Asia Archive

Shanghai, Nov 4 – The Shanghai Disneyland project has been approved by the Chinese central government, authorities said Wednesday.

The disneyland is planned to come up in the Pudong new district of Shanghai, a Xinhua report said.

Disney President and CEO Robert Iger said that China is one of the most dynamic, exciting and important countries in the world, and this approval marks ‘a very significant milestone’ for the Walt Disney Company in China’s mainland.

The foreign investment department officials said that several big state-owned firms in Shanghai would be forming a joint venture with the Walt Disney Co. to fund the project.

The Shanghai municipal government and the Walt Disney Co. reached an agreement on building China’s first Disneyland, Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng had said in January.

The multi-billion dollar project is expected to benefit industries, including property development, hotels, transport and entertainment, said Hou Zhigang, an associate professor with the Fudan University, Shanghai.

Beijing, Nov 3 – More than 1,000 lakes have disappeared in China in the past half century and more than 80 percent of lakes along the lower reach of the Yangtze river have been affected by algae outbreaks, officials said at the 13th World Lake Conference.

More than 1,400 environmental experts and scholars from over 40 countries are attending the four-day conference that began Monday in central Hubei province.

The theme of the conference is ‘rehabilitation of our lakes’.

‘The number of lakes has been reduced by 1,000 in 50 years, and there are 20 lakes on average disappearing in China every year,’ Zhang Yongchun, an expert from the Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences, told the Global Times Monday.

The country lost 9,570 sq km of water area, and 51.6 billion cubic meters of water-storage volume, in the past half century.

‘Deterioration of water quality in lakes hasn’t been controlled yet … Water quality of some lakes has descended to class V (seriously polluted) or even worse, resulting in algae bloom and oxygen deficiency,’ Water Resources Minister Chen Lei said at the opening ceremony of the conference.

He pointed out that most of the lakes in southeast China are suffering from eutrophication, a state when the waters have a large influx of mineral and organic nutrients, resulting in excessive algae growth that suffocates other creatures in the water.

‘Among 43 lakes we investigated, 27 lakes have been eutrophicated, and 12 lakes, including Taihu Lake, Chaohu Lake and Dianchi Lake, are in a severe eutrophication state,’ he added.

Taihu, located near Shanghai, is China’s third largest lake. Chaohu, in Anhui Province, is the fifth largest.

Under the dual effects of climate change and human activities, lakes are witnessing a continuous fall in water levels and decrease in fishable areas, experts said.

There are more than 2,300 lakes larger than one square kilometer in China.

Hubei, once known as ‘the province of a thousand lakes’, now has only 2,440 sq km of lakes, or a third of the water area it had in the 1950s.

The water level at Poyang lake, a large freshwater body, is also shrinking rapidly.

‘It’s a result of human activities, such as reclaiming the lake for farmland, over-drilling of water, and diverting river routes recklessly,’ Yu Hui, a professor from the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, said in an interview with the Global Times at the conference.

The deforestation around the upper reaches of the Yangtze river has brought large amounts of sand down into the lakes, which also reduces the water levels in the lakes.

The government has invested 14.5 million yuan (about $2 million) in a five-year cleanup programme. Yu said it is not a matter of funding, but rather how to stop factories from discharging pollutants.

Beijing, Nov 3 – Google has admitted to having scanned more than 20,000 books under Chinese copyright protection, a media report said Tuesday.

The world’s largest internet search engine has been in negotiations with China’s copyright watchdog for scanning works for its online library without permission, the China Daily reported.

The US company emphasised the Chinese books they scanned were from US libraries and some of them were available for public use.

But it also admitted at least 20,000 books were under China’s copyright protection, the newspaper said, citing Zhang Hongbo, deputy director of the China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS), which manages China’s copyrights for written works.

Earlier this month, CWWCS officials said at least 18,000 books from 570 Chinese writers had been scanned by Google, with authors neither informed nor paid.

Zhang said he already discussed a timetable to solve this problem with Erik Hartmann, the Asia-Pacific head of Google Books. Google books would provide a complete list of scanned Chinese books to the CWWCS Nov 16.

The CWWCS deputy director said they would depend on the negotiations to solve the problem and still want the company to admit infringement and apologise.

More than 50 writers have signed a letter of protest, demanding an apology from Google and compensation, said the newspaper.

