November 2010 Archives

By Radio Free Asia
November 29, 2010

But Chinese authorities seize activist's writings and keep him under close watch at home.

Authorities in the central Chinese city of Wuhan released a veteran pro-democracy activist on Monday only to keep him under tight surveillance at his home amid a number of restrictions.

Qin Yongmin was released after reaching the end of a 12-year jail term handed down in 1998 for "endangering state security" after he edited a human-rights newsletter and helped set up the banned China Democracy Party (CDP).

"I am extremely angry," Qin said on the day of his release, after being met by his daughter and other relatives at the Hankou Prison on his release.

Qin said prison guards and police had confiscated everything he had written during his 12-year sentence, including letters to his daughter that she had never seen.

"They were so cruel," he said.

Writings seized

"At about five in the morning, they went through every single thing I had written and confiscated it," Qin said. "I hung on and wouldn't let it go."

Qin said much of the material consisted of letters to his daughter, most of which she never received.

"There were more than a dozen police there, and they grabbed my arms and wrenched it away from me," he said. "They took more than 10 years' worth of writings from me."

Qin said that he was then transferred to his local police station, where he was warned not to give interviews to foreign media, and not to gather in groups of more than two people to talk or to eat.

"They made a lot of unreasonable demands," he said, adding that the police had stationed officers to watch his home 24 hours a day.

A 'high price'

Qin's daughter A Dan said she was concerned for her father's health.

"His blood pressure is pretty high," she said. "He has aged a great deal, and he will need some time to readjust after so many years in prison."

Fellow activist Lu Xinhua said Qin had made a huge contribution to democracy in China. "But he has also paid a high price," he said.

"His health is poor, and life will be very hard for him ... They are unlikely to allow him to do anything," he said.

Qin's ex-wife Li Jinfang said last week that national security police had frozen the couple's bank account, and had since refused to unfreeze Qin's money.

She also said she feared he might be held under house arrest even after his release, like many activists in the wake of jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Peace Prize award.

Veteran dissident

The 57-year-old Qin is a veteran dissident who was initially sentenced to eight years in prison for "counterrevolutionary propaganda and subversion" in the wake of the Democracy Wall movement in 1981.

A contemporary of exiled dissident Wei Jingsheng, Qin served a further two years' "re-education through labor" in 1993 after he penned a controversial document titled "Peace Charter."

By 1998, Qin was the editor of the Human Rights Observer newsletter, and one of a number of political activists who attempted to register the CDP.

He was sentenced to a 12-year prison term in 1998. Hangzhou-based CDP founder Wang Youcai and Beijing-based Xu Wenli received 11-year and 13-year jail terms respectively. Both were later exiled to the United States on medical parole.

Chinese political activists have been under especially heavy pressure following Liu's award.

Liu's wife, Liu Xia, and many of his colleagues are under a form of undeclared house arrest, a condition that isn't expected to end until after the Dec. 10 award ceremony in the Norwegian capital of Oslo.

Reported by Xin Yu for Radio Free Asia's Mandarin Service and by Grace Kei Lai-see for the Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

>> Original Source

By Radio Free Asia
November 26, 2010

Ahead of his release after a 12-year jail term, pro-democracy activist Qin Yongmin's bank account is frozen.

Authorities in the central Chinese city of Wuhan have frozen the bank account of a veteran pro-democracy activist who is due to be released on Monday, according to his ex-wife and a police officer.

Qin Yongmin is soon to reach the end of a 12-year jail term handed down in 1998 for "endangering state security" after he edited a human-rights newsletter and helped set up the banned China Democracy Party (CDP).

His ex-wife Li Jinfang said the national security police had frozen the couple's bank account, and had since refused to unfreeze Qin's money, saying that the family would ignore them if they did so.

"I told them that we hoped they would unfreeze the money soon, because Qin Yongmin needed it," Li said.

"They said they were still carrying out investigations, and that we still hadn't told them where the money came from."

"They don't need a reason for what they do. They just want to persecute him," she added.

Unconstitutional

Li said that Qin's conviction for subversion was unconstitutional, and that she was concerned that he might be held under house arrest even after his release, like many activists in the wake of jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Peace Prize award.

"He is being released at an unusual time," Li said. "I am worried that even though he comes home, they still won't let him have his freedom back completely, or that they might keep him cut off from the outside world."

Li said the police had also questioned her about articles she might have written.

"There were two people there and they asked me what I'd been doing lately. I said that I'd been sitting at home waiting for them to unfreeze the money," she said.

"Then they asked me if I'd written any articles. They said...they wanted to keep track of developments in my thinking."

National security police officer Ma Xiaodong, who was one of the officers who spoke to Li, said the decision to unfreeze Qin's assets had to come from higher up.

Qin has been told that he will be released from Hanyang Prison on Monday, but that he must leave copies of letters and other writings behind him.

Meeting plans

His brothers and daughter are planning to meet him when he is released, said one brother, who saw Qin last weekend in jail.

"His health isn't too bad," Qin's brother said. "Really, the big problem is his eyesight. He can't read for very long at a time.""He hasn't had an eye test, so we don't know what the reason is," he added.

Fellow CDP activist Gao Hongming said the Chinese police routinely interfered with the lives of dissidents and their families, insulting them, confiscating their belongings and freezing their bank accounts.

"These people's lives are hard enough already," Gao said. "Especially Li Jinfang, who hasn't had an income for so many years, and who has struggled to find money to keep her daughter."

Fellow Wuhan-based CDP member Lu Xinhua, who has himself served a four-year jail term for his involvement in the party, said he was glad to hear that Qin would soon be released.

"I have been inside myself, and I have experienced fully how hard life is inside prison," Lu said."And yet you can't talk about our two experiences in the same breath.
He has been in there for 12 years...He won't recognize what he sees when he gets out."

"He will have to rebuild all aspects of his life again from scratch," he said.

An employee who answered the phone at the Hanyang municipal jail said they knew little about Qin's case, and declined to comment further.

Veteran dissident

The 57-year-old Qin is a veteran dissident who was initially sentenced to eight years in prison for "counterrevolutionary propaganda and subversion" in the wake of the Democracy Wall movement in 1981.

A contemporary of exiled dissident Wei Jingsheng, Qin served a further two years' "re-education through labor" in 1993 after he penned a controversial document titled "Peace Charter".

By 1998, Qin was the editor of the Human Rights Observer newsletter, and one of a number of political activists who attempted to register the CDP.

