Gangs have penetrated into middle schools in China, according to lecturers from a seminar on crime prevention held in Guangzhou, China. Experts are calling for the justice system to get involved with these hate groups. The following is a translation of a report on the seminar published by Radio Free Asia. [1]

Some group members are actively recruiting students in middle schools to their organizations. Not only do they threaten students, but also force them to hand over their money. Their actions have created a bad image in the community. According to Hong Kong Takungpao [a Chinese-language newspaper], Liao Zongyi, Guangzhou City deputy prosecutor, said at the seminar that over the last several years the local juvenile crime rate continues to increase and these school gangs still exist despite being banned multiple times. Some gangs have more than one hundred members; thus, they are severely endangering society. These gangs have set up activities at many middle schools in Guangzhou City. There are more than 10 well-known gangs. They intimidate and lure other students to join their groups. According to the report, the main activities of gang members are recruiting people into their organizations, threatening people, and extorting money. They then turn the money into the leaders of these hate groups outside schools. Student members pay monthly membership fees from $4 to $10 (30 RMB to 80 RMB), thereby providing gang leaders approximately $120 (1,000 RMB) in cash just on membership fees alone.

Ms. Guo, professor of psychology at Zhongshan University, often volunteers to provide psychological counseling for juveniles. She said middle school-age students have a tendency to be group oriented and therefore want to be in groups, which makes them easy targets for gangs in society to manipulate.
 
"The characteristic of puberty (age 13 to 16) is that teenagers want to find a feeling of belonging from their peers to prove their lives have meaning and value. Even for an outstanding student, if his/her friends won’t accept him/her, he/she could feel that heaven was collapsing. This age group is deeply influenced by hormonal changes. In addition, regardless of country, during these teenage years (age 13 to 16) they are more likely to commit murders compared to other age categories.”

Dr. Liu Xiaozhu, a sociologist from the United States, said that the main reasons for juveniles to form unhealthy gangs were due to the rapid changes in social structures, poor economic conditions, and slow responses from the community.

"First of all, gangs from overseas come into China, especially from Hong Kong and Taiwan, making Guangdong province a rough place. If the social order is bad, the juvenile hate groups become attractive. Other factors are the stress coming from education and employment pressures. These environments allow for hate groups to easily develop.”
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According to official Chinese data, since 2000, the juvenile crime rate has annually increased 13 percent. Juvenile crimes make up 70 percent of national crimes; among these, 70 percent of juvenile crimes were committed by juveniles between the ages of 15 and 16. In other words, juveniles between the ages of 15 and 16 committed 50 percent of the overall national crimes. Normally, students with poor grades are more likely to join the gangs. However, a middle school “black dragon gang” from Guangzhou City shows that most of the outstanding students are also part of the gang. 

Liu Xiaozhu states that juveniles are full of energy. If they lack appropriate group activities, they create social problems easily. He concludes that the current juvenile education focuses too much on fame and that a lack of moral value is another reason for the increasing juvenile crimes.

"Our channels for guiding youth have become problematic. For example, it is said that religion is an important part in juveniles’ lives, but in China religion is depressed. If all the areas are blocked, and the newspaper is full of hypocritic propaganda, it will finally depress the juveniles to develop anti-social psychology. I think this is very sad."

Chinese experts have proposed to strengthen laws punishing juvenile offenders, lowering the age limits for the death penalty and criminal responsibility, and establishing a justice system for charging juvenile gangs. However, Liu Xiaozhu said that China has the world’s most severe criminal penalties. Therefore, the key to solving juvenile crime is not through severe punishment, but to rely on improving the quality of education and perfecting community support and family functions. 

