Chinese Are Left to Ask Why Schools Crumbled

Chinese Are Left to Ask Why Schools Crumbled
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: The New York Times, May 25, 2008
This story was reported by Jim Yardley, Jake Hooker and Andrew C. Revkin, and was written by Mr. Yardley.

DUJIANGYAN, China — The earthquake’s destruction of Xinjian Primary School was swift and complete. Hundreds of children were crushed as the floors collapsed in a deluge of falling bricks and concrete. Days later, as curiosity seekers came with video cameras and as parents came to grieve, the four-story school was no more than rubble.

In contrast, none of the nearby buildings were badly damaged. A separate kindergarten less than 20 feet away survived with barely a crack. An adjacent 10-story hotel stood largely undisturbed. And another local primary school, Beijie, catering to children of the elite, was in such good condition that local officials were using it as a refugee center.

“This is not a natural disaster,” said Ren Yongchang, whose 9-year-old son died inside the destroyed school. His hands were covered in plaster dust as he stood beside the rubble, shouting and weeping as he grabbed the exposed steel rebar of a broken concrete column. “This is not good steel. It doesn’t meet standards. They stole our children.”

There is no official figure on how many children died at Xinjian Primary School, nor on how many died at scores of other schools that collapsed in the powerful May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province. But the number of student deaths seems likely to exceed 10,000, and possibly go much higher, a staggering figure that has become a simmering controversy in China as grieving parents say their children might have lived had the schools been better built.

The Chinese government has enjoyed broad public support for its handling of the earthquake, and in Sichuan on Saturday, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations praised the government’s response.

But as parents at different schools begin to speak out, the question of whether official negligence, and possibly corruption, contributed to the student deaths could turn public opinion. The government has launched an investigation, but censors, wary of the public mood, are trying to suppress the issue in state-run media and online.

An examination of the collapse of Xinjian Primary School offers a disturbing picture of a calamity that might have been avoided. Many parents say they were told the school was unsafe. Xinjian was poorly built when it opened its doors in 1992, they say, and never got its share of government funds for reconstruction because of its low ranking in the local education bureaucracy and the low social status of its students.

A decade ago, a detached wing of the school was torn down and rebuilt because of safety concerns. But the main building remained unimproved. Engineers and earthquake experts who examined photographs of its wreckage concluded that the structure had many failings and one critical flaw: inadequate iron reinforcing rods running up the school’s vertical columns. One expert described the unstable concrete floor panels as “time bombs.”

Xinjian also was ill-equipped for a crisis. An ambulance and other rescue vehicles that responded after the earthquake could not fit through the entrance into the school’s courtyard. A bulldozer finally dug up beneath the front gate to create enough overhead clearance. Parents say they believe several hundred of the school’s 660 pupils died.

“It is impossible to describe,” said a nurse standing on the rubble of the Xinjian site. “There is death everywhere.”

Schools are vulnerable to earthquakes, especially in developing nations where less attention is paid to building codes. The quake in Sichuan Province has already claimed 60,560 lives, and some of the flattened schools, especially those buried under landslides, could not have stood under any circumstances. The government has not provided a public list of those schools, but one early estimate concluded that more than 7,000 “schoolrooms” were destroyed.

China has national building codes intended to ensure that major structures withstand earthquakes. The government also has made upgrading or replacing substandard schools a priority as part of a broader effort to improve and expand education. Yet codes are spottily enforced. In March 2006, Sichuan Province issued a notice that local governments must inspect schools because too many remained unsafe, according to one official Web site.

Nothing is more central to the social contract in China than schools. Parents sacrifice and “eat bitter” so their children can get educations that lead to better lives. In turn, children care for their parents in old age. As in Manhattan, affluent Chinese fight to gain entrance to top schools from kindergarten onward.

But the families who sent their children to Xinjian are neither wealthy nor well connected. They are among the hundreds of millions still struggling to benefit from China’s economic rise. Many lost their jobs when a local cement plant shut down. Some sought work in more prosperous areas, leaving their children behind to attend school.

Angry parents at several destroyed schools are beginning to stage small demonstrations. On Wednesday, more than 200 Xinjian parents demonstrated at the temporary tents used by Dujiangyan’s education bureau, demanding an investigation and accusing officials of corruption and negligence.

One of the parents, Li Wei, said his son was one of 54 students who died in a class of 60 fifth graders. He said education officials told the demonstrating parents that the bureau had reported safety concerns to municipal leaders in the past. But their complaints were ignored.

“We want to bring justice for our children,” one father said the day before the protest. “We want the local officials to pay the price.”

Poor School, Long Neglected
The earthquake struck on May 12 at 2:28 in the afternoon as 20 fifth graders were rehearsing a dance on the basketball court in front of the school. Fourth graders were outside for gym class. When nearby shopkeepers rushed over, the children were standing on the court amid a cloud of dust. “They weren’t crying,” said Chen Chunmei, 35, the manager of a shopping strip beside the school. “They were in shock.”

The main building was decimated. Parents, neighbors and nearby college students arrived to find awful carnage. Ma Qiang, a decommissioned soldier living across the street, described a sickening scene.

“We were standing on the bodies of dead children, pulling out other children,” he recalled days later. He stood in the rubble and held his hand level with his head. “The concrete was this high. On the top was a boy, and two girls below him, and another boy under them, who was dead. It took four hours to dig them out.”

For hours, this ad hoc rescue team formed a line and passed along bricks or chunks of concrete in an attempt to clear debris. Bodies of children were piled on the sidewalk across the street. By late evening, paramilitary officers arrived and ordered the parents and others to withdraw outside the school gate. Many parents considered this a tardy response that was a stinging reminder of Xinjian’s low standing.

“A lot of our students came from the mountains,” said Deng Huiying, the former long-time principal. “Their parents were migrant workers.”

