May 6, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
China, Human Rights
To some, holding the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will right wrongs; to others, it is just wrong
BEIJING – Red digits on a countdown clock blink out the days
until the International Olympic Committee chooses which country
will host the 2008 Summer Games.
An enormous scroll unfurled from China’s Great Wall recently
proclaimed “Success to Beijing!” and “We will win!”
At bid committee headquarters, architect Steven Gao showed
off his model of a remade Beijing, from Tiananmen Square and the
Forbidden City, where emperors sipped tea, to sparkling modern
sports facilities.
The 2008 Olympics, Gao said, will be the “continuation of
traditional China culture.”
Many agree with him that China is a likely bet to host the
Games. Commercial sponsors – primarily U.S. corporations – want
access to 1.3 billion Chinese. Olympic movement leaders want to
take the Games to regions such as China, Africa and South America
that haven’t hosted the Olympics. China lost the 2000 Games to
Australia by two votes.
But China remains relatively isolated despite two decades of
economic opening. And just as campaigning in Beijing culminates
with nationalistic public displays, China faces increasing
conflict with the United States over human rights and military
postures that threaten to turn confrontational.
The conflict gives grist for a renewed debate over whether
China deserves to host the Olympics. China’s communist leaders
bristle. They figured China already has done plenty to win global
acceptance.
New freedoms are allowed here and spreading, said Wang Wei,
secretary general of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games Bid Committee.
“China people, now we can comment on government affairs.
That’s a change that has taken place,” Wang said.
And the 2008 Olympics would be a “catalyst” for more change,
Wang said, “for human rights as well.” Changes “will not be as
fast,” he said, if China’s bid fails.
Beijing’s success also could help U.S. interests in hosting
the 2012 Olympics, Wang added.
“It will be very hard” for the U.S. to host the 2012 Games if
Toronto hosts the Olympics in ’08, he said. “It’s very important
not to let Toronto have it this time.”
Yet, opposition from some Americans is adamant. That is
especially true after last month’s detention of a U.S. spy plane
crew for 11 days and the continuing clash over returning the plane.
Hosting the Olympics “brings a certain status to a city and a
country,” Gov. Bill Owens said. “I don’t think, given China’s
human rights record, that it would be any more appropriate to have
had the Olympics in Cape Town,” South Africa, under apartheid.
Cleaning up Beijing
On July 13, IOC members will meet in Moscow to select a host
for the 2008 Games. Competing with Beijing are Istanbul, Turkey;
Osaka, Japan; Paris; and Toronto. U.S influence is limited, with
four U.S. members on the 126-person committee. Ballots IOC members
cast in a multiround elimination process are secret. Members from
candidate countries can’t vote.
IOC members this month are to receive technical reports from
committee experts who visited and evaluated candidate cities. The
reports are supposed to focus on site preparations – not politics.
And on that score, China has begun an all-out push including
flashy proposals for beach volleyball and other events to be
conducted at Tiananmen Square, site of China’s massacre of
pro-democracy supporters in 1989.
Consider the $12.2 billion Olympic environmental clean-up
Beijing launched after teaming with a Denver-area company.
Some of the world’s deadliest pollution hangs over Beijing.
Congested masses here hack and wheeze as they move through
the corrosive, gray murk. Breathing 24 hours of the pollution from
factories, coal-fired power plants and thickening traffic is the
equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, according to
world health authorities. Beijing is one of several Chinese cities
where, Chinese authorities reported this past decade, air
pollution caused millions of deaths.
China’s government accepted that Beijing’s pollution could
choke the throats – and memories – of visiting IOC technical
experts. So, in 1998, China turned to CH2M Hill.
A 12,000-employee engineering firm based in Greenwood
Village, CH2M Hill has been contracted to clean up messes from New
York’s toxic Love Canal to the Rocky Flats radioactive nuclear
weapons waste west of Denver.
In February, when the IOC experts arrived in Beijing for
inspections, CH2M Hill’s managing director for China, Sarah Liao,
presented the “Action Plan for a Green Olympics”:
Plant millions of fast-growing trees throughout Beijing (pop.
12 million) covering 100 square kilometers – an area the size of
Denver International Airport. The goal: Improve air quality and
shield Beijing from Gobi Desert dust that mixes with smog.
Reduce urban industrial pollution by moving factories away
from Beijing.
Double sewage treatment capacity so that most wastewater is
recycled.
Convert 90 percent of Beijing buses and 70 percent of taxis
to clean-burning natural gas.
Urge every citizen to recycle at least half their garbage.
IOC experts recorded this in detail. Americans and Chinese
involved contend this sort of U.S.-China cooperation could prove
far more effective than confrontation for both countries – and the
world – in the future.
“I think Beijing deserves the Olympics,” said CH2M Hill chief
executive Ralph Peterson, who was in Beijing on business last
month during the spy plane standoff.
Chinese leaders “have made tremendous progress” over the past
two decades, Peterson said. Letting Beijing host the Olympics now
“is a matter of encouraging China’s active participation in the
global community.”
U.S.-China relations
IOC vice president Dick Pound, one of five contenders to
succeed outgoing IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch in July,
applauded China’s environmental clean-up efforts during a Denver
Post interview.
“I don’t know whether it could win it for them,” Pound said,
“but it would certainly take out of play a major concern that
might otherwise be a question mark.”
Pound won’t vote because he’s Canadian, and Toronto is a
contender for the 2008 Games. But he’s familiar with IOC thinking.
The spy plane incident, Pound said, “is not going to play much of
a role at all. I don’t see that as even being on the radar screen
come July 13.”
But rancorous U.S.-China relations raged anew after President
Bush’s recent assertion that the United States will back Taiwan,
which China regards as a rebellious province, militarily if
necessary. Last week, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld downgraded
U.S. military relations with China, and China warned President
Bush’s proposed missile defense system will set off an arms race
that could threaten world peace. Bush then lashed out at China for
not allowing greater religious freedom, denouncing this as a sign
of weakness.
In the U.S. Congress, lawmakers want to use the Olympics as a
political wedge to punish China. Some 60 House members and more in
the Senate have sponsored bipartisan resolutions that the 2008
Olympics should not be conducted in Beijing unless China releases
all political prisoners and improves civil liberties.
Support is strong, said U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., on
the House International Relations Committee.
“This doesn’t mean we end trade with China,” Tancredo said,
casting the resolution he co-sponsored as political “cover” for
those leery of cutting economic ties. “This is a statement that
needs to be made. China and the world need to see that there is
strong concern in the United States about human rights in China
and the aggressive nature of the regime.”
Whether any of this will make any difference is unclear.
European leaders recently declined to join the United States in
sponsoring a United Nations censure of China. Choosing an Olympics
site is up to IOC members – not Congress.
But the highest-ranking U.S. member – IOC vice president
Anita DeFrantz – said, “I always take very seriously the opinions
expressed by Congress.” She discussed human rights in China
recently with Amnesty International Director William Schulz.
DeFrantz is another candidate to succeed Samaranch, the
outgoing IOC president. As an Olympic rower in 1980, she went to
court to oppose the U.S. government boycott of the Moscow Olympics
to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Yet DeFrantz said her vote in July will depend mostly on what
athletes want, including any concerns athletes may voice regarding
China’s human rights. “I am listening to many arguments,” DeFrantz
said.
The U.S. State Department’s latest assessment describes
worsening human rights in China, including crackdowns on religion
and the Falun Gong spiritual movement, a blend of meditation and
stretching that has attracted millions of Chinese followers. The
report also documents repression of minority groups, such as
Tibetans, and suppression of political dissent.
Some human rights groups are refocusing their campaigns
against China to challenge Beijing’s Olympics bid.
In Denver recently, Students for a Free Tibet, with 600
chapters nationwide, launched a campaign under the banner “No
Olympics for China until Tibet is Free.” College and high school
students sent hundreds of letters to IOC leaders: “Say No to
Beijing 2008.” And Tibetan immigrants across the United States are
mailing white silk “khata” prayer scarves as reminders that China
punishes Tibetans who challenge Chinese rule, said campaign leader
Tenzing Jigme, 32, a Tibetan student at the University of Colorado
in Denver.
“America has so many economic ties to China, people don’t
want to mess around,” Jigme said. “But the Olympics is one area
where you can maybe send a warning.”
“We want to vote’
In Beijing, news that anybody opposes Beijing’s bid brought
scowls from residents who overwhelmingly support hosting the
Olympics. Even some democracy advocates contend the Games would
promote positive change.
“There’s room to improve the system,” said Liu Dageng, 33, at
a restaurant with his wife, who was at Tiananmen Square shortly
before China’s 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators.
“We want to vote, of course.”
But denying the Olympics to try to force change misconstrues
the Games “as a kind of gift,” Liu said. That “hurts the
Olympics,” he said. “Keep it simple. This is against the Olympic
spirit.”
IOC officials have conducted the Games in politically
controversial places before – the Soviet Union in 1980, South
Korea in ’88 when Korea technically was at war and the government
clashed regularly with labor demonstrators, and Spain in ’92 when
sometimes-violent Basque separatists were active. Some Olympics
leaders say the Games can boost human rights in host countries.
