Billionaire Zhang Yin, who topped China's wealthiest citizens' list in 2006 with a fortune of US$3.4 billion, appeared the other day as a political figure and told the press that the country's new labor law could use some amendment, according to a news report.

Zhang is going to submit a proposal to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) at the upcoming annual conference in Beijing. She is a member of CPPCC's national committee.

"Requiring employers to give contracts of infinite length to workers is going back to the old times in China," she told the Chinese press, adding that the new labor law, which came into effect January 1, has already increased unemployment and impacted low-skilled and undereducated people in particular.

China's new labor law requires all employers, whether foreign or domestically-owned, to enter into written labor contracts, either fixed-term or open-ended, with the employee.

The law also stipulates that open-ended contracts must be signed if the employee has been working for the employer for more than 10 years or if the worker has already completed two fixed-term contracts.

Employers will be subject to a penalty (double the severance pay) if they fire workers without "good cause" before their contracts expire, according to the new law.

There has been wide speculation by consultants and economists that manufacturing in China will lose much of its competitive advantage under the new law.

But if Zhang's amendment proposal gets through, it will be a different story.

Although she has been living in the United States for almost two decades, Zhang remains well-connected in China in both political and business senses. Her father was a lieutenant in the People's Liberation Army.

Zhang built China's largest paper recycling business, Nine Dragons Paper. Although China's latest richest person is Yang Huiyan, a Ohio State graduate whose father handed her the real estate family business, Zhang still is the richest self-made woman.

Like it or not, now that Blu-ray has become the default next-generation disc format, the prices are already sneaking up.

An online report said that prices of Blue-ray disc titles have gone up on Amazon.com and Sony's new Blu-ray players will cost more than the old models.

But what if China is to make Blu-ray discs?

Word has it that a Chinese manufacturer is about to start production of Blu-ray discs. "Everything is ready. Once molds and the master disc arrive, mass-scale production will begin," according to a leading IT Web site in China.

That may be good news for global consumers, as China seems to always be able to offer low costs.

It is also speculated that this company will either be Henan Kerry Digital Co. Ltd. of Anyang, Henan province (100 percent Hong Kong ownership) or Dalian Hualu Group Co. of Dalian, Liaoning province.

Panasonic, a shareholder of Hualu, also makes Blu-ray discs.

Despite its abundant domestic PVC capacity, China still imports 150,000 to 160,000 metric tons of PVC paste resin (total value US$160 million to 170 million) annually.

China's State Council recently amended the tariff regulations so that PVC paste resin no longer shares the same tariff coding with general PVC powder. China Trade News commented that the change will "help with the healthy growth of domestic manufacturers of PVC paste resin."

China has been imposing anti-dumping charges on imported PVC powder since 2003. "But because general PVC powder was not distinguished from PVC paste resin, it was difficult for authorities and organizations to effectively monitor the pricing and trading of imported PVC powder; therefore, the industry couldn't accurately assess the effectiveness of the anti-dumping measures," the report said.

The tariff coding for general PVC power is 39041000 and the coding for PVC paste resin is 39041010.

The blaze that killed 15 last week at LongFei Recycling Co. Ltd. has been brought to the attention of China's central government. Head of the State Administration of Work Safety (SAWS), Li Yizhong, told the press that an investigation is under way with joint forces of a few ministries, according to New Express Daily. But no further information is available at this point.

Plastics News reported on the incident with extensive details in a February 29 story.

SAWS is one of the most closely followed national agencies in China, especially due to notorious coal mine disasters. Chinese workers in general are more vulnerable than their counterparts in other countries where safety measures are better enforced. A study revealed that China's casualty-GDP ratio goes up as the economy accelerates its pace.

The image of SAWS has become so negative that one of its spokesmen complained about being deemed a jinx. This official, Huang Yi, said February 26 during an online public chat that, "if the public feels that I bring nothing but bad news, I really hope I have less and less chance to appear... I'd rather disappear."

Well, it's my hope, too, that the country will cut down workplace accidents.

Yi added that he is sad about how the public equals work safety to accident/disaster. What he meant was, the public is earful of striking work accidents but doesn't hear about how preventive safety measures are put in place or how violators of safety regulations are penalized. Therefore, the terms of "work safety" and "work accidents" mean pretty much the same thing to them.

That is sad indeed.

Everyone knows labor is cheap in China. Unfortunately, it's not just the hourly pay that's cheap. It's also their health and lives. Every time a coal mine explosion happens in China, we hear how victims' families have a hard time getting any compensation and a "decent" settlement on a dead body only requires a few thousands, sometimes even just a few hundreds, dollars.