Xinjian is in the heart of the city of Dujiangyan. The lack of damage to the yellow-tiled kindergarten next door or to the Beijie Primary School a five-minute walk away has served as a reminder that proximity is not the same as equality.

Beijie is the city’s elite primary school, designated as a provincial-level “key” school, boasting the best facilities and the finest teachers. The kindergarten, meanwhile, was built and controlled directly by the city government of Dujiangyan. For years, Xinjian was controlled by a smaller, local township government, which had far less money and did little to improve the school.

In recent years, China’s central government has gradually abolished primary school tuition and other fees to ease burdens on farmers and migrants. Beijing has also increased its payments to local governments for education, but the main burden remains on local authorities, and many find themselves strapped for cash or siphon it off.

When Xinjian was built in 1992, many parents worked for the Dongfeng Cement Factory. Company bosses donated 40 tons of cement. But that was not enough. “Everybody knew they didn’t have enough cement,” said Dai Chuanbin, an older man familiar with the project. “So they used a lot of sand.”

Parents say the township government cut costs further by hiring farmers to do the work instead of trained construction crews. One former school official recalled that workers poured the foundation during such heavy rains that it collapsed. Another foundation had to be poured.

The school opened in 1993 and would quickly be overrun with students. The detached annex was rebuilt in 1998 after inspectors deemed it substandard. Ms. Deng, the former principal, recalled that nearby construction work in May 2006 caused the flooring in the main school building to shake violently. But she said she never had reason to believe the building was structurally unsound and never filed any written complaints with higher officials.

“If I’d thought the building was unsafe, there’s no way I would have let the kids stay there,” she said. When she saw the collapsed building, she fell on the ground, sobbing.

Several parents tell a different story. They say Ms. Deng and other school officials told them that the building was aging and unsafe, though they could provide no written proof. One father was told that Xinjian would soon be closed. Another, Zhu Junsheng, 44, claimed that Ms. Deng filed a report with Dujiangyan’s education bureau complaining about the building.

“The education bureau said there was no money,” said Mr. Zhu, sitting in front of a blue tent in a refugee camp a block from the school. “They didn’t care.

“I just want to say: The government didn’t do its job.”

Nearly two weeks after the earthquake, Mr. Ma, the decommissioned soldier, keeps returning to the rubble of Xinjian. He smokes cigarette after cigarette and has not changed out of the Che Guevara T-shirt and blue jeans he wore on that frantic afternoon.

“That’s where government officials send their children to nursery school,” he said, pointing to the undamaged, yellow-tiled kindergarten.

Mr. Ma saved several children the day of the disaster but cannot shake the memory of one girl. Her leg had been pinned beneath a heavy concrete slab. Two small cranes had failed to free her. Her body temperature was quickly dropping. So Mr. Ma told her father, “She can keep her leg or her life.”

The father was led away. Mr. Ma used a serrated knife he kept in his jeans. He said the job took three cuts across the girl’s shin. “She will hate me when she is older if she has trouble with love,” he said with a grim smile.

He does not know the girl’s name. “I have dreams every night,” he said. “She was very pretty. Very strong.”

Deadly Engineering Shortcuts
Techniques for fortifying buildings to withstand earthquakes have been clearly understood for decades. Use high-quality concrete. Embed extra iron rods. Tie them tightly into bundles with strong wire. Ensure that components of floors, walls and columns are firmly attached. Pay special attention to columns, which are the key to having a building sway rather than topple.

Engineers are already trying to assess how much of the destruction on May 12 should be attributed to faulty construction during China’s long and often helter-skelter building boom. The earthquake was so powerful, measuring at least 7.9 in magnitude, that a certain amount of damage could not be prevented. But engineering experts say Xinjian and some other schools in Sichuan were especially vulnerable.

Six structural engineers and earthquake experts asked by The New York Times to analyze an online photographic slide show of the wreckage at Xinjian concluded, independently, that inadequate steel reinforcement, or rebar, was used in the concrete columns supporting the school. They also found that the school’s precast, hollow concrete slab floors and walls did not appear to be securely joined together.

The widespread use of cheap, hollow slab floors is significant because numerous buildings with the same flooring collapsed during another Chinese earthquake in 1976, which devastated the city of Tangshan and killed at least 240,000. (A few buildings with the same flooring also fared poorly during the 1994 earthquake in California.)

“If the hollow core slabs are not adequately tied to the lateral frames, which seems to be the case in the photos, the structures are likely very flexible and would undergo large deformations under severe ground motions,” said Mary Beth Hueste, an associate professor of engineering at Texas A&M University, in an e-mail message.

When such components are not securely joined, they are “extremely dangerous, like time bombs,” said Xiao Yan, an expert in earthquake-resistant designs at the University of Southern California.

The most pronounced failing at Xinjian seemed to be inadequate steel reinforcement of the concrete columns supporting the school, experts said. There were too few rebar reinforcing rods and too little of the thin binding wire that holds the rebar together. And, critically, the steel bindings attaching the concrete flooring slabs were inadequate.

Xiaonian Duan, an engineer specializing in earthquake resilience for Arup, a multinational design consulting company whose head office is in London, said that concrete flooring panels fall apart during an earthquake if not strongly attached, “like we see Legos collapse.”

The Chinese government has known that many schools, especially in rural areas, are unsafe. Since 2001, the State Council, China’s cabinet, has budgeted roughly $1.5 billion for a nationwide program to repair dangerous schools in rural areas. In 2006, Sichuan Province’s government issued an urgent notice calling for localities to stop using substandard primary and middle schools.

“Unsafe buildings are the major hidden danger of school safety at present, and in recent years, accidents with death tolls and injuries were caused by collapsed schools,” the provincial notice warned.

Dr. Xiao toured the disaster zone after this month’s earthquake and found that many of the problems at Xinjian were common elsewhere. He said one reason for the widespread damage was that buildings in the region were not required to meet China’s most stringent standards for seismic protection. He also noted that China rates overall building design codes from 1 to 4. Buildings rated 1 are considered “important” and must meet stricter design requirements. But the system rates schools only as a 3, which means no additional design protections are needed.