He was sentenced to a 12-year prison term in 1998. Hangzhou-based CDP founder Wang Youcai and Beijing-based Xu Wenli received 11-year and 13-year jail terms respectively. Both were later exiled to the United States on medical parole.

In September, authorities in the eastern province of Zhejiang released another CDP founding member, dissident writer Chen Shuqing, who served a four-year prison term for subversion.

Reported by Qiao Long for Radio Free Asia's Mandarin Service and by Grace Kei Lai-see for the Cantonese service.Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie,

>> Original Source

By Radio Free Asia
November 24, 2010

Chinese authorities block student demands to use Tibetan language in their schools.

Authorities in the remote western Chinese province of Gansu have stepped up surveillance of Tibetan high schools following a small-scale protest in support of the Tibetan language in schools at the weekend, exiled sources said.

Gonpo, a researcher at the Norbulingka Institute in the hill-town of Dharamsala in northern India, said the renewed protests by Tibetan high-school students last weekend had prompted tight security around local school and college campuses.

"There is very tight surveillance in the classrooms," he said.

"The parents of the students have been required to go to the Machu county center to hold meetings with local government leaders."

"The principals of the schools have been fired, along with two teachers."

He said the two principals had been transferred to other departments within the education bureau, while their deputies had been transferred to other departments entirely.

Students 'taken away'

Local Tibetan sources said earlier this week that a group of two or three students marched in protest to the Machu county center in the Kanlho [in Chinese, Gannan] Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Gansu.

The students walked for about a mile, carrying a white banner and shouting slogans calling for the independence of Tibet, the source said.

The students, believed to be from the Machu High School, were later taken away by police, who arrived in three vehicles.

Security forces were strengthened in the area, with vehicles positioned at intersections and in the main streets of the Machu county center, Tibetan sources said.

An officer who anwered the phone at the Machu county police department on Tuesday said he didn't know whether any Tibetan students had been detained over the protests in recent days.

And an employee who answered the phone at the county government offices hung up when they heard the reporter's first question.

However, an employee who answered the phone at a local hotel confirmed an increased security presence in the county center.

"There are police on patrol here," she said, but declined to give further details. "It's hard for me to answer you," she said.

Hundreds protest

Gansu saw a wave of protests by Tibetan students last month after the authorities announced plans to drop the Tibetan language as a medium of instruction.

Several hundred students and teachers from high schools in Chentsa [in Chinese, Jianzha] county, in Qinghai's Malho [in Chinese, Huangnan] Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, took to the streets on Oct. 24 in support of the continued use of Tibetan in local schools.

Exiled Tibetans have said the protests are a sign of long-running dissatisfaction over the suppression of Tibetan cultural and religious freedoms by Beijing.

The Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, has accused Beijing of perpetrating "cultural genocide" in Tibet.

Beijing has run a high-profile "patriotic education" campaign among Tibetans since unrest spread across Tibetan regions from Lhasa in March 2008, requiring local people to denounce the Dalai Lama, whom the government rejects as a "splittist."

Original reporting in Cantonese by Hai Nan. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

>> Original Source

By Barry Bearak | The New York Times
November 20, 2010

NKANDABBWE, Zambia -- Hundreds of angry coal miners pushed toward the locked gate at Shaft 3, shouting and cursing as they neared the mine's Chinese managers, who understood neither the English nor the Tonga words of the mob. As the workers butted up against the fence, the bosses grew more fearful and finally two fired their shotguns.

The Zambian miners scrambled in terror. Bodies pivoted, jounced and stumbled. Boston Munakazela did not know he was hit until he suddenly fell over and saw the blood on his chest and arms. Vincent Chenjele was knocked off his bicycle with a hole ripped in his belly. Wisborn Simutombo, bleeding from his arms, legs and stomach, pleaded with friends to pull him to safety across the coal-dusted road.

"We weren't going to hurt them, but maybe the Chinese didn't understand that," Mr. Simutombo, 25, said recently, displaying scars left by the spray of shotgun pellets. "They were quick to shoot us though, and in Zambia the Chinese can get away with anything."

As in many other African nations, the Chinese are an enormous economic presence in this impoverished but mineral-rich country, and their treatment of local workers has become an explosive political issue, presenting an awkward balancing act for governments desperate for foreign investment. "We're an economy in transition, and we can't afford to lose the cow that gives us milk today," said Labor Minister Austin Liato.

Chinese investment here amounted to $1.2 billion in just the past year, according to the government. Nearly two-thirds of new construction involves Chinese-run companies, said Li Qiangmin, the Chinese ambassador in Lusaka, the capital. In this nation of 12 million where a small minority of workers, perhaps one in 10, have salaried employment, the 25,000 jobs provided by Chinese-backed businesses and projects are badly needed.

But many Zambians complain that these powerful foreigners are permitted to play by their own rules, plundering the country more than developing it and abusing workers as they go. The wounding of 13 miners in a labor dispute at the Collum mine last month once again brought these raw feelings to the surface, revealing conditions at a coal mine where men walk more than 1,000 steps into the earth to slosh through dark and frequently unsafe tunnels. They are paid about $4 a day and say they are expected to work every day of the year.

"We do not have support timbers everywhere they need to be, and we have no masks to protect us from the coal dust," said Boston Sikalamba, 21, who was buried for several minutes by a cave-in this month. "After the dynamite is set, there's nothing to do about the dust but breathe it, and if you are slow at your work, the Chinese beat you."

The Collum mine has been owned for the past nine years by a Chinese businessman, Xu Jianxue. His four younger brothers operate the mine's four shafts, employing 855 workers, including 62 Chinese supervisors.

Shaft 3, near the site of the shooting, is a steep, narrow pit, barely wide enough for both a man and the loaded coal bins that move on a single thin track to the top. The only light along the way comes from the miner's headlamp. Water trickles from the ceiling. There are no toilets below, and the miners say they use abandoned tunnels when they have the need.

Most of the Chinese know only a few words of English and Tonga, languages commonly spoken in this part of the country. On occasion, they tell the miners, "Tomorrow, job takwi," using the Tonga word for "nothing," meaning there will be no work. Such unexpected days off were at the root of the dispute.

Year after year, two unions have signed deals with Collum Coal, precisely spelling out benefits like a Christmas bonus and transportation allowances.

But these pacts are routinely ignored by the company, the unions say, and while workers bemoan the unremitting work schedule, their biggest gripe is getting docked for days when broken machinery or an oversupply of coal on the market leaves them idle.

