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By Radio Free Asia
August 31, 2010

The beating of an exposer of fraud highlights recent attacks against members of the Chinese media.

A leading Chinese campaigner against academic fraud and fake remedies is recovering as police investigate a brutal attack against him in a Beijing alleyway, his lawyer said Tuesday.

Peng Jian, the legal representative of "science cop" Fang Zhouzi, said his client was recovering well after he was attacked over the weekend by two men, one of whom sprayed anesthetic in his face, and the other of whom tried to beat him with a hammer.

"The thugs planned to have one of them knock me unconscious with the anesthetic and the other one beat me to death with the iron hammer," Fang said in a dramatic account of the attack carried on his personal blog and translated by Hong Kong-based blogger Roland Soong.

The attack took place near Fang Zhouzi's home at around 5 p.m. Aug. 29 after he had finished an interview with Liaoning TV about Taoist master Li Yi, whose claims of superhuman feats of endurance he had investigated.

"Learning from the attack on Fang Xuanchang, I reacted quickly, ran fast, and escaped," Fang Zhouzi wrote, referring to a similar attack on June 24 that left science journalist Fang Xuanchang hospitalized.

The Beijing municipal public security bureau posted on its sina.com microblog: "The police are investigating the attack on Fang and will reveal the investigation results to the public."

Journalists targeted

Chinese journalists and media are increasingly finding themselves the targets of threats and attempts at censorship by private-sector companies as well as government officials if their reporting damages vested interests, overseas rights groups say.

Paris-based press freedom group Reporter Without Borders (RSF) slammed the Beijing police investigation into the attack on Fang Xuanchang as "desultory."

Both Fang Zhouzi and Fang Xuanchang said they are convinced the attacks were acts of revenge by persons they had discredited during the course of their professional lives.

"This was obviously retaliation by someone whom I had once exposed," Fang Zhouzi wrote of his attackers. "They waited near near my residence for a long time until they seized this moment."

"I hope that the case will be solved quickly, along with the case of Fang Xuanchang."

Peng said Fang Zhouzi had also received threatening texts and phone calls about a month before the attack, which resembled in its methods the earlier attack on Fang Xuanchang.

"Fang Xuanchang was attacked by two thugs who hit him on the head with a hammer," Peng said. "Fang Zhouzi was also attacked by two thugs who tried to hit him on the head with a hammer."

"[Like the previous attack], they also used anesthetic, and used extreme force, and didn't say a word. Both attacks appeared calculated to kill their target."

Peng said he believed the attack might be linked to Fang Zhouzi's campaigning against a controversial surgical operation known as "Xiao's procedure," which claims to restore bladder control to people with spina bifida or spinal cord injury.

Fang Zhouzi had recently published an article in the U.S.-based Journal of Urology, which concluded that Xiao's procedure was ineffective, and highlighted the cases of patients who had complained about it on his campaign website.

Xiao's procedure is designed to treat neurogenic bladder due to spina bifida, or spinal cord injury, and has been undergoing clinical trials in China, the United States, and a few other countries.

Response to articles

Xu Youyu, a former professor at the China Academy of Social Sciences, called the attack on Fang Zhouzi a serious incident, but not an uncommon phenomenon in today's China.

"Firstly, he is a courageous and genuine person who works to overturn fraud, fakery, and corruption in academic circles," Xu said.

"I don't think he will be put off by these threats. I am confident that he will continue his work."

Fang Xuanchang also said he believes that the attacks on himself and Fang Zhouzi were the direct result of articles they had written.

"Right now, it doesn't look as if there could be any other reason," Fang Xuanchang said. "This is revenge because we have angered someone with the articles we have written."

"At a personal level, [we] haven't made any enemies, so it's purely the articles. I think we can rule out other possibilities."

Some Chinese media carried front-page coverage of the attack on Fang, with netizens responding in shock and outrage and calling on police to find the attackers.

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

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By Scott McDonald - AP | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
August 28, 2010

China's monster traffic jam has reared its head again, with trucks and cars backed up for up to 18 miles (30 kilometers) Saturday on a highway north of Beijing, although that is a third the size of what it was.

The traffic jam came four days after the break-up of an even bigger one -- stretching to 60 miles (100 kilometers) at one point.

State media said the latest jam on the Beijing-Tibet highway was caused by an accident and road maintenance.

The worst of the jam started in Zhangjiakou, a city about 90 miles (150 kilometers) northwest of Beijing, and stretched into Inner Mongolia in northern China, with traffic creeping along in fits and starts.