In the aftermath of the quake, a handful of bricklayers and builders have visited Xinjian Primary School out of professional curiosity. A builder from nearby Meishan City recognized the faulty columns and flooring problems. Then he picked up a chunk of concrete from the rubble and rubbed it in his hands.

“The ratio of sand and concrete isn’t right,” he said. “It fell down because of cheap materials.”

In Search of Justice
The parents of Xinjian Primary School posted an online petition last Wednesday. They demanded justice for their children. Local police officials have promised an investigation, but the parents are not satisfied. They intend to protest again.

School represents hope in China. The parents do not express it exactly like that, but they saw education as their children’s only chance. The cement factory that employed many parents — and provided cement for the school — went bankrupt in 2002. They now collect small welfare payments and hold down odd jobs to support their families.

Liao Minhui had aspirations for his daughter. He knew that Xinjian was considered inferior and that a better school might help her find a better life. So he tried to wheedle her into Beijie, the elite school. He said he offered thousands of yuan to gain her admission, to no avail. She died in the Xinjian rubble.

“I tried very hard,” Mr. Liao said. “I tried to get help from every well-connected friend I have. Everything there is the best. The teachers are the best. The facilities are the best.”

Jiang Xuezheng, 41, is a small, wiry man whose simple manner betrays his country upbringing in a village about 200 miles away. He has sold fruit in Dujiangyan for nearly a decade to support his family back in the village. But to do this, he lived apart from his son for eight years.

So last year, Mr. Jiang also paid to try to win his child admission to a city school. He chose Xinjian. To him, a peasant, a city school like Xinjian represented a step up. He paid a $1,400 fee to make the switch. His 9-year-old boy was admitted in September.

“My parents are still in the countryside, but I wanted my son to live with me,” said Mr. Jiang, bowing his head and weeping. “I waited for eight years. Finally, I was together with my son.

“And then tragedy happens.”

Jim Yardley and Jake Hooker reported from Dujiangyan, and Andrew C। Revkin from New York. Zhang Jing and Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/world/asia/25schools.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin

Unearthing Nevada's links to its ignored Chinese heritage

Unearthing Nevada's links to its ignored Chinese heritage
Marilyn Newton / Associated Press
A man's makeshift museum is an example of the state's slowly growing recognition of forgotten settlers.
By Ashley Powers, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
February 25, 2008

LOVELOCK, NEV. -- This wisp of a town owes its existence to Chinese laborers who panned gold in the mid-1800s and laid railroad tracks linking Utah and Sacramento. Yet the immigrants were mostly ostracized, made to live in a wood-shack Chinatown that later was bulldozed to make way for Interstate 80.

Now, their legacy is relegated to Larry De Leeuw's garage.

On a recent afternoon, De Leeuw squeezed into a cubbyhole walled off from his power tools and bottle cap collection. Strewed about him were brass opium containers, gambling tokens, a gong, rice bowl shards, turquoise ginger jars and a mirror with hand-carved dragons.

De Leeuw, 66, has cobbled together this collection of artifacts in the Frank Chang Museum, named after one of the last descendants of Lovelock's Chinese workers. Now, the only way to see this part of the town's past is through a large window in De Leeuw's garage, where a dedication -- typed on white paper -- describes Chang as an “avid hunter, fisherman, volunteer fireman.” He was also a staff sergeant in the Army.

“It was the least I could do,” De Leeuw said, to honor Chang and Lovelock's history.

His obsession took root about a decade ago, when he and his wife bought a brick fixer-upper in the Chinatown of Marysville, Calif., about 40 miles north of Sacramento. While renovating the two-story building, the now-retired construction worker -- who had also worked as a police officer and armored-car driver -- unearthed about 100 rice bowls and other relics beneath the ground floor.

De Leeuw became so enamored with Chinese laborer tales, amassing at least 40 books and pestering local mah-jongg players with questions, that one woman in Marysville nicknamed him Chinatown's mayor.

Then nearly four years ago, the De Leeuws discovered Lovelock -- a town about 90 miles northeast of Reno with mountain views, star-filled nights and few jobs beyond the nearby prison.

On a whim, they bought the 13-room Cadillac Inn. It's a short drive from downtown's Cowpoke Cafe, the Covered Wagon Motel and the Pershing County Courthouse, revered locally as “the nation's only working round courthouse.”

De Leeuw quickly figured out that the town's immigrant past mirrored Marysville's -- all it took was asking a few old-timers in this 2,000-person outpost. But as in many northern Nevada towns, Lovelock's Chinese heritage was largely overlooked.

Virginia City, Reno, Carson City and Elko had Chinatowns, settled in the post-Gold Rush westward expansion. Their immigrants helped piece together the Central Pacific Railroad, and some opened restaurants and stores in depot towns, although their fellow frontiersmen were far from welcoming.

In Lovelock, the Chinese hung signs declaring their businesses “white-run” lest they be boycotted, said Sue Fawn Chung, an associate history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In the ensuing decades, hostility and economic hard times drove many to Northern California, and most Nevada Chinatowns crumbled.

Only in recent years has Nevada moved to acknowledge this slice of its history; a private group hopes to raise at least $50 million for a Chinese Workers Museum near Carson City.

“The Donner Party has more prominence than what the Chinese did here,” said the group's co-founder, Khan Tung, a Carson City architect.

Lovelock demolished its Chinatown in the 1970s. But it recently has made an attempt to tout its heritage by encouraging “love-locking” -- a Chinese custom, common near the Yellow Mountains and the Great Wall, in which couples latch locks together in a show of their devotion.

About 900 locks now dangle behind the courthouse in Lovelock. The promotion, officials say, has lured a handful of drivers off the interstate.

De Leeuw considers his garage collection more a historical repository than a tourist attraction.

