July 2009 Archives

By PRWeb
July 29, 2009

China's Communist Party attacks "Dalai Lama Renaissance" (www.DalaiLamaFilm.com), a documentary film about the Dalai Lama narrated by Harrison Ford, after the film premieres in Taiwan and receives front page positive Taiwanese press. China's response likely an attempt to counteract the Chinese language Taiwanese press which is often read in China. Film to be released in China, under the radar of the Chinese government.

The Chinese government often has the clout and muscle to prevent Hollywood films from being released in Asia, and can even discourage films from having an extended release in the West if they are perceived to threaten Chinese policy.

Films starring such big name stars as Richard Gere and Sharon Stone were boycotted by China after the actors expressed support for the Tibet Independence Movement. After Disney released "Kundun," Martin Scorsese's 1997 feature film about the Dalai Lama, the studio incurred the wrath of the Chinese government, and Disney films were banned for an indefinite period of time.

Recently, after a theatrical documentary film about the Dalai Lama and narrated by Harrison Ford entitled Dalai Lama Renaissance (www.DalaiLamaFilm.com) was released in theaters in Taiwan this summer and received front page positive press in the Chinese language Taiwanese newspapers, the Chinese government took keen notice.

The People's Daily, a daily newspaper and media arm of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, quickly and sharply criticized "Dalai Lama Renaissance" in an article in its online edition.

The article, posted July 14th in the People's Daily Online entitled "Western Movies Build Grand and Perfect Image of Dalai Lama," argues that "in recent years, a wave of 'Dalai Lama fever' has appeared in the Western movie industry... describing the Chinese government's peaceful liberation of Tibet as 'cruel oppression,' and depicting the Dalai Lama's life in India as difficult... Some movies even advocate the Dalai Lama's concept of [Tibetan 'independence.'"

Although the title of the article refers to "Movies," the article exclusively focuses on "Dalai Lama Renaissance." Referring to the film, which has been distributed in cinemas around the world, the article criticizes that "the part of the movie related to the peaceful liberation of Tibet was filled with political bias, reflecting the director's ignorance and misunderstanding of Tibet's history... The movie transforms the Dalai Lama into an omniscient sage, reflecting a 'misunderstanding' of the Dalai Lama's image in the West... In fact, what these movies depict is just the 'anesthesia' given by the Dalai Lama to the West."

The fact that the Chinese Communist Party's main media organization has chosen to criticize the film may be a defensive reaction to the very positive press that Dalaki Lama Renaissance received in the Chinese language media in Taiwan, where it premiered in front of sold-out audiences on June 1. And it may be an attempt to counteract any effect on readers in mainland China, who often have access to Chinese language news from Taiwan.

Taiwan's best-selling weekly newspaper, E Weekly, gave the film a rating of 82, which is one of the highest ratings that a film has received in the past year in Taiwan. According to its Taiwanese theatrical distributor, Blockbuster of Taiwan (no relation to Blockbuster video in the United States), E Weekly regularly gives films far lower ratings. FTV, a television station in Taiwan, also reported that that the premiere of the film in Taiwan was very successful, with not an empty seat in the cinema, and that "many people were touched after watching the film." The Taipei Times wrote that "the film rapidly grabs hold of you... an insightful documentary."

Ironically, the Chinese Communist Party may feel most threatened by the idea brought up in the film regarding economic sanctions against China from the West. But despite this being a near unanimous suggestion by the Westerners in a scene in "Dalai Lama Renaissance," the Dalai Lama discouraged the proposal.

The Taiwanese newspaper The Liberty Times points out that, in the film, "the Dalai Lama thinks that humanity is the most important thing in the world and economic sanctions might affect many Chinese citizens, thus he is hesitant whether such an approach is right."

The People's Daily also tries to discredit the producer-director of the film, Khashyar Darvich. In its article, the newspaper claims that the director is a "follower" of the Dalai Lama, and supports this assertion by referring to an interview where Darvich mentioned that he produced the film party for the opportunity to spend time with the exiled Tibetan leader.

"It's interesting that the Chinese Communist Party refers to me as a follower of the Dalai Lama," Darvich responded. "Although I respect the Dalai Lama as a man of peace, just as the Nobel Peace Prize Committee did by awarding him the Nobel Peace prize, and as do most governments around the world, I am not a Dalai Lama groupie. When I began the film, I was not very familiar with the Dalai Lama's ideas. I think that his actions, and the respect that he garners around the world, speaks for itself."

Despite the Chinese Communist Party's attempt to discredit the film, Producer-Director Khashyar Darvich states that his production company, Wakan Films, has just signed an agreement to release "Dalai Lama Renaissance" unofficially into China itself, under the radar of the Chinese Government.

"My hope," says Darvich, "is that the film will open a dialog between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama, and that the average Chinese citizen will be able to see that the Dalai Lama is not such a bad guy and is interested in a solution to the Tibet issue that serves the highest good and benefits both the Chinese and Tibetans. I would be happy to attend a screening of the film in China and conduct a Q&A with Chinese audiences as a way to contribute to positive dialog."

For more information on "Dalai Lama Renaissance," go to www.DalaiLamaFilm.com.

