December 2005 Archives
By Tian Ning | The Epoch Times
December 27, 2005
Global Service Center for Quitting the Chinese Communist Party
The Epoch Times was the among the first media sources to disclose the true facts about the bloody suppression of Shanwei farmers on December 6, 2006. This incident has shocked the international community. The world has condemned the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for gunning people down. So far the CCP has not punished any government officials for neglect of duties, but has been monitoring the farmers even more closely. All relevant information is being blocked.
The Chinese people will discover the truth no matter how many blockades are put in place. Since this incident, many statements renouncing the CCP have been received by the Global Service Center of Quitting Chinese Communist Party from people near Dongzhou Town and other areas in China. They all state things along the lines of, "This evil party doesn't even care about people's lives; it certainly will disintegrate very soon."
By DAVID BARBOZA |The New York Times
December 29, 2005
SHANGHAI, Dec. 28 - When Nickelodeon's popular "Kids' Choice Awards" program came to China last month, the producers were forced to make some serious modifications. There would be no voting on favorite burp. Nor would children judge which movie character was the best at breaking wind.
There was, however, sliming, a highlight of the American version of the show, which involves dumping, squirting and otherwise propelling green gooey stuff at people. And adults repeatedly were whacked by children - with balloon bats, of course - just to give the Chinese a taste of the freedoms afforded to children in the United States.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the show's national television broadcast was that children in China seemed to think that even this much kinder, gentler version of the program was wonderfully, outrageously transgressive.
"This is just so much fun," said Wang Yinong, a shy 12-year-old girl who watched the show at home with her parents in Shanghai. "I'd really like to go there and do the same thing: slime people."
Sliming remains a novelty in China. While every American industry that comes here faces its own obstacles, the bar that exporters of children's television programming must vault is particularly high: a traditional culture of respect for parents and authority reinforced by decades of Communist discipline and the ruthless competitiveness of an educational system that favors rigor over imagination.
Still, Viacom, which dominates youth-oriented programming in the United States and other parts of the world with its MTV and Nickelodeon networks, is aggressively courting Chinese youngsters, hoping to introduce them to its brand of playfully antiauthoritarian programming. After all, China has roughly 300 million people younger than 14, and Viacom executives warm to the idea of capturing even a sliver of a demographic that now exceeds the population of the entire United States.
BBC News
December 29, 2005
The authorities in China have dismissed the top editor of the Beijing News, one of the country's most popular and daring newspapers. Editor-in-chief Yang Bin was removed along with two other senior editors.
No official reason was given, but a lawyer who often represents journalists said Communist officials had accused the paper of multiple errors.
The Beijing News has a reputation for forthright reporting and commentary, despite strict control over the press.
It exposed a bloody crackdown ordered by officials against protesting farmers in the northern province of Dingzhou in June, in which six farmers were killed.
By Joseph Kahn - The New York Times
December 28, 2005
SHIQIAO, China - The peasants surrounded the clerk in the busy court anteroom, badgering him to let them sue the officials who had seized their land.
No, no, the clerk said, shaking his head and waving his hands, as the peasants recalled it. They were wasting his time and theirs. But as they withdrew, their legal papers remained on his desk in plain sight. Maybe, the peasants hoped, that meant the clerk had tacitly accepted their application to sue.
"In two years of trying every option under the law, this was a moment of optimism," said Li Huitang, a leader of peasant resistance in Shiqiao, a village in Hebei Province, in northern China. "We hoped he might rule on our request."
Even a written rejection would have been a bonanza, enabling them to appeal to a higher court. But it was not to be. The clerk soon called Mr. Li's home, ordering him to retrieve the documents. When Mr. Li declined, the clerk mailed them back in a plain manila envelope, unmarked, unprocessed and officially ignored.
China's legal system often hands down verdicts that the powerless consider unfair. But a bigger problem is that courts often refuse to issue any verdict at all - or even acknowledge that some bothersome legal complaints exist.
The English translation is simply "put on the record" or "register a case," but in China "li'an" is so fraught with official meddling that for many with complaints against the government, the judicial system is closed for business.
Edward Cody, Washington Post |
December 25, 2005
Shanwei, China -- Two weeks after a protest that culminated in gunfire and bloodshed, the rebellious farmers and fishermen of Dongzhou have been reduced to submission. Authorities have sealed off the seaside village and flooded its streets and lanes with police patrols, residents said, and an unknown number of men have been summoned by a knock on the door and hauled away for interrogation.
As a result, the spirit of defiance that pushed several thousand villagers to clash with riot troops and People's Armed Police forces on Dec. 6 has been replaced by fear, foreboding and resentment, according to conversations with a number of residents. Normal life has been suspended inside the community, they said, and outsiders who approached Monday were halted by police at a barrier with a sign that read: "Entry Not Allowed."
