February 2009 Archives
By Agence France Presse | Dow Jones Newswire | via NASDAQ.COM
February 24, 2009
China has closed Tibet to foreign tourists ahead of next month's highly sensitive 50th anniversary of a failed uprising against Chinese rule, tour agencies and other industry people said Tuesday.
"Authorities asked tour agents to stop organizing foreigners coming to Tibet for tour trips until April 1," an employee at a government-run travel agency in Lhasa, who didn't want to be named for fear of reprisals, said.
A hotel in the Tibetan capital and three travel agencies in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu that normally organize trips into Tibet also confirmed the ban for foreigners during March.
By Edward Wong | THE NEW YORK TIMES
February 22, 2009
On Monday, a 62-year-old woman named Zhong Ruihua who traveled from southern China to Beijing during the Paralympics to conduct a protest is scheduled to go on trial for disturbing the public order, according to one of her daughters.
Ms. Zhong will be the first of 10 people from the industrial city of Liuzhou to come to trial for planned protests in September.
The group came to petition for redress for property seizures or destruction that involved local officials, a common complaint among Chinese. The oldest member was a 79-year-old woman.
They never got to protest; within an hour of being interviewed by The New York Times about their plans, they were detained by scores of plainclothes police officers who had followed them from their home in the Guangxi Autonomous Region. They were then driven back south. The daughter, a woman whose name is Ms. Dang, said no one had been allowed to see Ms. Zhong since she was driven back to her hometown.
Another daughter who had come to Beijing with Ms. Zhong is also being detained, said Ms. Dang, who asked that only her surname be used, citing fear of government reprisal.
"I'm not sure how her health is," Ms. Dang said of her mother. "Of course I'm anxious."
Ms. Zhong's original plan when she flew to Beijing was to apply for a permit to hold a protest. During the Summer Olympics and Paralympics, the Chinese government had said anyone could apply to hold a protest in one of three designated parks in Beijing. In the end, no permits were granted, and the government even detained some people who had applied, including two frail grandmothers in their 70s.
Ms. Zhong, who had heard about the earlier detentions, said she became too scared to apply for a permit when she heard that she had to do so in person. So on Sept. 10, she and one of her daughters walked out of an apartment in Beijing where Liuzhou's would-be protesters had been hiding. They were on their way to hold their protest when they were picked up by the police from Guangxi.
The other people in the apartment were also detained when they walked out the same afternoon.
One of the other women, Huang Liuhong, and her 4-month-old son have not been seen since September, when the two were put under arrest in a government hotel in Liuzhou, said one of her sisters.
Two other sisters and Ms. Huang's mother, 79, had also gone for the protest and were arrested in September. The mother has been released, but the other sisters are still in jail.
As Ms. Huang was being driven back to Liuzhou in September, she said by cellphone that the police had stripped her of her clothes so she would not flee.
"I have no idea where they are," the sister said Saturday. "The police won't let me see them."
By DOW JONES Newswires (Agence France Presse)
20 February 2009
Chinese authorities have told a Beijing law firm known for its human rights work that it will be closed, lawyers and activists said Friday.
A Beijing judicial bureau told the Yitong Law Firm on Tuesday that it would be shut down for six months, with a final decision to be made after a court hearing in coming days, said Li Jinsong, the firm's managing lawyer.
"Faced with this arbitrary use of power by administrative departments seeking to illegally pressure us, the Yitong firm could be facing a cold winter," Li said in a statement.
"But we will never give up our fight for a democratic legal system, and the future prospects of justice, fairness and the legal rights of the individual."
According to the notice, the firm would be shut for six months because it allowed a lawyer to practice without a license - but Li said the lawyer was being used as an administrative assistant, which is allowed.
The Haidian district judicial department that reportedly made the order refused to comment on the case.
The law firm has taken up the cases of China's top dissidents, including Hu Jia, who won the European Parliament's top human rights award last year and is now serving a three-and-a-half year jail term for inciting subversion.
The firm also represented Chen Guangcheng, a blind activist jailed in 2006 for four years after campaigning against forced abortions and sterilization by officials upholding China's "one child" population control policy.
