June 2006 Archives
By The Associated Press | The New York Times
30 June 2006
BEIJING (AP) -- China's Internet regulators are stepping up controls on blogs and search engines to block material it considers unlawful or immoral, the government said Friday.
''As more and more illegal and unhealthy information spreads through the blog and search engine, we will take effective measures to put the BBS, blog and search engine under control,'' said Cai Wu, director of the Information Office of China's Cabinet, quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency.
The government will step up research on monitoring technology and issue ''admittance standards'' for blogs, the report said, without providing any details.
China encourages Internet use for business and education but tries to block access to obscene or subversive material. It has the world's second-biggest population of Internet users after the United States, with 111 million people online.
China launched a campaign in February to ''purify the environment'' of the Internet and mobile communications, Xinhua said.
By REUTERS | The New York Times
June 28, 2006
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday voted to lift some decades-old restrictions limiting contacts American government officials can have with Taiwan.
With little debate, the House approved the measure in an amendment to a funding bill for the State Department. The bill has not yet been considered by the Senate, which must also approve the changes.
Any easing of restrictions was expected to be strongly opposed by China, which regards Taiwan as a renegade province and works to limit any formal links between the island and Washington.
A spokesman at China's embassy in Washington said: ``We hope the U.S. government will abide by the one-China policy.'' Under that policy Washington switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979.
Rep. Thomas Tancredo, the conservative Colorado Republican who pushed the amendment through the House, said: ``These guidelines needlessly complicate our ability to effectively communicate with our friends in Taiwan.''
The amendment did not address other restrictions in place since 1979 limiting visits by Taiwanese officials to the United States.
It would end State Department restrictions, in place since the United States established diplomatic relations with mainland China, that prevent high-ranking American military officers from traveling to Taiwan.
Also prohibited now are meetings between civilian U.S. and Taiwanese officials in certain government buildings, such as the White House and State Department.
Rep. Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican who is an outspoken critic of Beijing's human rights policy, said, ``There are 40 Catholic bishops and priests in jail in China and zero in jail in Taiwan.'' He added that maybe U.S. policy ought to be reversed so that communications restrictions are placed on Beijing instead of Taiwan.
Iris Ho, spokeswoman for the Formosan Association for Public Affairs in Washington, said Wednesday's vote marked a ''historic step in the U.S.-Taiwan relationship'' because it was the first time a chamber of the U.S. Congress voted to overturn the limitations.
``We have so many arcane restrictions from the U.S. side,'' Ho said, that ``impair our ability to have a more balanced viewpoint in the Taiwan Straits.''
She noted that under current U.S. regulations, Taiwan government officials cannot send letters to American counterparts using an official letterhead.
The Senate could debate the issue later this summer or in the fall.
By Joseph Kahn | The New York Times
June 27, 2006
BEIJING, June 26 — Chinese media outlets will be fined if they report on "sudden events" without prior authorization from government officials, under a draft law being considered by the Communist Party-controlled legislature.
The law would give government officials a powerful new tool to restrict coverage of mass outbreaks of disease, riots, strikes, accidents and other events that the authorities prefer to keep secret. Officials in charge of propaganda already exercise considerable sway over the Chinese news media, but their power tends to be informal, not codified in law.
More than 100 million Chinese have access to the Internet, and hundreds of commercially driven newspapers, magazines and television stations provide a much wider selection of news and information than was available in the past. But Chinese authorities have sought fresh ways to curtail reporting on topics they consider harmful to social and political stability.
Journalists say they receive a steady stream of bulletins from the Propaganda Department forbidding reporting on an ever-expanding list of taboo topics, including "sudden events." But a few leading newspapers and magazines occasionally defy such informal edicts. They might find it more costly to ignore the rules if they risked financial penalties.
The draft law, under consideration by the Standing Committee of the legislature, the National People's Congress, was described in outline by major state-run newspapers on Monday. It says that newspapers, magazines, news Web sites and television stations should face fines ranging from $6,250 to $12,500 each time they publish information about a sudden event "without authorization."
