Monday, April 29, 2013

The Foreign Aid Con

Australian tax payers rorted by Labor, Coalition and Greens, siphoning of millions for themselves, and deny those the money is intended for, creating more refugees and human suffering. Australia First do believe in foreign aid, but not this sort of model. Money should not be used in this way by the Major parties, nor should it be forwarded to corrupt governments and corrupt agencies, this aid should reach the people it is intended for directly and not always in the form of money, but other resources to rebuild and empower people at the coalface, then perhaps we wouldn't be seeing the amount of displaced peoples we currently see.

 

Poor miss out as pollies live large - EXCLUSIVE -


Author: EAN HIGGINS
Publication: The Australian (6,Fri 26 Apr 2013)
Edition: 1 - All-round Country
Section: Local
Keywords: Freedom (1),of (1),Information (1)


WHILE Labor has cut $375 million in aid to the world's poor, it has no intention of stopping political parties siphoning off millions from the foreign aid budget to send their officials on junkets to Europe and the US.

An analysis by The Australian has found the federal government has cut aid programs on issues close to its heart including education, health, women's development and climate change, as well as food security in some of the most desperate countries in the Third World.

But Foreign Minister Bob Carr remains supportive of an AusAID program that the ALP, the Liberals and more recently the Greens have used to fly business class to attend meetings with like-minded political parties overseas.

The travel costs are fully covered under the AusAID Australian Political Parties for Democracy Program, established by John Howard in 2005 and expanded by Labor to include the Greens.

It now provides $1m a year each to the Liberals and the ALP and $200,000 to the Greens, with only half the funds required to be spent on actual development aid.

AusAID documents recently released under Freedom of Information laws show party figures received thousands of taxpayer dollars a day to travel overseas to attend conferences with their ideological brethren.

Former Liberal Party president Shane Stone, former prime minister John Howard, party federal director Brian Loughnane and party international secretary Bruce Edwards travelled on APPDP money to London in 2011 to attend the conservative International Democrat Union party leaders meeting, at a cost to the taxpayer of $70,279.77

A trip to Colombia that year for three Young Liberals to attend a two-day conference of the International Young Democrat Union Freedom Forum cost $52,451.70

Labor figures, including former national secretaries Karl Bitar and Tim Gartrell, NSW state MP Luke Foley, NSW state secretary Sam Dastyari, and former senator Michael Forshaw have also enjoyed the largesse of APPDP.

Trips in 2010 to Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, Malta, Canada, Italy and the US for 24 Labor party figures, along with some incoming visits from those countries, under the title ``fraternal party relationships'' had a price tag of $196,050.15.

When The Australian asked Senator Carr whether he thought APPDP provided good outcomes for Third World countries, a spokeswoman said the program ``has been successful in promoting democracy in the Asia-Pacific''.

``In 2011, training on matters including campaigning, democratic practices and integrity and policy development and implementation were provided by Australian political parties to parties in East Timor, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Cambodia,'' the spokeswoman said.

Senator Carr announced in December he would ``re-prioritise'' $375m of aid this financial year and divert it to accommodating asylum-seekers.

In Africa, the cuts include deferrals of $10m for food security in Somalia and $5m in similar funding to South Sudan.

In 2011, then foreign minister Kevin Rudd visited Somalia to promise more food aid for the Horn of Africa. ``There are more than half a million Somalis in the refugee camps, and 50,000 arrived last month alone, with nearly half of the children under five starving,'' he said at the time.



WHAT IS BEING CUT

SOMALIA and SOUTH SUDAN Funding for food security programs - $10m and $5m respectively



ZIMBABWE Payments for a small-towns water, sanitation and hygiene program - $4m



NEPAL New water, sanitation and hygiene activities and a livelihoods program - $3.3m



PAKISTAN New health and water resource management activities - $7.9m



SRI LANKA Programs including nutrition,

water and sanitation, and economic governance - $3.3m



SAMOA Payments to a World Bank trust fund for a multi-donor health sector program, planned new activities to the law-and-justice program and engagement of long-term advisers in the governance sector - $3.1m



FIJI Scholarship programs, along with infrastructure projects in health and education - $3.1m



WHAT WENT AHEAD AND WHAT IT COST

LABOR

* Trips to the US for former national secretary Karl Bitar to Progessive Governance; Prime Minister's Office director of cabinet Mathew Jose to a Socialist International council meeting and the Centre for American Progress; and assistant national secretary Nick Martin to the Centre for American Progress - $44,086.83

* Trip to Liverpool for four ALP figures to attend British Labour Party conference - $56,745.86

* Trips to Britain, New Zealand and Germany for seven ALP figures including former senator Michael Forshaw, and incoming visits from these countries as well as Ireland, Norway and Canada, under the title 'fraternal party relationships' - $150,360.42

* Trips to Athens, Geneva, London, Mongolia, and Madrid for four ALP figures, and some incoming visits, under the title 'fraternal multi-lateral relationships' - $49,018.90



LIBERALS

* Trip to Washington DC for former party president Shane Stone to attend a three-day executive meeting of the International Democrat Union - $20,382.25

* Trip to New Zealand for Stone and federal director Brian Loughnane to attend the three-day NZ National Party conference - $8662.33

* Trip to South Korea for three Young Liberals to attend a six-day International Young Democrat Union study tour - $34,248.76

* Trip to US for campaign unit manager Jonathan Hawkes to visit US Republican Party - $23,340.30



GREENS

* Trip for trainer consultant Amanda Sully and party member Margie Law to Bangkok and funds for training 18 participants from parties including the Mongolian Green Party, the Philippine Greens, and the Green Civil Society of Nepal - $34,940.30

http://aap.newscentre.com.au/cpsunat/130426/library/union_related_issues/30948096.html

No Sanctions Here


Chinese surgeon should not keep award, academics say


By Amy Corderoy
A Chinese doctor accused of overseeing the harvesting of organs from political prisoners for transplantation should be stripped of an honorary professorship awarded by the University of Sydney, academics say.
But the university and the international Transplant Society say Dr Huang has been the "foremost leader" in reforming organ donation in China, calling for less reliance on organs from executed prisoners.
Sydney University academic Maria Fiatarone Singh, whose open letter to the university was signed by the Nobel peace prize-nominated anti-harvesting expert David Kilgour, said Dr Huang and the Chinese government had only payed "lip service" to stopping it.


There was a time in our country where we would not do business with human rights abusers, sweat shop labour and so on. Now it seems our government is happy to overlook all in the name of Chinese investment ! No sanctions here ! We dare not offend the Chinese, in fear they take their cheque books elsewhere. Is this what it has come too in Australia ?

What's In The Imported Food We Eat

By Xin Fei, Epoch Times Staff, Nov 23, 2008 -
Ms. Wang Haizhen, a vet from Hebei Animal Pharmaceutical Co., exposes corruption within the industry. (The Epoch Times)Ms. Wang Haizhen, a vet from Hebei Animal Pharmaceutical Co., exposes corruption within the industry. (The Epoch Times)
Ms. Wang Haizhen, a veterinarian from the Hebei Province Animal Pharmaceutical Co, recently went public with information exposing corruption in China’s food industry.
According to her, as early as 2005, several toxic substances including melamine were detected in some animal feed, resulting in contaminated milk powder, eggs, and pork having entered the food market and harming consumers. She said after the Sanlu Company’s contaminated baby formula incident, many other companies in the area have still been using chemicals such as the known carcinogen iodized rhodium protein, which is more dangerous than melamine.
Wang’s husband was arrested a few years ago for contacting the authorities in regards to contaminated animal feed. When the Sanlu incident occurred, she made the decision to not only continue appealing for her husband’s release but also follow in his footsteps by appealing for the people.

Wrongfully Imprisoned

Gao Songlin, Wang’s husband, was a sales manager for the Feilong Company, a subsidiary of the Hebei Animal Pharmaceutical Co. In 2005, Gao discovered that certain banned substances were being used in the formulas for some animal feed the company had been producing.  Much of this feed was already distributed, which means counterfeit drugs and toxic feed additives had already entered the market and contaminated the animal husbandry in some areas. This later led to the subsequent emergence of contaminated milk powder, eggs, and pork.
Gao was shocked by all this. He made arrangements to speak with An Diajin, the head of the legal department of the company in an effort to have the toxic substances removed from the animal feed formula. Gao also reported it to the Ministry of Agriculture several times. A month after the seizure of the company, An Dianjin falsely accused Gao of embezzlement. What should have been a civil case turned into a criminal case without a criminal investigation. Gao was arrested and sentenced to four years in prison.
Wang said, “The accusations are entirely false!”
Wang remarked that authorities had long since been aware of the presence of toxic substances in animal feed and its harmful effects but did their best to keep it quiet. She said they failed to take any preventive measures, and in order to protect their own best interests, they retaliated against the whistleblower.
“When my husband said he would report it, the person from the Pharmaceutical Company said, ‘Go ahead! Many of our men are the authorities.”

Toxic Materials Still Being Used

According to Wang, Hebei is the largest manufacturing base in China. It contains several large animal pharmaceutical companies for food additives, animal feed and animal pharmaceuticals. The Feilong Animal Pharmaceutical Company is one of them.
Wang said, although the Feilong Company was closed, it quickly changed its name and went on with business. Its plant and employees never changed. Just like the Sanlu Company, it changed its name and went right on with business.
According to Wang, a lot of manufacturers are still using melamine even after the Sanlu Scandal was exposed. Besides melamine, they also add large doses of Rh proteins, Lipiodol, Clenbuterol, attractant agents, just to name a few, to get the effect of accelerating the growth rate of animals. But the chemicals and toxic materials they are adding can easily have carcinogenic effects. Some of these additives are more dangerous than melamine.
She reported that in Hebei alone, there are several hundred companies like this. Besides these, there are several thousand unregistered companies. There are many cases like these in other parts of the country.
According to Wang, people on the inside know all the dirty tricks. Therefore they are usually very careful when it comes to eating meat. Consuming meat containing these additives on a long-term basis can lead to serious health consequences. Higher cancer rates nowadays are directly associated with eating contaminated meat.
She said it’s a secret trick of the trade to avoid meat as much as possible……. (more details from The Epochtimes)
 
Yet we import and consume this toxic garbage, many people know not what they eat, when we alert people to these dangers we are shouted down as 'racists' and so on. Many people are so brainwashed by the system, they need to step outside of their false utopia and fluffy feel good imaginary world they have been indoctrinated in to and start to think for themselves. Some of this junk is more toxic than cigarettes and people warning them about it can hardly be characterized as racist.