The blotch on that argument is Berlin, in 1936, where the
Olympics gave Hitler a platform shortly before he led the
Holocaust killing of 6 million European Jews.
Now in Beijing, residents eager to impress the world are
trying to help China’s Olympics campaign. They can’t do much about
their government’s approach to human rights and military buildup
with missiles aimed at Taiwan – which many support. But growing
numbers participate in the “Action Plan for a Green Olympics.”
A new Olympics-driven activism is emerging in some areas,
with restaurant operators considering whether to ban smoking.
University students recently debated forest-friendly alternatives
to China’s reliance on wood for hundreds of millions of chopsticks.
In the Chen Shou Yuan neighborhood southwest of Tiananmen
Square, residents planted trees, grass and flowers for an Olympics
Park amid their apartment towers.
Friends played pingpong in the park one recent evening, and
factory janitor Song Yue Ze, 49, laughed about the U.S.-China spy
plane standoff, pounding his fists together. Then he played tour
guide, pointing out how pleasant Beijing neighborhoods can be. “I
want your vote,” Song said.
And Liu Hung Ngor, apartment manager, earnestly taped up a
handwritten sign at the base of a stairwell. The sign urged
residents to go to the apartment office and pick up a new gas
nozzle, free, to attach to their stoves and limit pollution.
“It will be much cleaner,” Liu said. “We want Beijing to be
able to host the Olympics. And by hosting the Olympics, we can
tell the world what we are like. We are proud of our heritage.”
March 21, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
China, Globalization, Human Rights
Webb to open office in nation at odds with U.S.
On the surface, Beijing and Washington spar over destroyer
sales to Taiwan, missile defense and human rights.
But behind the scenes, U.S. business and local governments,
including Denver’s, conduct taxpayer-funded courtships of China,
forging closer and deeper relations than ever before.
This week, when Denver Mayor Wellington Webb departs for
China with 47 executives, scholars and city officials, he’ll push
the courtship to a new level by opening the first U.S. city office
in China.
Webb lined up a carpeted, bedroom-size sixth-floor office in
central Shanghai to serve as a conduit for business and pro-Denver
buzz. Connecting with China’s 1.3 billion people will propel
Denver “ahead of the curve,” Webb said in an interview, promising
local economic growth and “a relationship that will last long
after I am mayor.”
The City Council approved $160,000 for the China project, and
the eight-day trade mission is expected to cost another $36,000.
Shanghai-based trade representative Roland Tong’s salary will be
$84,000 to serve city interests across China.
An office-opening ceremony is set for Thursday with
Shanghai’s mayor.
Then, after swings through China’s ancient capital of Xi’an
and Beijing, Webb hopes to meet with Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji.
Webb and Colorado Gov. Bill Owens hosted Zhu in Denver two years
ago. Zhu oversees China’s economy and access by foreign companies.
Corporate executives accompanying Webb want to win
construction contracts in China, line up direct flights to Denver,
supply television programs and help China land the 2008 Olympics.
But they’re pursuing their interests as a high-level drama
between Washington and Beijing tilts U.S.-Chinese cooperation
toward competition. President Bush soon must decide whether to
defy Chinese President Jiang Zemin by selling four high-tech
destroyers to Taiwan. A Chinese diplomat last week warned of a
very serious setback if the sales go through. Diplomats also
dicker over Pentagon plans for missile defense, and evidence that
China recently aided Iraq. A new U.S.-backed United Nations
resolution would condemn China for human rights abuses – just as
Beijing seeks the Olympics.
Yet state and city ties to China and elsewhere deepen as
mainstream America connects with the global economy.
Over the past 30 years, states established at least 132 trade
offices worldwide, according to state records. Governors and
mayors also lead more trade missions and typically support
international sister-city links. In contrast, U.S. federal
government representation abroad, with 257 posts, stayed
relatively steady through the 1990s.
Relations with China in particular are growing. China
supplies U.S. families with affordable toys, shoes, clothing and
other merchandise worth $100 billion a year. In China, 15 states
run mainland or Hong Kong offices.
Among cities, Houston, too, is considering an office in China.
“If China is our strategic competitor,” Webb said, “one of
the ways to address that is to find areas where we agree, and
where we disagree. … It’s better to trade and tie your economies
together than have military buildups.”
Possible drawbacks
But even proponents see risks.
A risk that China won’t open up. China agreed to lower
tariffs as a condition for its expected entry into the World Trade
Organization this year. Currently, Colorado-based ConAgra Inc.
faces 40 percent tariffs to sell beef in China. In Fort Morgan,
sunflower seed entrepreneur Mike Erker, whose sales to China
topped $1.5 million last year, pays 32 percent tariffs that he
suspects back-channel seed sellers from Taiwan avoid.
A risk that strife between between Beijing and Washington
could stifle business. Englewood-based Jeppesen-Sanderson, which
makes navigational charts for airlines, can’t obtain coordinates
for some Chinese runways because Chinese military officials
object, chief executive Horst Bergmann said. “The political
climate is important for the business climate,” Bergmann said. “If
Washington would open up, I think China would possibly be more
lenient.”
A risk that even if China does cut tariffs and bureaucracy,
companies from Colorado still won’t be able to compete. U.S. trade
with China is increasingly imbalanced in favor of China. The
United States recently posted a record $83.8 billion deficit.
In the Rocky Mountain region, imports from China topped $883
million last year, up from $32 million in 1990, according to U.S.
customs data analyzed for The Denver Post by federal trade
specialists. The region includes Colorado and parts of Wyoming,
Idaho, Utah and Montana. The specialists said state-by-state
import statistics aren’t available but that the bulk of the
regional imports probably went to Colorado.
Meanwhile, exports of Colorado goods and services to China
were valued at just $164 million, up from $41 million in 1996.
Mainland China ranks 14th among Colorado trading partners. If
exports to mainland China are combined with the $233 million to
Hong Kong and $196 million to Taiwan, the “Chinese Economic
Region” looks more promising. Colorado’s top trade partner is
Canada, which bought goods and services worth more than $1 billion
last year, followed by Japan.
Human rights concerns
Beyond the risks, critics question whether cities and states
should deal with China, a communist dictatorship, on principle.
“China has the most repressive government on the planet,”
said Denver Councilman Ed Thomas, who tried unsuccessfully to
block public funding for Webb’s venture. “I don’t think we should
be over there shaking their hand.”
Thomas lambasted Webb for courting China when Webb previously
led city efforts to boycott South Africa under apartheid.
“People are setting themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square.
How much more odious do you want to get?” Thomas said. “You can’t
justifiably shut the door on South Africa and then offer an olive
branch to the government in China, where people are setting
themselves on fire in demonstrations.”
Chinese dissident Harry Wu, an author and lobbyist in
Washington, D.C., contends China’s treatment of political
dissidents, religious believers and labor activists is worsening.
Denver taxpayers “have to stop courtship like this,” Wu said.
“This is using the common people’s money for business, business
associated with a communist government. Why do you want to set up
all kinds of relations with this regime? You never wanted to do
this with the former Soviet Union because it was the “Evil
Empire,’ right?”
At least Webb should “strongly raise concerns,” said Jie Sun,
a Chinese immigrant in Denver devoted to the Falun Gong spiritual
movement, which China’s government has banned.
“To sacrifice human rights for a good trading relationship is
to sacrifice the American value of freedom of belief.”
In Washington, conservatives press for a harder line on
China. U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Littleton – a House International
Affairs committee member who opposed granting China permanent
normalized trade relations last year – denounced Webb’s overtures
as “ridiculous, naive at best. This will only increase our trade
imbalance with China, not improve it. There will be these little
sops they throw. We’ll get a contract here, a contract there.”
Yet Webb is adamant. He says human rights in China is a
serious issue but that economic engagement will increase U.S.
leverage and improve human rights and labor conditions.
Cheap labor beckons
And China with its 1.3 billion people – many of them willing
to work for 20 cents an hour – entices. More Colorado
businesspeople attend programs on China than on any other country,
said Jim Reis, chief of the Denver-based World Trade Center and an
architect of Denver’s trade mission.
For them to profit from China, veteran U.S. diplomats say,
support from political leaders helps.
Politician-led trade missions “have reasonable paybacks”
though generally nothing immediate, said Craig Johnstone, a
retired U.S. ambassador now serving as president of the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce Center for Corporate Citizenship.
“Very few are boondoggles,” he said. “It’s a shame more
public officials don’t do more of this.”
Most of the 30 or so businesspeople accompanying Webb already
have connections in China. They represent large companies such as
CH2M Hill, the Gates Corporation, Harza Engineering and RNL
Design, and a few smaller firms such as Chi Investments and Revis
Asbestos.
Few see Webb’s help and a trade office as crucial.
“We probably don’t need it as much as maybe some other
companies,” said Jim Nelson, vice president and general counsel
for Gates.
But Nelson and others said Webb, if effective, could boost
Colorado business by opening doors. In China, government approval
is required for just about everything, and building relationships
with ministry officials is seen as crucial. Often there’s no
occasion to do that without politicians and pomp – supported by
taxpayers.
