“This is not a cost-cutting exercise […] It’s a direct result of our strategy to have production close to the core markets. This factory will not supply Europe or North America,” Lego spokesman Roar Rude Trangbaek said, adding that the Lego factory in China will be able to supply 70% to 80% of the Lego bricks sold in Asia in 2017.

[…] Currently, Lego sources a small portion of its Lego and Duplo bricks from Chinese suppliers as well as the majority of its electronic and textile components.

But the coming Lego factory in Jiaxing, about 100 kilometers from Shanghai, will be a complete factory, a replica of Lego’s four existing factories in Denmark, Mexico, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

Lego’s total global sales reached $4.1 billion last year.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Denmark, education, factories, Jiaxing, manufacturing, toy industry, toys, Zhejiang
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The capital will take 180,000 old vehicles off the road and promote clean energy autos among government departments, the public and the urban cleaning sector, which includes street cleaners and trash collectors, Wang Anshun said at the opening of a session of the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress, the municipal legislature.

The heating systems of 44,000 old, single-story homes and coal-burning boilers downtown are to be replaced with clean energy, Wang said as he delivered a government work report.

The city will also speed up the promotion of clean energy in rural areas and strictly control dust in construction projects, said Wang.

He vowed to strengthen air quality monitoring and analysis, as well as the release of such information.

The promise of increased transparency, itself coming on the heels of a wave of unusually frank coverage in state media, was accompanied by a call for public comment on the new regulations. From Dexter Roberts at Bloomberg Businessweek:

In another sign that Beijing officials are, for now, leaning toward openness, officials will allow the city’s 20 million residents to weigh in on draft regulations aimed at curbing the Chinese capital’s horrendous air pollution, according to a notice posted Jan. 20 on the Beijing municipal government website. The public can comment on the proposed new measures until Feb. 8, the day before China shuts down for the annual Chinese New Year festival, said the statement issued by the city’s legal affairs office.

“This is important. Now public scrutiny should play a key role in promoting pollution control and enforcement of this rule,” says Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. Ma’s environmental advocacy group plans to comment through the online platform that the municipal government has created for this purpose.

Edward Wong argued at The New York Times on Sunday that Beijing’s “extraordinary surge” in air pollution was one of several drivers of growing demands for political input. But Reuters reported a generally unfavorable response to the plans on Sina Weibo:

“These plans are just dreams,” wrote one user.

Others said the phasing out of old cars would make little difference in a city where about 250,000 new cars hit the road every year, albeit with supposedly higher emissions standards.

“These ‘old cars’ are what the ordinary people drive. You people can only dare talk about this subject when you start phasing out all the cars officials drive,” wrote another user.

Other doubts remain about the likely effectiveness of public consultation, enforcement, and of rules targeted only at the city itself. From Yin Yeping at Global Times:

Zhang Yuanxun, a professor of resources and environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that a lack of law enforcement will be a problem.

“The punishments enshrined in the regulations are too strict and broad. It will require many more law enforcement officers to ensure its effective implementation,” he said.

“The old laws were not enforced, not to mention this new one,” he said.

[…] “Also, just restricting the local atmospheric pollution would have little contribution to its improvement if there are no changes in the pollution conditions in the surrounding areas [of Beijing],” [Zhou Rong, climate and energy director of Greenpeace] said.

Wang Yan, a resident working in international trade, said she thinks the new laws should have been launched already.

“I don’t think I’ll offer comments on the new regulation since I doubt if my voice will be heard,” she said, adding targeting street barbecues is ridiculous.

At chinadialogue, Gavin Lohry suggested an additional measure that might help address a range of environmental concerns, from air quality and energy consumption to drainage:

Green roofs – roofs covered with plant vegetation – first gained popularity in Germany and have since been spreading around the world. They help cities reduce storm water runoff, cool the urban environment, absorb air pollution, insulate buildings and increase biodiversity. With enough green roof adoption, Beijing could realise positive impacts on the environment and improved quality of life.