Endnote:
[1] Radio Free Asia, June 24
http://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/campus-06242008104134.html?searchterm=None

The following article has been posted on many Chinese websites under different titles. The extensive posting on China’s heavily censored websites and blogs indicates a widespread public acceptance of the article; it also indicates that the ruling regime feels a real sense of political crisis. In this scholarly article, both nationalism and the anti-western sentiment found in traditional propaganda have been blended together. China is portrayed as a grief-stricken victim, not of its own regime, or of the breakdown of morality in China, but of lustful western exploitation that has expended all its natural and human resources to contribute to the welfare of the West and of the rest of the world. The West is cited as a scapegoat for all the current problems that China faces: the prevalence of tainted food, slave-labor wages, the prevalence of crime and prostitution, the outrageous environmental degradations, wanton corruption, the lack of occupational safety, the heavy losses in the financial sector, and even why China’s wealthy transfer their assets abroad. Below is an unabridged translation of the Chinese original. Chinascope has not been able to verify the authorship. [1]

Author: Professor Zhang Hongliang of Central University of Nationalities

A volunteer named Zeng Feiyang did an investigation within the Pearl River Delta, which is known as China’s export base, and found that every year 30,000 accidents occur in which punch worker’s fingers are severed. This totals more than 40,000 fingers. These figures are only for accidents happening to punch workers; it is just a small percentage of the accidents that happen to all machinery workers. As for the actual number of total machinery accidents, it is probably a number that no one will ever figure out. However, an investigation was conducted of the 8-million laborers in Shenzhen City. The results showed that one out of every five laborers has had either a work accident or an occupational disease. Therefore some factories in Shenzhen completely change their workers every two years. In order to deal with the disabled workers going to court, so that the state can “maintain the stability of society” and “avoid affecting economic profits,” the local government purposely prolongs the processing time of the cases in which the workers sue the employers so that they last three years or more. Consequently, these disabled workers usually end up giving up because they do not have enough money to stay for three years. They go back to the rural area and there goes the second half of their lives. Take a look at the rushing water of the Pearl River; it is full of laborers’ blood and tears!

As we talk about the laborers’ misery, one will at once remember the mine accidents in China. The entire world has found them shocking. From 2001 to 2005 in China, the mine accidents where 10 or more people were killed occurred on the average of once every week. The price of the 80 million tons of coal is the yearly death of more than 6000 mineworkers, which is an average of 17 workers per day. These numbers come from government statistics; the actual numbers should be much higher. Even according to these government statistics, China’s death rate for every million tons of coal is 100 times more than that of the US, and 10 times more than that of India or Russia. China’s death rate is ranked number 1 in the world and the total number of deaths is higher than the sum of the rest of the world combined. The mountainous bone ash of mine workers has stacked up a countless amount of treasure for the international monopolies and the Chinese mine owners. In this year’s Beijing International Automobile Exhibit, a mine owner with a running nose wanted to buy a Ferrari that costs several millions of yuan. When the lady told him that the car was very expensive, the mine owner sniffed out the snot and said, “Just let me know how much. I’ll buy the car as well as you.” In the end, several mine owners bought a total of more than 80 Ferraris. This extremely distorted scene of capitalists in a Communist country cannot be seen anywhere else in the world, even in a colony.
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3. From the aspect of foreign exchange, the enormous amount of treasure obtained by the laborers’ blood and tears as well as the mine workers’ mountainous bone ash are all completely offered and transferred to the US. However, facing the unprecedented resource disaster and the catastrophes suffering by the common people, China’s mainstream economists are cheering and saying that we have obtained a great amount of valuable foreign exchange. We indeed have 1,000 billion dollars in foreign exchange. However, rather than saying that these are China’s valuable treasure, it is better to say that these are the US’s valuable treasure. First of all, more than 2/3 of these 1,000 billion dollars are US money. What is US money? Basically it is some paper printed by the US printing firms. The US can print whatever amount they like. As there is more and more US money printed, the value of US currency drops, and China’s foreign exchange is greatly reduced in value. Calculating the US dollar’s value in Euro dollars, the US currency’s value has dropped by 50% in the past few years. Just like that, more than 700 billion dollars of China’s foreign exchange has evaporated by half. This half equals the total income of the entirety of China’s population. This year another 6% of the foreign exchange will evaporate. This is 60 billion dollars and exceeds the total amount of medical care for the aged people in China. Secondly, most of the foreign exchange that China bought is the national debt of the US. In the past there is a line used in China for mobilizing people to take action, “Buy the national debt to support the nation’s construction.” Today, we are buying the US’s debt to help the financial success of the US, and using extra foreign exchange to help stabilize US market prices, to lower the everyday living cost of the US people, and to support the national construction of the US.

