Today's Links: Harvesting organs, 3G phones and drunk driving

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  • Organ trafficking stirs concern [Global Times] "The number of organ transplants from deceased donors in China is only 130 since the first case in 2003, one of the country's leading transplant experts said at a seminar yesterday. About 11,000 transplant operations are performed each year in China, including both living- and all deceased-donor transplantations, including executed prisoners, making the country the second-largest in the world to the US in total number. But that number it is far from enough to meet demand, Chen Zhonghua, the Chinese Medical Association's deputy director for transplanting, said…"
  • China Mobile plans 100 3G phone launches [Financial Times] "China Mobile, the world's biggest wireless operator by subscribers, wants to introduce more than a hundred new phone models in China by the end of the year to entice more of its users to switch to third-generation services, its chairman Wang Jianzhou said. Mr Wang said China Mobile, which has a user base of 493m, “still has a lot of room to develop” value-added services, such as music and games downloads, but is stymied by a lack of advanced devices that support China’s home-grown TD-SCDMA standard for 3G services."
  • A brush with the law in China [Telegraph] "China is in the midst of a serious drink-driving crackdown at the moment following a series of high-profile cases in which drunk-drivers have killed and maimed pedestrians. The most serious of these resulted in the death penalty being handed down to a 30-year-old company executive in Chengdu, Sichuan province who killed four people while driving under the influence last year. In Beijing, where China Daily reports 97 people were killed in drunk-driving related accidents in the first half of this year, the police are definitely on the case, as I know from first-hand experience following a small incident last Friday night."
  • Chinese Demand Is Driving Japan Growth, Cabinet Economist Says [Bloomberg] "Demand from China, the world’s fastest-growing major economy, is helping pull Japan out of its deepest postwar slump, a top Japanese government economist said. “There’s no mistake that China’s economic recovery is contributing to a rebound in Japan and other economies in the region,” Tomoko Hayashi, director for overseas economies at the Cabinet Office in Tokyo, said in an interview on Aug. 21."
  • Yahoo China Dealt Blow [WSJ] "Alibaba Group's restructuring of its China Yahoo business, which strips out a classified listings operation added to the site last year, marks yet another setback for China Yahoo since its high-profile tie-up with the Chinese e-commerce giant four years ago. Alibaba said Friday it would separate Koubei.com, a classified-listings Web site, from China Yahoo and inject Koubei into its rapidly expanding retail Web site, Taobao.com. The Koubei listings service was merged with China Yahoo in June 2008, one of several moves to revamp the site since Alibaba took over Yahoo Inc.'s China operations."
  • Without Explanation, China Releases 3 Activists [NYTimes] "Chinese authorities unexpectedly released three political activists from detention on Sunday, including one whose case had drawn global attention. Officials offered no reason for the releases, but they occurred one day after the new American ambassador to China, former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah, arrived in Beijing. The government did not say whether it had also suspended criminal tax-evasion charges made last week against the most prominent of the freed men, Xu Zhiyong, a public-interest lawyer, that could result in a prison sentence of seven years were he to be convicted."
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By Elaine Chow in on August 24, 2009 8:30 PM Comments 1 Likes Like

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