Going to China with Webb will give “access to people and
resources that you would not have going alone,” said Michael
Burke, vice president for Startek, a supply chain management
company with offices in Denver, Greeley and Grand Junction.
Some executives also hoped to get a better feel for the human
rights climate in China. It’s not a matter of questioning
government policies but rather understanding project-level
procedures such as how Chinese partners would treat contract
workers.
“If we can’t agree on certain principles, it would be
impossible for us to work,” said Dean Nelson, vice president of
Mortenson Construction, a top U.S. contractor that built Denver’s
Pepsi Center and Coors Field and is exploring opportunities in
China.
“From the humanitarian side, I think there are issues
everybody has trouble with,” Nelson said. “How are we going to
control safety for these people? … We simply couldn’t accept a
project or work under conditions where we would put people at risk.”
The businesspeople met with city officials last week – a
session city officials closed to reporters.
They also received guidance from Hai Yan Zhang, an
interpreter and cultural consultant who grew up in Beijing. She
said she always dreamed of building bridges between Colorado and
China.
Her advice to Webb and crew: Avoid the impatience, arrogance
and ignorance that often plague Americans in China. And pay
attention to image. Denver’s sixth-floor office in central
Shanghai – adjacent to a Ritz Carlton hotel in an
internationalized district with a Starbucks Coffee outlet – sends
the appropriate signal. A basement office would give “no face, no
status,” she said.
“In China, who you are and what you are doesn’t matter. It’s
what people think.”
February 4, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
SAN JULIAN, Mexico – Outside the house, the annual fiestas
reverberated, three weeks of dancing, weddings, family reunions,
polished pickup trucks parading through town.
Inside, Maria del Carmen, 49, sat silently at her kitchen
table holding a photo of a man in a cowboy hat standing by his
beloved red horse.
The man should have been here with all the other husbands,
sons, brothers and fathers reveling in their hometown before
returning to work in the United States.
But 16 months ago, Denver police stormed the wrong house at
the wrong time. They killed him, the wrong man, in a botched drug
raid.
The man was her husband, Ismael Mena. To make amends, Denver
taxpayers paid $400,000. That money bought this house at the edge
of San Julian for Maria and her nine children – more convenient
than living on Mena’s hardscrabble farm southeast of here.
The kitchen is fancier than Maria ever imagined, with running
water, a stove, a 4-foot-tall refrigerator, tile floor, even a
microwave. In addition, monthly $1,600 checks are scheduled to
arrive for two decades.
Still, every check “makes me more sad, because I remember
what happened to my husband,” Maria del Carmen said. “I’m
thinking, it was much nicer when he was here in Mexico with us.”
And while the legal business is officially over, the Mena
case festers, raising questions of justice that have many
Coloradans, and Mexicans, furious.
Last month, Denver leaders let officer Joseph Bini, whose
faulty no-knock warrant triggered the raid, resume police work
after a three-month suspension. Last week, City Council members
agreed to pay $1.2 million – three times as much – to a Denver
teenager paralyzed when police shot him running from a burglary
with a gun.
“Disgusting,” Mexican Consul General Carlos Barros said in
Denver.
Here in Mexico, people shake their heads, saying this just
cements the hypocrisy of a nation that relies on Mexican labor as
never before while openly discounting Mexican lives.
Yet Maria’s message to you in Denver is measured: “We thank
everyone who is helping us, supporting us,” she said. “I feel sad
when I think of what happened to my husband. I take consolation
that I’m with my children.”
For Bini, she voiced compassion. “I’m very sad about what
happened to my husband,” she said. “But him, he needs his work. He
has a family, too.”
New house means end
of life on the land
Big changes in the Mena survivors’ lives began six months ago
when they used some settlement money to buy the two-story,
three-bedroom house in this farming town of about 20,000 people.
It cost $70,000.
Living here’s easier, though not as free, as on the farm
where the Menas struggled before. Ismael Mena was exceptionally
devoted to traditional farming on his 14 acres. He kept his family
in a three-room adobe house. He invested in livestock despite
scarce water and globalization’s side effects: collapsing beef and
milk prices.
Mexico’s entry into the world economy means more competition
for small farmers and new factory opportunities for workers,
raising expectations – and shaking traditions Mena loved.
Now, his survivors’ house is fairly typical.
San Julian is filled with modern, bright two- and three-story
homes painted pink, turquoise and yellow, some adorned with
intricate round observatory towers and giant rooftop satellite
dishes. That’s because an estimated 90 percent of men here work in
the United States. They earn up to $20 an hour (about $41,600 a
year, not counting overtime), enabling an ever-more comfortable,
family-oriented lifestyle.
They are among 300,000 or more Mexicans who go north, legally
or illegally, to work in U.S. cities such as Denver. Mexicans
working in the United States last year sent home an estimated $7
billion. Meanwhile, poverty in Mexico is increasing, with 15
million people living on less than $1 a day. Ismael Mena worked in
the United States for years, with an official work permit at
times. In Denver, Coca-Cola accepted his papers and gave him a
$300-a-week night-shift job lifting red plastic crates.
Today in Mexico, the Menas are more or less middle class. Few
people know they receive money from Denver. The $1,600 monthly
checks, which started arriving in August, cover basic expenses.
Maria said groceries for 10 – including 2-year-old grandson Miguel
– cost about $1,000. Medicine costs about $100. Ismael Jr., 18, is
diabetic. Twin 21-year-old daughters Rosaelia and Rosalilia suffer
from headaches and underwent medical tests.
“They are traumatized,” Dr. Ismael Macias said in his
diagnosis. “It will take time.”
Other monthly expenses include $80 for telephone service, $20
for electricity, $20 for cable television (39 channels) and $8 for
water. Maria and her daughters make most of their own clothes.
They walk to church and shops, though eldest son Heriberto, 22,
recently paid $8,000 for a used Chevy truck. Filling it with gas
costs about $50 – too much.
The main difference now: less work. Running water – “hot
here, cold here, and we even have hot water upstairs,” Maria noted
proudly – means she needn’t hike out to pumps or ponds and lug
buckets back every time she washes dishes or clothes.
The gas stove frees her from having to find, cut and haul
wood before meals.
The refrigerator enables a more diverse diet. Maria still
prepares corn tortillas and beans in the blackened ceramic pot she
used before. Now she also serves beef and fresh vegetables.
At last the children are regularly in school. At sunrise, as
roosters crow, Juanita, 13, and Irene, 15, their backpacks stuffed
with books and notepads, set out down Calle Reforma toward the
high school with 17 rooms and 700 students. Soon after, Alejandro,
12, who loves soccer, and Carmen, 9, who loves coloring books,
walk through a pasture to a primary school.
Ismael Jr., makes furniture at a small local factory. Wages
are less than $10 a day. But he’s proud, learning new skills. “Six
days a week,” he said, smiling, sanding a sheet of pine for
shelves that are sold here in San Julian.
Family keeps memories of hard-working patriarch
Mena’s family keeps a suitcase full of his work clothes to help
them remember him – very strong, hardworking, a loving man who
brought them toys from the United States, a horseman who could
also ride bulls.
“When you hold the clothes, it makes you content,
remembering,” Rosaelia said.
Yet memories also torment them, arriving unexpectedly,
sister Rosalilia added.
“Not exactly every hour, but at various times all the day.
Always when we see something he liked. Or when we see a red horse
– like his. It’s sad, thinking. …”
The twins plan to work at small household sewing centers in
the future if their headaches pass. Maria taught them to sew on a
white Kenmore that Ismael brought from the United States.
For now, they work at home, mopping the tiled floor daily.
They hang clothes to dry on the patio. The children help water red
flowers growing in silver coffee cans and clay pots. They’re not
allowed to play in the living room with immaculate new furniture.
One recent night, the Mena children walked through San Julian
to a carnival, part of the annual Candelaria fiestas. Originally
religious, the fiestas are adapted to a family-centered migratory
culture. The Menas passed bumper cars, a roller coaster and dart
games where visiting fathers hovered over other children smiling
happily.
It’s a source of great sadness for Maria that her eldest son,
Heriberto, plans to move north again in the migration that
consumed his father.
Heriberto, 22, first left at 16. That’s what local heroes do.
He excelled in the United States, essentially running one
restaurant, waiting tables at another. He graduated from high
school and had begun college computer courses when his father was
killed.
He never visited home for fear his lack of legal immigration
papers would make it difficult for him to get back to work. He
missed his father’s funeral for this reason. In December, he went
home because the settlement made his family’s situation less
precarious.
He loved it. He went out every night, circling up and down
Avenida Hidalgo, letting friends drive his blue truck. A photo of
his father in his wallet, and long-awaited braces on his teeth,
Heriberto exchanged greetings, shook hands, savored every glance
at the beautiful women. He danced late into one starry night with
a girl in a pink top and tight black pants as Julio Preciado and
his band performed.
“But one month is enough,” he said. There’s no work here that
appeals to him, he said. Farming offers no future.
Looking at Heriberto chatting over tequila at a wedding as
the bride and groom danced, he seemed “like the happiest guy in
the world,” said Juan Herrera, 33, a close friend who stood nearby.