While the state news media did not offer a definition of "sudden events," in the past the term has included natural disasters, major accidents and events relating to public health and social safety.
By Howard W. French | The New York Times
June 27, 2006
SHANWEI, China, June 20 — When the police raked a crowd of demonstrators with gunfire last December in the seaside village of Dongzhou, a few miles from this city, Chinese human rights advocates denounced the action as the bloodiest in the country since the killings at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, in 1989.
Villagers said at the time that as many as 30 people had been killed, and that many others were missing. The authorities have said little or nothing about the episode, concentrating instead on preventing any accounts of it from circulating widely in the country. In the limited coverage that was allowed, officials blamed the unrest on the villagers.
Six months later, there has been no public investigation of the shootings. Instead, the government has quietly moved to close the matter, prosecuting 19 villagers earlier this month in a little-publicized trial. Seven were given long sentences after being convicted of disturbing the public order and of using explosives to attack the police. Nowhere in the verdict is there any mention of the loss of life.
Outside court, villagers say, the authorities have privately acknowledged the death of three residents during the protest. Many say they suspect that more were killed, citing a witness account of a pile of bodies, and details about people who remain missing, but they say they have been warned not to cite a higher figure.
Indeed, residents of the village, in Guangdong Province near Hong Kong, say they have been warned not to talk to outsiders at all. Given the fact that journalists, lawyers, human rights workers and other independent observers have been kept away from Dongzhou, a definitive death toll may never be established.
Whatever the lingering uncertainty, the handling of the protest and its aftermath stand out as a prominent example of how China deals with localized unrest, which has been rising in the countryside.
The protest erupted over plans for a wind-power plant that used village lands and required significant landfill in a bay where the people have for generations made a living fishing. Before that, nearby village land had been used for the construction of a coal-fired power plant.
But that is not the story that Beijing, which has a long tradition of establishing official histories, wants the world to hear. Dongzhou, it seems, has been consigned to the annals of forgettable minor incidents rather than the milestone it undoubtedly is in the wave of unrest over land issues that has swept the Chinese countryside.
Even six months after the deaths, pressure to deny the truth of the matter remains intense. In dozens of telephone conversations and in interviews with the handful of villagers who were willing to slip away from home and risk speaking with a foreign reporter here, residents of Dongzhou say their telephones are tapped and entry and exit from their village tightly controlled. One phrase, "We are scared to death," was repeated over and over.
By Feng Changle | The Epoch Times
June 22, 2006
Local family planning office carries out compulsory abortion on woman who lacked government permit to have a child
A 25-year-old unmarried woman was seven months pregnant when staff members from the local government family planning office forcibly took her to a clinic to give her an abortion.
Wang Liping lives in a suburb of Zhengzhou City, Henan Province. She became pregnant in November 2004. Because her boyfriend could not afford a wedding, they did not get married right away. She is the oldest sibling in her family, and her parents were excited about having grandchildren. Without a marriage certificate, however, she could not receive a government permit to give birth.
At about 6 p.m. on May 31, 2005, Wang was stopped on the street by a group of people who identified themselves as staff members from the township family planning office. They forced her into their car and took her in turn to the town clinic, an air force hospital, and Tangli Clinic. All three institutions refused to abort her fetus. At about 11 p.m., they took her to Laoyachen Clinic.
Without her consent or any pre-operation tests, the staff from the family planning office and several doctors and nurses held her arms and pushed her to the ground. She screamed for help. They also beat her, stripped off her pants, and injected a syringe of drugs into her abdominal area. She was then taken to a patient room and tied to the bed.
Wang Liping said, "I was both shocked and scared, and lost all strength to fight back. My calls for help were unanswered. I could not believe such a brutal, horrid thing was happening to me."
She said that at about 3 a.m. on June 2, after violent pains, the infant was born. The infant cried for a few minutes and then became silent and motionless. At that time, no hospital staff was around to help her. Deeply fearful, she shouted for a while before a yawning nurse appeared.
The nurse asked, "What are you shouting about?"