My research on the topic found that in Beijing there is around 93 million square metres of roof space suitable for cost effective green roof adoption. If the cheapest and most basic forms of green roofs covered the suitable roof space, the urban environment would be substantially improved.

Under this scenario air particle pollution could be reduced by as much as 880,000 kilograms every year, equivalent to taking 730,000 cars off the road. The roofs could reduce storm water by 3.5 million cubic metres during large rain events, equivalent to filling the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square with two metres of water or 1,400 Olympic swimming pools.

Any boost to Beijing’s drainage infrastructure would be valuable in the event of more storms like last summer’s, which killed 77 people. But there are no easy solutions: the problems are tangled, often beyond the scope of local government policies, or out of human control entirely. From Jonathan Kaiman at The Guardian:

Deborah Seligsohn, an expert on China’s environment at the University of California, San Diego, said that there is no silver bullet for the country’s air pollution. The underlying causes are dynamic and diverse: power plants, small factories, automobile emissions, rampant construction, farmers burning coal for heat. “One of the things about the air quality in Beijing is that it varies a lot more than it used to,” she said.

Beijing’s air quality fluctuates with the weather – a strong wind from the north can blow the smog to sea, she said, while south-eastern winds trap the air against a nearby mountain range, drowning the city in a pea-soup haze.

[…] Beijing has taken significant steps to combat pollution – it invested an estimated $10bn before the 2008 Olympics to raise emissions standards, replace residents’ coal stoves with natural gas heaters, and relocate a ring of steel plants on the city’s outskirts. Yet Beijing still shares its airspace with six surrounding provinces which may not adhere to comparable environmental standards.

“One of the fundamental problems is that the environmental regulators don’t have sufficient authority and resources to overcome the forces that are creating the pollution,” said Alex Wang, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on China’s environmental law.

The problem is indeed hardly limited to Beijing, as Peking University professor Pan Xiaochuan angrily pointed out while blasting the term “Beijing Cough” as an “extreme insult” to the city. Other cities have been even more severely affected, and Shanghai has not escaped. From Reuters:

Shanghai, too, is improving public communication of air pollution data, as Angel Hsu describes on her blog:

[… B]y far my favorite innovation Shanghai’s EPB has made so far is in the use of this little air quality mascot to communicate what the various levels of pollution on the normalized AQI index mean. For the most part, things take a sour turn for AQI girl (let’s just call her that, I’m not sure if she has an official name) after the Good (51-100) part of the range. I like how they coordinated her hair color with the official color codes of different pollutant thresholds – it’s a great way for people to automatically remember and understand what the different colors mean. AQI girl also provides a much more people and user-friendly means to calculate air quality, as opposed to other cartoon characters or anime figures that they could gone with.

[…] I can only imagine next will come a video game for AQI girl, that will feature her navigating Shanghai’s polluted streets, having to dodge roadside exhaust coming from tailpipes, all the while remembering to wear her face mask when she sees AQI readings above 150.

The Wall Street Journal’s Brian Spegele and Wayne Ma described the obstacles to implementing deeper and broader solutions. Proposed changes inevitably raise questions of who will pay for them.

Over the long term, drawing down emissions will require costly upgrades to industrial facilities and oil refineries, measures resisted by state-owned companies unable to pass costs on to consumers and local governments that depend on industrial output for revenue.

[…] Though attention over the years has focused on power plants and passenger-car emissions, China’s pollution problems are complex and spread broadly across the economy. Mr. Zhao, of Nanjing University, and a research team studied the effectiveness of Chinese government policies in curbing emissions between 2005 and 2010 and estimated PM2.5 from coal-fired power generation fell roughly 21% as cleaner technologies took hold. Meanwhile, PM2.5 emissions from iron and steel production rose roughly 39% to 2.2 million metric tons, according to the estimates, as output increased.

China is particularly struggling to curb what are known as secondary pollutants, formed when primary pollutants—such as emitted sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, from coal burning and other sources—undergo reactions in the atmosphere. The government has had some success targeting primary pollutants, but analysts say it is just beginning to target secondary pollutant problems, including particulate matter that is harmful to human health.

