June 2007 Archives
By Gu Qinger | The Epoch Times
June 30, 2007
800 Shanghai Residents Sign Petition on the Internet
Recently, about 800 Shanghai citizens, published their real names on the Internet with a joint appeal letter titled "Shanghai People's Urgent Appeal Letter: We Want Human Rights, Instead of the Olympics."
Not long ago 6,000 farmers who lost their land in China's northeast Heilongjiang Province also published a similar joint appeal.
"The 2008 Beijing Olympics is around the corner. Instead of bringing us good luck and happiness, for the last six years, we have been thrown into an unprecedented human rights disaster which we have not seen the end of yet." said their appeal letter.
Futility of Personal Appeals
Most of the 800 Shanghai citizens are long time appellants who have lost their homes through forced demolition and relocation. In order to protect their rights, they appealed continually, but instead of their problem being resolved, the regime uses "maintaining the social stability" for the Olympics as the excuse to suppress those appeals. According to the appeal letter, "All of the open and legal channels for us to appeal to have been blocked, many of us has been beaten many times by this mafia style government."
Violence and Coercion
The appellants' basic living conditions were also deprived. Many of them had been beaten, detained, sentenced, and/or experienced family breakups. Many of their relatives were tortured to death or committed suicide.
Mr. Zhang Zhaolin's house was illegally demolished nearly 5 years ago, and his family still has no regular place to live. Zhang's wife was forcefully sent to a mental hospital on September 19, 2005, because she looked for help from the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai.
Zhang said, "It has been two years since they deprived my wife of her freedom, she is not detained with normal people. I have looked at every avenue for help, but had no success. This Olympics has nothing to do with us. I just want to get the properties belonging to me returned to live a peaceful life."
Zhang continued, "It is supposed to be a glorious thing for any country to host the Olympics, but to us, we have no enthusiasm for the Olympics. We have no place to live, we are always on the move…the Olympics symbolize peace, harmony and prosperity, but in reality, there is no harmony."
On November 3, 2006, Duan Huimin went to Beijing to appeal. His internal organs were severely injured from a beating by police and local government officials whose duty it is to stop people from appealing. During his detention, Duan requested hospitalization daily, but all his requests were denied. On January 2, 2007, Duan died from his severe injuries and delayed treatment. Just two days before his death, Duan received a notice of a one year labor camp sentence.
Duan Huimin's younger sister Duan Huifang said, "What the Olympics gives us is salt on top of insult. We want a peaceful life, but whenever there are important conferences or foreign VIP visitors, we are illegally placed under house arrest and monitored. Not long ago, when the new Shanghai Party Chief Xi Jinping visited the neighborhood, we were place under house arrest."
"Does the Olympics promote a good life for the people, respect for human rights, protection of human rights? We have no human rights and no democracy, so we fail to see the purpose of holding the Olympics. Only a small group of dictators benefit, there is no benefit to Chinese democracy at all. We should resist the Olympics." said Duan Huifang.
Just before her death, the local regime forced Zhou Yuezhen to sign a document on her death bed agreeing to a forced relocation. To express her grievance, Zhou, in bed, took a photo of herself while holding her will, written in large script, to entrust her daughter to continue the appeal after she passes away. Zhou Yuezhen died on her birthday at age 70.
Zhou's daughter told the reporter that Zhou was very healthy before the forced relocation, but after appealing for several months, she suffered from fatigue and liver cancer.
Mao Haixiu used to have a happy family and a good income as a manager of a tailoring business in her inherited property. In August 2001, the local regime forcefully relocated her. Her ex-husband died at the scene.
Mao said, "It should be Chinese people's glory to have the Olympic Games here, but currently, even our right to a basic living cannot be ensured. What is the use of having such a peacockish thing, we are against it."
The appeal letter also said, "No matter how low profile our appeal is, and non-political and non organized… it could not change our fate of being persecuted, being cracked down upon!"
The People or the Games
"We appeal to all governments, media and non-governmental organizations with conscience: We want human rights instead of the Olympics! We hope you will continue to pay attention to Shanghai's human rights, listen to our voice, make a judgment between human rights and the Olympics. Which one is more important to Shanghai citizens?"
by AFP | via (uncensored) Yahoo! News
June 27, 2009
The United States on Wednesday called on Hong Kong to maintain political freedom after a top Taiwanese member of the Falun Gong sect was denied entry to the Chinese territory.
Theresa Chu, a lawyer, arrived in the territory on Sunday evening to protest in the run-up to the 10th anniversary of the former British territory Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule but was refused entry and repatriated the next day.
Her visit was "not conducive to public good," she was told by an immigration officer, said the Hong Kong Association of Falun Dafa, part of Falun Gong, which has been outlawed in China as a dangerous sect.
"We believe all individuals, regardless of their beliefs or affiliation, enjoy the right to legitimate travel and peaceful assembly," the US State Department said.
"We expect that Hong Kong would continue to uphold its high standards of personal and political freedom," it said.
By AFP | via (uncensored) Yahoo! New
June 24, 2007
A top Taiwanese member of Falun Gong was Monday repatriated after being denied entry to Hong Kong to protest in the run-up to the 10th anniversary of the city's return to Chinese rule.
Theresa Chu, a lawyer, arrived in the territory on Sunday evening but was refused entry because her visit was "not conducive to public good," she was told by an immigration officer, said the Hong Kong Association of Falun Dafa, part of Falun Gong.
An officer at the airport immigration department told AFP that Chu, who had successfully entered the former British colony last week with a valid travel document, was repatriated on Monday morning.
She could not be reached on her Hong Kong mobile phone but Kan Hung-cheung, a spokesman at Falun Dafa, said she had appealed the decision.
He said more than 100 Taiwanese members of Falun Gong, outlawed in China as a dangerous sect, have also been denied entry here for a series of protests planned in the run-up to the anniversary of the handover on July 1.
It was not the first time Chu has had difficulties getting into Hong Kong. In 2003, Chu and more than 80 other Falun Gong practitioners were denied entry on arrival to attend the group's activities.
She is one of the plaintiffs in a joint application involving Taiwanese and Hong Kong practitioners for a judicial review of refused entries.
China outlawed the Falun Gong, which combines meditation with Buddhist-inspired teachings, as an "evil cult" in mid-1999 and practitioners have subsequently faced often brutal repression.
By Sharon Silke Carty | USA Today
June 26, 2007
The government has ordered a small New Jersey tire importer to recall 450,000 Chinese-made light-truck tires because they might come apart and cause fatal crashes, even though the importer says the costs of a recall would bankrupt it.
The tires, in sizes typically used by full-size vans, SUVs and pickups, are blamed in a fatal accident outside Philadelphia that's generated a lawsuit against Foreign Tire Sales of Union, N.J. FTS has in turn sued Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber, one of China's biggest tiremakers, which sold it the potentially faulty tires.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it told Foreign Tire on Monday to recall the tires. It would be the second recall in a year and a half involving Hangzhou Zhongce tires. In February 2006, Cooper Tire & Rubber recalled 288,000 passenger-car tires from the Chinese maker because they contained "unauthorized material" in the sidewalls. Cooper said that could have caused air leaks and, eventually, tread separation. Cooper couldn't be reached Monday night for comment.
Foreign Tire says it sold Hangzhou Zhongce tires under brand names Westlake, Compass, Telluride and YKS since 2002.
Xu Youming, an administrative manager at Hangzhou, denied that the tires had safety issues.