In my opinion, China won't have world-class manufacturing until the labor condition is improved.

A main character behind the February 27 fire that killed 15 workers at LongFei Recycling Co. Ltd. in Shenzhen was detained by Chinese police. LongFei owner Chen Jinlong, 43, was arrested in his hometown of Shanwei, Guangdong province. Shenzhen police also has detained, among others, the company's business manager and accountant Chen Yongquan, according to a press release by the Shenzhen government.

Local public security and the fire department have told the press that the fire was caused by electrical wire short-circuits during Longfei's around-the-clock production. While the wires melted, sparks dropped to the piles of plastic waste in the operating room, reported local newspaper Yang Cheng Wan Bao.

Sadly, the three workers on shift, two night guards and a company driver who was playing Mahjong with two friends all escaped without alerting the 15 coworkers who were sound asleep. One of the workers said that after he left, he remembered about the 15 people in the loft and returned to the operating room and tried to control the fire with a fire extinguisher, but the raging fire scared him out right away.

The Shenzhen government said it, along with LongFei, has settled the compensation issues for the victims' families. The 15 dead included seven from Chongqing and eight from Lufeng, Guangdong province. The three wounded are all from Lufeng.

One of China's richest women, Zhang Yin, is in Beijing attending the annual session of the national political advisory body--Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC)-- March 3-14, but her proposal for amending the new labor contract law doesn't seem to have a chance.

Zhang has suggested the law exempt labor-intensive companies from having to sign permanent contracts with staff with 10 years' service. She was criticized by some CPPCC members.

China's Ministry of Labor and Social Security quickly responded to the press coverage Zhang's controversial proposal received. "Whether to amend the law contract law or not is not a question. The question right now is how to enforce this new law effectively," said deputy minister Sun Baoshu at a March 9 press conference, according to China News Agency.

"Some companies believe the new law is increasing their cost. That's because they didn't have to provide social security taxes. ... It is not right or legal to chase profits by scarifying workers' rights," he said.

In the upcoming restructuring of China's central government, the State Environmental Protection Administration will become one of the very few national agencies that actually expand. SEPA will upgrade to the Ministry of Environmental Protection, Jing Hua Times reported.

Wang Yuqing, former deputy chief of SEPA, said March 9 that the agency will also strengthen its personnel, functions and national network.

China is taking action to consolidate its bureaucracy by streamlining regulators. Basically, agencies, administrations, bureaus will be combined into a smaller number of more powerful ministries.

If anything, the increasingly prominent status of SEPA reflects the growing awareness of environmental protection among Chinese citizens and lawmakers.

But China's SEPA is still very small compared to its U.S. counterpart. Compared to SEPA's staff of 300 (excluding affiliated institutions), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency employs about 18,000 with an annual budget of about $7 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported.

I was skimming the official Web site of the state-owned People's Daily, China's largest daily newspaper when something caught my eye. It was a sentence in plain English, which really stood out in the all Chinese-language Web site. On a photo of a cloth bag, were the words "I'm not a plastic bag."

Back when I wrote my first blog item about the famous "I'm not a plastic bag" designed by Anya Hindmarch last August, I checked the Internet and found plenty of pictures of apparent knockoffs. But they were underground, and they knew they were illegal.

This one is different. The picture appears right under the authorities' noses, and in a well-respected newspaper, too! The one-paragraph story says: Many people were buying cotton bags that have the print of "I'm not a plastics bag" in front of a department store. The seller told the reporter that the production cost of one such bag is 10 yuan. However, in order to make consumers familiar with eco-friendly bags, it only sells for 2 yuan.

Obviously, the quality of the bag is not comparable to the real "I'm not a plastic bag." The font and layout have been slightly changed, too. Since I'm not an expert on intellectual property laws, I'm not sure if I can call it a knockoff or not.

However, if you want to educate Chinese consumers about the plastic reuse/recycle issue, why use the English slogan that many don't even know the meaning?

Here's my view: Chinese consumers are being immersed by the strongest-ever "green washing." Businesses are so excited with the best-ever opportunities of marketing anything that's not apparent plastic. Anyone really care about sustainability? Energy and resources conservation? Green house gas emission? Just ask a random person on the street what the popular nonwoven "eco-friendly" shopping bags are made of, and I bet nine out 10 wouldn't know that the material still is plastic.

