“Our company has delivery stations in every part of China,” boasts one Chinese-language Web site, with photos of illegal narcotics it sells. “We offer 24-hour delivery service to your door, and we have long-term and consistent supplies. If you just make one phone call, we’ll deliver to your hands in one to five hours.”

Another Chinese Web site offers meth wholesale for $19,700 a kilo, or deliveries to your door of smaller quantities in hundreds of cities around China. Even in remote Anhui Province, it delivers drugs in 21 different cities.

All this is completely illegal in China, where narcotics traffickers are routinely executed. But it doesn’t seem to be a top government priority, because these Web sites aren’t even closed down or blocked. Tens of thousands of censors delete references to human rights, but they ignore countless Chinese Web sites peddling drugs, guns or prostitutes.

Doesn’t it seem odd that China blocks Facebook, YouTube and The New York Times but shrugs at, say, guns?

Meanwhile, for Motherboard, Eveline Chao reports on the growing problem of methamphetamine production and use in China. As portrayed by the popular U.S. television show “Breaking Bad,” Mexico is the source of most of the meth in the U.S. But China is increasingly responsible for providing the chemicals that are used in the making of the drug:

Records of large drug busts involving meth in recent years–an increasingly common occurrence–tend to show a trail that leads back to China. Last January, the Mexican navy announced that a single bust had yielded 195 tons of meth chemicals in a Chinese shipment, following a six-week period that netted an additional 900 tons of precursor chemicals. In April, three tons of methylamine chloride, a chemical used in pharmaceuticals and pesticides, was found at LAX in a shipment from China; it was on its way to Mexico, where it was bound to be cooked into $40 million of methamphetamine for American consumers. The list gets longer.

American officials now estimate that 80 percent of the meth consumed in the US is Mexican-made–with ingredients from China. “The rising threat of new synthetic drugs requires a truly international response, and we look forward to extending our cooperative work with China to address the dangers that these substances pose to the citizens of both our countries,” Berit Hallberg, a spokesman for the White House’s drug czar, said in a statement to Stars and Stripes. James Rendon, the Coast Guard Rear Admiral in charge of the DoD’s Joint Interagency Task Force West, described the meth-from-China problem more simply: “It is a big problem, and it is getting bigger.”

In China–where crystal meth is generally called 冰 bing, or ice, and “doing meth” is called 溜冰 liu bing, or “ice skating”–the meth picture is a mirror image of that of the US. Both are large countries pocked with wide-open spaces that are ideal for homemade recipes of the smelly, noxious, explosive stuff. Whether you’re in Indiana or Shanxi, it’s in these rural spaces where meth consumption is most rampant, not least because it’s cheap and offers a lot of bang for your buck–users report a high that, unlike coke, lasts for hours.

Last week, NBC News reported on a drug bust in China which found almost 200 pounds of methamphetamines:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Post tags: drug addiction, drug trafficking, drugs, Gun laws, Internet control, nicholas kristof, prostitution
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After the Newtown attack, a Chinese commentator with a nationalist bent wrote, “When I see these democratic elites pretending to condemn the murderer, it seems absurd. You are the people who sustain the gun policy. You are also the people who condemn the shooter.” And another:

As the ‘free, democratic, human-rights-based’ land of heaven, the one that has lectured other countries everyday for a hundred years about ‘freedom, democracy, and human rights,’ even to the point of armed intervention, America should calm down and examine its own gun-control policy.

It takes a lot to make China’s government—beset, as it is, by corruption and opacity and the paralyzing effects of special interests—look good, by comparison, in the eyes of its people these days. But we’ve done it. When Chinese viewers looked at the two attacks side by side, more than a few of them concluded, as this one did that, “from the look of it, there’s no difference between a ‘developed’ country and a ‘developing’ country. And there’s no such thing as human rights. People are the most violent creatures on earth, and China, with its ban on guns, is doing pretty well!”

The Chinese government has taken the opportunity to urge the Obama administration to enact stricter gun laws, through an editorial in Xinhua News Agency:

Obama said of the latest tragedy the country had “been through this too many times,” and it was time to put aside political differences and “take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this.”

Some people have noticed Obama’s tougher tone this time, compared to the Colorado shooting, when he called for “prayer and reflection.”

Action speaks louder than words. If Obama wants to take practical measures to control guns, he has to make preparation for a protracted war and considerable political cost.

But online comments translated by chinaSMACK show a different side of Chinese responses, with many comparing the government reactions to the two incidents:

The United States have lowered their flags to half-mast, I want to know what China has done.

我抵制日货：

Democracy is a very complicated thing, so complicated that it is the only thing Chinese people have not been successful in shanzhai‘ing.

Sunder_Coo：

We’re unable to treat the elderly well and we’re also unable to keep our children safe. We have no past and we’ve lost the future as well…

[...]

JACKIE梦里不知身是客：

Yesterday, I watched an entire day’s worth of CCTV4 news. I watched how America is in chaos and an abyss of suffering, with guns spreading unchecked, and had no idea whatsoever about the extremely tragic crime in Henan! May the children rest in peace.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: children, crime, gun culture, Gun laws, school shootings, violence
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A security guard apparently angered by a court-imposed divorce settlement shot and killed three people and wounded three others at a courthouse in Hunan Province before turning the weapon on himself, the state media reported.

The rampage, a rare instance of gun violence in China, follows a spate of five seemingly unrelated knife and hammer attacks at schools that left 17 people dead and have deeply unnerved Chinese society.

Private gun ownership is illegal in China. According to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, the assailant, Zhu Jun, 46, was the head of security at a local Postal Savings Bank branch and had access to a small arsenal.

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China may be freer from gun crime than many nations, and official statistics show overall crime on a continuous down trend. Yet, these days, reports about gun crimes turn up as often as several times a week even in the tightly controlled state-run media. The reports are often brief, without much follow-up as cases progress. Still, the splashy gunfights, murders, gun-factory raids and smuggling busts that get reported contrast with China’s zero-tolerance stance on guns, and point to changes in criminals’ behavior.

But the trend is about more than crime. Guns are now fashionable in paintings and movies, while Chinese-language Web sites and glossy magazines cater to gun buffs. And legal shooting clubs in cities let customers fire away at targets for a fee. Bored with golfing, some affluent businessmen slip into the countryside for hunts.

Even as China’s government seeks to keep guns off the street, and shields its massive gun-manufacturing business behind state-secrets laws, it helps stoke the public imagination about guns.

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Post tags: gun culture, Gun laws, violence
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(...)
Read the rest of Video News: Chinese Hunting Parks and Winter Swimming – Reuters (34 words)

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The massacre at the Virginia Tech that left 33 people died has been one of the most discussed incidents among Chinese Internet users in the past 24 hours. Besides hundreds of comments expressing shock over the rampage and condolence for the victims, a large portion of the discussion touched on the issue of gun control.

Many Chinese people related the incidents to the widespread private ownership of guns in the United States. “[The U.S.] Better have ban on guns,” one commentator said.

They then started to feel fortunate that carrying gun is strictly prohibited for the general public in China, and the majority of the comments supported the ban.[Full Text]

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Post tags: Gun laws, illegal weapons, violence
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