The Laoyachen Clinic staff. (Photo provided by Wang Liping)Wang said, "Could you check on my baby?" The nurse walked over to the bed, looked at the baby, and said, "The baby is already dead." She then tossed the body aside.
Wang was so shocked by the news that she fainted. When she woke up in the morning, a doctor was standing by her bed and asked her to pay a fee to handle the baby's remains.
When Wang said that she had no money, the doctor put the body in a plastic bag, put it on her bed and said, "If you have no money, it's easy, just take the body and handle it yourself."
Wang was allowed to contact her family only after the baby had died. When her boyfriend and relatives went to the family planning office requesting to see the regulations that authorized such a late-term abortion, the staff ousted them out of the government offices. Meanwhile, Laoyachen Clinic sent them a bill again, asking them to pay a fee for "family planning."
Wang said, "The doctors and nurses have no sense of humanity or medical ethics. The staff at the family planning office has no conscience or understanding of basic legal concepts. I am almost at the point of a nervous breakdown. Where are our most fundamental human rights? Modern China is the only country in history that requires a government permit to have a child. How many families have suffered because of the family planning policy?"
Anguished, she said, "Since people are eating people now [see note below], I really want to kill these men-eating beasts with my own teeth!"
Note: According to articles circulating on some Chinese web sites, some restaurants cook aborted fetuses and sell them as a tonic.
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. | The New York Times
June 24, 2006
Did China have a death from avian flu two years before it admitted having any human cases?
The mystery deepened yesterday, and the possibility was raised that someone had tried to block publication of that event from a prestigious American medical journal.
The New England Journal of Medicine reversed an announcement it had made two days before, now saying that the eight Chinese authors of a letter describing a man's death in 2003 from avian flu had insisted that they really did want it printed.
The timing of the death is important because scientists believe that the A(H5N1) avian flu virus had percolated in China's chickens for many years, but it was not until last November that the government admitted to having a human case; it has officially reported 19 cases and 12 deaths. In 2003, China covered up dozens of SARS deaths for months after the epidemic began there.
By The Associated Press | The New York Times
June 22, 2006
The Falun Gong follower who heckled China's president, Hu Jintao, at a White House ceremony has reached a deal with prosecutors under which all charges against her will be dropped, her lawyer said.
The woman, Wang Wenyi, faced a misdemeanor charge of intimidating, coercing, threatening and harassing a foreign official for interrupting the April 20 event in which President Bush welcomed Mr. Hu to the White House. She could have faced six months in jail and a fine.
BBC World News
June 19, 2006
Piracy in China cost the film industry $2.7bn (£1.5bn) in 2005, according to a study by a major global movie body.
Around 93% of all films sold in China are pirated, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) study said.
The Chinese film industry was worst affected, losing around $1.5bn (£812m) to piracy, it said, while major US film studios lost around $565m (£306m).
According to the MPA report, almost 40% of the losses come from people downloading films on the internet.
"In terms of who's losing the most here in China, it's not the MPA's member companies, it's the local industry," MPA Asia Pacific head Mike Ellis said.
But the losses to US studios in China have risen since 2003, when the MPA estimated that film companies lost $168m (£91m).
BBC World News
20 June 2006
Police have occupied a college campus in central China after riots involving thousands of students, reports said.
Students at the college, in Henan province, were angry at the college's move to award less prestigious diplomas, local media said.
Last week, angry students ransacked the campus, damaging cars, shops and dormitories.
The college has now been placed under "total police control", Hong Kong daily Ta Kung Pao reports.
Photographs circulating on the internet of Thursday's riot at Shengda Economics, Trade and Management College showed smashed windows, damaged cars and a campus littered with debris and broken bicycles.
Hong Kong daily Ming Pao said up to 10,000 students took part in the riot.
By Tim Luard | BBC World News
June 16, 2006
China may have lost its reputation for making low-cost goods, but when it comes to weapons, there is no doubt which end of the market its sights are still set on
Some of the poorest and most unsavoury regimes on earth, which either cannot afford or are not allowed to buy sophisticated Western arms, are turning to the world's newest superpower to buy guns, leg-irons, anti-riot equipment and armoured vehicles.