By Zhang Mingkun | Central News Agency | The Epoch Times
21 June 2007
China and the U.S. held consultations in Geneva from June 5 to 8, 2007 on the protection of intellectual property in China and the market access of publications. The meeting came as the U.S. filed a request for dispute settlement with the World Trade Organization (WTO) in April, accusing China of failing to take adequate measures to protect intellectual property and against rampant pirating and copying in that land.
The U.S. is not China's only accuser; China is known in the world as the country where illegal copying is widespread. A Japanese TV program reported last month that the Beijing Shijingshan Amusement Park was suspected of copying famous cartoon characters in Disneyland in violation of intellectual property rights. Immediately after that report, several other foreign media outlets followed up, triggering a wave of media attacks on China's illegal copying.
The Japanese TV program showed that there was a man dressed as the cartoon character Tigger from Disney's Winnie the Pooh in the Shijiangshan Amusement Park, who yelled out in Pidgin English, "Five dollar one shoot," charging five yuan (US$ 0.6 dollar) from tourists who wanted to take a picture with him. He didn't know that the Tigger outfit he was wearing was unauthorized; still less was he aware that the people who came to videotape him were the crew from a Japanese TV program that had caught him red-handed.
The Shijingshan Amusement Park, just west of the fifth loop road of Beijing and built in 1986, was laid out in imitation of Disneyland with a castle in fairy tales as its trademark structure.
The Japanese TV footage revealed that staff dressed as popular cartoon figures such as Snow White, Seven Dwarfs, Tigger, Hello Kitty, Duola Ameng, to name a few, paraded in the park, charging tourists a fee for taking photos with them. They used these images without authorization from Disneyland or relevant Japanese authorities.
The program also showed that the peddlers in the park were openly displaying and selling imitated toy figures, such as Mickey Mouse, Minnie, the Clown fish in Finding Nemo, and Winnie the Pooh.
The park is only a miniature of the prevailing illegal copying problems on the streets of Beijing. Pirated goods in mainland China are flourishing thanks to their cheap prices; one pirated DVD movie costs only five yuan (US$ 0.6 dollar), which makes buying the authenticated version at a price ten or even twenty times higher much less attractive. Some people do not even want to pay for a copied DVD; instead, they opt for downloading free movies from the Internet.
People in China cannot care less about intellectual piracy. Westerners or Japanese tourists "do in Rome as the Romans do" too; they do not hesitate to buy copied goods when they come to China. One Beijing resident, a regular guide for foreign tourists, said, "When foreigners first came, they all appeared to feel disgusted with the copied goods. But later they changed, and bought a lot of them."
According to statistics published by the European Commission on May 31, 2007, about 80 percent of the copied goods seized by the customs in the European Union come from China.
In response to the serious intellectual piracy problems in China, the U.S. officially filed a report with the WTO in April, and it underscored that Americans' dissatisfaction has risen to the verge of a trade war.
Wang Guangze, a China commentator, said, "China has a serious intellectual piracy problem, so the U.S. indeed has the right to complain to the WTO. Since China has joined the WTO, it has a responsibility to address the ongoing illegal copying problems in its territory."
Ultimately, who is to blame for this stubborn problem of intellectual piracy in China? Wang hit the nail on the head when he said, "Neither the U.S. nor the WTO, nor the Chinese people are at fault. The only party that's at fault is the government in China."
Editorial - The New York Times
June 22, 2007
The “Chinese miracle” has been the biggest economic story for several years now, a tale of a nation rising from the ashes of a Stalinist command economy to become the world’s premier trading partner. But China reminds us with distressing regularity that the progress has been selective.
The latest reminders are reports of slave labor in Chinese factories and the discovery that some of the popular Thomas the Tank Engine toys manufactured in China have lead in their paint. Before that, it was the contaminated dog food, the stubborn support of Sudan for its oil, the regular reports of human rights abuses, the huge economic disparities between city and country, the controls on the media.
Why rehearse these faults now? Because governments and companies tend to become so seduced or intimidated by China that they won’t hold it to high standards of human rights and business ethics.
Western companies have been so anxious to transfer manufacturing to China’s cheap factories that they have been happy to close their eyes to what else goes on over there — just as Google or Yahoo were happy to assist in repressing information to get a toe into the Chinese market, or as Washington and other Western capitals compete in trying to please visiting Chinese leaders. The ultimate source of China’s failings is a Communist Party that has jettisoned worn-out Marxist economic theories but clings to its authoritarian rule on all other fronts, creating a dangerously unbalanced behemoth.
This is not an argument against trading with or investing in China. Globalization can be a potent force for democratization. But human rights violations cannot be relegated to untouchable internal affairs. Just as the world has not hesitated, rightly, to lambaste the United States over issues like Guantánamo Bay, it should not be shy about systematic and widespread violations of human rights in China.
China’s unreformed political system fosters corruption and an undue focus on short-term economic gains, which will lead to more internal inequities and injustices and more tainted exports. A politically reformed China would be an even more formidable economic power, but a less destructive one.
By REUTERS | via (uncensored) Yahoo! News
June 20, 2007
Yang Zhou is no cyberdissident, but recent curbs on his Web surfing habits by China's censors have him fomenting discontent about China's "Great Firewall."
Yang's fury erupted a few days ago when he found he could not browse his friend's holiday snaps on Flickr.com, due to access restrictions by censors after images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were posted on the photo-sharing Web site."
"Once you've complained all you can to your friends, what more can you do? What else is there but anger and disillusionment?" Yang said after venting his anger with friends at a hot-pot restaurant in Beijing.
The blocking of Flickr is the latest casualty of China's ongoing battle to control its sprawling Internet. Wikipedia, and a raft of other popular Web sites, discussion boards and blogs have already fallen victim to the country's censors.
China employs a complex system of filters and an army of tens of thousands of human monitors to survey the country's 140 million Internet users' surfing habits and surgically clip sensitive content from in front of their eyes.
Its stability-obsessed government says the surveillance machinery, commonly known as the "Great Firewall," is necessary to let Internet users enjoy a "healthy" online environment and build a "harmonious" society.
Yang just thinks it's a pain.
"I just want to look at some photos! What's wrong with that?" said the 24-year-old accountant, typical of millions of young urban-dwelling professionals who are increasingly aware of and fed up with state intrusions into their private life.
By Howard W. French | The New York Times
June 16, 2007
Su Jinduo and Su Jinpeng, brother and sister, were traveling home by bus from a vacation visit to Qingdao during the Chinese New Year when they disappeared.
Cheated out of their money when they sought to buy a ticket for the final leg of the journey home, their father, Su Jianjun, said in an interview, they were taken in by a woman who provided them with warm shelter and a meal on a cold winter night. She also offered them a chance to earn enough money to pay their fare by helping her sell fruit.
The next thing they knew, however, they were being loaded onto a minibus with several other children and taken to a factory in the next province, where they were pressed into service making bricks. Several days later, the boy, 16, escaped along with another boy and managed to reach home. A few days later, Mr. Su was able to rescue his daughter, 18.
This story and many others like it have swept China in recent days in an unfolding labor scandal in central China that involves the kidnapping of hundreds of children, most in their teens but some as young as 8.
The children, and many adults, reportedly, have been forced to work under brutal conditions — scantily clothed, unpaid and often fed little more than water and steamed buns — in the brick kilns of Shanxi Province.
As the stories spread across China this week, played prominently in newspaper headlines and on the Internet, a manhunt was announced midweek for Heng Tinghan, the foreman of one of the kilns, where 31 enslaved workers were recently rescued.
Mr. Su said his children were brought to the factory around midnight of the day they vanished. Once there, they were told they would have to make bricks. “You will start working in the morning, so get some sleep, and don’t lose your bowls, or you will have to pay for them,” he said the children were told. “They also charged them 50 renminbi for a blanket.” That is equivalent to about $6.50.