Spegele also discussed a range of air pollution issues with the Journal’s Deborah Kan:

Officials have been careful to manage expectations, stressing that real change will take years, just as the current situation was years in the making. South China Morning Post’s Li Jing spoke to Qu Geping, whose career in shaping China’s environmental policy included a stint as the country’s first environmental protection administrator from 1987 to 1993. Qu lamented that the present of emergency was foreseen thirty years ago, when China nearly chose a different development path to avoid it. He blames the lost opportunity on government according to “the rule of men”, rather than rule of law.

“I would not call the past 40 years’ efforts of environmental protection a total failure,” he said. “But I have to admit that governments have done far from enough to rein in the wild pursuit of economic growth … and failed to avoid some of the worst pollution scenarios we, as policymakers, had predicted.”

[…] But, Qu said, if the central government had respected a policy that it released in 1983, China could be in a much better place now.

“The State Council published a document that year, stipulating that economic and urban construction should synchronise with environmental protection, so that the three legs of social development could reach a co-ordinated benefit,” he said. “It was a pragmatic and feasible strategy, even more approachable than the notion of ‘sustainable development’ enshrined by the United Nations years later.”

[…] “Why was the strategy never properly implemented?” he said. “I think it is because there was no supervision of governments. It is because the power is still above the law.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Beijing Olympics, air pollution, air quality, Beijing, Beijing environment, beijing flood 2012, Chinese Academy of Science, clean air, clean energy, factories, forbidden city, greenpeace, industrial pollution, law enforcement, Ma Jun, PM2.5, power plants, rule of law, Shanghai, state-owned enterprises, steel, Tiananmen Square, Wang Anshun
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing has an intriguing new take on China’s place in the debate over Apple, iPhones, and the people who make them. While Americans hash out the moral ups and downs of having our electronics produced by Chinese factory hands, a young performance artist named Li Liao decided to jump into the middle of it. He got an assembly-line job making iPads, and forty-five days later he used his wages to buy one. As an exhibit, he put the iPad on a pedestal, tacked up his uniform and badges, and framed his contract. The effect, on a white gallery wall, is a strangely addictive ready-made tableau about the intersection of money, aspiration, and technology. I watched two young men separately linger over it for very different reasons: one was a hip Chinese gallerygoer in chunky glasses and a camel-hair coat, taking it all in; the other was a gallery security guard in a borrowed suit and white gloves. He was studying the details of the contract.

Did the experience change your perceptions of Apple one way or the other?

I worked at Foxconn for forty-five days. Before that, I was already an Apple consumer. I don’t think this experience changed my perception of the products; it only made one thing clearer: many of the products in this world actually have nothing to do with the workers who made them. To most of the workers there, Apple was just a name, a logo.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, art exhibitions, artists, Beijing, Evan Osnos, factories, factory workers, Foxconn, IPad, labor conditions, manufacturing, Shenzhen
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Griffin Technology, a company in Nashville that makes Apple accessories, said that moments after Apple introduced the iPhone 5, its employees were making final design tweaks in its prototyping shop, where 3-D printers turn out mock-ups of future products. Many Griffin employees had already traveled to China from the United States to be there when the iPhone 5 was introduced.

[…] Similarly, employees of Incase, a maker of iPhone cases based in San Francisco, crowded into a conference room to watch online reports of Apple’s presentation, said Dave Gotta, the chief executive. Employees in China were waiting at factories for final design specifications so they could get started making cases.

[…] Some companies take unsanctioned routes to get ahead of the game. Hard Candy Cases, a case maker, sent iPhone 5 cases to journalists before Apple even introduced the phone. Tim Hickman, chief executive of the company, said manufacturers in Shenzhen, where his cases are made, sent around design information for unreleased iPhones to attract case makers like himself.

“The factories have gone from, ‘Shhh, hey, buddy, look at what I have for you,’ to making it part of their presentation,” he said.

Others try to get a head start by sifting through the flood of rumours and purported leaks that precedes any Apple announcement, and then gambling on those that seem most credible. See ‘The Shadowy World of iPhone Cases‘, a Bloomberg report that followed the iPhone 4S launch last year, via CDT.

