February 2011 Archives

By Edward Wong | The New York Times 
February 24, 2011

Uighur advocacy groups have criticized the recent death sentences of four men who are all apparently ethnic Uighurs. The men were reportedly sentenced for three separate incidents of violence last year. They are Turhun Turdi, Abdulla Tunyaz, Ahunniyaz Nur, and Abdukerim Abdurahman. The report of the sentencing first appeared on Wednesday in Xinjiang Daily, an official newspaper published out of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, a vast region in western China where Uighurs, the largest ethnic group there, chafe against policies set by the ethnic Han, who rule China.

Two of the men were convicted in connection with an explosion that killed at least seven people last year in Aksu. "By sentencing these four Uighurs to death, China is attempting to intimidate the Uighur people, fearing that they will take to the streets to demand human rights, democracy and freedoms from the authoritarian Chinese government," Rebiya Kadeer, a leader of Uighur exiles, said in a written statement late Wednesday.

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Via Scoop Independent News (New Zealand)

Press Release: International Federation of Journalists
February 23, 2011

Journalists Blocked When Reporting 'Jasmine Revolution' Protests in China

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) is deeply concerned by reports that police and security agents intervened when journalists attempted to cover protests dubbed the "jasmine revolution" in China on February 20.

Many non-mainland journalists were blocked or harassed when covering the protests in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou on the day.

A Hong Kong journalist told the IFJ he was closely followed by a security officer who prevented him from making contact with a number of dissidents in Guangzhou. The journalist was harassed by the officer when investigating the case of a human rights lawyer, who was injured in a beating by five plain clothes officers after he tried to attend the Guangzhou protest.

"The security officer blocked my path to reach the injured lawyer and tried to snatch my cell phone when I recorded his unpleasant behaviour," said the journalist, who requested anonymity. The officer also damaged the journalist's phone in the incident.

The English service of state-controlled Xinhua News Agency reported on the protest but the stories later disappeared from its website. Xinhua's Chinese service did not report the story at all.

"It's only a show to foreign media - I'm not surprised," a mainland journalist told the IFJ.

"We haven't received any orders from the Central Propaganda Department regarding the 'jasmine revolution' so far but no relevant reports were published in Chinese media - it's because anyone who publishes will be fired right away."

The IFJ's monitoring of China's media in recent years has discovered that the authorities will often order punitive action, such as sacking and demotions, against journalists who are working to freely report the news.

"Protests in three separate locations in China are a matter of legitimate public interest, and we applaud those journalists who bravely attempt to cover these events under intense scrutiny and at risk to their livelihoods," IFJ General Secretary Aidan White said.

"A number of leaders of China's central authorities have publicly affirmed that public has the right to know about what is happening in their communities.

"Without the right to speak, these affirmations are hollow."

China authorities further restricted online messaging services and articles after the protests were announced on an overseas website on February 19, the day before the protests took place. Relevant information was totally blacked out and the website was attacked fiercely afterwards.

The IFJ urges central authorities to respect the rights of its citizens to enjoy their freedom of expression and freedom of the press, underwritten by Article 35 of China's Constitution.

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By Radio FREE Asia
February 20, 2011

Nobel laureate's wife briefly breaks silence in first online chat after four months.

Jailed Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo's wife, who is being held under house arrest, says she feels "miserable," her family is being held like "hostages" and "nobody can help her."

In what is believed to be her first contact with the outside world for four months, Liu Xia told her friend in an Internet chat that she was being held at home against her will and had seen her husband just once since his Nobel award was announced in October.

The chat took place after Liu Xia succeeded in getting an Internet connection for about five minutes late Thursday evening, while Chinese were celebrating the Lantern Festival, the last day of the Lunar New Year celebrations. Her friend happened to be online at the time.

The friend, through an intermediary, provided The Washington Post with a transcript of the conversation, hoping to make her words public and let the world know of her condition, the newspaper said in a report Sunday.

The authenticity of the transcript could not be independently verified but another friend of Liu Xiaobo's, writer and activist Mo Zhixu, confirmed with the Post that he also saw Liu Xia online at the same time, although he was not able to chat with her.