He unearthed many of his treasures in antique stores and near old workers' camps along the railroad tracks.

He also scoured the spot where the Chinatown stood -- now a junkyard near a McDonald's -- where decades ago archaeologists unearthed medicines, firecracker labels, an English snuff jar and 119 gold coins.

De Leeuw's passion extends beyond his driveway.About five miles west of town -- past fields of alfalfa and wheat -- is a cemetery where some of Lovelock's Chinese residents are buried.

Before De Leeuw got to work in 2005, it had been an unmarked patch of weeds and scrub brush next to the Lone Mountain Cemetery with its white crosses and marble headstones.

De Leeuw pulled death records, trying to figure out who was buried in the 35 or so unmarked graves.

He and other residents cleaned up the cemetery, and the county paid for a fence to keep out bikers and off-road vehicles. Each grave now is adorned with a dollar-store vase and a single fake flower.

In April, De Leeuw plans to preside over Ching Ming, a holiday when Chinese clean their ancestors' graves and offer roast duck and pig. De Leeuw has built a concrete-and-tile food platform for the festival.

“Last year, we had five Chinese people show up,” he said, his voice welling with pride.

ashley.powers@latimes.com

Asians, not whites, hurt most by race-conscious admissions

Asians, not whites, hurt most by race-conscious admissions
By Peter Schmidt, USA Today 2/20/08

The long-running debate over affirmative action in college admissions just got more complicated, thanks to a new study that challenges the common assumption that whites are hurt most when colleges take applicants' race and ethnicity into account।

The study, published by the University of California-Los Angeles last week in the scholarly journal InterActions, suggests that it is mainly Asian-Americans — not whites — who are held to a higher standard when top colleges use affirmative action।

Where such institutions have been banned from considering applicants' race, the study finds, enrollment of Asian-Americans has increased while admissions of whites remained flat or, in some cases, declined. The study, an analysis of long-term enrollment trends at several exclusive public universities, found that the Asian-American share of enrollment increased:
•More than 15% at the University of Texas at Austin after a 1996 federal court ruling barred consideration of race in admissions.
•More than 15% at the University of Florida after Gov. Jeb Bush persuaded the state university system's governing board to vote in 2000 to end race- and ethnicity-conscious admissions.
•More than 20% at the University of California-Berkeley, more than 10% at UCLA and more than 30% at the University of California-San Diego after that state's voters passed a 1996 ballot measure barring the use of affirmative-action preferences by public colleges and other state agencies।

Although David Colburn and his two co-authors consider themselves advocates of affirmative action, he acknowledged their numbers show "Asian-Americans were discriminated against under an affirmative-action system।"

Colburn's assessment is in keeping with other research that has suggested that Asian-Americans are regarded as overrepresented on college campuses and therefore held to higher standards to keep their numbers down। The white applicants covered by this study fared no better in the absence of affirmative action than before. In fact, the number of white admissions in some cases dropped because of increased competition from Hispanics and from Asian-Americans.

This report comes as efforts are under way in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma to ban the use of affirmative action by public colleges and state agencies। Similar measures easily won approval in California, Michigan and Washington.

The authors of the new study seem to be hoping that their conclusions will erode white voters' support for such measures। Their report says their findings "can hardly be satisfying" to "those who campaigned for the elimination of affirmative action in the belief that it would advantage the admission of white students." The study even predicts a white backlash against race-neutral admissions policies if Asian-Americans continue to make gains.

Most leading Asian-American advocacy groups have supported affirmative action। When the U.S. Supreme Court last weighed in on the legality of colleges' use of affirmative action in admissions in two University of Michigan rulings in 2003, 28 Asian-American organizations signed a legal brief urging the court to uphold such policies given the educational benefits of diversity. (A 5-4 majority of justices agreed with such logic.)

In the long term, it's unclear what impact this new study will have on the views of Asian-Americans — or the views of the courts. If colleges are using race-conscious admissions policies to limit enrollments of Chinese-, Vietnamese-, Indian- and Japanese-Americans, will they be able to continue convincing the courts that their intent is the promotion of diversity?
Peter Schmidt is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education and the author of Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning the War over College Affirmative Action.

1977 Exam Opened Escape Route Into China’s Elite

1977 Exam Opened Escape Route Into China’s Elite
By DAVID LAGUE
Published: New York Times, January 6, 2008

BEIJING — In the autumn of 1977, as relative calm returned to China after the decade-long chaos of the Cultural Revolution, An Ping was laboring in the countryside where she had been sent, like millions of other young people from the cities, to learn from the peasants.

For two years Ms. An, an army general’s daughter, fed pigs and chickens and tended crops on a commune outside Beijing, while living in unheated dormitories and going hungry.

Though Mao had died the year before, and the radical Gang of Four, who had directed the Cultural Revolution in his name, were in custody, there was little sign that Ms. An and other “sent down” urban youths would be allowed to return home.

“For the first time I felt life was not worth it,” said Ms. An, who was 19 then. “If you had asked me to go on living this kind of life, I would rather die.”

Then, in late October 1977, village authorities relayed the news that China would hold its first nationwide university entrance examination since 1965, shortly before academic pursuits were subordinated to political struggle. In acknowledgment of more than a decade of missed opportunity, candidates ranging in age from 13 to 37 were allowed to take the exam.

For Ms. An and a whole generation consigned to the countryside, it was the first chance to escape what seemed like a life sentence of tedium and hardship. A pent-up reservoir of talent and ambition was released as 5.7 million people took the two-day exam in November and December 1977, in what may have been the most competitive scholastic test in modern Chinese history.

The 4.7 percent of test-takers who won admission to universities — 273,000 people — became known as the class of ’77, widely regarded in China as the best and brightest of their time. By comparison, 58 percent of the nine million exam-takers in 2007 won admission to universities, as educational opportunities have greatly expanded.

