Chinese bid to stop ‘kids for sale’ film

-
This is the trailer for a new British documentary which the Chinese embassy in London is apparently trying to stop Channel 4 from broadcasting, according to the Sunday Times newspaper article below.

The Chinese embassy in London is trying to stop Channel 4 broadcasting a documentary about the trade in stolen children in China. The embassy is considering seeking an injunction to try to prevent China’s Stolen Children being shown on October 8. It has also been in touch with Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, and is expected to write to Channel 4’s board.

The Chinese are angry that they are not being given an advance screening of the documentary, which claims that the trade in stolen children is widespread. C4 says it is not its policy to show such programmes in advance.

However, the programme makers have provided the embassy with a three-page letter detailing their evidence. Professor Kevin Bales, a consultant to the United Nations programme on people trafficking, says in the film that at least 70,000 young children a year are sold or stolen in China.
Zhao Shangsen, press counsellor to the embassy, wrote to the programme makers saying: “The programme is deeply flawed, ignorant and simplistic.” He denies any link between child trafficking and China’s one-child policy, pointing to trafficking in other countries which do not have state-imposed birth control.

Shangsen wrote that China has made progress in trying to end child trafficking, which was on a far smaller scale than the programme suggested. “There is no good in finger-pointing at China,” Shangsen wrote to C4. The programme makers filmed undercover in China, speaking to parents who had had a child stolen or had sold a child, and to traffickers. More boys are taken than girls because they will grow up to earn more money. Most are taken for childless couples, although some are sold into prostitution.

Channel 4 has already conceded a right of reply at the end of the programme to the Chinese embassy. China’s Stolen Children is produced by the same team that made The Dying Rooms and Return to the Dying Rooms in the mid1990s which showed that many second-born children were dumped in orphanages and left to die.

The programmes led to a diplomatic row between China and the Tory government. Since then, trade links between Britain and China have strengthened considerably. With the Olympics in Beijing next year, China’s human rights and environmental record will be scrutinised in the West

By Richard Brooks
From The Sunday Times
September 23, 2007

Truevision, is the company making the documentary.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Angry China

-
A really interesting piece about modern China from the Economist The recent glimpses of a snarling China should scare the country's government as much as the world. CHINA is in a frightening mood. The sight of thousands of Chinese people waving xenophobic fists suggests that a country on its way to becoming a superpower may turn out to be a more dangerous force than optimists had hoped. But it isn't just foreigners who should be worried by these scenes: the Chinese government, which has encouraged this outburst of nationalism, should also be afraid. For three decades, having shed communism in all but the name of its ruling party, China's government has justified its monopolistic hold on power through economic advance.  Many Chinese enjoy a prosperity undreamt of by their forefathers. For them, though, it is no longer enough to be reminded of the grim austerity of their parents' childhoods. They need new aspirations. The government's solution is to promise them t...
Read more

China Debates New Holiday Schedule

-
Stuck in a crowd of about 200 other tourists, Zhong Jian and her friends waited for an hour to buy tickets for a boat cruise down the scenic Li River before giving up. Their problem: scheduling their trip during the May national holidays. "Every place we went, we saw so many people," said Zhong, a 24-year-old travel agent. Finally, they got the ride by soliciting help from a local driver, who used his connections. "It was chaos." As China becomes more prosperous, its people are traveling more on their vacations — and overwhelming the facilities. The resulting public backlash is prompting the government to rethink its tightly regulated national holiday policy. Most Chinese cannot take a break when they want. Rather, the government has set three weeks a year as national holidays. Factories and offices shut down — giving many workers time off they might otherwise never get. But putting so many of the country's 1.3 billion people on the move at one time is causing a...
Read more

Why I love Gentrifcation

-
Image
A store in my Beijing neighborhood shut down a few weeks ago, and it has left me wondering if I should be so happy about it. The place was sort of like a supermarket, except it had nothing good—at all. It is how I would have imagined shopping in East Germany to be. Each part of the store was a separate, independently operated section, equally as objectionable as the surrounding embarrassments. The shop keepers did not care much about the customers, and almost all of the products were mediocre. It’s the kind of place where you could stock up on dried sweet potatoes, green tea toothpaste, super cheap Chinese liquor, and nothing else. One day I went in and noticed that the shelves were more pathetically bare than normal. The place had always seemed pretty depressing anyway, with its dim lighting and sad selection. It was as if I was being punished for not overcoming my laziness and going somewhere better. However, the empty shelves took it to a new level, like a nuclear holocaust was comi...
Read more