It is not clear how she gained access to the online chat service.

Worried

Hu Ping, the chief editor of Beijing Spring, a New York-based pro-human rights and democracy journal, told RFA that he was surprised Liu Xia came online on Thursday.

He said that on Friday he had spoken on the phone with one of Liu Xia's friends in China who was saying that everyone was worried because they had not heard any news from her in recent months.

Hu Ping also expressed concern over Liu Xia's psychological state.

She was put under strict house arrest just after Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the first week of October.

She visited him in prison shortly after the announcement and briefly sent out messages through her Twitter account. Soon after, her Internet and phone lines were cut off, and she has not been seen in public.

Beijing has stepped up its crackdown on the Internet and known activists recently amid apparent concerns over the uprisings in the Arab world.

At the weekend, Chinese authorities staged a show of force to head off potential protests after mysterious posts online urged citizens to stage a "Jasmine Revolution," referring to the January unrest that led to Tunisian leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's ouster and which sparked revolts in Arab states.

Transcript

"I don't know how I managed to get online," Liu Xia wrote to the friend in her post, according to the published transcript. "Don't go online. Otherwise my whole family is in danger."

The friend asked, "Are you at home?"

"Yes," Liu Xia responded, writing in Pinyin, the Chinese transliteration system. She said she was using an old computer and apparently could not type Chinese characters.

"Can't go out. My whole family are hostages," Liu Xia said. Later she wrote, "I only saw him once," apparently referring to her husband, Liu Xiaobo.

"So miserable," she wrote. "Don't talk."

"I'm crying," she added. "Nobody can help me."

The friend said he was worried about causing her more trouble but offered words of support, writing: "Please log out first. We miss you and support you. We will wait for you outside."

She replied "Goodbye" and "Okay," and the chat ended.

Reported by Tang Qiwei for RFA's Mandarin service. Written in English by Rachel Vandenbrink.

>> Original Source

By Radio FREE Asia
February 20, 2011

Few turn out for Middle East-inspired protests in China amid heavy police presence.

Chinese authorities enacted strong security measures in several cities on Sunday following an online call for a revolution apparently modeled after pro-democracy demonstrations sweeping the Middle East.

Only a few protesters responded to the call for a "Jasmine Revolution," the same name given to the Tunisian freedom movement which sparked protests in Egypt and other Arab states, eyewitnesses said.

Authorities detained an undetermined number of activists, disrupted text messaging services, and censored Internet postings about the protest call, in an apparent show of force.

The largest gathering was reported in Beijing, where several hundred people - including protesters, plainclothes policemen, reporters, and onlookers - converged in front of the McDonald's outlet on the landmark Wangfujing shopping street.

One source at the scene said there were more plainclothes public security officers than civilians.

"By the McDonald's on Wangfujing, there were many people, [mostly] plainclothes policemen. And around the restaurant and in the building, there were cars with surveillance equipment," the source said.

People gathered around 2:00 p.m. and 10 minutes later, two people were led away by policemen. Later a man holding white flowers was also escorted away.

By 3:00 p.m., most of the crowd had dispersed.

Online campaign

The source of the campaign was unknown, but a notice for the protests was first posted on the U.S.-based Chinese-language website Boxun.com earlier in the week.

The notice called for protesters to meet in 13 cities across China for a Jasmine Revolution, saying anyone with an interest for the future of the country should join the movement.

"Whether you are the parent of a tainted-milk baby, a victim of a forced eviction, a laid-off worker, a petitioner, a Charter 08 signer, a Falun Gong practitioner, a Chinese Communist Party member, a Democracy Party supporter, someone dissatisfied with the injustice in Chinese society, or even just a spectator, at this moment, we are all Chinese. We must take responsibility for our future and for our children's future," the unsigned notice said.

Boxun.com reported being attacked on Saturday and was still inaccessible a day later. The site released a statement saying it could not verify the origin of the campaign.

The terms "jasmine" and "revolution" have been blocked on Sina Weibo, China's largest micro-blogging site.