Think about it, use cloth bags to replace plastic shopping bags might be a righteous and trendy thing, but not required by the laws. On the other hand, breaking the intellectual property laws is indeed illegal. When marketing schemes override the compliance with laws, whose agenda is driving the booming Chinese economy?Snapshot of my screen: just so readers can see what the bags look like

China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC), which spurred controversy in the United States in June 2005 by offering $18.5 billion to buy Unocal Corp., is finishing up a project that converts CO2 to degradable plastic.

China Blue Chemical Ltd., a subsidiary of CNOOC, announced it will start the production of carbon dioxide-propylene oxide copolymers (PPC) in June, according to China's Shanghai Securities News. The project will be the largest in the world with an annual capacity of 3,000 metric tons, the company said in a press release.

The facility is located in China's most southern province and an island in the South China Sea, Hainan.

The total investment on the project was reported to be around 152 million yuan ($21.4 million).

It remains a mystery whether Americans will buy more made-in-USA products during the economic slowdown or recession to protect the domestic economy, or buy more imported, cheaper items, to hold on to their wallets.

I asked exhibitors and attendees at the three-day International Home and Housewares Show in Chicago what they think will happen. Their response was mixed. I guess nobody really has the answer, they just hope to survive the hard times.

Meantime, although made-in-China has become a synonym for cheap imports, rising costs--including stricter quality control and inspection--in that country may raise commodity prices in the U.S. market.

Will the U.S. ditch or reduce imports to invigorate its own manufacturing at this critical point in time? Or will it rely more on imports to keep inflation down and maintain living standards?

Dell Inc. recently said it will purchase large amounts of components from China to help reduce cost, according to a Reuters story. The computer hardware manufacturer plans to buy US$23 billion of components from China this year and US$29 billion in 2009.

It looked like it's a clear upward trend, until I did some simple math.

Based on the fact Dell will buy a total of US$70 billion of computer-related supplies and equipment from China over the 2007-2009 period, also according to the Reuters story, we can easily figure out that Dell actually spent US$38 billion outsourcing from China in 2007. From $38 billion to $23 billion to $29 billion, would you say it's a boost of spending on outsourcing?

We need a bigger picture here. Is Dell's overall spending on outsourcing going up or down? At what kind of rate? Is China's share of Dell's outsourcing total rising or dipping? What are Dell's other major low-cost import countries? Where is the ratio of Dell's U.S. manufacturing versus overseas procurement headed? These are the questions multinational corporations need to answer, to provide the public with a better idea of what's going on in the economy.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I wrote a blog item about Blu-ray discs. The question came out about whether counterfeit Blu-ray players exist (got to be more profitable than knocking off Blu-ray discs, right?). Click here for the original posting.

Guess what? Blu-ray disc players themselves may have infringed a patent owned by a Columbia University professor emeritus. The U.S. International Trade Commission is going to launch an investigation into some 30 U.S. and foreign companies on possible patent infringement related to Blu-ray disc players and other products, Reuters reported.

The commission posted a news release Thursday on its Web site, explaining the issue in dispute:

The products at issue in this investigation are short-wavelength (e.g., blue, violet) LEDs and laser diodes that are used in products such as hand-held mobile devices, instrument panels, billboards, traffic lights, HD DVD players (e.g., Blu-ray disc players), and data storage devices.

The list of involved companies highlights big names including Sony Corp., Nokia, Motorola Inc., LG Electronics Inc., Panasonic maker Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB.

Behind the recent launch of China's largest polylactic acid plant stand the Chinese Academy of Sciences and pharmaceutical and chemical maker Zhejiang Hisun Chemical Co.Ltd.

The academy's subsidiary, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, announced March 18 that a new line with 5,000 metric tons (about 11 million pounds) of annual capacity has come on stream, claming the products are "as good as, and some with even better properties" than the world leader NatureWorks'.

The project took off after seven years of research and preparation, the announcement said.

NatureWorks' plant opened in 2003 with a nominal capacity of 300 million pounds (about 136,000 metric tons). But the company has been running at half that capacity, according to a report from PN's sister publication European Plastics News. NatureWorks, however, said it will reach, and probably exceed, its 300-million-pound capacity.

I thought readers of my China blog would not only be interested in plastics in China, but also China as a country, a culture, a business battlefield and a phenomenon. Therefore, from time to time, I'm going to share bits and pieces of news and facts that may help you understand the ever-changing China better. And sometimes, the news and facts out of China can be odd, like this one below.

