Epoch Times
By Rona Rui

At the top of its game in China’s defense industry, the Inner Mongolia North Heavy Industries Group Corp. Ltd. (NHIC) is also one of the world’s largest defense companies. By its own admission it employs 16,000 workers, and had a year’s return of over 10 billion yuan (US$1.46 billion).

NHIC’s business has been so good lately that workers have been called upon to work overtime every day.

Yet from 2006 to 2009, the company withheld 200 to 800 yuan (US$29.28 to $117.13) from employees’ paychecks each month, without offering a reason.

Employees have recently appealed to both the company and the union for the return of back wages, which has made them the object of derision.
Employee experience

In a recent phone interview, an employee (name withheld) told The Epoch Times that for four years, from 2006 to the end of 2009, the company had deducted 500 yuan (US$73.25) from his 1,800 yuan (US$263.69) salary every month. Combined with soaring prices and his child’s educational expenses, life became difficult.    more …

Confucius Institutes help develop the regime’s ‘soft power’

Epoch Times
By Michael Young

Confucius, an ethicist in China who taught before Christ, established moral principles called “Right Living” based on peace, order, wisdom, humanity, courage, and fidelity. He wrote his beliefs in the collection called “Analects” and remains one of the mo (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Apparently, Confucius was politically rehabilitated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He has twice been revived by the CCP, once as villain and now as hero.

When I was 9 years old and living in China, this old man, who had lived between 551 B.C. and 479 B.C., had made himself the top enemy of the CCP, along with Lin Biao. Lin Biao, who was once Chairman Mao’s right-hand man, died in a mysterious 1971 plane crash as he was fleeing China.

After Lin Biao’s death, Mao launched a political campaign in which everyone in China had to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius in meetings and in writing. We elementary school students had to write papers criticizing the two, following the assessment of the Party.

It was very hard for us to understand why everything Confucius had done and said seemed so evil. Some uneducated farmers imagined that Lin Biao and Confucius were brothers conspiring to overthrow Mao.

I still cannot figure out how Mao made the connection between these two men who lived almost 2,500 years apart. Confucius himself, as wise as he was, may have never imagined that he could still be a threat to the CCP in 1971.

Things have now changed and Confucius has become the CCP’s ambassador to the world.    more …

Activist exposed radioactive contamination of Yangtze River

Epoch Times
Jan 29, 2010

Sun Xiaodi, an environmental activist who exposed radioactive contamination of the Yangtze River, was sentenced to a forced labor camp along with his daughter. Groups supporting human rights in China are protesting the sentences.

Sun had worked as a warehouse manager at the No. 792 Uranium Mine in Gansu Province. When he became aware that the mine was discharging radioactive material directly into the Yangtze River, he spent more that a decade trying to expose the problem, according to Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch (CRLW) in China.

Sun was able to meet with foreign journalists in June 2004 to describe the environmental degradation that was occurring and provide them with relevant materials and photos of the mine. He has been under constant surveillance for his activities over the years and has been detained several times.

Human Rights in China reported that he was sentenced to two years of forced labor for leaking state secrets to foreign agencies by the Diebu County authorities. Sun’s daughter, Sun Dunbai, was sentenced to one and a half years of forced labor for her involvement.

Unnamed sources in Gansu Province say that agents of the Chinese Communist Party picked Sun up on June 15, 2009 after he appealed to the Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, calling on the international community to pay attention to the severity of the radioactive contamination in China.

On June 12, prior to his arrest, unidentified robbers ransacked Sun‘s house and destroyed half of his book collection. The incident was followed by threats from local police and Domestic Security officials who attempted to warn Sun against reporting on the nuclear contamination in Gansu Province.

They promised to buy Sun a house in another place if he would leave the Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture area and stop reporting on the radioactive contamination.     more …

BBC News
January 24, 2010

China has denied any state involvement in alleged cyber attacks on Google and accused the US of double standards.

A Chinese industry ministry spokesman told the state-run Xinhua news agency that claims that Beijing was behind recent cyber attacks were “groundless”.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week asked China to investigate claims by Google that it had been targeted by China-based hackers.

The US search giant has threatened to withdraw from China.

“The accusation that the Chinese government participated in [any] cyber attack, either in an explicit or inexplicit way, is groundless. We [are] firmly opposed to that,” the unnamed spokesman of China’s ministry of industry and information technology told Xinhua.

Isn’t it true that even in the United States, the homeland of Google, certain government agencies are also reported of often entering a massive number of personal e-mail accounts with certain excuses?

“China’s policy on internet safety is transparent and consistent,” he added.

Separately, China’s state-run China Daily newspaper said America’s internet strategy was “to exploit its advantages in internet funds, technology and marketing and export its politics, commerce and culture to other nations for political, commercial and cultural interests of the world’s only superpower”.

It also described the US government as being hypocritical, saying the country’s “certain government agencies” had reportedly illegally checked a massive number of personal e-mail accounts.

On Thursday, Mrs Clinton urged Beijing to investigate the alleged cyber attacks on Google.

Hillary Clinton: “We look to the Chinese authorities to conduct a thorough review”

“We look to Chinese authorities to conduct a thorough investigation of the cyber intrusions,” she said.

Mrs Clinton added that companies such as the US giant should refuse to support “politically motivated censorship”.

Again in reference to China, she said that any country which restricted free access to information risked “walling themselves off from the progress of the next century”.     more …

Asia Times
Oct 16, 2009
By Dhruba Adhikary

KATHMANDU – Nepal’s top Maoist leader, Prachanda, included a visit to the town of Shaoshan in Hunan province while on a trip to China this week. This stopover at Mao Zedong’s birthplace matches the one he made last year, as prime minister, in Germany – while en route to the United Nations headquarters in New York – to Trier, where Karl Marx was born.

Prachanda’s desire to visit places where some of the world’s greatest ideologues have surfaced derives from a deep-seated interest in original communist concepts, and in comparing them with present-day realities.

The party Prachanda currently heads, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), has purist members who believe that in China communism was diluted by later-day leaders in their bid to take
their country to modernity. Some of them also do not see any plausible reason to discredit the tumultuous 1966 to 1976 Cultural Revolution, and there are some others who criticize paramount leader Deng Xiaoping for deviating from the original path for the sake of the economic prosperity of a few.   more …