More Questions Surrounding The 'Wagga' Trade Centre

Espionage

Chinese Espionage and

Australia’s National Interest

Paul Monk
The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) is Australia’s front-line defence against increasingly aggressive Chinese—and other foreign or criminal—cyber espionage and cyber crime. It is nestled under the wing of the Attorney-General’s Department and complements the Cyber Security Operations Centre, inside the Defence Signals Directorate, within the Defence portfolio. As of April, CERT had close to 500 Australian companies on its books as clients warranting protection against such threats. Welcome to the world of twenty-first-century spying. At a time when there is increasing debate about China’s rise and our dilemma in balancing our economic relationship with it against our strategic security concerns, how preoccupied should we be with the challenge of Chinese espionage?
The subject of spies and conspiracies and all manner of dark arts holds a perennial fascination for a great many people. Personally, I’m a Le Carré fan, because his novels are more sombre and realistic than the popular spy genre. And, as I put it to a veteran of ASIO about a decade ago, when he approached me about the unfinished business of Soviet penetration of Australia’s intelligence and policy circles during the Cold War, “When it comes to such matters, I am unequivocally one of Smiley’s people.” For those unacquainted with the work of George Smiley, I recommend Le Carré’s marvellous end-of-Cold-War novel The Secret Pilgrim, published in 1991. It was dedicated to Alec Guinness, who had starred as Smiley in BBC productions of Le Carré’s classic 1970s Smiley novels Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People. The dedication was warranted. Guinness was a superb Smiley and I don’t think Gary Oldman, in the recent feature film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, laid a glove on him.
I identify with Smiley, because I have never subscribed to the cynical view that the West is the enemy of historical progress or “the revolution” and deserves betrayal, as the Cambridge Five and their numerous colleagues in treachery apparently believed, in the 1930s and afterwards. I also believe that Australia was deeply compromised by traitors during the Cold War: some of its own citizens became moles for the Soviet intelligence services. I despise the Left’s unyielding insistence that such allegations are paranoia and that, in any case, those who spied for Stalin and his successors were somehow “romantic” or “idealistic” figures. I grew up thinking of Stalin as the Dark Lord and the Kremlin as the Dark Tower and, the more I have learned about both, the more I see those childhood archetypes as largely justified. Finally, it seems clear to me, from what information I have been able to gather over the years, that very few of those who worked for the dark side in Australia during the Cold War have ever been identified or exposed to public obloquy. In particular, those who did so right through to the end of the Cold War have got away scot free.
Australia was rather poorly served during the Cold War by its counter-intelligence services, in large measure because they were deeply penetrated by the Soviet Union. This remains a subject that the Australian government is extraordinarily reticent about. That makes it possible for the Left to get away with the old Cold War canard that ASIO was a right-wing organisation obsessed with allegedly mythical reds under the bed. It turns out that the reds were not merely under the bed; they were in it. Yet it remains one of the most troubling aspects of post-Cold War revelations about Soviet espionage that, whereas much has come out about previously unconfirmed or altogether unknown Soviet spies in the United States, Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere, almost nothing has come to light about such spies in Australia. There is, however, disturbing evidence to suggest that Australia was perhaps at least as deeply penetrated as any other Western country during the Cold War and that this has been deliberately covered up over the past twenty years.
In late 2009, in an opinion column in the Australian, I drew attention to the anomalous fact that the KGB files on Australia have somehow never seen the light of day, despite the publication of two fat volumes, in 1999 and 2005, on the Mitrokhin revelations from the KGB archive. I noted that there were, indeed, revelations to be had about Soviet spies in Australia, but that these had apparently been suppressed, for no clear reason. I claimed that this had been done at the request of the Keating government. I added that, as prime minister, Paul Keating had, nonetheless, quietly set up two inquiries into Soviet penetration of Canberra and specifically of ASIO. Those inquiries were Operation Liver, by the Australian Federal Police; and a separate inquiry by senior diplomat and former head of ONA, Michael Cook. The AFP inquiry, I stated, was terminated by the Labor Attorney-General Michael Lavarch with the exclamation, “This has got to stop. There’s no knowing where it will end!” According to my understanding, I stated, Michael Cook deduced that there had been four Soviet moles inside ASIO, virtually up to the end of the Cold War.
As several serious, well-informed and responsible individuals have exclaimed to me since that piece came out, the silence in response to it was deafening. There was not a word of retort from Michael Cook, Paul Keating, Michael Lavarch, the AFP, ASIO or anyone else in a position to state that I was in error in any particular. Disconcertingly, there was no response, either, from the conservative side of politics. In the weeks following, I met with both the Inspector General for Intelligence and Security, Ian Carnell, and the Director General of ASIO, David Irvine, and neither gave me any ground for believing that I was in error in what I had claimed. Well before I had written it, I met with Cook and asked him whether the claim put to me that he had identified four Soviet moles in ASIO was correct. In a conversation that had been perfectly serious and cordial, his only response to this question was to say that he would not be divulging any information on that subject. Since then, I have been informed that, in fact, Cook’s report was based on Operation Liver and was not a separate inquiry; that up to ten suspected moles were quietly retired and that one of these individuals had worked inside ASIO from 1952 until 1985, ending up as head of security vetting. Moreover, ASIO was not the only part of the Australian government penetrated and, while some of those who spied back in the 1940s have been exposed, virtually nothing has come to light since the Petrov defection in 1954.
My present purpose is to address the matter of Chinese espionage, but if what I stated in 2009 about Soviet penetration of ASIO is in substance correct, and given that there has never been any public accounting for that debacle, what basis do we have now for confidence in the effectiveness of our counter-intelligence services against the Chinese? If it was possible for a Soviet mole to work undetected within ASIO for more than thirty years and end up as head of security vetting, why would we believe ASIO now to be secure against comparable penetration by the Chinese? My own view is that we have very little basis for confidence. The Russians counted on ideology and venality to place moles in the West. They continued to have successes right through to the end of the Cold War. The Chinese have advantages that the Soviet Union never enjoyed: a booming economy, a huge trade relationship with their target countries, not least Australia; interested lobby groups working on their behalf; very large pools of Chinese migrants in this and other Western countries; huge numbers of students and tourists coming here and to the other leading Western countries every year; and a widespread view that they are now a capitalist country set to overtake the United States, a view which encourages both apologias on their behalf and band-wagoning.
Let me relate a story that is both amusing in a dark kind of way and instructive in our present circumstances. Katrina Leung became a leading figure in the Chinese community in Los Angeles in the 1970s. In 1982, she was quietly recruited by the FBI, America’s ASIO. With their support, she was given American citizenship in 1984. She was codenamed Bureau Source 410; otherwise known as Parlour Maid. For twenty years, while remaining a high-profile figure in Los Angeles and the person it was said that you had to go to if you wanted to get something done in China, she travelled back and forth to Beijing, meeting an incredible range of people and reporting back to the FBI’s top Chinese-speaking counter-intelligence specialists in California, James Smith and William Cleveland. She quickly became the FBI’s top secret source on China, the Chinese political leadership and the Chinese Ministry of State Security. The FBI paid her $1.7 million during those years for her seemingly stunning intelligence on what top Chinese leaders were thinking. Briefings based on her reports went all the way to the White House.
There was just one problem. Even before she was recruited by the FBI, Katrina Leung was working for the Chinese intelligence service. She continued to do so for all those twenty years. Moreover, from shortly after the time he recruited her, James Smith became and remained her lover. From 1987, so did William Cleveland. Both would visit her and confide in her. Smith took briefcases full of classified documents to her home and she would filch them, copy them and transmit them to Beijing. In December 1990, the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted a telephone conversation in Chinese between a woman in Los Angeles and her Chinese handler in Beijing, whose name was Mao Guoha. She revealed to him, among other things, that William Cleveland was about to make a trip to China. The NSA sent the intercept to the FBI. It was passed on to Cleveland. When he listened to it, he recognised the woman’s voice at once: it was that of Katrina Leung.
Cleveland (and Smith, when he learned of the intercept) each realised they had a serious problem. They covered it up for the next twelve years and kept up their sexual liaisons with Parlour Maid. She was kept on the payroll. Smith kept taking briefcases full of classified documents to Leung’s house, when going there for trysts. She kept reporting to her handler in Beijing. Right up until 2002, neither Smith nor Cleveland apparently guessed what the other was up to with Parlour Maid. That, you might say, was need-to-know, compartmented information. She, meanwhile, kept sixteen foreign bank accounts, travelled to China at will, betrayed a string of sensitive FBI operations to her real intelligence masters and was paid handsomely by the FBI while doing all this. They thought they had a brilliant penetration operation running; but while their top agents were certainly penetrating Katrina Leung, she was penetrating the FBI in a manner that put the legendary Mata Hari in the shade. And when, eventually, she was exposed and brought to book, the FBI’s lawyers bungled the prosecution and she was given so nominal a penalty that she exclaimed in court, “I love America!” As well she might! But her loyalties had clearly been to China.