Oriental Today reported a striking proposal by a real estate giant in Beijing, who suggested demolishing the Forbidden City, the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming and Qing Dynasties located right in the middle of Beijing.

"Instead of spending billions [of yuan] every year on renovating and maintaining the palace, why don't we blow it flat and build real estate? It will significantly help skyrocketing housing prices in Beijing caused by lack of land," the unnamed businessman said.

What's more, the statement was backed up by an industry group official. Hu Yunjing, president of Beijing Real Estate Business Association, explained that, if the land the Forbidden City sits on now can be used for residential construction, it will provide 24 million square meters of housing for at least 1.2 million residents. "That will bring down the housing prices," he claimed.

I was speechless. Do they really believe it's a smart idea? By their logic, New York City should convert the Central Park to high-rises and Paris should transform Musee(sorry, the blog editing tool doesn't support accented letters) du Louvre to hot-selling condos.

And the truth is, Beijing's housing prices, some parts of which are catching up with Manhattan, won't come down no matter what. People from all over the country continue to flood in. And the real estate people know this the best. Their goal certainly is to make more money (as if they haven't made enough by doubling and tripling prices in the past few years), not to reduce or stabilize prices.

It's chilling to see how some Chinese people and businesses are becoming more relentlessly capitalistic than barons in the Enclosure Movement in Europe.

They seem to see nothing more important or meaningful in this world than money. If that's the case, it's no wonder that toxic products continue to be manufactured, substandard buildings continue to be constructed, workers continue to lose their health in poorly regulated factories, and the air, waters and land continue to be polluted.

According to China's financial newspaper 21st Century Economic Report, Morgan Stanley has finished a low profile transaction with Sichuan Huaton Industry Commerce Development Shareholding Co., which is said to be China's largest maker of polyphenylene sulfide resin (PPS).

The story said Morgan Stanley has helped Huaton finance US$200 million by issuing bonds to Morgan Stanley's equity management subsidiary. In addition, Morgan Stanley inked an agreement to buy less than 20 percent of Huaton's stake with US$80 million.

The China Engineering Plastic Industry Association confirmed that Huaton has larger capacity than the other two PPS manufacturers in China, both also located in Sichuan province.

Huaton's capacity will reach 35,400 metric tons by the time it finishes the ongoing expansion. China's demand for PPS, on the other hand, will top 70,000 metric tons by 2010, the report said.

Huaton also is considering going public outside of China. That certainly is something Morgan Stanley is looking forward to.

What does it take to get a "gold bowl" -- a permanent, prestigious and well-paid job and become a government employee in China? The short answer is "a lot," even more than what it takes to get hired by a Fortune 100 company's Chinese operation. Since I write for Plastics News, I'm not going to tell you all the unspoken secrets about Chinese government's human resources practices.

But here is a tip about what some Chinese government employees have to do to keep their jobs, which I bet their American counterparts can't even imagine. Next time you go on a trade mission to China, you can feel more knowledgeable about the society.

Government employees in the Dongpo District of Meishan City in China's southwestern province Sichuan (known for its spicy cuisine) are required to recite at least 10 poems written by ancient poet Su Dongpo, who the city district is named after, according to Sichuan News Web.

The local government organized a training session on the poems and distributed study materials.

What is the point of doing this? An official said: "When receiving foreign and domestic guests and potential investors, if an official couldn't even recite some Dongpo poems, wouldn't it be embarrassing?"

I don't think any businessman will base an investment decision on local officials' knowledge of ancient Chinese literature.

But the official also said something more telling, "[studying the poems] won't affect their regular work, we just encourage people to spend some of their drinking and card game time on studying."

There you go, drinking and card games. They are not just personal hobbies. Believe it or not, they can be work. Recently, a Chinese local official, Mr. Guo, died from drinking at a late-night reception (this is considered overtime work) and received an award, according to Oriental Today.

Mr. Guo, age 46, died "at work," according to a report. After it was revealed to the public that his death was by alcohol, the government said it would take back the award. But I actually feel very bad for him, because drinking is part of a government job, and he did die for his work.

If you refuse to drink to "bottoms empty" at a traditional-style reception in China, you are deemed disrespectful to the host or the person who toasts you. Mr. Guo and his family deserve something from the government, maybe not an award, but perhaps a change in the system?

Speaking of change, the local government had introduced an alcohol ban long ago. After Mr. Guo died, officials interpreted the ban to the questioning press: "the ban is only for lunch, not for dinner."

I guess I'd prefer the poems to drinking. But nothing is optional in the political world.