Underpinning charity work
Tang Yuankai

Wastepaper can provide the wrapping for a lot of good works. In east China’s Hangzhou City, three entrepreneurs co-founded a “paper for love” project to hire laid-off workers and people with intellectual disabilities to recycle wastepaper, or sell it and use the money to pay for the family service expenses of widowed elders.
One of the three entrepreneurs, Chen Boqin, head of the city’s first car dry cleaning service company, had read a newspaper report about several pupils who had paid the education expenses of economically disadvantaged students by collecting wastepaper and bottles. “I could do that, too,” Chen thought. Now Chen’s “paper for love” project encompasses over 400 government offices, enterprises and institutions that all turn over their wastepaper for re-use. Though the project has progressed well, the three founders have begun to have problems: with the increasing volume of business and funds, rumors have spread that “they are seeking private profits under the name of charity”. The three men turned to some government bodies for help, but got no response.
The fact is that there are no specific laws and regulations in China as yet covering charity organizations and their activities. This lack of legal support bothers those people full of love and care, and they have reached a consensus that creation of the proper legal environment is vital to the charity cause.
Charity law lags
“The lack of appropriate policies and regulations has been a bottleneck for China’s charity development,” said Wang Keying, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). The existing regulations in China can be counted on two hands, including the Red Cross Law of the People’s Republic of China (1993) and the Public Welfare Donations Law (1999). No specific regulations exist to cover functional distribution among government sectors.
“Even the existing charitable regulations are too general, lacking the operational details; what’s more, these regulations aren’t really compatible with other laws in China,” said Xu Huozhou, Deputy Director of the Red Cross Society of Guangdong Province.
Legislative proposals to foster a smoother charitable donation channel have been put forward since last year by many influential figures including Wang Keying, Shi Yongxin, the head abbot of Shaolin Temple and Yang Lan, a well-known TV presenter and studio manager.
“One bottleneck is the function of the charity organizations and foundations,” said Gu Shengzu, Vice-President of the All-China Federation of Industry & Commerce. By the end of 2005, the number of registered unofficial organizations had reached 315,000, including 168,000 social groups and 999 foundations. Of these, there are only a few hundred non-profit charity organizations, handling a mere 10 percent of public donations. Currently, China’s legal charity organizations have to register with either some government departments or organs authorized by the government. “Government still plays the leading role in charity, and this hampers the establishment and admittance of charitable organizations, and also results in unclear functional distribution and low efficiency,” said Yang Lan.
“It’s more difficult for private foundations to register with government bodies, which discourages the role of private wealth,” said newspaper columnist Ji Gang. “Public and private foundations have to have a minimum of 8 million yuan or 2 million yuan in capital to register. This threshold is too high and is not good for the development of foundations in China.”
But experts remain optimistic, insisting, “everything will be fine”. They know the Chinese Government has been trying to forge a favorable environment and a long-term and efficient system for charity development. In September 2004, China made the development of charity an important part of the social security system; in March 2005, the Report on the Work of the Government said it would support charity, which marked the first appearance of the charity concept in such an important report. At the end of 2005, the Ministry of Civil Affairs issued a Guide to China’s Charity Development (2006-10).
A promotional law for this purpose is listed in the legislation agenda of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. The Civil Affairs Ministry is working with the State Council and consulting a wide range of experts and scholars on its drafting.
Tax-free treatment
No more than 100,000 out of China’s registered 10 million enterprises have made donations. “That means about 99 percent of the companies never make any donations,” said Xu Yongguang, Vice-Chairman of the China Charity Federation, during a forum of the China Charity Conference last year. He also revealed statistics showing that private donations amounted to a mere 1.7 billion yuan, with a per capita donation of a little more than 1 yuan.
But, personally, many entrepreneurs and individuals are positive about making donations. “We carve out our careers, and we know the importance of giving back to society,” is a common refrain. The reason for the high enthusiasm but low rate of donations, according to Chen Xinnian, an expert with the National Development and Reform Commission, lies with system problems, such as tax.
“It’s not that the enterprises or individuals don’t want to make donations, but that the results may not be good for them,” complained Wang Jianlin, Board Chairman and President of the Dalian Wanda Group, a winner in the China Charity Awards of 2005. He said the existing business income tax provisional regulations allowed tax exemption if the donation is within 3 percent of the annual income tax; the individual income tax regulations allow exemptions on individual donations within 30 percent of the tax payment. “The more you donate, the more tax you pay,” complained Wang Jianlin.