There is an element of Keystone Cops to this story. One can only groan at the extraordinary incompetence of the FBI and the stunning susceptibility of the Bureau’s most highly rated Chinese-speaking counter-intelligence officers to the oldest lure in the book of spies. But the case raises a set of questions which, I suggest, are what we should now ponder. First, how much Chinese espionage of all kinds happens? Second, how much of it happens here in Australia? Third, what does China gain from its espionage? Fourth, are we any better placed to thwart it than the FBI? And finally, does it really matter, at the end of the day? The short answers are:
• A very great deal;
• Plenty (remember CERT);
• The biggest haul of data and intelligence you can imagine;
• Our lot may well be even less effective than the FBI; and
• It all depends on how the economics works out, because that will determine whether the West, including Australia, continues to thrive or ends up floundering in some kind of Asian century; apart from which China itself faces grave challenges in the years ahead.
I cannot prove these things here and now, any more than I can prove that there were four Soviet moles in ASIO right into the 1980s. I offer my judgments not as one with privileged information on the subject, but as a former senior intelligence analyst who has always taken an interest in the subject and keeps an eye on developments. My observations are intended to be responsible and concerned; but they are certainly not definitive.
China’s spy agencies include the Ministry of State Security (MSS), the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and the Military Intelligence Department (MID). The MSS is China’s foreign intelligence service; the MPS its internal security service. Katrina Leung worked for the MSS. Its headquarters are near the old Summer Palace in Beijing. The Chinese name for the MSS is Guojia Anquan Bu or GAB. You might say that Chinese espionage, with its fabled history dating back into the mists of time and enshrined in the vaunted treatises of Sun Tzu, is “the gift of the GAB”. It relies on tens of thousands of Chinese speakers with the gift of the gab travelling abroad, asking questions and reporting back to Beijing Centre—as well as the new dark arts of cyber espionage. It (and the MID) are targeting anyone and anything that can yield the Chinese Communist Party an advantage in its quest to make China the world’s greatest power by mid-century. Whether this is the best way to go about that ambitious goal is, of course, another matter; but that it is the goal and that the GAB is deeply involved in pursuing it there can be no doubt. It is now far better resourced and more sophisticated than ever it was in the days of Mao Zedong or the fabulous Fu Manchu.
The GAB has twelve bureaux:
• Recruitment for both domestic and overseas service
• Spy handling under diplomatic or commercial cover
• Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao operations
• Technology: wiretapping, communications, photography
• Internal security: domestic surveillance
• Counter-intelligence
• Intelligence analysis and reporting
• Research
• Counter-surveillance and counter-defection
• Scientific and technical intelligence
• Computers and computer security
• Foreign liaison and cooperation
Academically speaking, MSS spies are trained in the agency’s own university, the Institute of International Relations, in Beijing. Spying tradecraft is taught at the Institute of Cadre Management in Suzhou, not far from Shanghai. Suzhou also happens to be the city from which, according to long-standing tradition, the most beautiful women in China come. I remarked on this, many years ago, to a Chinese businessman sitting next to me on a flight from Beijing to Shanghai. He quipped, “You are well informed! But I wouldn’t go looking for them in Suzhou these days. They’re all in Guangzhou, because that’s where the new money is.”
Long after Stalin’s time, many a recruit to the KGB felt the lure of what was seen as an elite, front-line service in the global battle against the evil empire of imperialism. Kim Philby, in his memoir, spoke of his own secret recruitment by the KGB in such terms, but did not apparently see his recruitment by MI6 in the same glamorous light. Imagine the sense of patriotism, pride and prestige for young Chinese men and women entering into such training now, at a time when so many Chinese believe that their country is set to become, in their own lifetimes, the greatest economic power; perhaps even the greatest military power in the world and maybe in history. Lee Kuan Yew, in 1996, remarked of China, “This is not just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of man.” In the same year, then Chinese Premier Zou Jiahua, at a conference of Chinese intelligence agencies, praised “the tens of thousands of nameless heroes who cherish and loyally serve their motherland … quietly fighting in their specialised posts abroad”. This is the kind of swelling Chinese nationalist sentiment that we are up against.
Note Zou Jiahua’s mention of “tens of thousands”. Who was he talking about? Plainly not Chinese spies as the word spies is commonly understood in the West; not secret agents reporting to case officers in the Chinese embassy or planted inside foreign governments. As Madame Fu Ying remarked some years ago, in response to the defector Chen Yonglin’s claim that there were about a thousand Chinese agents in Australia, “If I had a thousand spies working for me, I wouldn’t have time to play golf.” She was right. If she had been running a thousand spies she wouldn’t have time to play golf. But ambassadors don’t handle spies. And China doesn’t handle most of its spies through its embassies. To assume that it does would be to fall into the trap of believing that China’s espionage services work in just the same way as the old Soviet intelligence services or the American or Australian intelligence services. They don’t. And this will be important to understand in any serious effort, should we mount one, to counter this kind of Chinese intelligence gathering in Australia.
Paul Moore, a specialist in classical Chinese language and literature and sometime head of the FBI’s whole China division, told David Wise, a US historian of intelligence matters:
if a beach was an espionage target, the Russians would send in a sub, frogmen would steal ashore in the dark of night and with great secrecy collect several buckets of sand and take them back to Moscow. The US would target the beach with satellites and produce reams of data. The Chinese would send in a thousand tourists, each assigned to collect a single grain of sand. When they returned, they would be asked to shake out their towels. And they would end up knowing more about the sand than anyone else. China does not normally pay money for intelligence, unlike the KGB and the CIA. Typically, you help them and they help you develop an export business. They don’t develop intelligence relationships with people, but general relationships, which may end up having an intelligence dimension. They don’t so much steal information as put sources in a position where they will be indiscreet or generous with information under false pretences.  
This might be dubbed “Moore’s Law”, though, strictly speaking, he should have spoken of each Chinese tourist collecting somewhat more than a single grain of sand—perhaps a handful or so and from many different parts of the beach.
Let me underscore a few crucial aspects of Moore’s Law. The MSS doesn’t target the vulnerable so much as the eager. It doesn’t offer money so much as it offers contacts in China and assistance in setting up or furthering a business or a research project there. It will make appeals not to ideology but to helpfulness and friendship and a desire to see China modernise. It also places numerous agents among first-generation Chinese immigrants, whether in the USA or here. As one press report on economic espionage by Chinese Americans put it in late April:
A common thread in these cases is desire by the scientist defendants, many of them Chinese-American immigrants, to help China advance economically. A case under way in San Francisco involves theft of a DuPont production process for titanium dioxide, which is used to whiten the centers of Oreo cookies as well as the trademark “M’’ on “M&M’s” candies. One scientist in the San Francisco case, Tze Chao, said in pleading guilty that executives from China “appealed to my Chinese ethnicity and asked me to work for the good of the PRC”. 
In the USA there are currently some 2600 Chinese diplomatic and consular officers; 25,000 visiting Chinese delegates each year; 127,000 Chinese students in schools and universities; and millions of Chinese citizens—1.2 million in California alone, with its large defence and aerospace industries and Silicon Valley. The counter-intelligence task here is incomparably more difficult than anything faced during the Cold War struggle with the KGB and the GRU. It’s like trying to find bombs hidden in shipping containers at America’s ports.
The absolute numbers of Chinese in Australia are smaller, but the proportional numbers are substantial. Now, let’s link this background stuff about Moore’s Law and the tale of Katrina Leung to recent developments in Australia. Recall the Joel Fitzgibbon affair of three years ago. Here’s the key press report from May 2009, as written up by the investigative journalist Philip Dorling:
Associates of the businesswoman Helen Liu claim Chinese intelligence services asked them to cultivate a relationship with Joel Fitzgibbon and his father, Eric Fitzgibbon, after they were flown first-class to China in 1993. Sources with close ties to the company that paid for the trip also allege that Chinese agents had electronically monitored the pair during their visit.
It was on this trip that Mr Fitzgibbon, then a NSW ALP official, and Eric Fitzgibbon, then a federal MP, first met Ms Liu, who has since become what the Defence Minister has described as “a very close” family friend. Sources familiar with the details of the trip allege Chinese spies eavesdropped on the private conversations of Eric Fitzgibbon, who as a serving MP had attracted their interest.
The sources, who are close to Ms Liu’s then business partner, Humphrey Xu, confirmed the trip was organised and paid for by Mr Xu through his company Diamond Hill International. According to the sources, Chinese intelligence officials expressed interest in the Fitzgibbons’ preparedness to accept benefits from Mr Xu and Ms Liu, and encouraged them to continue to develop their relationship with the Fitzgibbon family.
When asked about the 1993 trip, Joel Fitzgibbon said in March this year that he went in a private capacity and that his father “was invited to turn the first sod at a tourist development in China”. Both Joel and Eric Fitzgibbon deny receiving $US20,000 for their services on the all-expenses-paid 1993 trip. Eric Fitzgibbon declared the trip in the House of Representatives register of members’ interests.
In late 1995, Diamond Hill International contributed $20,000 to Joel Fitzgibbon’s campaign for the 1996 federal election. At the time, the donation was declared by the NSW Labor Party as a donation to a “party unit” with no direct reference to Mr Fitzgibbon. In 1996 the personal and business relationship between Mr Xu and Ms Liu broke apart and she took control of several joint companies including Diamond Hill International and Wincopy. Wincopy subsequently donated $20,000 to Joel Fitzgibbon’s 1998 re-election campaign. Her companies gave a further $50,000 to the NSW ALP between 2001 and 2007. Ms Liu has denied ever being involved in spying. 
