Two hours into Mr. Lai’s second shift, the building started to shake, as if an earthquake was under way. There was a series of blasts, plant workers said.

Then the screams began.

When Mr. Lai’s colleagues ran outside, dark smoke was mixing with a light rain, according to cellphone videos. The toll would eventually count four dead, 18 injured.

At the hospital, Mr. Lai’s girlfriend saw that his skin was almost completely burned away. “I recognized him from his legs, otherwise I wouldn’t know who that person was,” she said.

Eventually, his family arrived. Over 90 percent of his body had been seared. “My mom ran away from the room at the first sight of him. I cried. Nobody could stand it,” his brother said. When his mother eventually returned, she tried to avoid touching her son, for fear that it would cause pain.

“If I had known,” she said, “I would have grabbed his arm, I would have touched him.”

“He was very tough,” she said. “He held on for two days.”

After Mr. Lai died, Foxconn workers drove to Mr. Lai’s hometown and delivered a box of ashes. The company later wired a check for about $150,000.

Foxconn, in a statement, said that at the time of the explosion the Chengdu plant was in compliance with all relevant laws and regulations, and “after ensuring that the families of the deceased employees were given the support they required, we ensured that all of the injured employees were given the highest quality medical care.” After the explosion, the company added, Foxconn immediately halted work in all polishing workshops, and later improved ventilation and dust disposal, and adopted technologies to enhance worker safety.

In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that after the explosion, the company contacted “the foremost experts in process safety” and assembled a team to investigate and make recommendations to prevent future accidents.

In December, however, seven months after the blast that killed Mr. Lai, another iPad factory exploded, this one in Shanghai. Once again, aluminum dust was the cause, according to interviews and Apple’s most recent supplier responsibility report. That blast injured 59 workers, with 23 hospitalized.

“It is gross negligence, after an explosion occurs, not to realize that every factory should be inspected,” said Nicholas Ashford, the occupational safety expert, who is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If it were terribly difficult to deal with aluminum dust, I would understand. But do you know how easy dust is to control? It’s called ventilation. We solved this problem over a century ago.”

In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that while the explosions both involved combustible aluminum dust, the causes were different. The company declined, however, to provide details. The report added that Apple had now audited all suppliers polishing aluminum products and had put stronger precautions in place. All suppliers have initiated required countermeasures, except one, which remains shut down, the report said.

For Mr. Lai’s family, questions remain. “We’re really not sure why he died,” said Mr. Lai’s mother, standing beside a shrine she built near their home. “We don’t understand what happened.”

As American consumers ogle over shiny new gadgets at this week’s Consumer Electronic’s Show, the workers that make those products are threatening mass suicide for the horrid working conditions at Foxconn. 300 employees who worked making the Xbox 360 stood at the edge of the factory building, about to jump, after their boss reneged on promised compensation, reports English news site Want China Times. It’s not like this is the first time working conditions at Foxconn have made news outside China. But iPhone and Xbox sales surely haven’t lagged in the wake of those revelations and neither Apple nor Microsoft has done much of anything to fix things. 

Instead of the raise they requested, these workers were given the following ultimatum: quit with compensation, or keep their jobs with no pay increase. Most quit and never got the money. That’s when the mass suicide threat came in. The incident actually caused a factory wide shutdown, reports Record China. 

Xianiezhuang Village, China (CNN) — On most days, Zhang Huanzhi doesn’t look the part of a fighter for justice. Whenever she catches a break between tending the cornfield and feeding livestock, the 67-year-old farmer from northern China goes to court.

“I bike to the closest bus stop and then take a two-hour ride to the Hebei provincial high court,” Zhang said, as she thrashed sorghum in her courtyard one afternoon, her disabled husband sitting nearby.

“I’ve been doing this for the past six years — and as long as I can still move, I’m not giving up.”

Her only son, Nie Shubin, was executed in 1995 — when he was 20 — for raping and killing a woman. A decade later, another man confessed to the same crimes.

Since then Zhang has made countless journeys to the courthouse in the provincial capital of Shijiazhuang — 320 kilometers (200 miles) southwest of Beijing — with one simple yet futile appeal: retry the case to exonerate her son.

With more details emerging from domestic news coverage, many have viewed Zhang’s plight — and Nie’s case — as an egregious example of the flaws in the Chinese criminal justice system, including the use of torture, deficient due process and lax review of death sentences.