Not only is this so, including the US, many developed Western countries say that China has a large amount of favorable balance of trade, thus pressuring China’s currency from gaining value. They also work with the companies within China and threaten China with the greatly reduced value of foreign exchange, so that the Chinese government imports western products with a very high price. It is shocking how high the prices of the imported products are and how low the prices of the exported products are. The luxury cars that China imports cost more than three times the prices on the oversea markets. Rolls-Royce Phantom Coupe costs about $400,000 overseas, but in China it sold for several million. Not long ago, a real estate businessman just bought one for over two million dollars. Prices of middle class cars in China are also around two times the price on the oversea markets. The imported makeup products and other luxury products are even more unbelievable. It is like publicly robbing away money from China.

In the China Southern Luxury Exhibit, an emerald was sold for over 11 million dollars. In the following luxury exhibit in Shanghai, within four days, more than 70 million dollars were exchanged in all the successful deals. Many luxury companies in the world rushed into China; so far there are more than 300 of them. Even things that are cheap overseas are selling in China as luxury products. For example, le vin rouge from France costs over 1,000 yuan (140 USD) in China, but in France some beggars often drink it even in the subway. The intellectual products have even higher prices. Microsoft Windows 98 costs $50 in the US, which is about 400 yuan. It is less than two hours salary of an American blue collar worker. In China, it is sold for 6,999 yuan, which equals a Beijing worker’s wages for 14 months, or a Shenzhen laborer’s wages for 20 months. Later, the XP system came out and it costs as much as 65,000 yuan. The pirate market has actually kept all these prices low. Otherwise, these monopoly prices would force 95% of China’s computer users to quit and China’s information technology level would retrogress by 20 years.
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Western developed countries have hired China’s business groups and mainstream economic experts and have already successfully established a system where China imports products with high prices and exports product with low prices. Through this system, they are converting China’s resources and the health of China’s citizens into the cheap products in their countries. As the consumption level gets higher and higher, these developed countries, including Japan, have not worsened their environment at all; instead these countries’ environments are getting cleaner and cleaner. By using China’s business groups, these countries have successfully separated profits and cost. Without costing themselves any bad outcomes, they still get good economic growth, and let China bear the bad consequences for them. This system can also be seen now with the conflict of China’s currency (Renminbi). Unlike US dollars, which are losing value both internally and externally, China’s currency is rising in value in relation to US dollars, but its buying power is reducing inside China. What this rising and dropping are doing is basically moving all the money of the common Chinese people into the pockets of the overseas employers.

4. Looking at the foreign capital, on one hand, China is using an enormous amount of money to support the US’s economic development; on the other hand, it is sacrificing our own resources and even our sovereignty, in order to attract foreign capital. Foreign capital is becoming the economic basis for the developed western countries to control China’s economics. Under the globalization today, the fact that foreign capital is flowing into China itself is a normal phenomena. However, the way we are drawing the foreign capital is becoming a historic catastrophe for the nation and the people.

First, the foreign capital economics is becoming a major way in sucking out China’s wealth. The foreign capital in China occupies more than 40% of our GDP, and the foreign firms take up 55.48% of the total imports and exports. This by far exceeds the normal ratio of the foreign capital for an export-oriented economy country. By the end of 2005, the total foreign capital that our country used was 662.405 billion dollars. According the estimate by the World Bank, the yearly profit margin rate of the foreign firms in developing countries is as high as 16% – 18%. From this, we can estimate that just in 2005, foreign firms gained more than 100 billion dollars of profit from China. The World Bank’s estimate is for the average developing countries. However, it is obvious that this number is far off from the actual number in China. This is because the foreign firms in China enjoy tax free, cheap land, super cheap labor, and all kinds of corrupt benefits. These do not exist in other developing countries.