Censors have also limited media reports about the recent protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria, and Libya.

Tiananmen

In Tiananmen Square, the site of a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989, security was stepped up with police conducting security checks on people around the area.

Nearby, in front of the Ministry of Public Security, a dozen armored police vehicles were on standby.

One witness surnamed Li said, "In front of the Ministry of Public Security I saw more than ten armored buses."

"One of them could carry at least 55 people, so with ten of them there would be at least 500, and along with the other vehicles there would be at least 600. Some of the vehicles didn't have their curtains closed and I could see shields and riot helmets."

Other cities

In Shanghai, a large number of public security officers were on alert near the People's Square. When they forcibly led away three people, a scuffle broke out.

In Guangzhou, a few participants went to the People's Park, where public security officers had been on alert since the morning.

In Hong Kong, 20 protesters from the League of Social Democrats gathered and threw paper folded in the shape of jasmine flowers at the mainland's liaison office.

Activists detained

Human rights groups said several activists were detained, harassed, or missing in the run-up to the protests.

Beijing human rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong's wife Jin Bianling told RFA that her husband was taken away by public security officers on Sunday.

"Yesterday between 3:40 and 4:00 p.m. from the balcony, his mother saw policemen come into the courtyard. When Jiang Tianyong received a phone call he went downstairs ... and then they stuffed Jiang Tianyong into the car," she said.

Guangzhou human rights lawyer Liu Shihui said he was attacked by several men as he was leaving his house. He was sent to the hospital for treatment.

Another rights activist Ma Xiaoming warned that the situation was fragile.

"The current contradictions in society are very sharp. It only takes a small spark to light a fire."

"The problem [with the protests] is not whether [they are] successful or not, but rather that it is the expression of the people's will ... for a democratic system to replace an autocratic one," he said.

Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin Service.Translated and written in English by Rachel Vandenbrink.

>> Original Source

By Radio FREE Asia
February 18, 2011

Those behind the song say it was meant to "educate" local people while backing the Egyptian revolt.

China's censors moved swiftly on Friday to delete from video-sharing websites a revolutionary song in support of the Egyptian revolution which sparked a huge response from netizens, its author said.

"There has been a huge response," said the song's composer, Li Lei, whose online nickname is Red Uncle. "A lot of people have started following me on [popular chatroom service] QQ."

But he said the authorities had been quick to delete the song with accompanying video, as netizens had begun to share it on social networking sites.

The song, with lyrics by a poet identified as Snowman, was released onto Chinese video-sharing websites Tudou and Ku6 earlier this week, and had proliferated across at least 30 sites by 6.00 p.m. on Thursday, according to searches on Baidu and Google.

By Friday, only two video-sharing sites still carried it, with popular YouTube-style site Tudou producing an error message instead.

"Awakened lion"

The video, which includes limited English subtitles, addresses the "awakened lion" that is the Egyptian people.

"Go, go, go! Forge on ahead. The awakened lion is roaring," the lyrics read. "It will smash corruption, and bury the dictatorship."

"Mighty Egypt has no room for clowns. With no equality or human rights, these are the roots of poverty," it proclaims, against a background of news footage of demonstrators on Cairo's Liberation Square.

"May democracy shine on the Nile. Its people are no longer sheep," runs the lyrics, to music that may have once accompanied a hymn to late supreme leader Mao Zedong.

Li said he and his songwriting partner wanted to use the song to educate their own people, as well as to support the Egyptian revolution, which brought an end to the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak, whose picture is seen spinning away in the video.

"The people of Egypt have demanded democracy," Li said. "Their political goals are very similar to those of the Chinese people."

>> Please Read Full Report Here

By Andrew Jacobs | The New York Times
February 17, 2011

The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Thursday criticized a new Obama administration policy on Internet freedom, saying it was an attempt to meddle in the internal affairs of other countries.

The comments by a ministry spokesman, offered during a regular weekly news conference, were in response to a speech this week by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton outlining a $25 million program to promote technology that would allow people to circumvent Internet restrictions.

