White House Blames China, Russia for Syrian Peace Failure

The White House blamed Russia and China today for the failure of Kofi Annan’s peace mission inSyria.

Annan formally announced today he would step down as special envoy to Syria at the end of the month. Despite his intense diplomatic efforts over the last year, including trips to Syria and constant contact with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his mission failed to halt the bloodshed in Syria. Instead the conflict is increasing with an all-out battle now developing over Syria’s largest city, Aleppo.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Annan’s efforts were disrupted by the break of international unity against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

By Matthew Larotonda | ABC OTUS News

Kofi Annan, Joint Special Envoy of the United Nations and the Arab League for Syria, speaks during a press briefing, at the European headquarters of the United Nations, UN, in Geneva, Switzerland, Thursday Aug. 2, 2012. Annan is stepping down as UN Arab League mediator in the 17-month-old Syria conflict at the end of the month, U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon said in a statement on Thursday. (AP Photo/Keystone, Martial Trezzini)

“Annan’s resignation highlights the failure of the United Nations Security Council, of Russia and China, to support resolutions – gainful resolutions – that would have held Assad accountable for his failure to abide by his commitments under the Annan plan,” Carney said.

While thanking Annan for his service, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice also primarily blamed the Security Council for the failure of Annan’s mission. Russia and China have vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution that called for tougher actions against the Assad regime three times.

“When the Security Council failed to heed Mr. Annan’s repeated calls for collective and significant consequences for non-compliance with its prior resolutions, those members who blocked this action effectively made Mr. Annan’s mission impossible,” said Rice in a statement.

But in an op-ed to the Financial Times, Annan blamed Russia, China as well as the U.S. and its allies. He said that both sides became too entrenched in their positions.

“It takes leadership to compromise to overcome the destructive lure of national rivalries,” said Annan. “Joint action requires bilateral and collective efforts by all countries with influence over the actors on the ground in Syria, to press upon the parties that a political solution is essential.”

He advised that for a peaceful solution to the bloodshed Russia, China and Iran have to persuade Syria’s leadership to “change course and embrace a political transition.”

He didn’t explicitly call for Assad to step down but said, “The current government has lost all legitimacy.”

Annan also agreed with the U.S. position that the first move must be made by the government to accept his six point peace plan which includes ending the violence and beginning a political transition.

But Annan also had advice for the United States and its allies about what they need to do to have peace in Syria, saying that they have to press the opposition to “embrace a fully inclusive political process,” a process that will include elements of the Assad regime.

“This also means recognizing that the future of Syria rises and falls on more than the fate of just one man,” said Annan.

The diplomatic meltdown of Annan’s resignation came as the White House announced it was pledging another $12 million in humanitarian aid for Syrian civilians.

A White House official told ABC News the timing of the humanitarian aid announcement was not related to Annan’s removal, or Wednesday’s Reuters report that President Obama had signed a secret order authorizing the CIA and other agencies to provide support to rebels against the Bashar Assadregime.

The newest U.S. pledge focuses on humanitarian aid to the conflict-ridden country, and brings the total U.S. assistance to Syria to $76 million. The aid is partly distributed through the World Food Program, International Red Cross, and other organizations.

Over 130,000 have fled to neighboring states during its violent uprising and government crackdown. The U.N. has asked for $180 million in international assistance for the country.

The White House has declined to comment on the Reuters report, but while the precise date and nature of President Obama’s order to give non-lethal assistance to Syria’s opposition is undetermined, it comes on the heels of observations of a marked improvement in effectiveness by the armed opposition, and stops short of providing arms.

On Wednesday the State Department acknowledged $25 million had been set aside for “non lethal” assistance to the fighters, such as communications equipment.

Today Carney said, “We don’t believe that adding to the number of weapons in Syria will do anything to help bring about a peaceful transition.”

Read the rest:

http://news.yahoo.com/white-house-blames-china-russia-syrian

-peace-failure-205153431–abc-news-politics.html

One Great Gaffe: White House Announces Wrong Chinese National Anthem in 2006; Bush Jerks Around Hu Jintao

When the London Olympics mistakenly associated the flag of the free democratic South Korea with Olympic athletes from North Korea; we were reminded of other great diplomatic gaffes…..

Above: At the London Olympics yesterday, North Korean coach Son Kwang-ho objected and his team walked out when the flag for South Korea appeared to represent his team of North Koreans!

Here’s one of my all time favorite gaffes!

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I wrote the obligatory Hu Jintao in America article for Asia Times.

I was able to make some useful points about how the red carpet treatment for China creates a few fissures in the US/ROK/Japan alliance and points up problems for conventional containment strategy against the PRC.

Also, I provided some interesting perspective that I haven’t seen in the gazillion of other articles covering Hu’s visit:

2011 is not 2006.

