July 2012

Xinhua reported on Monday morning that the death toll after torrential rains pounded Beijing on Saturday had climbed to 37. The report said that “Among the victims, 25 were drowned, six were killed in house collapses, one by lightening strike and five were electrocuted.”

While there are certainly plenty of Chinese students overseas who are spoiled brats, often called ‘second generation rich’ and ‘second generation officials’ (fu erdai and guan erdai) who live off the fruits of their parents’ corruption or enterprise, the majority of Chinese students in the U.S., Canada, Australia and other popular destinations are there because of a lifetime of scrimping and saving on the part of their parents.

Recent reports of women being coerced into late-term abortions by local officials have thrust China’s population control policy into the spotlight and ignited an outcry among policy advisers and scholars who are seeking to push central officials to fundamentally change or repeal a law that penalizes families for having more than one child. Pressure to alter the policy is building on other fronts as well, as economists say that China’s aging population and dwindling pool of young, cheap labor will be a significant factor in slowing the nation’s economic growth rate.

AFTER a growing number of attacks on medical staff in China, doctors and nurses are finding hospitals increasingly unsafe. According to figures from the Ministry of Health, more than 17,000 “incidents” aimed at hospitals and their staff occurred in 2010, up from around 10,000 five years earlier. In a recent editorial, the Lancet, a medical journal published in Britain, warned bluntly that “China’s doctors are in crisis.”