“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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CaptainApathy419: What was it like covering the Tiananmen Square protests?

NicholasKristof: I’ll never forget Tiananmen. I was terrified as bullets whizzed over my head. My notebook was stained with my sweat from fear. And that night I saw a level of courage that i’ve never seen surpassed. there were rickshaw drivers who would drive toward the soldiers and pick up kids who’d been shot and drive them to the hospital. they drove toward me, tears streaming down their cheeks, so that i as a foreign reporter could see the carnage. I was awed by their guts.

RedDeadDerp: Do you still feel that sweatshops are still “an unpleasant but necessary stage in industrial development”?

NicholasKristof: yes, i do. i think the critics of sweatshops are right in their criticisms, and on top of those problems some of those factories also have environmental issues (e.g. dump pollution in a river). But the big need in poor countries is jobs, jobs, jobs. And garment factories provide those jobs, often to women who don’t have a lot of other alternatives. i remember a mother in indonesia telling me that her dream for her son was that he work in a sweatshop. My wife’s native area in China, taishan, has been transformed by sweatshops, and women have benefited in particular. In Africa the big problem is that there aren’t enough factories. I know it’s not a popular view, but i think that the one thing worse than being exploited by a foreign investor is being jobless.

supahappyfuntime: Hey Mr. Kristof, thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to do an AMA. Would you rather fight one horse sized duck, or 100 duck sized horses?

NicholasKristof: Definitely one horse-sized duck. Then I’d distract it with some cracked corn and, as it gobbled it up, I’d jump on its back and take it for a flight. I’m too poor to afford a private plane, so a personal horse-sized duck would be a nice alternative.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: development, industrial pollution, industrialization, June 4th, new york times, nicholas kristof, sweatshops, Taishan, Tiananmen Square
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Since China is in the middle of its harshest crackdown on independent thought in two decades, I thought that on this visit I might write about a woman named Cheng Jianping who is imprisoned for tweeting.

Ms. Cheng was arrested on what was supposed to have been her wedding day last fall for sending a single sarcastic Twitter message that included the words “charge, angry youth.” The government, lacking a sense of humor, sentenced her to a year in labor camp.

So I tried to interview her fiancé, Hua Chunhui, but it turns out that Mr. Hua was recently arrested and imprisoned as well. That’s the way it goes in China these days. The government’s crackdown is rippling through the country, undercutting China’s prodigious growth and representing the harshest clampdown since the crushing of the Tiananmen democracy movement in 1989.

The reason? Surprising as it may seem, the government is worried that China could become the next Egypt or Tunisia, unless security forces act early and ruthlessly ….

[One] official says that the Politburo internalized a basic lesson from the Tiananmen movement: It’s crucial to suppress protests early, before they gain traction. He says that from China’s point of view, the mistake that autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia made was not cracking down earlier and harder.

In February, Kristof embarked on a brief foray onto Sina Weibo, asking in one of his first posts, “Can we talk about Falun Gong?” He received an implicit “no” when his account was terminated a few minutes later.

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Post tags: crackdown, new york times, nicholas kristof, sina weibo, Twitter
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On this visit, I started with blogging and with microblogging, the Chinese version of Twitter. But, in an ominous sign, I discovered that the Chinese authorities had tightened the rules since my last experiments. These days, anyone starting an online account must supply an ID card number and cellphone number. That means that the authorities can quickly track down nettlesome commentators.

Once I got started, though, the censors were less aggressive than I had expected, apparently relying more on intimidation than on actual censorship. Even my microblog posts about Mr. Liu, the imprisoned dissident, went up. A similar post mentioning the banned Falun Gong movement triggered an automatic review, but then a moderator approved it.

(A Chinese moderator once explained to me that grunt-level censors are mostly young computer geeks who believe in Internet freedom and try to sabotage their responsibilities without getting fired.)

Still, there are limits. I posted a reference to the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen massacre. It went up automatically, and then was removed by a moderator 20 minutes later.

The challenge for the authorities is that there is just too much to police by moderators, and automatic filters don’t work terribly well. Chinese routinely use well-known code phrases for terms that will be censored (June 4 might become June 2+2, or May 35). Likewise, Chinese can usually get around the “great firewall of China” by using widely available software, like Freegate, or by tunneling through a virtual private network.