The New York-based organization Human Rights In China said the pending shutdown could be linked to Charter '08, a petition late last year calling for greater democracy in China. Several Yitong lawyers reportedly signed the petition.
By Jill McGivering | BBC World News
February 18, 2009
Chinese officials have said that HIV/Aids was the leading cause of death last year, compared with other infectious diseases.
It is thought to be the first time this has happened.
A report by the country's state media said HIV/Aids had led to the deaths of almost 7,000 people in the first nine months of 2008.
The number of deaths caused by tuberculosis and rabies fell back into second and third place.
The numbers are increasing dramatically - China's Ministry of Health say that until three years ago, fewer than 8,000 people altogether had died from HIV/Aids.
By last year, the total had risen to five times that many.
Data on HIV in China are still unreliable. Official reporting of cases does seem to have improved.
The central authorities seem more willing to recognise HIV as a public health crisis and address it with education campaigns.
But there are still concerns that officials at local and provincial level are under-reporting, either by mistake or because they think it's not in their interest to show rises.
This latest news comes as the spread of HIV in China has entered a dangerous new phase.
Initially it was concentrated in high-risk populations, injecting drug users in particular.
Infection from contaminated blood transfusions was also common.
More sex
But now the main cause of transmission is thought to be unsafe sex.
China is still a deeply conservative society - but it is also going through a period of rapid social change.
Greater freedom of movement means millions of migrant workers have left small communities to enjoy the anonymity of cities.
Male workers, away from their families, have more sexual opportunity.
Prostitution has increased. Premarital sex is also becoming more acceptable.
On Tuesday, the World Health Organisation warned of a steep rise in HIV amongst Asian men who have sex with men, unless prevention programmes targeting them were greatly improved.
By Associated Press | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
February 17, 2009
Police raided a private evangelical seminar in central China and detained more than 60 worshippers, with four of them still in custody a week after the roundup, a U.S.-based Christian group said Wednesday.
More than 30 police office broke into the gathering Feb. 11 in Nanyang city in central Henan province, the China Aid Association said in a statement.
China's communist government allows worship only in state-supervised churches, which claim about 11 million members. Christians and clergy in unofficial churches are regularly harassed and detained.
The participants came from four provinces for the event at which two South Korean pastors had been invited to speak, China Aid said.
The Christians were escorted to a hotel in Nanyang by police, where their personal belongings were taken. They were registered, fined and released, the group said. It was not clear how much they had to pay.
Li Dewei, director of the propaganda office of the public security bureau of Nanyang city, said he did not know about the matter.
The two South Korean pastors were expelled from China on Feb. 14 for "engaging in illegal religious activities," the group said. They were also banned from re-entering China for five years.
Two Chinese church leaders were released two days later, but at least four remain in custody, China Aid said.
By Austin Ramzy | TIME Magazine in Partnership with CNN
February 13, 2009
One thing is certain about avian influenza: it's deadly. Of the three people who contracted the H5N1 strain of the virus in China last year, three died. In the first six weeks of 2009, eight people have come down with bird flu and five have died. Another thing is that -- while the disease has yet to go pandemic as many doctors fear it could -- it remains worryingly persistent. Every year since 2003, about 100 people in Asia, the Middle East and Africa contract the disease. Last year, in a rare exception, the number dropped below 50.
But bird flu, it seems, is back. This year, China has already recorded eight human cases of the disease. Last month five people died in locations as far removed from each other as Beijing in the north, Xinjiang in the west, Guangxi in the south, Hunan in the center and Shandong in the east -- and one of the highest tallies of bird flu deaths China has ever recorded in a month. "From a disease-control perspective, the increase in cases in China is notable -- as is the wide geographic spread," says Dr. Hans Troedsson, the World Health Organization's representative in China. There is still no evidence that the virus has mutated to spread easily between humans, he says. But while such a nightmare scenario, which could set off a global flu pandemic that could kill millions, has shown no signs of being an immediate threat, serious concerns remain. "The fact that this is the highest number for a single month in China reminds us that the virus is entrenched and circulating in the environment," Troedsson says.