"We seldom go outside our houses anymore," said a villager contacted by telephone. "We seldom talk to other villagers. People are afraid to, because the police are patrolling all around the village. We are afraid that if we get together they might arrest us for some reason or another."
Dongzhou, on the southeast edge of Shanwei city about 125 miles northeast of Hong Kong, has come under a wave of repression. Shanwei officials, in their announcements, have focused attention on three men they qualified as "instigators" who they said used "threats and superstition" to arouse their neighbors to rebellion. All three have been in custody since Dec. 9.
The crackdown by officials in Dongzhou was similar to the response by authorities to riots that have erupted with increasing frequency across China over the past two years, according to accounts by witnesses and participants.
By JIM YARDLEY | The New York Times
XIAOSHABA, China - Far from the pulsing cities that symbolize modern China, this tiny hillside village of crude peasant houses seems disconnected from this century and the last. But follow a dirt path past a snarling watchdog, sidestep the chickens and ducks, and a small clearing on the banks of the Nu River reveals a dusty slab of concrete lying in a rotting pumpkin patch.
The innocuous concrete block is also a symbol, of a struggle over law that touches every corner of the country.
The block marks the spot on the Nu River where officials here in Yunnan Province want to begin building one of the biggest dam projects in the world. The project would produce more electricity than even the mighty Three Gorges Dam but would also threaten a region considered an ecological treasure. This village would be the first place to disappear.
For decades, the ruling Communist Party has rammed through such projects by fiat. But the Nu River proposal, already delayed for more than a year, is now unexpectedly presenting the Chinese government with a quandary of its own making: will it abide by its own laws?
A coalition led by Chinese environmental groups is urging the central government to hold open hearings and make public a secret report on the Nu dams before making a final decision. In a country where people cannot challenge decisions by their leaders, such public participation is a fairly radical idea. But the groups argue that new environmental laws grant exactly that right.
"This is the case to set a precedent," said Ma Jun, an environmental consultant in Beijing. "For the first time, there is a legal basis for public participation. If it happens, it would be a major step forward."
China's leaders often embrace the concept of rule of law, if leaving open how they choose to define it. For many people in China's fledgling "civil society" - environmentalists, journalists, lawyers, academics and others - the law has become a tool to promote environmental protection and to try to expand the rights of individuals in an authoritarian political system.
But trying to invoke the law is risky. Chinese nongovernmental organizations, few of which existed a decade ago, have taken up the Nu as a major cause. But the activism on the Nu and other issues has provoked deep suspicions by the Communist Party even as a broader clampdown against such NGO's has forced some to shut down. The government knows China has a drastic pollution problem and has passed new environmental laws. But top leaders also demand high economic growth and need to increase energy supplies to get it. The "green laws" are becoming a crucible to test which side will prevail and whether ordinary people can take part in the process.
The closed process that led to the Three Gorges Dam is what opponents of the Nu dams most want to avoid. In the late 1980's, a wide range of intellectuals and others tried in vain to force public hearings to discuss the environmental and social costs of a project that has flooded a vast region and forced huge relocations. Ultimately, opponents could only muster a symbolic victory as the final vote in the National People's Congress included an unusually high number of abstentions or nay votes.
The central government is still deliberating how to proceed on the Nu. Domestic media coverage has been banned in recent months. Three central government ministries refused interview requests, as did provincial officials in Yunnan. Local officials along the Nu River, after initially agreeing to an interview, failed to reply to a list of written questions.
Out in the jagged mountains along China's remote southwestern border, villagers in Xiaoshaba gather information about their future from rumors. In early December, a team of surveyors inventoried property and measured the narrow terrace of village farmland along the Nu. Several villagers say local officials have told them that everyone would be relocated around the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday, which ends in early February - even if the dams have not yet been approved.
"If they tell me to move," said one villager, Zhang Jianhua, "I have no other choice."
A Chinese democracy activist has reportedly been jailed for 12 years for helping to organise anti-Japanese protests in China earlier this year.
The wife of Xu Wanping said he had been found guilty of incitement to subvert state power at a closed hearing.
Mr Xu, 44, was among a number of activists known to have been arrested as a result of the protests in April.
Demonstrators opposed Japan's approval of textbooks which they said glossed over wartime atrocities it committed.
Mr Xu was accused of helping to organise a signature campaign against the school history books.
Original source: BBC News
DHARAMSALA — Chinese authorities in a Tibetan region of Gansu province have arrested a number of monks and nuns for putting up a poster calling on Beijing to start a dialogue with their exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.
"A group of monks and nuns from the Labrang Tashikyel monastery in Kanlho Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Gansu Province, were arrested for putting up a poster urging the Chinese leadership to initiate dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama," a source told Radio Free Asia's reporter in Dharamsala, home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile.