Beijing, Nov 3 – China Tuesday for the first time accused the Dalai Lama of trying to ‘wreck’ Sino-Indian ties after calling his planned visit to Arunachal Pradesh a ‘separatist’ activity.

The Dalai Lama is scheduled to visit the northeastern Indian state, a part of which Beijing claims, next week. China has repeatedly criticised the trip and asked India to foil it.

Foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu Tuesday flayed the Dalai Lama for his ‘separatist’ activities, media reports said.

Ma said: ‘The Dalai Lama often lies and often engages in acts to sabotage China’s relations with other countries.’

He told a news briefing: ‘I am confident that his scheme to wreck China’s relations with the relevant country will come to nothing.’

Ma went on to say that last month Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh had agreed to focus on promoting ‘healthy and stable relations’.

‘We hope that each side will continue striving to make strides in that direction,’ Ma was quoted as saying.

Wen and Manmohan Singh met for formal talks on the sidelines of the ASEAN Summit in the Thai resort of Hua Hin. They discussed the Dalai Lama at night during a dinner hosted by the Thai prime minister.

Beijing, Nov 3 – China’s commerce ministry has voiced concern over New Delhi’s reported insistence that only those with employment visa can work in India, a move a newspaper said had hurt Chinese workers badly.

China Daily reported that the government had received several complaints from Chinese companies in India.

‘We hope India will be considerate of the circumstances of Chinese firms there and provide more convenience for Chinese labourers and firms,’ an official was quoted as saying.

The foreign ministry Monday also warned Chinese citizens heading to work in India to acquire employment visas first.

‘Citizens can’t be engaged in works that doesn’t match with their visa category,’ said a notice posted on the ministry’s website.

China Daily said that the India visa policy, issued in mid-July, mainly affected expatriates working in India on business visa.

Jiang, a manager with Huaxia Outbound Labour Service in Jiangsu province, where the largest number of workers go abroad for work, told the daily that about 20 native workers to India were on their way back.

‘We are confident of their skills, but they had to return as they were not able to get a visa,’ he said.

Pan Xiaoyong, a technician with Huawei Technologies, a major Chinese telecommunications equipment supplier based in Shenzhen, said the firm was currently staging an urgent hunt for technicians holding India business visas to fill up the vacancies created by the new visa policy.

Chinese businesses in South Asia generated $18 billion in 2008, mostly in India, according to Chinese experts.

Hu Shisheng, scholar on South Asia Studies from China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, said the financial crisis that affected India’s labour-intensive industries was what compelled New Delhi to tighten its labour policy.

‘India has a huge population of young illiterates. They can depend on nothing but their labour to earn a living. So it’s conceivable that the Indian government would want to protect its own labour force,’ Hu was quoted as saying.

Those who fail to meet the government’s new criteria for the business visa had a deadline of Oct 31 to leave the country.

Many Chinese workers in India hold six-month visas called ‘Multiple Entry Business Visa’.

About 25,000 Chinese workers in sectors such as power generation, communication and petroleum in India will be affected by the clampdown. Under the amended rules, foreign clerical, secretarial and unskilled workers will not be given work visas in India.

Toronto, Nov 3 – Adults who have experienced physical abuse as children have a higher chance of suffering from osteoarthritis compared to those who have not been abused, according to a new study.

University of Toronto researchers investigated the relationship between self-reported childhood physical abuse and a diagnosis of osteoarthritis (OA).

After analysing representative data from the 2005 Canadian Community Health Survey, the researchers determined a significant association between childhood physical abuse and osteoarthritis in adulthood, the website Science Daily reported.

Osteoarthritis, which involves a degradation of joints, is an often debilitating chronic condition that affects millions of adults. ‘We found that 10.2 percent of those with osteoarthritis reported they had been physically abused as children in comparison to 6.5 percent of those without osteoarthritis,’ says lead author Esme Fuller-Thomson.

‘This study provides further support for the need to investigate the possible role that childhood abuse plays in the development of chronic illness.’

Co-author Sarah Brennenstuhl stated: ‘We were surprised that the significant association between childhood physical abuse and osteoarthritis persisted even after controlling for major potentially confounding factors such as obesity, physical activity levels as well as age, gender, income and race.’

According to the researchers, one important avenue for future research is to investigate the pathways through which arthritis may develop as a consequence of childhood physical abuse.

The study was published in the November issue of the journal Arthritis Care & Research.