The flexibility that allows these companies to finalise product details at such short notice is a characteristic of China’s industrial machine that Apple itself vigorously exploits: see Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher’s January New York Times article on how the U.S. lost out on iPhone work. For China-relevant information on the iPhone 5, see Tech in Asia’s coverage; for analysis of the crowded Chinese marketplace into which the new phone will land, see Paul Mozur’s report at The Wall Street Journal; and for netizens’ gleeful mockery of the device’s extended screen, see Ministry of Tofu.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, factories, Foxconn, industry, iPhone, manufacturing, Shenzhen
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Also on Wednesday, TED posted a talk filmed in June by Leslie T. Chang, author of Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. In it, she argued that Western consumers’ guilt over Chinese factory conditions is beside the point, if not outright patronising:

We, the beneficiaries of globalization seem to exploit these victims with every purchase we make, and the injustice feels embedded in these products themselves. After all, what’s wrong with a world in which a worker on an iPhone assembly line can’t even afford to buy one? It’s taken for granted that Chinese factories are oppressive, and that it’s our desire for cheap goods that makes them so. So this simple narrative equating Western demand and Chinese suffering is appealing, especially at a time when many of us already feel guilty about our impact on the world. But it’s also inaccurate and disrespectful. We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine that we have the power to drive tens of millions of people on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer in such terrible ways.

[…] By focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets, we have rendered the individuals on the other ends into invisibility, as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone. Chinese workers are not forced into factories because of our insatiable desire for iPods. They choose to leave their homes in order to earn money, to learn new skills, and to see the world. In the ongoing debate about globalisation what’s been missing is the voices of the workers themselves. Here are a few.

Chang’s talk echoes an article she wrote for the New Yorker in March, following This American Life’s retraction of an episode about worker abuses at Foxconn. (For other reactions, see CDT’s round-up.) “Should you feel bad?” she concluded. “I don’t think so. But whether you do or not is peripheral to a much larger and more important story.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, factories, factory workers, Foxconn, iPhone, labor abuse, labor conditions, migrant workers
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

In February, Caixin, a leading news weekly, quoted soil expert Chen Tongbin, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources (Environmental Remediation Research Centre), as saying 10 per cent of China’s farmland had been contaminated by heavy metals, the leading culprits being cadmium and arsenic ….

Much of the Pearl River Delta has been polluted by heavy metals, according to an investigation conducted by the State Environmental Protection Administration. The study found that 40 per cent of farms and vegetable plots in the region had been polluted by heavy metals ….

Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, says weak enforcement means there is a lack of incentive for manufacturers and buyers to act. Experts say companies are reluctant to spend money on advanced pollution-control equipment because that would cut into profits in a competitive environment. And, says Ma, local officials are “still putting gross domestic product ahead of environmental protection and public health”.

Even when polluters are punished, says Ma, “the penalty is not sufficient to really discourage [them]. The cost of violating is still lower than the cost of compliance. So we see some of the factories having problems year after year, just paying [the fines] without solving the problem.”

Ma warns that heavy metals pose a bigger threat than most other pollutants because they don’t decompose naturally, instead becoming more concentrated over time. Furthermore, victims of industrial pollution have limited legal protection.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cadmium batteries, Chinese Academy of Science, factories, farmland, industrial pollution, lead poisoning, Ma Jun
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

According to research from IHS Global Insight first reported on by the Financial Times, the value of China’s manufacturing output in 2010 was $1.995 trillion, or 19.8 percent of the worldwide total. It edged out the US, which accounted for 19.4 percent, worth about $1.952 trillion.

Based on the same IHS Global Insight data, Agence France Presse reports that between 2008 and 2010, China’s manufacturing sector grew at an annual rate of 20.2 percent, compared to 1.8 percent for the US and 4.25 percent for Japan.

China leads in manufacturing output, but not in productivity. Workers in the US manufacturing sector generated over eight times more value per person than their counterparts in Chinese factories.