How high is the actual profit margin rate? This is a highly confidential number to both the government and foreign firms. Therefore we can only try to estimate from various sources. The monopolies inside China (owned by the Chinese people) have a profit margin rate from 100% to 2000%. Usually, the profit margin rate of the foreign firms cannot be lower than these monopolies. This had been confirmed in many cases when foreign firms disclosed this information. For instance, Morgan Stanley had an internal conflict and some confidential information was disclosed as a result – their profit margin rate in China was 900%. If we calculate using the lowest rate of the monopolies, which is 100%, the total profit gained by the foreign firms in China each year should be around 700 billion dollars, which equals the sum of two years of all people’s salary in China.
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Also, nowadays when the foreign firms enter China, their main goal is no longer investing money into new projects. It is actually to collude with officials to purchase an enormous amount of state-owned assets at very low prices. This is a planned nation-wide murder. The first step is a tax-free system in which the foreign firms do not pay income tax for the first two years and pay half the income tax in the next three years. In the whole world, such a case only happens in China, where foreign firms enjoy something that the nation’s own citizens do not enjoy. This tax-free system has given the foreign firms the power to easily crush down any state-owned firms. The state-owned firms not only have to pay 33% (before it was 38%) of heavy taxation, but also have to cover the employee’s benefits. Consequently, when competing with the foreign firms, who do not pay tax or provide benefits to the employees, the result is already obvious. The second step is pressuring the desperate state-owned firms to “cut employees and increase efficiency.” Consequently, 60 million employees have been laid off from these state-owned firms. This is just like before trying to possess a woman, forcing her to throw away her kid. The result is that we have peeled off the barriers and separated out the clean capital. We are just waiting for foreign firms to come and swallow it.

Endnotes:
[1] Boxun, June 9, 2008
http://news.boxun.com/news/gb/china/2008/06/200806092153.shtml

The following article has been posted on many Chinese websites under different titles. The extensive posting on China’s heavily censored websites and blogs indicates a widespread public acceptance of the article; it also indicates that the ruling regime feels a real sense of political crisis. In this scholarly article, both nationalism and the anti-western sentiment found in traditional propaganda have been blended together. China is portrayed as a grief-stricken victim, not of its own regime, or of the breakdown of morality in China, but of lustful western exploitation that has expended all its natural and human resources to contribute to the welfare of the West and of the rest of the world. The West is cited as a scapegoat for all the current problems that China faces: the prevalence of tainted food, slave-labor wages, the prevalence of crime and prostitution, the outrageous environmental degradations, wanton corruption, the lack of occupational safety, the heavy losses in the financial sector, and even why China’s wealthy transfer their assets abroad. Below is an unabridged translation of the Chinese original. Chinascope has not been able to verify the authorship. [1]

Author: Professor Zhang Hongliang of Central University of Nationalities

Currently the Chinese people, taking establishing a harmonious society as a symbol, are returning to the struggle of the Garden of Eden. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, politically the big Western powers carved China up. At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, China’s economy is, again, being carved up by the big Western powers. What’s different now is that at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, big Western powers used various treaties to carve us up. Now the big Western powers are using various regulations to carve us up. The main sign that China has been carved up is that China is becoming a heedlessly milked "cow" of the Western developed countries. International capital monopolies have inserted wealth-sucking straws fully throughout China’s body, which sustains destructive developments that cut off our offspring’s resources. The result is that gigantic wealth is flowing to the developed Western countries like a big river. China has upgraded the standard of life in developed Western countries and has led the economic growth of the entire world, but in doing so has solely sacrificed the benefits of the Chinese people—not only the benefits of the people of this generation, but even more scarily, it has exhausted the foundation of our offspring’s resources.