But Heriberto’s head is turning inside, Herrera said. “Maybe
after five years, this family will begin to feel better.” Denver’s
wrongful death money “is part of” the healing, Herrera said. “But
it’s not everything. Because in Mexico the family is so strong, it
is harder here. It’s going to take time.”
No formal apology from Denver ever arrived here, the Menas say.
One recent morning, Heriberto drove half an hour east to the
cemetery where his father is buried.
Caretaker Pedro Losano was hauling weeds in a wheelbarrow.
Heriberto found the white tomb. He faced it silently for
nearly two minutes. He cried quietly.
He went to Losano and asked what the family must pay to keep
the bones in the tomb after five years.
Then Heriberto drove west, kicking up contrails of dust, on
the road to the family farm by an old church and a few houses that
together are known as San Felipe Jesus de las Casas Blancas.
He stopped at the church. Old men were fixing it up slowly
for a fiesta today. Heriberto entered through the side. He
crossed himself and sat in the front pew where the family used to
sit together.
Outside, Sara and Francisco Cabrera, selling sodas to passing
pilgrims, told Heriberto it’s not right that police responsible
for killing his father continue to work.
Heriberto drove on to the family farm where his grandmother
Dona Julia, 81, putters alone with her mutt and caged dove. She
refuses to leave the crumbling old house with dirt floors: “mi
casa.”
She padlocks herself into her room every night, where candles
burn by the carved statues of saints on her shelves.
Heriberto sat with her, and reluctantly gave her $100 for
food. He gave her money before and she promptly donated it to the
church in memory of her son.
An old friend, Santiago Torres, approached on his burro,
asking if anybody had seen three stray cows.
He told how he knew Ismael Mena when Heriberto was a toddler,
helped him build the gray adobe house and work the cornfield.
Torres knew Ismael “better than I,” Heriberto recalled sadly, for
his father worked in the United States during much of his childhood.
His grandmother returned to her stitching and watering her
plants. She said Ismael’s ghost visits her on the farm. “I still
cry for my littlest boy,” she said tearfully.
“I had a dream. My son was calling. “Mama! Mama!’ I woke up.
I went to console him, my poor little boy. But he wasn’t there.”
THE CASE OF ISMAEL MENA
Sept. 29, 1999
Denver police kill Mexican migrant Ismael Mena in a botched
no-knock drug raid on High Street in Denver. SWAT officers went to
the wrong house because of a mistake in a search warrant prepared
by officer Joseph Bini. Mena had been sleeping after his night
shift at the Coca-Cola bottling plant.
Dec. 15, 1999
The FBI launches as investigation of possible criminal civil
rights violations after Mexican officials raise concerns in
Washington, D.C.
Feb. 4, 2000
Special prosecutor appointed by Denver District Attorney Bill
Ritter charges Bini with perjury. Bini allegedly lied to the judge
who signed the warrant, claiming he knew the address in the
warrant was correct because he saw his informant enter and leave
the house.
Feb. 8, 2000
Denver Police Chief Tom Sanchez returns from Hawaii after being
called back by Denver Mayor Wellington Webb. That evening, Webb
fires Sanchez as chief.
Feb. 23, 2000
Webb names Division Chief Gerry Whitman interim police chief.
Feb. 24, 2000
Webb announces a proposed overhaul of Police Department
policies, including reducing the number of no-knock raids and
giving the public access to discipline records.
March 23, 2000
Mena family settles with the city of Denver for $400,000.
May 19, 2000
Gov. Bill Owens signs Senate Bill 208, which tightens
requirements for approval of no-knock warrants. A prosecutor’s
signature now is required before a judge is asked to approve a
warrant.
July 7, 2000
Whitman becomes police chief.
July 18, 2000
Denver police alter ride-along rules after revelations that
then-Colorado Rockie player Mike Lansing accompanied police during
the Mena raid.
Sept. 1, 2000
A Denver judge limits evidence that can be presented against
Bini. Mention of Mena’s death during next month’s trial is
forbidden.
Dec. 1, 2000
Denver District Judge Shelly Gilman sentences Bini to 12 months
probation and 150 hours of community service after he pleads
tearfuly for mercy. Bini pleaded guilty to first-degree
misconduct, a misdemeanor.
Jan. 15, 2001
Denver Manager of Safety Ari Zavaras and Whitman concur: Bini
can go back to work. They announce he received a three-month
suspension without pay.
Jan. 29, 2001
Denver City Council members approve a $1.2 million settlement
for a Denver teenager shot at the scene of a burglary by Denver
police officer Keith Cowgill. The teen was left paralyzed. Police
emphasized he had a gun. The $1.2 million is three times what
Denver paid Mena’s family.
January 14, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Migration
Russian migrants left homes, families to follow a dream
At night in a gym south of Denver, a dozen Russian Cossack
dancers rehearse.
Sweat beads streak their faces as they clash swords. They
whirl around fiercely and, from squatting positions, snap-kick
their legs.
“Hey!”
They’re giving their all after taking a big risk: snubbing
their Russian government sponsors on a U.S. tour 13 months ago,
and leaving their children back in Russia – on a hunch that the
people in materially rich America will accept them.
“To this day, I think we made a good decision,” Stanislava
Perets, 26, said confidently.
But their future is uncertain as they defy the norm for
immigrants in Colorado, where the foreign-born population is
growing faster than in any other state.
Most immigrants do cleaning work, drive cabs, haul boxes in
warehouses, cook in restaurants or sell products – basic wage
services the state economy devours. Few enter immediately into the
professional careers that many of them trained for abroad. That
causes frustration, especially among Colorado’s well-educated
20,000 or more Russian speakers.
Depression and family strife result, social workers say.
In contrast, the Cossacks see performing as their only way
into America.
This band broke away from an elite Russian troupe that
traveled the world demonstrating traditional soldierly skills in
skits and dances, accompanied by the three-stringed balalaika. It
is superpatriotic artistry. Russian nationalists revere the
Cossack culture that evolved among boisterous peasant soldiers on
Russia’s southern frontiers.
The problem: On government salaries of about $40 a month in
Russia, these Cossack dancers barely got by.
On Dec. 3, 1999, they were sitting in a Florida hotel the day
after their 84-member troupe completed a multicity U.S. tour.
They were taking stock, comparing America’s material comfort
and respect for law and order with hardship in Russia. Andrei
Perets, 30, was typical. He worked three jobs in Russia – as
performer, teacher and night security watchman. He hardly slept.
He hardly saw his daughter.
Five Cossacks initially announced they intended to stay in
the United States. Others followed. Supervisors bristled. Reports
of a mutiny made headlines in Moscow and Rostov, the troupe’s home
base on the Don River near the Black Sea.
Historically, ancestors of these Cossacks often defied
government control.
Peasant soldiers enslaved under the czars, Cossacks revolted
frequently and at times were enlisted to defend against the Turks.
“Cossack” means “free person.” On Russia’s southern frontiers,
Cossacks honed their skills riding horses, sword-fighting,
shooting and swilling vodka.
“We didn’t want to spend our lives as slaves,” Perets said.
From Florida, the breakaway, modern-day Cossacks called
Sergey Shadioun, 43, a former Red Army performer they knew who’d
emigrated to Denver. They begged Shadioun to contact lawyers and
explore how the performers could emigrate legally. Shadioun
obliged, and eventually agreed to be president and chief
choreographer for the group. He found apartments they share in
Glendale. He rounded up equipment, including costumes and swords
that had to be ordered from Russia.
Many in Denver’s Russian-speaking community are impressed,
and hope the group will succeed here. “It would be nice to have a
group of wonderful performers,” said Anna Tsesarsky of Jewish
Family Services resettlement agency.
Yet cracking mainstream Colorado as a Cossack is hard.
By day, the once-celebrated dancers are strangers driving
around in newly purchased used cars. They struggle with English.
They decline to talk about “little work” they may do to supplement
what they earn performing. Basic needs are met. Each performer now
lives on about $1,000 a month, Shadioun said.
Nearly every night, they gather at the Universal Gymnastics
gym in an office park south of Denver. Shadioun arranged to rent
the place after 9 p.m. The Cossacks train nightly for two intense
hours in a warm yellow light, leaping around, thumping on the
wooden floor, while a tape deck plays folk tunes that move them.
Veronika Alimova, 21, darted away now and then last week to
check on her baby, Cristina, almost 4 months old. “This is just
the beginning,” she said, cradling Cristina. “We hope to perform
on big stages here in the future. I want to spend all my life
dancing. I trained for so many years.”
In embroidered costumes, black boots and blue soldier caps,
chanting “Hey,” they ignited an otherwise silent suburban
nightscape of neon-lit car lots, warehouses, satellite dishes and
exits.
They miss home.
Stanislava Perets said she regularly phones her 7-year-old
daughter, Anastasia, – left with grandparents – asking about
school, promising they’ll be together soon if immigration
applications are approved.
Yuriy Abramenko, 39, yearning for his wife, clings to a
conviction that, among nations, “America is best. Beautiful. Every
citizen respects the law. This is a country of immigrants.” All
these Cossacks need “is a chance to show people our spirit.”