Now, three decades later, the powerful combination of intellect and determination has taken many in this elite group to the top in politics, education, art and business. Last October, one successful applicant who had gone on to study law and economics at Peking University, Li Keqiang, was brought into the Chinese Communist Party’s decision-making Politburo Standing Committee, where he is being watched as a possible successor to President Hu Jintao or Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.

“They were a very bright bunch, and they knew it,” said Robin Munro, research director for the Hong Kong-based China Labor Bulletin, who was a British exchange student at Peking University in 1978, when those freshmen arrived.

“They were the first students in 10 years let into university on merit, and they were going places.”

But back in 1977, most had only a few desperate weeks to prepare for the examination that would change their lives. The timing was especially daunting for those who had been cut off from schooling for years. All over China, students found themselves scrambling to find textbooks, seeking out former tutors and straining to recall half-forgotten formulas.

Ms. An, who now works in New York as the director of public relations for Committee of 100, a Chinese-American advocacy group, exaggerated the seriousness of a back injury and took a month’s medical leave, which she devoted to studying.

“I had to succeed,” she said.

The examination tested not only academic subjects, but also political correctness.

Han Ximing, now 50 and a Chinese literature professor at Nanjing Audit University, said she felt she was already well prepared to handle political questions from careful study of the party line in official newspapers in rural Jiangsu Province.

For years, the papers had been filled with criticism of Deng Xiaoping. “That was a big topic,” she said. “Actually, I had no idea why Deng was supposed to be so bad.”

In reality, it was the return of Deng, the veteran Communist leader, to a position of power in Beijing after the fall of the Gang of Four that led to the reinstatement of the annual exam, and a return to the pragmatism that would soon ignite decades of explosive economic growth.

Among those who have assumed positions of power, aside from Mr. Li of the Politburo, are Zhou Qiang, the governor of Hunan Province; Wang Yi, party secretary of the Foreign Affairs Ministry and a former ambassador to Japan; and Jin Liqun, vice president of the Asian Development Bank.

Artistic talent to emerge from the class of ’77 includes the filmmakers Zhang Yimou (“Raise the Red Lantern”) and Chen Kaige (“Farewell My Concubine”), and the writer Chen Cun.

“To be immodest, it was a phenomenal generation,” said Fan Haoyi, now 50, who earned a chance to study French at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages (now the Beijing Foreign Studies University), a stepping stone to a business career in Africa and Europe. “We had a rage to learn.”

Many successful candidates said they felt they had been given a priceless opportunity, and they were determined to make the most of it. “We were not just gifted, we also worked really hard,” said Ms. Han, the literature professor.

Still, not everyone jumped at the chance to take the exam.

After years when privilege and opportunity were reserved for the offspring of senior officials or people with approved class backgrounds, many prospective candidates doubted that the test would be fair. Others were reluctant to give up the security of even menial jobs.

For Ms. An, the desire to escape her rural life was tempered by the conviction that taking the exam was risky. Relations between the farmers and students were complex; if she failed and was forced to return to the village, she worried that she would be given all the dirty jobs.

“They didn’t like us being there because they had to share their land,” she said. “But if we tried to leave, they would think we looked down on them.”

Li Xiyue was also part of a rural production team. The work was hard but he found it difficult to imagine any other future for himself. “By the time I was sent to the rural areas, this policy had been in place for 10 years,” said Mr. Li, 50, who won a seat at Guangxi University and went on to become a writer and university lecturer. Hard farm labor “was normal,” he said. “Going to college was not normal.”

Still, he found time to study in his spare time. “The problem was, it was difficult to find interesting material,” he said. “I would even read the literature that came with farming equipment.”

When the time came to take the university entrance exam, some found it difficult to break with the commune.

Ms. Han was allowed to return home to study for the exam, but she became alarmed when she heard that she had been criticized at a commune meeting for pursuing personal ambition at the expense of the revolution.

“I ran back to the team, but my father was very angry and brought me home,” she said. “He banned all further contact with them.”

Ms. An said she had taken some French in middle school, but classes were overlaid with politics and broken up by military training and factory work. Less than confident, she went to see a former teacher who assured her that the examiners would not ask overly complicated questions.

But the teacher predicted that she would be asked why she wanted to study French, advising her to say she was doing it to serve the revolution.

“They did ask me that,” said Ms. An, who qualified to study French at the Beijing Language Institute (now the Beijing Language and Culture University) and later at the Sorbonne in Paris.

When the academic year began in 1978, after the lost decade of the Cultural Revolution, it was an unusually mature freshman class that entered universities across the country. Ms. Han said that some of her fellow students at Nanjing Normal University were twice her age. “I had a classmate who was the father of four kids,” she said.

As they began their studies, many were fired by idealism and eagerness to achieve a fresh start for themselves and their country.

“It was a time full of dreams and hopes for the future,” Ms. Han said.

Thirty years later, many express mixed feelings about the direction events took. While acknowledging the benefits of China’s economic development, some voiced disappointment with the pace of political change. Others complained that rapid material progress had fostered greed and cynicism.

“A lot of things we could not even imagine have become reality,” Mr. Li, the writer and lecturer, said. “But it’s painful to see so much corruption, especially among high-ranking officials.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/world/asia/06china.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin

Entrepreneurs From China Flourish in Africa

Entrepreneurs From China Flourish in Africa
Benedicte Kurzen for The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH and LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: New York Times, August 18, 2007

LILONGWE, Malawi — When Yang Jie left home at 18, he was doing what people from China’s hardscrabble Fujian Province have done for generations: emigrating in search of a better living overseas.

What set him apart was his destination. Instead of the traditional adopted homelands like the United States and Europe, where Fujian people have settled by the hundreds of thousands, he chose this small, landlocked country in southern Africa.

“Before I left China,” said Mr. Yang, now 25, “I thought Africa was all one big desert.” So he figured that ice cream would be in high demand, and with money pooled from relatives and friends, he created his own factory at the edge of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital. The climate is in fact subtropical, but that has not stopped his ice cream company from becoming the country’s biggest.