It can be said that sacrificing the foundation of our offspring’s resources in exchange for a generation’s riches is already a type of crime, much less that this generation of Chinese people has not even enjoyed the benefits. They have been completely consumed by this generation of westerners. This is why, while in thirty years of development, Japan’s wages caught up with the U.S.’s, but China’s wages are only 3% of the American wage. This is why (according to the latest statistics) the top 0.02% who control 70% of China’s wealth go all out to transfer their assets and their relatives abroad. This is why in the process of rapid economic growth, the Chinese people have again sunk under the oppression of the "three mountains."[2] Furthermore, international capitalist monopolies have already developed a plan to kill the cow after milking it dry. This is done through the use of hedge control of the stock market and the money market to roll up all the last capital remnants.
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1. Looking at it from the whole economic volume, the world economic engine that is China has contributed its resources, its environment and its citizens’ health to the astonishing growth of western countries’ wealth, so that three of the nine fortune forums were held in China. For the fourth consecutive year, China has driven the world’s 15% economic growth with only 4% of the world’s GDP. The four-year total contribution China has made to the world’s GDP is approximately 1.5 trillion USD, which is equivalent to 12 trillion Chinese Yuan. According to last year’s national wage standard, it is equivalent to more than six years of total wages of city and town workers in the entire country. China’s huge contribution to the world’s economy is most obviously seen in the frantic increase of international energy prices. China’s imports in recent years have resulted in a 70% average annual increase in the price of the world’s mining products. The cost of international sea transportation has increased even more, averaging a frantic 170% growth per year. The frantic rise in prices of goods imported into China and the frantic drop of China export prices has become one of the most inconceivable anomalies in the history of world economic development.

China’s contribution to Asia is even more astounding. One hundred percent of Asia’s export growth has come from China. It was China that pushed Asia out of its 1998 financial crisis. This is especially so with the major Asian economic power of Japan, which has kept its annual export growth to China at double digits ever since the turn of the 21st century. Exports to China have accounted for approximately 70% of Japan’s export growth. Japan admitted itself that "trade with China sustained Japan’s export-led economic rebound," and is an important reason for Japan’s freeing itself from the quagmire and for its recovery toward a prosperous economy.

But economic development has a price. In this world, there isn’t such a thing as a free lunch. The price for its huge contribution to the world, and Asia, including Japan, is the catastrophic destruction of China’s resources and environment. 80% of rivers and lakes have dried up; two-thirds of China’s grassland has been desertified; an overwhelming majority of China’s forests have disappeared; almost 100% of China’s soil has hardened and become impervious. According to statistics from Japan’s customs, for ten-plus years, China’s annual chopstick export to Japan required the cutting down of more than two million trees. The total number of chopsticks China exported to Japan in a decade was approximately 224.3 billion pairs. According to China forestry’s expert calculations, the amount of mountain forests destroyed to produce these chopsticks accounted more than 20% of China’s land.

At the same time that resources are being depleted, China’s ecological system is facing more and more threats. One-third of China’s soil has been polluted by acid rain; two-fifths of China’s major river systems have already become the five categories of bad water. More than 300 million farmers have no safe water to drink. More than 400 million city dwellers have been breathing in heavily polluted air. Fifteen million people have developed bronchitis and respiratory tract cancer as a result. The World Bank reported that China has sixteen of the twenty most seriously polluted cities in the world. Two-thirds of the 668 cities in China are surrounded by trash. This trash not only occupies ever more farming land, but threatens the basic living environment. Under the circumstance of not being able to treat the accumulating domestic trash, China is still wantonly importing trash from the developed Western countries. China has become the Western developed countries’ dump yard for emptying trash. One of three major U.S. exports to China is trash. It is also the one export with the largest growth rate. In some southern regions where trash has been imported, animals have become fully extinct; plants have been seriously mutated; and people’s health is deteriorating daily. In some regions, for many years there hasn’t been a single military enlistee who passed [his or her] physical examine.
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Looking at only the economic accounts, the losses are also quite astounding. In 2003 alone, the economic losses brought about by China’s environmental pollution and ecological destruction accounted for 15% of the year’s GDP. At the same time that we contributed to 15% of the world economic growth, we have deducted 15% from ourselves each year.

Not only has China’s natural environment worsened; so has its social environment. From 1979 to 2003, the crime rate rose six fold from 0.55 per thousand to 3.41 per thousand. Its annual growth rate is 7%. If we take into consideration the ever lowering standards for placing a file for investigation and prosecution, there is an even greater disparity. The societal death rate has increased from 44 per million in 1979 to 106 per million. The annual growth rate is 3.5%. In 2003, the rate of contagious disease outbreak announced by the Public Health Department increased 6.7% over the previous year; the death rate increased 37%. The Chinese people went from not knowing what an anti-burglary door and window were to installing anti-burglary doors and windows up to and above the 7th floor. Because ruffians are everywhere and are impossible to defend against effectively, industries nationwide have long stopped arranging night shifts for female workers. Poisonous food has already covered 100% of all industries. Only heaven knows what people are swallowing down their throats every day. Sexual promiscuity has spread to preschool-aged children. One can only imagine the future of their bodies and their lifespans.

