarging the framework of discussions from North Korea to Northeast Asia.
Attitudes are psychologically important. China needs to be careful about policies seeming to exclude America from Asia and our sensitivities regarding human rights, which will influence the flexibility and scope of the U.S. stance toward China. America needs to understand that a hectoring tone evokes in China memories of imperialist condescension and that it is not appropriate in dealing with a country that has managed 4,000 years of uninterrupted self-government.
As a new century begins, the relations between China and the United States may well determine whether our children will live in turmoil even worse than the 20th century's or will witness a new world order compatible with universal aspirations for peace and progress.

China Tightens Security Around Tiananmen

June 5, 2005 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BEIJING (AP) -- China tightened security around Tiananmen Square on Saturday to prevent memorials on the anniversary of the bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. But in Hong Kong, tens of thousands of protesters staged a candlelight rally.

In Sydney, Australia, a Chinese diplomat who is seeking asylum emerged from hiding to address a memorial rally.

Tiananmen Square, the symbolic political heart of China, was open to the public. But extra carloads of police watched tourists on the vast plaza, where weeks of student-led demonstrations that drew tens of thousands ended in a military attack 16 years ago Saturday. Troops killed hundreds and perhaps thousands of protesters that day.

There was no public mention of the anniversary in China nor any sign of attempts to commemorate it.

The United States used the anniversary to press Beijing for a full account of the dead, missing and detained from what it called the ''brutal and tragic'' events of 1989 and demanded that China generally show greater respect for internationally recognized human rights.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States remembered the many Chinese citizens killed, detained, or missing in connection with the protests. In addition to those who died, thousands of Chinese were arrested and sentenced without trial, and as many as 250 still languish in prison for Tiananmen-related activities, he said.

''We call on the Chinese government to fully account for the thousands killed, detained, or missing, and to release those unjustly imprisoned,'' McCormack said.

''It is now time for the Chinese government to move forward with a reexamination of Tiananmen, and give its citizens the ability to flourish by allowing them to think, speak, assemble and worship freely. We continue to urge China to bring its human rights practices into conformity with international standards and law.''

The day was especially sensitive because it followed the death in January of Zhao Ziyang, the former Communist Party leader who was purged in 1989 for sympathizing with the protesters.
Communist leaders have eased many of the social controls that fueled the unrest but still crush any activity that they fear might challenge their monopoly on power. After an official ruling that the nonviolent protests were a subversive riot, activists and relatives of the dead who appeal that ruling are detained and harassed.

''Family members of victims, like the Tiananmen mothers, and other citizens who urge their government to undertake a reassessment of what happened June 4, 1989, should be free from harassment and detention,'' McCormack said.

In Hong Kong, a crowd estimated by organizers at 30,000-40,000 raised candles in the air in Victoria Park and sang solemn songs in the only large-scale memorial on Chinese soil. They carried signs that read: ''Don't forget June 4'' and ''Democracy fighters live forever.''

The former British territory retains many of its Western-style civil liberties -- a status that many there say obligates them to speak out while those on the mainland cannot.

''Our slogan is 'Recognize history,' and we're asking Beijing to do just that,'' said a vigil organizer, Lee Cheuk-yan.

A younger generation of Chinese who came of age since the protests know little about 1989 because of an official ban on public discussion.

But many in Hong Kong are still emotional about the crackdown, which came as the territory was preparing for its 1997 return to Chinese rule.

''Hong Kong people will not forget this history when a government uses guns and tanks to crush students. It's very atrocious,'' said Shum Ming, a 58-year-old construction worker.

In their rare public comments about 1989, Chinese leaders defend the crackdown by pointing to the nation's emergence as an economic powerhouse since then, saying it would have been impossible without the enforced stability of one-party rule. A booming private economy has freed millions of Chinese from the structure of state jobs that controlled where they lived and worked -- and even whom they could marry.

That defense was echoed Saturday by Donald Tsang, the leading candidate in the campaign to become Hong Kong's next leader.

''I had shared Hong Kong people's passion and impetus when the June 4 incident happened. But after 16 years, I've seen our country's impressive economic and social development,'' Tsang said. ''My feelings have become calmer.''

In Sydney, Chen Yonglin, a 37-year-old Chinese diplomat who abandoned his post, said at a memorial rally that he was seeking asylum in Australia because of the lack of freedoms in China.
''In 16 years, the Chinese government has done nothing for political reform,'' he said. ''People have no political freedom, no human rights.''

Chen was the consul for political affairs at the Chinese consulate in Sydney.