If charity is an important component of the social welfare undertaking, then realistically it should be tax-free. Though recent government policy allows companies to make donations to certain charity organizations that enjoy tax-free status, these organizations number no more than 20. “Many donors didn’t apply for tax-free treatment because they don’t know such a policy exists or they give up applying due to the complex procedures,” said Wang Zhenyao, Director of the Disaster Relief Department of the Ministry of Civil Affairs. He once donated 500 yuan to the China Charity Federation and could reclaim the 50 yuan tax under the regulations. But he had to go through 10 different bureaucratic procedures spread over two months to get the money back. “The average person may take longer than me. Our charity donation system does have big defects,” said Wang. But he said the upcoming promotional law for China’s charity development would simplify the application of tax-free status.
However, some experts worry that companies may use charity donations as a means of dodging tax. “The current corporate and personal income tax regulations don’t encourage them to make charitable donations, but the upcoming promotional law will bring some changes,” said Li Liguo, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
More transparency
Li Shufu, Chairman of Geely Automobile Holding Co., a privately-owned carmaker in China occupying fifth place on the 2006 China Philanthropy List with a total donation of 233 million yuan, faced some headaches after he decided to provide financial aid for 1,000 poor students to help them finish college. “The aid money is not a problem. The problem is we have to pay more to find the eligible 1,000 students. We once got duped, as some of the ‘poor kids’ receiving our aid turned out to be the children of local officials.”
For sure this is the last thing that philanthropists want to see. But such things do occur from time to time; as a result, more than half of the philanthropists on the 2006 China Philanthropy List said they didn’t trust certain charity organizations and would rather carry out their own direct philanthropy.
“Two things have been overlooked here: philanthropist’s rights and the credit of charity organizations. To some degree, they are the two sticking points that have hampered the current development of charity in China,” said Chen Xiaozhu, a Master of Sociology in Beijing.
Philanthropist’s rights include the right to know and the right to intervene. “The donor is entitled to know where the money is going and how it is used, as well as the right of make suggestions on how to handle the donation,” she said. But unfortunately, the accounts of many charity organizations are not made public. “This will leads to poor functioning in finance, and, with an imperfect supervision system, corruption easily occurs. Finally, public distrust is bred.”
The company where Chen’s husband Fan Wei works has, for years, given donations to the China Foundation For Poverty Alleviation. “We choose the China Foundation For Poverty Alleviation because the organization has a definite object and standard practice,” said Fan.
“We need to run the foundation like running a company, thus we can utilize funds more efficiently,” said He Daofeng, the foundation’s deputy director.
“A company aims at generating maxim profits at minimum cost, while a foundation has to collect money and make full use of it. We design projects to raise money and spend money, where to spend and how to spend it. At the same time, each project will undergo independent accounting, so that the donor will have a clear picture of how the money is being used”.

The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles (Exchange Item)


India–US nuclear cooperation agreement: Is it about energy?
Adil Sultan

The proposed Indo-US civil nuclear cooperation agreement generated an interesting debate between the proponents and the opponents of the nuclear deal. Delay in the US congressional approval due to concerns raised by those who were opposing the deal has highlighted the influence of the Washington think tanks on policy making processes within the US.
Some of the negative implications highlighted by the non-proliferationists have recently been proven correct after North Korea’s decision to go nuclear. It may further deter those who were already skeptical about the deal and may put the whole process of approval and subsequent implementation of the nuclear agreement in the backburner.
There are some who still believe that because both sides have made heavy political investment therefore it is unlikely that President Bush and PM Singh would allow any deal breakers to impede the whole initiative. It is possible that under US pressure India might agree to some of the preconditions being proposed by the Senate for the eventual approval and implementation of the agreement. Unless PM Singh makes some crucial compromises, the concerns highlighted earlier will continue to overshadow the ongoing debate.
The Deal is about Energy? The proponents of the deal argue that the initiative is actually an effort to strengthen India’s ability to expand its civilian nuclear energy’s contribution to India’s large and rapidly growing electricity needs. US Secretary of State Condoleza Rice also argued that; “Civil nuclear cooperation agreement with India will help meet its rising energy needs without increasing its reliance on unstable foreign sources of oil and gas, such as nearby Iran.”