Although not aimed solely at China, the new efforts are in part intended to help users circumvent the so-called Great Firewall, a far-reaching menu of direct censorship and "opinion guidance" that restricts what the country's 450 million Internet users can read or write online.

"The United States continues to help people in oppressive Internet environments get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors, the hackers and the thugs who beat them up or imprison them for what they say online," Mrs. Clinton said in the speech, given on Tuesday at George Washington Unitversity.

In his comments, the ministry spokesman, Ma Zhaoxu, reiterated China's oft-repeated contention that Chinese Internet users are unrestrained, with some exceptions "in accordance with the law," and that China was not opposed to cooperating with other countries that seek to promote a more open Internet. "But we are against any other countries using Internet freedom as a pretext for interfering in others' internal affairs," he said.

China has some of the world's most extensive Internet restrictions, which include blocks on pornographic content and Web sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Day-to-day censorship, however, is often carried out by privately run Web sites.

Mrs. Clinton's speech did not get much coverage in China, and censors promptly removed blog posts on the subject sent out by the United States Embassy in Beijing.

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By Barry Eichengreen | The Japan Times 
February 12, 2011

A strictly economic interpretation of events in Tunisia and Egypt would be too simplistic -- however tempting such an exercise is for an economist. That said, there is no question that the upheavals in both countries -- and elsewhere in the Arab world -- largely reflect their governments' failure to share the wealth.

The problem is not an inability to deliver economic growth. In both Tunisia and Egypt, the authorities have strengthened macroeconomic policy and moved to open the economy. Their reforms have produced strong results. Annual growth since 1999 has averaged 5.1 percent in Egypt and 4.6 percent in Tunisia -- not Chinese-style growth rates, to be sure, but comparable nonetheless to emerging-market countries like Brazil and Indonesia, which are now widely viewed as economic successes.

Rather, the problem is that the benefits of growth have failed to trickle down to disaffected youth. The share of workers under the age of 30 is higher in North Africa and the Middle East than in any other part of the world. Their economic prospects are correspondingly more limited. University graduates find few opportunities outside of banking and finance. Anyone who has traveled to the region will have had an experience with a highly literate, overeducated tour guide.

With modern manufacturing underdeveloped, many young workers with fewer skills and less education are consigned to the informal sector. Corruption is widespread. Getting ahead depends on personal connections of the sort enjoyed by the sons of military officers and political officials, but few others.

It may stretch credulity to think that a high-growth economy like China might soon be facing similar problems. But the warning signs are there. Given the lack of political freedoms, the Chinese government's legitimacy rests on its ability to deliver improved living standards and increased economic opportunity to the masses. So far those masses have little to complain about. But that could change, and suddenly.

First, there is the growing problem of unemployment and underemployment among university graduates. Since 1999, when the Chinese government began a push to ramp up university education, the number of graduates has risen sevenfold, but the number of high-skilled, high-paying jobs has not kept pace.

Indeed, the country is rife with reports of desperate university graduates unable to find productive employment. Newspapers and blogs speak of the "ant tribe" of recent graduates living in cramped basements in the country's big cities while futilely searching for work.

In part, these unfortunate outcomes reflect the inflexibility of China's education system. Students spend their entire four years at university studying a single subject, be it accounting or computer science. As a result, they have few skills that can be applied elsewhere if the job they expect fails to materialize. There has also been a tendency to push students into fields like engineering, even though the Chinese economy is now beginning to shift from manufacturing to services.

Thus, China needs to move quickly on education reform. It needs to provide its university students with more flexible skills, more general training and more encouragement to think critically and creatively.

Moreover, there is the problem of less-skilled and less-educated migrants from the countryside, who are consigned to second-class jobs in the cities. Not possessing urban residency permits, they lack even the limited job protections and benefits of workers who do. And, because they may be here today but gone tomorrow, they receive little in the way of meaningful on-the-job training.

The migrants' predicament underscores the need to reform hukou, China's system of residency permits. A handful of provinces and cities have gone so far as to abolish it, without catastrophic consequences. Others could usefully follow their lead.