>> Original source

By BBC World News
July 29, 2009

By John Grobler - Mail&Guardian (South Africa)
July 27, 2009

In yet another example of sharp Chinese diplomatic elbows in African business it has emerged that the China National Machinery & Equipment Import & Export Company (CMEC) tried to charge Namibia nearly four times the going rate for the installation of a rail link to the Angolan border town of Oshikango.

On Wednesday the chief of the Namibian Defence Force, General Martin Shalli, was suspended by President Hifikepunye Pohamba in connection with an alleged $250 000 (R1,9-million) kickback from a Chinese company.

Shalli is suspected of taking the bribe while serving as Namibia's high commissioner to Zambia, in return for facilitating an arms deal.

Documents obtained by the Mail & Guardian show that CMEC offered to complete the 60km link between Ondongwa and Oshikango for a whopping R1,063-billion.

Since 2005 it has cost about R900-million to complete the first 250km from Tsumeb to Ondangwa.

The new section was to be financed under a special $100-million "concessional loan" facility, offered by Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, during his visit to Namibia early last year. The same facility was to be used for a controversial industrial X-ray equipment deal that is now threatening to engulf Hu's son, Haifeng, as well.

In a memorandum to his seniors on April 19, Robert Kalomho, the acting railway director, pointed out that the Chinese offer was more than four times as much as a bid from a local company, partnering with Italian industrial giant Lucchini.

The Chinese wanted R290-million for the rails and R773-million for the installation, documents showed. By comparison, the competitors had offered to do the same job for a total of R250-million, Kalomho noted.

>> Complete report

By RADIO FREE ASIA
July 24, 2009

Chinese Web sites tying the president's son to news of a corruption probe are shut down and later reopened with the related stories missing.

Chinese authorities shut down sections of two major Web portals in the wake of news reports that President Hu Jintao's son is linked to a Namibian graft probe, industry sources said.

The popular Web sites 163.com and Sina had their technology sections closed simultaneously Tuesday, with messages announcing that they did not exist.

State-run media ignored the reports.

"It was probably around 11:00 a.m. [on Tuesday] that we were unable to visit the technology sections of 163.com and Sina," a former employee at one of the portals said.

"This really is not normal. A quick keyword search confirmed that the report [about a graft probe involving President Hu's son, Hu Haifeng] had been posted on both of those technology sections, and that other Web sites were linking to it," he said.

The industry source said: "Both sections were back online at around 5:00 p.m. My sources had told me they expected the two sites to be closed for at least a day."

The report related to Hu Haifeng had been deleted from both Web sites when their technology sections came back online.

Allegations of graft

Namibia's Anti Corruption Commission (ACC) has called on Hu Haifeng, who headed state-controlled Chinese security equipment provider Nuctech until last year, to assist in the investigation into the disappearance of millions of U.S. dollars linked to a government supply contract in Namibia.

Two Namibians and a Chinese national were arrested last week in Namibia as part of a probe into bribery allegations involving Nuctech, a company headed until last year by Hu's 38-year-old son, Hu Haifeng, who is now Communist Party secretary of Nuctech's parent company.

Their arrest was followed swiftly by the suspension of the country's defense force chief amid allegations that he too was linked to the Nuctech case.

Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba said in a statement: "The decision to suspend Lieutenant General Martin Shalli stems from serious allegations of irregularities, which must be thoroughly investigated."

Namibian media reported on Thursday that Shalli was accused of allegedly having millions of Namibian dollars transferred to him, through a third party, by the Chinese company.

Nuctech representative Yang Fan and two Namibians, Teckla Lameck and Jerobeam Mokaxwa, were arrested after Namibia's ACC said they had taken money from a U.S. $12.8 million down payment on security scanning equipment, which Nuctech was supplying to the Namibian government, financed by a Chinese government loan.

The supply contract and loan were inked on Hu Jintao's 2007 trip to Namibia.

Likely to face sanctions

In China, another industry insider who declined to give his name said that both Sina and 163.com were likely to face official sanctions following the posting of a report titled "No sooner has Hu Jintao vowed to battle graft, than his son is in trouble."

"If the news story contained the name of one of China's leaders, and if it was posted by an editor after it had been deleted according to the rules, then that is a very big problem," he said.

Professor Joseph Cheng, of Hong Kong's City University, agreed.

"Even if there is a case of this kind, it can't be allowed to involve either Hu Jintao or his family members," Cheng said.

"Of course, some executive from the compan[ies] will take all the blame. Even the suspicion of involvement by family members will have a big effect on the image of China's leaders," he said.

Searches for information on the case and Hu Haifeng's connection to it on Chinese Web portals turned up error messages such as: "The search results may contain content not in line with relevant laws, regulations, and policies."

This message is commonly found when Internet users attempt to access forbidden material online.

China habitually adds information about the country's top leaders to its lists of banned keywords, prompting deletion and self-censorship by Web sites providing news.

Any attempt to search with the "forbidden words" returns a similar message.

US-based China Digital Times, which monitors Web usage in China, said propaganda officials had issued an order banning Internet searches related to the Nuctech case.

Neither company confirmed that the sites had been blocked by the authorities or that their blockage was linked to any content, however.

But a customer service executive at Sina.com said the site had experienced technical problems.

"The technical problems experienced by our technology section are believed to have originated with a server or network error, and our engineers are investigating the reason," he said.