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Post tags: blogs, Internet censorship, Liu Xiaobo, nicholas kristof
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In the aftermath of the great Sichuan earthquake, we’ve seen a hopeful glimpse of China’s future: a more open and self-confident nation, and maybe — just maybe — the birth of grass-roots politics here.

In traveling around China in the days after the quake, I was struck by how the public and the news media initially seized the initiative from the government. Ordinary Chinese are traveling to the quake zone to help move rubble, and tycoons, peasants and even children are reaching into their pockets to donate to the victims.

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Post tags: nicholas kristof
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Post tags: Labrang Monastery, nicholas kristof, Tibet
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In any case, my sense is that many Chinese — whether in China or outside the country — are deeply indignant at U.S. media coverage of Tibet in particular and China-U.S. relations in general. I get waves of angry emails whenever I write about China and Darfur. So here’s your chance: What do we get wrong, and why?

Frankly, it strikes me that China’s problems are rather similar to America’s: an obliviousness to how one’s own country is perceived abroad, a nationalistic people who are sometimes blind to the power of nationalism on the part of others (e.g. Iraqis and Tibetans), lousy leadership in the center, and a tendency to take steps intended to preserve national security that end up undermining that security.

What do you think? Are the parallels real? Americans are welcome to weigh in as well, but In particular I’d love to get some thoughtful Chinese voices.

For some sense of why Kristof’s writing on China and Sudan elicits angry emails (presumably from Chinese readers), see his January column “China’s Genocide Olympics” (via the IHT).

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Post tags: Lhasa unrest, nicholas kristof, Olympics boycott
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There are, I think, four reasons why Chinese students do so well.

First, Chinese students are hungry for education and advancement and work harder. In contrast, U.S. children average 900 hours a year in class and 1,023 hours in front of a television.

Here in Sheryl’s ancestral village, the students show up at school at about 6:30 a.m. to get extra tutoring before classes start at 7:30. They go home for a lunch break at 11:20 and then are back at school from 2 p.m. until 5. They do homework every night and weekend, and an hour or two of homework each day during their eight-week summer vacation.

(...)
Read the rest of The Educated Giant – Nicholas D. Kristof (154 words)

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Post tags: China's rise, education, nicholas kristof
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All this underscores, I think, that China is not the police state that its leaders sometimes would like it to be; the Communist Party’s monopoly on information is crumbling, and its monopoly on power will follow. The Internet is chipping away relentlessly at the Party, for even 30,000 censors can’t keep up with 120 million Chinese Netizens. With the Internet, China is developing for the first time in 4,000 years of history a powerful independent institution that offers checks and balances on the emperors.

It’s not that President Hu Jintao grants these freedoms, for he has arrested dozens of cyberdissidents as well as journalists. But the Internet is just too big and complex for State Security to control, and so the Web is beginning to assume the watchdog role filled by the news media in freer countries. [Full text]

UPDATE (6/20/06 8:50 pm PST): The blog started by Nicholas Kristof on Sohu.com is now inaccessible.
UPDATE (6/21/06 5:05 am PST) Kristof’s blog on Sina.com is also gone.)

UPDATE (6/20/06 afternoon PST): Here are two links to Kristof’s blogs in Chinese. And here is an example of the comments Kristof has received on his blog. This one is signed by “A Chinese reader of the New York Times online edition” (translated by CDT):

(...)
Read the rest of In China It’s ******* vs. Netizens – Nicholas D. Kristof (Updated) (196 words)

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Post tags: blogs, freedom of expression, Internet control, Li Xinde, nicholas kristof
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Suppose that Anne Frank had maintained an e-mail account while in hiding in 1944, and that the Nazis had asked Yahoo for cooperation in tracking her down. It seems, based on Yahoo’s behavior in China, that it might have complied.

Granted, China is not remotely Nazi Germany. But when members of Congress pilloried executives of Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems at a hearing about their China operations on Wednesday, there were three important people who couldn’t attend. They were Shi Tao, Li Zhi and Jiang Lijun, three Chinese cyberdissidents whom Yahoo helped send to prison for terms of 10 years, 8 years and 4 years, respectively.

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