Finally, China needs to get serious about its corruption problem. Personal connections, or guanxi, remain critical for getting ahead. Recent migrants from the countryside and graduates with degrees from second-tier universities sorely lack such connections. If they continue to see the children of high government officials doing better, their disaffection will grow.

The ability of disaffected youth -- university-educated youth in particular -- to use social media to organize themselves has been on powerful display recently in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. Last month, it was still possible for the Egyptian government to halt all Internet traffic and for China to block the Chinese word for "Egypt" from its Twitter-like service Sina. But in social media, as in banking, the regulated tend to stay one step ahead of the regulators. Such shutdowns will be increasingly difficult to enforce.

If Chinese officials don't move faster to channel popular grievances and head off potential sources of disaffection, they could eventually be confronted with an uprising of their own -- an uprising far broader and more determined than the student protest that they crushed in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Barry Eichengreen is a professor of economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley

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By Associated Press | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
February 12, 2011

China is downplaying news of the massive uprising in Egypt that led to the resignation of its president, likely wary of spawning any unrest that might threaten Beijing's grip on power.

Most newspapers and online portals were running a terse report from the official Xinhua News Agency that gave basic facts about President Hosni Mubarak's resignation while only briefly mentioning the large-scale protests that brought about his ouster.

The news from Egypt was buried in the middle of state television's noon newscast Saturday. CCTV did not air any footage of protesters but instead used showed scenes of shuttered shops and empty streets.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in a statement that China hopes Egypt can restore stability as soon as possible.

>> Original Source

By BBC World News
February 10, 2011

One of China's most high-profile human rights activists says he is being held under house arrest.

"I've come out of a small jail and entered a bigger one," Chen Guangcheng says in the secretly shot video, released by a US-based campaign group.

These are the first comments from Mr Chen since his release from prison last September. He accused the authorities of carrying out forced abortions.

China has not confirmed that the activist is under house arrest.

US-based campaign group China Aid says it received the hour-long film from an "anonymous government friend inside China".

In it, Mr Chen's wife filmed what appeared to be a Chinese security agent.

He is perched on a ladder, peering into the house in Shandong province, keeping watch.

'Miserable Conditions'

Standing in his home, the blind self-taught lawyer then describes how for the past five months he has been under 24-hour surveillance.

His phone has been cut off, and men and vehicles block access to his house. Anyone who tries to help him is threatened, he says.

"I cannot take even half a step out of my house. My wife is not allowed to leave either. Only my mother can go out and buy food to keep us going," said the activist, who used to offer legal advice to local people.

"I can be jailed again at any time, it is very easy. They can say I am a criminal and just lock me up."

Mr Chen said he could be beaten at any time and that any such action would be ignored by the authorities.

"They are trying to provoke me, if I dare to fight back they can accuse me of assault and jail me," he said.

China Aid said it was releasing the video to show the persecution Mr Chen is facing at the hands of the government.

"Mr Chen is living in miserable conditions, cut off from all outside contact, and detained illegally in his home," said Bob Fu, China Aid's founder and president.

"We cannot believe that China is serious about the rule of law when Chen Guangcheng and other rights advocates are jailed, disappeared, or harassed."

Mr Chen has been held ever since he completed a four-year prison term in September.

He had accused local officials of coercing up to 7,000 women in his province into forced abortions or sterilisations.

But he was convicted on charges of damaging property and disrupting the traffic.

Last month US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton highlighted Mr Chen's case, calling for his release together with the jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo and another detained lawyer, Gao Zhisheng.

>> Original Source

By Radio FREE Asia
February 03, 2011

China's One-Child policy leads to widespread suffering and abuse

Friends grieve at the funeral of a 21-year-old Chinese woman who died following a forced abortion in Liuyang City, Hunan Province, in February 2009

Chinese authorities routinely force women to terminate "unauthorized" pregnancies despite President Hu Jintao's denial that the practice exists, experts say.

Hu's denial came at a meeting with Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairwoman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, when the Chinese leader made a state visit to the United States last month.

In a statement released following the meeting, Ros-Lehtinen said she had challenged Hu on a range of Chinese human rights abuses.