Xu Jianrui, the brother who operates Shaft 3, denied in a phone interview that the miners were overworked or mistreated. "They have four or five days off every month because they need to go to church," he said, speaking in Chinese. "You know, they are kind of lazy. They work like 10 to 15 days but want a full month's salary."

Since the shooting, Zambia's labor commissioner, Noah Siasimuna, has been drawn into the dispute. Atop his desk is a thick folder about Collum Coal, but most of the paperwork is new. No signed labor agreement with the company was ever filed with his office as required by law, he said. Nor did the unions formally report any noncompliance.

Mr. Siasimuna, like the labor minister, Mr. Liato, cautioned against any conclusion that impugned Chinese businesses as worse than others. "We have bad employers that come from everywhere, including Zambia," Mr. Liato said.

The unions, however, say Chinese owners are indeed their biggest headache. And, contradicting the government, the president of the Gemstone and Allied Workers Union of Zambia, Sifuniso Nyumbu, was able to produce contracts with Collum that had the signed and stamped approval of the commissioner's office as well as letters from the Labor Ministry acknowledging union complaints about the company.

"The Chinese promise to implement a deal, then claim they forgot or there was an oversight," Mr. Nyumbu said. "The union doesn't have enough money to keep sending people down to Collum Coal, and when our members there speak up, they get fired."

>> Please Read Complete Report

Editorial - The New York Times
November 19, 2010

China's autocrats have tried pretty much everything they can think of to stop the world from celebrating the courage of Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned democracy activist. It tried to bully the Nobel committee into not awarding Mr. Liu this year's Nobel Peace Prize. When the committee went ahead, China confined Mr. Liu's wife to her home, barred others from attending the ceremony, and warned governments not to go.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has rightly decided to proceed with the Dec. 10 awards ceremony. The rules say the prize must be presented to the winner or a member of his family. So the committee is expected to postpone bestowing the medal and the $1.5 million award but read some of Mr. Liu's writings aloud.

The peace prize has been awarded three times to detained human rights and democracy activists -- the Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov; Myanmar's opposition leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi; and the Polish trade unionist Lech Walesa. In those cases, family members accepted the awards.

The last time neither a winner nor any family member could go to Oslo was in 1936 when the German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky was barred from leaving Nazi Germany. That historical comparison is chilling -- and should shame Beijing.

Some governments have decided to stay away: Russia, Cuba, Kazakhstan and, most disturbing, Iraq. Whether they're doing that because of Beijing's demands, or their own autocratic ways, isn't clear. The good news is that many more countries -- 36 by last count -- will attend. All governments should go and honor Mr. Liu.

The scholar, writer and social commentator is the first Chinese to win the Nobel Peace Prize. His credentials are beyond reproach. During the 1989 pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square, he negotiated a peaceful retreat of student demonstrators. Since then, he has refused to be silenced. His 11-year jail sentence on spurious subversion charges is punishment for helping write Charter 08, which called for democratic reforms.

China's government is now denouncing the award at home as some devious Western plot. The desire for freedom transcends any political boundaries or system. China's people should be proud of their Nobel laureate.

>> Original Source

By Michael Wines | The New York Times
November 17, 2010

One night in late October, a college student named Chen Xiaofeng was in-line skating with a friend on the grounds of Hebei University in central China. They were gliding past the campus grocery when a Volkswagen sedan raced down a narrow lane and struck them head-on.

The impact sent Ms. Chen flying and broke the other woman's leg. The 22-year-old driver, who was intoxicated, tried to speed away. Security guards intercepted him, but he was undeterred. He warned them, "My father is Li Gang!"

"The two girls were motionless," one passer-by that night, a student who identified himself only by his surname, Duan, said this week. "There was a small pool of blood." The next day, Ms. Chen was dead.

Chen Xiaofeng was a poor farm girl. The man accused of killing her, Li Qiming, is the son of Li Gang, the deputy police chief in the Beishi district of Baoding. The tale of her death is precisely the sort of gripping socio-drama -- a commoner grievously wronged; a privileged transgressor pulling strings to escape punishment -- that sets off alarm bells in the offices of Communist Party censors. And in fact, party propaganda officials moved swiftly after the accident to ensure that the story never gained traction.

Curiously, however, the opposite has happened. A month after the accident, much of China knows the story, and "My father is Li Gang" has become a bitter inside joke, a catchphrase for shirking any responsibility -- washing the dishes, being faithful to a girlfriend -- with impunity. Even the government's heavy-handed effort to control the story has become the object of scorn among younger, savvier Chinese.

"There was a little on the school news channel at first," one Hebei University student who offered only his surname, Wang, said in an interview last week. "But then it went completely quiet. We're really disappointed in the press for stopping coverage of this major news."

In many ways, the Li Gang case, as it is known, exemplifies how China's propaganda machine -- able to slant or kill any news in the age of printing presses and television -- is sometimes hamstrung in the age of the Internet, especially when it tries to manipulate a pithy narrative about the abuse of power.

"Frequently we'll see directives on coverage, but those directives don't necessarily mean there is no coverage," said David Bandurski, an analyst at the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project. "They're not all that effective."

"Censorship is increasingly unpopular in China," he added. "We know how unpopular it is, because they have to keep the guidelines themselves under wraps."

A gadfly blog, sarcastically titled Ministry of Truth, has begun to puncture the veil surrounding censorship, anonymously posting secret government directives leaked by free-speech sympathizers. According to the blog's sources, the Central Propaganda Department issued a directive on Oct. 28, 10 days after the accident, "ensuring there is no more hype regarding the disturbance over traffic at Hebei University."

On that same day, censors prohibited reporting on six other incidents. One involved another girl's death in police custody. Others included an investigation of a Hunan Province security official, the sexual dalliance of a Maoming vice mayor, the abandonment of closed pavilions at Shanghai's World Expo and the increasing censorship of Internet chat rooms.

But the Li Gang case was hard to suppress, partly because it personified an enduring grievance: the belief that the powerful can flout the rules to which ordinary folk are forced to submit. Increasingly, that grievance focuses on what Chinese mockingly call the "guan er dai" and "fu er dai" -- the "second generation," children of privileged government officials and the super-rich.

Realizing the delicacy of the matter, the government tried to shape public reaction in more ways than by simply restricting coverage. After Internet bulletin boards began buzzing with outrage, China's national television network, CCTV, broadcast an Oct. 22 interview with Li Gang and his son, filled with effusive apologies for the accident. On Oct. 24, the news media reported that Li Qiming, who had been detained by the police the day after the accident, had been arrested.