Mr. Su managed to recover his children after only a matter of days at the kiln, but many other parents have been less fortunate, losing contact with children for months or years. As stories of forced labor at the brick kilns have spread, hundreds of parents have petitioned local authorities to help them find their children and crack down on the kilns.
In some cases, according to Chinese news media reports, parents have also come together to try to rescue their children, placing little stock in the local authorities, who are sometimes in collusion with the operators of the kilns. Other reports have said that local authorities, including labor inspectors, have taken children from freshly closed kilns and resold them to other factories.
The director of the legal department of the Shanxi Province Worker’s Union said it was hard to monitor the kilns because of their location in isolated areas.
“Those factories are located in very remote places and most them are illegal entities, without any legal registration, so it is very hard for people outside to know what is going on there,” said the union official, Zhang Xiaosuo. “We are now doing a province-wide investigation into them, both the legal and illegal ones, to look into labor issues there.”
Liu Cheng, a professor of labor law at Shanghai Normal University, had a different explanation. “My first reaction is that this seems like a typical example of a government-business alliance,” Mr. Liu said. “Forced labor and child labor in China are illegal, but some local governments don’t care too much.”
Zhang Xiaoying, 37, whose 15-year-old son disappeared in January, said she had visited over 100 brick factories during a handful of visits to Shanxi Province in search of him.
“You just could not believe what you saw,” Ms. Zhang said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “Some of the kids working at these places were at most 14 or 15 years old.”
The local police, she said, were unwilling to help. Outside one factory, she said, they even demanded bribes.
By Walt Bogdanich | The New York Times
June 17, 2007
After a drug ingredient from China killed dozens of Haitian children a decade ago, a senior American health official sent a cable to her investigators: find out who made the poisonous ingredient and why a state-owned company in China exported it as safe, pharmaceutical-grade glycerin.
The Chinese were of little help. Requests to find the manufacturer were ignored. Business records were withheld or destroyed.
The Americans had reason for alarm. “The U.S. imports a lot of Chinese glycerin and it is used in ingested products such as toothpaste,” Mary K. Pendergast, then deputy commissioner for the Food and Drug Administration, wrote on Oct. 27, 1997. Learning how diethylene glycol, a syrupy poison used in some antifreeze, ended up in Haitian fever medicine might “prevent this tragedy from happening again,” she wrote.
The F.D.A.’s mission ultimately failed. By the time an F.D.A. agent visited the suspected manufacturer, the plant was shut down and Chinese companies said they bore no responsibility for the mass poisoning.
Ten years later it happened again, this time in Panama. Chinese-made diethylene glycol, masquerading as its more expensive chemical cousin glycerin, was mixed into medicine, killing at least 100 people there last year. And recently, Chinese toothpaste containing diethylene glycol was found in the United States and seven other countries, prompting tens of thousands of tubes to be recalled.
The F.D.A.’s efforts to investigate the Haiti poisonings, documented in internal F.D.A. memorandums obtained by The New York Times, demonstrate not only the intransigence of Chinese officials, but also the same regulatory failings that allowed a virtually identical poisoning to occur 10 years later. The cases further illustrate what happens when nations fail to police the global pipeline of pharmaceutical ingredients.
In Haiti and Panama, the poison was traced to Chinese chemical companies not certified to make pharmaceutical ingredients. State-owned exporters then shipped the toxic syrup to European traders, who resold it without identifying the previous owner — an attempt to keep buyers from bypassing them on future orders.
As a result, most of the buyers did not know that the ingredient came from China, known for producing counterfeit products, nor did they show much interest in finding out.
China itself was a victim of diethylene glycol poisoning last year when at least 18 people died after ingesting poisonous medicine made there. In the wake of the deaths, and reports of pet food and other products contaminated with dangerous ingredients from China, officials there announced that they would overhaul the regulation of food, drugs and chemicals.
Beyond the three incidents linked to Chinese diethylene glycol, there have been at least five other mass poisonings involving the mislabeled chemical in the past two decades — in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Argentina and twice in India.
“This problem keeps coming back,” said Dr. Joshua G. Schier, a toxicologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And no wonder: the counterfeiters are rarely identified, much less prosecuted.
Finding a way to keep diethylene glycol out of medicine, particularly in developing countries, has confounded health officials for decades. “It is preventable and we have to figure out some way of stopping this from happening again,” said Carol Rubin, a senior C.D.C. official.
In a global economy, ingredients for drugs are often bought and sold many times in different countries, sometimes without proper paperwork, all of which increases the risk of fraud, the authorities say.
The Panama poison passed through five hands, the Haitian poison six. In both cases, the factory’s original certificate of analysis, attesting to the contents of the shipment and its provenance, did not accompany the product as it moved around the world.
“Where there is a loophole in the system, a frailty in the system, it’s the ability of an unscrupulous distributor to take industrial or technical material and pass it off as pharmaceutical grade,” said Kevin J. McGlue, a board member of the International Pharmaceutical Excipients Council.
Uncovering that deception can be difficult. “It’s impossible to get anyone to do the trace-backs,” said Dr. Michael L. Bennish, co-author of a 1995 medical journal article on a poisoning epidemic in Bangladesh.
One reason, Dr. Bennish said, is the clout of local manufacturers. “We tried to follow up as amateur Sherlocks, investigators, but you don’t go down to the wholesale market and ask questions,” he said. “You are going to get your fingers burnt.”
A Crisis in Haiti
By the end of June 1996, the F.D.A. knew it might have an international crisis on its hands. A poison had found its way into fever syrup in Haiti, and the F.D.A. wanted to know if more of the same might be heading to the United States or, for that matter, to any other country. But to learn that, the agency needed to find the manufacturer.
This was not just any poison. Virtually every young poisoning victim who showed up at the main hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, died.
Labeled pharmaceutical-grade glycerin, the toxic syrup was mixed into thousands of bottles of fever medicine. For months, parents gave it to children, then watched them die, in agony, from kidney failure. No one suspected the medicine until much later.
Officially, at least 88 children died, nearly half under the age of 2. But those 88 were only the ones doctors remembered or for whom hospital records could be found.
The F.D.A. traced the poison to a German broker, Chemical Trading and Consulting, but the company’s records were not much help. “They cannot trace glycerine lots to their manufacturer,” David Pulham, an F.D.A. investigator, wrote on June 30, 1996.
Chemical Trading had arranged for a Dutch company, Vos B.V., to sell 72 barrels of the suspect syrup to Haiti, records show. The agency dispatched an investigator, Ann deMarco, who made an unsettling discovery: sitting in Vos’s warehouse near Rotterdam were 66 more barrels labeled glycerin, all containing lethal concentrations of diethylene glycol.
“Some of this second shipment has been sold,” Ms. deMarco wrote in a memorandum on July 4, 1996. Although the missing barrels had gone to an industrial user, not a drug maker, the F.D.A.’s worries grew.
Ms. deMarco learned that another broker, Metall-Chemie, a German trader, had arranged for Vos to buy the barrels from Sinochem International Chemicals Company, a giant exporter in Beijing owned by the Chinese government.
But Metall-Chemie also did not know the manufacturer, and one of its officials predicted that the F.D.A. would have trouble finding that out. “It is difficult to get any information from Chinese traders,” Ms. deMarco wrote.
By REUTERS | The New York Times
15 June 2007
China is the source of about 80 percent of shipments of suspected fake goods seized by U.S. Customs last year, a U.S. Customs official said on Friday.
The extent of pirated goods made in China, from drugs and designer bags to golf clubs and DVDs, has become a major source of friction between Beijing and Washington, prompting the United States to lodge two intellectual property rights (IPR) cases against China at the World Trade Organization this year.