Officials at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology press office declined to comment on the closures.

Foreign ministry officials have referred media inquiries to Nuctech.

Government pressure

Beijing-based journalist Gao Yu said Beijing wasn't showing much reaction to the case on the outside, but that top officials would be scrambling to put out fires behind the scenes..

"This is a really big story of the utmost urgency for them," said Gao, deputy chief editor of Economics Weekly.

"Of course they must try to play it down, and whatever happens, Prince Hu musn't be touched by it," she said, referring to Hu Haifeng.

Gao said she believed the Chinese government had already leaned heavily on Namibian authorities, resulting in the postponement of a bail hearing for the three suspects until next week.

"Of course there is Chinese involvement in the postponement of the hearing by Namibia," she said. "China will keep a poker face, trying to play it down to the outside world, and never admitting it inside China."

City University's Cheng agreed the case would evoke a negative response from within the country.

"Whenever the Chinese Communist Party leadership makes any plans to stamp out corruption, it's going to reduce public confidence," Cheng said.

"Most people believe that at the highest echelons of leadership, the Party won't do anything about corruption, and that if they do, it's not about corruption, but rather about a political power struggle," he said.

China is rapidly building strong economic and diplomatic ties among African countries, which will help ensure future energy security for its booming economy, markets for its goods, and a place to invest its capital, experts say.

Original reporting in Mandarin by Ding Xiao and in Cantonese by Grace Kei Lai-see. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

>> Original source

By Agence France Presse | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
July 23, 2009

China's Internet censors blocked news Thursday about a graft probe in Namibia involving a firm linked to the son of President Hu Jintao, as the state-run media ignored the sensitive issue.

Two Namibians and a Chinese national were arrested last week in Namibia as part of a probe into bribery allegations involving Nuctech, a company headed until last year by Hu's 38-year-old son, Hu Haifeng.

Searches for information on the case and Hu Haifeng's connection to it on Chinese Web portals turned up error messages such as: "The search results may contain content not in line with relevant laws, regulations and policies."

Such results on China's heavily censored Internet are typically returned when a Web user seeks banned information.

China has a history of blocking access to sensitive data on the Internet, especially concerning politics and the lives of top leaders.

Popular sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have been blocked for weeks as censors sought to limit the information flow over deadly unrest in Xinjiang and the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

The US-based China Digital Times, which monitors Web developments in China, said propaganda officials had issued an order banning various Internet searches related to the Nuctech case.

Xiao Qiang, who heads China Digital Times, said it was an "iron-clad" rule that negative information on top leaders and their families be kept from the public, but that such efforts often fuelled interest and the news leaked out.

"Censorship backfires on the censors much more in the Internet age," he said in an email to AFP.

China Digital Times and media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said it appeared the Nuctech Internet censorship had been in place for a few days.

China's mainstream media is more tightly controlled by the government, and newspapers as well as television news have also made no mention of the Nuctech case in recent days.

Hu Haifeng was president of Nuctech, which provides security scanning equipment, until last year, when he was promoted to Communist Party secretary of Tsinghua Holdings, which controls Nuctech and more than 20 other companies.

Nuctech representative Yang Fan and two Namibians, Teckla Lameck and Jerobeam Mokaxwa, were arrested after Namibia's Anti-Corruption Commission discovered that a 12.8 million dollar down payment on 13 scanners had been diverted to a firm called Teko Trading owned by the two Namibians.

Nuctech has a Namibian government contract to supply security scanning equipment in a 55.3 million dollar deal, paid for with a Chinese loan granted when the Chinese president visited the country in 2007.

Investigators say the down payment was diverted to Teko Trading between March and April.

All three of the accused later drew large sums from the Teko account, with Yang taking 16.8 million Namibia dollars (2.1 million US dollars), most of which he is said to have paid into an investment fund, investigators say.

China's foreign ministry declined comment when contacted by AFP about the case on Wednesday, referring queries to Nuctech.

However staff at Nuctech's Beijing-based headquarters declined comment.

"We never speak to the media," said a woman who answered the phone.

>> Original source

By Michael Wines | The New York Times
July 22, 2009

To the likely consternation of diplomats in both Beijing and faraway Windhoek, a newly minted initiative by Namibia's government to root out official corruption has snared an early catch: three people who, Namibian prosecutors charge, helped win a lucrative contract for a Chinese company recently headed by the son of Hu Jintao, China's president.

The charges against the three, including one Chinese national, have yet to be heard in court. There is no public evidence that President Hu's 38-year-old son, Hu Haifeng, or other high officials of the company, Nuctech Company Limited, knew of the Namibian dealings.

But mere reports of the charges have already prompted Chinese government censors to block Internet surfers from searching for news about the younger Mr. Hu, Namibia or Nuctech, according to the California-based Internet site China Digitial Times.

Separately, the office of Namibia's prosecutor general, Martha Imalwa, said she had traveled to Beijing to request that Mr. Hu be interviewed in the case as a witness, but not as a suspect.

Until last year, Mr. Hu was president of Nuctech, a Beijing-based maker of advanced security scanners used in airports, customs warehouses and other traffic points. He has since been elevated to Communist Party secretary of Tsinghua Holdings, the state-controlled firm that runs Nuctech and about 30 other businesses.