EDITORIAL - THE NEW YORK TIMES
08 February 2009
In a changing world, one unfortunate constant is the abhorrent ways in which China abuses its people. Huang Qi is a victim of that abuse because he dared to help other victims -- grieving parents whose children were killed last May when hundreds of poorly built schools collapsed during the earthquake in Sichuan Province.
Mr. Huang runs an organization called the Tianwang Human Rights Center in the Sichuan capital, Chengdu. He was arrested in June after posting an article on the center's Web site outlining the demands of five parents whose children died when the Dongqi Middle School crumbled.
By official Chinese figures, as many as 10,000 schoolchildren were killed across Sichuan as school buildings and dormitories shattered. In many cases, other nearby buildings remained standing -- raising questions about corruption in the construction of facilities for society's most vulnerable members.
The parents Mr. Huang was assisting had reasonable demands: an investigation into the school's construction, accountability for those responsible for any failures, and compensation for the children lost. But Chinese officials, eager to crush even the most reasonable questioning of their authority, acted unreasonably.
Mr. Huang has been charged with illegal possession of state secrets -- a legal ruse when officials want to punish a dissident. His trial was expected last week, but his wife said the judge told her it had been delayed indefinitely. The charge is especially difficult to defend against because the official definition of secrets is broad, lawyers, witnesses and family members have limited access to evidence, and the courts lack independence.
Beijing has pledged to strengthen human rights protections. It can prove that by immediately releasing Mr. Huang and addressing the legitimate demands of all of the parents who lost children in the Sichuan quake.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will have many issues to discuss when she visits Beijing this month. China's appalling human rights record and Mr. Huang's unjustified imprisonment must be among them.
By Sujay Mehdudia | The Hindu (India)
February 08, 2009
Brushing aside the threat by China of dragging India to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath on Friday plugged the loopholes in the rules that could allow manufacturers in China to dispatch toys into the market through a third country.
Officials said here that the Ministry has informed and alerted the customs authorities to ensure that Chinese toys do not enter the Indian ports through a third country route.
"Prohibition shall be applicable on all such toys which have originated from China, irrespective of the country of import. Originated shall mean 'manufactured' in China," the Directorate General of Foreign Trade said in a directive to all Commissioners of Customs and licensing authorities.
Mr. Nath said the ban on Chinese toys was on grounds of public health and safety and the action was compliant with the WTO rules. "India is a responsible country and before we take any action we make sure that it should be WTO compatible," Mr. Nath told journalists here. However, he said the move would not sour India's commercial ties with China because the ban was a matter of public rather than commercial concern.
After India slapped the ban on import of toys from China on January 23, Chinese official media reported that Beijing was contemplating a WTO action against New Delhi.
By Sharon LaFraniere | THE NEW YORK TIMES
February 06, 2009
Nearly nine months after a devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, left 80,000 people dead or missing, a growing number of American and Chinese scientists are suggesting that the calamity was triggered by a four-year-old reservoir built close to the earthquake's geological fault line.
A Columbia University scientist who studied the quake has said that it may have been triggered by the weight of 320 million tons of water in the Zipingpu Reservoir less than a mile from a well-known major fault. His conclusions, presented to the American Geophysical Union in December, coincide with a new finding by Chinese geophysicists that the dam caused significant seismic changes before the earthquake.
Scientists emphasize that the link between the dam and the failure of the fault has not been conclusively proved, and that even if the dam acted as a trigger, it would only have hastened a quake that would have occurred at some point.
Nonetheless, any suggestion that a government project played a role in one of the biggest natural disasters in recent Chinese history is likely to be politically explosive.
The issue of government accountability and responsiveness has boiled over in China in the past year. The grieving parents of thousands of schoolchildren killed in the disaster have already made the 7.9-magnitude earthquake a political issue, charging that children died needlessly in unsafe school buildings approved by negligent or corrupt officials.
More public anger erupted last year when the government failed to prevent the sale of tainted milk powder that sickened nearly 300,000 children and killed six.
"Any kind of government-related disaster presently is very, very damaging and politically extremely sensitive," said Cheng Li, the China research director at the Brookings Institution.
If it is proved that the earthquake "was related to a man-made situation and not just a natural disaster, the government will be very uncomfortable with that kind of report because of the whole issue of government accountability," Mr. Li said.