Police regulations ostensibly bar interviews with detainees. A Baoding police spokeswoman who identified herself as Ms. Zhou said in an e-mail that the network obtained the interview because it had been approved by the local party propaganda office.

Ms. Chen's survivors were not afforded the same access. In early November, Fenghuang Satellite Television, a news channel based in Hong Kong that is available to some in mainland China, broadcast an angry interview with Ms. Chen's brother, Chen Lin. On Nov. 4, the Central Propaganda Department banned further news of the interview.

>> Read Complete Report

By Sharon LaFraniere and Dan Levine | The New York Times (second of two reports)
November 11, 2010

Xu Lindong, a poor village farmer with close-cropped hair and a fourth-grade education, knew nothing but decades of backbreaking labor. Even at age 50, the rope of muscles on his arms bespoke a lifetime of hard plowing and harvesting in the fields of his native Henan Province.

But after four years locked up in Zhumadian Psychiatric Hospital, he was barely recognizable to his siblings. Emaciated, barefoot, clad in tattered striped pajamas, Mr. Xu spoke haltingly. His face was etched with exhaustion.

"I was so heartbroken when I saw him I cannot describe it," said his elder brother, Xu Linfu, recalling his first visit there, in 2007. "My brother was a strong as a bull. Now he looked like a hospital patient."

Xu Lindong's confinement in a locked mental ward was all the more notable, his brother says, for one extraordinary fact: he was not the least bit deranged. Angered by a dispute over land, he had merely filed a series of complaints against the local government. The government's response was to draw up an order to commit him to a mental hospital -- and then to forge his brother's name on the signature line.

He was finally released in April, after six and a half years in Zhumadian and a second mental institution. In an interview, he said he had endured 54 electric-shock treatments, was repeatedly roped to his bed and was routinely injected with drugs powerful enough to make him swoon. Fearing he would be left permanently disabled, he said, he attempted suicide three times.

Mr. Xu's ordeal exemplifies far broader problems in China's psychiatric system: a gaping lack of legal protections against psychiatric abuses, shaky standards of medical ethics and poorly trained psychiatrists and hospital administrators who sometimes feel obliged to accept anyone -- sane or not -- who is escorted by a government official.

No one knows how often cases like Mr. Xu's occur. But human rights activists say confinements in mental hospitals appear to be on the rise because the local authorities are under intense pressure to nip social unrest in the bud, but at the same time are less free than they once were to jail people they consider troublemakers.

"The police know that to arbitrarily detain someone is illegal. They have to worry about that now," said Huang Xuetao, a lawyer in Shenzhen, in Guangdong Province, who specializes in mental health law. "But officials have discovered this big hole in the psychiatric system, and they are increasingly taking advantage of it."

Worse, Ms. Huang said, the government squanders its meager health care resources confining harmless petitioners like Mr. Xu while neglecting people desperately in need of help.

She and a colleague recently analyzed 300 news reports involving people who had been hospitalized for mental illness and others who had not. "Those who needed to be treated were not and those who should not have been treated were treated and guarded," their study concluded.

Liu Feiyue, the founder of Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, a Chinese human-rights organization, said his group had compiled a database of more than 200 Chinese citizens who were wrongly committed to mental hospitals in the past decade after they filed grievances -- called petitions in China -- against the government.

He said he suspected that the real number was much higher because his organization's list was compiled mostly from accounts on the Internet.

"The government has no place to put these people," he said.

China no longer discloses how many petitioners seek redress, but the government estimated in 2004 that more than 10 million people write or visit the government with petitions each year. Only two in a thousand complaints are resolved, according to research cited in a study this year by Tsinghua University in Beijing.

In annual performance reviews of local government officials, reducing the number of petitioners is considered a measure of good governance. Allowing them to band together, and possibly stir up broader unrest, is an significant black mark that can lead to demotion.

Classified as Crazy

The most dogged petitioners are often classified as crazy. In an interview last year, Sun Dongdong, chief of forenjsic psychiatry at prestigious Peking University, said, "I have no doubt that at least 99 percent of China's pigheaded, persistent 'professional petitioners' are mentally ill." He later apologized for what he said was an "inappropriate" remark.

Yan Jun, who heads the Ministry of Health's mental health bureau, declined repeated requests for an interview on whether petitioners were wrongly confined and other issues with the mental health system.

>> Please read complete Report

By Sharon LaFraniere | The New York Times (first of two reports)
November 10, 2010

After five months in a rundown ward at the Hepu County Psychiatric Hospital, Yang Jiaqin no longer suffers terrifying hallucinations. Still, his wife dares not mention children, not even their own, for fear of unleashing the demons that possessed him one day last spring.

On a warm, sunny afternoon in April, Mr. Yang burst from his home in this rural village near the Vietnamese border, carrying a kitchen cleaver. He encountered three youngsters headed home from school on the dirt path outside. He hacked two primary schoolers, badly wounding both, and slit a second grader's throat, leaving him dying on the ground. Then he moved on. By the time police officers caught up and subdued him, he had slashed two more people to death.

The victims' families have focused their rage on the police. Three days earlier, Mr. Yang had struck a neighbor in the head with an ax, but was not detained.

"They are completely responsible for this," said Wu Huanglong, the second grader's father. "They did not protect us."

But Mr. Yang's doctors see a bigger failing. Despite clear signs of schizophrenia, Mr. Yang had received medical care for just one month in the previous five years.

"If he had been given medication and treatment, his illness would not have developed," said Chen Guoqiang, the psychiatric hospital's chief doctor. "If he had been able to control his hallucinations, he would not have killed anyone."

It has been nearly 35 years since the end of the Cultural Revolution, when mental illness was declared a bourgeois self-delusion and the sick were treated with readings from Chairman Mao. Psychiatric treatment has returned. But mental health remains a medical backwater, desperately short of financing, practitioners and esteem.

Too often, the official response to mental illness is to look the other way. The government authorities, already shaken by an attack the previous month in which eight schoolchildren were stabbed to death, threw a news blackout over the Xizhen incident lest it inspire copycats or incite further outrage.

At least three of six men whose attacks near schoolyards this year left 21 people dead had earlier appeared deranged or suicidal, according to news reports. But in the highest-level statement on the killings, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said only that China needed to resolve "social tensions" underlying the attacks.

Yan Jun, director of the mental health division of the Ministry of Health, refused repeated requests for an interview. The ministry said in a written statement that the government was "continuously strengthening" both its resources and professionals to provide mental health care.

