China, From Within: China’s GrubHub Revolution, Pesticide Overload, and an Online Free Trade Zone

Every day, FP‘s China team at the Tea Leaf Nation channel scours dozens of Chinese media outlets to find compelling stories unreported in Western mainstream press. This week, we bring you China’s Grubhub revolution, AIDS discrimination in the workplace, China’s pesticide problem, and more.

Regulation can’t keep up with China’s burgeoning online food ordering market.

Ordering food online in China has gotten a lot easier since Chinese GrubHub lookalikes are growing in popularity. But that means it’s also gotten easier for "black restaurants" — operations without business or sanitation licenses — to evade regulators. According to a Nov. 3 report in state-run newspaper New Finance Observer, some "black restaurants" may not even have brick-and-mortar restaurants, but operate solely through website orders and delivery, making it more difficult for regulators to track.

HIV positive teacher appeals over decision on AIDS discrimination.

A school in southwestern Guizhou province fired teacher Li Cheng in September 2013, after he tested HIV positive. Li decided to sue the school and local education bureau in June 2014, but a local court turned down the case. Business magazine Caixin reported on Nov. 6 that he is appealing the decision in the intermediate court. This is China’s sixth legal case involving AIDS discrimination according to Caixin: The previous cases were either turned down by local courts, resulted in an adverse decision against the plaintiffs, or settled out of court. Chinese laws and regulations protect HIV positive individuals from workplace discrimination, but the courts have so far refused to rule in favor of the plaintiffs in these cases. For that reason, this is a case to watch.

China’s farms are on pesticide overload.

China’s Ministry of Agriculture has found that Chinese farmers use 15 percent more pesticides and other chemicals than developed countries, according to a Nov. 7 report by the liberal Beijing News. The report also found that 2.9 percent of China’s total land is degraded to a "medium to heavy" degree, meaning that erosion, acidification, or pollution has reduced the soil’s agricultural productivity. A previous report found that 40 percent of its arable land is degraded. The report concluded that the "ecological pressure exerted" on Chinese land is growing, and that the situation "must change."

China’s e-commerce capital looks to establish an online free-trade zone.

As China plans to replicate the Shanghai Free Trade Zone in Tianjin, Guangzhou, and other regions around China, the Hangzhou city government has announced its intention to create its own "online free trade zone," pending central government approval. As the home of e-commerce giant Alibaba, Hangzhou has actively embraced the industry  to become China’s e-commerce capital. According to state-run China News Net’s Nov. 4 report, Tong Guili, a member of the Communist Party committee which governs the city, said that while more than one billion people in the world shop online, e-commerce still isn’t viewed as a "new form of trade" in China. Hangzhou hopes to change that.

Suing the government in China has a low success rate — but that might change.

China is amending its administrative litigation law for the first time in 25 years, revising the law to prevent local government interference in lawsuits. According to a Nov. 5 report in state-run Dahe News, the law governs cases where ordinary citizens take government agencies to court. Since Chinese courts are not independent from government and party interferences, plaintiffs in such cases have low success rates of approximately 10 percent, compared to 30 percent about 10 years ago. As a result, local residents have been more likely to make the trek to Beijing to petition the central government directly — a practice that both the central and local governments would prefer to limit. The change in administrative litigation law will likely help aggrieved local residents get their complaints resolved locally.

Shujie Leng contributed research.