W. Ralph Basham, Commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said he hoped a new agreement with China to provide information on seizures would help curb rampant violations.
"We've got to start dealing with the source of the problem. We can't expect to rely on interdiction to be our tool in order to stop these IPR violations," Basham told reporters.
By Luo Bing | Cheng Ming Monthly | The Epoch Times
June 14, 2007
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo Standing Committee, during an extended meeting in May of this year, conducted the 14th annual review of the June 4 Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, which the CCP calls the "political disturbances of 1989."
Despite repeated requests for an official reassessment of the incident, CCP state secretary Zeng Qinghong announced that no revisions would be forthcoming.
The importance of this issue to the CCP is apparent: it was one of three main agenda items discussed at the Committee session. The three major agenda items were Chinese premier Wen Jiabao's report on the current economic and financial situation, Chinese legislator Wu Bangguo's report on the progress in planning for the 17th CCP National Congress, and a review of the "political disturbances of 1989."
The 1989 June 4 Massacre claimed the lives of approximately three thousand Chinese college students who were demonstrating in Tiananmen Square for a reform and modernization of CCP policies. Then-CCP military secretary Deng Xiaoping ordered the Army to assault the students with tanks and machine guns to clear the square. Although there was photographic and filmed evidence of the murders, the CCP's official position was that no students had died, but rather that some students had attacked the troops and killed some.
The CCP later revised this stance, admitting that 200–300 students might have been killed.
The Politburo has discussed officially revising its view of the Tianamnen Square Massacre fourteen times since 1991.
This year's review began with CCP state secretary Zeng Qinghong presenting his report on polling data about people's opinions about the Tianamen Massacre. Next, the assembly expressed its unanimous belief that the actions taken on the night of June 3–4 represented the only possible means of addressing the situation, which would have continued to deteriorate and perhaps have become uncontrollable otherwise.
Various points were raised including the fact that although eighteen years have passed, there is tremendous political and social pressure to revise the official view. Strong opinions and recommendations have come from within the Party itself and from all sectors of the society.
By Zhang Liming | Radio Free Asia | The Epoch Times
June 14, 2007
On May 27, 2006, Sichuan Province officials sent armed forces to suppress a group of over a thousand Tibetans protesting the exploitation of the sacred Yala Mountain.
A local resident explained that the government had arbitrarily sold the mountain to a lead-zinc mining company. When the protesters gathered outside the offices of the company who had purchased the mountain, they were beaten and driven away by public security officers and armed police. At least ten Tibetans were injured in the assault and twenty individuals, including tribal leaders, were arrested.
"Many armed troops were called to the scene," explained one local resident who witnessed the event. "They jumped on and beat the protesters recklessly without giving a reason. Many protesters were injured and hospitalized. One in particular had to be put on a respirator."
According to one resident, public security officers and armed police have taken over a local school as their headquarters, leaving children without a school to attend for the past seven days. Officers have also been sent to search protesters' homes, destroying personal property and arresting about a dozen people in the process. The twelve tribal leaders who met with provincial party committee members to discuss the preservation of the sacred mountain are believed to have also been detained.
By Kathleen E. McLaughlin, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
via (uncensored) yahoo!news
June 13, 2007
When a British-based labor consortium charged this week that factory workers as young as 12 are toiling to produce gear and souvenirs licensed by Beijing for its 2008 Olympics, China's reaction was swift.
Beijing officials announced they would deal "seriously" with factories that violate China's "very strict" labor codes. But the negative publicity – along with other reports that the problem goes beyond production of Olympic-related memorabilia – comes at a sensitive moment for Beijing as it seeks to burnish its international image ahead of the games.
Some observers say that the latest reports represent a weak point in China's otherwise strong record of enforcing child labor laws – especially at a time when child labor is on the decline worldwide.
Playfair Alliance, which targets sporting goods and athletic merchandise, reported this week that child labor in China is not limited to a few factories making Olympic souvenirs but may be a growing, potentially widespread problem spurred by increasing labor shortages and rural poverty.
Another survey report from the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin, which investigated a growing underage labor force in several small towns, found that poorly funded rural schools and a higher-than-recorded school dropout rate are forcing many children to work before the law allows.
In small towns across the vast Chinese countryside, kids age 13, 14, and 15 – below the legal working age of 16 – are entering the workforce as factory owners and other employers turn a blind eye, according to the report.
"Looking at the results of our on-site surveys, and reports in the Chinese media … we do not believe that the child labor problem in China has been suppressed that effectively," said the China Labour Bulletin's report.
A 2006 study from the International Labor Organization (ILO) said that overall, child labor has been reduced by 11 percent in the past four years worldwide.
Despite the recent studies, conclusive figures aren't available in China, so no true comparison is possible. The Chinese government considers the topic too sensitive to allow international groups to conduct widespread national investigations of how many under-age workers appear in the labor force.
By The Associated Press | The New York Times
June 11, 2007
BEIJING (AP) -- The wife of a Chinese dissident was detained at the airport by security agents Monday and barred from leaving the country to attend a human rights meeting in Switzerland, the activist said.
Hu Jia, who like most dissidents is under constant surveillance, has been largely confined to his home since last month after security agents stopped him and his wife from leaving China, saying they were a threat to national security.
Hu said his wife Zeng Jinyan, who is four months pregnant, was detained at the airport for two hours Monday.
''Plainclothes security officers came there and wouldn't let her depart China because of the charges (that she is a security threat) and confiscated her travel documents,'' he said in a telephone interview.
Zeng was released Monday afternoon but it wasn't clear how long her passport would be held, said Hu, an AIDS activist.
China has been taking great pains to protect its image ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a source of great pride for the country. But in recent months, activist groups have used the games to bring attention to China's handling of issues such as the Darfur crisis in Sudan and calls for Tibet independence.
''If in Europe we disclose proof of the Chinese government's human rights violations, then it would be a heavy blow,'' Hu said. ''So I think this time, they're strictly regulating not just me but my wife as well.''
Phones at the press office of the Ministry of Public Security rang unanswered Monday afternoon.
By Breffni O'Rourke | Radio Free Europe - Radio Liberty
June 11, 2007
China has been accused of allowing the exploitation of children and adult workers at enterprises manufacturing official merchandise for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
The Play Fair Alliance, a human-rights panel which monitors working conditions, gave details about the charges in a report just issued. It says many workers are receiving less than half of the minimum wage.
The Play Fair Alliance is active in looking behind the glitter and glamour of the Olympic Games to uncover the seamy side of preparations for the world's greatest sporting festival.
With the 2008 Olympics in Beijing approaching fast, the Play Fair Alliance has been examining the factories in China that are churning out millions of pieces of merchandise for visitors to the games, such as officially approved caps, bags, stationery, badges, and numerous other trinkets.
A report just issued by Play Fair is alarming. It says the owners of factories are falsifying employment records and forcing workers to lie about their wages and conditions.
"What our researchers have found is evidence of children as young as 12 years old producing Olympic merchandise," says Owen Tudor, the head of the international department at Britain's Trades Union Congress. "They also found adults earning just 14 pence ($0.25) an hour -- that's half the minimum wage in China, which is already pretty low, and employees [are] forced to work 15 hours a day, seven days a week."
By David Lague | International Herald Tribune
June 10, 2007
BEIJING: For almost six decades, U.S. military power has frustrated the ambition of China's ruling Communist Party to unite Taiwan with the mainland.
With this U.S. security blanket in place, Beijing has been largely powerless to prevent the prosperous, self-governing island from becoming independent in all but name.