In 2006, the occasion of Hu’s previous visit, George W Bush was still riding high in the early years of his second term. The “war on terror”, with a few bumps, was rolling along and doing in the surviving members of the “axis of evil” – North Korea and Iran – was at the top of the foreign policy agenda after the third member, Iraq, had already been dealt with. Confronting China – long a preoccupation of vice president Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne Cheney – to moderate its support of North Korea and Iran was an important priority.

In April 2006, when Hu visited, the US campaign to financially isolate and destabilize North Korea – initiated with the Treasury finding that Macau’s Banco Delta Asia (BDA) was a “financial institution of money laundering concern” and toppled it into insolvency – was in full swing.

And China was feeling the heat.

As the architect of the effort, David Asher, subsequently testified to the US congress, the objective of the BDA designation was an aggressive effort to “kill the chicken in order to scare the monkey”, that is, intimidate China into actively participating in the financial blockade of North Korea by threatening its own institutions such as the People’s Bank of China with a BDA-type designation if it continued its dealings with the Pyongyang regime.

The campaign, led by Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence Stuart Levey, was global in reach and reportedly successful enough to force some Chinese banks into cutting banking ties with North Korea. However, the US did not succeed in getting the Chinese government to change its North Korea policy or even abandon its support for BDA.

China’s role as an impediment to Bush administration policies did not make for a particularly hospitable environment for Hu’s visit.

As Dana Milbank reported at the time:

 The protocol-obsessed Chinese leader suffered a day full of indignities – some intentional, others just careless. The visit began with a slight when the official announcer said the band would play the “national anthem of the Republic of China” – the official name of Taiwan. It continued when Vice President Cheney donned sunglasses for the ceremony, and again when Hu, attempting to leave the stage via the wrong staircase, was yanked back by his jacket. Hu looked down at his sleeve to see the president of the United States tugging at it as if redirecting an errant child.

Then there were the intentional slights. China wanted a formal state visit such as Jiang [Zemin] got, but the administration refused, calling it instead an “official” visit. Bush acquiesced to the 21-gun salute but insisted on a luncheon instead of a formal dinner, in the East Room instead of the State Dining Room. Even the visiting country’s flags were missing from the lampposts near the White House. 

In addition to his sunglass-donning transgression, Cheney also had to deny he had marked Hu’s Oval Office briefing by taking a nap in his chair (thereby, perhaps inadvertently, leaving the impression that he had actually chosen to feign sleep in order to show his contempt for the red supremo).

The capper to the disastrous visit was the outburst of Dr Wang Wenyi, Falungong’s point person on the issue of vivisection and organ harvesting allegedly inflicted on Falungong practitioners by the Chinese government.

Despite having been denied press credentials by Maltese security during a previous overseas trip of Hu’s, somehow Wang was able to evade the scrutiny of the White House press office and acquire a one-day credential for Hu’s visit as the press rep of Falungong’s Epoch Times.

It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that somebody in the press office thought it might be a fun prank to throw Hu together with a Falungong activist.

In 2006, the Secret Service did not cover itself in glory, either, as Milbank described:

90 seconds into Hu’s speech on the South Lawn, the woman started shrieking, “President Hu, your days are numbered!” and “President Bush, stop him from killing!”

    Bush and Hu looked up, stunned. It took so long to silence her – a full three minutes – that Bush aides began to wonder if the Secret Service’s strategy was to let her scream herself hoarse. The rattled Chinese president haltingly attempted to continue his speech and television coverage went to split screen.

Even if the U.S. commentariat doesn’t remember the nitty gritty of the 2006 visit, Hu Jintao undoubtedly does–and finds the contrast extremely gratifying.

Above: President Bush “jerks around” Chinese President Hu Jintao: a classic gaffe of protocol.

Our Thanks to China matters at blogspot

Labels: Hu Jintao

China Recreating Significant Maritime History

Zheng He (1371–1433) was a fleet admiral, mariner, diplomat and explorer who sailed from China all the way to the Horn of Africa more than three hundred years before the United States existed!

Above: Statue from a modern monument to Zheng He at the Stadthuys Museum in Malacca Town, Malaysia

Zheng He is China’s most famous maritime explorer. His extraordinary ability and vision found brilliant expression in the great achievements of his life, including maritime exploration, foreign diplomacy, and military affairs.

The replica of the ship Zheng He used while navigating to the west some 600 years ago is under construction in Nanjing, capital of east China’s Jiangsu Province.

Sources:

Xinhua (China state news service)

http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/zhenhe/131897.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He

 

China’s new missile submarine seen by satellite

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – China’s newest ballistic missile submarine, the Jin-class vessel, has been spotted for the first time by a commercial satellite, a nuclear expert at the Federation of American Scientists said on Thursday.