“She’s just a Chinese business woman with whom I am friends and who happens to have good Party connections,” was the Fitzgibbon defence. Exactly so; although the nature of the gifts and contributions looks highly suspicious. But such gifts and contributions, such friendships, are the way it works and the target may never know what the game is until deeply into it. The donations to Joel Fitzgibbon’s election campaigns are straight out of the Katrina Leung playbook. That Mr Fitzgibbon may not have done anything so much as questionable doesn’t alter the troubling reality of the situation. It simply highlights the great difficulty in countering the ancient Chinese art of espionage. And let’s be clear: the Fitzgibbon case was high-profile only because he was Minister of Defence. It would be naive to believe that it is anything but the tip of an iceberg of considerable proportions. Think, for example, of the relationships of such figures as Alexander Downer and John Brumby to a company like Huawei and consider how much such people are in a position to divulge to their Chinese business friends.
In any case, Chinese espionage right now is occurring on a scale that dwarfs what the Soviet Union accomplished during the height of the Cold War. This is not something widely appreciated. It has three sources or enablers. First, China, unlike the Soviet Union, is now a commercially thriving state, doing vast volumes of trade all over the world. This gives it both the incentive and the means to conduct espionage of every kind to an extent that the Soviet Union could only have envied. Second, there is a huge Chinese diaspora and China’s intelligence services, unlike their Soviet counterparts, have always depended primarily upon first-generation immigrants to foreign countries and students or tourists travelling abroad, to gather much of their intelligence for them, a handful at a time. Third, China is now conducting cyber espionage—something that was never possible for the Soviet Union. It was not technically possible in the Cold War years and, in any case, information science was one of the many areas in which the Soviet Union was left behind by the West in the 1970s and 1980s. Consider the 17,526 documents purloined by the Cambridge Five over twenty years and more, then think of WikiLeaks. Bradley Manning downloaded 250,000 documents onto CD read/write disks, in about as much time as it would have taken Kim Philby to hold a single meeting with his KGB controller.
For years now, business people travelling to China have been warned either not to bring laptops and mobile phones with them, or to never leave them unguarded; because the MSS targets them and copies their content. Michael Hayden, former CIA and NSA chief, issued this warning not so long ago; but the well-informed have known it for quite a bit longer. Moreover, few foreigners have ever realised the extent to which the MSS collects intelligence on them into vast databases for future reference. If you have heard tales of the files collected by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover or by ASIO during the Cold War, you have a faint inkling of what the MSS has done domestically and abroad for decades. And such collection often takes place, as you might expect on a little reflection, in the most apparently innocuous ways. This is intensive in the United States, targeting think-tanks and policy centres, for example; and has been even more so since China’s reform and opening era began than in the Mao years. Australia may be provincial, by comparison, but the same is true here. Think Chinese restaurants and ask how many Soviet restaurants ever operated in the West at any point between 1917 and 1991. Even now, Russian restaurants are as rare as hen’s teeth. Chinese restaurants are everywhere. Think the Mafia and pizza parlours.
In recent years, Western security and counter-intelligence organisations, including our own, have warned repeatedly that financial firms, banks and law practices are targets of cyber invasion by the Chinese. It need hardly be said that the same holds true for government departments, ministerial offices and the headquarters and personnel of leading firms doing business in China. In 2009, MI5 disseminated a fourteen-page white paper to a number of financial institutions warning of hacking by the Chinese. Such cyber espionage, MI5 added, is backed up by “honey traps” set to ensnare British businessmen. It’s a case, of course, of the two oldest professions in the world, as the saying has it, becoming interwoven, as they so often have been. Remember the brouhaha that ensued when Google announced that it had detected highly sophisticated Chinese hacking of its own cyber networks. The sophistication of these attacks was described as “staggering” and, while Beijing routinely denies that it bears any responsibility for them, no one of any seriousness or standing believes these disclaimers.
It’s important to register two things here: the scale on which Chinese cyber espionage is now being conducted and the fact that it’s happening here as well as elsewhere. “They are stealing everything that isn’t bolted down, and it’s getting exponentially worse,” according to Mike Rogers, a Republican Congressman from Michigan and chairman of America’s Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Economic and technological cyber espionage is intended to enable China to leapfrog over its American and other foreign competitors to further its goal of becoming the world’s largest economy, according to a US intelligence report of November last year. As national security and counter-terrorism specialist Richard Clarke has expressed it, “What has been happening over the course of the last five years is that China … has been hacking its way into every corporation it can find listed in Dun & Bradstreet.”
Clarke is a former special adviser on cyber security to President George W. Bush. Speaking at a conference on the subject last October, he stated that the Chinese have targeted every corporation in the USA, in Asia, in Germany. They are “using a vacuum cleaner to suck data out in terabytes and petabytes. I don’t think you can overstate the damage to this country that has already been done.” According to a Bloomberg editorial of mid-December last year, “The electronic theft of proprietary information from US companies has reached the level of grand larceny on a national scale. One declassified government estimate put the value of information stolen in the last year—everything from blueprints to merger plans—at almost $500 billion.” One specialist has described all this as the greatest illegal transfer of wealth in the form of intellectual property in history.
This grand larceny is the fruit of an operation originally launched in 1986, under the title Program 863, to close the gap with the West in areas such as nano-, bio- and information technology. Program 863 operates in such a way that the MSS and the Foreign Ministry can routinely disclaim any responsibility for it. Indeed, it would appear that much of it is conducted under the auspices of Chinese military intelligence and by special task forces created to make plausible deniability feasible. Given the extent of Australia’s trade with China, there is no good reason to believe that our own companies and ministries have not been targeted in the same way. I have no privileged information on what Chinese human and cyber spies have accomplished, you’ll be disappointed to learn; but our large mining companies are certain to be a target-rich environment for Chinese espionage. One must assume they look to their own cyber defences and personnel security. I need hardly add that Chinese espionage will be strongly centred, also, on our defence alliance with the United States, our force structure plans and our intelligence agencies.
At a time when prominent figures in this country are calling for us to distance ourselves from the United States and draw closer to China, the counter-intelligence challenge is becoming acute. It becomes ever easier for Chinese operatives to develop relationships and ask questions in the name of “balance” and “friendship”. This is all the more troubling if we ponder even a few successful, old-fashioned Chinese espionage successes in the United States, in addition to the work of Katrina Leung. Over the past thirty or forty years, Chinese spies have penetrated the CIA and US nuclear weapons laboratories and have passed to China crucial technological intelligence on some of the most sophisticated weapons in the US arsenal, including the neutron bomb, the W-70 nuclear warhead, the W-88 thermonuclear warhead for the Trident submarines and stealth technology. Gwo-bao Min, Wen Ho Lee and Larry Wu-tai Chin are not exactly household names, but if the story of Chinese espionage in America was better known, these would be names as famous as the top Soviet spies of an earlier era, such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs.
Gwo-bao Min, for example, worked at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories on missile defence and had access to the designs of every US nuclear missile. He had come to the USA in 1963, got a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan in 1970 and joined Livermore in 1975. In 1979 he travelled to China, and Chinese friends who helped him with his visa steered him to China’s nuclear scientists for close questioning. That visit to China in 1979 by Gwo-bao Min became a focal point in the investigation that the FBI launched many years later in an effort to determine who had leaked the secrets of so much American nuclear weapons technology to the Chinese.
Another key suspect in that case was Wen Ho Lee. Lee worked in X Division at Los Alamos, the most highly sensitive part of the laboratory where America’s nuclear bombs have been designed ever since the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. He downloaded vast quantities of highly classified data without accounting for why; made trips to China about which he lied; made contact with Gwo-bao Min and lied about that; and yet when prosecuted for espionage was acquitted and apologised to by the trial judge, because the case could not be proven beyond reasonable doubt. He walked free, sued for damages and accepted $1,645,000 in an out-of-court settlement in 2006. Like Katrina Leung, he must have decided that he just loved America.
Larry Wu-tai Chin was born in Beijing in 1922 and began working as a translator for the Americans in 1944 in Fuzhou. By 1948 he was working in the US consulate in Shanghai. When the USA pulled out of mainland China, he found himself in Korea, where he worked as an interpreter, interviewing Chinese POWs, in 1951. In 1952, he joined the CIA’s fledgling Foreign Broadcast Information Service and was based in Okinawa. For years within FBIS he had access to CIA reports, including those from covert agents in the Chinese world. He used to make regular visits to Hong Kong. In 1961 he was transferred by FBIS to California and in 1965 was granted US citizenship. He was given a Top Secret security clearance and, in 1970, transferred to the CIA’s FBIS headquarters in Rosslyn, Virginia. He now had very high level access to classified information and this remained the case right up to the point in July 1981, when at the age of fifty-nine, he retired.
At a special ceremony on his retirement, Chin was presented with a Career Intelligence Medal as the CIA’s best translator by CIA deputy director Bobby Inman. A week later, he flew to Hong Kong, where an MSS officer paid him a retirement bonus of $US40,000—the equivalent in today’s terms of several times that amount. He had been spying for the Chinese since 1944. He betrayed Chinese POWs that he had interviewed in Korea. In all probability a good many of them were incarcerated or executed on their return to China. He used to meet his case officer, Ou Qiming, on those visits to Hong Kong from Okinawa, all the way back in the 1950s. He had had an emergency contact in New York in the 1970s: one Father Mark Cheung, a Catholic priest at the Church of the Transfiguration in Chinatown. Cheung really was a priest; the MSS had sent him to a Catholic seminary to become a mole inside the Catholic Church. All the while, he had a wife inside China. When he visited her, he threw off his priestly attire and resumed his personal identity.