A woman who answered the phone at the Beijing traffic management office said drivers should not take the highway. "The traffic flow is very slow," said the woman, who refused to give her name.

Traffic jams are part of daily life in China's major cities, with vehicles moving at a crawl in parts of Beijing for most of the day.

In the last traffic jam on the Beijing-Tibet highway, which started Aug. 14 and lasted about 10 days, state media said some drivers were stuck for five days with drivers on the worst-hit stretches passing the time sitting in the shade of their immobilized trucks, playing cards, sleeping on the asphalt or bargaining with price-gouging food vendors.

A bottle of water was selling for 10 yuan ($1.50), 10 times the normal price, Chinese media reports said.

The main reason traffic has increased on the partially four-lane highway is the opening of coal mines in the northwest, vital for the booming economy, which this month surpassed Japan's in size and is now second only to America's.

Officials eased the first jam by directing truckers to take a 180-mile-long (300-kilometer-long) detour, the China Daily said.

It quoted one truck driver, Lu Yong, who was stuck in both jams, as saying he should have prepared some food this time. "Who knows when the traffic will move again?" said the 37-year-old, who was stranded for two nights in the last jam at almost the same location.

A woman at the Inner Mongolian traffic management office said it may take several days to ease the latest jam. "Please do not drive on this expressway," said the official, who also would not give her name.

>> Original Source

By Matthew Little and Jason Loftus | The Epoch Times
August 18, 2010

The office of Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon has called on the Chinese embassy in Ottawa to return a Canadian journalist's passport, which he said was withheld when he refused to provide details about his personal life in Canada.

Zhang Zhaopei applied for a visa to visit China from the Chinese consulate in Toronto on Friday, submitting his Canadian passport as part of the process. But when he went to pick up his visa, he was given a blank sheet of paper and told to list extensive personal information about his work, family, and personal history.

Mr. Zhang refused, saying he would abandon his visa application. But Zhang says he was told he still wouldn't get his Canadian passport back if he didn't provide the requested details.

"I never thought they can do this thing," said Zhang, a reporter for New Tang Dynasty Television and a Falun Gong practitioner.

On Wednesday, a spokesperson for Minister Cannon said Canada had asked for the passport to be returned.

"We are aware that the individual in question had requested a visa on Friday to travel to China and that his passport has not been returned," spokesperson Melissa Lantsman told The Epoch Times.

"A Canadian passport is the property of the government of Canada. We have made a formal request to the Chinese embassy that the passport be returned into our possession."

Ms. Lantsman said her office had read Mr. Zhang's story earlier this week in The Epoch Times and that the coverage had brought "much needed attention" to his case.

Zhang was attempting to return to China to visit his family who he has been unable to see in nine years.

Zhang had tried to return to China from Singapore in 2002 and 2004, only to be sent packing once he landed in Beijing and Shanghai, respectively. At that time, he was told it was because he practiced Falun Gong, a traditional Chinese meditation practice that became the target of persecution in China in 1999 and has since put up a spirited defence of human rights.

Mr. Zhang immigrated to Canada in 2005 and is now a citizen. He said he wasn't surprised he was denied a visa this time around, though having his passport withheld did come as a shock.

New Tang Dynasty Television has encountered interference from the Chinese authorities in the past. The regime previously pressured a European satellite carrier to drop the station's signal into China and has also attempted to exclude NTDTV from a press event inside Canada's Parliament Hill earlier this year.

NTDTV and The Epoch Times made headlines in the lead-up to the G-20 this June when a press conference with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Chinese leader Hu Jintao failed to take place due to the regime's insistence that both media outlets be prohibited from attending, a request the Parliamentary Press Gallery refused to accommodate.

Zhang said the information the consulate requested would have made it easier for the consulate to interfere and monitor his daily activities--something he didn't want to facilitate.

"I think they just want to control everything of myself, including my work and everything ... They want to control everything," he said.

Zhang told the consulate worker handling his case that if they didn't return his passport, he would contact the police. A supervisor there told him to go ahead, he said.

>> Complete Report and Related Articles

By David Barboza | The New York Times
13 August 2010

In an apparent bid to extend its control over the Internet and cash in on the rapid growth of mobile devices, China plans to create a government-controlled search engine.

The new venture would compete with Baidu.com, a private company that runs China's dominant search engine. Baidu's market has grown since Google retreated from the mainland earlier this year.

The state-owned China Mobile -- the world's biggest cellphone carrier -- and Xinhua, China's official state-run news agency, signed an agreement on Thursday to create a joint venture called the Search Engine New Media International Communications Company.