Stories like this have become legion across Africa in the past five years or so, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese have discovered the continent, setting off to do business in a part of the world that had been terra incognita. The Xinhua News Agency recently estimated that at least 750,000 Chinese were working or living for extended periods on the continent, a reflection of deepening economic ties between China and Africa that reached $55 billion in trade in 2006, compared with less than $10 million a generation earlier.

Even when Mr. Yang arrived here in 2001, he said, he could go weeks without encountering another traveler from his homeland. But as surely as his investments in the country have prospered, he said, an increasingly large community of Chinese migrants has taken root, and now runs everything from small factories to health care clinics and trading companies.

During the previous wave of Chinese interest in Africa in the 1960s and ’70s, an era of radical socialism and proclaimed third-world solidarity, European and American companies held sway over economies in most of the continent. Here and there, though, the Chinese made their presence felt, often in drably dressed, state-run work brigades that built stadiums, railroads and highways, crushing rocks and doing other labor by hand.

Today, in many of the countries where the new Chinese emigrants have settled, like Chad, Chinese-owned pharmacies, massage parlors and restaurants serving a variety of regional Chinese cuisines can be found; the Western presence, once dominant, has steadily dwindled, and essentially consists nowadays of relief experts working international agencies or oil workers, living behind high walls in heavily guarded enclaves.

At first, this new Chinese exodus was driven largely by word of mouth, as pioneers like Mr. Yang relayed news back home of abundant opportunities in a part of the world where many economies lie undeveloped or in ruins, and where even in the richer countries many things taken for granted in the developed world await builders and investors.

Conditions like these often deter Western investors, but for many budding Chinese entrepreneurs, Africa’s emerging economies are inviting precisely because they seem small and accessible. Competition is often weak or nonexistent, and for African customers, the low price of many Chinese goods and services make them more affordable than their Western counterparts.

Chinese Expansion

You Xianwen sold his pipe-laying business in Chengdu, in southwest China, this year to move to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, to join a startup company with a Chinese partner he had met only online. “Back where I come from we are pretty independent people,” Mr. You, 55, said. “My brothers and sisters all supported my decision to come here. In fact, they say that if things really work out for me, they would like to move to Africa, too.”

Mr. You said he had considered other African countries before settling on Ethiopia, including Zambia. “Luckily I didn’t decide to go there,” he said, explaining that he had been frightened by the recent anti-Chinese protests in that country.

His new business, ABC Bioenergy, builds devices that generate combustible gas from ordinary refuse, providing what Mr. You said would be an affordable alternative source of energy in a country where electricity supplies are erratic and prices high.

Mr. You’s partner here, Mei Haijun, first came to Ethiopia a decade ago to work at a Chinese-built textile factory and has since married an Ethiopian woman, with whom he has a child. “When I first came here you could go two months without seeing another Chinese person,” he said. “But it is a different era now. There’s a flight to China every day.”

The pickup in air traffic between China and countries like Ethiopia now has Chinese companies scrambling to add new routes, as the Chinese government and big Chinese companies increase their stake in Africa.

Much of that activity reflects an intense appetite for African oil and mineral resources needed to fuel China’s manufacturing sector, but big Chinese companies have quickly become formidable competitors in other sectors as well, particularly for big-ticket public works contracts. China is building major new railroad lines in Nigeria and Angola, large dams in Sudan, airports in several countries and new roads, it seems, almost everywhere.

One of the largest road builders, China Road and Bridge Construction, has picked up where the solidarity brigades of an earlier generation left off. The company, which is owned by the Chinese government, has 29 projects in Africa, many financed by the World Bank or other lenders, and it maintains offices in 22 African countries.

On a recent Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Beijing brimming with Chinese contractors, workers from Road and Bridge and other companies swapped notes on the grab bag of countries they work in, and debated about the difficulties of learning Portuguese and French in places like Mozambique and Ivory Coast.

Africans view the influx of Chinese with a mix of anticipation and dread. Business leaders in Chad, a central African nation with deepening oil ties to China, are bracing for what they suspect will be an army of Chinese workers and investors.

“We expect a large influx of at least 40,000 Chinese in the coming years,” said Renaud Dinguemnaial, director of Chad’s Chamber of Commerce. “This massive arrival could be a plus for the economy, but we are also worried. When they arrive, will they bring their own workers, stay in their own houses, send all their money home?”

In Zambia, where anti-Chinese sentiment has been building for several years, merchants at the central market in Lusaka, the capital, said that if Chinese people wanted to come to Africa, they should come as investors, building factories, not as petty traders who compete for already scarce customers for bottom-dollar items like flip-flops and T-shirts.

“The Chinese claim to come here as investors, but they are trading just like us,” said Dorothy Mainga, who sells knockoff Puma sneakers and Harley Davidson T-shirts in the Kamwala Market in Lusaka. “They are selling the same things we are selling at cheap prices. We pay duty and tax, but they use their connections to avoid paying tax.”

Although Chinese oil workers have been kidnapped in Nigeria and in Ethiopia, where nine were killed by an armed separatist movement in May, the growing Chinese presence around the continent has produced few serious incidents.

Misunderstandings are common, however, and resentments inevitably arise. Africans in many countries complain that Chinese workers occupy jobs that locals are either qualified for or could be easily trained to do. “We are happy to have the Chinese here,” said Dennis Phiri, 21, a Malawian university student who is studying to become an engineer. “The problem with the Chinese companies is that they reserve all the good jobs for their own people. Africans are only hired in menial roles.”

Another frequent criticism is that the Chinese are clannish, sticking among themselves day and night.

In Addis Ababa, in what is a typical arrangement for most large companies, the 200 Chinese workers for the Road and Bridge Corporation live in a communal compound, eating food prepared by cooks brought from China and receiving basic health care from a Chinese doctor.