Questions about the Zipingpu Dam are especially delicate because China is building many major hydroelectric dams in the southwest, a region which has abundant water resources but is considered prone to earthquakes.
In a petition to the government in July, a group of environmentalists and scholars said the fact that government scientists had underestimated the risk of the May earthquake raised questions about a host of other dams built in the same valley and along five other major rivers, according to an article published by Probe International, an environmental advocacy group. Chinese authorities have steadfastly dismissed any notion that reservoir-building in Sichuan Province placed citizens at any added risk, and they have blocked some Web sites of environmental groups that suggest that dangers have been overlooked.
In a December article in the Chinese magazine Science Times, two scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences strongly denied that the dam played any role in the earthquake. "The earthquake research community outside and inside China has widely accepted the notion that the May 12 Wenchuan earthquake was a huge natural disaster caused by massive crustal movement, because no reservoir triggered-quake with a magnitude eight has ever occurred in history," said Pan Jiazheng, an expert in hydroengineering, according to a translation published by Probe International.
Scientists generally agree that a reservoir, no matter how big, cannot by itself cause an earthquake. But Leonardo Seeber, a senior scientist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, said the impact of so much water could hasten an earthquake's occurrence if geological conditions for a quake already existed. He said the best known example was a 1967 earthquake triggered by the Koyna Dam in a remote area of India, with a magnitude of about 6.5 and a death toll of about 180 people.
Mr. Seeber said that while the link between the Sichuan earthquake and the Zipingpu Dam was not yet proved, work by Christian Klose, a Columbia University researcher specializing in geophysical hazards, suggested the stress caused by the water's weight might have hastened the quake by a few hundred years.
By Edward Wong | THE NEW YORK TIMES
February 03, 2009
A human rights advocate who tried to help grieving parents push for an official investigation into a school that collapsed during May's earthquake in Sichuan Province has been charged with illegal possession of state secrets, a legal step Chinese officials take when they intend to punish a dissident.
The advocate, Huang Qi, runs an informal organization called the Tianwang Human Rights Center in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, in southwest China.
Mr. Huang's wife, Zeng Li, said she was told Monday morning of the charge against her husband and that a closed-door trial would be held on Tuesday. She later said that a judge called her at 6 p.m. to say the trial had been postponed indefinitely, possibly because several foreign news organizations had run articles about the charge on their Web sites.
People charged with "illegal possession of state secrets" have little hope of defending themselves in the court system, which operates under Communist Party control. The official definition of secrets is broad and flexible, and can be applied to widely available government documents or even reports published by state-run media. The exact secret involved is rarely revealed.
The charge is used often enough to punish people who have challenged the authorities that some human rights advocates consider allegations of illegally possessing or revealing state secrets the equivalent of a political offense under Mao.
By Henry Sanderson - Associated Press | via UNCENSORED Yahoo!News
February 03, 2009
China's foreign ministry and media on Tuesday denounced a man who hurled his shoe at the country's premier and called him a dictator on a visit to Britain -- all while avoiding explicit descriptions of the protest itself.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu called the disruption of Premier Wen Jiabao's speech "despicable" during a press conference but said it would not "stem the tide of friendly relations between China and Britain." She didn't mention shoes.
Unlike the now-famous incident when an Iraqi reporter threw his shoes at former President George W. Bush in December, covered widely not only in China but around the world, state-run newspapers and Web sites in China carried stories on Wen's speech but did not directly mention the shoe-throwing.
China's state-run CCTV network reported Foreign Ministry comments, which acknowledged a "disturbance" during the speech, but made no mention a shoe had been thrown at Wen.
The official Xinhua News Agency issued a story saying that Britain apologized for an incident and that China had "expressed its strong feelings against the occurrence of the incident." However, it did not say what the incident was.
China keeps a tight grip on its media, blocking any content deemed as a challenge or insulting to the ruling Communist Party or the country's leaders.
In the live broadcast of the speech on CCTV's Web site, the camera remains fixed on Wen, not showing the shoe or the protester, although his remarks and the sound of the shoe hitting the stage can be heard. Wen pauses, glances sideways as the shoe hits the stage, and then continues his speech.
