In China, out-of-work migrants destabilizing

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Friday, January 23, 2009 – San Francisco Chronicle

Anna Mehler Paperny

SHANGHAI

On a recent Sunday morning, the scene on the K290 train heading west from Shanghai to China’s rural heartland was one of chaos.

The hard-seat cars teemed with passengers, many of them migrant workers fighting to place their baggage in overhead compartments or find space to sit in the aisles.

Chun yun, or spring festival transport, is the world’s largest human migration, involving hundreds of millions of people annually traveling home before the Lunar New Year. But this year, migrants returning home before the Year of the Ox begins Monday got an early start after hundreds of thousands of workers lost their city jobs.

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China’s wild west

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Urumqi, China
Photo by Anna Mehler Paperny

Anna Mehler Paperny

Maclean’s Magazine – December 4, 2008

URUMQI, CHINA

China’s Xinjiang region, in the deserts and mountains of the country’s far northwest, could be two parallel universes. One is on the receiving end of a flood of foreign investment, home to swiftly multiplying oil derricks and gleaming office towers. This is the image the Chinese government wants to spring to mind when foreigners think of Xinjiang, the “wild west” whose economy Beijing is trying to bring level with the more prosperous areas of the country. The other, home to about eight million Uighurs, functions in a different language and boasts wholly foreign religion, culture and food. To a visitor it’s like another country entirely. And that’s what has Beijing worried.

In August, the region was rocked by violent attacks in the west that killed at least 33 people. The unrest, which the Chinese government has blamed on Uighur separatist groups, humiliated the government and shook China’s ostensibly shatterproof national security leading up to the Beijing Olympics. In Xinjiang, the aftermath is still palpable. It’s translated into heightened security measures—omnipresent guards and checkpoints, among other things—and tightened restrictions on religious practice for the Muslim Uighurs, one of China’s 50-plus ethnic minorities that are separated from the Han majority by language and a deep-seated, mutual distrust.

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Losing the drive to quit: ‘There’s no rehabilitation system at all’

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Saturday, August 30, 2008

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

VANCOUVER — After an 18-month cocaine and heroin binge, Karmalita Joe was ready to get clean.

She had tried and failed before at detox centres around Vancouver, but the persistent urging of staff at InSite – the supervised-injection site where she says she went to shoot up “repeatedly, daily, sadistically” – prevailed. On a Friday in early July, she asked to be admitted to OnSite, the detox facility upstairs.

But the facility, which has been operating at capacity almost since it opened a year ago, didn’t have any spare beds. Come back Monday, she was told.

In the intervening two days, she was on another trip.

“When you want to quit, you need to quit now,” she said. “If you’re told you have to wait three or four days, that drive to quit … it just goes down, and addiction takes over.”

Ms. Joe was lucky: She was back at OnSite the following Wednesday, got a bed in its detox program and has graduated to its third-floor stabilization room.

“I still, for the life of me, cannot believe I was able to stay clean,” she said.

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Vancouver faces Olympian hurdle as rock slide cuts off vital corridor

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Thursday, July 31, 2008

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

With reports from Justine Hunter in Victoria, Sunny Dhillon in Lions Bay and Cathryn Atkinson in Squamish

VANCOUVER — It almost cost Vancouver the 2010 Olympic Games five years ago.

Now, the narrow and precarious cliff-side Sea to Sky Highway is coming back to haunt the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee a year and a half before the big event.

Thousands of cubic metres of jagged boulders laid strewn 10 metres high, blocking the vital artery linking Vancouver and Whistler, the Games’ two primary venue cities. The rock slide Tuesday night near Porteau Bluffs south of Squamish is the highway’s biggest in a dozen years. It is expected to shut down the road for five days and has conjured disastrous visions of stranded athletes and tourists during the 2010 Olympics. The cliffs above the highway are geologically prone to weak planes of rock.

Commuters, tourists and businesses are girding for a long wait.

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Stopping the great escapes: Aquaculture firm calls off search for 29,616 rogue Atlantic salmon that may put B.C.’s wild stocks at risk of a dwindling food supply

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Saturday, July 5, 2008

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

VANCOUVER — A continent away from their native waters, disoriented and out of captivity for the first time in their lives, 30,000-odd Atlantic salmon are roaming free off the British Columbia coast.

Their mass exodus from a pen at Marine Harvest Canada’s Frederick Arm site on July 1 is B.C.’s largest farmed-salmon escape in eight years. It has spawned a government investigation, with Environment Ministry conservation officers combing the site to find out exactly what went wrong.

The company stopped trying to recapture the escaped fish yesterday afternoon, leaving 29,616 fish missing.

“They’re out, they’re free, they’ll be mingling,” said Raincoast Research biologist Alexandra Morton. And it doesn’t bode well for wild Pacific salmon.

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