Original source: Radio Free Asia
Government Persecutes Civil Society Groups That Address HIV/AIDS
(New York, December 20, 2005) – In shutting down Beijing’s first-ever gay and lesbian cultural festival, the Chinese government violated basic freedoms and persecuted activists who are addressing the country’s burgeoning AIDS crisis, Human Rights Watch and the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network said today in letters to the Chinese authorities.
"China continues to talk about political reform, but closing down a cultural event is a crude reminder of the limits on openness," said Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch."This police raid was an effort to drive China’s gay and lesbian communities underground and to silence open discussions about sexuality throughout the country."
Original source: Human Rights Watch
By HOWARD W. FRENCH - The New York Times
SHANGHAI, Dec. 16 - Ten days ago, the sleepy fishing village of Dongzhou was the scene of a deadly face-off, with protesters hurling homemade bombs and the police gunning them down in the streets.
Now, a stilted calm prevails, a cover-up so carefully planned that the small town looks like a relic from the Cultural Revolution, as if the government had decided to re-educate the entire population. Banners hang everywhere, with slogans in big red characters proclaiming things like, "Stability is paramount" and "Don't trust instigators."
Many facts remain unclear about the police crackdown on a Dongzhou demonstration on Dec. 6, which residents say ended in the deaths of 20 or more people, but one thing is certain: The government is doing everything possible to prevent witnesses' accounts of what happened from emerging.
By HOWARD W. FRENCH - The New York Times
SHANGHAI, Dec. 13 - One week after the police violently suppressed a demonstration against the construction of a power plant in China, leaving as many as 20 people dead, an overwhelming majority of the Chinese public still knows nothing of the event.
In the wake of the biggest use of armed force against civilians since the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, Chinese officials have used a variety of techniques - from barring reports in most newspapers outside the immediate region to banning place names and other keywords associated with the event from major Internet search engines, like Google - to prevent news of the deaths from spreading.
Beijing's handling of news about the incident, which was widely reported internationally, provides a revealing picture of the government's ambitions to control the flow of information to its citizens, and of the increasingly sophisticated techniques - a combination of old-fashioned authoritarian methods and the latest Internet technologies - that it uses to keep people in the dark.
The government's first response was to impose a news blackout, apparently banning all Chinese news media from reporting the Dec. 6 confrontation. It was not until Saturday, four days later, with foreign news reports proliferating, that the official New China News Agency released the first Chinese account.
By JOSEPH KAHN - The New York Times
BEIJING, Dec. 12 - One November morning, the Beijing Judicial Bureau convened a hearing on its decree that one of China's best-known law firms must shut down for a year because it failed to file a change of address form when it moved offices.
The same morning, Gao Zhisheng, the firm's founder and star litigator, was 1,800 miles away in Xinjiang, in the remote west. He skipped what he called the "absurd and corrupt" hearing so he could rally members of an underground Christian church to sue China's secret police.
"I can't guarantee that you will win the lawsuit - in fact you will almost certainly lose," Mr. Gao told one church member who had been detained in a raid. "But I warn you that if you are too timid to confront their barbaric behavior, you will be completely defeated."
The advice could well summarize Mr. Gao's own fateful clash with the authorities. Bold, brusque and often roused to fiery indignation, Mr. Gao, 41, is one of a handful of self-proclaimed legal "rights defenders."
He travels the country filing lawsuits over corruption, land seizures, police abuses and religious freedom. His opponent is usually the same: the ruling Communist Party.
Now, the party has told him to cease and desist. The order to suspend his firm's operating license was expanded last week to include his personal permit to practice law. The authorities threatened to confiscate it by force if Mr. Gao fails to hand it over voluntarily by Wednesday.
Secret police now watch his home and follow him wherever he goes, he says.
from the BBC News
The authorities in China have arrested a police commander who ordered officers to open fire during a disturbance, killing protesters, media reports say.
The arrest comes after officials broke several days' silence to say that three villagers were shot dead in the protest, in Guangdong province.
Local residents have alleged that up to 20 people were killed.
If this is true, this could be China's deadliest use of force against protesters since Tiananmen Square.
A special investigation into the incident has been launched.
Protests against corruption, pollution and land seizures have become increasingly common in rural China.
By HOWARD W. FRENCH - The New York Times
SHANGHAI, Dec. 9 - Residents of a fishing village near Hong Kong said Friday that as many as 20 people were killed by the paramilitary police this week, in an unusually violent clash that marked an escalation in the widespread social protests roiling the Chinese countryside. Villagers said as many as 50 other residents remained unaccounted for since the shootings on Tuesday.
It was the largest known use of force by security personnel against citizens since the killings around Tiananmen Square in 1989. That death toll is still unknown, but is estimated to have been in the hundreds.