A Dearth of Care

It has far to go. Only 1 in 12 Chinese needing psychiatric care ever sees a professional, according to a study last year in The Lancet, a British medical journal. China has no national mental health law, little insurance coverage for psychiatric care, almost no care in rural communities, too few inpatient beds, too few professionals and a weak government mental health bureaucracy, Chinese experts in the field say.

The Health Ministry's own mental health bureau, established four years ago, consists of three people. Dr. Yan, the director, is a public health specialist, not a psychiatrist.

Every few years, China's news media declare that a national mental health law is speeding toward adoption. The first draft was written half a century ago. Asked how many revisions it has undergone, Dr. Ma Hong of the Peking University Institute of Mental Health said, "Countless."

Most psychiatric hospitals are financially unviable, said Yu Xin, who directs the Peking University Institute of Mental Health. One, in Hubei Province, opened a box factory in the 1990s to stay afloat. The fee structure is so absurd, he said, that hospitals can charge patients more for computer-generated diagnoses based on filled-out forms than for sessions with actual psychiatrists.

The Lancet study estimated that roughly 173 million Chinese suffer from a mental disorder. Despite government efforts to expand insurance coverage, a senior Health Ministry official said last June that in recent years, only 45,000 people had been covered for free outpatient treatment and only 7,000 for free inpatient care because they were either dangerous to society or too impoverished to pay.

>> Please read complete Report

By RADIO FREE ASIA
November 11, 2010

Ahead of the Dec. 10 Nobel Prize presentation ceremony, jailed recipient Liu Xiaobo's supporters face a travel ban.

Chinese authorities have prevented a number of top Chinese intellectuals linked to jailed Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo from leaving the country, Beijing-based scholars said.

"I have heard of a lot of similar cases one after the other in recent days," said constitutional scholar Zhang Boshu, who was himself prevented from traveling to Taiwan to observe mayoral elections on the democratically ruled island.

The former professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said at least 10 people, many of whom had signed an open letter in support of the Liu's award in the face of strong official condemnation, had been stopped by border guards since the Nobel committee announced the prize decision on Oct. 8.

"[Beijing Film Academy professor] Hao Jian was refused permission," Zhang said. "And in the past couple of days, [rights lawyers] He Weifang and Mo Shaoping have both run into the same problem."

"I think it has to do with the Nobel prize-giving ceremony in Norway on Dec. 10," Zhang said. "Actually it's very stupid. You can corral everyone here, but a lot of us weren't even leaving China in order to attend that event."

Zhang said he had no plans to try to attend the award ceremony in Oslo, although several hundred of Liu's supporters have expressed interest in attending, organizers said.

Lack of respect

Chinese officials reacted furiously to the Nobel committee's decision, saying that giving Liu the award showed a lack of respect for China's legal system.

Liu, 54, was sentenced in December 2009 to 11 years in jail on subversion charges in what is widely seen as retaliation for his authoring an appeal for political reform and respect for human rights.

Official commentaries have compared Liu's "crimes" with  incitement to racial hatred in other jurisdictions, or with plotting to dethrone Britain's Queen Elizabeth or assassinate President Obama.

Zhang said he thinks Beijing is out of step with international public opinion, however. "In front of the international community, this is a stupid and humiliating move to make," he said.

"When it happened to me, I said to them that this was a violation of my rights as a citizen," Zhang added.

Among others told they must remain in China were Beijing-based political scholar Xu Youyu and Beijing Film Academy professor Cui Weiping.

Both Cui and Xu signed the Oct. 14 open letter in support of Liu's award, which called on China's leaders to take a rational and realistic attitude to the award.

Cui said she had planned to arrive in Rome on Friday to attend an Asian film festival hosted in Italy.

"They told me I didn't have approval to go," she said.

Cui said she was outraged at her treatment. "I am an international film critic, and this event was purely about film. It is extremely uncivilized of them not to let us attend, nor to travel there."

"I find it totally and utterly unacceptable to be unable to go overseas to attend normal scholarly and professional activities," Cui said.

"It is shocking and appalling that they should use such coercive measures against intellectuals," she said.

Stopped by police

Zhang said he had tried to leave mainland Chinese territory at the Lo Wu border crossing from Shenzhen into Hong Kong on Wednesday.

"They took me to a small room, and a policewoman came in a while later. I asked her why I wasn't being allowed to leave the country, but she said she wasn't able to give me an explanation."

"[Later], she came back and said it was the Beijing police department that had stopped me from leaving the country," he added.

Veteran pro-democracy activist and journalist Chen Ziming said he had also been stopped from going to Taiwan to attend an academic event.

"They invited me, sent an invitation letter," Chen said on Thursday.

"Last time I applied to Hong Kong it didn't work out because they didn't get me the permit you need. So I told them in advance I wanted to go to Taiwan and they said they would ask for instructions."

"Then they told me I wouldn't be able to go."

At the end of last month, authorities in Beijing and Shanghai prevented two prominent rights lawyers from leaving the country.

Both men were on their way to the United States to observe the democratic process of the mid-term elections, and to build contacts with U.S.-based legal profession.

China has warned other countries against attending the Nobel award ceremony, with diplomats from several countries saying last week that they have received letters from the Chinese embassy in Norway.

In Beijing, Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai said governments would have to "take responsibility for the consequences" if they show support for Liu.

The Chinese warnings do not appear to have dissuaded many Norway-based ambassadors, royalty, or celebrities from attending, however.

Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

>> Original Source

By Radio Free Asia
November 10, 2010

Supporters are devastated by the harsh sentence handed down to a Chinese child advocate.

Authorities in Beijing have sentenced a Chinese activist who sought compensation for children sickened by the 2008 tainted milk scandal to two-and-a-half years in jail, relatives and lawyers said.

Zhao Lianhai, whose child was one of 300,000 made ill by infant formula milk laced with the industrial chemical melamine, cried out in protest when the sentence was handed down in Beijing's Daxing District People's Court on Wednesday.

According to eyewitnesses, he ripped off his prison uniform, threw it at the judge, and vowed to go back on hunger strike.

In the spectators' gallery, his devastated family broke into sobs.

"When they sentenced Zhao Lianhai to two-and-a-half years in jail, he shouted in protest, but the judge hadn't finished reading the judgment," lawyer Peng Jian said.

"Zhao Lianhai's relatives, who were in the gallery, also shouted out in protest."

Zhao's wife, Li Xuemei, mother and two sisters were present when the sentencing took place at 8:30 a.m. local time.