Military specialists contacted by the BBC News website have confirmed the main findings of a report issued this week by Amnesty International, which said Chinese arms sales were fuelling conflicts and human rights abuses in countries such as Sudan and Burma.
China has been the Burmese military government's main supplier of weapons - including artillery, trucks, logistical support and communications equipment - ever since the 1990s, according to Tim Huxley, an Asia specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
"Without Chinese arms supplies, the Burmese army would find it impossible to operate," he said.
By Nicholas D. Kristof | The New York Times
June 18, 2006
With President Bush on the ropes, the most important person in the world right now may well be President Hu Jintao, as he presides over 1.3 billion people and the rise of China.
But while China is one of the great successes on the world scene, Mr. Hu increasingly looks like a loser.
He has disappointed many Chinese intellectuals and Communist Party officials with his Brezhnevian approach to political reform. Former President Jiang Zemin and former Prime Minister Zhu Rongji are among the party officials who are said by insiders to be unhappy with Mr. Hu's reign.
Mr. Hu has a brilliant mind and is pragmatic in economics and diplomacy, managing both well. But in politics he has been a throwback to the ideologues of the past (like his own patron, Song Ping), and he has attempted to tug China backward by clamping down on the news media, law, religion and the Internet.
China now imprisons some 32 journalists, more than any country in the world. A religious crackdown has led to underground Christians being arrested and sometimes tortured, particularly in rural areas. And China has tried harder than almost any country to neuter the Internet by filtering out obscene words like "human rights."
And yes, it is personal. I spent Friday outside the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court, as a New York Times colleague, Zhao Yan, was enduring a farcical secret trial on Mr. Hu's orders. Mr. Zhao, a researcher in The Times's Beijing bureau, has already been imprisoned virtually incommunicado for the last 22 months, and he may now face a decade or more in prison.
I was allowed into the courthouse by mistake — I drove through the gate with two colleagues, and nobody stopped us when we walked in — and it's a gorgeous building with more magnificent courtrooms than I've ever seen in the U.S. But the courthouse was mostly empty, and finally we found out why: people aren't allowed in the People's Court. A group of indignant plainclothes police officers swarmed in and herded us outside.
The courthouse is a perfect symbol of Mr. Hu's vision of China today: a dazzling building with lavish facilities, but empty in every sense. It's all infrastructure, no software. It's as if Mr. Hu thinks that building a modern judicial system is about high ceilings and padded seats rather than about laws and justice.
The trial was conducted in secret, and we didn't even get a glimpse of Mr. Zhao. The trial ended in one day without a single witness giving testimony for either side. The verdict will be handed down soon, and it's almost a foregone conclusion that Mr. Zhao will be sent to prison for a long sentence.
This case originally arose after Mr. Hu was irritated by a scoop by The Times's Beijing bureau chief, Joseph Kahn, and ordered that the leaker be punished. The State Security authorities couldn't find the real source, so they arrested Mr. Zhao instead because they didn't like his reporting about rural unrest.
I'm still a believer in China, partly because Mr. Hu and his aides have managed the economy so well. Mr. Hu has also done well in canceling the agriculture tax and taking other measures to try to address the destabilizing income gaps in China (there, 1 percent of the population now controls 60 percent of the wealth, whereas in the U.S., 5 percent controls 60 percent of the wealth).
Yet ultimately, Mr. Hu's efforts to create stability by clamping down just risk more instability. Most Chinese don't want upheavals, but they are fed up with corruption and lies, with being blocked from Google and Wikipedia, with having to waste time studying political drivel like Mr. Hu's "Eight Honorables and Eight Shames" campaign. Wags call it "Hu shuo ba dao," a clever pun that translates as "utter nonsense."
Indeed, Mr. Hu's crackdown has been singularly ineffective, annoying people more than scaring them. Many Communist Party officials worry that crackdowns just anger and alienate the public; that is why some have talked of allowing people to let off steam through greater freedom of the press and more elections. In one province, a poll found that 85 percent of officials themselves wanted to speed up political reform.