But, an increasingly wealthy China is now building a military force tailored specifically to challenge any attempt by the United States to intervene in a conflict over Taiwan, Western and Chinese military analysts say.
They say the People's Liberation Army is spending heavily on the hardware and technology it needs to keep the United States and its allies at bay if the Beijing leadership decides it must use force to defeat Taiwan or compel the island's leaders to negotiate.
Without attempting to match the overwhelming U.S. military might, experts say, the army has developed a strategy of "area denial," where an array of precision weapons would be deployed in an attempt to keep U.S. forces, particularly aircraft carriers, at a distance for long enough that China could overwhelm Taiwan's defenses.
"The plans that China has to develop a submarine force, to develop long-range strike capability in its air force and deploy better ballistic missiles means it will be increasingly more difficult for the U.S. to guarantee the security of Taiwan," said Allan Behm, a Canberra-based security analyst and former senior Australian Defense Department strategic planner.
If China's strategy were successful, U.S. forces could face defeat without suffering major military losses.
"A weakened initial U.S. response to a Chinese assault on Taiwan, for example, could result in the collapse of Taiwan's military resistance," said a Rand Corporation study for the U.S. Air Force published late last month. "The island might therefore capitulate before the United States could bring all its combat power to bear.
"If that were to happen, it seems unlikely that the United States would continue the conflict, even though U.S. military power would largely be intact," the study said.
One analyst also sees the military threat as the foundation of a "grand strategy" to absorb Taiwan without war by building increasingly important economic, cultural and political ties with the island while maintaining its rapid and overt military preparations.
"The ideal calculus for Beijing is that in the end, the U.S. just lets go," said Lin Chong-pin, a Taipei-based security analyst and former vice minister for defense in the governing Democratic Progressive Party government.
For most analysts, the Chinese Army's preoccupation with a potential U.S military intervention in a Taiwan conflict is not new.
Official Chinese military periodicals and journals have regularly carried articles analyzing the potential vulnerabilities of U.S. forces and measures China could employ to defeat its stronger adversary.
Military analysts on Taiwan have also been monitoring the modernization and doctrine of the Chinese Army.
"I've been warning about this for years," Lin said. "The idea of the PLA is to deter the U.S. and seize Taiwan."
What has changed, analysts say, is that China's increasingly powerful military makes it more dangerous by the day for the United States if it decided to enter this type of conflict.
But, some analysts warn that China could face dangerous consequences even if it succeeds in forcing Taiwan to submit while deterring U.S. intervention.
They argue that the ability and desire to protect Taiwan is the litmus test of Washington's commitment to remain the dominant power in Asia.
"If China can threaten the U.S. guarantee of security for Taiwan, it can also threaten the U.S. guarantee of security for Japan," Behm said. "It would be incredibly destabilizing if Japan felt it had no choice but to develop nuclear weapons.
"China has to be very careful it doesn't force Japan to go in that direction," he said.
In response to China's buildup, the Bush administration late last month delivered a forceful warning of the possible consequences if Beijing went to war over Taiwan.
In its annual report to Congress on China's military, published on May 26, the Pentagon said Beijing still lacked the power to take control of Taiwan, particularly if the United States intervened.
The report also suggested that Chinese forces could be tied up for years fighting an insurgency on Taiwan while China faced a range of economic and political repercussions including a possible boycott of the 2008 Olympics.
War over Taiwan could also spark civil unrest on the mainland, the Pentagon said.
China reacted angrily to the Pentagon report, with a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman describing it as a "brutal interference" in its internal affairs and insisting that Beijing's military preparations were purely defensive.
By David Barboza | The New York Times
09 June 2007
A dispute between Groupe Danone, the French dairy and beverage maker, and its Chinese partner, the beverage maker Wahaha, became even stranger on Friday when Wahaha released several letters written by employees that denounced Danone for being run by “rascals” who were committing “evil deeds.”
The letters, which were filled with vitriol and old-fashioned Communist slogans, came a day after the founder and chairman of Wahaha, Zong Qinghou, resigned in anger, saying that his reputation was being ruined by the dispute.
The resignation had appeared to be a victory for Danone, which is trying to gain control of the venture. On Thursday, Danone named Emmanuel Faber, the head of its Asian operations, as the interim chairman of Wahaha.
But by Friday, there were indications that Wahaha was still being controlled by Mr. Zong or a management team loyal to him.
A spokesman for Danone declined to comment.
Mr. Zong, an entrepreneur who has been ranked as one of China’s wealthiest individuals, could not be reached for comment on Friday.
But Danone’s dispute with its joint venture partner is turning into an increasingly nasty affair, complicating the company’s control over one of its biggest and most lucrative investments in China, a beverage maker with sales of more than $1.4 billion a year.
The dispute erupted this year after Danone, which owns 51 percent of the Wahaha joint venture that was founded in 1996, accused Mr. Zong of operating mirror companies that independently sold goods in China under the Wahaha brand name and then pocketing huge profits.
But Mr. Zong has insisted that Danone executives knew about the affiliated companies and even audited them. He said Danone was seeking to acquire most of them but was unwilling to pay a hefty price, setting off the dispute.
Earlier this year, Danone imposed a deadline on its Wahaha partner to stop the companies from selling Wahaha products outside of the joint venture company.
On Monday, after that deadline had passed, Danone filed a lawsuit in the United States against one of Mr. Zong’s Wahaha-affiliated companies, claiming that Danone had been cheated out of at least $100 million.
The target of the lawsuit was a company controlled or owned by Mr. Zong and his wife and daughter, who are listed as the company’s legal representatives and who live in California.
By BBC World News
June 08, 2007
An international media watchdog has condemned China for sacking three editors who published an advert marking the 1989 Tiananmen Square bloodshed.
On the 18th anniversary of the killings on Monday, an advert in a provincial paper praised the relatives who still campaign for justice for the victims.
It was accepted for publication by a young office clerk who was not aware of its significance, reports say.
The Chinese government forbids any public discussion of Tiananmen.
The tiny advert on page 14 of the Chengdu Evening News read: "Paying tribute to the strong mothers of June 4 victims."
It is thought to have been a reference to the Tiananmen Mothers' Organisation, which is seeking justice for the students gunned down when government soldiers broke up pro-democracy protests on 4 June 1989.
The young woman who accepted the advert phoned back the person who placed it to ask what "June 4" meant and he told her it was the date of a mining disaster, according to Hong Kong's South China Morning Post.
The chief editor and two vice editors were subsequently sacked.
"Those three journalists are innocent victims twice over," the press freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders said.
"They let through this ad, because one of their staff didn't know what happened on 4 June 1989, so relentless is censorship about this episode."
"These journalists have as a result fallen victim to a purge, which is typical of this government."
By AFP | via (uncensored) yahoo!news
June 05, 2007
US President George W. Bush met the exiled leader of China's Uighur Muslims on Tuesday, US Uighurs said, as he accused Beijing of jailing her sons in retaliation against her human rights campaign.
Rights activists described Bush's meeting with Rebiya Kadeer as significant amid international pressure on China to put a stop to what they called serious human rights abuses ahead of the Beijing Olympics in August 2008.
Bush met Kadeer at the sidelines of a conference in Prague attended by political dissidents from around the world shortly before he flew to Germany to attend the G8 summit starting Wednesday, a statement from the Uighur American Association said in Washington.
Before the meeting, Bush highlighted Kadeer as the symbol of struggle for the 10 million mostly Muslim Uighurs, the largest ethnic group in China's Xinjiang region.
"Another dissident I will meet with here is Rebiya Kadeer of China, whose sons have been jailed in what we believe is an act of retaliation for her human rights activities," Bush said in his speech at the Prague conference.