Chin, having been handsomely paid over the years and having invested his gains in properties, thirty-one of which he owned in the Washington DC area alone; lived comfortably in retirement. But over three years from 1982, two Chinese sources informed the CIA of Chin’s career as a spy, and his cover was blown when their testimony led the FBI to hard evidence of his espionage. For once, the FBI got its man. He was arrested in late 1985, and put on trial. Convicted on charges that could carry two life terms, he committed suicide in prison by self-asphyxiation, on February 21, 1986, before he could even be sentenced. Isn’t it remarkable that this man had worked for the Chinese intelligence service for thirty-seven years as a mole inside US intelligence and the CIA without ever being detected and that only Chinese defectors blew his cover? It’s almost enough to make one a little paranoid. But paranoia is not what I advise.
Now, you might ask, “What is the evidence that any such spies have operated in Australia?” After all, we don’t have nuclear weapons or stealth aircraft or other high-profile targets for Chinese espionage. Well, the question of evidence regarding espionage in Australia in general is a strange and elusive subject; and the targets of foreign espionage here are often indirect. Throughout the Cold War, we were seen by the Soviet Union as a prime target because of our close relationship with the United States, Britain and Canada. It is clear that high-level intelligence was going to the KGB out of H.V. Evatt’s office when he was Chifley’s Minister for External Affairs. Several of his staff, including Alan Dalziel, have always been suspected of being Soviet spies. Des Ball, one of the leading specialists on Cold War intelligence matters in Australia, recently gave it as his opinion that John Burton, Secretary for External Affairs, and even Evatt himself, may have been spies and were certainly fellow travellers indulgent of actual spies in their midst.
In 1981, CIA veteran Ted Shackley told Brian Toohey that Australia had been more deeply penetrated by the Soviets than any other Western country. Think about that. He was convinced that there was a high-level Soviet mole in either Defence, Foreign Affairs or the office of the Prime Minister at that time. A decade later, Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB head of counter-intelligence, wrote of having had a mole in ASIO. And these moles were interested chiefly in Australia as a key regional ally of the United States.
There can be no serious doubt that Chinese espionage in Australia in our time, like Soviet espionage during the Cold War, is directed at US secrets confided to the Australian government; at the nature of the Australian alliance with the United States; and, of course, also at inside information regarding commodities trade and the Australian economy. There is also relentless pressure on Chinese dissidents in exile, whether they are democracy and human rights activists, Tibetans, Uyghurs or Taiwanese.
Fear of espionage has, for a hundred years, been prone to stir up popular fantasy and paranoia. I do not seek to stoke any such fire. I do believe, however, that Chinese espionage is a serious issue. I am not inclined to believe that our intelligence services are on top of the problem and I have no confidence in the willingness or capacity of our diplomatic cadre or immigration officials to stand up against any but the most blatant Chinese offences. It has been refreshing, however, to see that, based on warnings from ASIO, the government has banned Huawei from bidding for involvement in the NBN project, over the hypocritical objections of Beijing.
For the most part, of course, the MSS does not commit “blatant” offences. It knows its business well, as I trust my handful of anecdotes showed. Rather, however, than use all these points as a platform from which to declare that we need to double and redouble our counter-intelligence budget, I prefer to ask a provocative question: How much does this espionage really matter, when all is said and done? I ask that question because, as a moment’s reflection will remind you, despite the scale and success of Soviet espionage, the West won the Cold War. And it was not counter-intelligence and espionage that won it for us; though the role it did play is fascinating to ponder.
We need to be realistic about the challenge we face, without becoming paranoid. Many years studying the history of Western intelligence and working inside it have left me with the belief that, all things considered, the secret world is considerably over-rated. Too much is kept secret and the whole game of secrecy feeds on itself. The books of William Burrows—Deep Black (1986) and By Any Means Necessary (2001)—are excellent inquiries into the work of America’s U-2, SR-71 and KH-11 aerial and satellite surveillance programs of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was seen, by many of the most senior officers who ran these programs, as so malevolent and so secretive that enormous expense was justified in spying on it, just as almost unlimited expense was said to be justified in building up a nuclear arsenal to intimidate it. Even so, there was much that was never learned and much that was misinterpreted. The system that was supposed to guard us fed paranoia on the Soviet side and more than once came perilously close to triggering thermonuclear war. Meanwhile, the CIA, shaped by Dulles to be as ruthless and secretive as the KGB, engaged in activities that often reflected very badly on the United States. I have studied those activities.
The Soviet Union fell, in the end, because of its own economic, social and political deficiencies. Our task in the years ahead is not to stop the Chinese from spying on us, but to manage our economic and political affairs better than they manage theirs. The Chinese intelligence services are less efficient and less cohesive than fable and imagination might make them seem and they have had some notable strategic failures as well as successes. Consider that, in 1999, the MPS, for all its vast resources and arbitrary powers, failed to give the Communist Party leadership any warning at all before many thousands of Falun Gong practitioners appeared in Tiananmen Square to peacefully protest against the Party’s abuse of its power. Neither the MSS nor MID apparently gave the Party or military leadership any advance warning of North Korea’s first nuclear weapons test. Both failures are said to have alarmed and infuriated the Party leadership. Such failures need to be weighed in the balance against the concern we might well feel about the successes of a Katrina Leung or a Larry Wu-tai Chin.
In any case, the West has done far more damage to itself through economic mismanagement than the Soviet Union or China has ever done to it through espionage. The debts that are now all but bankrupting the United States, the EU and Japan were not caused by Chinese spies. China’s surge in economic growth was not accomplished by China’s spies. Nor will China’s massive thefts avail it very much, unless it is able to become far more technologically creative and unless we in the West continue to fumble the economic football. Sure, China is pouring resources into a huge peacetime military build-up, but the most acute imbalances and shifting balances in the world are those of productivity and solvency. If we are to get our counter-intelligence and defence strategies right, we must keep a sense of proportion and ensure that we fight only those battles that really matter and only when we can win them.
The chief battle, then and now, is economic, and it’s a battle the West is losing. In 2010, Nobel laureate in economics Robert Fogel estimated that, by 2040, China’s GDP will have soared to $US123 trillion, or about eight times the current US GDP; and that China’s gross domestic product will be 40 per cent of world output, or twice the combined output of the USA and the EU. That, he concluded, is what Chinese economic hegemony will look like. At the same time, the US Congressional Budget Office was estimating that US national debt would climb to as much as 700 per cent of GDP by 2080. We live, of course, in a time of such extravagant and alarming projections, including the more alarming climate change scenarios. They should be used to concentrate the mind; they should not be permitted to take it over. I am sceptical of such long-range linear extrapolations. China, as its own premier pointed out publicly on March 14, faces enormous hurdles in the years immediately ahead, and 2080 is a very long way off.
As Yogi Berra famously said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” Those who know about landmines differentiate between pressure mines and jumping mines. When you step on a pressure mine, it blows off your feet and leaves you crippled and bleeding on the ground. A jumping landmine doesn’t explode when you step on it. It waits until you step off it. Then it pops up to about groin height before detonating. Having accumulated three trillion dollars and euros in foreign exchange reserves and created an economy enormously dependent on exports to the USA and the EU, China is standing right now on a gigantic jumping landmine. Its biggest “intelligence” challenge is figuring out what to do to rebalance its economy and hedge against the weakening of both the dollar and the euro. It faces immense demographic and institutional challenges in the coming decade or two and, as Wen Jiabao candidly stated: China could face an historical tragedy and an upheaval on the scale of the Cultural Revolution if it fails to negotiate these challenges. That, I suggest, is the perspective in which to set both Robert Fogel’s extravagant curve and our own concerns about Chinese spies.
There may, of course, be those who think that we, too, have stepped onto a big jumping landmine: over-dependence on commodity exports to China at the expense of the more balanced and forward-looking development and management of our own economy. They would be correct. Our own greatest intelligence challenge in the years immediately ahead, therefore, is to think this one through. Sure, we would be prudent to keep a watchful eye on economic and strategic espionage by Chinese spies; but we should remember the main game, keep our eye on the prize and understand that the expensive and secretive world of espionage is, as often as not, inefficient, counter-productive and even irrelevant.
Writing after the end of the Cold War, Oleg Kalugin remarked wryly that there may have been some in the CIA who truly believed the KGB was efficient, adroit and masterful, but that those inside it knew it to be corrupt, inefficient, plagued by ideological obsessions and often groping in the dark. We should not allow our judgment to be clouded by myths and nightmares; nor should we imagine that what really counts in the world is secret intelligence. What counts far more is clear strategic thinking and economic efficiency. We are short of both right now—and it’s not China’s fault.
Paul Monk was head of China analysis for the Defence Intelligence Organisation in 1994-95 and is the author of Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2005) and The West in a Nutshell: Foundations, Fragilities, Futures (2009). He wrote on “China, America, and the Danger to World Order” in the May issue.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2012/6/chinese-espionage-and-australia-s-national-interest

