Written by Probe International

In a move that has infuriated Chinese officials, the Nobel Committee has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the jailed dissident writer and famous democracy advocate, Liu Xiaobo.  read more »

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After recent evidence showed that China was receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid funds to fight diseases such as malaria that were almost non-existent in the country—and at the expense of other developing countries suffering thousands of deaths from these same diseases—there are new reports revealing that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that China is receiving billons of dollars in foreign aid each year. Many are now asking why, when China spends billions of dollars on lavish projects such as the 2008 Olympics and the Shanghai Expo, it deserves any aid at all.  read more »

Leaders from across the world recently pledged to step up foreign aid efforts in order to meet the much-talked-about Millennium Development goals. But more and more economists, politicians and academics are arguing that an efficient and accountable tax regime will do a much better job promoting development than foreign aid.  read more »

As the controversies surrounding the United Nations’ (UN) carbon credit scheme continue to mount, the agency is trying to pass the buck on liability for exaggerated carbon-reducing claims. The Executive Board—the body that overseas the UN’s international carbon credit scheme, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)—has tabled a proposal to make the companies that verify carbon emissions liable for excess credits.  read more »

As Chinese officials look to “green” their image internationally by cleaning up polluting sectors such as manufacturing and power generation, they’re using a very traditional method: the heavy hand of the state. But that heavy hand is backfiring, creating massive blackouts, and ironically, leading to worse pollution.  read more »

Foreign aid is a flop, say an increasing number of Third World experts, leaders, and foreign aid executives who have witnessed, first hand, its inability to deliver development. Nowhere is foreign aid’s failure clearer, they argue, than in Africa—the darling of aid agencies. In the latest salvo, Kurt Gerhardt a former journalist and country director for the German Development Service (DED) in Niger in West Africa, has written a scathing denunciation of foreign aid in Der Spiegel, one of Germany's leading publications.  read more »

Government officials in China are continuing to harass critics of the country’s infrastructure projects and the political corruption that often plagues these state vanity projects. Earlier this month, officials arrested Xie Chaoping, a former journalist and recent author of a book about the struggles of the more than 400,000 citizens relocated, first in the 1950s and again in 1985, to make way for Sanmenxia dam on the Yellow river.  read more »

Officials have been warned for years that the Three Gorges reservoir would be seriously and dangerously polluted. They should have addressed the problem long ago. Their failure to take effective action makes them all the more culpable.

Probe International is providing a chronology of worries about the contamination of China's Yangtze River and of the dirty waters behind the dam.  read more »

Chinese State Owned Enterprises (SOEs)—a growing source of capital and investment in the developing world, and especially in its own Southeast Asian backyard—are provoking increased scrutiny and criticism from local populations affected by Chinese foreign investment. Now, a Beijing-based economic think tank, is offering more criticism in the way SOEs conduct their business abroad.  read more »