"The talent of men and women like Rebiya is the greatest resource of their nations -- far more valuable than the weapons of their army or oil under the ground," he said.
T. Kumar, Washington-based advocacy director for Asia Pacific for Amnesty International, said Bush's meeting with Kadeer sent a "powerful message" to the Chinese leadership to "take constructive steps" to improve human rights before the Olympics.
"The jailing of Kadeer's children is an example of how China uses innocent family members as hostages to silence political dissidents," Kumar said.
Kadeer's son Ablikim Abdiriyim, the latest family member to be jailed, was sentenced in April to nine years in prison for what Beijing called "secessionist" activities.
By David Baboza | The New York Times
June 05, 2007
WUDI, China — They might be called China’s renegade businessmen, small entrepreneurs who are experts at counterfeiting and willing to go to extraordinary lengths to make a profit. But just how far out of the Chinese mainstream are they?
Here in Wudi in eastern China, a few companies tried to save money by slipping the industrial chemical melamine into pet food ingredients as a cheap protein enhancer, helping incite one of the largest pet food recalls ever.
In Taixing, a city far to the south, a small business cheated the system by substituting a cheap toxic chemical for pharmaceutical-grade syrup, leading to a mass poisoning in Panama. And in the eastern province of Anhui, a group of entrepreneurs concocted a fake baby-milk formula that eventually killed dozens of rural children.
The incidents are the latest indications that cutting corners or producing fake goods is not just a legacy of China’s initial rush toward the free market three decades ago but still woven into the fabric of the nation’s thriving industrial economy. It is driven by entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of a weak legal system, lax regulations and a business culture where bribery and corruption are rampant.
“This is cut-throat market capitalism,” said Wenran Jiang, a specialist in China who teaches at the University of Alberta. “But the question has to be asked: is this uniquely Chinese or is there simply a lack of regulation in the market?”
Counterfeiting, of course, is not new to China. Since this country’s economic reforms began to take root in the 1980s, businesses have engineered countless ways to produce everything from fake car parts, cosmetics and brand name bags to counterfeit electrical cables and phony Viagra. Counterfeiting rings are broken nearly every week; nonetheless, the government seems to be waging a losing battle against the operations.
Dozens of Chinese cities have risen to prominence over the last two decades by first specializing in fake goods, like Wenzhou, which was once known for selling counterfeit Procter & Gamble products, and Kaihua in Zhejiang province, which specialized in fake Philips light bulbs.
For a time, people even derided the entire province of Henan as the capital of substandard or fake goods, like medicines that could make you miraculously grow taller.
But the discovery of dangerous ingredients in foods and drugs has raised more serious questions.
One such operation is centered here in Wudi, about five hours southeast of Beijing. This is where the trail of the American pet food recall leads.
Regulators came to Wudi in early May and shut down one of the region’s biggest feed exporters, the Binzhou Futian Biology Technology Company. They also detained its manager, Tian Feng, after American officials identified Binzhou Futian as one of two Chinese companies responsible for shipping contaminated pet food ingredients to the United States.
Chinese authorities said that Binzhou Futian and a company in bordering Jiangsu province had intentionally doctored feed ingredients to generate bigger profits. Regulators in China called it an isolated incident.
But agricultural workers and experts in this region tell a different story. They say the practice of doctoring animal and fish feed with melamine and other ingredients is widespread in China. And Wudi, they say, has long been known as a center for such activity.
“Wudi became famous for fake fish powder almost 10 years ago,” said Chen Baojiang, a professor of animal nutrition at the Agricultural University of Hebei. (Fish powder is used as a protein additive to animal feed, including fish feed.)
“All kinds of fillers have been used. At the beginning it was vegetable protein, then urea. Now it’s feather powder.”
In small village workshops on the outskirts of Wudi, residents say hundreds of workers make animal feed doctored with fish scraps and cheap ingredients that are then packaged for sale to unsuspecting farmers and fish farms.
Much of the fish scrap comes from the nearby Bohai Bay area or imported from Peru and then blended with cheap fillers to bolster profits.
“About 90 percent of the fish powder on the market is fake,” said Xue Min, who works at the Feed Research Institute, a division of the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing. “When it reaches the customer, he doesn’t know how many kinds of filler have been added.”
By Keith Bradsher | The New York Times
June 05, 2007
A candlelight vigil here on Monday evening to observe the 18th anniversary of the military crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Beijing drew an unusually large crowd, apparently in response to the recent assertion by the leader of Hong Kong’s pro-China party that no massacre took place.
By contrast, Tiananmen Square itself remained quiet, if under tight security, on a sunny day, with the usual tour groups and pedestrians milling about. Several well-known dissidents had been placed under house arrest or close watch, though some described the harassment as more passive than in years past.
Some dissidents communicated through Web sites established to commemorate the anniversary.
Hu Jia, a leading Chinese advocate on issues like AIDS, said that he and others had been confined to their homes but that the authorities had shown a few small signs of leniency. He said Ding Zilin, a leader of a group known as the Tiananmen Mothers, was allowed to commemorate the death of her son by visiting one of the sites where soldiers fired upon pro-democracy demonstrators.
In Hong Kong, the Tiananmen Square killings are once more a subject of active discussion after remarks on May 15 by Ma Lik, the chairman of the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong. Mr. Ma told local reporters that Hong Kong residents lacked patriotic devotion to China because they believed that the Communist Party had massacred people at Tiananmen Square.
By Radio Free Asia
04 June 2007
HONG KONG—A former top aide in China's ruling Communist Party has called on the Chinese people to keep up pressure on their government, which he described as "utterly corrupt."
"The pressure exerted by the Chinese people is indeed a good thing; its vice-like grip gives us the best available tool with which to reform an authoritarian, one-party state," wrote Bao Tong, former aide to ousted late premier Zhao Ziyang in an essay broadcast on RFA's Mandarin service Friday.
In a memorial essay written for the 18th anniversary of the June 4 crackdown on the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement, Bao also hit out at those who "sold their souls" by pretending that the crackdown was good for China's economy.
'Butcher' Deng Xiaoping
"There are always those who are prepared to sell their own souls, who in the past 18 years have praised the massacre perpetrated by that butcher as providing a firm basis for prosperity, because he broke the will of the people with his iron fist," Bao wrote. "That butcher" refers to the late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, who is credited with launching China's economic boom.
"This chairman gave the order to the People's Liberation Army to shoulder their assault weapons and drive tanks in a move that crushed and strafed the masters of the country," Bao said.
"The numbers of injured went beyond the capacity of emergency rooms in the capital to handle. The dead were piled up in the morgues."
"The rest of the world witnessed the bloodbath in China's capital via satellite television. This sort of event, whether it occurred in the slave society or during the time of the warlords, is the sort of crime which has the power to extinguish the human spirit," he wrote.