“In other words, the US manufacturing sector is producing roughly the same amount of output in 2010 with 11.5 million workers as opposed to its Chinese counterpart with around 100 million workers,” IHS said, according to AFP.

WTO statistics suggest that China was the world’s largest exporter of manufactured goods in 2010, followed by the US and Germany.

China was the world’s largest manufacturer of goods in the 19th century and now returns to that position once again. From the Financial Times:

China has become the world’s top manufacturing country by output, returning the country to the position it occupied in the early 19th century and ending the US’s 110-year run as the largest goods producer.

The change is revealed in a study released on Monday by IHS Global Insight, a US-based economics consultancy, which estimates that China last year accounted for 19.8 per cent of world manufacturing output, fractionally ahead of the US with 19.4 per cent.

The last time China was the world’s biggest goods producer was in about 1850 when the country was close to the end of a long period of population growth and technological ascendancy. Buoyed by the industrial revolution, the UK then became the top maker of factory goods and held this position for almost 50 years, following which the US began a long run as the world’s premier manufacturing nation.

© victoriawu for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: factories, manufacturing, U.S. China business competition
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology quietly published a list late Sunday of 2,087 steel mills, cement works and other energy-intensive factories required to close by Sept. 30.

Energy analysts described it as significant step toward the country’s energy efficiency goals, but not enough by itself to achieve them.

Over the years, provincial and municipal officials have sometimes tried to block Beijing’s attempts to close aging factories in their jurisdictions. These officials have particularly sought to protect older steel mills and other heavy industrial operations that frequently have thousands of employees and have sometimes provided workers with housing, athletic facilities and other benefits since the 1950s or 1960s.

To prevent such local obstruction this time, the ministry said in a statement on its Web site that the factories on its list would be barred from obtaining bank loans, export credits, business licenses and land. The ministry even warned that their electricity would be shut off, if necessary.

See also: “Factory ‘Closure’ Order Less Than It Might Seem” from the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time reports.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: energy demand, factories
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The Chinese government has shown “strong interest” in setting up factories in Africa, helping the continent develop a manufacturing base and boost its economy, the president of the World Bank said today.

While most attention on China’s investment in Africa has focused on its large-scale pursuit of natural resources, experts say a growing number of entrepreneurs are experimenting with production.

However, some questioned whether the workshop of the world was ready to outsource much of its industry.

“There is not only willingness but strong interest among some in China, and I’ve discussed with the minister of commerce, Chen Deming, that there may be possibilities of moving some of the lower-value manufacturing facilities to sub-Saharan Africa, toys or footwear,” Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, told the Financial Times.

He suggested that Chinese knowhow in production and marketing could boost Africa’s declining share of international trade, but admitted infrastructure improvements were needed to attract companies.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Africa investment, factories
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Those who joined Friday’s demonstration said they owned or worked at businesses that supplied parts to Dongfang Redpower Electronics Co. Ltd., which makes DVD, audio and GPS systems for cars.

One of the protest leaders, Zhang Ruimei, said that the company owes its suppliers 90 million yuan ($13.14 million) but the owners have skipped off to Hong Kong.

Zhang said the group had also protested outside Redpower’s factory in the township of Hengli in the nearby city of Dongguan on Wednesday, but police broke up the demonstration with clubs and tear gas. She said a dozen people were hurt.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: factories, Guangzhou, protests
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

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.”

© Japhet Weeks for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: factories, financial crisis 2008-2009, wenzhou
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

A Chinese toymaker which supplied firms including US giant Mattel has gone out of business with the loss of up to 7,000 jobs.

Rising raw material and labour costs and slowing US demand forced Smart Union to close its doors this week.

Workers have since been protesting outside the firm’s factories and a government building in Guangdong province to demand their unpaid wages.

See this video from BBC World News for more about worker unrest surrounding the shut down of toy factories in China.

Laid-off Smart Union assembly line workers have greeted the plant’s closure with rage directed not only at the toymaker’s management, but also at the credit crisis still gripping Wall Street. From AP:

“This financial crisis in America is going to kill us. It’s already taking food out of our mouths,” the 42-year-old laborer [Wang Wenming] said Friday as he stood outside the shuttered Smart Union Group (Holdings) Ltd. factory in the southern city of Dongguan.

