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Reuters reports Chinese police have detained three people suspected of selling milk powder tainted with melamine, state media said on Thursday, the industrial chemical involved in a massive toxic food scandal last year.

The three were detained in northwestern Shaanxi province on Dec. 2, before tainted goods reached stores, the official Xinhua news agency said.
It named the three as Liu Ping, general manager of Shaanxi Jinqiao Diary Company, and two of the firm’s employees and said they were detained for “the suspected crime of producing and selling toxic food.”
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Every six seconds a child on this planet dies of hunger.

We’ve had industrial revolutions in the west and more recently in China and South Asia; budding revolutions in “superjumbo” aircraft and plug-in electric cars; and Seinfeld episodes that can be downloaded onto cellphones worldwide.

Yet we remain trapped in some previous century in that most basic of necessities; keeping the world population fed. Remarkably, the facts today point to yet another global food shortage just a few years after the food crisis of 2007-08, which ended only when the Great Recession curbed a debilitating upward spiral in prices of basic staples like rice, corn and wheat worldwide. As the world economy recovers, the prospect of another global food crisis looms large.

The determining factors in famine are mostly man-made. They include civil war and political instability in many, if not most undernourished regions. Protectionism in affluent nations that removes the incentive for developing-world farmers to enhance crop yields in the hope of earning export revenue. A sharp decline in affluent-world donations of agricultural assistance to underfed countries. A growing scourge of crop failure related to global warming. And a ferocious debate between advocates of natural farming methods and those arguing for a new agricultural revolution based on genetically modified (GM) crops.

By David Olive. Read more about this story.

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HIS FIRST trip to China will include a tour of the Forbidden City and some banquets of great Chinese food, but President Barack Obama’s visit to Beijing is no ordinary jaunt to the ancient capital.

Mr Obama landed in Shanghai yesterday to start his four-day visit during which he will try to balance his efforts to underline strong Sino-US ties with the need to emphasise Washington’s global role in the face of growing Chinese economic muscle.

International efforts to fight climate change, the need to co-ordinate action on global trouble spots such as North Korea and Iran, and concern over the value of the Chinese currency will all feature on the agenda.

The Nobel Peace laureate will also address human rights issues such as freedom of worship, although the American leader will avoid confrontation in the lead-in to his China visit, probably the most strategically important stopping point on his nine-day Asian jaunt. Saving face is important here.

On issues such as Tibet, he will have to deal with an at-times unsophisticated approach. A government spokesman said Mr Obama should be especially sympathetic to China’s opposition to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan independence, because he is a black president who lauded Abraham Lincoln for helping abolish slavery.

“He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln’s major significance for that movement,” said foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang.

“Lincoln played an incomparable role in protecting the national unity and territorial integrity of the United States,” he said.

Tibet is sure to be a knotty issue over the talks. Beijing calls the Dalai Lama a dangerous “splittist”, encouraging Tibetan independence, a charge he denies, saying he merely wants more autonomy for the region.

by The Irish Times. Read more on this story.

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Not long ago, Tsoi Chun Bun made potato chips. Now he designs and sells millions of mobile phones a year.

He is one of hundreds of young entrepreneurs seeking overnight fortunes in Shenzhen Inc. — the Wild West of the mobile-phone industry. Phones made and designed by these Chinese vendors will account for about a third of the 1.1 billion cell phones that will be sold around the world this year.

Three decades ago, Shenzhen was China’s first city to experience market-oriented economic reform, unleashing anything-goes capitalism that has spread throughout the nominally capitalist country. And while China’s mobile-phone industry has spread beyond Shenzhen, the southern region remains a center of the mobile-phone ecosystem that inspires dreams of instant success.

“It is China’s version of the Gold Rush,” said Shanghai-based Ken Qing Wang, general manager of the China operations of Silicon Valley-based Telegent Systems, which supplies analog TV chips to the mobile-phone industry. “A lot of wealth has been generated.”
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CarterSinclair Org announced that Choy Sum Food Company has signed on as a Program Sponsor to support Cartersinclair outreach program, Spoon Feeding. It is a community-based outreach campaign that brings information about the seriousness of diabetes and the importance of a healthy lifestyle to the La Quinta community.

The Marketing officer will also tackle how to stay healthy and still enjoy Chinese food by planning ahead, choosing wisely and watching how much you eat. Choosing traditional food dishes that are high in fiber, vitamins and minerals, and low in fat. Choosing beans, peas, tofu, bean sprouts and dark green vegetables such as Chinese broccoli, choy sum, watercress, Chinese chives, Chinese yard-long beans and amaranth also known as Chinese spinach.

Also pointed out other Chinese vegetables that are rich in iron like Chinese mushroom, seaweed and black fungus. Go for the mung beans (green gram beans), yellow bean and black bean dishes for soup or desserts with artificial sweetener. Sweet potatoes are also high in fiber and very nutritious . Whole wheat and rye bread and cornbread are good sources of fiber and are good for everyone.