Namibia prosecutors accuse Nuctech's Africa representative, 39-year-old Yang Fan, and two Namibians of joining in a bribery scheme that secured a $55.3 million contract in May 2008 to install Nuctech scanners at customs inspection points across Namibia.

Most of the cost was to be borne by a so-called soft loan -- usually a loan at below market rates or with other favorable terms -- that China's government granted Namibia on the condition that it purchase scanners from Nuctech.

Namibia's government paid about $12.8 million to Nuctech in February. But prosecutors allege that most of that money was quickly transferred to a Namibian company listed as a Nuctech consultant, and then split among Mr. Yang and the two Namibian defendants.

The case came to light because of a new money-laundering law that requires Namibian banks to routinely report large money transfers to investigators. Prosecutors said that the three defendants in the Nuctech case appear to have spent much of the money on what officials called an enormous spending spree.

Nuctech has offered to send officials to Namibia to aid in the investigation, but has not commented publicly. The three defendants were to appear in court in Windhoek, Namibia's capital, on Wednesday for a bail hearing.

Nuctech was created in 1997 as an offshoot of Tsinghua University, a Beijing campus with a heavy emphasis on technology where both President Hu and, later, his son were engineering graduates.

The company has risen rapidly to become one of the world's top providers of security scanning equipment, supplying about 50 nations, including the United States. In late 2006, the company won a contract to install advanced scanners at all 147 of China's airports to detect potentially dangerous liquids.

While the company's products have won praise from users in places as diverse as Australia and Norway, Nuctech's business practices have come under increasing scrutiny abroad.

The European Union is investigating whether the company has used soft loan deals from the Chinese government to effectively lower its prices and undercut competitors. South Africa's Mail & Guardian newspaper reported that Nuctech's agent in a $380 million scanner sale there was a company implicated in corrupt contracts involving the nation's scandal-plagued Parliament. In the Philippines, legislators charged that the government's customs agency overpaid in 2006 and 2007 when it reached a $150 million no-bid agreement, also financed by a soft loan, to install Nuctech scanners at transit points there.

Namibian critics also contend that their government grossly overpaid for the scanning equipment and that much of the excess payments ended up in private hands, including those of some Namibian politicians. Namibia's inquiry into the deal is ongoing.

John Grobler contributed reporting from Windhoek, Namibia.

>> Original source

By Brian Womack - Bloomberg.com
21 July 2009

The Chinese government restricted access to more social-networking sites in the past few days, escalating a clampdown that started about six months ago, said Xia Qiang, director of the Berkeley China Internet Project.

The sites that are inaccessible or aren't working properly include Fanfou, Digu, Zuosa and Jiwai, said Qiang, who is an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley in California. Those sites work like Twitter, allowing users to post information quickly before editors can review their submissions, Qiang said.

"It turns out one of the very interesting functions of those sites is the news and opinions is getting circulated very quickly," Qiang said. That makes it much harder for authorities to keep control, he said.

Internet users in China had difficulty logging on to Facebook and other social-networking sites earlier this month following ethnic clashes in western China that left more than 150 people dead. Access to Google Inc.'s YouTube, a video- sharing site, and the Twitter messaging service also has been limited.

When accessed from San Francisco, the Digu and Zuosa Web sites said they were closed for maintenance today, according to postings on their home pages. Fanfou wasn't available as of 11 a.m. San Francisco time. The Web site of Jiwai appeared to be working.

Bing, Twitter

Twitter and Microsoft Corp.'s new Bing.com search engine were inaccessible in Beijing in June, around the time of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Facebook, the most visited social-networking site, continues to receive reports of users having problems accessing the site in China, Debbie Frost, a spokeswoman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, said today.

>> Original report

By RADIO FREE ASIA
17 July 2009

Chinese authorities in Beijing have closed a legal research center and revoked the licenses of more than 50 attorneys in a bid to exert greater control over activists.

Some 20 officials from Beijing's Civil Affairs Bureau arrived early Friday at the Open Constitution Initiative [in Chinese, Gongmeng] rights organization's legal research center.

The officials questioned employees about their work and confiscated computers from the center's offices.

The legal center researches public welfare and withoffers legal aid, including recently representing the parents of children sickened by milk tainted by the industrial chemical melamine.

The center was shut down two days after Beijing's Tax Bureau fined the Open Constitution Initiative 1.4 million yuan (U.S. $200,000), claiming the group had not paid taxes, which the group denies.

Lawyers have arranged a hearing with the bureau and say that the full amount of taxes has been paid.

Tian Qizhuang, chief executive officer of the Open Constitution Initiative, said the group neither provided the tax bureau with fake bookkeeping nor intended to evade taxes.

"Their accusations suggest that there were funds that were not recorded and reported as income. The fact of the matter is the fund they were referring to just arrived, and we didn't even have time to do the bookkeeping."

"We never intended to hide any income records," Tian said.

Both the State Administration of Taxation and the Beijing Local Taxation Bureau refused to comment.

Lu Jun, a lawyer from another Beijing-based NGO, said authorities were making an example of the Open Constitution Initiative.

"We have discovered as we have been doing our job that the authorities neither trust nor like the NGOs, especially those that are independently operated," Lu said.