But Mr. Hu seems paralyzed, altogether the weakest Chinese leader since Hua Guofeng in the 1970's. The result? Brace yourself for turbulence ahead in China.
By Elaine Kurtenbach | Associated Press
June 17, 2006
Move over, Da Vinci Code: The communist flick fest is coming to China.
China suddenly pulled the blockbuster film last week, saying it needed to make room for local movies. It turns out that a whole slew of them is on the way.
The country is planning to release 26 films to mark the 85th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party, the official Xinhua News Agency reported this week.
Although China has relaxed many social controls in the past few decades and seen an influx of foreign books, movies and other products, the ruling Communist Party still controls most public media. China limits film imports to 20 a year in an effort to protect its state-run studios.
The communist film fest is slated to run from Tuesday through July 10. The films include The Forest Ranger, featuring a ranger who dies protecting a state-owned forest, and The Backbone, a documentary about communist heroes.
By AUDRA ANG, Associated Press Writer
15 June 2006
A Chinese journalist found guilty of extortion after writing articles about official corruption was sentenced Thursday to one year in prison, his wife and lawyer said.
Yang Xiaoqing, a reporter for the state-run China Industrial Economy News, was sentenced at the Longhui No. 1 People's Court in Hunan province, his lawyer, Zhang Xingshui said.
Yang's wife, Gong Jie, said she would appeal the decision immediately.
"It's a terrible thing," Gong said. "He has not committed a single crime. He has not done one thing wrong. To sentence him to even one day of prison is the real crime."
She said hundreds of onlookers swarmed the court and blocked police cars to protest the sentence. Some carried signs reading: "Corrupt officials should not bully reporters and the people!"
Telephones rang unanswered at the Hunan court Thursday evening.
Yang was detained Jan. 22 after being accused by authorities of concocting reports in order to extort the equivalent of up to $100,000 from officials in Longhui county, human rights groups have said. Yang pleaded innocent and has insisted the evidence against him was fabricated.
Gong has said Yang was targeted after writing articles accusing Yang Jianxin, a local Communist Party official, of embezzling state assets.
Yang, who is not related to the reporter, since has moved to a new post at a government advisory body in nearby Shaoyang city. He has denied framing Yang Xiaoqing.
Reporters at China's state-run media pursuing sensitive stories often face violence and harassment, sometimes from local authorities, and often lose their jobs or are detained under unspecified charges.
BBC World News
June 16, 2006
The trial of New York Times researcher Zhao Yan has ended in Beijing, with no word on when a verdict will be reached.
Mr Zhao, who has been held by the Chinese authorities since September 2004, denied charges of fraud and leaking state secrets.
The trial took place behind closed doors because of its sensitive nature.
Mr Zhao, if convicted of "providing state secrets abroad", faces a minimum of 10 years in jail. Authorities have given no details of the alleged crime.
However Mr Zhao is thought to have been detained in connection with a New York Times report about plans by ex-President Jiang Zemin to retire from his top military post.
At the time, Mr Jiang's intention would have been a closely guarded secret, and any leak regarded as a serious offence.
Mr Zhao, 44, has spent nearly two years in detention, while the authorities decided whether to pursue the case against him.
The charges against him were dropped in March, weeks before President Hu Jintao visited the United States.
But Mr Zhao remained in detention, and the case was revived last month.
By David Lague | The New York Times - International Herald Tribune
June 15, 2006
BEIJING, June 14 — The trial of a researcher for The New York Times, which is to begin here on Friday, is evidence of China's increasing reliance on state secrecy laws to tighten control over information, experts in human rights and the legal system say.
The researcher, Zhao Yan, 44, who worked in the Beijing bureau of The Times, is charged with fraud and disclosing state secrets. Mr. Zhao denies the charges. The Times also denies that he disclosed state secrets.
Critics of the case against Mr. Zhao accuse the authorities of applying all-embracing secrecy laws to contain public debate, burgeoning Internet discussion and sometimes rebellious news media.
