20th September 08

The Australian

Rowan Callick, China correspondent

CHINA'S poisoned milk disaster widened yesterday, with the Government's food safety agency announcing that 10 per cent of the liquid milk it has tested is contaminated, as well as 14 per cent of the baby formula. Hong Kong's food watchdog has also discovered pollutants in Chinese ice cream and yoghurt. China's whole food chain appears to be under some threat of contamination as a result, with tests now being extended to animal feed.

From the Archive

The Age

Made in China
John Garnaut

EACH day NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites pass over north-east Asia and take a snapshot of the world's scariest environmental problem. The photos often show a blanket of soot, sulphur, nitric oxide, ozone and dust that blocks out an area stretching from Beijing in the north to Xian in the west and south past the Yangtze River. These toxins irritate the eyes, scratch the throat and lodge deep inside the lungs to cause the premature death of one Chinese person every 42 seconds, or 750,000 people a year. The satellite pictures show why China's pollution is not just China's problem. In spring and autumn, prevailing winds blow the cloud east across Korea, Japan and even Alaska. NASA says 15% of air pollution particles in western parts of the United States originated in China, potentially cancelling improvements from American air pollution controls. The good news, according to the World Bank and Chinese environmental authorities, is the Chinese Government is treating the problem seriously, and the air in most Chinese cities is getting cleaner.

ABC Radio National Audio Recording

China is the industrial success story of the last decade and looks set to continue for years to come. It’s also likely to become the global environmental villain, unless its scientists can find a solution to waste and pollution. The government has pinned its hopes on greener, cleaner technology, having made a Kyoto-style energy research pact with countries such as Australia and the United States. Rather than trying to enforce recycling policies across the whole country, China hopes that science will pull them out of the hole. Will this be enough to stem the rise of an increasingly hungry consumer culture? China is one the few countries where bicycle use is on the decline, whilst car ownership increases rapidly along with mobile phones, computers and household gadgets. This year, Beijing hosts the world’s largest zero waste technologies conference, involving hundred of researchers from around the world, all seeking to find ways of making sustainability a reality. With China hosting what they claim with be the greenest Olympic games ever, in 2008, the world is watching.

The International Herald Tribune

Lost in the new Beijing: The old neighbourhood

Historical cycles that took a century to unfold in the West can be compressed into less than a decade in today's China. And that's as true of Beijing's preservation movement as it is of the nation's ferocious building boom. The explosion of construction activity that has transformed Beijing into a modern metropolis over the past decade also turned many of its historical neighborhoods — known for their narrow alleyways, or hutongs — into rubble. As grass-roots preservationists began sounding the alarm, the aging wood frames and tile roofs of the ancient courtyard houses that give these neighborhoods their identity were being supplanted so quickly by mighty towers that it was hard to pinpoint where they once stood.

Asia Times Online

Wary of China, Russians look West
By Dmitry Shlapentokh

Like his predecessor Vladimir Putin, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev followed his taking over the Kremlin, in May, with a visit to China. For some pundits this raised the specter of a Chinese-Russian alliance as a threat to the West. This is not the case. The Russian - both elite and popular - approach to China is often guarded. And as with all flirtation with Chinese and Asian powers, Russia continues to be West-oriented. My recent visit to Russia confirmed this. My arrival coincided with Medvedev's landing in China. Russian TV carried his speech in which he proclaimed that Russia and China were strategic partners, despite the fact that "someone" might be upset with this.