September 2011 Archives
By Andrew Jacobs :: The New York Times
September 23, 2011
For a nation not yet inured to lurid and senseless crime, a report that a former civil servant in central China kept six women enslaved in an underground bunker -- and that he killed two of them -- was shocking enough.
But perhaps almost as disturbing, at least to some readers, was that the journalist who exposed the crime more than two weeks after the suspect's arrest was detained by security agents who accused him of revealing state secrets.
After his release from questioning on Thursday, the reporter, Ji Xuguang, wrote an article that accused the authorities of trying to keep the public in the dark about a heinous crime that unfolded less than two miles from the city's public security bureau.
"I was only thinking about how to make my story as accurate as possible and to satisfy the public's right to know, but I soon discovered that I failed to address the most important issue -- face," wrote Mr. Ji, a reporter for Southern Metropolis Daily, one of the country's most aggressively independent publications. "Before the truth becomes a state secret, the public and myself need answers."
Still, much of the national media on Friday were mesmerized by the horrifying details of the case, which took place in the city of Luoyang, in Henan Province.
According to Mr. Ji's account, the suspect, Li Hao, 34, kidnapped the women, ages 16 to 24, from the karaoke parlors where they worked and imprisoned them in a 215-square-foot dungeon he dug beneath a rented basement space. Over the course of two years, Mr. Li repeatedly forced the women to have sex with him, Mr. Ji said.
According to a police official who provided details to Mr. Ji, the suspect kept his captives perpetually starved so they would have little energy for escape, but he also gave them two computers on which they could "kill time" by watching movies and playing games. Mr. Li, who is married with an infant son, lived elsewhere in the city.
Mr. Li's arrest came on Sept. 6, when one of the women escaped and found her way to the police.
Mr. Ji said the rescued women were still in police custody on suspicion that they had a hand in the murders of the two women.
In his posting on Friday, Mr. Ji said he stumbled upon the story this week after spending a few days in Luoyang to investigate the murder of a local television reporter. In his follow-up article, he said his questioners deemed the case a state secret because, he later learned, they feared that its revelation might tarnish Luoyang's quest to become a "Civilized City" as part of a national competition.
By Radio FREE Asia
September 23, 2011
Family planning officials brutalize women, demolish homes.
China's strictly enforced One-Child Policy has led to increased gender discrimination and violence and could destabilize the world's most populous country, experts warned this week at a U.S. congressional hearing.
Chinese authorities have also become more "brutal" in implementing the controversial three-decade-old one-child-per-couple law, fueling abortions and increasingly skewing birth sex ratios in favor of males due to the traditional Chinese preference for a son, the experts testified.
This has led to millions of girls being "culled" from the population through abortion, said Brigham Young University political scientist Valerie Hudson, speaking on Thursday at a hearing called by the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs subcommittee on human rights.
And for each of these girls, someone else's son will become "surplus" or unmarried--"or in colloquial Chinese, a 'bare branch on the family tree,'" Hudson said.
By 2020 the number of these unmarried young men will be in excess of 30 million, or approximately one in every five young Chinese men, Hudson said, adding that it will be mainly young men without the advantages of education, skills, or money--a group already "aggrieved with the existing social order"--who will find themselves unable to form families.
This will lead to an unstable China "marked by increases in crime, violent crime, crimes against women, substance abuse, and the formation of gangs that profit from these behaviors," and to meet this challenge, China will likely become "more authoritarian," Hudson said.
And in the future, Hudson added, a more "masculinized" China could be susceptible to political campaigns focused on national pride and hostility toward competing nations.
Broken lives
China's growing gender imbalance is also "a powerful, driving force behind trafficking in women and sexual slavery from nations surrounding China," said human rights advocate Reggie Littlejohn.
She pointed to the broken lives already resulting from the increased levels of violence used in enforcing the One-Child Policy, which the Chinese authorities claim has prevented about 400 million births.
Littlejohn's California-based group Women's Rights Without Frontiers has documented abuses under the policy in a Sept. 22 report, "China's One Child Policy: New Evidence of Coercion."
"In this report, we have cases of forced abortion--one woman at eight months and another woman forcibly aborted with twins at eight-and-a half months ... There's a woman here who missed [an official] pregnancy check, and her own relatives were forced to demolish her home," she said.
In other cases, Littlejohn said, a man was "smashed in the head" and left permanently disabled after his wife gave birth to a second child, and another man was beaten to death because his son's wife was suspected of an unauthorized birth.
"These things happen with impunity," Littlejohn said.
"People are not prosecuted, they've not held accountable. I would really say that the spirit of the Red Guards lives on in the Family Planning Police."