Friday, April 26, 2013

The Chilling Facts

It wouldn't matter what the Chinese did to innocent people, greedy Australian politicians still roll out the 'red' carpet and ignore all crimes against humanity.


Epoch Times 21.3.13

When a transplant donor is a person overseas who has been commercially exploited or even worse, effectively killed to provide an organ, then in the absence of effective legislation to criminalise this, all Australians pay the price for silence and government lawmakers risk becoming complicit.
International experts are calling on the State Government to support legislation that would ban NSW residents from receiving organs found to be from illegal and unethical sources.
David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State (Asia-Pacific), and Maria Fiatarone Singh, Professor of Medicine at Sydney University, addressed an audience that included several members of the legislature at NSW Parliament on March 12.
A briefing was hosted to raise awareness of a proposed amendment to the Human Tissue (Trafficking in Human Organs) Bill.
In the opening address, it was explained that an increased demand for transplant surgery was being met “on the international market through grossly unethical sourcing of organs”.
A number of NSW residents are travelling overseas each year to receive organs illegally or that have been unethically harvested.
A story was recounted in which a NSW renal surgeon was informed by his dialysis patient that they would be flying to China for a kidney transplant where a “donor” was about to be shot.
Health services provided through publically funded Medicare are given to Australian organ recipients before and after transplant operations.
While the State Government expressed concern about these trends in a recent parliamentary discussion, they have for now forfeited responsibility on the matter, instead stating it was a Commonwealth issue.
David Kilgour, recipient of the 2009 Human Rights Award from the International Society for Human Rights for his work on illegal organ harvesting, said to The Epoch Times that “jurisdictional buck-passing” was not uncommon where political will was lacking.
The provision of health services is in the domain of both state and federal governments, “so both can legislate and in this case it would be ideal”, said Mr Kilgour.
The official number of Australians travelling overseas for organs is unclear as records are not maintained. Hospitals however do have records of post-transplant treatment, but this has not been collated into one source.
The NSW Government purports there are only one or two cases per year, while it is believed to be closer to six cases per year, based on known dealings with renal surgeons.
The spectrum of illegal and unethical transplant tourism is described as starting with “desperately poor people” living in poverty in countries like India and the Philippines who are exploited to sell their organs for very little compensation. The worst cases of it are reported in China, where victims include prisoners detained without trial and held because of their spiritual beliefs “only to be killed at facilities in China that can provide complex, complicated and sophisticated arrangements, where effectively prisoners are killed to order”.
When questioned on the issue of magnitude of the problem at the briefing, Professor Singh said: “To say it’s not an issue of huge magnitude to Australians is one thing, but it is of huge magnitude for the number of Chinese people being killed. That’s putting a very different priority on the life of one person over another.
“It’s symbolic as well. Even if only one person from NSW goes [overseas for an organ], if there is a law against it, at least it makes the statement that NSW has some integrity in this regard and it’s a symbol for the other states and the Commonwealth Government to follow in their footsteps.”

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Native Title Under Threat, We Must Resist

Below are some very telling articles of what the big money men and their foreign investor friends have in store for Australians.

Australia First alerts our Aboriginal friends to this con. The overarching agenda here will be to water down if not extinguish Native Title rights. All this talk of 'Food Forums, Food Bowl Of Asia' etc and prosperity for all is a lie.

The Northern Zone agenda will be anything but prosperity for all. The Northern Zone is designed to be a situation of profit for the elite and their foreign friends and a 'purpose built' destination  for refugees and other sources of cheap foreign labour to meet that end.

Make no mistake, this will mean total dispossession of Aboriginal and European Australians. Our politicians and their rich friends are no more than Rats with gold teeth, their greed knows no end.

Australia First Party intends to stridently resist this agenda.



AUSTRALIA'S largest agricultural corporation has called for an end to political squabbling about foreign ownership of farm land and a focus on achieving an ambitious food bowl vision for northern Australia.         
David Farley and Donald McGauchie, respectively managing director and chairman of the Australian Agricultural Company, the biggest owners of land and cattle in Australia, said it was not important who owned agricultural assets but that they were developed quickly and to their full potential.
In an exclusive interview with The Australian yesterday, the two men called for all pastoral leases in northern Australia to be converted to freehold or private land tenure to attract foreign rural development capital.
Mr McGauchie, a former Reserve Bank board member, said foreign banks, companies and cashed-up overseas pension funds did not regard leasehold land as a secure enough form of land ownership. The possibility that it could be tampered with or confiscated by governments made them unwilling to invest in developing high-cost irrigation and proposed new food projects on large pastoral lease cattle stations across northern Australia.
Legal implications about native title rights to ownership, royalties and compensation linked to leases were also deterring overseas investors, he said.
More than 40 per cent of the nation and most expansive outback rural properties - including most of northern Australia and the entire Northern Territory - are at present designated as state-controlled leasehold land, which is leased back to farmers, land managers and some indigenous groups.
Aboriginal leaders said last night it was incorrect to assume wholesale land title conversion of existing pastoral leases to freehold properties would be opposed by indigenous groups or that such a change would automatically extinguish native title rights.
Northern Land Council chief Kim Hill said that as long as all parties, including indigenous land owners, were involved in goodwill negotiations the issue of lease conversion to freehold title was an "interesting debate we have to have". "We need to develop northern Australia," he said. "We need capital infrastructure and foreign investment that will generate employment opportunities for indigenous Australians beyond the life of these mines.
"As long as we don't become a land or water grab for wealthy investors, let's have the debate about how to develop the north and do what we have to do to get the infrastructure here."
Mr Farley said that as the world reached "peak food" demand by 2040 Australia could not afford to waste the next five years bickering about foreign ownership.
If Australia missed the opportunity or delayed too long, Mr Farley said, the risk was that the nation would lose its leading position as the world's second-biggest exporter of beef and sugar and the third-biggest wheat and cotton exporter to countries with a greater pride in their agricultural potential such as Brazil. Exports worth $4.5 billion, projected to grow to $10bn by 2040, are at stake.
The outspoken AACo managing director said large-scale irrigated agriculture must be rapidly developed on remote rivers and outback stations from the Pilbara to the Queensland Gulf country and that billions of dollars of offshore or foreign capital was the only way to convert dry cattle stations to irrigated cropping food bowls. "There's plenty of capital in the world, but it's about getting the agricultural industry ready for it.
"But it won't happen unless we shift the debate very quickly from one where (Nationals Senate leader) Barnaby (Joyce) is talking about fears of Chinese money to one where we as a nation are preparing ourselves psychologically and structurally for agricultural growth," Mr Farley said.
Mr Farley said he had already discussed the urgent need for leasehold title conversion to speed northern development with the conservative Queensland Newman government and received a favourable response.


AACo, an Australian company listed on the Australian stock exchange, is 62 per cent owned by overseas shareholders and pension funds.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/food-boom-needs-foreign-cash/story-fn59niix-1226472211718

MAJOR parties are neglecting the $2 trillion opportunity of exporting agricultural produce to Asia, instead miring themselves in the "140 character" world of political bickering and failing to provide the vision and leadership required to take the nation forward, says the head of Australia's largest beef producer.
AACo chief executive David Farley said Australia should urgently develop a bold agricultural plan spanning geopolitical borders, similar to those of the British Empire in the 19th century, the US in the 1940s and Europe more recently with its Common Agricultural Policy.
It also should consider appointing a "ministry for feeding Asia", and begin root to branch reform of the bureaucracy to ensure it is best placed to manage the coming agricultural boom.
The comments by Mr Farley come as billionaire packaging and recycling magnate Anthony Pratt called yesterday for sweeping changes to allow Australia to quadruple its food exports and feed 200 million people.
Mr Farley said Simon Crean was the best person in Canberra to begin the process of turning Australia into a food superpower, and regretted that the former minister had lost his job in last month's failed Labor leadership coup.
He complimented the Coalition's leaked Developing Northern Australia plan, but said that in numerous meetings with conservative MPs he had not witnessed the depth of talent and experience necessary to build the international agricultural trade, with the Nationals too "internally focused".
"We haven't got a government platform at the moment big enough to take up this international opportunity," he said.
"It's going to take a fairly bold party to step into a project like this because on the front end there's no votes in it."
He said land rights and native title legislation should be redrafted to make Australia more attractive to foreign capital, without disenfranchising indigenous people. Governments should consider investing "hundreds of billions" in infrastructure in northern Australia, recouping the spending through asset sales to superannuation funds and foreign annuities. Meanwhile, agricultural research and development should be refocused north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and infrastructure links strengthened east and west.
"We've only got about a 22-year window," Mr Farley said, referring to predictions of peak demand in about 2050. "This needs a seriously broad plan thinker (who) can do strategy and take strategy into government and then bolt policy into government on a (long-term) bipartisan platform."
Asked who was best placed across both main parties in Canberra, he singled out Mr Crean as a politician "capable of delivering a future".
"(As a minister) he was deep in experience and he was a willing contributor. he was determined to leave footprints behind on what he was doing."
A spokesman for Mr Crean said the former minister was unavailable for comment.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/in-depth/push-to-sell-farm-produce-to-asia/story-fni2wt8c-1226623855192

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Unanswered Questions

Daryl Maquire: Some Serious Questions
Edited and updated version, April 22
Daryl Maguire is the NSW MP for Wagga Wagga and he’s been intricately involved with the secretive ‘agenda’ of establishing a Chinese Trade Centre [CTC} in the Riverina region’s largest city.
Much of the following irrefutably sourced information, first came to the attention of Australia First Party via an operative in Tumut and courtesy of a business woman there named ‘Hansie’ As she conveyed it to our operative: “Maguire has spent about ten years working to bring this project [the CTC] to life”.
However, it’s only been in the past eighteen months that he has vigorously ramped up his activities to bring this scheme to fruition. The fawning subservience he’s shown to the state-capitalist system of the Chinese imperialists -  appears entirely borne from the money he can ultimately acquire, something that clearly identifies him as being a member of our country’s traitor class.
Quite simply Mr. Maguire, along with everyone from Bob Hawke to Visy’s Chairman Anthony Pratt and the mining oligarchs, is prepared to sell Australia off to China for massive private pecuniary rewards. He is doing what they are doing. He is a member of a group and it operates a system and hence we rightly speak of a ‘traitor class’.
The expose of Mr. Maguire’s commitment to the CTC is bad enough to stomach. However, there’s a dark and covert component to Mr. Maguire’s background which Australia First Party wants him to address. His credibility is on the line.