Zhang is now back in the public spotlight, as the government proposes major revisions to its criminal code — the first in 15 years — ostensibly aimed at better protecting its citizens and preventing a recurrence of situations like what happened her son.

Her fight nevertheless continues to hit a wall and even the People’s Daily — the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party — ran a scathing commentary in September that asked: “In a case where someone was clearly wronged, why has it been so difficult to make it right?”

“Rehabilitation means little to the dead, but it means a lot to his surviving family and all other citizens,” it added. “We can no longer afford to let Nie’s case drag on.”

A mother’s dogged pursuit

Zhang now seals her most treasured possessions in a Ziploc bag: two old photos and several legal documents.

“He was about 19 and it was taken right here in our courtyard,” she recalled, pointing to the fading color prints of her shy stuttering son — a square-faced teenager wearing a blue tank top in one picture and shirtless in the other — beaming for the camera.

Nie was taken into custody not long after the photos were taken and would never see his mother again. Zhang said local police, during their several visits to question the family and search the house, never told her why they had detained her son. Court documents cited “tips from local residents” but did not elaborate.

Authorities tried Nie behind closed doors and barred the parents from the courtroom, but Nie told a lawyer hired by his family that he was beaten into a confession on his sixth day in jail. Zhang was convinced that Nie was a victim of torture, after seeing her normally healthy son walk with a limp into the courthouse before the first trial.

Seven months after he was first detained, the government executed Nie in April 1995 — without notifying his parents. After the initial shock, Zhang had to endure more agony to locate her son’s remains and deal with a failed suicide attempt and subsequent half-paralysis of her husband, who was crushed by Nie’s execution.

Living off her husband’s monthly pension of $150, Zhang learned to take care of the family by herself. Her daily routine, however, was disrupted in 2005 by a sudden influx of Chinese reporters, who revealed to her that a man named Wang Shujin had just confessed to the same crimes Nie was executed for a decade earlier.

Carefully laying the contents from her Ziploc bag on a table, Zhang described each legal document as she recounted her six-year lone quest for justice: a copy of the verdict against Nie that detailed his “crimes;” a 2007 letter from the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing, in which the nation’s highest court instructed the Hebei high court to “process” her appeal; and most importantly, a printout of a written statement by Wang’s lawyer on his client’s confession.

The lawyer, Zhu Aimin, confirmed to CNN that Wang has admitted to the crimes Nie was convicted of — with corroborative details. Ironically Wang, sentenced to death for four other murder and rape cases, is now receiving a reprieve, as his connection to the Nie case has delayed the completion of his second trial.

Officials from the Hebei high court in Shijiazhuang and the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing never responded to CNN’s requests for comment despite repeated phone calls and faxes.

“The cold reality doesn’t offer us ordinary people much hope — so why do I keep pursuing?” Zhang said. “I don’t want to hold anyone responsible, I don’t want government compensation, and I don’t want the judge to bring back my son alive — but one thing I must have is his innocence.”

New law, old problems

In recent years, state media have exposed an increasing number of wrongful convictions in China. At least five death row inmates — most reportedly tortured during police interrogation — were set free, either because their “victims” turned up alive years after the alleged murders, or the real perpetrators were caught.

Such cases could be prevented if the new Criminal Procedure Law takes effect next March as scheduled, the Chinese government has argued, because the proposed changes strengthen the rights of defense lawyers while barring the practices of forcing suspects to incriminate themselves or coercing their families to testify against them.

The current draft also incorporates earlier government pronouncements, including those making evidence obtained through torture inadmissible in court and limiting the use of the death penalty. China executes more people than all other countries combined, according to the London-based Amnesty International human rights group, which estimated the figure — considered a state secret — to be in the thousands last year.

Many lawyers and legal scholars call the revisions mere window dressing. With the government more concerned about maintaining social stability in the wake of the Arab Spring unrest, they depict an increasingly repressive environment for ordinary citizens and lawyers alike.

“The authorities do whatever they want — detention, surveillance and harassment — it’s just too arbitrary,” said Zhang Sizhi, a prominent lawyer in Beijing who was once assigned by the government to defend Chairman Mao Zedong’s widow.

He and others note the draft law does not include the long-proposed right to silence for suspects or abolition of forced labor camps. Yet it does include a clause authorizing police to detain citizens for up to six months in certain cases without having to inform their families.

One aspect the revisions largely ignore is the appeals process, experts say, leaving ordinary people — like Zhang Huanzhi — who are trying to overturn a court ruling trapped in the legal labyrinth.