A Chinese woman who once worked in a state-owned textile factory where the One-Child policy was strictly enforced said at the hearing that she had been forced to have five abortions.
"When discovered, pregnant women would be dragged to undergo forced abortions--there simply was no other choice," said the woman, using the pseudonym Liu Ping.
"We had no dignity as potential child-bearers."
"I am simply one of these many women whose lives were destroyed by the policy," said Liu, who has since emigrated to the United States.
Reported By Richard Finney.
By Andrew Jacobs | The New York Times
September 23, 2011
Rioters in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong have besieged government buildings, attacked police officers and overturned SWAT team vehicles during protests this week against the seizure of farmland, said officials in Shanwei, a city that skirts the South China Sea not far from Hong Kong.
According to a government Web site, hundreds of people on Wednesday blocked an important highway while others mobbed the local headquarters of the Communist Party and a police station in the city of Lufeng, injuring a dozen officers. Some witnesses, posting anonymous accounts online, put the number of rioters at more than 1,000.
The protests continued Friday, with farmers gathered in front of a government building banging gongs and holding aloft signs that said "Give us back our farmland" and "Let us continue farming," Reuters reported.
The authorities say the violence escalated Thursday after rumors spread that the police had killed a girl. At least four people were arrested, including a man officials accused of instigating the crowd.
The violence was the latest outbreak of civil unrest in China fueled by popular discontent over industrial pollution, police misconduct or illegal land grabs that leave peasants with little or no compensation. Such "mass incidents," as the government calls them, have been steadily increasing in recent years, providing party leaders with worrisome proof that official malfeasance combined with a dysfunctional judiciary often has combustible results.
Last week, hundreds of residents protesting environmental contamination by a solar panel factory in Zhejiang Province stormed the factory and destroyed office equipment and vehicles. Weeks earlier, 12,000 people peacefully gathered in the city of Dalian to demand the closure of a chemical factory.
In Lufeng, the protests were just the most dramatic manifestation of a long-running battle over land that residents say their ancestors reclaimed from the sea. According to a local Web site, the Lufeng city government has already sold off more than 800 acres of the property for industrial parks and high-priced housing. The proffered compensation per acre, villagers said, has been barely enough to buy a new bed.
"Wake up, my neighbors, if we don't unite now, the land of our ancestors will be sold off to the last square meter! If we don't unite now, our children will be homeless!" read one posting on the site.
"We will have no where to bury our parents or raise our children!"
Municipal governments, which own all land in China, largely depend on sales of long-term property leases to fill their operating budgets. In many cases, private real estate companies collude with officials to clear and develop the land as quickly as possible.
The latest seized plots were sold to a developer for about $156 million, according to The South China Morning Post, which first reported the sale and seizure. According to the company's Web site, the complex is to be called "Country Garden" after the name of the developer.
"To shape a prosperous future through our conscience and social responsibility," is one of the company's mottoes.
News of the demonstrations and photos and videos were quickly deleted from the Web by censors, but a few images persisted Friday. In one, demonstrators carried a banner that read "Give back my ancestors' farmland." A video lingered on overturned police vehicles, including one with graffiti that read "running dogs," an insult once directed at perceived enemies of the people.
The continuing unrest could pose a threat to the political aspirations of Wang Yang, the provincial party secretary who has partly staked his reputation on promoting the well-being of Guangdong's 104 million residents and by trying to gauge the level of their happiness.
"Happiness for the people is like flowers," Mr. Wang wrote this year. "The party and the government shall create the proper environment for the flowers to grow."
The province is China's most populous and a manufacturing powerhouse that produces roughly one third of the country's exports.
By BBC World News
September 23, 2011
Protests are taking place in a Chinese city for a third day, after two days of reported rioting over a land sale.
Officials said protesters in Lufeng city injured police officers and damaged government buildings during the unrest that began on Wednesday.
A reporter for Reuters news agency who visited Lufeng on Friday said protests were continuing at government offices.
There are tens of thousands of protests each year in China, some of which turn violent.
Many are triggered by local grievances, such as farmers being expelled from their land to make way for development.
'Ulterior motives'
One media report said several thousand people had taken part in the violence earlier this week in Wukan village, which is part of Lufeng city, in Guangdong province.
According to the South China Morning Post, protesters targeted a Communist Party building, a police station and an industrial park, amongst others.
They believe that local party officials have sold their land to developers, the daily said.
Images on internet forums showed villagers marching with a banner that read: "Return my ancestral farmland".
Local officials said only a few hundred people had been involved.
In a statement, they said that while a land deal had been the initial trigger, rumours that police had killed a child sparked further anger.
