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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 22nd, 2008 From: media at avaaz.org The August 23, 2008 - PRESS RELEASE - Will Appear In the International Herald Tribune and China’s Ming Pao, on the Day of The Beijing Olympics’ Closing. It Willl Say - Love China / Love Tibet / Love Burma / Love Darfur - and Will Promote Human Rights For China - a Hanshake to the World. 175,000 STRONG GLOBAL HANDSHAKE TO LAND IN BEIJING AHEAD OF OLYMPIC CLOSING CEREMONY see avaaz.org A virtual global handshake will land in Beijing tomorrow ahead of the Olympic Closing Ceremony. To culminate the campaign, this weekend, Avaaz.org has taken out an advertisement in Saturday’s International Herald Tribune and China’s Ming Pao to deliver the handshake to the world.
*** The global handshake petition reads: “With this handshake, we reach out to one another as citizens round the world in the Olympic spirit of friendship and excellence, committing to hold all our governments to a higher standard of peace, justice and respect for human dignity wherever they fall short – be it in Tibet, Iraq, Burma or beyond. Dialogue is the best way forward, for China, and the world.” *** AVAILABLE FOR INTERVIEW Ricken Patel, Executive Director, ricken at avaaz.org, +1 646 229 5416 *** Avaaz is a global web movement with over 3.3 million members worldwide, working to ensure that the views and values of people everywhere inform global decision-making. Avaaz means “voice” in many languages. Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on June 18th, 2008 From: mweldon at civic-exchange.org Hong Kong-based public policy think tank Civic Exchange has released a new report - A full copy of the report can be downloaded from the Civic Exchange website: A copy of the presentation can also be found on the website at : Related reports Marine Emission Reduction Options for Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta Region A Price too High: Health Impacts of Air Pollution in South China Lessons for Hong Kong: Air Quality Management in London and Los Angeles Apologies for cross posting Civic Exchange is a non-profit public policy think tank based in Hong Kong that helps to improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis. If you would like or further information on Civic Exchange’s ongoing and planned research programmes, please do not hesitate to contact our new Environmental Programme Manger Mike Kilburn ( mkilburn at civic-exchange.org) or visit our website at www.civic-exchange.org. Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on June 11th, 2008 A Price Too High: Health Impacts of Air Pollution in Southern China. Hong Kong-based think tank Civic Exchange, the Department of Community Medicine, School of Public Health of Hong Kong University; the Department of Community and Family Medicine, School of Public Health of Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Institute for the Environment of the University of Hong Kong for Science & Technology are pleased to announce the release a groundbreaking study today entitled A Price Too High – Health Impacts of Air Pollution in southern China. Using 2006 air quality data, the number of premature deaths estimated at 10,000 in Hong Kong, Macao and the Pearl River Delta can be avoided. At current levels, the pollution is also responsible for 440,000 annual hospital bed-days, and 11 million annual outpatient visits throughout the region. These are very large numbers exacting a heavy cost on the citizens in the region. The research also shows there has not been sufficient local and regional air pollution and public health research to track the effectiveness of policies, and assist the authorities to formulate the best policies to reduce pollution. In the past 25 years only 147 such reports have been conducted for all of mainland China, with only 37 of those concerned with southern China. With the East Asian and Asian Games coming to Hong Kong and Guangzhou in 2009 and 2010 respectively, the report outlines clear opportunities for positive collaboration to reduce emissions and improve public health. Full report and presentation are available on Civic Exchange website: Full literature review and supplementary report: Civic Exchange is a non-profit public policy think tank based in Hong Kong that helps to improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis. For more information about Civic Exchange, please visit www.civic-exchange.org Michele Weldon Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 18th, 2008 PROACTIVE CLIMATE CHANGE POLICY ON BUILDINGS NEEDED IN HONG KONG AND MACAU Civic Exchange and the Architects Association of Macau (AAM) are pleased to inform you of their first joint report on buildings and climate change, titled ‘Green’ House or Greenhouse? - Climate Change & The Building Stock of Hong Kong & Macau and funded by ADM Capital Foundation. The report argues that reducing emissions from buildings should be a priority since they are both major contributors to and very vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Other key messages include: · Good buildings are vital to quality of life; The report can be downloaded from the Civic Exchange website http://www.civic-exchange.org/eng/upload… To coincide with the release, on Friday 25th April 2008, Civic Exchange and the AAM will host a lively workshop on the challenges and opportunities for creating a low carbon built environment in Hong Kong. For further details and registration please go the Civic Exchange website at http://www.civic-exchange.org/eng/event_… Civic Exchange is a non-profit public policy think tank based in Hong Kong that helps to improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis. For more information about Civic Exchange, please visit www.civic-exchange.org AAM is an association of public and private sector architects based in Macau and undertakes a variety of activities related to architecture in Macau. For more information please visit www.macaoarchitects.com Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 8th, 2008 Contrasting responses to crackdowns in Tibet and Burma. By BRAHMA CHELLANEY, April 9, 2008, The Japan Times online. NEW DELHI — There are striking similarities between Tibet and Burma — both are strategically located, endowed with rich natural resources, suffering under long-standing repressive rule, resisting hard power with soft power and facing an influx of Han settlers. Yet the international response to the brutal crackdown on monk-led protests in Tibet and Burma has been a study in contrast. When the Burmese crackdown on peaceful protesters in Yangon last September left at least 31 people dead — according to a U.N. special rapporteur’s report — it ignited international indignation and a new round of U.S.-led sanctions. More than six months later, the tepid international response to an ongoing harsh crackdown in Tibet by the Burmese junta’s closest ally, China, raises the question whether that country has accumulated such power as to escape even censure over actions that are far more repressive and extensive than what Burma witnessed. Despite growing international appeals to Beijing to respect Tibetans’ human rights and cultural identity, and to begin dialogue with the Dalai Lama, there has been no call for any penal action, however mild, against China. Even the leverage provided by the 2008 Beijing Olympics is not being seized upon to help end the repression in the Tibetan region. When the Burmese generals cracked down on monks and their prodemocracy supporters, the outside world watched vivid images of brutality, thanks to citizen reporters using the Internet. But China employs tens of thousands of cyberpolice to censor Web sites, patrol cybercafes, monitor text and video messages from cellular phones, and hunt down Internet activists. As a result, the outside world has yet to see a single haunting image of the Chinese use of brute force against Tibetans. The only images released by Beijing are those that seek to show Tibetans in bad light, as engaged in arson and other attacks.