If this is to be true then why should India not place maximum number of its nuclear facilities under the civilian head, thus benefiting most from foreign supplied fuel for its civilian designated facilities? The fact is that India’s nuclear power production is just under 3% of the total electricity power generation. Other sources are coal, oil, gas, wind, etc. The net gain once the nuclear agreement materializes would be increase in nuclear power production to a maximum of 6.7%. It is difficult to understand how this increase of 3.5 - 4% would bring economic and environmental revolution in India. Experts like Edward J Markey, while testifying before the House International Relations Committee said; “In 2005, only 1% of India’s installed electrical capacity was fuelled by oil and only 2.7% by nuclear power….Throughout the next century, Coal will continue to be the major player in India’s electricity sector. India plans to build additional 213 coal plants by 2012. These plants will produce the bulk of India’s electricity. A realistic, safe, and practical plan for partnership between the United States and India would be a Clean-coal cooperative, not a nuclear one.” Another expert on nuclear energy Leonard Weiss agrees and said that an aggressive plan by India of improved energy efficiency could substitute for all the future power output from nuclear reactors currently being planned in India between now and 2020. Based on the above-mentioned facts, it becomes difficult to conclude that the need for nuclear energy is indeed the driving motive behind nuclear initiative, as it would hardly make any difference in India’s growing energy demand.
India does not have Uranium Shortage? The second contradiction that surfaced more recently in defense of the proposed nuclear agreement is that India does not have uranium shortage for its civilian or military programs. Mr Ashley Tellis, who is one of the architect of the nuclear agreement, in his paper Atoms for War wrote; “India has sufficient reserves to sustain the largest nuclear weapons program that can be envisaged…possesses enough uranium to sustain more than three times its current and planned capacity as far as nuclear power production is concerned…this basic reality will not be altered whether Bush-Singh nuclear cooperation initiative now being reviewed by the US Congress is successfully consummated or not.” He has also termed one other proliferation concern that the US supplied fuel would free up India’s indigenous reserves purely for producing nuclear weapons, as ‘fungibility’ thesis. According to him, India possesses requisite Uranium reserves to build as many weapons as it might realistically desire. The question is, if India is self-sufficient to meet its civilian and military needs then why PM Singh’s government is desperate to have a deal at any cost and risk political backlash from within India, and face international condemnation for undermining global non-proliferation rules.
In fact, this fallacy of India being self sufficient in uranium reserves has been exposed by 2005-06 Indian Department of Energy report, in which it acknowledges that India has meager reserves of Uranium. India’s leading national magazine ‘Frontline’ in its last Dec-Jan issue also concluded that India’s nuclear program is heading for a crisis, due to uranium shortage in the country.
It is a well-known fact that contrary to what it propagates, India does not have uranium reserves to meet both its growing civilian needs and its ambitious military program. The proposed nuclear cooperation would enable India to use imported fuel to be used in its civilian facilities for power generation, thus freeing up the indigenous uranium reserves purely for military purpose. According to a former Indian intelligence official, as a result of the nuclear agreement India would be able to build as many as 50 warheads per year.
Intangible Proliferation Concern. One of the projected advantages of the nuclear deal is that access to new reactor technology from abroad would give India’s nuclear engineers exposure to new advanced designs that maximize efficiency and output. This could lead to intangible form of proliferation of nuclear technology.
The advanced nuclear know-how could be misused by the Indian scientists in making qualitative and quantitative improvement in India’s NWs and their delivery systems. The separation of civilian and military nuclear facilities may be possible but it would be difficult to separate scientists working in civil and military facilities. India has a past record in which it received nuclear and space technology for peaceful purposes but misused it for making NWs and their delivery systems. As Gary Milhollin, another expert on nuclear issues while testifying before the Congress stated; “India, in fact, is the first country to develop long range nuclear missile from a civilian space program. India’s Agni missile tested in 1989, was built by using the design of the American ‘Scout’ space rocket. India imported the blue prints from NASA under the cover of peaceful space cooperation.”
Conclusion
The proposed nuclear cooperation agreement could be under greater scrutiny after the November elections in the US. There could be a possibility that the new Congress may initiate the whole process of approval from the very start. Making country specific exceptions is detrimental for the global non-proliferation regime, as it provides incentive to the threshold states to break free from their non-proliferation obligations, as has been proven by the North Korean nuclear test. If the US military industrial complex is keen to draw maximum economic incentives from the proposed nuclear cooperation, it may very well push the Administration for a criteria-based approach that may benefit all aspirants without any discrimination, as acquisition of civil nuclear technology is inalienable right of all. (The writer is a security analyst working on nuclear and missile issues.)