"On 22 September at about one in the afternoon, some villagers who had ulterior motives spread rumours about police killing a child, inciting some of the villagers to storm a border police station," the statement said.
Local officials said 12 officers had been wounded and six police cars burnt. Residents said a number of protesters had also been hurt, the South China Morning Post reported.
A Reuters reporter who visited Lufeng on Friday said several hundred people were still protesting outside government offices, calling for their land to be returned.
"We are very angry because we have no land for our livelihood anymore," one farmer was quoted as saying.
The scene was tense but there was no violence, the agency reported. Protesters had used motorbikes to block roads and broken bricks were piled up.
Searches for the word Lufeng on micro-blogging sites were reportedly being blocked.
Stability fears
There are hundreds of protests in China every week, says the BBC's Michael Bristow in Beijing.
Some are small in scale and centre on local grievances, but certain issues keep cropping up.
One often-heard complaint is that corrupt officials collude with developers to sell off farmland without giving farmers the proper compensation.
Laws are in place to protect farmers, but are often ignored at local level.
Earlier this year, addressing the opening of the National People's Congress, Premier Wen Jiabao warned that if China wanted to ensure social stability it had to tackle corruption and address economic inequalities.
By Liao Yiwu - Op-Ed Contributor | The New York Times
YUNNAN PROVINCE, in southwestern China, has long been the exit point for Chinese who yearn for a new life outside the country. There, one can sneak out of China by land, passing through pristine forests, or one can go by water, floating all the way down the Lancang River until it becomes the Mekong, which meanders into Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.
So each time I set foot there, in a land where red soil gleams in the sun, I turned restless; my imagination ran wild. After all, having been imprisoned for four years after I wrote a poem that condemned the Chinese government's brutal suppression of student protesters in 1989, I had been denied permission to leave China 16 times.
I felt very tempted. It doesn't matter if you have a passport or visa. All that counts is the amount of cash in your pocket. You toss your cellphone, cut off communications with the outside world and sneak into a village, where you can easily locate a peasant or a smuggler willing to help you. After settling on the right price, you are led out of China on a secret path that lies beyond the knowledge of humans and ghosts.
Until earlier this year, I had resisted the urge to escape. Instead, I chose to stay in China, continuing to document the lives of those occupying the bottom rung of society. Then, democratic protests swept across the Arab world, and posts began appearing on the Internet calling for similar street protests in China. In February and March, there were peaceful gatherings at busy commercial and tourist centers in dozens of cities every Sunday afternoon. The government panicked, staging a concerted show of force nationwide. Soldiers changed into civilian clothes and patrolled the streets with guns, arresting anyone they deemed suspicious.
Meanwhile, any reference to Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution (and even the word jasmine) was censored in text messages and on search engines. The police rounded up human rights lawyers, writers and artists. The democracy activist Liu Xianbin, who had served nine years in prison for helping to form the China Democratic Party, was given a new sentence of 10 years. The artist Ai Weiwei vanished in April and has lived under close government surveillance since his release in mid-June.
An old-fashioned writer, I seldom surf the Web, and the Arab Spring simply passed me by. Staying on the sidelines did not spare me police harassment, though. When public security officers learned that my books would be published in Germany, Taiwan and the United States, they began phoning and visiting me frequently.
In March, my police handlers stationed themselves outside my apartment to monitor my daily activities. "Publishing in the West is a violation of Chinese law," they told me. "The prison memoir tarnishes the reputation of China's prison system and 'God Is Red' distorts the party's policy on religion and promotes underground churches." If I refused to cancel my contract with Western publishers, they said, I'd face legal consequences.
Then an invitation from Salman Rushdie arrived, asking me to attend the PEN World Voices Festival in New York. I immediately contacted the local authorities to apply for permission to leave China, and booked my plane ticket. However, the day before my scheduled departure, a police officer called me to "have tea," informing me that my request had been denied. If I insisted on going to the airport, the officer told me, they would make me disappear, just like Ai Weiwei.
For a writer, especially one who aspires to bear witness to what is happening in China, freedom of speech and publication mean more than life itself. My good friend, the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, has paid a hefty price for his writings and political activism. I did not want to follow his path. I had no intention of going back to prison. I was also unwilling to be treated as a "symbol of freedom" by people outside the tall prison walls.
Only by escaping this colossal and invisible prison called China could I write and publish freely. I have the responsibility to let the world know about the real China hidden behind the illusion of an economic boom -- a China indifferent to ordinary people's simmering resentment.