"The closure of the Open Constitution Initiative is purely a crackdown and retaliation with political motives. This is meant to send a warning message to similar independently run NGOs," he said.

Revoked licenses

The Beijing Justice Bureau also posted a list of 53 local lawyers on its Web site last week, saying it had revoked their licenses for failing assessments by their firms or failing to register with the bureau.

One of the listed lawyers, Jiang Tianyong, said in an interview that he was never notified about the cancellation in person and learned about it only through the bureau's public announcement.

"Since authorities have said that this was only the first group, there might be a second and a third group. Of course by releasing the names of the first group, the authorities might just want to issue a warning to other lawyers," Jiang said.

He recently defended a Tibetan charged with concealing weapons in an area of China where anti-government protests occurred.

"Also, this is the first time that authorities have made such a highprofile announcement of this kind," he said.

Another listed lawyer, Li Heping, said he was frustrated by the license revocation because the disbarred attorneys had been working hard to "safeguard the rule of law."

"They truly embraced the rule of law, and they truly had a belief in the rule of law," Li said.

"If these lawyers are sacked, the message from authorities could be interpreted only as saying that our legal system is bogus: 'Don't ever trust us, or this kind of outcome could be your destiny,'" he said.

An employee at the Beijing Civil Affairs Bureau Law Enforcement Unit, reached for comment, said he wasn't authorized to comment.

Outcry raised

Amnesty International issued a statement condemning the crackdown.

"There are only a tiny group of lawyers left in China who are brave enough to take the risk of representing victims of human rights violations," said Roseann Rife, the group's Asia-Pacific deputy director.

"A further crackdown against human rights lawyers is a major blow not only to these legal professionals but to the human rights defense movement in China."

Human Rights Watch called the closure of the Open Constitution Initiative and the disbarment of the 53 Beijing lawyers "a sharp intensification of official efforts to silence China's human rights defenders."

"The attack on OCI marks a new low in the Chinese government's campaign against human rights defenders," said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.

"This is precisely the kind of organization whose work the government should value, as it helps ease grievances and minimize unrest."

Original reporting by Xin Yu for RFA's Mandarin service and by Ji Lisi and Li Ruoqing for RFA's Cantonese service. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Translation by Xiaoming Feng. Written for the Web in English by Joshua Lipes. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

>> Original source

By Rob Taylor | REUTERS | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
July 14, 2009

China's government, entangled in a row with Australia over alleged commercial spying, has stirred more controversy by demanding a documentary about restive ethnic Uighurs be dropped from Australia's largest film festival.

Chinese consular staff contacted organizers of the Melbourne International Film Festival urging them to dump a film about exiled Uighur businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer, blamed by Beijing for instigating this month's ethnic riots in Xinjiang.

China's consulate in Melbourne phoned last week to insist the documentary "The 10 Conditions of Love" be withdrawn ahead of its August 8 premiere and demanding justification for its inclusion, festival director Richard Moore said on Wednesday.

"No-one reacts well to strident approaches, or to the appearance of being bullied. I don't think it's a positive way of behaving," Moore told Reuters.

The call, he said, came from the new Melbourne cultural attache Chunmei Chen. Calls to the consulate by Reuters on Wednesday went unanswered.

"She urged me to withdraw the film from the festival and then told me in no uncertain terms that I should justify my decision to include the film in the festival program," Moore said.

The incident is attracting widespread media attention in Australia.

The film tells of Kadeer's relationship with activist husband Sidik Rouzi and the fallout on her 11 children of her push for more autonomy for China's 10 million mainly-Muslim Uighurs. Three of her children have been jailed.

China's government accuses Kadeer's World Uighur Congress of being a front for extremist militants pushing for a separate East Turkistan homeland. She was arrested in 1999 and found guilty of "providing secret information to foreigners."

China's embassies and consular staff are keeping a low profile in Australia since the detention last week by Chinese security officials of four staff working for global miner Rio Tinto, related to accusations of commercial spying.

>> Complete report

By Dru Gladney for BBC World News
09 July 2009

The recent Urumqi and Lhasa riots have shattered the myth of a monolithic China, writes China and Uighur expert Professor Dru Gladney.

Foreigners and the Chinese themselves typically picture China's population as a vast homogeneous Han majority with a sprinkling of exotic minorities living along the country's borders.

This understates China's tremendous cultural, geographic, and linguistic diversity - in particular the important cultural differences within the Han population. More importantly, recent events suggest that China may well be increasingly insecure regarding not only these nationalities, but also its own national integration.

The unprecedented early departure of President Hu Jintao from the G8 meetings in Italy to attend to the ethnic problems in Xinjiang is an indication of the seriousness with which China regards this issue.

Across the country, China is seeing a resurgence of local ethnicity and culture, most notably among southerners such as the Cantonese and Hakka, who are now classified as Han.

For centuries, China has held together a vast multi-cultural and multi-ethnic nation despite alternating periods of political centralization and fragmentation. But cultural and linguistic cleavages could worsen in a China weakened by internal strife, an economic downturn, uneven growth, or a struggle over future political succession.

The initial brawl between workers in a Guangdong toy factory, which left at least two Uighur dead on 25 June, prompted the mass unrest in Xinjiang on 5 July, which ended with 156 dead, thousands injured, and 1500 arrested, with on-going violence spreading throughout the region.