"They are so unjust," Li shouted, on exiting the courtroom.

"They have no human feelings left inside them," she said. "We told them ... our family circumstances, and they said they would think about it."

"I never thought that they would think about it in this way," said Li, who vowed to appeal the sentence in a higher court.

"The lawyer is going to prepare the documents."

Targeted for speaking out

Zhao's lawyer, Li Fangping, said the charges against his client should never have stood up in court.

"Not only have they found him guilty, they've given him such a harsh sentence," Li said.

He said one factor contributing to the sentence might have been the fact that Zhao spoke with the media.

"There was a sentence in the judgment which specifically mentioned Zhao giving interviews by the side of the road to reporters," Li said.

"Another thing it said was that he had held up A4 size sheets in protest at the Shijiazhuang Court and outside the offices of Sanlu," he said, referring to the dairy company where tainted milk was first discovered.

"It also said that he held a meeting on the anniversary of the '911' melamine scandal's discovery," Li added, referring to the date the scandal broke in September 2008.

He said the appeal would be lodged with an intermediate court in the next 10 days.

Child advocate

Zhao's supporters say he had not just been taking action on behalf of his own child, but on behalf of all children and parents who had been affected by the melamine-tainted milk scandal.

"There have been a lot of similar cases to this where people have been sentenced to six to eight month jail terms," Li said. "None of them has been more than a year."

Fellow tainted milk activist Xiang Qingyu was in the courtroom at the time the sentence was handed down.

"Zhao Lianhai said he didn't agree, and took off his uniform and threw it at the judge," Xiang said.

"He shouldn't have been found guilty ... They wouldn't let his lawyer speak," he said.

Outside the court buildings, activist Liu Shasha was handing out yellow ribbons to Zhao's supporters.

"The ribbons bear the words, 'Zhao Lianhai is Innocent' and 'Zhao Lianhai Come Home,'" said Liu.

"We rushed towards the court buildings, shouting 'two-and-a-half years,'" she said. "I asked them what he had done to get two-and-a-half years. By the time I got to the [entrance], people were shouting out behind me 'Zhao Lianhai is Innocent.'"

Jiang Yalin, a fellow activist and head of the civic group Kidney Stone Babies, said she was deeply angry at the sentence.

"I am full of grief and anger," she said. "If Zhao Lianhai is guilty, then so are all the parents who are struggling to protect the rights of their own children."

"That means our children are guilty too," Jiang said.

Political factors

Professor Wang Youjin of the China University of Political Science and Law said the harshness of Zhao's sentence pointed to political factors in his case.

"The authorities are afraid that Zhao Lianhai will be a rallying point for all the parents whose children were affected by the milk scandal to stage a collective protest, and destabilize the regime," Wang said.

"The heavy sentence handed to Zhao Lianhai is intended to uphold the stability of the regime," he said.

Wang said there was little chance that any appeal would succeed in reversing the original decision.

Online reaction to the sentence was critical, with Beijing-based legal scholar Teng Biao slamming the court as "shameless."

"We should run a search on the court official who signed this judgment," Teng said on the microblogging service Twitter.

"He too will be judged!"

Another user wrote: "Zhao Lianhai ran to the four corners of the earth to get justice for the kidney stone babies ... but so far not a single agency or company has paid out a penny in compensation."

'Provoking social disorder'

Zhao was accused of holding "illegal meetings and shouting slogans" leading to social disturbance, and could have faced a jail term of up to five years.

He went on trial behind closed doors in a Beijing court on March 30, accused of "provoking social disorder."

Authorities say almost all of the 25,100 tons of defective milk powder seized in the 2008 toxic baby food probe have now been incinerated and buried.

The announcement came after melamine was found in further dairy products in several Chinese provinces last year.

Three executives of the Shanghai Panda Dairy Company were jailed for terms of three to five years in March for their roles in the production and sale of melamine-tainted dairy products last year.

And in November 2009, authorities in the northern city of Shijiazhuang executed two people for their role in the scandal, which killed at least six children and sickened hundreds of thousands.

Reported in Mandarin by Qiao Long. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

>> Original Source

By BBC World News
November 05, 2010

China has warned that there will be "consequences" if governments show support for jailed Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo at the award ceremony.

Vice-Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai said the prize was highly politicised and "a challenge to China's judicial system".

Diplomats in Oslo said China's embassy had sent letters implicitly warning them not to attend the prize-giving.

Liu was jailed in December for subversion after calling for sweeping political reform in China.

China angrily condemned the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to the dissident. It has said the award was tantamount to "encouraging crime".

'Political tool'

"The choice before some European countries and others is clear and simple: do they want to be part of the political game to challenge China's judicial system or do they want to develop a true friendly relationship with the Chinese government and people?" Cui Tiankai said.

"What image do they want to leave for ordinary Chinese people? So, in my view, they are facing such a choice. They have to make the choice according to their own judgement," Mr Cui said.

"If they make the wrong choice, they have to bear the consequences."

A commentary published in Friday in the People's Daily, the Communist Party's flagship newspaper, described the prize as a Western political tool used to attack a rising China.

The newspaper said the Nobel Prize has become wrapped up in ideology since the end of the Cold War and had become "a tool for Western countries to impose peaceful evolution on powers which do not meet their standards".

'Clear message'

Ambassadors in the city normally attend the ceremony, to be held on 10 December in Oslo City Hall.

"We have received a letter which explains the Chinese position and which asks us not to do anything which could destabilise China," Olof Huldtgren, the deputy head of mission at the Swedish embassy in Oslo, told AFP.

Mr Huldtgren said the letter did not explicitly warn against attending the ceremony, but that "the message is clear".

A spokesman for the Foreign Office in London acknowledged the Chinese "have raised the issue with us". But the spokesman stressed: "It is the normal practice of the British ambassador to Norway to attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. The ambassador intends to attend this year."

The Dutch foreign ministry said it had "taken note of China's concerns", but had told Beijing that the ambassador would be attending.

It is not known who will pick up Mr Liu's Nobel prize on his behalf.

>> Original Source

By Radio Free Asia
November 01, 2010

Chinese officials restrict the travel of two rights lawyers and detain a third.

Authorities in Beijing and Shanghai have prevented two prominent rights lawyers from leaving the country, and detained a third on charges of "disturbing the peace."

Li Subin was stopped from boarding a flight by border guards at Beijing's International Airport, while Jiang Tianyong was prevented from getting on a flight at Shanghai's Pudong International Airport.