The Chinese Con Man-Jimmy Foo
Between 2001 and prior to when he was arrested in 2003, we know for certain that Mr. Maguire had at least four direct dealings with the inveterate and notorious Chinese con man, ‘Jimmy Foo’. Jimmy Foo’s most serious offence related to him robbing SingTel (a telecommunications corporation) of around $6 million Singaporean dollars,. However, J.F’s web of deceit extended beyond Singapore and found its way as far a field as Dubbo, where he conned that city’s Council and even a local evangelical Christian. Quite clearly, those occurrences cast a long cloud of concern over Mr. Maguire’s integrity.
It is a matter of record that Foo stayed illegally in Australia in the period between 1994 – 2003. According to federal police documents, J.F was able to avoid being arrested because “he had a cluck of counterfeit passports that made him look more like Jason Bourne than the
simple conman he was.
Whilst in Australia, Foo socialised and made a point of being photographed with some top politicians, including the then Prime Minister, John Howard; his Employment Minister, Tony Abbott; the NSW Premier, Bob Carr; former Prime Minister Bob Hawke right through to the former Labor leader Kim Beazley. 
Quite significantly, Foo was also introduced to former Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock through the efforts of a Lebanese businessman Karim Kisrwani. Apropos to Kisrwani, it’s been established that he was a central figure in the infamous, cash-for- visas affair, of 2003-4.
As it turns out, Foo’s objective for making donations to the Liberal Party was to then use it as leverage to manipulate unsuspecting parties i.e. the Dubbo City Council.  To glean more about J.F’s devious activities, read:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/13/1071125685412.html
Of course, the mist from those bygone days has dissipated.  However, a smell still lingers around. And whilst the facts indicate that Mr. Ruddock committed no offences in his dealings with J.F., it has to be said that the Liberal Party kept the cash benefits.
J.F. eventually came unstuck after a report in the Dubbo Daily Liberal about a falling- out he had with a former close associate, Gary Knight, who was the public relations chief for Pioneer Spirit Development. Pioneer was Foo's brainchild - a $50 million, five-star resort in Dubbo, set on 28 hectares, which was to combine a 189-room hotel with 120 condominium-style villas to be sold off the plan.  See:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/22/1058853078543.html
Pioneer Spirit Development also donated to the Labor Party, obviously ‘covering both bases’.
With respect to Messer’s Knight, Foo and Maguire it is relevant to state that, the former person is a long-term friend of the latter. And it came to pass that it was Knight who introduced Foo to Maguire.
In July 2003, the Federal Police raided the offices of Australian Rural Expo [ARE] in Sydney and confiscated their documents and computers. At the same time they arrested J.F. and Gary Knight, who was the then principal of ARE. A former Federal
copper told an Australia First member that “Knight was going to be charged with facilitating Foo to disburse the money he had stolen from SingTel. However, J.F. said that he wouldn’t fight extradition and plead guilty to charges ‘on the condition’ that they let Knight go” - which appears to be correct.
Ultimately, Foo ended up back in Singapore where he was convicted for another large fraud involving a property scam that cheated a friend out of more than $1.7 million Singapore dollars ($A1.3 million) and he was imprisoned for six and a half years
Yet in a sense the spirit of Foo and Knight lingers on with us today with Maguire, because it was that infamous duo, primarily Gary Knight, who instigated and, indeed inspired Maguire to establish a Chinese Trade Centre in Wagga Wagga. At this point it’s not clear what Knight’s connection is to the CTC. But it appears that Knight has been totally shafted and abandoned by Mr. Maguire.

Gary Knight-What Sort Of A Knight ?
Mr. Gary Knight these days fronts for Australian Rural Expo (ARE). Knight explained back in 2003 that despite Foo's dealings with the Immigration Department over his proposals to bring migrant workers to Dubbo, he received "no favours from the minister”. But Dubbo was then  -and the new gold mine is Wagga and the Riverina. It’s also understood from the same business source in Tumut, that Gary Knight some years back was very active with the Waui Corporation’s drive to secure a Trade Centre in the Riverina.
Regrettably, the notion of an investment link to China dies hard. Yes, we concede that those in Wagga Wagga are not working with the likes of Jimmy Foo, but it’s imperative to state that the Australian advocates for the CTC in Wagga might end up with millions for themselves. However, what does it profit someone to make a fortune, but lose their country? The warnings are historical and contemporary. Just look! For example, EVERY country in Africa that’s allowed the Chinese to set themselves up in their lands has been ruthlessly rorted by the invasive, exploitive and hegemonistic Chinese business class. Would it be any different here?
There are bigger questions too, that take us beyond the CTC as such, but which cause any Australian to think. What happens if China invades Taiwan or Vietnam and they become our enemies? So, how in the world will we contain at least 2 million ethnic Chinese living in our midst – 400,000 of them overseas students? And if anyone thinks that’s fanciful then let us take you back to August 2008, when 10,000 overseas Chinese students – who, let it be known, were each paid $150 to do so and had their transportation costs covered by the Chinese government - descended upon Canberra to verbally threaten and physically harass the peaceful pro-Tibetan protestors at the Olympic Torch Relay.  That was a veritable military  division of activists, mobilised by the Chinese security apparatus. And the peddlers of the CTC  seek 20,000 Chinese in Wagga! What could these people do to damage the Australian interest? Or does the traitor class believe the only interest now is them getting richer?
That 2008 day in Canberra, without any shadow of a doubt, overtly highlighted what a piss-weak, low-life, kowtowing, Chinese-loving government and media - we are endowed with. Obviously, what should have happened is that EVERY Chinese student who attended that vile rally should have been deported. Unfortunately, our universities have become so dependant upon them paying their fees that
nothing was done to square the gross insult of that day. That folks is how imperialist penetration works.
But for a closer look at Mr. Knight, see:
http://www.ausruralexpo.com/index.php/about/our-team
Mr. Knight was also a migration agent and is a strident advocate of utilizing the supposed business acumen of Asia (and China in particular) to “revitalize rural Australia”. But due to him being arrested, he has since been disqualified from holding a ‘credited’ migration agent’s license. But when he was so credited, he vigorously lobbied for the watering down of visa rules and regulations in order to get Asian businessmen into the country.
Interestingly, the brand, ‘rural expo’, is hoped to morph into becoming the ‘permanent expo’ of a CTC of Chinese business people who will function in league with local and other politicians and businesses. However, these collaborators inhabit a fantasy world whereby they imagine that this Chinese business class will treat them with equality and respect. It’s akin to Neville Chamberlain waving a document when returning from Munich in 1938 and saying, “peace in our time”.
Today in Wagga, Mayor Mr. Rod Kendall along with the State MP Mr. Maguire and the Federal MP Mr. McCormack, are hell-bent on steamrolling every interest and the welfare of the people of Wagga - and, indeed the whole of Australia in order to get the CTC up and running. Furthermore, this triumvirate-of-traitors also has the NSW Premier, Barry O’Farrell pushing their barrow. To substantiate Mr. O’Farrell’s deep commitment to the CTC in Wagga coming to pass we have only to look at his agenda to have “Sydney’s second airport in Canberra”.
The reason behind Barry O’Farrell’s plans to make Canberra Sydney’s second airport (sic), lies in who supports it: the Sydney Institute (run by Gerard Henderson) and the Lowy Institute which are both committed to having the CTC materialise in Wagga. The goal of a functional Centre in Wagga Wagga means that birth of the first of a few Special Economic Zones [SEZ’s], places where foreigners have special rights and the traitor class draws a profit. Thus, if Canberra becomes ‘Sydney’s second airport’  it will obtain full international status and flights from China can fly directly there. Thereby, the intrinsic logic for achieving this goal is because it’s a much shorter trip from there for Chinese to travel onto Wagga Wagga. An upgrade of the train line to Wagga Wagga is also being discussed behind the cloak of talk of very Fast Trains.

Australia First Party Wants Mr. Maquire to Answer The Following Questions

1. How many times did you met with the convicted and self-confessed felon, Jimmy Foo?
2. If you agree you’ve met Mr. Foo, what was involved in the discussions?
3. Did you at any time counsel Foo over any immigration proposal?
4. What is your relationship with Jimmy Foo’s close associate, Mr. Gary Knight?
5. Did you ever give Knight political leverage with assisting his clients to migrate to Australia?
6. Is there any truth in the rumour that you were advised by the Federal Police in April 2003 that, you should disassociate yourself from dealing with Knight and Foo because they were “under investigation”?
7. If that is correct, did you take their advice?
8.  Did you at any time discuss a Chinese Trade Centre for Wagga with Mr. Knight? If so, when did that first take place?
9. Have you been involved in giving references for Chinese business clients of Gary Knight in order that they receive visas?
10. Is Mr Humphrey Xu who visited Wagga on Sunday 21.4.13 representing the proposed Wuai trade centre development, the same Humphrey Xu, property developer, that was a business partner of Helen Lui until the late nineties ?
Obviously your credibility, Mr. Maguire, is very much at stake here and the questions we’ve asked warrant a truthful response
http://www.smh.com.au/national/fitzgibbon-faces-new-claims-over-china-trip-20090529-bqel.html

http://www.smh.com.au/national/secret-payments-to-labor-mp-listed-in-liu-files-20100202-nb49.html

We must also note that Mr. Maguire has done little for the electorate of Wagga Wagga in his extended term as Member. He may beg to disagree and now point to his grand project. If he goes down in history as a trailblazer for Chinese imperialism, a footnote in someone’s (sic) school textbook a half century hence, then he would have done much – for the wrong side.