Even as China's headlong economic boom continues to deliver wider economic and personal freedom, the scope of these laws has been broadened over the last two decades to include almost all information related to the ruling Communist Party and the government.
"The system is actually expanding," said Nicolas Becquelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch. "Basically, anything can be classified as a state secret."
Mr. Zhao has been in custody since his arrest in September 2004. If he is found guilty here in the No. 2 Intermediate People's Court, he could face 10 years or more in prison.
The charges are linked to an article in The Times on Sept. 7, 2004, reporting that the former president, Jiang Zemin, had offered to resign as head of the military. The report proved to be accurate; Mr. Jiang retired less than two weeks later.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | The New York Times
June 14, 2006
BEIJING (AP) -- A Chinese activist was struck by an assailant and left paralyzed after meeting with police to discuss an interview he gave on German television, a human rights group and a German broadcaster said Tuesday.
The attack on Fu Xiancai, a critic of the government's treatment of people displaced by the Three Gorges dam project, highlighted the risks Chinese rights campaigners face.
In recent years, activists have increasingly complained about attacks by thugs who they and rights groups have sometimes charged were acting on orders from authorities.
In an interview aired by German TV network ARD on May 19, Fu said he had been threatened and beaten for complaining to the government about not getting compensation he was promised for relocating, according to a letter from a German broadcaster, Norddeutscher Rundfunk.
By Dr Gao Dawei | The Epoch Times
12 June 2006
High level government and military officers join the tide of withdrawals, regime said to be on the brink of collapse
Dr. Gao Dawei, a representative of the Global Quit the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Service Center, spoke at a rally in Los Angeles on June 10 in support of 11 million withdrawals from the CCP and reported on the latest developments in the withdrawal movement in China. Following is a summary of his speech:
More People Are Awakening Every Day
The Communist regime in China is increasingly afraid of the "Nine Commentaries" and the movement of quitting the CCP that is surging across the nation. In recent weeks, the regime has gone all out to block the hotlines of the global Quit the CCP Service Center as well as the Web sites—wujie.net and dongtai.net (now restored) that help to facilitate the movement.
The CCP continues to abduct, detain, and illegally sentence those who spread the "Nine Commentaries" and promote withdrawals from the Party, the Communist Youth League and the Young Pioneers. But the conscience of the public and military is rapidly awakening, and the regime is unable to suppress this movement. The following are some examples that occurred during the communist regime's recent blockade of our Web sites.
By The Associated Press | The New York Times
13 June 2006
BEIJING (AP) -- China's Foreign Ministry on Tuesday said a resolution by U.S. lawmakers condemning Beijing for allegedly stepping up religious persecution was a ''groundless accusation'' that interfered in China's internal affairs.
The House of Representatives on Monday approved the resolution condemning China for rising persecution of religious believers.
The resolution ''constitutes a gross interference in China's internal affairs,'' said Jiang Yu, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman. ''We express strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition.''
Jiang said the passing of the resolution was a ''groundless accusation and attack against China's religious and human rights.''
China maintains tight control over all religions. Those who practice Falun Gong, a banned spiritual movement, or attend underground Protestant or Catholic churches routinely face detention, harassment and sometimes imprisonment.
''The Chinese government protects the freedom of religious beliefs in accordance with the law,'' Jiang said.
BBC World News
June 11, 2006
The human rights organisation Amnesty International has accused China of being of the world's most secretive and irresponsible arms exporters.
In a report, it says Chinese weapons have helped to fuel conflicts such as those in Sudan, Nepal and Burma.
Amnesty is urging China to publish information on its arms exports.
The authorities in Beijing have long insisted that they have strict safeguards in place to prevent any unethical arms sales.
Amnesty International challenges this idea in the report.
"China describes its approach to arms export licensing as 'cautious and responsible', yet the reality couldn't be further from the truth," the author's report, Helen Hughes, said in a statement.
By Keith Bradsherand David Barboza | The New York Times
June 11, 2006
HANJING, China — One of China's lesser-known exports is a dangerous brew of soot, toxic chemicals and climate-changing gases from the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants.