I kept my plan to myself. I didn't follow my usual routine of asking my police handlers for permission. Instead, I packed some clothes, my Chinese flute, a Tibetan singing bowl and two of my prized books, "The Records of the Grand Historian" and the "I Ching." Then I left home while the police were not watching, and traveled to Yunnan. Even though it was sweltering there, I felt like a rat in winter, lying still to save my energy. I spent most of my time with street people. I knew that if I dug around, I could eventually find an exit.
WITH my passport and valid visas from Germany, the United States and Vietnam, I began to move. I shut off my cellphone after making brief contacts with my friends in the West, who had collaborated on the plan. Several days later, I reached a small border town, where I could see Vietnam across a fast-flowing river. My local helper said I could pay someone to secretly ferry me across, but I declined. I had a valid passport. I chose to leave through the border checkpoint on the bridge.
Before the escape, my helper had put me up at a hotel near the border. Amid intermittent showers, I floated in and out of dreams and awoke nervously to the sound of a knock on the door, only to see a prostitute shivering in the rain and asking for shelter. Although sympathetic, I was in no position to help.
At 10 a.m. on July 2, I walked 100 yards to the border post, fully prepared for the worst, but a miracle occurred. The officer checked my papers, stared at me momentarily and then stamped my passport. Without stopping, I traveled to Hanoi and boarded a flight to Poland and then to Germany. As I walked out of Tegel airport in Berlin on the morning of July 6, my German editor, Peter Sillem, greeted me. "My God, my God," he exclaimed. He was deeply moved and could not believe that I was actually in Germany. Outside the airport, the air was fresh and I felt free.
After I settled in, I called my family and girlfriend, who were questioned by the authorities. News about my escape spread fast. A painter friend told me that he had gone to visit Ai Weiwei, who is still closely watched. When my friend mentioned that I had mysteriously landed in Germany, Old Ai's eyes widened. He howled with disbelief, "Really? Really? Really?"
By Sally Huang and Chris Buckley | REUTERS - via UNCENSORED yahoo!news
September 13, 2011
A celebrity army general and his fast-driving son have become the target of Chinese public ire about the privileges of the political elite after the son hit and beat up a couple and then scoffed at bystanders about calling the police.
Li Tianyi, the teenage son of People's Liberation Army general Li Shuangjiang, a singer known for belting out patriotic songs for television shows and official events, careened a souped-up BMW into another car in Beijing last week, and since then the outrage has not stopped.
The younger Li and a friend driving another high-end car then jumped out and roughed up the couple in the other car, and shouted "Who dares call 110?" at alarmed onlookers, the Chinese emergency number used to summon police, media reported.
Li Senior and Junior have become the latest target of angry complaints that the sons and daughters of China's privileged Communist Party elite can scoff at the law because of their family influence.
"How could be a boy so arrogant, so unconscionable?!," one commenter, Pu Zhenghuan, said on Sina.com's popular Chinese microblogging site.
"You have a powerful father, so you can do anything you like? No one can dial the police," another, Hong Can, said on the same website.
Last year, a 22-year-old man was sentenced to six years in jail after he ran over a student in a university in northern China and shouted "Sue me if you dare. My father is Li Gang!" He was arrested and punished after an online uproar started by students at the university.
Li Gang was a deputy police chief in the province, and since then his son's warning has become a byword for the reluctance of officials to confront powerful families.
Li, the 15-year-old son of the general, had no driver's license, according to the Beijing News, and his friend, Su Nan, drove a car with number plates that indicated it had high-level privileges. Police are often reluctant to confront cars with such official plates, although these turned out to be fake, according to some news reports.
The two youths were detained by police on charges of "stirring up trouble." Many comments on China's internet, however, have demanded harsh punishment for the two.
Pedestrians and ordinary drivers in Beijing and other Chinese cities often gripe about privileged drivers in cars with government and army number plates who flout the usual rules.
Li Shuangjiang, 72, the army general, has apologized for his son's actions and promised to make amends to the couple who were attacked.
By Michael Bristow | BBC World News
09 September 2011
A Chinese rights activist has been sentenced to nine months in prison for "stirring up trouble".
Wang Lihong was charged after attending a demonstration last year at the trial of three other activists.
She was detained in March after the government launched a crackdown on dissent.
In prosecuting the 55-year-old, the Chinese authorities have shown how little dissent they are willing to accept in society.
A nine-month sentence could be seen as relatively light, as the maximum prison term for this charge is five years.
But her son, Qi Jianxiang, told the BBC after the sentencing that he was still angry.
He said his mother had been merely fighting for other people's legal rights - and there is nothing wrong with that.
"We think it is unfair because she is not guilty," said Mr Qi, who was in court to hear the sentence.
'Profound' changes
Wang Lihong's crime was to take part in a protest outside a courthouse in Fujian province where three other activists were on trial.
