News: November 2011 Archives

By Radio FREE Asia

November 25, 2011

Two popular television hosts are fired in Hong Kong, raising fears that Chinese censors are exerting undue influence over the island.

Hong Kong's government broadcaster has said it won't renew the contracts of two popular current-affairs talk show hosts in 2012, sparking fears of further pressure on media freedom in the territory since its return to Chinese rule.

Ng Chi-sum and Robert Chow hosted two popular radio phone-in shows for government broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), but the pair have now been told their contracts will not be renewed.

Wu expressed regret at the decision, which comes just months after the arrival of a new director of broadcasting, Roy Tang.

"It takes a very long time for a station to establish a talk show with a popular host, and the listeners become familiar with the personal style of that presenter, and they like it," Ng told reporters this week.

"I don't believe that I am too aggressive as a presenter, so I don't think I should have been targeted."

Ng's show, "Open Line, Open View," will continue with a new line-up of presenters and guest hosts, as well as relying heavily on the services of student reporters.

Meanwhile, Chow said the decision not to extend his contract, which didn't give him civil service status, must have been a fairly weighty one.

"It's hard for me to believe that our new director of broadcasting had no hand at all in this decision," he told local media.

"But if the staff believe that a civil servant can do a better job of presenting a show than any outsider, then I wish them good luck," he said.

Political motives?

Hong Kong has seen a number of outspoken radio personalities depart from key talk shows in the years since the handover of sovereignty to Beijing in 1997.

But RTHK management have denied any political motive behind the move.

Spokeswoman Kirindi Chan said the decision was arrived at following discussions among production staff.

"There are no political factors here, and there was no pressure from Director of Broadcasting Roy Tang," she told reporters.

Democratic legislator Emily Lau called on RTHK to hold a news conference to answer detailed questions about the decision to remove Ng and Chow.

"It's fine to change some things about RTHK, but they should give a clear explanation of how the new reforms make things better than they were before," Lau told local media.

"They should come out alongside the two presenters and give a clear account of this," she said.

"RTHK is itself a media organization, and for them to deal with things in such a way is pretty poor from a public relations point of view."

Under the terms of its handover from British rule, Hong Kong has been promised the continuation of existing freedoms of expression and association for 50 years.

But journalists fear that media organizations in the territory may nevertheless be highly susceptible to self-censorship, for fear of angering powerful corporations or high-ranking officials in mainland China.

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

>> Original Source

By Andrew Jacobs | The New York Times

November 26, 2011

After two decades of working as a successful engineer in the United States, Hu Zhicheng decided to return to China in 2004 and apply his rich experience to designing catalytic converters for the nation's booming automotive industry.

"I saw how polluted the air was here, and thought I could make a difference," said Mr. Hu, a naturalized American citizen who has a doctorate in engineering.

Now it seems he cannot leave.

The last three times he tried to board an airplane and return to his family in Los Angeles, Mr. Hu, 49, was turned away by Chinese border agents who claimed that he was a wanted man.

The problem is, he cannot find out exactly who wants him and why.

Mr. Hu, an inventor trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with 48 patents and a number of prestigious science awards to his name,was jailed for a year and a half starting in 2008 after a former business associate accused him of commercial theft. The charges were so spurious that prosecutors withdrew the case -- a rare gesture in China's top-down legal system.

But since his release 19 months ago, Mr. Hu's life has been in limbo and his family has grown increasingly frantic. He writes to powerful Communist Party officials who he imagines might control his fate. A coterie of influential friends and colleagues has been lobbying on his behalf. And this month, his daughter, a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley, began a petition campaign that has garnered more than 50,000 signatures.

Richard Buangan, a spokesman for the United States Embassy in Beijing, said that American diplomats had had little success in pressing his case with Chinese officials. "No authority has been cooperative with our request for information on the exit control," he said.