The National Day celebrations scheduled for October 2009, seeks to highlight 60 years of the "harmonious" leadership of the Communist Party in China, and like the 2008 Olympics, its enormous success. The rioting threatens to de-rail these celebrations.

Officially, China is made up of 56 nationalities: one majority nationality, the Han, and 55 minority groups. The 2000 census revealed a total official minority population of nearly 104m, or approximately 9% of the total population.

The peoples identified as Han comprise 91% of the population from Beijing in the north to Canton in the south, and include the Hakka, Fujianese, Cantonese, and other groups. These Han are thought to be united by a common history, culture, and written language; differences in language, dress, diet, and customs are regarded as minor and superficial. An active state-sponsored programme assists these official minority cultures and promotes their economic development (with mixed results).

The recognition of minorities, however, also helped the Communists' long-term goal of forging a united Chinese nation by solidifying the recognition of the Han as a unified "majority". Emphasizing the difference between Han and minorities helped to de-emphasize the differences within the Han community.

The Communists incorporated the idea of Han unity into a Marxist ideology of progress, with the Han in the forefront of development and civilization. The more "backward" or "primitive" the minorities were, the more "advanced" and "civilized" the so-called Han seemed, and the greater the need for a unified national identity.

Minorities who do not support development policies are thought to be "backward" and anti-modern, holding themselves and the country back.

The supposedly homogenous Han speak eight mutually unintelligible languages. Even these sub-groups show marked linguistic and cultural diversity.

China's policy toward minorities involves official recognition, limited autonomy, and unofficial efforts at control. Although totalling only 9% of the population, they are concentrated in resource-rich areas spanning nearly 60% of the country's landmass and exceed 90% of the population in counties and villages along many border areas of Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Yunnan.

Xinjiang occupies one-sixth of China's landmass, with Tibet the second-largest province.

Indeed, one might even say it has become popular to be "ethnic" in today's China. Mongolian hot pot, Muslim noodle, and Korean barbecue restaurants proliferate in every city, while minority clothing, artistic motifs, and cultural styles adorn Chinese bodies and private homes.

This rise of "ethnic chic" is in dramatic contrast to the anti-ethnic homogenizing policies of the late 1950s anti-Rightist period, the Cultural Revolution, the late-1980s "spiritual pollution" campaigns, and now the ethnic riots in the west.

While ethnic separatism on its own will never be a serious threat to a strong China, a China weakened by internal strife, inflation, uneven economic growth, or the struggle for political succession could become further divided along cultural and linguistic lines.

China's separatists, such as they are, could never mount such a co-ordinated attack as was seen on 11 September, 2001 in the United States, and China's more closed society lacks the openness that has allowed terrorists to move so freely in the West.

China's threats will most likely come from civil unrest, and perhaps internal ethnic unrest from within the so-called Han majority. We should recall that it was a southerner, born and educated abroad, who led the revolution that ended China's last dynasty.

Moreover, the Taiping Rebellion that nearly brought down the Qing dynasty also had its origins in the southern border region of Guangxi among so-called marginal Yao and Hakka peoples.

These events are being remembered as the generally well-hidden and overlooked "Others" within Chinese society begin to reassert their own identities, in addition to the official nationalities.

Dru Gladney is a China expert and president of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College in California.

>> Original source

By Radio Free Asia
08 July 2009

Authorities in the northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have blocked access to certain key government Web sites around the region, which has been rocked in recent days by ethnic violence.

The Web sites of the regional government and all regional state-run media were inaccessible from outside Xinjiang on Wednesday.

Municipal Web sites and official radio, television stations, and newspapers in Urumqi, Kashgar, Ili, and Hotan cities were also offline. Shache and Aksu city governments and media were also unavailable.

China's net police have also blocked access by Chinese netizens to popular micro-blogging platform Twitter and similar sites, with limited success.

Foreign journalists on the ground in Urumqi said mobile phone networks had also been affected by the security clampdown, with some able to send updates only via Twitter using the Web, instead of by text message as is usually possible.

Exiled Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer said the government was trying to prevent further information about the recent unrest from spreading amid great tension.

YouTube blocked

"The Chinese government is now blocking information by shutting down all cell phone networks and radio stations," Kadeer said.

"The current situation is very dangerous."

Twitter and video-sharing site YouTube were blocked by Tuesday afternoon.

Posts on forums and bulletin boards about the riots were deleted immediately, although comments made on old posts related to Xinjiang lasted somewhat longer, netizens said.

Guangdong-based cyber commentator Bei Feng said he didn't think the government's measures would be entirely successful, especially in Xinjiang.

"From a technical point of view, Twitter is hard to block. Netizens can outwit the blockade by using the cyber technique called 'wall-scaling,'" Bei Feng said.

"In fact, online browsers can now obtain plenty of information from both domestic and foreign sources. For instance, the Associated Press reported the latest demonstration by about 300 people in the southern Xinjiang city of Kashgar. Chinese netizens got this information right away," he said.

Beijing-based Tibetan writer Woeser agreed, saying that many netizens in China could now access information more easily.

