More than ten thousand workers stage strike at massive Dongguan shoe factory
14 April, 2014
At least 10,000 workers at shoe-making factories owned by Yu Yuan Industrial in Dongguan took to the streets Monday 14 April 2014, protesting the company’s failure to pay its 70,000 employees their full social security and housing fund contributions.
Workers swamped the basketball courts inside the dormitory area holding banners that read: “Pay back the social security and public housing fund! Shame on Yu Yuan’s illegal activities!”
As the peaceful demonstration wound down around 5.30 pm., hundreds of riot police armed with batons reportedly rushed the crowd and grabbed about ten of those who had held banners and threw them into a police van parked nearby.Two of the arrested were women. Four workers were beaten and hospitalized.
The company, which had vowed to provide a solution to the dispute which first broke out on 5 April when hundreds of workers blocked a local bridge, announced on Monday that it would only agree to sign new contracts with all its employees as of 1 May and refused to pay the social security contributions and public housing fund payments in arrears.
“The company hasn’t paid us since 2006, today’s announcement shows that they knew all along and don't want to pay a penny!” said a mid-level manager named Xue. “Some of my colleagues estimate that Yu Yuan owes the workers as much as one billion yuan over the years.”
“Someone set up a QQ group before the 5 April event and thousands joined,” said Xue. “But they were quickly ‘shut-up’ and the initial group was scrapped. Now we have four new online groups, and the number of those want to join is growing.”
According to former long-time employee, Mr Zhu, the workers are preparing to stage a full-scale strike Tuesday morning. He said: “Yu Yuan has been shifting production from Dongguan to those inland provinces as well as Vietnam and Indonesia for several years, but those workers who devoted their best years to the factories are not going to go quietly.”
Catholic Schools in U.S. Court China’s Youth, and Their Cash
WAYNE, N.J. — When she arrived at DePaul Catholic High School to join the class of 2014, Di Wang hardly lacked for international experience. The daughter of a Chinese petroleum executive from Shaanxi, she had attended an elite summer camp in Japan. She knew firsthand the pleasures of French cuisine. Her favorite movie was “The Godfather.”
Her worldly exposure, though, did not extend to the particulars of a Roman Catholic education. Ms. Wang, 18, got her first lesson on that inside the school’s lobby. Gazing up at an emaciated Jesus hanging from a wooden cross, she was so startled she recalls gasping: “Oh, my God! So this is a Catholic school.”
She is hardly an anomaly. American parochial schools from Westchester County to Washington State are becoming magnets for the offspring of Chinese real estate tycoons, energy executives and government officials. The schools are aggressively recruiting them, flying admissions officers to China, hiring agencies to produce glossy brochures in Chinese, and putting up web pages with eye-catching photos of blond, tousled-haired students gamboling around with their beaming Chinese classmates.
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Ms. Wang, a Chinese student who attends a Catholic high school in Wayne, N.J., is an atheist.CreditÁngel Franco/The New York Times
The students, some of whom pay more than five times as much as local students, are infusing an international sensibility into these schools, and helping with their often-battered finances after many have suffered steep declines in enrollment.
Today at DePaul, 39 of the 625 students come from China. Besides courses like chemistry, European history, studio art and chorus, they also take theology, lead Christian service club meetings and attend monthly Mass, where they can approach the altar to receive a blessing from the priest during communion but cannot partake in the sacramental wafer because they are not baptized.
At Marquette Catholic High School in Michigan City, Ind., 20 Chinese students live in a brick Victorian and nearby carriage house, recently renovated to accommodate the school’s expanding international program. There are 60 international students at Melbourne Central Catholic High School, near Cape Canaveral, Fla., close to 10 percent of the school’s population. Most are from China.
“The students are not just going to the big cities,” said Robert R. Bimonte, the president of the National Catholic Educational Association, in Arlington, Va. “It’s rural; it’s suburban and it’s small towns.”
The schools do not require the students to convert. But, several school officials said, they must be respectful during prayers, enroll in mandatory theology courses and fulfill required Christian service hours, which means, for example, tutoring low-income students in a church basement or serving the hungry at a Catholic soup kitchen.
The accommodation goes both ways. At John F. Kennedy Catholic High School in Somers, N.Y., where about 9 percent of the student body hails from China, bake sales can include both cupcakes and guava-flavored hard candy. Students in the international friendship club decorate the school with wreaths for Christmas and red paper lanterns for Lunar New Year.
The Rev. Mark Vaillancourt, the principal, says only half jokingly that Beijing has become his fourth recruitment district, after the Bronx and Putnam and Westchester Counties.
With the foreign tuition, he has upgraded the computer labs, completed a gym renovation, installed LED lighting and new ceiling tiles, and added more local students to the scholarship rosters.
Students from China pay $47,500, more than five times what local students pay. Some, but not all, of the difference is due to room, board and services like insurance. Father Vaillancourt said the higher bill was justified because the parents do not help out on fund-raisers or otherwise contribute, and because he does not believe the students will become active alumni.
Besides helping their own schools, he said he and his counterparts were also developing positive relations between the church and China’s up-and-comers.
“You always want to be a good ambassador for the faith,” he said.
Wealthy Chinese parents are not seeking out a Catholic education so much as an American one, to help prepare their children for college in the United States and to escape what many describe as a test-heavy, reductive educational system. Secular private schools have also been recruiting heavily in China in recent years.
Jiacheng Wang, a senior at John F. Kennedy from Ningbo, a coastal city, said he left China to obtain a well-rounded education in the arts and sciences. “I wanted to have time to do the things I love,” he said, including drumming and singing. He said that the school’s religious affiliation played almost no role in his decision to enroll, but he now finds the school’s daily prayers calming. Sometimes before bed now, he prays alone.
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DePaul Catholic High School in Wayne, N.J., recruits students from China.CreditÁngel Franco/The New York Times
“I believe in science,” Mr. Wang said. “But now, I’m kind of 50 percent Christian. I start to believe this God stuff.”
Asked during a phone interview from China whether she believed her son would convert, his mother, Li Qijun, 46, replied dismissively in Mandarin. “That won’t happen.”
As for her own religious beliefs: “I don’t have any,” she said. “I’m a party member, a Communist Party member.”
Anna Sun, director of the Asian studies program at Kenyon College, says Chinese students attending parochial schools may well appreciate, and even be moved by, Christian traditions but not feel the need to make a classic conversion.
“Unlike in the West, where one is either a Catholic or a Protestant but cannot be both, most people in China have a more fluid relationship to religion, mainly because traditional Chinese religions are not monotheistic,” she said.
The ranks of Chinese Christians are relatively small but growing, in part because of underground churches that have survived in spite of the government’s wariness of organized religion. According to a 2011 Pew Research Center report, 5 percent of Chinese citizens identified themselves as Christian, with less than 1 percent Catholic.
Recruiters and agencies that help place Chinese students in schools abroad say they do not make a big deal about the religious aspect of Catholic schools. Instead they push elements that they believe are more important to today’s Chinese families, using phrases like “the value-based, mission-driven” qualities of a Catholic education as well as safety and supervision.
Barnabas Chan, the international admissions recruiter for Bishop Kearney High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, which currently educates about 30 students from China, travels to cities including Kunming, Guangzhou and Zhuhai every winter to give talks at middle schools and in the sprawling living rooms of import-export magnates and technology executives. He says parents do not make much of a distinction between parochial and secular private schools. So, he does not “lead with it.”
When they arrived at DePaul two years ago, Ms. Wang and 26 other students from China underwent a three-week orientation before classes began.
They got a primer on the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, ate pizza, toured nearby subdivisions and boned up on their English. Then they moved on to Catholicism.
Bethany Duane-Dacles, a history teacher and director of the school’s summer programs, says the seminars included videos, PowerPoint presentations and props like rosary beads. Students were taught the basics: the Ten Commandments, the hierarchy of the church, how to read the Bible and make the sign of the cross.
“If you don’t know who Jesus is, it’s really difficult,” she said.
Theology teachers tend to pass fleetingly through sticky terrain. The church’s position on abortion, which directly opposes that of the Chinese government, is one such area.
Ms. Wang, who plans to attend college in the United States, says she has enjoyed learning about church doctrine, which she sums up like this: “Do good, avoid evil.”
Sitting in the school library on a recent morning, donning one of DePaul’s black fleeces, she said her interest did not extend further. She intends to remain an atheist. Still, now, she does sometimes pray. “Thank God,” she whispers to herself, “for this beautiful day.”
A Brief Guide to China’s Media Landscape – February 2014
by Rachel Wang on February 20, 2014
The table below shows mainland China’s most important websites, newspapers, and broadcast news organizations, together with numbers for website traffic, circulation and audience.
The numbers are guesstimates based on media reports, listed companies’ public filings, media advertising rate cards, Alexa.com and Danwei interviews with media insiders. Like all numbers in China, they should be taken with a pinch of salt, for reference only. This list is updated every three months.
The major changes since the last version of this report (published in November 2013) are continued growth of Internet users, and the rise of the mobile device as the most common means of accessing the Internet:
“The number of Internet users in China had hit 604 million as of the end of September [2013], with mobile phones becoming the favored means of accessing the web, the State Internet Information Office announced”according to the China Daily.
2013 also witnessed a significant downturn of activity on Sina Weibo (often glossed as “China’s Twitter”). According to recent reports released by China Internet Network Information Center, 22.8% netizens reduced their usage of Weibo, including visits from mobile devices. In December 2013, there were 196 million mobile phone Weibo users, which is 5.96 million fewer than at the end of 2012. The decline is widely blamed on several factors, including the rise of Tencent’s WeChat messaging and mobile app service; government censorship, especially the”Big V Crackdown”; too much advertising and commercial “noise” on users’ Weibo feeds; and a lack of innovation from Sina (see this article for more on the factors behind the decline).