But now the Han demographic invasion of the Tibetan plateau is spilling over into Burma, with Chinese presence conspicuous in Mandalay city and the areas to the northeast. Today, the resistance against repressive rule in both Tibet and Burma is led by iconic Nobel laureates, one living in exile and the other under house detention. In fact, the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi received the Nobel peace prize in quick succession for the same reason: For leading a non-violent struggle. Each is a symbol of soft power, building such moral authority as to command wide international respect and influence. Yet another parallel is that heavy repression has failed to break the resistance to autocratic rule in both Tibet and Burma. If anything, growing authoritarianism has begun to backfire, as the popular monk-led revolts in Tibet and Burma have highlighted.
Energy-rich Burma is a land bridge between the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. China, however, has succeeded in strategically penetrating Burma, which it values as an entryway to the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean. Beijing is now busy completing the Irrawaddy Corridor through Burma involving road, river, rail, port and energy-transport links. The key difference between Tibet and Burma is that the repression in the former is by an occupying power. Months after the 1949 communist takeover in Beijing, China’s People’s Liberation Army entered what was effectively a sovereign nation in full control of its own affairs. At the root of the present Tibet crisis is China’s failure to grant the autonomy it promised when it imposed on Tibetans a “17-Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” in 1951. Instead of agreeing to autonomy, Beijing has actually done the opposite: It has pursued Machiavellian policies by breaking up Tibet as it existed before the invasion, and by seeking to reduce Tibetans to a minority in their own homeland through the state-supported relocation of millions of Han Chinese. It has gerrymandered Tibet by making Amdo (the present Dalai Lama’s birthplace) Qinghai province and merging eastern Kham into the Han provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu. More recently, Chongqing province was carved out of Sichuan. The traditional Tibetan region is a distinct cultural and economic entity. But with large, heavily Tibetan areas having been severed from Tibet, what is left is just the 1965 creation — the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), the central plateau comprising U-Tsang and western Kham, or roughly half of the Tibetan plateau. Yet China has changed even the demographic composition of TAR, where there were hardly any Han settlers before the Chinese annexation. TAR, home to barely 40 percent of the 6.5 million Tibetans in China, was the last “autonomous region” created by the Chinese communists, the others being Inner Mongolia (1947), Xinjiang (1955), Guangxi Zhuang (1958) and Ningxia (1958). In addition, China has 30 “autonomous prefectures,” 120 “autonomous counties” and 1,256 “autonomous townships.” All of the so-called autonomous areas are in minority homelands, which historically were ruled from Beijing only when China itself had been conquered by foreigners — first by the Mongols, and then the Manchu. Today, these areas are autonomous only in name, with that tag designed to package a fiction to the ethnic minorities. Apart from not enforcing its one-child norm in these sparsely populated but vast regions (which make up three-fifths of China’s landmass), Beijing grants them no meaningful autonomy. In Tibet, what the ravages of the Cultural Revolution left incomplete, forced “political education” since has sought to accomplish.
Instead it has sought to malign the Dalai Lama for seeking “Greater Tibet” and pressed a maximalist historical position. Not content with the Dalai Lama’s 1987 concession in publicly forsaking Tibetan independence, Beijing insists that he also affirm that Tibet was always part of China. But as the Dalai Lama said in a recent interview, “Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history.” Contrary to China’s claim that its present national political structure is unalterable to accommodate Tibetan aspirations, the fact is that its constitutional arrangements have continued to change, as underscored by the creation of 47 new supposedly “autonomous” municipalities or counties in minority homelands just between 1984 and 1994, according to the work of Harvard scholar Lobsang Sangay. Until the latest uprising, Beijing believed its weapon of repression was working well and thus saw no need to bring Tibetans together under one administrative unit, as they demand, or to grant Tibet a status equivalent to Hong Kong and Macau. President Hu Jintao, who regards Tibet as his core political base from the time he was the party boss there, has ruled out any compromise that would allow the Dalai Lama to return home from his long exile in India. Following the uprising, Hu’s line on Tibet is likely to further harden, unless effective international pressure is brought to bear. The contrasting international response to the repression in Tibet and Burma brings out an inconvenient truth: The principle that engagement is better than punitive action to help change state behavior is applied only to powerful autocratic countries, while sanctions are a favored tool to try and tame the weak. Sanctions against China are also precluded by the fact that the West has a huge commercial stake in that country. But Burma, where its interests are trifling, is a soft target. So, while an impoverished Burma reels under widening sanctions, a booming China openly mocks the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Even the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of countless hundreds of students did not trigger lasting international trade sanctions against Beijing. No one today is suggesting trade sanctions. But given that Beijing secured the right to host the 2008 Olympics on the promise to improve its human-rights record, the free world has a duty to demand that it end its repression in Tibet or face an international boycott, if not of the Games, at least of the opening ceremony, to which world leaders have been invited. By making the success of this summer’s Olympics a prestige issue, China has handed the world valuable leverage that today is begging to be exercised. This rare opportunity must not be frittered away. Permalink | ### |