In early April, a dense cloud of pollutants over Northern China sailed to nearby Seoul, sweeping along dust and desert sand before wafting across the Pacific. An American satellite spotted the cloud as it crossed the West Coast.
Researchers in California, Oregon and Washington noticed specks of sulfur compounds, carbon and other byproducts of coal combustion coating the silvery surfaces of their mountaintop detectors. These microscopic particles can work their way deep into the lungs, contributing to respiratory damage, heart disease and cancer.
Filters near Lake Tahoe in the mountains of eastern California "are the darkest that we've seen" outside smoggy urban areas, said Steven S. Cliff, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at Davis.
Unless China finds a way to clean up its coal plants and the thousands of factories that burn coal, pollution will soar both at home and abroad. The increase in global-warming gases from China's coal use will probably exceed that for all industrialized countries combined over the next 25 years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol seeks.
By Howard W. French | The New York Times
June 10, 2006
NIE YUANZI was an ambitious college professor whose "big character poster," displayed on the grounds of Beijing University, was said to have ignited the Cultural Revolution, a prairie fire of violent purges and denunciations that quickly spread across the nation.
Wang Rongfen was a student of German at Beijing's elite Foreign Language Institute who was imprisoned after writing a bold letter to Mao challenging his judgment in unleashing the self-destructive frenzy of his young vigilantes, the Red Guards.
Even today, the history of that time has been shunted into a dark corner. There have been no news reports or public memorials of the catastrophe, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed and China's economy was devastated. Yet four decades after the start of the Cultural Revolution in May 1966, there remains a compelling symmetry to the experiences and reflections of the two women who played such prominent roles at the outset of this disastrous era, and had their lives tragically derailed as a result.
However different, they were both, in the phrase of Ms. Wang, "bold and straightforward" women.
After the publication of an article criticizing Mao's political rivals, Ms. Nie, then Communist Party secretary of Beijing University's philosophy department, put up a poster that claimed the university was under the control of the bourgeoisie. Mao had the poster read over the radio, giving it his stamp of approval and encouraging attacks on authority figures.
Vaulted into the leadership of the Red Guard, she was detained only a year later after becoming disenchanted with its excesses, and was jailed for 17 years.
From REUTERS | The Los Angeles Times
June 09, 2006
WASHINGTON — U.S. labor groups urged the Bush administration Thursday to increase pressure on China to stop widespread labor abuses they said have cost millions of Americans their jobs in addition to harming Chinese workers.
The 9-million-member AFL-CIO labor federation filed a petition, for the second time since 2004, asking the U.S. trade representative's office to launch a one-year probe into whether China's "systematic repression" of worker rights is an unfair trade practice that warrants using U.S. sanctions to stop.
"In China, millions of child workers and forced laborers produce goods and services, many of them for export. Workers who protest or seek to form independent unions are fired, beaten and imprisoned," the AFL-CIO said.
More than 126,000 Chinese workers died from injuries or illnesses they got on the job in 2005, the labor groups said. Many corporations in China reap "huge profits" while paying their workers less than 50 cents an hour, the AFL-CIO said.
June 2006
Human Rights in China (HRIC) has launched a podcast series of interviews with participants of the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement. The podcasts, which can be downloaded as audio files from HRIC's Web site, include oral histories of the June 4th Tiananmen Square crackdown never previously made public. The interviews also explore the role of the democracy and independent labor movements in addressing challenges facing China.
Seventeen years after the violent crackdown in 1989, the Chinese government has yet to respond to demands for a full investigation and official accountability, compensation for the victims and their families and a reassessment of the crackdown. In the face of official Chinese propaganda and information control, HRIC aims to preserve a historical record as well as to support efforts promoting greater democracy and openness.
Agence France Presse
June 07, 2006
The Google.com search engine has been blocked in most parts of China, as Beijing steps up its efforts to restrict the public's access to information, a Paris-based media watchdog said.
Internet users in many major Chinese cities have had difficulty connecting to the uncensored international version of Google for the past week, Reporters Without Borders said in a statement received here Wednesday.