"In China, people can now use a skill online called 'wall-scaling,'" Woeser said. "Through proxy servers, we can see overseas Web sites. Bloggers on large Chinese Web sites carry instant opinions from the people," she said.

Original reporting in Mandarin by Tang Qiwei and He Ping, and by RFA's Uyghur and Cantonese services. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Uyghur service director: Dolkun Kamberi. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Translated by Chen Ping. Written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

>> Original source

By BBC World News
July 8, 2009

Ethnic violence has erupted in China's western province of Xinjiang, with scores of people being killed and hundreds injured.

Here are some of the most recent developments:

5 JULY

A small number of Uighurs - Muslim inhabitants of Xinjiang region - gather in the provincial capital, Urumqi, to protest.

Anger has been seeping through the Uighur community for weeks, following a brawl between Uighurs and ethnic Han Chinese in June, in Guangdong province 2,000 miles away (3,200km).

The Uighurs say they were demanding justice for their compatriots - two of whom died in the brawl.

"We are mourning our compatriots who were beaten to death in Guangdong," one protester tells the Associated Press.

But the small protest quickly spreads across the city - where Han Chinese account for three-quarters of the population.

The state-run news agency, Xinhua, says rioters are "attacking passers-by and setting fire to vehicles", adding that police have been sent to quell the disturbances.

But witnesses are soon describing hundreds - possibly thousands - of Uighurs rampaging through Urumqi, attacking Han Chinese, setting light to cars and smashing up shops.

In the late evening in China, the first reports of deaths emerge with Xinhua saying "three ordinary people of the Han ethnic group" were killed.

Uighur groups say hundreds of police began opening fire indiscriminately on protesters, and claim the death toll is much higher than reported.

6 JULY

Officials revise their figures of the number of dead, saying 140 people were killed in Sunday's violence.

Residents of Urumqi describe the city as in "lock-down" as Chinese security forces arrive to ensure there can be no further unrest.

Officials begin to enforce a communications blackout, with internet users complaining of no connection.

One mobile-phone operator, China Mobile, tells the Associated Press it has suspended its services in the region "to help keep the peace and prevent the incident from spreading further".

Meanwhile, officials apportion blame firmly on the shoulders of exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer.

"Rebiya had phone conversations with people in China on 5 July in order to incite," Xinjiang Governor Nur Bekri said in a televised address.

In the afternoon, regional police officials speak of hundreds of people being arrested and dozens more "key suspects" being hunted.

And the unrest appears briefly to be spreading, with reports of protests in Kashgar.

But later reports suggest a small rally of about 200 Uighurs outside a Kashgar mosque is quickly dispersed by police, with no reports of casualties or fighting.

When asked about the violence, UN chief Ban Ki-moon urges governments to respect their people's right to protest.

"All the differences of opinion, whether domestic or international, must be resolved peacefully through dialogue," he says.

News of the violence enrages overseas Uighurs - groups of whom attack a Chinese embassy in the Netherlands with stones and burn a Chinese flag.

Xinhua reports say most of the dead and injured are Han Chinese, and officials insist the violence was premeditated, arranged through web forums.

The authorities feel sufficiently confident that they allow a group of foreign journalists into Urumqi for a supervised tour of the area where the violence took place.

7 JULY

Overnight officials again announce a higher death toll from Sunday's violence, with 156 people now confirmed to have died and more than 1,000 injured.

They also announce that 1,434 suspects have been detained in police operations since the violence began.

A group of overseas journalists on a supervised tour of the city then becomes the focus of a renewed protest - this time from a 200-strong group of Uighur women demanding that their men-folk be released.

In a public-relations disaster for the Chinese government, riot police move in to stop the protest in front of the watching photographers and journalists.

The BBC's Quentin Sommerville, who witnesses the protest, describes it as an extraordinary act of defiance in front of officers armed with rifles and tear gas.

Later, though, groups of Han Chinese armed with homemade weapons take to the streets - hundreds according to some reports, thousands according to others.

They seem bent on revenge for what they consider to be attacks on them by the Uighurs, and smash shops and stalls before confronting groups of Uighurs.

Riot police step in and quell the unrest, and officials announce a curfew that will run from 2100 until 0800.

8 JULY

As more troops are deployed to Urumqi, Chinese President Hu Jintao cuts short a visit to Italy, where he was due to attend a summit of world leaders, to deal with the crisis.

A BBC correspondent says security forces in full body armour and with semi-automatic weapons have drawn a line between the Han and Uighur communities, although areas have not been fully sealed off and people can still move about.

>> Original source

By Robert Mackey | THE NEW YORK TIMES
July 07, 2009

As my colleague Edward Wong reports from Urumqi, China, where rioting and ethnic clashes have led to more than 150 deaths, a government-organized tour for foreign and Chinese journalists went badly awry on Tuesday when hundreds of Uighur protesters made an unscheduled appearance:

A wailing crowd of women, joined later by scores of Uighur men, marched down a wide avenue Tuesday with raised fists and tearfully demanded that the police release Uighur men who they said had been seized from their homes after Sunday's violence. Some women waved the identification cards of men who had been detained.

As journalists watched, the demonstrators smashed the windshield of a police car and several police officers drew their pistols before the entire crowd was encircled by officers and paramilitary troops in riot gear.