China already has the world's largest number of Internet users, more than 420 million, and also the largest number of mobile phone subscribers, with more than 800 million.

Private start-up companies play a big role on the Web in China, but the government maintains tight control over Internet companies and censors content that it deems dangerous or sensitive.

Now, though, analysts say that Beijing is pushing state-run companies to take a more active role online. China Central Television, the nation's dominant broadcaster, is trying to develop an online video site. Xinhua News Agency is trying to build a global platform of news providers using television and the Internet.

At the announcement of the joint venture in Beijing on Thursday, Zhou Xisheng, vice president of Xinhua, said the new company would build a leading search engine platform. But he also said the move was "part of the country's broader efforts to safeguard its information security and push forward the robust, healthy and orderly development of China's new media industry."

Representatives of Baidu could not be reached for comment.

For years, Baidu has dominated Internet searches in China, holding a sizable lead over Google, which entered the market late. Earlier this year, Google pulled its search engine out of Beijing after complaining about censorship and online attacks that appeared to be coming from hackers within China.

Google now operates its Chinese-language search engine from Hong Kong; it is accessible from China but some results are censored by the government.

Most of China's other big, private Internet companies are involved in online games and entertainment. But on Monday, Alibaba.com, one of the country's biggest e-commerce sites, said the company and a fund co-founded by its chairman would acquire a 16 percent stake in the search engine Sogou, which is owned by the Chinese portal Sohu.com.

Yahoo, the United States portal, holds a 40 percent stake in the Alibaba Group.

>> Original Report

By Radio Free Asia
August 05, 2010

People previously allowed free movement are now having problems leaving China

Chinese lawyers, academics, and rights activists say that authorities are increasingly targeting them through immigration controls, with a growing number of people prevented from leaving the country in recent months to attend overseas events.

Earlier this week, authorities in the southeastern province of Fujian prevented Beijing-based writer Mo Zhixu from leaving the country, on grounds that he posed a "danger to state security."

"They told me very clearly that it might harm national security if I were to leave the country," Mo said from his Beijing home after being refused permission to board a flight for Hokkaido in Japan at an airport in the southeastern city of Xiamen.

"I had an inkling that something like this might happen because of [my involvement in] Charter '08," said Mo, referring to his signing of a document in December 2008 which called for sweeping political reforms in China.

Mo said he had been a vocal supporter of jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, who helped to draft the Charter. Liu is currently serving an 11-year jail term for subversion.

Mo said he also took part in a discussion forum last year on the June 4, 1989 military crackdown on the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

"They want to put on the pressure now," Mo said, noting that other Charter signatories and fellow activists had received similar treatment. "I thought that it might happen to me, as well."

"But I also thought that mostly I write commentaries, and I haven't actually done very much ... but in end they didn't let me go," he said.

Security concerns cited

Mo said he was prevented from leaving China under Section 1, Clause 8, of the Entry and Exit Management Law of the People's Republic of China, which states that a person whom the Chinese government believes to be threat to national security may be prevented from leaving the country.

However, the authorities did not confiscate his passport, Mo said.

Guo Yushan, director of the nongovernment Transition Institute, said he had been prevented from leaving China in July to attend a conference of nongovernment organizations (NGOs) run by the European Union.

"I have been prevented from leaving for two events," Guo said. "One was on my way to Poland, where I would have been the only Chinese person."

"At the other one, in Brussels, I knew that quite a few of us were going. [AIDS activist] Wan Yanhai went to that one."

Guo, whose group researches free-market economics, said officials gave no reason for the refusal to let him leave, and didn't retain his passport, either.

And in May, Beijing-based rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong was refused permission to leave China as he attempted to go through immigration controls at Beijing's international airport, on his way to attend an event in the United States.

A growing trend?

Jiang was detained in a small room and held while officials checked with their superiors, and then told him he wouldn't be allowed to leave, citing the same clause of China's immigration law that was applied in the case of Mo Zhixu.

"I'm not sure exactly about the timing, but we have discovered that a large group of people who had never run into problems before were being told they couldn't leave," Jiang said.

"[These are] all people who are fairly active in the public domain, and these measures are being used against them."

Fan Yafeng, former law professor at the prestigious China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), said he sees the measures as part of a growing trend in national security enforcement.

He said ordinary citizens, rights activists, lawyers, and academics had been subjected to such controls recently, and that there is no way to appeal against the decisions, nor to pursue complaints against the officials responsible.

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

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