Approximately 20 million young girls have been forced into prostitution. Their income accounts for 6% of the GDP, which is equivalent to over one trillion Yuan. This phenomenon is unique in world history. The average height of Chinese people is 2.5 cm shorter than Japanese people. Little Japan has really become "great Japan." According to GotoRead, there is one industrial accident related death for every 100 million Yuan GDP. In 2003, 136,000 people died from industrial injuries. At this rate, this year’s industrial deaths will reach 200,000. It is in reality as well as in name "a bloody GDP." Actually, this number is only the tip of the iceberg: a death figure from published statistics, which only includes state-owned industries and major accidents that involve a relatively large number of deaths. In private and foreign industries, ordinary deaths involving several people never make it to the statistics bureau at all. But the number of workers employed in private and foreign industries far surpasses the number in state-owned industries. When this factor is taken into consideration, the number of deaths each year is at least equivalent to a Nanking Massacre.

2. Looking solely from foreign trade, China’s astounding transfusion of wealth to developed Western countries has already made China sink into the saddest condition of colonialism. China’s export prices are so low that they’re almost free. Historically, other than the white people going to Africa to capture blacks for free, there has not been a single colony that has plundered in trade to such an extent. Referencing [prices] in foreign trade and prices in developed countries, one will find that foreign businessmen take over 95% of the profits of foreign trade. Last year, our country exported 17.7 billion articles of clothing. On the average, each garment costs only 3.51 USD, and each pair of shoes costs less than 2.50 USD. The price for a popular Barbie doll on the U.S. market is 10 USD. China’s industry in Suzhou only received 35 cents. Logitech sends to the U.S. 20 million "made-in-China" mice every year. The selling price for these mice is approximately 40 USD. China only receives 3 USD for each mouse. Workers’ wages, the costs of energy, transportation, and other regular costs are all included in this 3 USD.
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It is with this less-than-five-percent profit that we accumulated the one trillion USD foreign exchange reserve, which implies that we have, at the same time, contributed twenty trillion USD in capital to international monopolies. On the fifth anniversary of China joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), China Central TV repeatedly broadcasted that in the five years since China joined the WTO, it saved American families one-fifth of their living expenses. A survey by Morgan Stanley also indicated that American consumers have saved 100 billion dollars by buying China’s cheap products. The Japanese throw away Chinese chopsticks because buying is cheaper than washing. Also because it’s too cheap, Japan, which has long stopped burning coal; it has imported more than 20 million tons of coal to fill the sea and turn it into a man-made coal energy reserve. What the flood of China’s cheap disposable products into Western countries has destroyed is China’s resources. Even some people of conscience in the Western countries have been shocked, calling in succession for a change in disposable consumption, and sincerely advising China to protect its resources.

Foreign businessmen have taken an overwhelming majority of profits. Foreign industries operating in China have sucked the lifeblood of workers by lowering costs. After the Foxconn incident, America’s Apple Computer and UK’s Financial Times came to China in succession. Their reports indicated that Foxconn’s 150,000 female workers worked over 15 hours a day and earned less than 50 USD a month, which is less than two hours of wages compared to their American counterparts. The timeliness of receiving even such meager wages is a variable. Such low wages have turned workers in current society completely into slaves in a slave society. The reason that the overwhelming majority of young women and young men can work for next to nothing for a sustained period of time is because they dream of becoming a city dweller (i.e. a registered city resident) one day. To them, working for next to nothing is not scary. What’s scary is industrial injuries and disabilities. With 95% of the profits taken by foreign businessmen, proprietors can’t pay for labor protection at all. Injuries and disabilities have thus become a worker’s most fearful nightmare.

Endnotes:
[1] Boxun, June 9, 2008
http://news.boxun.com/news/gb/china/2008/06/200806092153.shtml
[2] The "three mountains" refers to the difficulties in seeing a doctor, in getting an education, and in securing a dwelling.