China Says Defector Lying To Stay In Australia

June 5, 2005

By REUTERS Filed at 6:41 a.m. ET

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A Chinese diplomat seeking asylum in Australia claiming spies are hunting him after he aided pro-democracy supporters and criticized Beijing, is lying to stay in the country, a Chinese official said on Sunday.

Chen Yonglin, the 37-year-old consul for political affairs at China's Sydney consulate, was due to return home after four years in Australia and had made up stories in order to stay, a spokesman for the Chinese Consul-General Qiu Shaofang said.

``To achieve the aim of staying in Australia, Chen Yonglin fabricated stories, which are unfounded and purely fictitious,'' said the spokesman in a statement.

Chen, who first appeared in public on Saturday at a rally in Sydney to mark the anniversary of the 1989 crushing of Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, said the Chinese government considered him a threat because he had offered help to some democracy activists and Falun Gong practitioners.

Falun Gong is an amalgam of religions, meditation and exercises that Beijing considers to be an evil cult.

Chen said he had walked out of the consulate four days ago and was seeking asylum because he could no longer support China's repression of pro-democracy and religious groups.

He said he was in hiding with his wife Jin Ping, 38, and 6-year-old daughter.

Chen said that there were up to 1,000 Chinese spies in Australia and that Chinese spies were trying to kidnap him and take him back to China.

``Chinese agents are looking for me and they could kidnap me,'' he told the rally. ``If I am sent back to China I will be persecuted. I am very frightened. I am afraid it will be easy for them to find me.''

Chen said Chinese spies had previously kidnapped critics of Beijing in Australia and returned them to China.

``They have successfully been kidnapping people in Australia back to China,'' he said. ``Each year they have kidnapped a good number.''

Chen's attempted defection could muddy Australia's ties with Beijing, its third-largest trading partner with annual exchanges now worth A$28.9 billion ($22.7 billion).

PERSECUTION FEARS

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Chen had applied for a protection visa.

Asked whether Chen's fears of persecution if sent back to China would be considered, Downer said: ``He's spoken out (against Beijing) very recently. That's something the immigration department will obviously have to weigh up.

``They'll have to take into account the implications of refusing his protection visa application, and in those circumstances he'd be sent back to China,'' Downer told Australian television.
Downer said he was unaware of claims of large numbers of Chinese spies operating in Australia, but added the government did not comment on intelligence matters.

The Australian newspaper recently reported that the number of Chinese agents in Australia had increased sharply during the past decade and now outnumbered Soviet spies during the Cold War.

It said that the nation's main spy agency, the Australian Secret Intelligence Organization (ASIO), had set up a new counter-espionage unit to boost surveillance of foreign spies.
Citing unnamed government sources, the daily said that Australia has been targeted aggressively in recent years by Chinese spies seeking information on military-related technology and strategic policy secrets.

The small Greens party criticized the Australian government on Sunday for its handling of Chen's asylum application, saying the government had put trade above human rights.

Party leader Bob Brown said Chen had written to the Australian government in late May asking for his asylum request to be urgently processed, but had received no protection.

``The idea of sending this man back to China is unthinkable -- it would be tantamount to ending this man's life and that of his family,'' Senator Brown told reporters.

Chinese Diplomat in Australia Seeks Asylum

June 5, 2005 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- A senior Chinese diplomat in Sydney who abandoned his post and is seeking political asylum in Australia came out of hiding Saturday to address a pro-democracy rally.

Chen Yonglin, 37, the consul for political affairs at the consulate-general in Sydney, walked out of the mission a week ago. Shadowed by a security guard, he appeared Saturday at a Sydney rally to commemorate the June 4, 1989, crackdown on the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in Beijing.

In a wide-ranging address, Chen outlined examples of what he said were kidnappings, life imprisonments and executions of dissidents by the Chinese government.

''I feel very unsafe,'' Chen told the rally of several hundred. ''In 16 years, the Chinese government has done nothing for political reform. People have no political freedom, no human rights.''

Chen, who said he had worked at the Sydney consulate for four years, expressed hope that the Australian government would offer him protection ''so I will not have to hide again.''

Chen has been in hiding with his wife and their 6-year-old daughter.

In a statement issued Sunday, China's Consul-General accused Chen of claiming asylum purely to remain in Australia. ''To achieve the aim of staying in Australia, Chen Yonglin fabricated stories, which are unfounded and purely fictitious,'' a spokesman for the Chinese Consul-General Qiu Shaofang said in a statement.

On Sunday, Amanda Vanstone, Australia's immigration minister said Chen's request for political asylum would be considered on its merits.