[...]Economic upheaval in the U.S. is already changing and shrinking China‘s vast manufacturing hub in the southern province of Guangdong, long regarded as the world’s factory floor.

[...]Already, China’s toy industry is hurting. The official Xinhua News Agency reported this week that 3,631 toy exporters — 52.7 percent of the industry’s enterprises — went out of business in 2008. The causes: higher production costs, wage increases for workers and the rising value of the yuan, the report said.

However, in a China Daily editorial, You Nuo’s opinion is that poor or corrupt management is to blame for Smart Union’s collapse and others like it, not the evaporation of global demand. He points out that thousands of toymakers had gone out of business well before the eruption of the U.S. financial crisis:

But wait a minute. These reports also reflect something like a trend, the closures of toy factories, and that the trend had started long before the Wall Street started to panic. How much those factory closures were really linked with things in the U.S., contrary to what is generally reported or believed, is actually quite vague, and not readily supported by the data from across the Pacific.

As information leaked out of Dongguan reveals, especially from the suppliers to the Hong Kong toy-makers, there had been signs of their failing business for quite some time. They reported about continuous internal strifes that affected business policies and shop-floor management. If that is the case, it should not be attributed only to the U.S. crisis. It would be a case of management failure, perhaps one in which some company leaders stole the revenue that should have been shared by workers, shareholders, and suppliers.

You concludes by calling for an investigation into any possible embezzlement by the management of the failed toy companies:

If it is found that some did steal company profit from the Chinese mainland for investing in new companies elsewhere, to seek cheaper labor and lower taxes, they should be brought to trial.

Kenneth Tan at the Shanghaiist has his own reading of You’s editorial, particularly in regards to that last paragraph :

Expect heads to be brought to the chopping board soon. The Dongguan government is now coughing RMB24 million out of its own pocket to quell simmering unrest by paying the 7,000 laid off workers their wages, and we all know there is no such thing as a free lunch.

© dwang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: economic growth, factories, financial crisis 2008-2009, Hong Kong stock exchange, laid-off workers, Smart Union
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

But the massive cleanup effort for the Olympic Games has come at a cost to the local economy of some nearby industrial cities, whose factories have been forced to close down temporarily.

The roar of industry in one of these towns, Tangshan, has quieted to a hum recently. Just 90 miles from Beijing, 267 factories have been closed down for the Olympics. They are mainly big polluters like steelworks, cement plants and power generators. Some have been closed since the beginning of July, while others shut their doors just recently.

One sleepy village houses workers from a major steelworks. Some of the factory’s 4,000 employees are still working, but many others are at home, on enforced “holidays.”

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: factories, Olympics environment
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

“The RMB is killing me,” groaned Jin Jue.

Mr. Jin, a hip-looking 35-year-old with spiky hair and an all-black ensemble, describes himself on his business card as the “board chairman” of the Shanghai Jinjue Fashion Company. It was my first full day in China, and Mr. Jin was showing me around his factory on the outskirts of town.

RMB, of course, is shorthand for renminbi, the Chinese currency, also known as the yuan, which, since the beginning of the year, has risen more than 4 percent against the declining dollar. Even as the Chinese economy has become increasingly powerful, the government has kept the yuan artificially low, much to the annoyance of the United States. Truth to tell, it is still not nearly as high as it would be if it were unmoored from government control. When the Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson Jr., was in Beijing this week, he praised the recent rise of the yuan though — as he invariably does when he’s in China — he called on Chinese officials to let their currency float freely.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: factories, made in China, Yuan rate
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Despite tight restrictions on religion in China, the country’s largest bible factory prints more than six million religious books a year.

There are more than 600 staff and the factory is about to move to a new site on a Nanjing industrial park.

However, the Bible can still only be sold in official churches and not ordinary bookshops.

© Kiran Goldman for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bible, Christianity, factories, religious freedom
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall