Mission & Justice

Mary-Anne Toy; 21/6/08

Bill Zhang, a school teacher who became a dissident after being swept up in the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests, killed himself last Saturday night. He threw himself off the sixth or seventh floor of a friend’s housing estate in the southern province of Guangdong because he had lost the will to keep fighting to return to Australia. Mr Zhang (not his real name) lived in Sydney for eight years, driving a bottle recycling truck in Botany, while he kept applying for a protection visa. He was refused six times - the refugee tribunal doubted his story - and ended up in Villawood detention centre before being deported last year.

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Sian Powell; 12/6/08

Ground-breaking Australian research has uncovered the extent of China’s secretive aid program in the Pacific - estimated to have grown almost nine-fold since 2005, to $US293million ($309 million) last year. Lowy Institute research associate Fergus Hanson, who has spent months delving into China’s aid program, said yesterday that although China received $US1.76 billion in assistance in 2005, the nation had been busily pledging and disbursing aid around the world, particularly in the Pacific. “The main driver of Chinese aid to the region remains halting and reversing diplomatic recognition of Taiwan,” Mr Hanson told a Lowy Institute audience in Sydney yesterday. “China regards Taiwan as a renegade province, and has for several decades waged a largely successful battle to wrest diplomatic recognition from ‘the other China’. This battle remains particularly intense in the Pacific.” China aids eight developing Pacific Island Forum nations that recognise its sovereignty - the Cook Islands, Fiji, Micronesia, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu.

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11/6/08

Muddy water from a dangerously unstable “quake lake” rushed into the devastated Chinese town of Beichuan yesterday, covering about a third of the ruins, after soldiers used explosives to widen a sluice. Brown water, clumps of trees and occasional vehicles were moving quickly into low-lying areas of the town, washing away remains of corpses, family mementos and valuables left under the rubble. Wang Guiru, 43, whose wife died in the quake alongside his father and mother-in-law, said he had hoped eventually to look for their remains. “Now I guess we can never go back,” he said stoically. “This is fate. We have to learn to face up to realities.”

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10/6/08

Chinese soldiers used anti-tank weapons to blast away rocks and mud holding back waters in an earthquake-formed lake that threatens more than a million people living downstream. Television and official websites showed People’s Liberation Army troops firing 82mm recoilless guns at debris on Sunday. Troops dislodged enough debris to speed the drainage of waters in Tangjiashan lake, although the level continued to rise with the inflow from the blocked river behind the dam, the Xinhua news agency reported. A further 120 troops were sent to continue the operations yesterday, Xinhua said.

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John Garnaut; 7/6/08

Up to 2 million swans, spoonbills and other migratory birds have flocked to Dalai Lake and its surrounding wetlands since early May. Some, like the red-crowned crane, a Chinese symbol of immortality that is threatened with extinction, come here to breed. Others, like the tiny red-necked stint, merely pause to refuel en route from Australia to their Arctic breeding grounds. The wetlands are a vital “staging ground” in the Daurian Steppe at the intersection of the Chinese, Mongolian and Russian borders, on the so-called East Asia flyway. Nearly 300 bird species have been counted here. Many fly from as far as Australia and New Zealand in an endless pursuit of summer. But next year these birds might be in for a terrible shock because China’s largest gold company is secretly laying a huge pipeline to drain water from Dalai Lake. The lake’s only artificial outflow will hasten an already rapid fall in water levels. Worse, it is likely to be a catalyst for larger water diversion schemes that threaten the whole cross-border ecosystem.

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David Hawkins; 6/5/08

The speed with with the school came down has raised questions over construction standard. Driving through Dujiangyan, a resort town in China’s Sichuan province that was hit by the May 12 earthquake, was surprising. I’d expected the place to be in ruins, like a factory village further up in the hills we’d visited the previous day. But it wasn’t. Most of the buildings were still standing and people were going about their business. There were cars on the roads. The shops were mostly open. Only a few buildings had collapsed. A lot of them though, were schools. The school we visited, the Xian Jin Primary School, was down an alley. More than 600 children were at their desks when the powerful magnitude 7.8 quake hit. About half of them were killed when their school collapsed into a heap of broken concrete and twisted steel reinforcement bars. About those bars – they’re supposed to give the building strength. But walking through what’s left of the school, I noticed that a lot of the twisted steel bars were thinner than my little finger.

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5/6/08

Efforts to ease the dangers of the “quake lake” that threatens to burst its banks are at a critical juncture, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao says. “Now it’s a critical moment for the Tangjiashan quake lake, and the most important thing is to ensure there is no casualty of the people,” the official Xinhua news agency quoted Wen as saying. He arrived in the quake zone on this morning and immediately boarded a helicopter to the lake at Tangjiashan, Xinhua reported. The lake was created in the May 12 earthquake when a landslide blocked the Jianjiang river, and the water masses have been building up steadily since then.

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Rowan Callick; 4/6/08

Work on the $1 billion Ramu nickel mine being built in Papua New Guinea by China Metallurgical Construction Corporation (MCC) is on the verge of a prolonged shutdown as landowners, the Madang provincial Government, the Evangelical Lutheran Church and an array of non-government organisations have lined up to attack theproject. Mine construction has hit a series of problems since construction started 18 months ago. In February last year, PNG Secretary for Labour David Tibu said after visiting the site: “The Chinese developer does not seem to have any standards, and I will not allow my countrymen and women to be used as slaves.” In Australia, MCC - the world’s 26th-largest contractor, and China’s 39th-biggest company, owned by the Government - will develop the Cape Lambert iron ore project in Western Australia’s Pilbara.

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30/5/08

More than one million people may have to urgently evacuate a Chinese valley that is under the threat of flooding from an earthquake-spawned lake. Emergency officials have been preparing to run a drill on Saturday to ensure 1.3 million people in dozens of villages in the Mianyang region can be evacuated quickly. Hundreds of Chinese troops are working around the clock in the northern part of Sichuan province to drain the Tangjiashan lake, which formed above Beichuan town when a hillside plunged into the river valley. Initial reports by the official Xinhua news agency on Friday suggested that the 1.3 million people had already been ordered to leave the valley. But an official with the press office of Mianyang City Quake Control and Relief Headquarters, said the report was incorrect.

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29/5/08

China has asked Japan to send its military to help with earthquake relief operations as powerful new aftershocks heightened fears that a huge “quake lake” threatening 1.3 million people could burst and trigger massive floods in the area. If granted, the request would be the first time Japan’s military has been deployed in China since the end of World War II. Chinese authorities yesterday evacuated more than 158,000 people from dozens of villages in the Beichuan region of Sichuan province - one of the hardest hit by the devastating May 12 quake. The China Daily quoted Premier Wen Jiabao as telling a meeting of the State Council, China’s cabinet, that 35 swelling lakes created by the quake were the “most pressing task”.

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