Nearby, blue TV light blinked inside airy pastel homes of
the Coloradans the Cossacks hope to reach. The group performed 13
times in December, but in small venues.
Now, Russian Cafe owner Eugene Valershteyn has discovered the
dancers. He hired them to perform Saturday nights at his
red-walled Russian Cafe at Orchard Road and University Boulevard.
Well-heeled Americans are his main clientele. At a recent
performance, they watched raptly, clapping, some standing on
chairs. Russian emigres Olga and Michael Novikov sat in the cafe
that night. They marveled as the Cossacks danced, nearly kicking
tables with their boots. Olga had seen them years ago in a large
Moscow theater. She cringed to think how they must feel to perform
in a tiny restaurant.
When she saw their passionate faces, she understood. “They
can’t live without dancing,” she said. “It is love.”
January 5, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Migration
Restaurant leads Ethiopian to better life
Restaurant owner Haime Asfaw, 40, fled Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,
during a civil war in 1982. She resettled in Los Angeles, where
she supported herself and her son by working in a bank. She
attended college, too.
But when her son, Michael, grew into a teenager, she worried
about his safety in Los Angeles. “We didn’t have gangs in our
country. That was the reason I moved to Colorado – to give him a
better life.”
Starting in 1992, Asfaw worked in a Denver typewriter shop,
then a bank, then as an accountant at Denver International
Airport. Gradually she settled into a city that felt cosmopolitan
yet relaxed, with a diverse population and good weather. In 1997,
she rented an old shop and began selling Ethiopian spices to other
immigrants. A year later, she renovated that shop at 3504 E.
Colfax Avenue and turned it into the Arada Ethiopian Restaurant.
Newspaper reviewers rate her food highly.
Michael, 22, now studies at Metropolitan State College. Asfaw
misses Ethiopia – her relatives and culture – and visits when
possible.
But more and more customers are demanding the spicy meats and
vegetables she prepares according to ancient traditions her mother
taught her in Africa. “My mother deserves all the credit,” Asfaw
said Thursday at work.
January 5, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Latin America, Migration
Road paved with good fortune for RTD driver
RTD bus driver Luis Escebedo, 40, grew up on dirt streets at
the edge of Juarez in northern Mexico. He’ll never forget the
families who lived there without electricity, purchasing their
drinking water weekly from a tanker truck that filled metal drums.
Escebedo moved north to Denver in 1978 to visit his sister. “I
fell in love with the place.”
He found work as a janitor on South Colorado Boulevard. Then
he found better work driving a forklift at a brick factory.
He met his wife, Rosa, here in Denver. Now they raise four
sons in a tidy house off a park in northwest Denver.
“My children love it here,” Escebedo said Thursday before
beginning his afternoon shift at the Regional Transportation
District. “There’s not much crime. This is one of the most
beautiful cities I’ve ever seen. The economy is great. That’s why
so many people are coming. The weather is good.”
Two years ago, Escebedo became a legal resident – fulfilling
his mother’s dream back in Mexico before she passed on. His goal:
“Stay together as a family. My life is my kids. I would do
anything for them.”
The Escebedos envision their best future in Denver. Yet
every December, Luis or his brother return to the dirt streets at
the edge of Juarez.
They deliver toys to the children of fathers less fortunate.
January 5, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Migration
Russian scientist was forced to leave
Telephone calls to scientist Leonid Reznikov’s apartment in
St. Petersburg, Russia, during 1992 forced him out. He remembers
the caller’s voice clearly: “Leave the country. This country is
not for you. You hold a good position, which should be for
Russians, not Jews.”
Police couldn’t guarantee his safety. And when the caller
threatened to kill his daughter, Reznikov rode a train to the U.S.
Embassy in Moscow. He moved to Colorado five months later as a
refugee and settled in Denver. Now 38, he works as an assistant
professor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
He’s trying to find new ways to diagnose cancer as part of an
elite international research team led by Dr. Charles Dinarello.
Reznikov also runs the local Russian newspaper Horizon, one of
four Russian newspapers circulating in Denver, along with helping
raise two children.
“I found lots of scientific opportunities on this team. Labs
like this, they are at the same level as the most advanced labs in
the United States,” Reznikov said Thursday at work. “I hope to
continue my work here.”
January 5, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Migration
Population growth fastest in U.S.
Colorado’s foreign-born population nearly tripled this past
decade and is growing faster than any other state’s, according to
an analysis of new U.S. Census Bureau data.
In 1990, 142,000 Coloradans, or 4.3 percent, were born
abroad. Last year, 413,000, or nearly 10 percent, were born
abroad.
The newcomers arrived from all over, with the greatest
numbers from Mexico, East Asia, Europe and Africa. They’re
changing the face of almost every street: a hockey-loving Denver
bus driver from Mexico, an Ethiopian woman who cooks spicy meats
on East Colfax, a cancer researcher from Russia who also runs a
newspaper.
The influx over the past decade was far more pronounced than
in traditionally international states such as New York and
California.
And considering the rapidly increasing foreign migration into
other interior states such as Nevada, Kentucky, Iowa and Arizona,
experts at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C.,
think tank analyzing Census Bureau data, see the makings of a
major demographic shift.
“The places that are attracting a lot of immigrants that are
nontraditional places generally have the characteristics of
Colorado: good labor market and a relatively low cost of living,”
said Steven Camarota, research director at the center. “And
Colorado has reached a critical mass in terms of networks of
immigrants. Immigrants are drawn in by the economy and by the
networks. Middle America now is experiencing a lot more immigration.”
Colorado ranked 13th among states on number of foreign-born
residents. California had the most, followed by New York, Florida
and Texas.
The new numbers come from a population survey conducted last
year by the Census Bureau – separate from the bureau’s
once-a-decade population count.
The figures were broken down state-by-state and analyzed this
month at the Center for Immigration Studies. The bureau plans to
release more data on the foreign-born population over the next two
years.
It might seem as if Colorado’s fast-growing foreign-born
population is a factor in the state’s overall population growth
last decade by 31 percent to 4.3 million. More than 1 million new
residents gave Colorado the third-fastest-growing population
behind Nevada and Arizona.
Actually, foreign migration into Colorado – including births
to immigrants – accounts for about one-third of population growth
here, Camarota said. Nationally, foreign migration plus births
play a larger role, accounting for about two-thirds of U.S.
population growth.
For The Denver Post, the Center for Immigration Studies
conducted some additional analysis of foreign-born population
survey data obtained from the Census Bureau. Among the findings:
About 223,000, or 54 percent, of the foreign-born population
resides in the Denver area.
Poverty and education levels of newcomers vary widely.
African, European and South American-born Coloradans over 21
generally had completed at least high school, but 62 percent of
Mexican-born Coloradans had not completed high school. About a
third of African-born Coloradans lived below the official poverty
line, as did 24 percent of Mexican-born Coloradans. Three percent
of European-born Coloradans lived in poverty.
Of the 413,000 foreign-born Coloradans, 234,000, or 57
percent, moved here during the 1990s, often after settling in
other states.
Colorado stands out nationally with a higher-than-average
share of Mexican-born and African-born residents. About 43 percent
of foreign-born Coloradans came from Mexico – compared with 28
percent nationally. About 6.5 percent of foreign-born Coloradans
came from Africa – compared with 2 percent nationally. East
Asian-born Coloradans made up 12 percent of the foreign-born
population – compared with 18 percent nationwide.
November 26, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
China, Globalization, Human Rights
Low wage workers fuel world economy
LOTUS MOUNTAIN, China – The shiny blue and maroon fabric that worker No. 0391 guides into a Chinese factory sewing machine could be on your back this winter.
The worker, Lu Huikun, makes ski jackets, including this U.S. Ski Team model, for Colorado-based Spyder Active Sports. The jackets cost up to $529 in Denver-area stores.
Lu is paid 31 cents an hour if she keeps a brisk pace at the rattling machine.
A 36-year-old mother of two, she considers herself lucky. Bulldozers making room for factories scraped away her family’s rice field 12 years ago. Lu’s job sewing sportswear for Spyder, Adidas, Champion and other companies helps sustain her family.
“May you all be champions,” she says to those who would buy her jackets this fall.
But Lu’s eyes are tired from overtime shifts. Her thin legs tremble as she pedals her bicycle down People’s Road. More overtime lies ahead.
Lu’s daughter is gradually going blind. She needs special glasses that cost $250 – five months’ wages. When Lu reaches home, crosses a brick courtyard and bends to pump water, the 9-year-old clings to her leg, frightened by a world growing cloudier each day.
Behind many of your possessions – and goods you may buy in the holiday shopping blitz that began Friday – are desperate laborers like Lu in low-wage countries worldwide.
They are the invisible backbone of today’s world economy. But their presence increasingly raises policy questions in corporate boardrooms, spawns riots at trade summits from Seattle to Prague, ruffles consciences of some shoppers in malls.
This report will show you how these workers – in most cases the only people to touch your possessions before you – count on your purchases to survive. Still, they lack many things Americans take for granted.
