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China news tagged with: wenzhou (15)

• Photo News: Wenzhou Shoe Factory Closes, Gets Raided

  

  A Wenzhou shoe factory let go all of its employees and was then stripped of its inventory and infrastructure. Even the wood pallets were pilfered. From Hangzhou.com.cn via forum.dwnews.com.

  

  

  

  According to the Dushi Kuaibao (都市快报): A local official explained the reason for the closing of the shoe factory was the owner’s failed real estate investment, it was “not because of the shoe business itself.”

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  • November 28, 2008 10:18 PM

• Can China Spend Its Way Out Of Trouble?

  

  John Garnaut writes in the Age:

  Wenzhou, the heartland of Chinese capitalism, is once again fighting for its survival. The city was famously forsaken by Maoist China but it stayed alive and later thrived by building one of the most entrepreneurial and dynamic marketplaces on the planet.

  Wenzhou’s manufacturers used to battle against the Communist Party’s efforts to control them. Now, as China’s export markets collapse and they are forced to turn inland, they are fighting against the market itself.

  “We had more than 1000 workers, but now we are down to about 700. The rest have bolted home,” says Shi Oubing, whose Triangular Cow factory made 3 million of the billion shoes produced last year in Wenzhou, a city ringed by mountains on the coast of Zhejiang province south of Shanghai.

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  • November 15, 2008 9:49 PM

• Bus Explosion Kills at Least 14 in East China (Updated)

  

  From Xinhua:

  At least 14 people were killed in an explosion after a bus and a tractor collided in east China’s Zhejiang Province Saturday afternoon, local police said.

  The collision happened at about 1:54 p.m. in Yongzhong town, Longwan District of Wenzhou City, Zhejiang. The bus blew up and 13people died at the scene, and another in hospital, said local police.

  Photos are from boxun.com:

  
  
  

  UPDATE: According to netease.com, the Wenzhou police later announced that the explosion was manmade. However, they said explosives were not found on the bus, but were on a tractor which crashed into the bus by accident. The total death toll was 18, and 27 people were wounded, according to Wenzhou police.

  “赌博村”制造爆炸 18人死27人伤

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  • May 17, 2008 10:25 AM

• Dubai Island Gets Shanghaied - Cao Qian

  

  From Shanghai Daily:

  A Wenzhou developer is taking the Huangpu River all the way to Dubai. The Zhejiang Zhongzhou Group plans to build an S-shaped waterway simulating Shanghai’s famous river in the World Islands project off the coast of the United Arab Emirates , company Chairman Hu Bin told Shanghai Daily yesterday.

  Island Shanghai - which comprises nine manmade islets linked by bridges - will feature architecture similar to that found along the city’s Bund and even a smaller version of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower . [Full Text]

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  • October 17, 2007 4:44 PM

• China Fines Schneider $45m - Jamil Anderlini

  

  From Financial Times:

  A Chinese court has ordered France’s Schneider Electric to pay a Chinese company $45m in damages for infringing its patent, the largest amount ever awarded in an intellectual property case in the country.

  Intellectual property violations are one of the main sources of friction between China and the rest of the world, and in the vast majority of IPR cases involving foreign players, the Chinese company is the defendant. The Intermediate People’s Court in Wenzhou city , eastern Zhejiang province, told Schneider to stop making five types of miniature circuit-breakers, which it ruled were based on patents held by low-voltage equi¬≠p¬≠ment maker Chint Group‚Äâof Wenzhou. The court also awarded Chint Rmb334,869,872 ($44.6m) in damages. [Full Text]

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  • October 3, 2007 11:06 AM

• Is Made in China Pricing Itself Out of the Market? - Mark Kleinman

  

  Few experiences capture the essence of China’s rise as an industrial powerhouse as vividly as a journey into one of the vast factory towns of the Pearl River Delta. The chemical fumes and roar of machinery are a reminder that like almost nowhere else in the world, southern China has become the focal point on the compass of global manufacturing. From Telegraph:
  
