August 2006 Archives
By RADIO FREE ASIA
28 August 2006
HONG KONG—Authorities across China have stepped up detentions and surveillance of key rights activists amid growing calls for the release of Beijing-based lawyer Gao Zhisheng.
"Gao Zhisheng was taken away by unidentified men in plain clothes who gave no identification nor any reason for his detention while he was on a trip to Dongying city, Shandong province, to visit his sister," said New York-based writer Hu Ping of Gao’s August 15 arrest.
"Gao Zhisheng is a well-known lawyer who has been on the front line in the battle for civil rights for a very long time," wrote Hu, an occasional RFA commentator, in an open online letter.
"He has been subject to all manner of persecution...and we strongly protest against this and call for his immediate release."
by BBC World News
August 25, 2006
Several recent trials in China have highlighted the dangers of dissent, in what appears to be a growing clampdown, writes the BBC's Dan Griffiths in Beijing.
In just a few days China's leaders have shown once again that they will not tolerate dissent on issues they consider sensitive or embarrassing.
Earlier in the week blind human rights activist Chen Guangcheng was sentenced to four years and three months in prison.
The self-taught lawyer was well known in China for his outspoken campaigns to help poor rural farmers and the disabled.
But he gained international attention when he publicised claims that Chinese officials in the eastern province of Shandong were enforcing late-term abortions and sterilisations - in an attempt to control population growth.
That angered the Chinese authorities and Mr Chen was arrested and charged with destroying public property and disturbing social order. His supporters have always claimed the charges were fabricated.
Other Chinese rights activists who have campaigned for Mr Chen's release have been put under house arrest in Beijing, deported from there to distant cities, or gone into hiding.
By Jim Yardley and Joseph Kahn | The New York Times
August 25, 2006
BEIJING, Friday, Aug. 25 — A Beijing court on Friday morning unexpectedly dismissed a state secrets charge against a researcher for The New York Times but sentenced him to three years in prison on a lesser, unrelated charge of fraud.
The verdict against the researcher, Zhao Yan, 44, spared him a prison sentence of 10 years or longer and also served as a blunt rebuke to the investigation by state security agents. Agents began detaining Mr. Zhao almost two years ago and accused him of leaking state secrets to The Times. He has consistently stated that he is innocent of both charges.
In another closely watched case, a Chinese court in Shandong Province on Thursday convicted an advocate for peasants rights and sentenced him to more than four years in prison. The advocate, Chen Guangcheng, is a blind man who tried to file a class-action lawsuit on behalf of women who were subjected to forced abortions. His case, like that of Mr. Zhao’s, was considered a test of China’s legal system, and his defense team described the conviction as a sham.
In Mr. Zhao’s case, the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court rejected the state secrets charge in strong language in a 10-page verdict released Friday morning.
“On the charge against the defendant Zhao Yan that he provided state secrets abroad, the evidence is insufficient,” the court ruling read. “The charge for this crime cannot stand, and this court does not accept it.”
Mr. Zhao’s lead defense lawyer, Mo Shaoping, said, “This is the way they proclaim someone innocent.”
>>>please follow link at the bottom for full text<<<
continued:
On Thursday, Mr. Chen, the rights advocate, was convicted of destroying property and organizing a mob to block traffic. He earned the enmity of local Communist Party leaders in Shandong Province, in eastern China, when he sought to organize a class-action lawsuit against forced abortions and sterilizations there.
The New China News Agency announced the sentence, four years and three months, in a terse dispatch on its English-language news wire. The information did not appear in Chinese, and other state-run media have been banned from reporting on the matter.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | The New York Times
August 24, 2006
BEIJING (AP) -- A blind activist who was arrested after recording complaints of forced abortions was sentenced Thursday to four years and three months in prison on what his supporters say were phony charges, a defense lawyer said.
Chen Guangcheng was convicted of damaging property and ''organizing a mob to disturb traffic'' after a trial in the eastern province of Shandong, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Chen's supporters say local officials fabricated the charges against him in retaliation for his activism.
''I am outraged by the sentence,'' said Li Fangping, a member of a team of volunteer defense lawyers for Chen. ''The whole justice system has acted totally illegally in Chen Guangcheng's case.''
Li said Chen would appeal.
Chen was put on trial last week without his lawyers present after police detained three members of the defense team on theft charges and refused to let them see evidence against him.