The submarine was photographed in late 2006 south of the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian, said Hans Kristensen, director of the FAS’s Nuclear Information Project.

It appeared to be based on Russia’s Victor-3 model and, although photographs are unclear, resembles China’s early-1980s Xia-class submarines, said Kristensen, who spotted the long-anticipated vessel.

Google Earth captured an image of the new Chinese ballistic-missile submarine, docked at the Xiaopingdao base south of Dalian. U.S. officials say the new submarines may increase Beijing´s strategic arsenal.

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The Type 094 (NATO reporting name: Jin-class; Chinese: 晋级潜艇) is a class of ballistic missile submarine developed by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy. The first-of-class was constructed at Huludao Shipyard in Huludao, Liaoning and launched in July 2004. Four submarines are believed to have been constructed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_094_submarine

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The 133-metre (436-foot) Jin-class submarine probably will carry Julang-2 sea-launched ballistic missiles in its estimated 12 launch tubes. It was spotted moored at Xiaopingdao Submarine Base, which it has used for testing in the past, he said.

“Chinese nuclear submarines are normally not based there. They’re located to the south, near Qingdao,” Kristensen said by telephone.

In a defense strategy paper published on Thursday, Australia echoed previous documents by the United States and Japan in voicing concern about a rapid Chinese military expansion and lack of transparency about strategy and policy.

The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence estimated in December that China might build five Jin-class submarines, but that estimate was not included in the Pentagon’s annual report on China’s military power, published in May, Kristensen noted.

“The Chinese naval nuclear programs so far have been very, very slow,” he said. “They’ve managed to get this submarine out, but it’s been under construction for many years.”

Images of the submarine are published and analyzed on the FAS web site http://www.fas.org and visible on Google Earth http://earth.google.com.

Normally secretive China likely sees a deterrent effect in allowing the submarine to be seen from the sky by outsiders, Kristensen said.

“The fact that they have it and the fact that it moves around, I’m sure they want the world to know about it,” he said.

Vietnam and China: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil

By John E. Carey
OnlineOpinion.com
Australia and the World
July 3, 2007

Presidents are often accused of selective blindness. Hero of the US Civil War General U.S. Grant became President of the United States and was considered, by most men of his time including Mark Twain who published the president’s memoirs, an honorable man. Yet Grant filled his government with corrupt and crooked men who almost destroyed him.

In the last century, some leaders hailed Adolph Hitler during the 1930s for building an economic resurgence of miracle proportions in Germany. After 1945, they claimed to deny the holocaust or said that they were just following orders.

The current President of Vietnam, H.E Nguyen Minh Triet, spent last week in the United States transmitting a message of economic prosperity and growth for those that do business with Vietnam. But what he was told, by the President of the United States and several congressional leaders, was that he had to address what Amnesty International has called widespread abuse of human rights in Vietnam. “Harassment and threats against leading dissidents increased and attempts were made to ensure that they could not meet or talk with foreigners,” Amnesty International reported on May 23, 2007.
President Triet didn’t hear any of this.

More than 70 per cent of the US and western media reporters that filed stories on President Triet’s visit to the US discussed the issue of human rights in Vietnam. President Triet and his advisors did not see any of this.

We know this because in the Washington Times, President Triet spelled out his myopic vision of the future for the Vietnam and US relationship. It is a wonderful fantasy of economic wealth not unlike Adolph Hitler’s 1930s promises. It makes no mention of Vietnam’s ugly, largely unseen, repression of religious freedom, denial of free speech and free elections, near genocide of ethnic minorities such as the Hmong, and other human rights abuses like human trafficking.

The President of the United States says he mentioned these abuses to President Triet. But reading President Triet’s account of his trip to the US reveals an additional crime of selective listening.

President Hu Jintao of China suffers from the same psychiatric ailments that inflict President Triet of Vietnam.

President Hu and the rest of China have agreed to be completely oblivious to what President Bush and others in the world community call the genocide in Darfur.

There are a few small glitches, though, in President Hu’s current myopia which Peace and Freedom calls the “Blindness to Darfur” strategy. The UN condemns it. The EU condemns it. NATO condemns it. Everybody condemns it. Both the Canadian Prime Minister and the King of Sweden and his PM spoke to Hu about it in the course of ten days in June 2007. But President Hu is on a course to blow off the entire world, which he has been doing for some time. One small fly in the ointment: Hollywood stars that are starting to refer to the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics as the “Genocide Games”.

President Hu has also watched a series of interesting scandals erupt inside China during the last few months.

China has slavery hidden in the outlying regions far from the prying eyes of the western media. Children are used as slaves in mines and in brick making. Child labour is a problem too. Children were found manufacturing Beijing Olympics 2008 memorabilia. China has exported to the United States, and the world, tons of food, pet food and digestible health care products like toothpaste which are laced with poisonous substances prohibited for such uses in the west.