Mr. Hu's predicament highlights the potential perils of doing business in China, where commercial disputes can easily become criminal matters, especially when the politically well-connected use the country's malleable legal system to bludgeon rivals. Most worrisome, legal experts say, are the country's vague commercial secrets laws that state-owned enterprises -- the companies that dominate China's economy -- sometimes wield to protect information related to production, procurement, mergers and strategic planning.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that overseas Chinese are more vulnerable to such abuses than their non-Chinese compatriots. Last year, Stern Hu, a Chinese-Australian mining executive, was detained shortly after a deal between his company,Rio Tinto, and the state-owned Aluminum Corporation of China fell through. Convicted of stealing trade secrets and bribery, Mr. Hu was sentenced to 10 years in prison after a largely closed trial.

Xue Feng, a Chinese-American geologist who is serving eight years in prison on similar charges, said he was tortured during his interrogation. His supporters, including American diplomats, insist that the oil and gas industry data he sold was publicly available. In 2008, the authorities executed Wo Weihan, a Chinese biomedical researcher who had returned from Europe to start a medical supply company in Beijing. Tried in secret, Mr. Wo was accused of espionage, although the details of his crimes were never disclosed.

Even as official policies seek to lure Chinese-born inventors, academics and entrepreneurs with housing perks and financial incentives, lingering anti-Western xenophobia nurtured during the Mao years sometimes taints them as unpatriotic for having left the motherland. "It's kind of reverse racism," said John Kamm, executive director of Dui Hua, an American human rights group that frequently advocates on behalf of detained foreign nationals in China. "If you're ethnic Chinese with a foreign passport, you're really not considered a foreigner."

Mr. Hu, whose long résumé includes stints as a researcher in Japan and more than a decade working for an American designer of catalytic converters, the Engelhard Corporation, would seem to be the ideal returnee.

In 2006, when he took a job as chief scientist for Wuxi Weifu Environmental Catalysts, a company in eastern Jiangsu Province, he also brought his wife and their two American-born children, in part, he says, because he wanted them to become steeped in Chinese language and culture.

His return coincided with a surge in domestic car production and government-led efforts to reduce tailpipe emissions. The company prospered, and so did Mr. Hu, who eventually became Wuxi Weifu's president. It now provides catalytic converters for half of all Chinese-made cars.

Mr. Hu's troubles began after his company refused to buy components from the Hysci Specialty Materials Company, which is based in Tianjin and once supplied Engelhard.

According to Mr. Hu and his lawyers, Hysci would not take no for an answer. They say Hysci's well-connected chief executive, Dou Shihua, sent Tianjin public security agents to Wuxi Weifu to pressure Mr. Hu to change his mind.

The police raised allegations of stolen trade secrets but also suggested that the accusations would evaporate if the two companies did business together. Mr. Hu would not budge. "We have a system of quality control, and even one word from me could not change that," he said.

In the end, the veiled threats gave way to an arrest, and Mr. Hu was put in a jail in Tianjin.

The patent infringement case that prosecutors eventually built against him cited technology that has been publicly available in the United States for decades, according to several scientists who rallied to his defense.

But even after prosecutors withdrew the case and Mr. Hu was freed, he found his return home blocked by immigration officials who claimed that he was still wanted by the Tianjin police. Each time he or his lawyer contacted the authorities there, however, they were told there were no such restrictions.

One of his lawyers, Wang Shou, said he believed that Mr. Dou, Hysci's chief executive, was continuing to use his influence to exact revenge or get a deal yet.

Reached by telephone, a sales executive at Hysci refused to comment on the case. The Tianjin Public Security Bureau hung up before answering questions about Mr. Hu.

His family does not know what else to do. Although his daughter visited last summer, Mr. Hu's wife and 16-year-old son are reluctant to come here, saying they fear they, too, could be prevented from leaving.

"I worry about my husband every hour of every day," his wife, Hong Li, who is also an engineer, said by telephone from Los Angeles. "I don't want my son to grow up without a father."

The emotional anguish suffered by Mr. Hu has been compounded by pain from a herniated disc that worsened during the 17 months he slept on the floor of his jail cell.

Earlier this month, at a chemical engineering conference on the outskirts of Beijing, he lectured about ways to reduce emissions from heavy trucks in China.

As the conference wound down and his American colleagues headed to the airport, he made a joke about escaping across the border.

"If I could only invent something that would make me invisible," he said.

>> Original Source

By Radio FREE Asia

22 November 2011

His wife says police also took away his personal computer hard disk drive.