  

  In recent years, many Chinese towns have become specialist production lines for dirt-cheap Western consumer goods. In Foshan, for example, the factories churn out electrical products and toys, while Wenzhou has a virtual monopoly on the production of cigarette lighters. But while the exports vary, all of these places near mainland China’s border with Hong Kong have also been exporting something less tangible to the world’s consumer markets: deflation…

  True, Chinese exports are still rising, fuelling its massive trade surplus. Many multinationals are continuing to outsource incremental production demand to China. Last month, a survey by Deloitte found that more than two-thirds of manufacturers planned to establish or increase production in China. [Full Text]

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  • September 8, 2007 11:03 PM

• China’s Instant Cities - Peter Hessler

  

  In National Geographic, Peter Hessler writes about Wenzhou and the factory towns that are springing up nearby to feed the region’s entrepreneurial boom. The article also includes a slideshow by Mark Leong:

  The Wenzhou airport bookstore stocks a volume titled, Actually, You Don’t Understand the Wenzhou People. It shares a shelf with The Feared Wenzhou People, The Collected Secrets of How Wenzhou People Make Money, and The Jews of the East: The Commercial Stories of Fifty Wenzhou Businessmen. For the Chinese, this part of Zhejiang Province has become a source of fascination, and the local press contributes to the legend. Recently, Wenzhou’s Fortune Weekly conducted a survey of local millionaires. One question was: If forced to choose between your business and your family, which would it be? Of the respondents, 60 percent chose business, and 20 percent chose family. The other 20 percent couldn’t make up their minds.

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  • May 17, 2007 10:10 AM

• Chinese Speculators Eye Property Overseas - Li Qian

  

  From China Daily:

  Speculators from Wenzhou who contributed to the hike in real estate prices in China’s large cities, are moving their money to Malaysia.

  A tour group is departing from Wenzhou for Kuala Lumpur and Genting on Friday. With most of the members being entrepreneurs and professional investors, the group looks like it will be doing more scouting property than sight-seeing.

  Wenzhou is located in coastal Zhejiang Province, the richest area on the Chinese mainland, and many of the people there accumulated their wealth from manufacturing clothes and commodities such as lighters and drinking straws….[Full Text]

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  • April 19, 2007 10:59 PM

• Beijing Battles to Control its Booming Coal Biz - Jonathan Ansfield

  

  CDT’s esteemed Biganzi editor writes for Newsweek International on the opening of China’s most efficient coal plant ever, but he tempers the optimism with an illuminating look at the environmental calamity China faces as a result of its continued dependance on coal to feed the furnace of its chugging economy. From the lead:

  It isn’t the Great Wall or the Three Gorges Dam, but the launch last month of China’s most robust”and efficient”coal-fired power plant was hailed as a critical feat. Make that “ultra-supercritical“: that’s the name for the technology behind the next-generation 1,000-megawatt electricity plant located near the city of Wenzhou, in bustling, coastal Zhejiang Province. The $2.3 billion plant, which abuts the East China Sea, employs energy-saving “clean coal” technology. Because its hulking boilers can heat steam to 600 degrees Celsius”well beyond the “critical” boiling point”the plant needs 17 percent less coal than an average Chinese power plant to produce a kilowatt hour of electricity. [Full Text]

  As the article notes, the plant is owned by Huaneng, one of China’s five biggest electricity producers. In a strange twist noted in CDT last week, the company was recently among four power producers denied permission to build new plants on account of poor environmental practices.

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  • January 17, 2007 1:50 AM

• The Long March to the rule of law - Kent Ewing

  

  Kent Ewing is a teacher and writer at Hong Kong International School. He wrote the following essay in the Asia Times:

  A stubborn group of fish farmers in eastern China’s Zhejiang province has struck a blow for both the environment and rule of law in the country, leaving analysts to speculate on the promising long-term implications of their case.