The U.S. State Department criticized the lawyers' detention, saying it raised questions about China's commitment to the rule of law.
Chen, who was blinded by fever in infancy, taught himself law in order to fight discrimination against himself and handicapped farmers in his home province of Shandong.
He was arrested after recording complaints by villagers who said they were forced to undergo abortions and sterilizations to meet birth limits under Chinese regulations that limit most urban couples to one child and most in the countryside to two.
Such practices are illegal, but local officials often resort to drastic measures for fear of being punished for exceeding birth quotas.
Chen's efforts to record the complaints prompted China's family planning agency to investigate. It confirmed the claims and said some officials were detained or fired.
Since last August, Chen and members of his family have been beaten, threatened and confined to their house by thugs. His wife, Yuan Weijing, says the men were hired by local officials.
Chen's legal team included some of China's most prominent activist lawyers and a leading law professor from Beijing.
By Dennis Overbye : The New York Times
August 22, 2006
BEIJING — The first time he was purged, Xu Liangying was 37, an up-and-coming physicist, philosopher and historian and a veteran of the Communist underground. He had to divorce his wife, leave his sons and go live on his mother’s farm in the country.
Three decades later, only a heart attack saved him from imprisonment or worse during the massacre that ended the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.
During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards stole the Einstein translations that Dr. Xu had labored over during his farm exile. Armed guards once surrounded his apartment to keep him away from Secretary of State Warren Christopher.
For seven decades, Xu Liangying has been Albert Einstein’s man in China, intertwining revolution and physics to speak up for political freedom and the value of scientific curiosity in a land where the rulers have often had a different agenda. His Einstein translations, retrieved and published, helped inspire a rebirth of interest in Einstein and in science in China.
Chinese leaders say today that science is the key to the country’s modernization and growth, but Dr. Xu finds no pleasure in that.
“They are just using it to serve themselves,” he said recently.
His phone, he says, is still bugged.
Today, at 86, his hair is white, and history, in the form of scholars, human rights activists and journalists, comes to him, in his book-lined apartment overlooking the university district in Beijing.
By BBC World News
August 18, 2006
The trial of a Chinese activist who raised concerns about forced abortion and sterilisation has taken place. Chen Guangcheng, under house arrest since September 2005, is charged with public order offences. It is not clear when a verdict will be announced.
He had accused officials in Shandong of breaking family planning laws in their enforcement of the one-child policy.
Before the trial, three lawyers connected to his case were arrested, but two have now been released.
One of them, Li Fangping, told the BBC that Mr Chen had been represented, against his will, by two state-appointed lawyers in the closed-door proceedings.
His wife told the news agency AFP she had not been allowed to attend the trial, which according to reports lasted about two hours.
The rights group Amnesty International said Mr Chen's rights were being denied and he was not getting a fair trial.
"It is Chen Guangcheng's fundamental right to have the lawyers of his choice and to have family members attend his trial," said Corinna-Barbara Francis from Amnesty International.
"Their attitude epitomises the general pattern of obstruction towards human rights lawyers in China."
By Joseph Kahn | The New York Times
August 18, 2006
BEIJING, Aug. 18 — Chinese officials intensified a crackdown on defense lawyers today, the latest sign that Communist Party leaders are determined to stamp out legal challenges to their authority.
In Beijing, the police detained Gao Zhisheng, one of the country’s most outspoken lawyers and dissidents, on suspicion of criminal activity, according to reports in state-run news media.
In Shandong Province, another well-known dissident legal expert, Chen Guangcheng, was tried today in a closed criminal trial that Mr. Chen’s defense attorneys condemned as a heavy-handed political persecution.
While the Chinese leadership is eager to create the impression that it is building an impartial legal system, the latest actions suggest that at least some powerful officials want to curtail the growing use of lawsuits to contest abuses of power, human rights violations, land seizures and official corruption.
The ruling party has encouraged the idea that ordinary people have legal rights, as a way of checking petty corruption, improving efficiency and channeling social grievances into the party-controlled judicial system.
But a surge in social unrest in recent years, including protests by people who feel thwarted in exercising their constitutional rights, has alarmed local and national leaders.
By REUTERS | The New York Times
18 August 2006
BEIJING (Reuters) - China detained two of the nation's top human rights advocates before a blind rights activist went on trial on Friday, depriving him of his legal defense, in what appeared to be part of a concerted crackdown.