China has brutally subjugated Tibet. China arms terrorists via Iran. China has overtaken all other countries to become the world’s number one polluter.

The list of President Hu’s and China’s embarrassing tactics and practices is growing to become an endless condemnation of the communist system he espouses.

And the two communist regimes of President Triet’s Vietnam and President Hu’s China share many things besides economic prosperity: a lack of freedom of religion, a lack of free elections, a lack of freedom of speech and the media, and a propensity for human abuses including child labour, slavery and human trafficking.

So, like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and others like those of us at Peace and Freedom, I just wanted to mention to the myopic leaders of Vietnam and China: the world will not swallow your arrogant lies forever. Human rights are meaningful and important. You cannot trash the earth and abuse your fellow man without consequences.

Even though President Triet of Vietnam and President Hu of China are partially blind; others in the world see fairly well.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6045

Mike Benge on Vietnam:
‘Big Lie’ lives in Vietnam

See also our Commentary in Asia Times:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/IF27Ae01.html

And in The Washington Times:

http://washingtontimes.com/article/20070622/

COMMENTARY/106220020/1012/commentary

Catholic Pope Seems To Reach Limits on China for Reconciliation

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday invited all Roman Catholics in China to unite under his jurisdiction and urged Beijing to restore diplomatic ties and permit religious freedom.

He called the state-run Catholic Church “incompatible” with Catholic doctrine but nevertheless made unprecedented overtures toward it.

In an eagerly awaited letter to the faithful in China taking up a priority of his papacy, Benedict insisted on his right to appoint bishops, but said he trusted that an agreement could be reached with the Beijing authorities on nominations.

Significantly, Benedict revoked previous Vatican-issued restrictions on contacts with the clergy of the official church, and recognized that some Chinese faithful have no choice but to attend officially recognized Masses.

The Vatican said in a note accompanying the letter that it was prepared to move its diplomatic representation from Taiwan to Beijing “at any time” as soon as an agreement with the government was reached.

The letter was the most significant effort by Benedict to balance his pastoral concerns for the up to 12 million Roman Catholics in China who are divided between an official church — the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association — and an underground church that is not registered with the authorities.

China forced its Roman Catholics to cut ties with the Vatican in 1951, shortly after the officially atheist Communist Party took power. Worship is allowed only in the government-controlled churches, which recognize the pope as a spiritual leader but appoint their own priests and bishops.

Millions of Chinese, however, belong to unofficial congregations that remain loyal to Rome.

On several occasions, Benedict praised Catholics who resisted pressure to join the official church and paid a price for it “with the shedding of their blood.”

But he urged them to forgive and reconcile with others for the sake of unifying the church.

“Indeed, the purification of memory, the pardoning of wrongdoers, the forgetting of injustices suffered and the loving restoration to serenity of troubled hearts … can require moving beyond personal positions or viewpoints, born of painful or difficult experiences,” he wrote.

Tellingly, Benedict referred repeatedly to the “Catholic Church in China,” without distinguishing between the divisions — an indication of his aim to see the two united and in communion with Rome.

But on several occasions, he also called the Patriotic Association “incompatible with Catholic doctrine” because it named its own bishops and sought to guide the life of the church.

At the same time, however, Benedict made an unprecedented gesture, revoking 1988 guidelines issued by the Vatican’s evangelization office that sought to limit contacts with the official church and declared that any bishop ordained by the official church would incur an automatic excommunication.

The letter does refer to church law that calls for excommunication for a bishop ordained without the pope’s consent, but does not dwell on that rule and Benedict welcomed the fact that most bishops who had been ordained without his consent had now reconciled with the Holy See.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the revocation of the 1988 norms was “significant” because it meant that the Catholic Church in China did not require special Vatican regulation.

In a message directed to the Beijing authorities, Benedict insisted that the church had no political aims in China. At the same time, however, he said the state cannot interfere “in matters regarding the faith and discipline of the church.”

“It is likewise clear that she (the church) asks the state to guarantee to those same Catholic citizens the full exercise of their faith, with respect for authentic religious freedom,” he wrote.

Benedict stressed that he alone must appoint bishops to ensure apostolic succession. But he said he was willing to compromise.

“I trust that an accord can be reached with the government so as to resolve certain questions regarding the choice of candidates,” he wrote.

The Vatican would like to have a formula similar to the one it has with Vietnam, another communist country, where the Vatican proposes a few names and the government selects one.

The Vatican’s release of the letter was remarkable: It translated it into five languages — including Mandarin and Cantonese — issued it with two notes highlighting key points, included a prepared statement by the Vatican spokesman, and posted the letter in Chinese on the Vatican home page.