Dan Chung and Tania Branigan of The Guardian were also on the media tour and they filed a video report and a slide show showing images of the Uighur protests witnessed by the foreign and Chinese press.

As if to underscore how very badly this attempt at media management by the Chinese government failed, it led to the image at the top of this post, of a lone woman standing before Chinese riot police, which evokes the iconic image of the Tiananmen Square protests, of a man confronting a row of Chinese tanks.

Similar shots of the woman in Urumqi today are featured in both The Guardian's video report and slide show.

In today's New York Times, Michael Wines reports that Chinese officials arranged the tour as part of a broad effort to manage media perceptions of the unrest. Apparently hoping to do more than just shut off the flow of unwelcome images of protests from appearing on the Web, as Iranian authorities did recently, China invited foreign journalists to take part in the official trip to Urumqi, the site of the unrest, "to know better about the riots." But China's ethnic minorities have a habit of not remaining placidly in the background during these sorts of state-managed photo-ops.

Image by David Gray / REUTERS

An elderly Uighur woman, leaning on a crutch, confronted riot police in Urumqi, China on Tuesday

>> Complete report

By Simon Elegant | TIME Magazine in Partnership with CNN
Monday, July 06, 2009

Chinese authorities announced today that some 140 people had been killed and over 800 wounded in protests that roiled Urumqi, the capital of China's far western Xinjiang province, on Sunday. According to the official news agency Xinhua, Urumqi police chief Liu Yaohua told a press conference that the number of dead was still rising and that there had also been extensive damage to property.

The enormous loss of life marked a bloody milestone in Beijing's administration of the troubled zone, in which Muslim Uighurs make up the majority of the population. It also presages a severe tightening of the already vise-like grip the authorities maintain on the semiautonomous region, one that could be even harsher than the crackdown that followed the violent suppression of protests in the Tibetan capital Lhasa in March of 2008. Officials said that several hundred protesters had already been arrested and some 90 more were still being sought on Monday afternoon. "I fear for what is to come," said Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch. "China has a very poor record of accountability when it comes to those arrested for protesting. In Tibet, for example, there are still hundreds unaccounted for by the government's own admission." (See pictures of the March 2008 riots in Tibet.)

Liu told the official news agency that rioters burned 261 motor vehicles and around 200 shops yesterday in violence that was, according to an earlier Xinhua report, "masterminded from overseas by the separatist World Uighur Congress (WUC) led by Rebiya Kadeer." Sections of the city populated by concentrations of ethnic Uighurs, who make up only around 10% of Urumqi's population, were reportedly under curfew Monday.

Alim Seytoff, a spokesman for the WUC, a Washington, D.C.-based Uighur exile group founded by Rebiya Kadeer, denied it had had any role organizing the protests. "It is shocking to see the extent of the lethal force the Chinese government used against peaceful, unarmed protesters," Alim said in a telephone interview. "This is the darkest day in recent Uighur history."

Alim said the demonstrations were a reaction to a June 26 incident at a factory in Guangdong province, when two Uighur workers were beaten to death by Han Chinese colleagues. "The mob in Guangdong beat and killed Uighurs with immunity," Alim says. "The security forces didn't arrest anyone and did absolutely nothing. The protesters were very angry and disappointed." Alim added that the WUC believed that more than two Uighurs may have died in the Guangdong incident.

>> Complete report

By Sally Sara | ABC - Australian Broadcasting Corporation
July 03, 2009

The Chinese Government has reacted angrily to an Australian parliamentary delegation's visit to meet Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, in India.

It is the first time a group of Australian MPs and senators has travelled to meet the Tibetan spiritual leader in the Indian hill town of Dharamsala.

The Chinese Embassy in Canberra says the visit constitutes interference in China's internal affairs.

The Dalai Lama says Tibet has been given a death sentence by the Chinese Government.

"No freedom of speech, no freedom of press. Their own people put in dark. It is, I think, immoral," he said.

The Dalai Lama spent more than an hour meeting with members of the first Australian parliamentary delegation to visit him in Dharamsala.

He thanked the all party group of MPs and senators for their support.

"Usually I describe our supporters not like pro-Tibetan, but rather pro-justice," he said.

Labor MP Michael Danby says several members of the delegation are hoping to travel to Tibet later in the year during an official visit to China.

"If the Parliament asks the Chinese Government to allow this group to go, I don't see why they shouldn't be," he said.

"They would be breaking their word and I'm sure the Chinese Government wouldn't like to be seen to be doing that."

The delegation expressed its support for the Dalai Lama's middle way approach of autonomy rather than independence for Tibet.

The Chinese Embassy in Canberra has condemned the Australian visit, saying it constitutes interference in China's internal affairs.

Fifty years after the Dalai Lama fled Tibet, more activists are continuing to arrive in Dharamsala.

The Australian delegation visited a new arrivals centre and met one man who says he was shot by Chinese forces during a protest in March last year.

He told the delegation he thought he was going to die because he was bleeding so heavily.

On Monday, the Dalai Lama will celebrate his 74th birthday and he remains hopeful of returning home.

"Even some of my friends, Tibetan, are now 90 years old. Some, even [though] they [are] also still waiting, one day [will] go back," he said.

"So then I compare them who [are] already in [their] 90s. So I am a bit younger."

>> Original source