And in the corporate drive for flexibility and low-wage efficiency, some are treated in ways Americans won’t tolerate at home.
A Denver Post examination of the system traced the origins of products into China, where U.S. firms farm out production of everything from ski coats to computers. Many companies try to shield this information from the public.
Once, such products might have been labeled “Made In USA.”
But today if you buy one of those trendy collapsible scooters, odds are it was made in China. Same with many skateboards, snowshoes, inline skates. The fireworks you shoot on the Fourth of July? Made in China. Your child’s school backpack or the one you wear hiking? Stitched and inspected in China.
The Post gained access to eight factories and interviewed dozens of workers and managers. Compulsory overtime here is the norm. Uniformed guards patrol gated factory compounds, where up to eight workers reside in dormitory rooms. Workers are paid based on quotas that punish any lapse. Wages in China vary, but 30 cents an hour is common; factories producing for Americans typically pay roughly minimum wage. Sometimes workers can’t leave factory compounds. Police on motorcycles cruise industrial zone streets looking for factory workers who cause trouble.
China’s central government requires 40-hour weeks, limits overtime to no more than three hours a day or 36 a month, and bans workers under 16.
Yet with tens of millions fleeing rural areas to seek work, factory managers say the labor law is seldom enforced. Workers often don’t receive extra pay for overtime and can’t refuse to stay late, said Kent Guo, a U.S. Foreign Commercial Service officer posted in Guangzhou.
“The employers say, “If you don’t want to work overtime, I’ll fire you.’ Or they find another reason to fire you.”
Compound-restricted workers proudly build “gliding boards’
Inside the Circle Skater Corp. factory – about two hours north of Hong Kong near Dongguan – 1,500 workers run by Taiwanese managers produce many things sold in America.
It’s a typical factory, a gated cluster of three-story buildings. The workers are migrants who live at the compound where, as at many factories, room and board is provided. Normally they’re allowed out three times a week, factory manager Circle Yan said. A team of 30 ex-soldiers in blue-and-white uniforms patrols 24 hours a day, registering who comes and goes.
The factory supplies sporting goods including skateboards, beginner snowboards bearing Bugs Bunny and the Time Warner logo, plastic snowshoes and inline skates, elbow and kneepads. One of the hottest products made here for U.S. consumers, Yan said, is a silvery collapsible scooter. The Chinese call these “gliding boards.”
Factory sales of all products top $23.6 million a year. You can find stuff made here in Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, and Toys ‘R” Us among others, Yan said.
Soon after receiving an order, he mobilizes assembly lines that roar, hum and shake as workers rivet, glue, hoist and haul. Workers seldom speak in the process.
Boxed products roll out of workshops on conveyor belts leading into shipping containers mounted atop trucks. The trucks travel new concrete highways to Hong Kong for shipping to the United States. The journey from Chinese factory to Colorado store can take as few as 14 days.
Workers earn an average of 20 cents an hour, Yan said. That’s based on a quota tied to how much and how well they produce. The official work week is eight hours a day for six days – more days than China’s law allows. About 12 hours of overtime is typical, he said – again, more than permitted.
The workers are restricted in leaving the compound, Yan said, because he needs them close to respond quickly to orders from the United States.
“We are very busy. Most of the time they work.”
The restriction breeds bitterness.
“Here there’s a lack of freedom,” said 19-year-old Huang Changbin, a migrant villager diligently assembling scooters.
“We can’t go out when we want. I want to go out and play.”
Huang and his crew of 60 workers assemble 2,000 scooters in 12 hours, a foreman said proudly. Each scooter retails for about $75 in the United States. That’s about $150,000 worth of scooters for U.S. retailers. The workers combined, at 20 cents an hour each, earn about $144 for their part – one one-thousandth of the market value of their products.
Like many here, Huang migrated from a village in western China after completing junior high school. “There was nothing to do,” he said. He paid $25 for a third-class train ticket, a huge burden for his subsistence-farming family, and rode for 36 hours to Dongguan.
This Pearl River Delta region in South China – where Lu Huikun works too – draws millions of migrants into what may be the world’s biggest industrial zone. From Lotus Mountain, a 1,000-foot-high knoll in the middle of it, gray-black factories splay out spewing noise and smoke into a thick acid haze.
Here, Huang can earn up to $50 a month. “My family will save it for when I return,” he said. “I wanted to see the world, what’s going on here.”
He shares a room with seven others. Homesick and confined to the compound, he devotes off hours to writing letters to his parents and 16-year-old sister Changyan.
His advice to his sister: “Stay at home. Study. Read more books.”
But he’ll gut this out.
He’s worked as much as 70 hours in one week. He wants more, maybe a better job sewing. “I can get more money.”
He characterized his life as “not very good, not very bad.”
There was one high point.
He got to try out one of the “gliding boards” he assembles. He smiled as he described zipping across a factory floor on the scooter. Supervisors waived company rules for that test ride.
Back assembling handlebars, Huang takes consolation imagining he is an instructor for young riders in America showing them how to set up the scooter, watching them glide down a street.
“I know American little friends will enjoy playing with this,” Huang said, looking up from the factory line. “Let them play happily.”
U.S. companies try to respond to labor concerns with codes
Few U.S. corporations that sell things made in China allow scrutiny. Many won’t even identify who makes their products.
Wal-Mart spokesman Tom Williams declined repeated Denver Post requests to visit any Wal-Mart supplier factory, saying locations of factories are a closely held secret because “everybody watches everybody else and where they buy.”
Target spokeswoman Susan Eich said “we don’t have any such list” of supplier factories in China.
Kmart, too, counts on China. Chinese suppliers of electronics, bicycles and other products are required “to notify us of who their subcontractors are,” said Dale Apley, Kmart’s public policy director. But he wouldn’t give details or allow a visit.
Colorado-based corporations such as bicycle maker Schwinn, ski clothing company Obermeyer, and Crazy Scrubs – colorful medical wear – take a similar approach.
Meantime, public concern is growing about globalization hurting human rights. Street riots that shut down Seattle during World Trade Organization meetings last year were motivated in part by a sense of injustice in factories abroad.
“We get dozens of letters every month. A lot are form letters: “We want you to stop exploiting children,'” said Tim Lyons, spokesman for J.C. Penney, which sells products made in China at 1,100 stories across 50 states. The ideological anti-corporate tenor of some critics is such, Lyons lamented, that “you can’t win.”
Many corporations have responded. Target, Kmart, Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney officials say their suppliers must agree to obey local labor laws, pay prevailing wages, and ban child or forced labor.
Some companies such as Nike and Levi Strauss established elaborate codes of conduct that are posted on factory walls. Some firms hire auditors to review supply-chain conditions, sometimes visiting factories unannounced and conducting off-site interviews with workers.
In Colorado, Spyder this fall began negotiating a code of conduct with 24 suppliers in Asia. Chris Okazaki, formerly with Nike, is helping lead Spyder’s effort.
Fireworks industry an example of raw capitalism of China
Still, shoppers eyeing foreign-made products generally can’t tell from packaging the conditions in which those products were made.
And tracing products to specific factories “is probably one of the toughest things you could ever try to do,” said John Colledge, the U.S. Customs chief of forced-labor investigations. “We need substantive information to tie the product back to the factory. That’s what the consumer is going to need too.”
A 1930 U.S. law prohibits import of products made with forced labor. U.S. investigators say access in China in particular is so restricted that they’ve resorted to offering money over the Internet for tips.
And even inside factories in China, the source of a product isn’t always obvious.
Just as U.S. companies farm out production to factories in China, many big factories in China farm out work to smaller and smaller factories down to informal village-level “cottage” labor.
U.S. fireworks companies such as Rocky Mountain Fireworks in Denver rely on factories in China. Rising labor costs and safety regulations forced closure of factories at home, said Bill Stonebraker, president of Rocky Mountain Fireworks.
And demand is growing. U.S. consumers bought $625 million worth of fireworks in 1999, a figure that increased by about $25 million a year through the decade, according to Julie Heckman, director of the American Pyrotechnics Association.
One of the emerging new suppliers handling orders from Stonebraker and others is Brothers Pyrotechnics, based in Beihai, in a rural area near Vietnam along China’s southern coast.
Much of China’s fireworks industry is struggling after a series of explosions at factories. Most recently, an explosion July 1 at a plant in Guangzhou killed 40 workers, and central government officials shut down factories nationwide.
But by mid-September, Brothers was up and running. U.S. industry safety inspectors stationed in Beihai give the company high marks.
In charge is Garry Wang, 38, the son of a fisherman turned into flamboyant entrepreneur. Relying on a network of 20 rural Chinese factories, he sells $20 million worth of fireworks a year to Stonebraker and others.
Wang lives in a mansion with marble floors in Beihai. Recently at midnight, he strolled outside across his manicured grounds, fountains burbling, to practice golf.
Gardeners teed up balls and Wang swung away. A day later, he sat beneath a full moon by his swimming pool with two old friends, after a feast and footrubs, and addressed the matter of U.S. sensitivity about working conditions in China. The capitalism emerging here is raw, he said, like in the United States last century, with huge rich-poor gaps and also huge opportunity.