Read the letter:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/letters/2007/documents/hf_ben-xvi_let_20070527_china_en.html

The impending food fight

Victor Davis Hanson
June 30, 2007

While we worry about gas prices, the cost of milk, meat and fresh produce silently skyrockets. So like the end of cheap energy, is the era of cheap food also finally over?
Since the farm depression of the early 1980s — remember the first Farm Aid concert in 1985 — farmers have gone broke in droves from cheap commodity prices. The public shrugged, happy enough to get inexpensive food. Globalization saw increased world acreage planted and farmed under Western methods of efficient production. And that brought into the United States even more plentiful imported food.

Continued leaps in agricultural technology ensured more production per acre. The result was likewise predictable: the same old food surpluses and low prices. My late parents, who owned the farm I now live on in central California, used to sigh that the planet was reaching 6 billion mouths, and so things someday “would have to turn around for farmers.”

Now they apparently have. Food prices are climbing at rates approaching 10 percent per year. But why the sudden change?

A number of relatively recent radical changes in the United States and the world, taken together, provide the answer: Modern high-tech farming is energy intensive. So recent huge price increases in diesel fuel and petroleum-based fertilizers and chemicals have been passed on to the consumer.

The public furor over illegal immigration has, despite all the government inaction, still translated into some increased border security. And with more vigilance, fewer illegal aliens cross the border to work in labor-intensive crops like fresh fruits and vegetables.

The U.S. population still increases while suburbanization continues. The sprawl of housing tracts, edge cities and shopping centers insidiously gobbles up prime farmland at the rate of hundreds of thousands of acres per year. In turn, in the West periodic droughts and competition from growing suburbs have made water for farming scarcer, more expensive — and sometimes unavailable.
On the world scene, 2 billion Indians and Chinese are enjoying the greatest material.

On the world scene, 2 billion Indians and Chinese are enjoying the greatest material improvement in their nations’ histories — and their improved diets mean more food consumed than ever before.

The result is that global food supplies are also tightening, both at home and abroad. America has become a net food importer. We seem to have developed a new refined taste for foreign wines, cheeses and fresh winter fruits even as we consume more of our corn, wheat, soybeans and dairy products at home.
 

Now comes the biofuels movement. For various reasons, ranging from an attempt to become less dependent on foreign oil to a desire for cleaner fuels, millions of acres of farmland are being redirected to corn-based ethanol.
 

If hundreds of planned new ethanol refineries are built, the U.S. could very shortly be producing around 30 billion gallons of corn-based fuel per year, using 1 of every 4 acres planted to corn for fuel. This dilemma of food or fuel is also appearing elsewhere in the world as Europeans and South Americans begin redirecting food acreages to corn-, soy- or sugar-based biofuels.
 

Corn prices in America have spiked. And since corn is also a prime ingredient for animal feeds and sweeteners, prices likewise are rising for poultry, beef and everything from soft drinks to candy.
 

There is currently more corn acreage — about 90 million acres are predicted this year — than at any time in the nation’s last half-century. But today’s total farm acreage is either static or shrinking; land for biofuels is usually taken from wheat, soybeans or cotton, ensuring those supplies grow tight as well.
 

In the past, the genius of our farmers and the mind-boggling innovation of American agribusiness meant farm production periodically doubled. Indeed, today we produce far more food on far fewer acres than ever before. But we are nearing the limits of further efficiency — especially when such past amazing leaps in production relied on once-cheap petro-chemicals, fuels and fertilizers.
 

As in the case of oil, we’ve gone through these sudden farm price spikes before. My grandfather once told me that in some 70 years of boom-and-bust farming he only made money during World Wars I and II, and the late 1960s.
 

But this latest round of high food prices seems coupled to energy shortages, and so won’t go away anytime soon. That raises questions critical to the very security of this nation, which may have to import as many agricultural commodities as it does energy — and find a way to pay for both.
 

The American consumer lifestyle took off thanks to low-cost fuel and food. Once families could drive and eat cheaply, they had plenty of disposable income for housing and consumer goods.
 

But if they can’t do either anymore, how angry will they get as they buy less and pay more for the very staples of life?
 

Victor Davis Hanson is a nationally syndicated columnist, a classicist and historian at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.”
 

Hong Kong drug addicts head to China to pop pills

By Tan Ee Lyn

HONG KONG (Reuters) – The ease of travel to the China mainland since Hong Kong’s handover in 1997 has drawn the city’s young people to a cheap and convenient playground just across the border in Shenzhen city.
Every weekend, young people pour into Shenzhen in China’s southern Guangdong province to devour cheap food, entertainment — and illicit party drugs.

Street drugs of all types — cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, ketamine and methamphetamine — are more easily available and cheaper in discotheques in southern China than in Hong Kong.

“At first I didn’t like Shenzhen because it seemed foreign and dangerous, but after a while it was very nice, a new place with new faces and we didn’t get raided there,” said Siu Bak, a former addict of nine years who kicked the habit in 2005.