The violence near Hong Kong began after dark on Tuesday evening in the town of Dongzhou, when the police opened fire on crowds to put down a demonstration over plans for a power plant. Terrified residents said their hamlet has been occupied since then by thousands of security officers, who have blocked off all access roads and were arresting residents who have tried to leave the area in the wake of the heavily armed assault.
"From about 7 p.m. the police started firing tear gas into the crowd, but this failed to scare people," said a resident who gave his name only as Li and claimed to have been at the scene, where, he said, a relative had been killed.
"Later, we heard more than 10 explosions, and thought they were just detonators, so nobody was scared," Li said. "At about 8 p.m. they started using guns, shooting bullets into the ground, but not really targeting anybody. Finally, at about 10 p.m. they started killing people."
By AUDRA ANG, Associated Press Writer
Armed with guns and shields, hundreds of riot police sealed off a southern Chinese village after fatally shooting demonstrators and searched for the protest organizers, villagers said Friday.
Although security forces often use tear gas and truncheons to disperse demonstrators, it is extremely rare for them to fire into a crowd — as they did in putting down pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 near Tiananmen Square. Hundreds, if not thousands, were killed.
During the demonstration Tuesday in Dongzhou, a village in southern Guangdong province, thousands of people gathered to protest the amount of money offered by the government as compensation for land to be used to construct a wind power plant.
Police started firing into the crowd and killed several people, mostly men, villagers reached by telephone said Friday. The death toll ranged from two to 10, they said, and many remained missing.
State media have not mentioned the incident and both provincial and local governments have repeatedly refused to comment. This is typical in China, where the ruling Communist Party controls the media and lower-level authorities are leery of releasing information without permission from the central government.
By JOSEPH KAHN - The New York Times
BEIJING, Dec. 6 - China on Tuesday contested the conclusions of a United Nations envoy and denied that torture was widespread in the country, asking the envoy to revise his views before making a final report on his two-week visit.
Manfred Nowak, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, presented an initial summary of his investigation last week, accusing the Chinese police, prison guards and other judicial officials of relying on torture to extract confessions and eliminate "deviant behavior." He also said Chinese security forces had hampered his investigation by following him and intimidating people whom he intended to interview.
"China cannot accept the so-called conclusion that torture is widespread," the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said at a news conference, adding that torture was banned in China.
"The rapporteur was only in China for two short weeks and went to three cities, after which he made the judgment that torture was widespread." Mr. Qin said. "This lacks an objective foundation and does not accord with reality."
He also denied that security forces had hindered Mr. Nowak's investigation, though several people who spoke with or sought to reach Mr. Nowak during his stay said separately in interviews that they had been harassed or physically prevented from contacting him.
from Radio Free Asia
HONG KONG — At least two villagers in China’s southern province of Guangdong have died after police fired on a crowd protesting the construction of a wind power plant, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports.
Witnesses and Dongzhou Hospital authorities near the port city of Shanwei told RFA’s Mandarin service that by 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, villagers Jiang Hu and Jiang Guanji had died in the local hospital while a third, identified as Tang Daxiang, was receiving emergency treatment.
“At least four villagers have died,” another villager said at approximately 11:30 p.m. “There is a dead body on the street yet to be retrieved. Many are wounded by gunshots. I don’t know what kind of guns. I just know they were using real bullets on us. No policemen were wounded.”
“The hospital has become a virtual funeral hall with family members of the dead crying,”one villager told reporter Ding Xiao.
By ALEXA OLESEN, Associated Press Writer
The first U.N. torture investigator to visit China said Friday that abuse was still widespread and authorities subjected detainees to electric shocks, beatings and sleep deprivation. He also accused the government of obstructing his work.
Manfred Nowak, the U.N. Human Rights Commission's special investigator on torture, told reporters at the end of his trip that certain groups have been particular targets of torture: political dissidents, human rights activists, practitioners of Falun Gong, unofficial church groups and Tibetan and Uighur minorities.
Nowak's visit, which began Nov. 21, capped a decade-long effort by the U.N. to send an investigator to look into claims of torture and mistreatment by Chinese authorities. Beijing has repeatedly agreed to allow the visits and then postponed them.
When asked about the prevalence of torture, which was outlawed in 1996, Nowak replied: "I consider it on the decline but still widespread."
Nowak visited detention centers in Beijing, Tibet and the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang, and held talks with top Chinese prosecutors and justice officials.
A United Nations statement said the organization has received reports that Chinese authorities, over the years, have used various methods of torture including electric shock batons, cigarettes, hoods or blindfolds, submerging prisoners in water or sewage or exposing them to extreme heat or cold.
Based on the information Nowak gathered, he was able to confirm that "many of these methods of torture have been used in China," the statement said.
"Very often an individual police officer is not instructed to torture but is under pressure to extract a confession," he told reporters.
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