“They have nowhere to go — who will listen to them?” said Jerome Cohen, a New York University law professor and an internationally recognized authority in Chinese law. “It requires far more reform than this draft to address these issues.”

During the just-ended month-long public comment period on the draft, the government received more than 72,000 responses. Cohen says enough negative feedback may prompt the authorities to shelve this version and start anew later.

Back in Xianiezhuang Village, Zhang has heard about the proposed new criminal code and simply wishes the government would do whatever it takes to protect other families from the kind of anguish she has suffered.

As she sat on a stool to winnow grains, her husband started wailing uncontrollably while reading a newspaper profile on her titled, “A Mother’s Race Against Time.”

“I’ve talked to my son several times on his grave,” she said, wiping tears. “I told him: Son, you have to fight for justice in your world and mom will keep fighting for you in mine.”

“He would thank me because he knows a mother can’t live without her son.”

Click here for video.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: October 16, 2011

As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, the response from the movement’s targets has gradually changed: contemptuous dismissal has been replaced by whining. (A reader of my blog suggests that we start calling our ruling class the “kvetchocracy.”) The modern lords of finance look at the protesters and ask, Don’t they understand what we’ve done for the U.S. economy?

The answer is: yes, many of the protesters do understand what Wall Street and more generally the nation’s economic elite have done for us. And that’s why they’re protesting.

On Saturday The Times reported what people in the financial industry are saying privately about the protests. My favorite quote came from an unnamed money manager who declared, “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it.”

This is deeply unfair to American workers, who are good at lots of things, and could be even better if we made adequate investments in education and infrastructure. But to the extent that America has lagged in everything except financial services, shouldn’t the question be why, and whether it’s a trend we want to continue?

For the financialization of America wasn’t dictated by the invisible hand of the market. What caused the financial industry to grow much faster than the rest of the economy starting around 1980 was a series of deliberate policy choices, in particular a process of deregulation that continued right up to the eve of the 2008 crisis.

Not coincidentally, the era of an ever-growing financial industry was also an era of ever-growing inequality of income and wealth. Wall Street made a large direct contribution to economic polarization, because soaring incomes in finance accounted for a significant fraction of the rising share of the top 1 percent (and the top 0.1 percent, which accounts for most of the top 1 percent’s gains) in the nation’s income. More broadly, the same political forces that promoted financial deregulation fostered overall inequality in a variety of ways, undermining organized labor, doing away with the “outrage constraint” that used to limit executive paychecks, and more.

Oh, and taxes on the wealthy were, of course, sharply reduced.

All of this was supposed to be justified by results: the paychecks of the wizards of Wall Street were appropriate, we were told, because of the wonderful things they did. Somehow, however, that wonderfulness failed to trickle down to the rest of the nation — and that was true even before the crisis. Median family income, adjusted for inflation, grew only about a fifth as much between 1980 and 2007 as it did in the generation following World War II, even though the postwar economy was marked both by strict financial regulation and by much higher tax rates on the wealthy than anything currently under political discussion.

Then came the crisis, which proved that all those claims about how modern finance had reduced risk and made the system more stable were utter nonsense. Government bailouts were all that saved us from a financial meltdown as bad as or worse than the one that caused the Great Depression.

And what about the current situation? Wall Street pay has rebounded even as ordinary workers continue to suffer from high unemployment and falling real wages. Yet it’s harder than ever to see what, if anything, financiers are doing to earn that money.

Why, then, does Wall Street expect anyone to take its whining seriously? That money manager claiming that finance is the only thing America does well also complained that New York’s two Democratic senators aren’t on his side, declaring that “They need to understand who their constituency is.” Actually, they surely know very well who their constituency is — and even in New York, 16 out of 17 workers are employed by nonfinancial industries.

But he wasn’t really talking about voters, of course. He was talking about the one thing Wall Street still has plenty of thanks to those bailouts, despite its total loss of credibility: money.

Money talks in American politics, and what the financial industry’s money has been saying lately is that it will punish any politician who dares to criticize that industry’s behavior, no matter how gently — as evidenced by the way Wall Street money has now abandoned President Obama in favor of Mitt Romney. And this explains the industry’s shock over recent events.

You see, until a few weeks ago it seemed as if Wall Street had effectively bribed and bullied our political system into forgetting about that whole drawing lavish paychecks while destroying the world economy thing. Then, all of a sudden, some people insisted on bringing the subject up again.

And their outrage has found resonance with millions of Americans. No wonder Wall Street is whining.