“It’s far easier to get drugs in China. Any staff can get it for you. The security guards will just turn a blind eye or they will tell you to take them in the toilet,” said Siu Bak, 24.

Ketamine is one of the most popular party drugs now in Hong Kong and it is proving to be a disastrous health hazard.

In a report published last week, a group of Hong Kong doctors detailed cases of bladder and kidney dysfunction in 10 ketamine addicts. Their mean age was 25, with the youngest only 18.

Among the symptoms, the addicts’ bladders were able to hold the equivalent of only two tablespoons of urine and they needed to urinate every 15 minutes.

Ketamine, an anesthetic for animals, has never been linked to such disorders. But street ketamine — in the form of a white powder — is diluted with cheap substances to fatten suppliers’ profits.

Street ketamine can include washing powder, paint flakes, talcum powder, flour, painkillers and barbiturates, said scientists who have examined the drug.

“Some suppliers put in glass powder to give it a shine, which is a mark of high grade ketamine. They give you a nosebleed, but all ketamine does that after a while because all that snorting damages your nasal membranes,” said Siu Bak, who used to use more than 30 packets of ketamine a day at the height of her addiction.

A packet of ketamine, containing about half a teaspoon of powder, cost HK$100 (US$12.80) a few years ago but can be obtained for as little as HK$20 now.

“These people are consuming all sorts of street ketamine, from different suppliers and we don’t know what kind of contaminants they have been snorting,” said Lau Fei-lung, director of the Hong Kong Poisons Information Centre, .

“We don’t know if these disorders are due to ketamine or the cutting agents,” he said. “Ketamine is normally not consumed this way. It’s an anesthetic agent and there have been no studies on its effect if it is taken daily, or twice a day, for years. The effect will be different, it will be totally unpredictable.”

OBLIVIOUS

But these concerns hardly figure in Shenzhen’s packed discos where revelers vigorously toss heads to the beat of fast music.

Many people can go on for hours — expending a store of energy so huge that party-goers readily admit it can only come with help from illicit drugs.

A powerful hallucinogen containing LSD has even been named after this jerky head dance – “fing tau yun” in Cantonese, or “vigorous head-tossing pill.”

“These people from Hong Kong come to our massage parlor … after tossing their heads all night,” said a masseur in Shenzhen. “Their necks are so stiff we need to use all our strength for them to feel even a little effect. Some interrupt the massage session and snort drugs right in front of us.”

Peggy Chu, a urologist and member of the team of doctors who revealed the disorders linked to ketamine, said there were now 30 young addicts being treated for bladder damage from the drug.

“We used traditional drugs to relax their bladders but they are not working and we are trying new drugs. But treating them is very difficult and complicated because none of them have given up ketamine. They say they have stopped but when I check their urine, I still detect ketamine,” Chu said.

“One of them who had an operation to enlarge the bladder has even shifted to cocaine. In the worst case, they may end up with renal failure and require dialysis and even a kidney transplant.”

China’s double standard

Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
June 26, 2007

Communist China has done it again. Desperate for new sources of energy, the Chinese are moving into an oil-rich nation eschewed by others.

In this case, however, the country in question is not a state-sponsor of terror or other pariah state. Rather, it is Iraq, a country the United States has gone to great lengths to make a member in good standing of the Free World — free, among other things, of the influence of those like China that had close ties to Saddam Hussein.

Yet now, according to the Financial Times, the Iraqi government last Friday “revived a contract signed by the Saddam Hussein administration allowing a state-owned Chinese oil company to develop an Iraqi oil field.”

The deal to develop the al-Ahdab field in Iraq was signed with China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) in 1997 and was valued at the time at $1.2 billion. What is more, the FT reported Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani announced “Baghdad welcomed Chinese oil company bids for any other contract in the country through a ‘fair and transparent bidding process’ to be laid out in the new oil law under discussion in Iraq’s parliament.”

Part of the impetus behind the free Iraqi government embracing CNPC — China’s largest state-owned oil company and an instrument for its partnerships with the world’s most odious regimes — is a harsh reality: China is one of all too few investors who appreciate the strategic opportunities inherent in securing a foothold in Iraq today and are able to accept and mitigate the risks associated with doing business there.

Another consideration has to do with the matter of Iraqi sovereign debt to Communist China dating from Saddam Hussein’s time and estimated to be worth as much as $10 billion. China has insisted the successor government in Baghdad is responsible for its predecessor’s liabilities.

The Financial Times noted Friday a seeming breakthrough occurred during a visit to China last month by Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani. Beijing announced “a ‘large margin’ of Iraqi debt would be canceled, although no specific figures were released.” As communists are fond of saying, this is hardly a coincidence, comrade.