China says that amounted to stirring up trouble.
The 55-year-old maintains she is innocent - and told the judges so at this hearing in Beijing.
"That's your understanding," one apparently answered back, according to her son. Despite that, the activist intends to appeal against the conviction.
Wang Lihong, who is retired, started helping people with their own grievances several years ago.
She was detained during a round-up of activists, dissidents and lawyers earlier this year.
The government apparently thought the Arab Spring might inspire similar protests in China. That never happened - but officials, it seems, did not want to take any chances.
Mr Qi managed to speak to his mother before she was taken away. "She told me to say 'hello' to the internet," he said.
The son said the comment was a reference to how the internet is changing the way people get information in China, a development that is bringing "deep and profound" changes to society.
By Radio FREE Asia
31 Augsut 2011
Chinese authorities further tighten state controls online.
China has announced a clampdown on domestic computer crime starting this week, but activists say the new rules look more likely to limit political dissent.
China's Supreme People's Court and state prosecution service issued a set of regulations on Monday, in a move state-run media said is aimed at fighting hacking and other Internet crime.
"Those who knowingly purchase, sell or cover up illegally obtained data or network control will be subject to criminal penalties," according to a joint legal interpretation, which takes effect on Thursday.
Officials say illegal data transactions have been on the rise in recent months.
"Penalizing these violations helps sever the profit chain of hacking and other related crimes," the official Xinhua news agency reported this week.
Sichuan-based Internet expert Pu Fei, who works for activist Huang Qi's 64Tiananmen website, said the new rules will limit online freedom, however.
"The clarification of terms around hacking offenses and the delineation of online actions is totally unnecessary and won't solve anything," Pu said.
"It is mostly aimed at dissenting opinion online."
He said many of the definitions of hacking could also encompass the use of Web circumvention software by netizens seeking to break through the complex system of filters, blocks, and human censorship known collectively as the "Great Firewall," or GFW.
"Some of the anti-GFW software does things which could be construed as hacking under their definition," Pu said.
Social networking concerns
Chinese officials are increasingly concerned over the power of microblogging sites like Twitter and Sina Weibo to mold and drive public opinion.
An article carried by Xinhua on Tuesday called for an end to the "cancer" of online rumors, in the latest sign of official unease over the rising popularity of social networking sites.
"The Internet is an important carrier of social information, civilization, and progress. Rumors will harm the network and are a dangerous cancer," Xinhua said in a commentary published only in Chinese.
"To nurture a healthy Internet, we must eradicate the soil in which rumors grow," it said.
According to popular blogger Wen Yunchao, known online by his nickname Beifeng, recent moves by Internet giant Sina to close the accounts of some microbloggers accused of "rumor-mongering" could lead to far tighter controls over Twitter-like services in future.
"If they set up a real-name registration system, then they can move to ensure that anyone in public security databases isn't able to carry out their activities via social media," Wen said.
The same would not be true for the "50 cent party," paid freelancers who direct online discussions according to the line taken by the ruling Communist Party, he said.
"Of course the organizations that run the 50-centers would have their own special channels for arranging [microblogging] accounts," Wen said. "Those people would still be active."
He said that if a real-name system is adopted, it won't just be on the Sina platform. "It will be right across the board," he said.
China suspected of attacks
While China has repeatedly denied accusations of involvement in international cyberattacks, recent video footage showed software designed to launch cyberattacks on overseas institutions.
The video, which included shots of software including a drop-down menu of attack targets for selection, the former I.P. address of a U.S. university website, and a large button labeled "attack," was available for playback on the official station website for weeks after broadcast, but was later deleted.
Earlier this year, security firm McAfee said in a report titled "Operation Shady RAT" that hackers compromised computer security at more than 70 global organizations, including the U.N. and U.S. government bodies, sparking speculation that China was behind the attacks.
McAfee did not identify any country behind the hacking campaign, but its security experts said in February that hackers working from China had targeted the computers of oil and gas companies in the U.S., Greece, Taiwan, and Kazakhstan.
Chinese officials say that the country is just as much the target of online crime as anywhere else, however.
Xinhua reported on Tuesday that more than one million IP addresses in China were controlled from overseas in 2009, while 42,000 websites were distorted by hackers.
According to official figures, around 18 million Chinese computers are infected by the Conficker virus every month, or about 30 percent of computers infected globally.
According to Beijing's Ministry of Public Security, the number of viruses circulating on the Internet has risen by around 80 percent year-on-year over the past five years, while 80 percent of Internet-connected computers are vulnerable to hackers.
Reported by Bi Zimo for RFA's Cantonese service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
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