As the sponsor, Choy Sum will support Carter Sinclair Org’s mission to prevent the onset of diabetes within La Quinta community and help those who are already living with the disease. Support will emphasize importance
of diabetes information from the CarterSinclair Org, including information about making better food choices.
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In some ways, art can better express a people’s pain, suffering and aspirations than history books can. At the same time China’s communist regime was showcasing its power with a massive military parade in Beijing, an art exhibit of paintings and sculptures, illustrating the blood-and- tears history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s tyranny, was on display at the Rayburn House Office Building of the U.S. Congress.

Artwork by well known artists Haiyan, Chen Weiming, Tom Block, Yan Yukun, Bob Hieronimus, and Daxiong told the story of the CCP, as well as serving as an inspiration to all of us.

Wei Jingsheng, 59, is much more at home with words than with art. As one of China’s most renowned dissidents, Wei was incarcerated by the Chinese regime for nearly 18 years for advocating democracy, before he was finally released and exiled to the U.S. in 1997. His 1978 essay “The Fifth Modernization—Democracy” challenged the Communist Party’s new leadership’s stance that progress could be made without democracy.

Organized by the Wei Jingsheng Foundation and open on October 1 and 2, this art exhibit in the nation’s capital is a way for the proponents of human rights and democracy to observe the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China by condemning the crimes perpetrated by the CCP over the past 60 years. The major co-sponsors of the exhibit are the “Tear Down This Wall” Foundation, the Human Rights Painting Project of Amnesty International, and the Asia Democracy Alliance. Several other groups, including The Epoch Times, also supported the exhibit.

The concept behind the art exhibit and news conference, which were followed by a seminar the next day, was to include not only the Han Chinese ,who have suffered under 60 years of tyranny, but the minority groups who have also been victimized by the CCP since it took power by force in 1949. The Tibetans, Uyghurs, Inner Mongolians, Burmese, and Vietnamese were represented at the news conference and by the art depicted. (Dr. Quan Nguyen, representing Vietnam, was invited but was ill and could not attend.)
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Oct. 1 marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. A mammoth birthday fete will include China’s largest ever military parade showcasing new weapons, and an Olympic-size gala. Efforts are even being made to improve the weather.

U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates just warned China’s growing military power “threatens our freedom of movement and narrows our strategic options.”

Translation: the U.S. Seventh Fleet can no longer operate with impunity off China’s coast. True enough. China is reasserting its historic sovereignty and will push U.S. power back into the Pacific.

I first went to China in 1975 during the madness of the Cultural Revolution. Over the ensuing three decades, I saw China transformed from a giant, dimly-lit prison camp into today’s booming nation, which just surpassed Japan to become the world’s second largest economy.

This is the most remarkable event I have seen in my life.

Much of the credit goes to China’s late leader, Deng Xiaoping, one of the 20th century’s greatest men.

He ended Marxist dogma, releasing the energy of his long-suffering people whose nation had been raped by western imperialism, then ravaged by brutal civil wars. Until 1800, China was a leading world power.
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Europeans are aggressively marketing their wine and cheese dining culture to China’s expanding middle class.

The following is not a full transcript; for full story, listen to audio.

BBC World Service correspondent Mukul Devichand traveled to Shanghai to explore the profound impact of new European foods to Chinese society, and found that the culinary market there is already crowded:

At a Chinese radio station, on-air personalities tout the virtues of pairing the proper wines with the proper cheese, eating pasta and enjoying a good cigar.

British, French and Portuguese foodies are pushing gastronomy and fine dining to a remarkable new class of Chinese citizens.

The problem is, parmesan, cheddar and brie are pretty alien to the Chinese palate. Despite over 3000 years of Chinese fine dining, it’s only from the 20th century that dairy products were really consumed in China — many there remain lactose intolerant.

The solution for European marketers is to educate Chinese consumers.
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Police here have detained a former employee of a Coca-Cola bottling plant, whom they accused of corruption and bribery.

The detention of the employee from the Shanghai Shen-Mei Beverage and Food Company, a bottling plant partly owned by Coca-Cola, was reported over the weekend by China’s state-run news media, which said the employee took about $1.5 million in bribes.

A spokesman for Coca-Cola, Kenth Kaerhoeg, confirmed on Sunday that a female middle manager at the plant was detained by Shanghai police this year and then dismissed by the bottling company.

Mr. Kaerhoeg declined to give further details about the case, but he said Coca-Cola was cooperating with the investigation.

Calls to Shen-Mei, in which Coca-Cola has a minority stake, went unanswered on Sunday and Shanghai police officials could not be reached for comment.

The detention is the second prominent bribery case this year involving a global company operating in China.
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