“Comparatively speaking, I think the United States is more important to China than China is to the United States,” he said. “Imagine what would happen if Americans stopped buying all these products. So many Chinese people would lose their jobs.”
Indeed, workers at Wang’s supplier factories said they were grateful for their jobs.
But some doubt they’ll ever get ahead.
“I know people enjoy these,” said Mou Qijuan, 30, piecing together a golden cardboard “Mighty Dragon” firework in a room at one factory with a dozen other women. The Mighty Dragons, which when lit roll around spitting sparks, sell for $3 or so at U.S. fireworks stands. Silently she and her co-workers folded, twisted and glued labels on hundreds of small fireworks every hour. Mou said she earns 15 cents an hour if she works at top speed.
Life for Mou is “just work, nothing exciting.”
She does a lot better than the cottage-worker villagers who make cardboard tubes for fireworks outside factories. They earn the least of all.
As Mou and her colleagues worked, she allowed that “sometimes my back hurts.” She added: “No rest.” Still, any overtime work was welcome. “If I am paid more,” she said emphatically.
The problem, she said, is that she isn’t paid enough.
Now that her son Lu Tiehua is 6, she said, she pays $12.50 a month – half her earnings – for child care so she can work. Not to mention money for food, and medicine when he falls sick.
“How can you save?” Mou asked indignantly.
As she spoke, Zheng Daji, 41, the factory manager, looked on. He’s run this compound with 2,200 workers since 1985.
Zheng acknowledged the plight of his workers. “If we don’t have orders for more fireworks, we have to ask people to leave,” he said.
He often hears complaints, usually about money. ” “Can you pay more?'” He always says no, fearing others would make demands too. He said he’s worried about growing unrest. “I’m afraid it will happen.”
But Brothers assistant business manager Judy Zhu, who accompanied Zheng as an overseer of his factory, hastily downplayed this. Jobs are too scarce, there are too many workers, she told Zheng. “I don’t think it will happen.”
Back in Colorado, Stonebraker at Rocky Mountain Fireworks said conditions that look harsh to Americans must be seen in the different context of China. He suggested U.S. consumers, not human rights groups, should guide how the United States handles standards in the global economy.
“It’s what you are going to pay for that product that governs what the manufacturer has to do,” Stonebraker said.
And for Chinese people “their recreation is work, more than in the United States. We don’t know what work is anymore. These people are happy in their way of doing things. We need to leave them alone. They do well by themselves. And they are advancing themselves at a pace they can stand.”
Villagers chase dreams with assembly-line jobs
Many villages offer Chinese workers little opportunity beyond subsistence farming.
In western China’s impoverished Yellow River Basin, landowner Hou Jianguo, 46, found growing crops in the dry clay soil of Gansu Province too hard. The family barely survived, eating almost all that they grew.
So in 1997, Jianguo decided to move his family. He, his wife and 19-year-old daughter rode a train for three days and two nights to China’s eastern coast south of Shanghai.
He found work burning holes into nylon pullstraps for Colorado-based Samsonite at a factory the company owns in Ningbo.
He calls his $112-a-month wages “very good.” He lives apart from his wife and daughter. His daughter works and lives at a garment factory nearby. His wife lives with a relative in town taking care of children while the relative works.
Jianguo’s family will endure the separation, he said on the Samsonite assembly line, because eventually they’ll attain their dream: returning to Gansu and opening a small tailoring shop.
“I’ll work until I’m old,” he said looking down at a stack of nylon pullstraps he’ll prepare for “Worldproof” suitcases. “Then I’ll return to my hometown.”
Similarly, Yiana Zhenghai, 24, left her village near Ningbo when she had a son in hopes that he might live more like American children. Her mother watches the boy each day while Yiana works in a backpack factory.
Workers there recently were stitching up wallets for Esprit and “America’s No. 1” backpacks for Jansport. Manager Sunshine Gui walked across the factory floor picking up odds and ends from the floor. Workers at sewing machines eyed her nervously as she passed.
At the end of the line, Yiana inspected every stitch. She and the others amaze manager Gui with how intensely they work for piecework wages. During lunch break many continue to work, she said, to earn a little more money.
“Of course I will spend the money I earn on my son,” Yiana said.
Despite the economic lure, the factory system also traps workers such as 22-year-old Zhang Youyan.
Now tending a juice shop near Dongguan, she made clothing for export since age 14. The juice job is easier but a dead end.
“People like me,” she said, “we just live one day at a time. We don’t think about the future. … It’s not that I don’t dream. I do dream. I just don’t have the opportunity to make it.”
Consumer group aspires to “fair labor’ labels
While the laborers churn out consumer goods, a growing debate about corporate responsibility is taking a new twist. Beyond street protests, a fledgling movement aspires to give U.S. consumers information about how products are made in hopes they’ll discriminate carefully. Leaders of the effort contend workers bear disproportionate burdens and that Americans would respond if they knew.
“If you believe that you are your brother’s keeper, you have some obligation to the people who are the least advantaged in the world,” said Sam Brown, director of the Fair Labor Association in Washington, D.C. “If your prosperity is built on the backs of people who are being exploited, then you have an obligation.”
Brown said retail discount giants in particular are perpetuating a shameful global “race to the bottom.” Within two years, he said, companies that adhere to humanitarian standards will be able to put “fair labor” labels on their products and gain a competitive boost.
But manager Yan at the scooter factory figures codes of conduct and labeling won’t amount to much. It’s window-dressing for image-conscious companies, he said, sitting in the office where he receives orders.
U.S. executives “only care about good products,” Yan said.
“They don’t care about human rights. They are businesses.”
Worker sadly, proudly toils to earn glasses for daughter
Lu Huikun and her colleagues at the sportswear factory doubted Americans who buy their products think about factory workers.
Even if Americans did care, they “can’t do much to help me,” Liang Qianzhen said, finishing some Adidas trousers. “There are too many people in this country.”
The best hope is that Americans consume as much as they can while workers here toil as fast as they can, Lu said. “I just want more work from you so I can make more money.”
She’s given up travel plans she and her husband, a delivery motorcycle driver, once shared. Now, instead of imagining a family vacation in Beijing, she thinks of her daughter’s future, and worries about her impending blindness.
Her daughter is bright and talks of becoming a doctor or teacher. “Mommy and Daddy save money,” the girl says.
Doctors insist there’s no cure. “Sometimes my daughter feels bad that she can’t see clearly,” Lu said. “When that happens, I tell her: “Don’t think too much about this problem. You were born with it.'”
So Lu toils and saves for special glasses. Tears streaked her face as she spoke. She sees no end to her struggles for her child.
And making things for Americans probably won’t meet her needs. She sat silently at her machine for a moment. But rather than dwell on consumers far away, she resumed sewing.
“I’ll try,” she said proudly, “as hard as I can.”
November 19, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Globalization, Human Rights, Security
Israeli, Arab long for peace
Colorado camp drew girls together
HADERA, Israel – Blue police lights flashed at the central bus
depot. Israeli soldiers swarmed with machine guns. A plainclothes
commander barked into a cellphone, chasing a tip about a
Palestinian. The Holy Land pulsed, again, as if something was
about to explode.
Ignoring this blitz, a Jewish girl, 16-year-old Adi Meidan,
and a Palestinian girl, 17-year-old Moran Zhalka, ran toward each
other, smiling. They embraced.
“I believe in Adi. She will never kill anyone,” said Zhalka.
“Moran has this magical smile. She can really cheer me up
when I’m down,” said Meidan.
This unlikely friendship – surviving in the face of an
escalating Mideast war and skepticism from their segregated
communities – began five months ago in Colorado. At a three-week
“Bridges For Peace” camp in the San Juan Mountains, Meidan and
Zhalka met far from the pressures of their charged home environment.
The Colorado camp over seven years has introduced more than
200 Jewish and Palestinian girls to each other – a youth version
of the 1993 Norway retreat that, until this fall, had Israeli and
Palestinian leaders working toward peace. Building peace is an
ideal role for Americans, said camp director Melodye Feldman.
“We’re not rioting and shooting in our streets. We have something
to teach. We have a democracy that works and a society that is
pluralistic in its views. It’s something other nations can learn from.”
She and her Jewish and Arab-American supporters plan to
expand the camp to include boys. They talk of inviting teens from
Belfast to Bosnia.
But in the Mideast, seven weeks of killing as Palestinians
and Jews clash over land they both covet is thwarting those
efforts to open young minds. Teenagers are among the most furious
fighters, say parents in Israel and Palestinian territories. And
unlike Meidan and Zhalka, Feldman finds most of the girls who met
in Colorado now feel hopeless.
Internet conversations between the girls grew contentious,
even angry, during recent hostilities: Israel’s Sept. 30 shooting
of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy as he huddled against his father
for protection; the Oct. 12 Palestinian mob slaying of two Israeli
soldiers; and Israel’s Nov. 9 helicopter-missile attack on a
Palestinian leader. The death toll has topped 230. Most of the
dead are Palestinians.
The new war “definitely has set us back, probably by 10
years,” Feldman said, adding that she may have to change camp next
summer because fewer families are willing to participate and
Palestinian girls may face travel restrictions.