China President Hu Jintao (R) and his Iraqi counterpart Jalal Talabani are seen in Beijing in this 21 June 2007 file photo. China is committed to economic and political reforms, but change should “adhere to a correct political direction”, Hu said in a keynote speech published on Tuesday ahead of a Communist Party meeting. REUTERS/Teh Eng Koon/Pool 
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 China used the leverage of a promise to forgive what is, as a practical matter, uncollectible Iraqi debt to secure renewed access to Iraqi oil.

There is a special irony to China’s adamancy on the subject that successor governments are responsible for their predecessors’ sovereign debts. After all, American and other investors are estimated to hold Chinese sovereign bonds issued by pre-communist regimes worth roughly $260 billion — bonds the People’s Republic of China has, to date, refused to honor. While British holders of such Chinese bonds were given a discriminatory settlement back in 1987, their American counterparts have been left holding the bag.

Now, though, U.S. legislators are considering a resolution that could induce China to be more forthcoming. House Concurrent Resolution 160, introduced last month by Rep. Lincoln Davis, Tennessee Democrat, and others on both sides of the aisle, would deny the PRC access to the U.S. capital markets until such time as, among other things, Communist China “fully honors repayment of its outstanding defaulted public debts owed to United States citizens.” 

Such a penalty for China’s effective default would be a first. Until now, there have been no material costs to China for reneging on these debts. Its bond ratings were unaffected. Neither has there been any impediment to the PRC’s ability to bring to American and other international exchanges various “bad actors” — often state-owned companies, like CNPC, Petrochina and Sinopec, engaged in activities inimical to vital U.S. security, economic and/or human rights interests.

In the absence of any serious, let alone sustained, effort by the executive branch and the Congress to resolve this corrosive bilateral problem, is it any wonder that there has been no satisfactory resolution to other financial abuses by China? These include: Beijing’s manipulation of its currency; its underwriting of the genocidal regime in Sudan; and China’s worrisome financial (and other) ties with Iran, Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and North Korea, etc

The adoption by both houses of Congress of legislation like H. Con. Res. 160 should be but the first of several steps taken to induce the PRC to clean up its sovereign debt. For example, as legislative and other measures are developed to counter China’s currency manipulation, provisions should be included requiring Beijing to make good on its defaulted sovereign bonds.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and other credit-rating agencies should be required to take into account China’s defaulted bonds in their ratings and disclosure requirements. And targeted financial sanctions against the PRC should be promulgated in the event China continues to ignore its longstanding financial commitments.

Last, but not least, American and other vendors should be encouraged to settle accounts with China by using the legal tender of Chinese sovereign bonds. In this fashion, Beijing can be held accountable for its debts, with minimal impact on trade and other relations.

If China can use sovereign debt owed it — even debt incurred by previous governments as despicable as that of Saddam Hussein — to euchre freedom-aspiring Iraqis into making strategically momentous concessions, the least the United States can do is ensure the Communist Chinese are held to no lesser standard. Sauce for the goose, after all, must be sauce for the Beijing duck.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times.

In China, Cash Carries the Weight

 By Ariana Eunjung Cha
The Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 26, 2007; Page D01

BEIJING — When Wang Xiaoyu set out to buy some sleek Lincoln automobiles for the small company he owns, the problem was how to pay. No dealer in China takes personal checks. Credit card limits are too low. Car loans barely exist.

So he brought cash, more than $200,000 worth of it, in three rolling suitcases.

Because credit cards in China have low limits and few stores take them, they are more popular as fashion statements than financial tools. (By Ng Han Guan — Associated Press)
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“Everything else is a lot of trouble — just easier to use cash,” said Wang, 29, who runs a consulting company that helps Chinese businesses find foreign partners.

China’s state-owned banks rank among the highest-valued in the world, with stock market capitalizations in the billions of dollars, but they are widely considered the weakest part of the country’s booming economy.

Although China has made strides in reforming its banking system over the past five years — cracking down on corruption, buying out many troubled loans and allowing foreign banks into the market — retail banking remains stuck in an earlier era. The problem isn’t new, but the number of people in China who have enough money to need modern banking services is soaring. The system hasn’t kept up.

Many employees’ salaries are still distributed in fat envelopes of cash rather than by check or direct deposit. It’s not unusual for life’s major purchases, such as cars or even houses, to be paid for in cash.

It isn’t just the banks stuck in the past; there’s consumer resistance in China to financial tools that are routine in other countries. Credit cards are gradually spreading, for instance, but many people embrace them chiefly as a fashion statement. There are floral-scented ones, cards bearing Hello Kitty logos, pink cards aimed at women. But because they are only accepted at some stores, such as designer boutiques and larger chains, their utility is limited.

“The reason I got that in the first place was because it was cute and cool, and has value as a collectible,” Zhu Jing, a 24-year-old bank clerk said as she flashed one of her cards. She has seven, including one with an MSN Messenger logo and another with an Olympics theme.