“After a day off you wonder what you’re doing here, so we like to keep working,” said Cheng Qian, the country manager for the road-building company in Ethiopia. He added that his family had never visited him during several years of work here.

African Ambivalence

Sometimes, the Chinese approach has created serious frictions with African workers. At a leading hotel here in Lilongwe, breakfast guests stared as an agitated Chinese traveling salesman, sweating profusely, screamed at his staff minutes before his pitch on nutritional supplements was set to begin.

“You say it is not your fault, but the way you are doing things is just stupid, stupid,” the man sputtered before a clutch of African assistants, who looked humiliated. “You people are unbelievable.”

When the salesman finally left the room, members of the restaurant staff gathered near the door and vented their disgust. “We don’t need people like that to come here and colonize us again,” one said.

After nearly seven years in Malawi, Yang Jie, the ice cream maker, seems to have learned better. Greeting his workers at the ice cream factory, he begins the day by asking, “How did you sleep last night?”

One quickly replied, “Very well,” sounding a bit formal.

“Don’t tell me a lie,” Mr. Yang answered with a sly, friendly smile. “It’s O.K. to tell me your worries.”


Howard W. French reported from Lilongwe and from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Lydia Polgreen from Lusaka, Zambia, and Dakar, Senegal.

Report Details Student Contrast

Report details student contrast
Southeast Asians are less ready for college
San Gabriel Valley Tribune, 8/6/2007
By Lisa M. Krieger Staff Writer

Asian-American students are often viewed as brainy, affluent and over-achieving. But a new government report concludes that several Asian groups are not well-prepared - either academically or financially - to succeed in college.

Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian students typically do well in school, fulfilling the "model minority" stereotype, according to the report by the Government Accountability Office, the research and investigative arm of Congress. Many of their families have saved money for college and do not depend on their children's help at home.

But others - Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asians of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Thai and Burmese descent - do not enroll in the rigorous math and reading classes needed to climb the ladder of collegiate success, the report found.

Moreover, Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders who make it to college are more likely to need outside financial support, often living at home and working to help their families, according to the report.

For instance, 68 percent of Chinese college students reported they could afford college without working, compared with only 36 percent of Vietnamese. Almost half of all Vietnamese college students said they helped their families with tutoring, translating, transportation and household chores.

While 42 percent of Korean families saved $20,000 or more for college, only 8 percent of Southeast-Asian families had.

"The report confirms the need to avoid making national generalizations about Asian-American achievements in education and conflating all Asian-American subgroups as if all Asian Americans are homogeneous," said L. Ling-chi Wang, chairman of the ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley. "We need to look at each subgroup separately."

Deborah Reed of the San Francisco-based Public Policy Institute of California concurred.

"Asians and Pacific Islanders tend to have relatively high levels of education and income and relatively low poverty rates," she said.

"(But) when we look at Southeast Asians from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos - the refugee-sending countries - we find lower family income, lower education and higher poverty than for other Asian groups in California."

To be sure, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are, on average, better educated than the average American. Almost half have a four-year college degree, compared with one-third of whites, 17percent of African Americans and 12 percent of Latinos.

And the academic strength of even the most disadvantaged groups grows over time, Reed said.

"When we look at the second generation, we see increasing progress."

The study, conducted from July 2006 through July 2007, used data from the U.S. Census Bureau and two large national education databases. Researchers also visited eight colleges with high numbers of Asian students, and conducted discussion groups on these campuses.

Many of the differences were attributed to the number of years that an ethnic group had been in the United States - or whether immigrants had arrived to escape war and persecution or seek high-tech jobs.

The report, released July 27 before the education committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, found wide differences in:

An estimated 68 percent of Asian-Indian and 64 percent of Chinese adults had at least a college degree, compared with 25 percent of Vietnamese, 17 percent of Pacific Islanders and 13 percent of other Indochinese - Cambodians, Laotians and Hmong.

More than 90 percent of Filipino, Indians and Japanese identified themselves as fluent in English. That compares with 70percent of Koreans, 62 percent of Vietnamese and 60 percent of the other Indochinese groups.

About 80 percent of Vietnamese undergraduates reported their parents paid none of their tuition. High numbers of Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders groups lived at home or attended schools within driving distance of home. In contrast, many Chinese, Indian and Korean undergraduates worked to gain job experience or earn spending money.

Simply put, poverty creates barriers to education, whether one is Asian American, Latino or African American, said Paul Fong, a political science professor at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose.

"There's an achievement gap among Filipino Americans, Cambodian Americans and Vietnamese Americans - the haves and have-nots," Fong said.

Staff Writer Kim Vo contributed to this story.

http://www.sgvtribune.com/news/ci_6552950

Las Vegas Caters to Asia’s High Rollers

Las Vegas Caters to Asia’s High Rollers
By GARY RIVLIN
Published: New York Times, June 13, 2007

LAS VEGAS — Without the dreamy postcard views of the neon-pulsing Strip, visitors to the V.I.P. lounge at the top of the Venetian hotel and casino here might think they had taken an elevator to someplace in Hong Kong or Shanghai.

The televisions in this sanctuary reserved for the wealthiest high rollers are tuned to Chinese stations. The newspapers use Chinese characters. The plinking tones wafting through the sprawling lounge are distinctly Chinese and many of the lounge’s supremely solicitous, perpetually bowing staff members come from one Asian country or another. Its head chef is a dim sum master recently imported from Hong Kong.

Then there are the special accommodations offered to gamblers willing to wager several hundred thousand dollars or more: four 8,000-square-feet suites heavy on black lacquer furniture, bronze dragons, jade and appliances imported from China.

Casino operators have long recognized that a large number of Asians, especially Chinese and Chinese-Americans, are avid gamblers. For years, casinos have dispatched special buses to any Chinatown within a day’s drive.