【大纪元5月31日讯】（大纪元记者冯长乐采访报导）“六四”纪念日又将到来，当年在安徽大学就读的学运领袖之一陶君，那场震惊世界的惨案对他仍然历历在目。“六四份子”的头衔让他成为中共“辛德勒”名单上的人。十八年来，从监控、监视居住到入狱，妻离子散，四度工作四次遭解雇，人到哪里警察就跟到哪里，但他说，他从来就不会被打倒。
学运领袖——中共“辛德勒”名单上的人
18年前的今天，北京学潮正如火如荼, “反官倒”、“反腐败”、“要民主”的呼声高涨，各地学子云集北京加入声援，天安门广场成为人的海洋。作为安徽省高校自治联合会（简称“高自联”）总指挥，外地高校联合会（简称“外高联”）华东区常委，陶君带着募集来的四千元钱从合肥来到北京，与千千万万的学子一起投身于声援洪流中。
5月28日在北京举行了声势浩大的全球大游行。当时仅从安徽陆续来北京声援的学生就有两三万不止。当时聚集在天安门广场的学生数十万甚至上百万了，还有很多北京市民也加入其中。
6月3日夜北京发生镇压后，已经回合肥陶君在看到被杀害的学生的图片，感到非常震惊：有的人腿被坦克车碾断,有的下身压成肉饼上面还压着冰块。当时学生悲愤的情绪达到顶点，学生们制作花圈、写上挽联，手里拿着死者遗像、伤残人的照片从4号到8号连续在合肥游行、呐喊。
两个月后陶君遭到通缉被捕，被开除团籍、学籍。1999年六四十周年纪念日前，仅因点燃一支蜡烛悼念亡灵，陶君遭到关押。
创办梅花网遭三年囚禁
扑不灭的自由民主之火一直在陶君心中燃烧。2000年他尝试创办梅花网，工作之余撰写文章、诗歌、时评。当时网站上的文章《谁来监督总书记》、诗《火把》等作品触动了当局敏感的神经。2001年4月陶君在蛇口被刑事拘留。不久当局以“煽动颠覆国家政权、推翻社会主义制度罪”判处三年有期徒刑。陶君分别在福田看守所和韶关监狱度过了三年刻骨铭心的悲惨岁月。
福田看守所
在关押福田看守所四个月里的时间里，陶君说他每天被迫从事12小时繁重的劳动——做塑胶花。
他披露：“从叶子到花都是一个一个装配的，塑胶花上贴的是美国纽约一家公司，价格是2美元。每天早上7点准时开始，一直干到晚上11点，中午没有休息。很快手就出血了，加上胶水的毒副作用，成伤口的溃疡。夏天简直就是活受罪。有的嫌疑犯浑身都是疮，流脓。”
“一个仓（号子）的嫌疑犯三十多人，干活慢的，会被仓头用塑胶包的铁条殴打，每天早上都会有人被鞭打，若是反抗的，管教（警察）会“开鞭”，用很粗的铁鞭子抽，被打得皮开肉涨。”
广东韶关监狱
在韶关监狱他的工作就是植发，把塑胶头皮里面塞满米，然后在头皮上植上假发，而且要纵横均匀、间隔一致，头发的根数都要严格按照要求，开始是一天三个头，后来是四个头的任务，眼睛老是盯着头皮，不能休息，时间久了视网膜脱落。夏天车间里的温度高达38度以上，像蒸笼一样，煎烤着犯人的四肢、躯干和双眼。他的血压降到80/ 55，整日感到无力、疲劳。他想到难道生命要到头了？
令他恐怖的是监狱肺结核非常普遍。有时候几乎一半人都得了这种病。犯人对肺结核非常害怕，警察也尽量去隐瞒。他看到过一个犯人突然大吐血，满地都是血块，然后被拉进监狱医院。每年都有好几个犯人因患肺结核病而死亡。
他感叹：那个时候他深深体验到没有什么比失去人身自由更让人刻骨铭心的，惊惧、惶恐、失重、亢奋、无助……到现在他看到市场买的塑胶花、圣诞树、中国结他心就很不舒服，很伤感，他知道那都是犯人做的，都是奴役産品。
妻离子散 盼团圆
1994年陶君跟心上人喜结连理，并育有一子。为家计开始打拼。专业使然让他在IP（互联网）行业展露才华，业务精专职位升迁，并颇受雇主好评与器重。擅长管理的他，成为一家公司的西北区的总经理，管理旗下几家分公司。生活比较稳定，还买了房子。公安似乎也放松对他的监视。但是因办梅花网站遭到逮捕判刑后，他失去了拥有的这一切幸福。
令陶君难以忘却和备受打击的是：在2002年在法院判决书下达当天，另一个残酷现实接踵而来。妻子提出离婚，并要求将孩子改名换姓。这让已经身陷囹圄失去人身自由的陶君感到绝望，精神几乎崩溃。
陶君回忆说：当时他心里最放不下的就是孩子。2001年他在蛇口被捕与孩子分别的那个画面深深的刻在他脑海中，也许几辈子也抹不去。
那天在蛇口车站，三辆警车停在他的跟前，下来几名警察，他们没有出示任何证件，当着他儿子的面，将他带走，而他儿子使劲拉着他的手，不让带走爸爸，他儿子当时只有六岁……几年后，陶君去探视孩子的时候曾问起过，孩子说仍然记得那个场景，他忍不住流泪。孩子仍然还记得他这个爸爸。孩子已经11岁，自己洗衣服自己做饭吃。有时候会打来电话。
孩子告诉他，上小学的时候得过三次小学生奥林匹克数学竞赛一等奖，因为成绩好跳级，现在已经上初一。
因感到对孩子和家庭很愧疚，陶君拚命四处打工。想到自己家庭的不幸，他哽咽着说：“现在我们天各一方，孩子在浙江，孩子妈妈在四川打工，我在广东。”想到这些陶君心里很难过，感觉感情像被撕裂一样的痛楚，但他相信这样的生活总有结束的那一天。
"我从来就不会被打倒，我仍然很强壮，我仍然年轻”
2004年陶君出狱，依然坚持一边打工一边写作，他撰写的时政评论和探讨民主、自由、人权的理论文章及诗歌多在国际互联网、海内外论坛上转载，受到读普遍赞誉。2006年陶君在网上发起的“首届陶君中国民主奖（小人物奖）”活动，并参与维权。原本就是中共“辛德勒”名单上的陶君，随之遭致多次的迫害——饭碗多次被砸。
前不久遭到第四次解雇的陶君表示：他具有极强的生存本领和工作能力。十八年来，从监控、监视居住到入狱，妻离子散， 工作被当局解雇，再工作再被解雇，人到哪里警察就跟到哪里，但我从来就不会被打倒，我仍然很强壮，我仍然年轻，像十八年前一样，我好汉着呢！ ”
中国遍地是干柴
六四惨案发生到今天18年了，他为此付出昂贵代价。他表示：不久前香港那个中共的奴才发表言论说六四北京非屠城，没有杀人，跟18年前北京当局说天安门广场没有死一个人同出一辙。很无耻。早在六四北京戒严开始，学生们就喊出了“打倒共产党”的口号，18年后退党大潮出现在中国，意味着共産独裁时代结束。当今的中国老百姓的愤怒遍及全国，官逼民反，中国现在遍地是干柴。
“六四屠杀”和共产党重罪必须要清算
陶君最后表示：１８年来，共产党一直动用国家机器捂住自己犯下的滔天罪行，他们想一直捂下去，他们被清算的日子已经临近了，我们都可以听到来自那震耳欲聋的脚步声。“六四屠杀”和共产党重罪必须要清算。中共“辛德勒”名单上的所有人，将永获自由，六四英灵将含笑九泉。
本文网址: http://www.epochtimes.com/gb/7/5/31/n1727853.htm
By Feng Changle | The Epoch Times
June 04, 2007
The commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Democratic Movement (June 4th) is approaching. Tao Jun, a student leader who studied at Anhui University at the time, said the scene of the calamity that appalled the whole world is still vivid in his mind. Being a member of the movement, he is listed as "June 4th elements" by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). During the last 18 years, he has been monitored, put under house arrest, sent to jail, lost four jobs due to CCP official's pressure on his employers and experienced family breakup. In spite of this, he said he would never give up.