Chen Jing, a 28-year-old teacher from the eastern coastal city of Ningbo, however, came to the conclusion that the novelty wasn’t worth the $25 annual fee. “I had a credit card but just canceled it recently because I don’t need it and I never used it,” Chen said.

The underdeveloped financial system has frustrated many Chinese consumers and foreigners trying to do business in the country. But China’s banking regulators say the slow pace of change is in the national interest.

China’s financial leaders say they are cautious about moving too quickly because they see the problems that has caused in other countries. They cite the United States as an example of what can happen to a country that hands out credit too loosely, pointing to high levels of indebtedness among young Americans and the recent problems in the mortgage industry that have caused families to lose their homes.

Wang Huaqing, assistant chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, said in an interview that in recent months, the country has been alarmed to see novel financial schemes crop up. People have been caught taking out cash from credit cards and loans to gamble the money away in the stock markets or on speculative real estate. Gangs have been investigated for stealing people’s identities to open accounts. And criminals have been put away for laundering money.
“We have been paying great attention to credit card risk and loan risk,” Wang said.

As a result, Wang said, the country is trying to avoid allowing citizens to get their hands on credit too easily. He said restrictions on retail banking — such as a $50,000 a year cap on how much a Chinese citizen can convert from yuan to foreign currencies and low credit limits on cards — are meant to prevent these problems from spiraling out of control.
The slow development of consumer banking in China is rooted in the role banks historically played in the Communist state.

Until a few years ago, China’s banks essentially were agents of government social policy, keeping state-owned enterprises afloat. Retail banking existed on a limited basis. Chinese citizens who wanted to invest had no choice but to put their money in state-owned banks because foreign banks were not allowed to operate in the country and because stock markets didn’t exist.

Furthermore, the banks had little financial incentive to introduce fee-based retail banking. They were already markedly profitable from a large spread between lending and deposit rates, both controlled by the central government.

Now, retail banking is still a secondary reason for banks’ existence. China’s banks mostly supply credit to enterprises, said Arthur Kroeber, managing editor of the China Economic Quarterly in Beijing. He said the banks are not like those in the United States, which, he said, “provide credit to the creditworthy.” They are “more like the idea of banks in Japan in the ’70s or South Korea in the ’80s and ’90s.”

“In a broad sense, the main purpose of the state-owned banks in China today is not profit maximization for shareholders,” he said. “It’s financing industrial development.”

For instance, at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, one of the largest state-owned banks, bad loans represented 21 percent of its portfolio in 2005.

It wasn’t uncommon for clerks at its remotest branches to use abacuses to make calculations. If a local branch was in trouble because of bad loans, the central government would send trucks with cash to bail it out and prevent a run on the bank.

But after a series of overhauls, the ICBC in October 2006 pulled off the biggest-ever initial public offering, raising $21.9 billion to make it the world’s No. 5 bank by market value of its shares, just behind J.P. Morgan Chase. Its value climbed late in the year and it has since been the No. 2 or No. 3 bank in the world, depending on the closing price of various banks’ shares. Only Citigroup of New York consistently outranks it now.

China’s banks are so large that near-monthly announcements of embezzlement and bribery valued in the millions of dollars are mostly shrugged off by investors. For example, in 2005, shares in China Construction Bank, whose chairman resigned after allegations that he was taking bribes, soared during its initial public offering, which occurred after the scandal was announced.

“In any other country, this kind of scale of scandal would be a big event. But in China, the scandal cases did not really have a material impact on the operations of the banks,” said May Yan, a bank analyst at Moody’s Investors Service in Hong Kong.

Taking ICBC public was supposed to be part of China’s transition to a free-market economy. But analysts say investors are throwing money at Chinese banks for an opposite reason: support of the Communist government, with investors calculating that the government won’t let the country’s flagship banks fail. “It’s a bet on China,” May said.

Kroeber backed that up. “There is an implicit message: If things get really bad, the government would come in,” he said.
Moody’s estimates that China has poured $432 billion into bailing out state-owned banks. Recapitalizing the Agricultural Bank and the China Everbright Bank may cost $150 billion more.

Wang acknowledges that excessive dependence on the government is not a sustainable strategy, because it means the banks won’t innovate. “They don’t have any motive to create new financial products,” Wang said. “This is a big difference between China’s banks and multinationals.”

As the Chinese government opens its banking sector to more foreign competition, there’s a recognition that China’s citizens will turn elsewhere for banking. This year, China’s government for the first time allowed foreign banks to take local currency deposits and offer yuan-denominated credit cards.

Wang said that in the future, China would inevitably have to cut the banks loose to fend for themselves.

Staff researcher Crissie Ding contributed to this report.