Xu Zhiyong, a law academic from Beijing, was held by police on Thursday in the eastern province of Shandong, where he was preparing to defend activist Chen Guangcheng against charges of disrupting traffic and destroying property during a protest there in February, according to other lawyers defending Chen.
Xu's whereabouts when Chen's trial began in the afternoon was unclear. A police officer at the Jiehu police station where Xu had been held said he had been released, but Xu's mobile phone was turned off and fellow lawyers had not heard from him.
Also on Friday, Beijing police announced they had detained Gao Zhisheng, a combative human rights lawyer who has campaigned for Chen's release.
By Tan Ee Lyn | REUTERS | via Yahoo
15 August 2006
Meng Lin, who is HIV positive and an AIDS activist in Beijing, relies on friends to send him drugs from overseas every month -- medicine he needs to stay alive.
There are days when he despairs as he watches his cache of drugs dwindle with no replenishment in sight.
"I feel very troubled when the supply drops to just eight to 10 days. The worst is when there's just a day's supply left, before the replenishment arrives," Meng told Reuters in a telephone call from Beijing.
"It often happens and I get very anxious because if (I develop resistance to these drugs), there'll be no more chance for me."
Experts at the 16th international AIDS conference in Toronto this week are discussing the difficulties in making AIDS drugs widely available to everyone around the world who needs them.
Some 650,000 people in China are living with HIV/AIDS, but only one in four who need HIV drugs received them in 2005, according to a recent report by the United Nations' UNAIDS.
By REUTERS |The New York Times
August 14, 2006
BEIJING (Reuters) - A reporter for a Singapore newspaper went on trial in China on Tuesday accused of espionage, a rights group said, one of several cases that have highlighted Beijing's harsh controls of the flow of information.
Ching Cheong, a Hong Kong-based China correspondent for the Straits Times, was detained in China in April 2005 and charged with spying for Taiwan, the self-ruled island that rejects Beijing's claims of sovereignty.
The Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said in a statement Ching's trial began at a Beijing court on Tuesday.
Hong Kong's RTHK radio station said the trial was held at the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court. But court officials, reached by telephone, said they had no knowledge of the trial.
China usually conducts trials involving espionage and state security in secret.
Ching's wife and lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment.
Ching was detained in southern Guangzhou where he had travelled to collect documents related to former Chinese Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang.
China is the world's leading jailer of journalists, with at least 32 in custody and another 50 Internet campaigners also in prison, rights group Reporters Without Borders says.
By Josh Grossberg | Eonline | via Yahoo
August 14, 2006
Quick, how do you say ay caramba in Chinese?!
China has officially banned The Simpsons and several other cartoon shows from airing during prime time to provide a boost to the country's ailing animation industry.
Per Guangzhou's daily Southern Metropolis News, the restrictions will apply to Homer and Bart, Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Warner Bros. 'toon gang, Mickey Mouse and his Disney cohorts, and the Pokemon crew--and may even extend to the BBC's Teletubbies. The cartoons cannot be shown between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., when the bulk of the country's 250 million children tune in to China's Central Television..
While the new rules haven't gone into affect yet, the decision by Chinese regulators aims to protect homegrown fare like Journey to the West, which follows the adventures of the country's iconic Monkey King, and also help Chinese studios compete internationally.
The government action sparked intense criticism from newspapers, among them the Metropolis, which argued in an editorials that such regulations weren't the answer.
By REUTERS | The New York Times
12 August 2006
China indefinitely postponed an auction that would have allowed foreign hunting organizations to bid for licenses to hunt wild animals of 14 different species after a public backlash, the state news media reported. The government-sanctioned auction was to have been held tomorrow. The permits were based on types and numbers of the animals, from $200 for a wolf to as much as $40,000 for a wild yak. The whole idea had infuriated China’s Internet users, The official New China News Agency reported. “The response from the public is beyond our expectation,” it quoted Wang Wei, an official of the State Forestry Association, the auction’s organizer, as saying.
By Verna Yu | AFP
August 10, 2006
A Chinese online encyclopedia has closed down due to government pressure as China continues to crack down on Internet information it sees as dangerous, an international rights group has said.
e-Wiki, a collaborative Internet encyclopedia modelled on the hugely successful Wikipedia, closed itself down in late July, Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.
e-Wiki decided to close under government pressure after it called Taiwan the "Republic of China" and posted information on James Lung, a Hong Kong activist who is close to the banned Falungong movement, the press watchdog said.
Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province awaiting reunification, and Falungong are two extremely sensitive issues for the nation's Communist Party rulers.
By Howard W. French | The New York Times
10 August 2006
SHANGHAI, Aug. 9 — It was late last month, the boy said, his voice still tinged with emotion, when he and his father were forced to march their two German shepherds to a public square and hang them from a tree.
The boy, Xia Shaoli, was not alone in his pain. Officials in Mouding County in southwestern Yunnan Province had ordered the mass extermination of dogs, pets as well as strays, after three people died in a rabies outbreak. And as a crowd gathered around a large tree in the village of Xiajiashan, owners complied one after another with commands to string their dogs up.
According to official figures, 54,429 dogs were killed during the Yunnan campaign. Reports in the Chinese news media say that some people out walking their dogs had the animals seized by gangs of vigilantes, who clubbed the dogs to death on the spot.
The events in Yunnan have been quickly followed by rabies scares in other parts of China. On Wednesday, the Chinese news media reported the killings of 280 dogs in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai, and 13 in the city of Fuzhou in southern Fujian Province.
Earlier this week, a cluster of 16 villages in the southwestern part of Shandong Province declared a rabies alert, and county officials have drafted a dog extermination plan that would call for the killing of any dog found within a three-mile radius of any known rabies case.
There are half a million dogs in the city of Jining, which encompasses the 16 villages, the official New China News Agency says. Officials there said their extermination plan was scheduled to begin later this month. There have also been reports of smaller extermination schemes in other parts of the country, notably in Sichuan Province.
As remarkable as the killings themselves, however, has been the response. With its rising prosperity, China is developing a pet-owning culture, with dogs standing out as a particular favorite. As word of the killings has spread here, pet owners have begun to mobilize — speaking out online and circulating petitions — to try to stop the killings.
BBC World News
August 09, 2006
China is to auction licences for foreigners to hunt wild animals, including endangered species, according to local media.
The auction will offer the right to hunt yaks, wolves and other wild animals in five western provinces.
The price of a licence will depend on the type and number of animals to be hunted, the Beijing Youth Daily said.
The auctioneers told the BBC that the sale, the first of its kind in China, would go ahead on Sunday.
A licence to hunt a wolf could go for about $200 (£105), while permission to shoot a yak could be as much as $40,000 (£21,000), the daily said.
Shooting an argali, a large wild sheep, will cost about $10,000 (£5,000) while a blue sheep will cost $2,500 (£1,300), the paper said..
By Audra Ang - The Associated Press | Arkansas Democrat Gazette
August 6, 2006
Tanya Davis fled Jizhou No. 1 Middle School one winter morning in March before the sun rose over the surrounding cotton fields covered with stubble from last fall’s crop.
In the nine months Davis and her boyfriend had taught English at the school in rural north China, they had endured extra work hours, unpaid salaries and frigid temperatures without heating and, on many days, electricity.
Hearts pounding and worried their employer would find a pretext to stop them from leaving, the couple lugged their backpacks, suitcase, books and guitar past a sleeping guard and into a taxi.
As they drove away, “the sense of relief was immense,” said Davis, a petite, soft-spoken 23-year-old from Wales. “I felt like we had crossed our last hurdle and everything was going to be OK.”
It’s a new twist on globalization: For decades, Chinese made their way to the West, often illegally, to end up doing dangerous, low-paying jobs in sweatshop conditions. Now some foreigners drawn by China’s growth and hunger for English lessons are landing in the schoolhouse version of the sweatshop.
The Sydney Morning Herald
07 August 2006
BEIJING: With their control over newspapers, television, magazines and the internet secure, censors in China are now turning their attention to the nation's karaoke parlours.
The Ministry of Culture has issued new rules to prevent "unhealthy" songs from ringing forth in the sing-along bars, and to safeguard intellectual property rights.
The Government has picked three cities, Wuhan, Zhengzhou and Qingdao, to test the program, under which member businesses will choose songs from a central database. If successful, the program may go nationwide.
"All the songs in the database for use by karaoke parlours and consumers need to be censored" to ensure content meets government standards, Liang Gang, from the Ministry of Culture, told state media.