Eighteen Years Ago
Eighteen years ago, the students' movement in Beijing was like a raging fire. The calls for "anti-corruption" and "democracy" grew louder and louder. Students in other places gathered in Beijing to support and Tiananmen Square was crowded with people. Tao Jun, the director of autonomy federation of universities in Anhui, went to Beijing with 4,000 yuan (approximately US$483) he collected from Hefei City.
On May 28, 1989, students held a big parade in Beijing. About 20,000 to 30,000 students went to Beijing to support from Anhui Province alone. More than one million students gathered in Tiananmen Square and many other Beijing citizens joined in as well.
After the massacre had started on the night of June 3, Tao Jun, who had gone back to Hefei, was shocked when he saw pictures of the slaughter. Some students' legs were broken and some students' lower bodies were crushed by the tanks. In Hefei, students' grief and indignation reached the highest point. From June 4 to June 8, they held a parade with pictures of the victims and the injured and shouted with wreaths and elegiac laments.
Two months later, Tao was arrested. He was expelled from the university and the Communist Youth League.
Three Years Imprisonment for Democratic Website
The fire for freedom and democracy is always burning within Tao's heart. In 2000 he established Maihua Net during his spare time to make public his articles, poems, and commentaries. However, one of his articles entitled, "Who Will Supervise the General Secretary," touched the sensitive nerve of the authorities. In April 2001, he was put in a criminal detention in Shekou. Not long after being placed in detention that the authorities sentenced him to three years imprisonment for "crimes of inciting subversion of the state power and of overthrowing the socialist system." Consequently, he spent three miserable years in Futian Detention Center and Shaoguan Prison.
For four months while he was in Futian Detention Center, he was forced to do heavy labor work making plastic leaves and flowers for 12 hours a day. He said, "We made plastic leaves and flowers for a New York company. The price was two dollars. We started work from 7:00 a.m. right up to 11:00 p.m. everyday without a break at noon. The skin on our fingers ulcerated and the wounds became infected due to the poisonous glue we were using. Some of us developed sores and pus all over the body."
In Shaoguan Prison, his work was to plant hair on plastic scalps. He filled rice into the plastic scalps and planted hair on them. The space between each hair had to be the same and evenly spaced with the required number of hairs. At the beginning the requirement was to make three scalps per day, and then the number grew to four per day. Tao and other workers stared at the scalps all day without taking a break. As a result, they suffered from retinal detachment. The temperature in the workshops during the summer was more than 38 degrees. It was like a sauna.
What scared Tao the most was tuberculosis because it was very common in the prison. About half of the prisoners were infected. Everyone was afraid of the disease, so the police had to hide the facts. He once witnessed a prisoner vomiting blood and there were blood clots all over the ground. The prisoner was then sent to the prison hospital. Many prisoners died from tuberculosis every year.
The loss of personal freedom that Tao experienced was unforgettable. Whenever he sees plastic flowers or plastic Christmas trees in the market, he feels sad because he knows they were made by prisoners – the products of slavery.
Family Breakup
Tao married his girlfriend in 1994 and they had a son. Since he was talented in the field of the internet, he became a company's general manager in northwestern China. He bought a house and life was stable then. However, after he was arrested for establishing Maihua Net, he lost everything as well as his family life.
What hurt the most and is unforgettable to Tao was the fact that on the same day the court sentenced him to prison, his wife asked for a divorce and changed his son's last name. He went into despair and almost collapsed. He found it very hard to let his son go. The scene of his arrest and the loss of his child in 2001 are deeply imprinted in his mind, which probably will not be erased for the rest of his life.
When he recalls the loss of his family, he is choked with sobs, "Now we are in different places. My son is in Zhejinag Province. The child's mother is in Sichuan, and I am in Guangdong."
"I Won't be Beaten Down"
Tao left the jail in 2004 and he continued to write while working. His works include political commentaries, poems and thesis about democracy, freedom and human rights, many of which has been published on the internet and widely spread on BBS. In 2006, Tao initiated "First Tao Jun Chinese Democrat Award" and devoted himself into right protection activities.
Recently Tao lost his job for the fourth time. He said he has very strong survival skills and working capabilities. In the last 18 years, he has experienced house arrest, imprisonment, family breakup, and several job losses because of the communist regime's pressure. It is not exaggerating to say that wherever he goes, the police follow him. However, Tao told journalist, "I am still strong, I am still young, like 18 years ago, and I am still a man."
"Now, hidden dangers are all over the county; people are furious, the regime is forcing the people to rebel," he shared.
Tao said that 18 years ago, the regime told Chinese people, "Nobody died on Tiananmen Square." Now the pro-communist leader in Hong Kong, Ma Lik (note), repeated the lie again.
Eighteen years ago, only students on Tiananmen Square shouted the slogan "End the Communist Ruling", but today quit the Chinese Communist Party Campaign has spread to all over the country. "It is time for the end of the communist dictatorship," Tao says.
At the end of the interview, Tao said, "In the past 18 years, the regime exhausted its efforts to cover up its crime with the state power, and it wants to continue to cover up, but its date is coming to an end; we can hear the steps. Tiananmen Square Massacre and all the other crimes committed by the regime must be settled. All innocent people will regain their freedom; the heroes of the Tiananmen Square Massacre will rest in peace."
Note: Chairman of the Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB), a pro-Beijing political party in Hong Kong
By AFP | via (uncensored) Yahoo! News
June 02, 2007
Washington on Friday issued an unusually frank warning to China that its hosting of the Olympics could be marred by its poor human rights record, and notably its failure to acknowledge the Tiananmen massacre of pro-democracy activists 18 years ago.
The State Department marked next Monday's 18th anniversary of what it called the "brutal and tragic events of Tiananmen Square" by complaining that "the international community and ordinary Chinese citizens still do not know how many people were killed or injured" in the crackdown.
"The fullest possible accounting by the Chinese government of those killed, detained, or missing is long overdue," department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said.
"Many in China and elsewhere are unaware that thousands of Chinese citizens were arrested and sentenced without trial in 1989, and an estimated 100-200 still languish in prison for Tiananmen-related activities," Casey said.
"As the 2008 Olympic Games approach, the international community will place China under greater scrutiny," he added.
"We urge the Chinese government to move forward with a reexamination of Tiananmen, to release all Tiananmen era prisoners, and to cease harassment of the families of victims of Tiananmen," he said.
The unusually open US criticism came just after the State Department's top east Asia official, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, returned from a visit to Beijing for talks on a series of bilateral disputes, a senior US official said.
During the trip, the Chinese expressed frustration over US policy on a range of issues including the North Korean nuclear standoff and US demands for sanctions against Sudan over the Darfur crisis, the official said.
The State Department reference to next year's summer Olympic Games in Beijing was particularly pointed given China's strongly voiced concern over calls for a boycott of the event by US and international human rights activists due to China's reticence to pressure Sudan -- a key Beijing ally -- to accept a UN peacekeeping force in Darfur.
Beijing has repeatedly dismissed suggestions that hundreds or thousands of people were killed in the Tiananmen crackdown, insisting that its handling of the protest was necessary to ensure China's economic growth and stability.
Friday's statement contrasted with recent US efforts to highlight increased cooperation between Washington and Beijing on a range of matters, including multilateral negotiations to curb the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran.
But US officials say Beijing has begun voicing frustration over Washington's handling of a banking dispute with Pyongyang which has held up implementation of a February agreement under which North Korea agreed to give up its nuclear weapons program.
China also voiced displeasure over a US decision this week to impose unilateral sanctions on Sudan for its refusal to allow a major UN-led peacekeeping force into war-torn Darfur. China is the biggest buyer of Sudanese oil.
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