  The 82 farmers, who have been fighting for years to have authorities investigate the pollution of their fish ponds by the 2,000 factories operating in the municipality of Wenzhou, last week won a landmark ruling against provincial police in a local court. The farmers allege that between 2003 and 2004, pollution from factories in the Wenzhou industrial zone caused 170 million yuan (nearly US$21.8 million) in damages to more than 367 hectares of fish ponds.

  The Shangchen District Court in Hangzhou ordered Zhejiang police authorities to determine why the Wenzhou Public Security Bureau did not act on the farmers’ complaints. While the ultimate resolution of the case is unknown, it has already made Chinese legal history in that a local court has ruled against a provincial authority. China’s big problem with implementing reform -environmental and otherwise - has been that local and provincial officials have often acted in cahoots to subvert central-government edicts that they did not perceive to be in their economic interests. [Full Text]

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  • January 11, 2007 7:15 AM

• In China, Churches Challenge the Rules - Maureen Fan

  

  From Washington Post:
  
  

  A new breed of churches in this region of China has demonstrated a boldness and independence unmatched elsewhere in the country, despite strict government guidelines for places of worship.

  Here in Wenzhou and the surrounding province of Zhejiang, just south of Shanghai, a growing number of congregations that began life as house churches — unauthorized places of worship set up in private, often dilapidated homes — have recently registered with the government, while continuing to spurn the rules of the official Protestant church in China. Like so many institutions in China, these churches now hover in a sort of legal netherworld.

  The official church, known as the Three-Self Patriotic Movement(中国基督教三自爱国运动委员会), was founded in the 1950s to free religious Chinese from foreign funds and influence. Its name is derived from the principles of self-governance, self-support and self-propagation of the Gospel. [Full Text]

  Related article of “Freedom of religion in China” from Association for Asia Research

  Read the ICRF Report: Religious Freedom in China from International Coalition for Religious Freedom

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  • October 1, 2006 7:22 PM

• A Tale of Two Chinas - Stephen Glain

  

  From Smithsonian Magazine (link):

  If China’s colossal impact on world markets is now familiar, the effect of the red-hot economy at home, where it is fueling record levels of internal unrest, is less well known. Last year, China’s public security minister Zhou Yongkang reported that almost four million Chinese took part in nearly 75,000 protest “incidents” in 2004. Zhou characterized the number as a “dramatic increase” over the previous year and noted a trend toward organized, rather than spontaneous, outbursts. In response, Beijing has reportedly formed a new police force equipped with helicopters and armored vehicles.

  Meanwhile in the West, starry-eyed accounts of China’s economic transformation often obscure Beijing’s contempt for basic human rights, its one-party politics, its rubber-stamp judiciary, its censored Internet and oppressed minorities, and a prison system so secretive that human rights groups can only guess at how many people may be languishing in it.

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  • May 1, 2006 2:22 PM

• Wenzhou shoe makers file joint protest agains EU anti-dumping tax - Huang Wufeng

  

  From Zhejiang Daily via Xinhua News Agency (in Chinese), translated by CDT (link):

  Wenzhou’s 14 shoe making firms have joined hands in filing a protest against the EU’s recent anti-dumping tax on the shoes made by these Chinese companies. They also encouraged all the Chinese companied involved to stand up hand in hand.

  The EU’s anti-dumping has started to show effects. Shipments from the Wenzhou shoe makers started dropping in February.

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  • April 6, 2006 7:20 PM

• Photo: A worker in a factory in Wenzhou, producing cellphones to be exported abroad through Hong Kong, via zjol.com.

  

  

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  • February 7, 2006 9:47 PM

• China’s capitalist capital

  

  From BBC, Louisa Lim wrote: “A father and son thresh wheat by hand, painstakingly working along their tiny patch of land. “Life is hard,” grunted the father. It is an age-old scene, but the landscape behind the threshers has been transformed out of all recognition. ”

  The full article is here.

  » Read more
  • October 25, 2004 12:45 PM

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