Editorial - The New York Times
August 04, 2006
A strong United Nations force is needed to halt the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region. If it is not sent soon, it may be too late for many thousands of potential victims. The immediate cause of the delay is the refusal by Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, to agree to a U.N. force, which he preposterously claims would attempt to recolonize his African nation. He is able to get away with this largely because China, a permanent member of the Security Council, continues to protect him with the threat of using its veto.
One reason Beijing stands behind Mr. Bashir is oil. China is trying to diversify its oil sources beyond the crisis-prone Middle East, and Africa is one obvious alternative. Already, some 7 percent of China’s imported oil comes from Sudan.
Another factor is Beijing’s extreme sensitivity to any U.N. encroachments on national sovereignty. China fears that by assenting to U.N. intervention in Darfur over the protests of the Sudanese government, it might open the door to unwanted meddling in its own affairs — with regard to Tibet, for example. No such precedent would be established, however, if China used its influence with Mr. Bashir to win his agreement to a U.N. force.
China is generally pretty thick-skinned about human-rights criticisms. Its practices at home leave much to be desired, and it does business with more than its share of unsavory regimes abroad. But genocide is different, and Beijing knows it. China is already embarrassed by its support for Mr. Bashir. When Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited Africa recently, he pointedly did not go to Sudan.
Surely Beijing does not want the world to see it as the main obstacle to sending a U.N. force to end the killing in Darfur. But right now, that is exactly the case. Other countries, like Russia, are also hanging back. But if China dropped its objections, they would probably follow its lead.
Washington, for its part, needs to build up its own pressure on Mr. Bashir. With the recent departure from government of Robert Zoellick, the administration’s highest-ranking diplomat working on Darfur, there is a real danger that crucial momentum will be lost. President Bush needs to appoint an envoy to Sudan right away, before the genocide’s toll — already more than 200,000 deaths — grows still larger.
CBS News
August 01, 2006
(AP) The slaughter of a reported 50,000 dogs in an anti-rabies crackdown in southwestern China sparked unusually pointed criticism in state media on Tuesday, along with calls for a boycott of Chinese products from activist group People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Health experts, meanwhile, said the brutal policy underscores deep weaknesses in China's health care system, which sees more than 2,000 human deaths from rabies each year.
The five-day massacre in Yunnan province's Mouding county that ended Sunday spared only military guard dogs and police canine units, state media reported.
Dogs being walked were taken from their owners and beaten to death on the spot, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported. Led by the county police chief, other killing teams entered villages at night creating noise to get dogs barking, then homed in on their prey, the reports said.
Owners were offered 5 yuan (63 U.S. cents; 49 euro cents) per animal to kill their own dogs before the teams were sent in, they said.
Radio Free Asia
August 1st, 2006
WASHINGTON, Aug. 1, 2006—A well-known Tibetan writer whose blogs have now been closed by Chinese authorities vowed Tuesday to keep speaking out and raising awareness in China of Tibetan culture.
“Though my blogs are shut down, they cannot stop my speech and my writing,” Woeser said during an 80-minute call-in program on RFA’s Tibetan service. She joined the program by phone from her home in Beijing.
“I will be writing and speaking. Since I am writer in Chinese, I want to make more people know reality of Tibetan culture, history, and traditions. I especially want the Chinese people to learn the truth about Tibetan history, culture, religion and traditions.”
Woeser, 40, who writes primarily in Chinese and is married to the Chinese writer Wang Lixiong, said she believed that Chinese authorities had closed her blogs because she had recently published a photo of Tibet’s exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, on one of them. Woeser is a well-known writer of Tibetan origin. She is the author of 10 volumes, including one book of collected poems, a prose volume titled Tibet Journal, and two books on the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. Most of her work is banned inside China.
By Christopher Bodeen | Associated Press Writer
July 31, 2006
Police clashed with 3,000 Christians protesting the forced demolition of a partially built church in eastern China, leaving four people with serious injuries, a human rights group said Monday.
Fighting broke out Saturday when 500 officers arrived in Xiaoshan, a district on the outskirts of the resort city of Hangzhou, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy reported.
The demolition work went ahead despite the clash, in which about 20 people were hurt, the Hong Kong-based group said.
A Xiaoshan police officer confirmed an "illegal building" had been torn down, but he refused to give his name or any details. Other local government officials refused to comment.
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