From The Wall Street Journal:

This summer China passed a new law, which technically went into effect on October 15, requiring foreign workers and their employers to contribute to a social security fund. To help foreigners living in China better understand what the new social security tax means, China Real Time has compiled a list of facts that the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security has revealed thus far:

1. Pricing

Every city will have its own pricing scheme, requiring companies to pay a percentage of an employee’s salary to the social security fund. The individual contribution will hover around 10% of the employee’s salary. The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security recommends that every individual check with a local bureau to determine rates.

For Beijing, companies will contribute the following percentage based on an employee’s salary per month, with a salary cap of 12,603 yuan ($1,981): 

2. Start Date The law will be implemented by year-end and money will be collected according to an Oct. 15 start date, requiring retroactive payments.

3. Medical Insurance The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security says the medical insurance plan will allow foreigners to choose which hospitals they’d like to go to. An unspecified percentage of expenses will be reimbursed using the funds from the account.

Officials have not yet specified whether insurance will cover a foreigner beyond China’s borders.

Upon leaving China, foreigners will be able to collect the unused portion of the individual contribution to the medical insurance fund. Corporate contributions cannot be collected.

4. Maternity Insurance The Ministry has not yet specified if maternity insurance will cover multiple births

5. Unemployment The Ministry said it is working with employment and visa agencies to devise a plan that will allow unemployed foreigners to collect.

6. Pension Pensions can be collected if the foreigner has contributed for 15 years. They will be paid until death.

The Ministry has not specified a retirement age for foreigners or how foreigners will collect the fund.

Upon leaving China, foreigners will be able to collect the individual contribution to the retirement fund. Corporate contributions cannot be collected.

7. Contract Workers Contract workers and workers who would be forced to pay on behalf of the company and themselves can visit the local bureau of the social security office to have their cases reviewed. The Ministry will reconfigure payments for individuals.

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/10/28/cough-it-up-a-guide-to-chinas-new-foreigner-social-security-tax/

Article published on The New York Times:

An Internet cafe in Beijing. China is trying to rein in microblogs.

By SHARON LAFRANIERE, MICHAEL WINES and EDWARD WONG

Published: October 26, 2011

Now, the party appears to be saying “enough.”

Whether spooked by popular uprisings worldwide, a coming leadership transition at home or their own citizens’ increasingly provocative tastes, Communist leaders are proposing new limits on media and Internet freedoms that include some of the most restrictive measures in years.

The most striking instance occurred Tuesday, when the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television ordered 34 major regional television stations to limit themselves to no more than two 90-minute entertainment shows each per week, and collectively 10 nationwide. They are also being ordered to broadcast two hours of state-approved news every evening and to disregard audience ratings in their programming decisions. The ministry said the measures, to go into effect on Jan. 1, were aimed at rooting out “excessive entertainment and vulgar tendencies.”

The restrictions arrived as party leaders signaled new curbs on China’s short-message, Twitter-like microblogs, an Internet sensation that has mushroomed in less than two years into a major — and difficult to control — source of whistle-blowing. Microbloggers, some of whom have attracted millions of followers, have been exposing scandals and official malfeasance, including an attempted cover-up of a recent high-speed rail accident, with astonishing speed and popularity.

On Wednesday, the Communist Party’s Central Committee called in a report on its annual meeting for an “Internet management system” that would strictly regulate social network and instant-message systems, and punish those who spread “harmful information.” The focus of the meeting, held this month, was on culture and ideology.

Analysts and employees inside the private companies that manage the microblogs say party officials are pressing for increasingly strict and swift censorship of unapproved opinions. Perhaps most telling, the authorities are discussing requiring microbloggers to register accounts with their real names and identification numbers instead of the anonymous handles now in wide use.

Although China’s most famous bloggers tend to use their own names, requiring everyone to do so would make online whistle-blowing and criticism of officialdom — two public services not easily duplicated elsewhere — considerably riskier.

It would “definitely be harmful to free speech,” said one microblog editor who refused to be named for fear of reprisal.

This newly buttoned-down approach coincides with a planned shift in the top leadership of the ruling party and government, an intricate process that will last for the next year. During such a period, tolerance for outspokenness outside official channels tends to shrink, and bureaucrats eager for promotion show their conservative stripes.

The crackdown also follows popular uprisings across the Middle East that appear to have given China’s leaders pause regarding their own hold on absolute power. In the view of some, it also tracks the influence in China’s ruling hierarchy of hard-liners like Zhou Yongkang, the public security chief who helped preside over the suppression of riots by ethnic Uighurs in western China’s Xinjiang region.

On Tuesday, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that Mr. Zhou was urging authorities “to solve problems regarding social integrity, morality and Internet management” and that he had called for “the early introduction of laws and regulations on the management of the Internet,” among other things.

Nobody outside China’s closeted leadership knows the true reason for the maneuvers, beyond a general and intangible sense of uneasiness over the degree to which freer speech is taking root here.

The microblogs, or weibos, are perhaps the prime example. In the last year, weibos have become the forum of choice for Chinese to pass on news and gossip about scandals involving government and the elite. The two largest, run by the privately held Sina Corporation and Tencent Holdings, each count more than 200 million registered users.

In the face of official censorship, their weibos are filled with salacious tales of official malfeasance, such as a July frenzy — photographs included — over a Yunnan Province city official’s sex orgy. Industry insiders say the principal weibo (pronounced way-bwah) regulators, based in Beijing and the Shenzhen Communist Party Internet offices, have been assailed by government leaders elsewhere for allowing the scandals to spread online unchecked.

How can I be proud of my China if we are a nation of 1.4bn cold hearts?

The death of the two-year-old run over as passersby ignored her is symptomatic of a deepening moral crisis

READ THE ARTICLE ON THE GUARDIAN