And Now Comes A Matter Of Espionage Comes Full Circle Upon The Trade Centre
If we were the American FBI investigating a person or group under the Racketeer Influenced And Criminal Organisations Act (RICO), out would come the legendary white-board with all the faces of the rogues connected by the dots. And was not an apparent part of the skulduggery would be revealed by its effect.
Australia First Party would say that what’s happening with the Chinese Trade Centre is imperialism, rather one large step up from racketeering, although some might say the principle is the same.
Enter espionage and patronage and penetration of the nation’s politics and economic structures. Such happenings are the very guts of imperialism.
The Sun Herald newspaper (April 21), in a remarkable piece of honest journalism for a mainstream rag, has pointed the finger at Federal Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon over his commercial and personal relationship with Helen Liu.
This matter has been simmering for four years with allegations that Fitzgibbon accepted gifts and did favours for Liu. It seems that Fitzgibbon was caught out being less than honest over his relationship with Liu. The paper has pointed to a web of intrigue that saw Liu in the company of John Howard, Fitzgibbon, Bob Carr and other luminaries while she amassed a fortune in property after arriving in Australia in 1989.
While even Australia’s spy agencies may not have the formal proof either, it would seem likely that Liu is a spy. Her relationships with Communist Party officials in China and the ease with which she has conducted her business makes it somewhat inevitable.
The fix up for her citizenship and that of her Chinese boyfriend and business partner Humphrey Xu - was organized by a certain Mr. Philip Everson who worked in a migration agency and employed a couple of Aussies to marry them.
Grace Clague ( fake wife ), Humphrey Xu and Helen Liu ( below )

David Shultz ( fake Husband ) and Helen Liu, married in Kings Cross ( below )



It must now be noted that Mr. Everson was a friend of Gary Knight, although the latter regarded him as a rather squalid and corrupt individual who would do just about anything for dollars. Ultimately one of the young dupes of Liu and Everson would run a cleaning company that fed on Chinese students who would clean buildings that belonged to Liu.
There does not seem any connection between the Liu / Fitzgibbon spy affair and its related intrigue with the Chinese Trade Centre in Wagga Wagga save through a tendentious ‘link’. However that is not our point.
The connection lies in the RICO white board of Chinese imperialist penetration of Australia. If a Minister of Defence was inveighled in the affairs of a Chinese spy, what defence against espionage and subversion does the likes of Messrs Kendall, Maguire and McCormack possess? We can understand why the Chinese espionage service would be interested in the Defence Minister and so can most other folks. But Chinese imperialism seeks to control and otherwise enmesh sectors of the Australian economy with their own and acquire cheap resources and political leverage. Chinese agencies would take a close interest in the affairs and the very personal secrets of the Riverina reps of our traitor class.
It seems to us that these traitor class Riverina icons men may be clever in how they advance their business interests – but they are idiots too. Make a pact with the Devil, as Faust found out-has it's very special perils.

Developing Into Oblivion

ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS IN CHINA


Environmental problems in China are already at a critical level and they are getting worse. Rapid development has transformed huge swaths of the country into environmental wastelands. Acid rain corrodes the Great Wall; parts of the Grand Canal resemble open sewers; parts of Shanghai are slowly sinking because water beneath them has been sucked out; and some cities are so clogged with air pollution they don't appear in satellite pictures. Reports indicate that only 32 percent of China's industrial waste is treated in any sort of way. Already there are concerns of millions of environmental refugees in China and sulfurous rain clouds drifting from China to Japan and Korea.
Canadian scholar Vaclav Smith, an expert of China's environment, has called China "the world's most worrisome case of environmental degradation." "The Chinese," wrote Theroux, have “moved mountains, diverted rivers, wiped out the animals, eliminated the wilderness; they had subdued nature and had it screaming for mercy...In Chinese terms prosperity always spelled pollution.”
The main problem is China’s greatest success—it phenomenal economic growth—is the main forces behind its environmental problems. Factories that dump pollutants into the air and water produce cheaper products than ones that filter out pollutants and treat waste water. It is hard to see the Chinese making sacrifices to improve their environment if it means slowing economic growth. Jennifer Turner of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars told Discover magazine, “What’s different about China is the scale and speed of pollution and environmental degradation...It’s like nothing the world has ever seen.”


China Faces ‘Very Grave’ Environmental Situation

 

Ian Johnson of Reuters wrote: “China’s three decades of rapid economic growth have left it with a “very grave” environmental situation even as it tries to move away from a development-at-all-costs strategy, senior government officials. In a blunt assessment of the problems facing the world’s most populous country, officials from the Ministry of Environmental Protection delivered their 2010 annual report. They pointed to major improvements in water and air quality — goals that the ministry had set for itself over a five-year period ending in December. The targets were met, with pollutants in surface water down 32 percent, and sulfur dioxide emissions in cities down 19 percent. [Source: Ian Johnson, Reuters, June 3, 2011]

But officials cautioned that many other problems were serious and scarcely under control. “The overall environmental situation is still very grave and is facing many difficulties and challenges,” said Li Ganjie, the vice minister. Mr. Li said biodiversity was declining with “a continuous loss and drain of genetic resources.” The countryside was becoming more polluted, he added, as dirty industries were moved out of cities and into rural areas. Mr. Li pledged to control contamination by heavy metals, which resulted in many cases of lead poisoning. He said China needed a law to regulate heavy metals, and he was confident it would be written and passed soon.” [Ibid]

“But the signs are growing that environmental neglect is causing instability,” Johnson wrote. “Protests in Inner Mongolia last week were partly due to concerns that industries like coal and mining — largely dominated by ethnic Chinese — are destroying the grasslands used for herding by the indigenous Mongolians. Similar conflicts have arisen in other sensitive ethnic areas like Tibet and Xinjiang. “In some of these areas that are very fragile, we will strictly limit development,” Mr. Li pledged. He Li said that more than a fifth of the land that has been set aside as nature reserves had been illegally developed by companies, often with local government collusion.” [Ibid]

 

Cancer Villages and Deformed Babies in China


Increases in cancer rates of 19 percent in urban areas and 23 percent in rural area have been blamed on air and water pollution.
The most awful and shameful examples of how bad China’s pollution has become are the so-called cancer villages, where pollution in the water and air is blamed for surges in cancer rates. One such place is Yangqiao, a town in the wetlands of southeastern China that has been so fouled by the waste from chemical plants, the air is acrid and make people dizzy and yellow waste water seeps into irrigation ditches, producing sick dogs, dead fish, stunted crops and high cancer rates.
In March 2006, 130 people were hospitalized outside the city of Ningbo in Zhejiang Province in eastern China following a leak of poisonous gas from a chemical plant. Villagers reported seeing a cloud of gas floating across farmland killing crops and poultry and several days later began experiencing dizziness, sore throats, chest pains and skin irritation.
Pollution is also blamed for the increase in the number of deformed children in places where pollution levels are high. Babies born with deformities such as cleft palates, neural tube defects, congenital heart disease, water on the brain, and extra fingers and toes is up 6 percent a year nationwide—and 40 percent between 2001 and 2006—with rates much higher in place like the major coal-mining areas of Shanxi Province.
Shanxi is home to the world’s three most polluted cities. In addition to coal mining there is pollution from coke, steel and chemical industries. It also lead the world in the incidents of cleft palates and extra fingers among babies. Some parents whose children are born with extra toes cut them off so it is easier to buy shoes.
The river that flows through the village of Shangba in Guangdong Province is polluted by heavy metals. It varies in color from murky white to bright orange and is so viscous that it barely moves when winds blow on it. One villager told AP, “All the fish died, even chickens and ducks that drank the water died. If you put your leg in the water, you’ll get rashes and a terrible itch...Last years alone, six people in our villages died from cancer, and they were in their 30s and 40s.” Two girls, who often played in the river died at the ages of 12 and 18 from kidney and stomach cancer, which are rare among you people.
The source of much of the pollution is the state-owned Daboshan mine, which produces huge piles of tailing discarded next to rice fields and dumps large amounts of cadmium, a known carcinogen, as well as lead, zinc, indium and other metals into water supplies. Tests have shown high levels of cadmium and zinc in the drinking water and the rice. Stomach, liver kidney and colon cancer account for 85 percent of the cancers acquired by villagers.
Publicity on Shangba’s plight convinced the government to help foot the bill for a new reservoir and water system for the town. Liangqiao is a village contaminated by the same mine. The local river has a reddish color. Since the late 1990s cancer has caused two thirds of the deaths in the village. One villager there told Time, “We have to use the polluted water to irrigate our fields, since we don’t have any money to start a water project. We know very well that we are being poisoned by eating the grain. What more can we do? We can’t just wait to starve to death.’

  


River turned blood red from chemical dyes
 
Children Poisoned by Lead and Attempts to Cover It Up
In January 2011, it was revealed a lead factories in Huaining County in Anhui Province sickened more than 200 children with lead poisoning. Twenty children need hospitalization. Testing of 307 children found that 228 of them had high levels of lead in their blood. An environmental official in Huaining was suspended. Xinhua said the factories just across the street from people’s home despite regulations that required them to be at least 500 meters from residential areas.
Sharon Lafraniere wrote in the New York Times, “Near Jiyuan City, in Henan Province, nearly 1,000 children from 10 villages were found to have elevated blood lead levels in 2009. Government officials ordered the children treated, families relocated and the smelters cleaned up. But a visitor there in 2011 found children still playing in the streets of one village literally in the shadow of a privately-owned lead smelter that nightly belches plumes of dark smoke. In interviews, their parents and grandparents said that local hospitals now refuse to administer new blood lead level tests, even if the families pay out of their own pockets.” [Source: Sharon Lafraniere, New York Times, June 15, 2011]
“The children are not healthy. We don’t know how sick they are, and we can’t find out,” a 66-year-old villager told the New York Times. His two grandsons were found to have blood lead levels two and three times above the norm when tested in 2009. Local officials appeared determined to suppress such complaints. Within a few hours of a visitor’s arrival this month, Jiyuan City’s propaganda chief appeared with three carloads of plainclothes officers, bringing all reporting and interviewing to a screeching halt. [Ibid]
Near Suji battery factory in Zhejiang Province test showed 53 children and 120 adults suffered from excessive lead level. Local officials told residents: “Whoever makes noise will not receive compensation or medical treatment.” Migrant workers and their families were also left out of the program, villagers said. Yang Fufen, 40, said her 2-year-old son tested at more than three times the allowable blood lead level in March, but has received no medical attention, apparently because her legal residence is elsewhere.

Chinese Pollution Outside of China

China’s environmental negligence sometimes seeps abroad. In April 2010, a Chinese coal carrier ran aground off Australia on a shoal in the Great Barrier reef, leaking three tons of oil and pulverizing part of a shoal. Reef scientists said that it could take 20 years for the reef to completely recover. The owners of the ship—Shenzhen Energy Transport—admitted that the ship had strayed off course and apologized for the mishap.

http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=394