Both men were on their way to the United States to observe the democratic process of the mid-term elections and build contacts with the U.S.-based legal profession, they said.

"It was about 7 a.m. on Oct. 30, as I was going through immigration at Terminal 3 of Beijing's Capital Airport," Li said.

"They stopped me at the border exit saying there was a problem with my passport and that they would have to check it," he said.

But Li said he had already been on several overseas trips, including to Europe, with no problems reported with his passport before.

"They told me their superiors had ordered it to be checked, and they took it away," Li said.

He said officials had told him they were acting on police orders.

"They said they'd been told by the Beijing national security police not to let me out of the country," Li added. "Later, I got in touch with the national security police ... and they told me I wasn't allowed to leave China."

"He told me that the restriction wouldn't be easy to lift, now that it was in place."

An official who answered the phone on Sunday at the Beijing national security police declined to comment on Li's case.

"I have no obligation to answer your questions," the official said.

Academic exchange

According to the U.S.-based Christian group China Aid, both Li and Jiang had accepted invitations for academic exchanges with American legal scholars and to observe processes of the mid-term elections.

It said both men were Christians but did not point out whether this was relevant to the exit ban.

Jiang was also prevented from leaving the country at Pudong international airport, it said.

China Aid founder Bob Fu said that the treatment of both men was unacceptable.

"Both men were genuinely advancing the rule of law in China," Fu said.

Calls to Jiang's mobile went unanswered with a "mobile phone switched off" message on Sunday.

Jiang was one of the lawyers acting on behalf of missing lawyer Gao Zhisheng, while Li has previously testified to an EU parliamentary human rights committee on the human rights situation in China.

Li has also represented blind Shandong rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who is still being held under house arrest in the wake of a four-year jail term.

House-church detention

Meanwhile, Beijing police detained Protestant house-church leader Fan Yafeng, who heads a group of Christian human rights lawyers on Saturday morning.

"Yesterday, some police officers from the Shuangyushu police station took me down to the police station yet again for causing a so-called disturbance," Fan said on Sunday.

"They forced me to cancel a discussion meeting that we had planned at the office that afternoon. They took me to the Shuangyushu Guesthouse, which is near my home [and kept me there] from 9:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.," he said.

"A national security policeman told me that from today I was forbidden to hold any meetings at my home or at my office, including today's prayer meeting."

Fan said he believed an alleged noise complaint was made simply as a pretext to get him away from his house ahead of the prayer meeting, which was also raided by police who roughed up some of those in attendance.

"There was a young man, a university student ... who was searched by several policemen who then called the college and got them to come and take him away," Fan said.

Officially an atheist country, China has an army of officials whose job is to watch over faith-based activities, which have spread rapidly in the wake of massive social change and economic uncertainty since economic reforms began 30 years ago.

Party officials are put in charge of Catholics, Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims, and Protestants. Judaism isn't recognized, and worship in unapproved temples, churches, or mosques is against the law.

China's rights lawyers are frequently subjected to harassment and detention when they are involved in politically sensitive cases, as well as harassment in the form of prosecution for economic offenses and revocation of their licenses.

Reported in Mandarin by Qiao Long. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

>> Original Source

By Radio Free Asia
November 01, 2010

Gheyret Niyaz's family has heard nothing about his case since a court sentenced him in July.

A court in China's troubled northwestern city of Urumqi, which was rocked by ethnic violence last year, appears to be stalling an appeal hearing in the case of an ethnic Uyghur journalist handed a 15-year jail term, supporters said.

Outspoken Uyghur economics professor Ilham Tohti said the family of journalist and webmaster Gheyret Niyaz has heard nothing about his fate since a court sentenced him on July 23 for "endangering state security."

Beijing-based Tohti also said Gheyret's family has been unable to secure the best legal representation.

"After the first hearing, three lawyers from Beijing went up to Urumqi and made contact with Harat's family," Tohti said. "But in the end they were unable to take on the case, probably because the authorities wanted to keep it secret."

"Even his family has heard nothing about it to date."

He said no details of any appeal hearing had been released, either.

"According to my information, he hasn't been transferred to prison [from police custody], and the details of the judgment haven't been released," Tohti added.

"Gheyret is still being detained in the Urumqi municipal detention center," he said.

'Wife afraid for her job'

Beijing-based rights lawyer Teng Biao said he was one of the lawyers who contacted Gheyret's family at the time of the trial.

"In the end, his wife was afraid for her job, so she didn't meet with me," Teng said.

"Gheyret is being represented by a local lawyer. We don't know whether the lawyer was appointed by the authorities on his behalf," he added.

"His relatives were frightened, and they didn't want to appoint a lawyer from Beijing."

"I have no information about any appeal. I never heard whether the appeal hearing had begun, either," Teng added.

'Too many interviews'

Niyaz, 51, was detained at his home in Tacheng city in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in early October 2009.

His family received word three days later that he had been formally detained on charges of "endangering state security."

A former deputy director of the official Xinjiang Legal Daily, Gheyret was employed at the official Xinjiang Economic Daily as a journalist at the time of his detention.

Niyaz also served as webmaster and administrator of the Uyghur Online website, run by Tohti.

In its 2009 annual report, the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) noted that Uyghur Online and its staff were uniquely targeted after the 2009 violence.

When Niyaz was detained in October, he was taken to the Heavenly Mountain District [Tianshan Qu] detention center in Urumqi, capital of the XUAR, friends said.

Police said "he did too many interviews with foreign media about the July 5 Urumqi riots," one source said.

Three life sentences

Uyghur activists in exile expressed shock at his arrest because he was widely regarded as pro-government, even warning XUAR officials in July that ethnic riots could be imminent, although the exact content of his warning is unknown.

In August, Urumqi authorities also sentenced three ethnic minority Uyghur webmasters to life in jail for alleged separatist offenses.

Dilshat Perhat, webmaster and owner of Diyarim; Nureli, webmaster of Salkin; and Nijat Azat, webmaster of Shabnam were sentenced to five, three, and 10 years in jail respectively, also for "endangering state security."

The verdicts were handed down in a series of closed trials at the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court, sources said at the time.

All three websites publish online in the Uyghur language, spoken by the predominantly Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority.

Ethnic Uyghurs took to the streets en masse in July 2009 in an initially peaceful demonstration to protest a violent attack weeks earlier against Uyghur migrant workers in far-off Guangdong province, which officials allegedly failed to quell promptly.

The clashes in Urumqi left some 200 people dead, by official count.

Chinese authorities detained hundreds of people in the aftermath and charged an unknown number with fomenting the violence.