Yet the friendship of Meidan and Zhalka has survived. The
two say they are determined to defy any challenges. In a few
months, Meidan is supposed to begin her compulsory military
service in Israel’s army. Two of Zhalka’s schoolmates recently
were shot by Israeli soldiers who fired into an “intifada” rally.
Since returning from Colorado in July, the girls called each
other almost every day, sometimes surreptitiously.
In her Hebrew-speaking Jewish suburb of Tel Aviv, Meidan
slinks upstairs to the phone in the family office while her
brother, two older sisters and parents get ready for bed. The
escalating war has left her so distracted that her grades have
dropped. She says a million thoughts race in her head.
Zhalka may be “the only one who really understands me,” she
said.
They talk about everything, from family arguments to
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Lately they dwell on the Army
decision that looms more heavily than anything Meidan has had to
do.
Refusing her required service would cause problems: no
admission to some universities and difficulty finding jobs and
obtaining loans.
“On one hand, it’s my duty,” Meidan said. “On the other, it’s
an organization that is using violence. I’m against violence and
don’t want to be part of it.”
About 90 minutes to the north, Zhalka retreats upstairs to
her room with a Boyzone poster on the wall and a telephone. A
rooftop porch looks out across Kfar Qara, an Arabic-speaking
Palestinian town amid olive trees just north of the West Bank
territories.
Outgoing and self-confident, Zhalka is a natural class leader,
according to a teacher. But like Meidan, she can’t concentrate
these days in class.
The killings “make me angry all of the time” and unleash
feelings that cut to the core of her identity as an
Arab-Palestinian. As Israel emerged as a nation where he and his
forefathers have grown olives for centuries, Moran Zhalka’s
father, Ali, gave her the Jewish first name Moran in hopes it
would bring better opportunity in her life.
“Sometimes I want to change my name and make it an Arabic
name,” she said.
But as hostilities intensified, the girls learned to control
their own anger and maintain mutual respect.
Consider what happened after the Sept. 30 incident when
Israeli bullets killed 12-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Al-Dura as
he huddled against his father for protection.
Zhalka was so enraged that she questioned whether she could
still be friends with Meidan. She spoke first with her father, who
told her that “this girl, your friend, is not guilty.” He’s an
elementary school principal who, after recent riots, arranged a
roadside peace rally including some Jewish principals from Hadera.
They passed out bumper stickers that say, “Enough. Don’t Destroy
Our Home.”
When Zhalka spoke with Meidan after the shooting, she felt
conflicted, she said, swallowing thoughts she hesitated to
express, worried about making Meidan angry and defensive.
“When I talked to Adi about the kid being killed, I didn’t
want to say this at first: “You see? This is your army.’ Because
Adi is a special girl. You want to say: “They are a killer.’ But
what does she have to do with that? I know Adi. She would start to
cry. She would be in her room for a week. So, I didn’t say anything.”
On Oct. 12, a Palestinian mob killed two Israeli soldiers in
Ramallah and flashed bloody hands to the world.
Meidan fumed. “It’s murder. You can’t defend it.”
Zhalka agreed. Yet she understood, even shared, the anger
motivating the slaying. Every day in Kfar Qara, she and other
Palestinians hear menacing thuds of Israeli soldiers taking target
practice – perhaps “to make us afraid.” In October, when some of
her classmates joined a local “intifada” demonstration against
Israeli killings, Israeli soldiers opened fire and injured two.
After the slaying in Ramallah, an Israeli helicopter fired a
missile into the central Palestinian police station. Sad and
confused, Meidan forgot her anger and called Zhalka and three
Ramallah girls she had met in Colorado. She didn’t want to argue
about what happened. She wanted to see if they were all right.
They were. They told her they were scared, the shooting was so
close to their homes. They told her they were happy she cared
enough to call.
Meidan must decide soon about the army. She’s scheduled for
interviews and tests in January. Her sister is in the army, along
with a boyfriend who serves in the West Bank. Her mother and
father want her to serve. “Maybe, if I go, I can make a little
change,” she said.
Zhalka holds back her comments on this too.
“I’m afraid she will change,” Zhalka confided away from
Meidan, “that she may begin to agree with what the army will do.
I’m afraid when I think about it.”
Yet when Meidan cries, flip-flopping about what to do, Zhalka
tries to respond comfortingly. “I tell her: “You have to go.’ I
think we can still be friends.”
While the girls grew closer, their communities grew more and
more tense – and disapproving of the girls talking, let alone
meeting face-to-face.
Meidan’s father, Rami, 51, an accountant, said he let her go
to the Colorado camp for a broadening experience, not to change
the world. He says he doesn’t believe in peace camps. His own
experience has imbued deep wariness. His father, a Jewish tailor,
was expelled penniless from Iraq. Rami grew up knowing hunger.
Fighting for Israel against Egypt in 1968, he lost his right arm.
He looked ahead to the Mideast he figures his daughter will face
in two decades, and said sadly: “There will be fighting. Small
wars.” The only question, he said, is whether a nuclear bomb
destroys everything.
At school, Meidan and Zhalka are regarded at best as dreamers.
At worst, their siblings, friends and neighbors accused them of
disloyalty.
Zhalka’s older sister Ann, 20, “doesn’t like that I have a
Jewish friend,” she said. Ann and her other sisters warn that
hanging out with Jews could corrupt her, lead her into forbidden
behavior such as drinking beer. “And my sisters think that,
because I have a Jewish friend, maybe I won’t talk to my Arab
friends.”
Palestinians pushed Zhalka to reconsider what she’s doing.
One girl said: “Maybe her father would kill your father. How can
you be friends?”
Jewish boys at Meidan’s school told her “Arabs are bad.”
“I feel so alone,” Meidan said.
Now the girls idealize Colorado – Meidan remembered it as
“this special warm place full of love and happiness.” They long to
return to camp next summer.
In Colorado, nobody asked for identification, Zhalka
marveled. “It felt great. And I found myself. Before, I didn’t
know for what I was living. I wanted another goal, not just to
study and be someone. I want to live so that, after I die, people
will say: “She changed something.'”
And in Colorado, the girls can get together – something that’s
nearly impossible here. In Israel, Jewish and Palestinian
communities mostly are segregated, similar to apartheid-era living
that split people racially in South Africa.
The girls’ parents say meeting face-to-face is too dangerous.
Fighting once concentrated in Gaza and the Palestinian West
Bank territories – where 3.1 million Palestinians reside –
threatens to spread closer to the girls’ homes. As the killing
continues, Israelis increasingly question the allegiance of the 1
million Arab-Palestinians living outside the West Bank in Israel.
Riots against Israeli killing recently erupted in
Palestinian-Israeli towns including Zhalka’s home, Kfar Qara.
In early November, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat still were refusing to talk.
Bloodshed was increasing daily. Fighting escalated toward all-out
guerilla combat.
Meidan and Zhalka resolved that their relationship also had to
take a new course.
They launched an offensive of their own.
Their mothers immediately said no.
The girls persisted.
They proposed a meeting in Hadera – a Jewish coastal city
between their homes.
On a sunny afternoon, Meidan called Zhalka to say even that
was refused, but promised she’d keep pressing anyway. Zhalka then
sat with her father on the porch overlooking the hillsides where
olive trees were heavy with fruit.
Just then, the phone rang again – Meidan with a breakthrough.
“OK!” Zhalka reported to her father. “We will meet in Hadera!
Her mother agreed to meet in Hadera. She said her mother asked her
why Moran can’t come here. And she told her mother: “The same
reason you don’t let me go there.’ OK!”
Her father’s face furrowed. How would Moran get to the bus
depot in Hadera? His car was broken. Taxis wouldn’t go to Kfar
Qara. Israeli soldiers were shaking down Arabs everywhere.
Zhalka begged. Finally, Ali Zhalka got up and hastily
arranged to borrow a car.
Off they went to Hadera’s bus depot.
And they saw the flashing police lights and soldiers. Ali
drove past them, pulled over. Moran got out. That’s when Meidan
saw her and ran.
After they hugged, the girls climbed into the back of the
borrowed car.
Ali Zhalka felt tears in his eyes as, in the rearview mirror,
he saw the girls happily sitting together talking.
“When you see something like that, you hate this conflict,”
he said. “You hate everything that would keep two girls who want
to be friends apart.”
He drove the girls to the Odd Cafe on Hadera’s main street.
Meidan had an hour. He waited nearby while the girls sat at a
table and ordered two cups of hot chocolate.
While machine guns crackled across the West Bank and Gaza,
they sipped and talked.
While Arafat and Barak stayed deadlocked, the girls made new
plans. Swim together. Go for a walk on the beach. Eat pizza
together. Attend a concert.
While military commanders honed strategies for stepped-up
action, the girls honed a strategy too. Soon, they vowed, they
will visit each other’s homes.
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A journalist and lawyer, Bruce Finley has investigated local, national and international issues with on-site reporting in more than 40 countries. In his position as a staff writer for the Denver Post, he is focusing on environment-related news including water challenges, the oil and gas boom and wildfire.
