Research, public education and pilot interventions on the linkages between environmental pollution and human health will form the core of a China grant-making program by the US-based Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which is resuming operations in Southern China after a three-year hiatus during which the foundation reassessed its global priorities.

Shanghai police broke up a small press conference organised on April 20 by 37 haemophiliacs and their family members who contracted the HIV or Hepatitis C viruses via unsafe blood products.

The United Nations Development Programme and Stora Enso, a Finnish multinational paper products company, are joining forces in south-west Guangxi Province in a public-private partnership that UNDP hopes will set new standards for environmental and social corporate practice.

Massive loans from the government of China to developing countries may lower global standards of aid transparency and corporate responsibility, according to an article in the December issue of Ethical Corporation magazine.

Green Watershed from Yunnan and Green Hanjiang from central Hubei were placed first in, respectively, ‘environment protection’ and ‘education’ categories of a Ford Motor Company conservation and environmental grants competition that has announced awards totalling CNY 1 million (USD 123,457) to sixteen organisations and individuals in Beijing.

A recent spate of conferences and workshops (see text box) has served to underline how quickly the idea of ‘corporate social responsibility’ is being taken up in China—much more readily than was the idea of ‘civil society’ when it became intellectually fashionable across much of the rest of the world in the 1990s.

Tina Qian reports on a corporate-NGO partnership to bring computer literacy to young migrants from rural areas.

Greenpeace China has stepped up its campaign against genetically engineered (GE) rice with an open letter to the world’s second largest retailer, Carrefour, accusing the French supermarket chain of selling GE rice in Wuhan hypermarkets, in contravention of both Chinese regulations and the company’s own food safety policy.

Meanwhile, Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), accused by Greenpeace of illegal logging in Yunnan and Hainan, wrote in May 2005 to the State Forestry Commission pledging “to operate legally according to Chinese regulations and policies,” according to a report in the Beijing News (Xin Jing Bao).

Greenpeace China has stepped up its campaign against genetically engineered (GE) rice with an open letter to the world’s second largest retailer, Carrefour, accusing the French supermarket chain of selling GE rice in Wuhan hypermarkets, in contravention of both Chinese regulations and the company’s own food safety policy.