Reported by Hai Nan for RFA's Cantonese service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

>> Original Report 

By MARK LANDLER, JIM YARDLEY and MICHAEL WINES | THE NEW YORK TIMES
October 30, 2010

HANOI, Vietnam -- China's military expansion and assertive trade policies have set off jitters across Asia, prompting many of its neighbors to rekindle old alliances and cultivate new ones to better defend their interests against the rising superpower.

A whirl of deal-making and diplomacy, from Tokyo to New Delhi, is giving the United States an opportunity to reassert itself in a region where its eclipse by China has been viewed as inevitable.

President Obama's trip to the region this week, his most extensive as president, will take him to the area's big democracies, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan, skirting authoritarian China. Those countries and other neighbors have taken steps, though with varying degrees of candor, to blunt China's assertiveness in the region.

Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India are expected to sign a landmark deal for American military transport aircraft and are discussing the possible sale of jet fighters, which would escalate the Pentagon's defense partnership with India to new heights. Japan and India are courting Southeast Asian nations with trade agreements and talk of a "circle of democracy." Vietnam has a rapidly warming rapport with its old foe, the United States, in large part because its old friend, China, makes broad territorial claims in the South China Sea.

The deals and alliances are not intended to contain China. But they suggest a palpable shift in the diplomatic landscape, on vivid display as leaders from 18 countries gathered this weekend under the wavelike roof of Hanoi's futuristic convention center, not far from Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, for a meeting suffused by tensions between China and its neighbors.

China's escalating feud with Japan over another set of islands, in the East China Sea, stole the meeting's headlines on Saturday, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed three-way negotiations to resolve the issue.

Most Asian countries, even as they argue that China will inevitably replace the United States as the top regional power, have grown concerned at how quickly that shift is occurring, and what China the superpower may look like.

China's big trading partners are complaining more loudly that it intervenes too aggressively to keep its currency undervalued. Its recent restrictions on exports of crucial rare earths minerals, first to Japan and then to the United States and Europe, raised the prospect that it may use its dominant positions in some industries as a diplomatic and political weapon.

And its rapid naval expansion, combined with a more strident defense of its claims to disputed territories far off its shores, has persuaded Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Singapore to reaffirm their enthusiasm for the American security umbrella.

"The most common thing that Asian leaders have said to me in my travels over this last 20 months is, 'Thank you, we're so glad that you're playing an active role in Asia again,' " Mrs. Clinton said in Hawaii, opening a seven-country tour of Asia that included a last-minute stop in China.

Few of China's neighbors voice their concerns about the country publicly, but analysts and diplomats say they express wariness about the pace of China's military expansion and the severity of its trade policies in private.

"Most of these countries have come to us and said, 'We're really worried about China,' " said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China adviser to President Bill Clinton who is now at the Brookings Institution.

The Obama administration has been quick to capitalize on China's missteps. Where officials used to speak of China as the Asian economic giant, they now speak of India and China as twin giants. And they make clear which one they believe has a closer affinity to the United States.

"India and the United States have never mattered more to each other," Mrs. Clinton said. "As the world's two largest democracies, we are united by common interests and common values."

As Mr. Obama prepares to visit India in his first stop on his tour of Asian democracies, Mr. Singh, India's prime minister, will have just returned from his own grand tour -- with both of them somewhat conspicuously, if at least partly coincidentally, circling China.

None of this seems likely to lead to a cold war-style standoff. China is fully integrated into the global economy, and all of its neighbors are eager to deepen their ties with it. China has fought no wars since a border skirmish with Vietnam three decades ago, and it often emphasizes that it has no intention of projecting power through the use of force.

At the same time, fears that China has become more assertive as it has grown richer are having real consequences.

India is promoting itself throughout the region as a counterweight to China; Japan is settling a dispute with the United States over a Marine air base; the Vietnamese are negotiating a deal to obtain civilian nuclear technology from the United States; and the Americans, who had largely ignored the rest of Asia as they waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, see an opportunity to come back in a big way.

In July, for example, Mrs. Clinton reassured Vietnam and the Philippines by announcing that the United States would be willing to help resolve disputes between China and its neighbors over a string of strategically important islands in the South China Sea.

China's foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, reacted furiously, accusing the United States of plotting against it, according to people briefed on the meeting. Mr. Yang went on to note that China was a big country, staring pointedly at the foreign minister of tiny Singapore. Undaunted, Mrs. Clinton not only repeated the American pledge on the South China Sea in Hanoi on Saturday, but expanded it to include the dispute with Japan.

China's rise as an authoritarian power has also revived a sense that democracies should stick together. K. Subrahmanyam, an influential strategic analyst in India, noted that half the world's people now live in democracies and that of the world's six biggest powers, only China has not accepted democracy.

"Today the problem is a rising China that is not democratic and is challenging for the No. 1 position in the world," he said.

Indeed, how to deal with China seems to be an abiding preoccupation of Asia's leaders. In Japan, Prime Minister Naoto Kan and Mr. Singh discussed China's booming economy, military expansion and increased territorial assertiveness.

"Prime Minister Kan was keen to understand how India engages China," India's foreign secretary, Nirupama Rao, told reporters. "Our prime minister said it requires developing trust, close engagement and a lot of patience."

South Korea was deeply frustrated earlier this year when China blocked an explicit international condemnation of North Korea for sinking a South Korean warship, the Cheonan. South Korea accused North Korea of the attack, but China, a historic ally of the North, was unwilling to hold it responsible.

India has watched nervously as China has started building ports in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, extending rail lines toward the border of Nepal, and otherwise seeking to expand its footprint in South Asia.

India's Defense Ministry has sought military contacts with a host of Asian nations while steadily expanding contacts and weapons procurements from the United States. The United States, American officials said, has conducted more exercises in recent years with India than with any other nation.

Mr. Singh's trip was part of his "Look East" policy, intended to broaden trade with the rest of Asia. He has said it was not related to any frictions with China, but China is concerned. On Thursday, People's Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, ran an opinion article asking, "Does India's 'Look East' Policy Mean 'Look to Encircle China'?"

That wary view may well reflect China's reaction to the whole panoply of developments among its neighbors.

"The Chinese perceived the Hanoi meeting as a gang attack on them," said Charles Freeman, an expert on Chinese politics and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "There's no question that they have miscalculated their own standing in the region."

Mark Landler reported from Hanoi, Jim Yardley from New Delhi, and Michael Wines from Beijing.

>> Original Report