Week of August 17, 2001The U.S. and China This Week
U.S.-CHINA RELATIONS: China Rejects U.S. Offer for Plane ExpensesChina said the U.S. should pay it $1 million for
expenses holding the crew and the aircraft, which was eventually cut up
into boxes and flown back to the U.S. in a cargo plane. The U.S. has offered
a “non-negotiable?payment of $34,567 for part of the period the crew was
housed and work associated with the plane. “The so-called decision is unacceptable
to China both in its content and its form,?Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman
Zhang Qiyue said. “We urge the U.S. side to correct its erroneous decision.?#060;/font>
The U.S. appears to have tried to discern from
China’s bill what were inevitable costs associated with the plane landing
on Chinese territory. Pentagon officials said the U.S. offer was only for
“a couple of days?of food and housing; the U.S. government believes the
crew should have been released much sooner. Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral
Craig Quigley said the offer included payment “for the material and contracts
and whatnot?needed to retrieve the aircraft. However, the U.S. has maintained
that the plane could have been fixed and flown out of China, a less expensive
option China rejected.
DOMESTIC: World Bank Funded Research Contradicts China’s Pollution ClaimsNobuhiro Horii, of Japan’s Institute of Developing Economies, said coal mines in Hunan province that the Beijing government ordered closed were in fact kept open. Horii maintained talks he had with people in other provinces indicated the problem was nation-wide. Horii also said improving energy efficiency takes about a decade, and China’s claims to be increasing energy efficiency in carbon dioxide production in much faster time are not credible. “Yes, China is increasing energy efficiency, but they are doing it slowly, like everyone else,?he said. In April, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California
reported that since 1996, China’s energy output had fallen 17 percent and
its
However, a report put out by the U.S. embassy in Beijing this month
claims China’s greenhouse gas emissions have hardly dropped any, if at
all. And at a
Zhou Dadi, director of the Energy Research Institute of the Chinese
government’s State Development Planning Commission, said while doubts about
INTERNATIONAL: China Allows Protests of Japanese Leader’s Visit to ShrineTokyo shrine for war dead. “Boycott Japanese goods!?called 61-year-old Bi Jixin, reading a protest letter outside the Japanese embassy in Beijing; he was later allowed to deliver the message. According to the official Xinhua news agency, dozens of university students protested outside the Japanese embassy and on campus on August 15th. There was also a protest at a memorial in Nanjing, where Chinese figures say Imperial Japanese troops massacred at least 300,000 civilians in 1937. Banners displayed there said “Don’t forget the past.?#060;/font> In Beijing, at least three groups of students
protested separately. At one point, three young Chinese men, thought to
be students, burned makeshift Japanese
The gatherings were the first protests aimed at
foreigners known to have been permitted in China since the anti-U.S. and
anti-British protests that followed
DOMESTIC: Censors Shut Down Marxist Journal for Criticism of Jiangadmit capitalists into the Communist Party. The small but influential publication ran two articles in particular that are said to have riled Jiang. In the May issue, Lin Yanzhi, a deputy party secretary in Jilin province and son of a revolutionary founder, wrote capitalists would “seize power within the party and change the party’s nature.?In the next month’s issue, Zheng Tianxiang, a retired supreme court judge, said corruption and spread of private property might bring about “a collapsed party and a collapsed country.?Tianxiang asked, “If capitalists join the party can it still be the vanguard of the working class??#060;/font> Leftists in recent weeks have circulated a rebuke
of Jiang on the Internet; so far, 17 prominent individuals have signed
it. That document says Jiang has
Pursuit of Truth was founded in 1990 and is edited
by Yu Quanyu, a retired propaganda official. Yu signed the Internet rebuke
of Jiang. Jiang’s theory of
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Last updated: 23 August 2001 |