"Out of all the issues I raised, the only one which received a response from Mr. Hu was my statement urging the end of China's forced abortion policy. I was astonished when he insisted that such a policy does not exist," Ros-Lehtinen said.

Speaking in an interview, women's rights advocate Reggie Littlejohn slammed Hu's statement as "an absolutely appalling misrepresentation."

"It is an undeniable fact that forced abortion occurs in China, and we have lots of evidence of this," said Littlejohn, president of the California-based Women's Rights Without Frontiers.

"At the provincial and at the local level, regulations say that 'out-of-plan' pregnancies shall be terminated," Littlejohn said, referring to measures taken to enforce China's strict One-Child policy limiting the number of allowable births.

"Women who have pregnancies out of plan are required to take 'remedial measures,' which is a euphemism for forced abortion," she added.

"So I just believe that [Hu's] statement was false and misleading."

'An execution'

In a case reported in October by RFA, a woman in the southern Chinese city of Amoy in Fujian province was detained in her 32nd week of pregnancy by local family planning officials, beaten, and forced to undergo an abortion.

Chinese netizens exposed the case on the microblogging site Twitter, calling for public attention to the fate of the pregnant woman, Xiao Aiying, and condemning the late-term abortion as "an execution."

Xiao's husband Luo Yanquan said in an interview that Xiao had been taken from their home late one night by local family planning cadres.

"She refused to go and insisted on waiting for me to be home, but they forced her to leave," Luo said.

"They took her to the Street Committee Office and locked her up there, taking her cell phone away and barring anyone from visiting her. Several men beat her up, bruising her legs and feet. She was kept there for about 40 hours," Luo added.

Luo said that Xiao was then taken to Amoy's Siming Hospital, checked into a room in the obstetrics ward, and injected with drugs to induce an abortion.

 "Neither my wife nor I signed an agreement," Luos said.  "But the cadres 'approved' and signed the paperwork and presented it to the hospital."

"This was a forced abortion," Luo said.

'Routinely punished'

In a 2010 report, the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China noted that local officials in China had continued during the year "to coerce women with unauthorized pregnancies to undergo abortions  in both urban and rural areas across China's major regions."

Violators of China's One-Child policy "are routinely punished with fines, and in some cases, subjected to forced sterilization, forced abortion, arbitrary detention, and torture," the Commission added.

"China's population planning policies in both their nature and implementation violate international human rights standards," the Commission said.

Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin service. Translated by Chen Ping. Written in English with additional reporting by Richard Finney.

>> Original Source

By Tania Branigan | guardian.co.uk
January 28, 2011

China's air force is again under close scrutiny as internet users pore over images of its fighter pilots in action. For the second time in a month pictures of military manoeuvres - this time aired by the state broadcaster - have spread rapidly across websites and blogs.

This time the craft is not the country's new stealth fighter; and the reaction is not excitement but amusement. Sharp-eyed viewers have spotted that a key clip came straight from the film Top Gun.

China Central Television News last week broadcast a training exercise by the People's Liberation Army Air Force with one plane firing a missile at another. But an observant viewer spotted that the resulting explosion matches a blast from the final fight scene in the Tom Cruise movie.

The frame-by-frame comparison of the images, by someone posting under the name Liu Yi, demonstrates the likeness, and the Wall Street journal has produced a video comparing the news clip with the movie scene.

The news broadcast was posted on the CCTV website but vanished after news of the gaffe began to spread.

A spokeswoman in the foreign affairs department at CCTV said she was not aware of the claims and would need to look into them. She was not available when the Guardian rang back.

While the clip is no doubt the work of a maverick employee, many internet users have enjoyed the broadcaster's embarrassment. The authorities censor television more strictly than publications and CCTV's news bulletins, in particular, are notorious for their unflinching dullness.

When fire consumed a building in the glossy new CCTV headquarters in 2009, many attacked the broadcaster for censoring the images in its own reports. The celebrity blogger Han Han described the blaze as an act of self-castration by "the world's number one eunuch media".

>> Original Source