Aside from the Google.com search engine, Reporters Without Borders said the blocking was being gradually extended to the Google News and Google Mail services.
"Google has just definitively joined the club of western companies that comply with online censorship in China," Reporters Without Borders said.
"It is deplorable that Chinese Internet users are forced to wage a technological war against censorship in order to access banned content."
Random attempts to access Google.com in Beijing appeared to confirm that the international version of the search engine had indeed been made unavailable, while the censored Chinese-language version, Google.cn, was still accessible.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | The New York Times
June 04, 2006
BEIJING (AP) -- Chinese police tore up a protester's poster and detained at least two people on Beijing's Tiananmen Square on Sunday as the country marked 17 years since local troops crushed a pro-democracy demonstration in the public space.
An elderly woman tried to pull out a poster with apparently political material written on it, but police ripped it up and then took her away in a van.
A farmer tried to stage a protest apparently unrelated to the 1989 crackdown, but he also was taken away in a van.
After dawn, a group of tourists tried to open a banner while posing for a photo, catching the attention of police, who quickly forced them to put the nonpolitical material away. They were not detained.
Discussion of the crackdown is still taboo in China outside of the semiautonomous regions of Hong Kong and Macau. Chinese television news and major newspapers did not mention the anniversary.
In Hong Kong, several hundred people holding candles gathered at Victoria Park, creating a sea of lights covering four soccer fields. They observed a brief silence and organizers laid wreaths at a makeshift shrine dedicated to ''martyrs of democracy.''
BBC World News
May 31, 2006
A prominent campaigner for the rights of China's Uighur minority says three of her children have been detained.
Rebiya Kadeer, who moved to the US after being freed from a Chinese prison in 2005, said two sons and a daughter were taken into custody on Monday.
She said they were detained to stop them speaking to a US Congressional team visiting Xinjiang, the region where most of China's Uighurs live.
"I demand the immediate release of my three children," she said.
Ms Kadeer was a successful businesswoman before she fell foul of China's authorities, who jailed her in 2000 for "leaking state secrets".
Radio Free Asia - The Epoch Times
June 01, 2006
Critics say 'mutual supervision' will suppress opinions and have people informing on each other
[ Editor's note: This new measure is different from the already existing surveillance conducted by the Internet police ]
CHINA - On May 24, the Beijing Association of Online Media recruited 200 special Internet supervisors from across China to conduct comprehensive surveillance on the flow of information.
According to the Web site Qianlong.net, 200 people joined the first batch of special Internet supervisors for Beijing. From now on, all Web sites in Beijing will be under the surveillance of these Internet supervisors. If there is any so-called illegal content and undesirable information, the supervisor will rapidly transmit the relevant information to the Beijing Association of Online Media.
Current affairs analyst Zeng Ning from Guiyang City believes that employing Internet supervisors may be illegitimate. He said, "Such surveillance action, in my opinion, may infringe upon the legal rights of the person who posts the information. For example, the person's right to privacy or freedom of speech may be violated."
The Beijing Association of Online Media Web site indicates that the part-time responsibilities of the 200 Internet supervisors include conducting surveillance on uncivilized behavior, illegal and undesirable information in Beijing Web sites, and promptly informing the Beijing Association of Online Media through telephone, email and non-periodic participation in meetings.
By REUTERS | The New York Times
June 01, 2006
BEIJING (Reuters) - A U.S.-based rights group on Thursday condemned China's closed-door conviction and jailing of 13 villagers for their roles in a protest that was quelled with riot police opening fire.
At least three people died and eight were wounded in Dongzhou, a village in the southern province of Guangdong, in December when police shot residents protesting against a lack of compensation for land lost to a wind power plant.
It was the most violent in a series of recent protests around the country being fueled by a growing gap between rich and poor, corruption and disputes over land rights.
Search
The purpose of the website is to publish articles by journalists about a variety of topics concerning the People’s Republic of China. All journalists and the publications that publish their writings are clearly identified. All copyrights belong exclusively to the identified sources of these articles. | Powered by
Information + More