Recently, though, casinos have become much more aggressive in wooing Asians both domestically and abroad. They are aiming not just at the newly wealthy from China, who in recent years have emerged as Las Vegas’s best customers, but also Asian-Americans and recent immigrants from the Pacific Rim.

The vigor of their efforts is stirring the ire of some Asian activists and others. “If the casinos singled out African-Americans and marketed to them as heavily as they do Asians, I’d imagine there’d be this huge political outcry,” said Timothy W. Fong, co-director of the Gambling Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The marketing has been so aggressive, and the penetration so deep, we’re starting to see alarming increases in the rates of problem gambling among Asians.”

These efforts include redesigning large portions of a casino floor to cater to the tastes of Asian guests; advertisements written in Asian dialects and placed in community newspapers in nearby cities; and mailers written in a recipient’s native language. The impact has been especially heavy among recent immigrants, Dr. Fong said.

One trend-setter has been Harrah’s Entertainment, which operates two dozen casinos across the United States, including the Caesars Palaces in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. At the start of 2006, Harrah’s opened a gambling and dining area inspired by the Ming- and Song-dynasty architectural elements at the Showboat in Atlantic City, in what Gary Loveman, its chief executive, described as “the country’s first authentic Asian gaming pit.”

The company imported carved woods from China to house a dozen baccarat tables — the preferred game among many Asian players — and several more for pai gow poker, which is based on an ancient Chinese dominoes game.

Over all, table game revenue at Showboat increased 35 percent last year, to $63 million, up from $46 million, and the casino more than doubled its business among Asian players. Table games include baccarat and pai gow but also craps, blackjack and roulette.

When the installation of an Asian gambling pit caused a similar increase in the table game winnings at Caesars Atlantic City, Mr. Loveman ordered similar changes at casinos across the country.

“There’s this interest in gambling among the Chinese that transcends anything you see in any other socioeconomic or ethnic group,” he said.

Experts are inclined to agree. “Ours is a culture that believes a lot in numbers and superstition and places a large focus on money,” said Dr. Fong, whose parents were born in mainland China. “So much revolves around fortune and fate and testing whether the ancestors have blessed you with a good life.”

Other casinos have followed Harrah’s lead, including the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which created its own Asian gambling pit last July, and the Mohegan Sun in eastern Connecticut, which is building an all-Asian gambling hall complete with a Hong Kong-style food court.

Las Vegas has been undergoing a similar makeover. Asian-themed baccarat salons and noodle bars are now as standard as scantily clad cocktail waitresses, and baccarat generates far more revenue than roulette or craps.

The spread of baccarat, said William P. Weidner, the president of Las Vegas Sands, the parent company of the Venetian, is “entirely a function of its popularity among the Chinese.”

It is also a function, Mr. Weidner said, of a small group of high rollers sometimes called whales — or those Mr. Weidner dubbed the “V-V.I.P.s” — who are willing to wager $50,000 or more on a single hand or roll of the dice and risk several million dollars over a weekend.

About 80 percent of Las Vegas’s biggest whales are from Asia, he said, echoing the estimates of other casino executives. Most of them are baccarat players from China and Hong Kong.

“One difference between our domestic and Asian guests are that our Asian guests spend much more time gambling,” said Mike Zanolli, manager of the 50 butlers the Venetian places at the service of its high rollers. “We see our Asian guest mainly in the baccarat salon,” Mr. Zanolli said, adding that they even take all or most of their meals there.

“The Asian customer on average uses a significantly larger share of their disposable income to game with,” said Mr. Weidner, who so prizes these high rollers that several times he has traveled with an interpreter to Hong Kong to run his casino designs by a feng shui master.

Mark Juliano, the former president of Caesars Las Vegas, says Asians account for even more than 80 percent of the city’s gambling whales.

“The big change I started noticing in 2004, 2005, were the Asians coming from mainland China,” said Mr. Juliano, now the chief operating officer of Trump Entertainment Resorts. Customers from Shanghai, Beijing and Guangdong are “becoming more and more dominant.”

Casino companies are not just pulling out the stops to attract Asian high rollers to America, they are also going to where the customers are. Several years ago, the Sands and Wynn Resorts opened large Las Vegas-style casinos in Macao, the former Portuguese colony that is the only place in China where gambling is legal. The Sands is aggressively seeking to expand elsewhere in Asia.

Last year, Macao surpassed the Las Vegas Strip to become the world’s largest gambling center.

“We view Asia as a critical growth area for our company,” Mr. Weidner said.

The wooing of newly rich high rollers from China is of little concern to critics but the broader focus on less-affluent Asian-Americans is a growing worry.

“Gambling has been a part of Asian culture going back thousands of years,” said Kent Woo, the executive director of the NICOS Chinese Health Coalition in San Francisco. “People grew up with gambling in their households. It was part of celebrations, it was part of everyday life. But there’s also a feeling that the casinos are exploiting our culture.”

The reactions among Asian activists to the aggressive marketing by casino companies, Mr. Woo said, “range from concern, to upset, to extreme anger.”

Studies suggest higher rates of problem gambling among Asians than other groups. Several recent studies in New Zealand and Australia have found that Asians living there had higher rates of addiction than non-Asians. Studies of Southeast Asian refugees living in Connecticut and Chinese waiters working in Montreal reached similar findings.

One long-term study under way in California, Dr. Fong of U.C.L.A. said, suggests that Asians are three times as likely as other groups to develop a serious gambling problem. He cautions, though, that the study is based on only a small sample of gamblers in the Los Angeles area.

Still, the evidence in California has been alarming enough to get the state government in 2004 to create an Asian Pacific Islander Problem Gambling Task Force, which is focused on starting treatment and prevention programs catering to those who speak only Chinese and other Asian languages.

“If there’s this hidden problem of addiction that’s not being addressed, and that’s what we think is happening,” Dr. Fong said, “it will slowly eat away at the fabric of the community.”