By RADIO FREE ASIA
January 30, 2009
A Tibetan youth detained for his role in a nonviolent protest has been beaten to death by police, Tibetan sources say.
Pema Tsepak, 24, a resident of Punda town in the Dzogang county of Tibet's Chamdo prefecture, had been held in police custody for his role in a demonstration against Chinese rule in Tsawa Dzogang since Jan. 20.
A Tibetan who would not give his name, but said he was from Punda town, said Chinese authorities were trying to cover up the circumstances of Pema Tsepak's death.
"Chinese officials said he jumped off a building, but we believe he was beaten to death and then thrown off the building," the man said.
Tibetans in exile, originally residents of the same area, said that contacts there had informed them of the incident.
Namgyal Tsering, a Tibetan living in Delhi, India, said in an interview that Pema Tsepak had been hospitalized following mistreatment at the hands of his captors.
"He was so severely beaten that his kidneys and intestines were badly damaged. He was initially taken to Dzogang [county] hospital, but they could not treat him, and they took him to Chamdo hospital instead," Tsering said.
Another Tibetan, who did not give his name, said he saw Pema Tsepak in handcuffs as authorities brought him to Dzogang county hospital to treat his injuries.
Nyima Norbu, a Tibetan living in Dharamsala, India, seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile, said that local officials had confirmed Pema Tsepak's death.
"Chinese police informed Dzogang officials that Pema Tsepak had died in Chamdo and that his body will be cremated there," Nyima Norbu, also a Dzogang native, said.
Ruled a suicide
Jamyang, the brother of a Tibetan official from Punda town where Pema Tsepak lived, said that one family member of each of the three detainees had traveled to Dzogang to visit with them.
They were told upon arrival that the detainees had been moved to Chamdo.
"Only one person could go to visit them in Chamdo. Finally Lobsang Jampa, the elder brother of Pema Tsepak, was taken there. When he reached Chamdo, he was informed that his brother Pema Tsepak had jumped from the top of a building and died," Jamyang said, in an interview from Canada.
Calls seeking comment from police in Chamdo went unanswered.
Jamyang said that while Lobsang Jampa traveled to Chamdo, a convoy of 18 vehicles, including army trucks carrying soldiers and officials, arrived in Punda town and began searching the homes of the detainees.
"They searched the homes of the [detainees] and took away photos of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. When officials reached Pema Tsepak's home, they informed his family members of his death. They said that Pema Tsepak had attacked a police officer with a knife and then jumped from the window of the building and died," Jamyang said.
Protesters rounded up
On Jan. 20, Pema Tsepak, Thinley Ngodrub, 24; and his brother Thargyal, 23, were attacked and detained by police as they walked towards the local police headquarters in Tsawa Dzogang. They were carrying a white banner reading "Independence for Tibet," distributing fliers, and shouting slogans against Chinese rule.
A 19 year-old girl named Dechen Wangmo, found in possession of Pema Tsepak's mobile phone, was also detained.
Namgyal Tsering said that in a separate incident on Jan. 22, three Tibetans, including Thinley Gyatso, 44; Tashi Norbu, 29; and Lobsang Lhamo, 27, were also detained immediately after staging a protest.
"Except for one boy, the rest are all from Punda town," he said.
Nyima Norbu said that Thinley Gyatso, Dechen Wangmo, and Lobsang Lhamo had been released, but that the others were still in custody.
"Tashi Norbu is detained at the Dzogang county jail, while the other two protestors are still detained in Chamdo," he said.
Continuing unrest
Tensions in the Tibetan region are expected to escalate around the one-year anniversary of a crackdown in March 2008 on anti-China demonstrations and the 50th anniversary, also in March, of a failed national rebellion.
China's Sichuan province and other Tibetan-populated areas of China saw repeated protests last year following demonstrations in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, which led to violent riots on March 14.
Tibet's government in exile said more than 200 Tibetans were killed in the subsequent region-wide crackdown. China has meanwhile reported police as having killed just one "insurgent" and blames Tibetan "rioters" for the deaths of 21 people.
Original reporting by Dorjee Damdul for RFA's Tibetan service. Translated by Karma Dorjee. Tibetan service director: Jigme Ngapo. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
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