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To: TobagoJack who wrote (3931)	5/28/2001 2:03:04 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

>>Deadly Shadow Darkens Remote Chinese Village By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL DONGHU, China — The most striking things about people from this village are that their threadbare clothes seem way too big and that nearly all of them share a hollow, desperate look in their eyes. Stooped and shuffling, frail before their time, farmers who should be in their peak productive years are unable to tend their wheat fields or to care for their children. In this picturesque central Chinese village of 4,500, every family is touched by gruesome maladies: fevers, chronic diarrhea, mouth sores, unbearable headaches, weight loss, racking coughs, boils that do not heal. Dozens of relatively young people have died here in each of the last two years. In December, 14 people in their 30's and 40's died. The culprit that has devastated not just the health but the very soul of this impoverished place is something that local officials here in Henan Province have generally insisted is not a problem: it is H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. While hints of this secret epidemic first seeped out from remote areas of China's countryside last year, the depth of the tragedy and the staggering toll it has taken on villages like Donghu are only now emerging, as desperate, dying farmers have started to speak out. In Donghu, residents estimate that more than 80 percent of adults carry H.I.V., and more than 60 percent are already suffering debilitating symptoms. That would give this village, and the others like it, localized rates that are the highest in the world. They add that local governments are in part responsible. Often encouraged by local officials, many farmers here in Henan contracted H.I.V. in the 1990's after selling blood at government-owned collection stations, under a procedure that could return pooled and infected blood to donors. From that point, the virus has continued to spread through other routes because those officials have blocked research and education campaigns about H.I.V., which they consider an embarrassment. "Every family has someone who is ill, and many people have two or three," said Zhang Jianzhi, 51, who gathered with others who have the virus here. "I would guess more than 95 percent of people over the age of 14 or 15 sold their blood at least once," said Ms. Zhang, still stout but suffering from fevers and malaise. "And now we are all sick, with fever, diarrhea, boils." As China begins to confront its AIDS problem, the emerging evidence of virtually blanket infections in villages like this one has become a huge wild card, whose proportions are undefined. Officially, the Chinese government says there are only 22,517 people in a country of more than 1.2 billion who have been registered as H.I.V. positive — mostly drug addicts and prostitutes — although health officials estimate that 600,000 carry the virus. But some Chinese doctors who have worked in the province said more than a million people had probably contracted the AIDS virus from selling blood here in Henan Province alone, where the problem is most severe. They add that while the sale of blood has died out in the most severely affected villages, it continues elsewhere to a lesser extent, both in Henan and other provinces. << More at nytimes.com

To: TobagoJack who wrote (3931)	5/28/2001 2:29:24 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

If you asked me to name the biggest investors in China, I never would have dreamed of Taiwan. >>The globe is now dotted with districts hailed as this or that country's answer to Silicon Valley, of course. But China's digital domain promises to stand out, thanks to a growing pool of university-trained engineers and a huge potential home market — not to mention a plentiful labor force. China is already the world's third-largest manufacturer of PC's sold under brand names like Dell and I.B.M., and it is quickly moving into more complex product lines. Most of the investment has come from Taiwan, where rising labor costs, earthquake risks and eagerness to capture a share of the growing China market have driven manufacturers across the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan companies committed an estimated $10 billion to China projects the last two years, most of it in high-technology ventures. And a recent poll by the Taipei Computer Association found that 90 percent of Taiwan-based high-technology companies have invested or plan to invest in the mainland. "It's inevitable," said Winston Wong, scion of Taiwan's most powerful business family, whose Shanghai semiconductor plant will anchor one end of the technology corridor. With China entering the World Trade Organization, he said, the mainland market is too big to ignore. The Taiwan government outlaws investments in the mainland that exceed $50 million and bars companies in Taiwan from building digital cameras, laptops or semiconductors on the mainland — fearing that those industries' geographic shift would leave the island economically weakened and politically beholden to Beijing. But under pressure from local businessmen, Taiwan is expected to relax those rules soon. Already, Taiwanese investors increasingly ignore the strictures by investing through offshore companies. The first phase of Mr. Wong's project, for example, will cost $1.63 billion. And though the company investing that money — the Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation — is registered on the Cayman Islands, much of the financing is expected to come from Taiwan. Half a dozen pile drivers puff and pound where the first of Mr. Wong's four planned semiconductor plants will rise in a technology park at the end of Guo Shoujing Road in Shanghai, named for a 13th-century Chinese astronomer. "It's very easy to build, it's just a matter of getting together the capital and the people," said Daniel Wang, the company's vice president, at his temporary office in a cluster of white, two-story prefabricated buildings on a concrete apron near the construction site. Most of that talent and capital can be found locally or can be imported from Taiwan. There are already a quarter-million people from Taiwan in the Shanghai-Suzhou area at any one time. And enticing Taiwan engineers to China is increasingly easy because their purchasing power triples when they come to the mainland. Mr. Wong's vice chairman is Nasa Tsai, a founder of Mosel-Vitelic, one of Taiwan's largest semiconductor design companies.<< nytimes.com