The question is, if India is self-sufficient to meet its civilian and military needs then why PM Singh’s government is desperate to have a deal at any cost and risk political backlash from within India, and face international condemnation for undermining global non-proliferation rules. In fact, this fallacy of India being self sufficient in uranium reserves has been exposed by 2005-06 Indian Department of Energy report, in which it acknowledges that India has meager reserves of Uranium. India’s leading national magazine ‘Frontline’ in its last Dec-Jan issue also concluded that India’s nuclear program is heading for a crisis, due to uranium shortage in the country.
It is a well-known fact that contrary to what it propagates, India does not have uranium reserves to meet both its growing civilian needs and its ambitious military program. The proposed nuclear cooperation would enable India to use imported fuel to be used in its civilian facilities for power generation, thus freeing up the indigenous uranium reserves purely for military purpose. According to a former Indian intelligence official, as a result of the nuclear agreement India would be able to build as many as 50 warheads per year.




The Zionists conspirators
Col ® M Zaman Malik

Two leading US periodicals, News Week and US News & World Report, have described both North Korea and Pakistan as rogue states, blaming the former for having nuclear device and the latter for assisting it in development of the nuclear device. The whole world knows that Pakistan’s nuclear programme is based on enriched Uranium whereas, North Korean has nothing to do with Uranium; it is based on plutonium. Why Israel or others never ever raised a little finger on India’s nuclear explosions continuing since 1974? India’s nuclear programme is entirely based on Plutonium, like that of the North Korean. Sometime back India alone, therefore, was being held responsible for providing all that was needed by Iran and Iraq both, with its enriched plutonium programme. None of the mentioned states indeed, need Pakistan’s nuclear assistance. At one stage, Pakistan was also going to believe in what the Zionist’s - driven world was being fed with, e.g., the fabricated stories and transcripts. But, as of today, Pakistanis are going to believe that the US is limbering up to take on Iran. The propaganda thrust against Pakistan has therefore been rejuvenated afresh so as to divert every body’s focus from Iran, while keeping it fixed on Pakistan and North Korea. It’s a deceptive measure. America can never take a single step effectively against North Korea, in any case. It is bound to take on Iran.
India and Israel are interconnected at least by two most prominent and most evident and visible proofs that need no explanation. Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of about one hundred villages in the hill country North of Jerusalem, which have been dated to about 1200 BCE. The Civilization had begun in Mesopotamia. The king of Babylon was the greatest Power in the Middle East and Judah was the vassal of Babylon. At this point in time, Mohanjo Dharro (before the Cataclysm) and Judah existed in their respective regions, contemporarily. The worship of Oxen, Cow and Calf were in practice seriously among both the peoples; one can see the same in the Shrine in West Jerusalem houses and the Dead Sea Scrolls.’ “The sexual imagery embodied in the Shrine shows how deeply the Secular State of Israel had assimilated the ancient myths of sacred geography.” (A History of Jerusalem-one city, two Faiths, by Keren Armstrong, P.XVI). The Oxen, Cow or Calf and the marble-made organ of the human male fixed in the Hindu Temples are still being worshipped by men and women in India with the same belief and enthusiasm. BJP was always preferred by the Jews and their vassals, over Congress, for these good old similarities that existed among both the orthodoxies.
Muslims, despite being the believers of one of the Faiths of Abraham, are frowned at, by Jews and their vassals. They don’t believe in what has been mentioned in the Holy Qur’an about Ishmael and his father Abraham; instead they believe that the Holy Kahba was raised by Ishaque and his father Abraham. How sad, they always rebelled against most of the Messengers and made fun of them when they didn’t say what they were told to say by the Jews. The Bestowal of Prophethood was always there to guide His Messengers and He saved them from the false and fabricated revelations, approved by the Jews. These are the reasons for Zionist’s likings for Hindus and hatred against Muslims. However, the today’s likings are preferred over the old similarities. Japan, India, Israel and The United States are One Group of the WTO’s Nihilism and they share common security concerns. They use phrases “International Community” and “shared sovereignty”, which are, if not quite, oxymoron, at least charged with wishful thinking. They are hollandaise sauce and their incompatible ingredients can not be made to blend by beating them together hard enough.