A protester holds a paper-made prison door in front of a policeman (R) standing guard during Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang's visit to Hong Kong, Aug. 18, 2011.

Chinese authorities detained an activist in the central province of Anhui on Tuesday after he reported that a cyber dissident was tortured in detention, his wife said.

Police also took away Li Wenge's personal computer hard disk drive after searching his home in Bengbu city.

"Seven or eight police officers from the National Security Bureau came to our home around 10 o'clock in the morning, and they took my husband away for 10 days of detention," said Zhong Xuemei, Li's wife.

"I don't know why he was detained and he did nothing wrong," Zhong added.

Zhong was formally informed about her husband's detention when she went to a nearby police station to send his personal items.

"The notice said Li Wenge was detained for 'disturbing social order,'" the wife told RFA.

She said the police notice indicated that his detention was over a report written by him and Wuhan-based dissident Qin Yongmin about dissident writer Wu Lebao who was allegedly tortured while in detention in Bengbu.

"It alleges that my husband distorted the facts, spreading slander against the [Chinese] Communist Party," Zhong said.

Critical articles

Wu was detained for more than three months earlier this year for posting articles critical of the government on the Internet.

On his release at the end of last month, reports about his torture in detention surfaced.

Li and Qin sent out an online appeal for an investigation into the case, condemning what they called police atrocities.

However, their petition led to a police crackdown.

On Nov. 16, police in Wuhan searched Qin's home and also confiscated his computer hard drive and put him on a 10-day detention. Qin is expected to be released later this week.

"I believe that the detention of Mr. Li Wenge has two reasons," said Chengdu-based dissident Huang Qi in an interview on Tuesday.

"The first one is that he launched an appeal for released rights activist Wu Lebao who was tortured during his detention. And the second one is that Li supported a series of campaigns against human rights abuses in the southern province of Guangdong," Huang explained.

Huang pointed out that Li has been one of the leading human rights activists in China, saying he worked on a low profile but relentlessly exposed human rights violations.

Huang warned the Chinese authorities against continuing with the crackdown.

"The people's rights campaign in China has currently developed to a stage where the authorities are beginning to have dialogues with rights activists. Under these circumstances, any local people or organization who clamps down on rights activists will be nailed on the 'Pillar of Shame.'"

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

>> Original Source

By Associated Press | via UNCENSORED yahoo!news

November 16, 2011

By Grace Ng | The Straits Times | ASIA News Network

November 11, 2011

By Michael Bristow | BBC World News

November 10, 2011

The three men acted swiftly and efficiently - they had a job to do. They yanked open the car door, barked a few orders and then snatched equipment from out of our hands: cameras, mobile phones and recording devices. We were told to stay put while one man radioed for help.

This was the scene at the entrance to the village of Dongshigu in China's Shandong Province, where a self-taught legal activist has been virtually imprisoned in his own home.

Chen Guangcheng, blind since childhood, is watched by plainclothes security officers, who appear to be acting outside the law - but with the authorities' approval.

Activists have been trying to visit him for months; many say they are beaten up for their efforts. The BBC saw the kind of men they say they come up against.

Mr Chen made his name by helping women who said they had been forced to have abortions or undergo sterilisation. He helped expose the harsher side of China's family planning policies.

His activism eventually landed him in jail. The 39-year-old was sentenced to more than four years in 2006 for disrupting traffic and damaging property.

He denied the allegations, with many believing the charges were brought simply to silence him.

The activist was released last year, but, along with his wife and daughter, has spent much of the time since confined to his home.

Although he is isolated from the world, unable to leave a village surrounded by orchards and hills, Mr Chen has not been forgotten.

A steady trickle of activists has been making its way to his home, near the booming city of Linyi, for the past several months. But few get through the security cordon.

Personal grievance

A group of 37 tried to visit at the end of October and were attacked by about 100 unidentified individuals, according to the New York-based organisation Human Rights in China.

One of those who went along was Liu Li, a 49-year-old who has been living in Beijing for the last six months, pursuing his own personal grievance against the government.

Mr Liu is still on crutches, the result of being beaten up outside Mr Chen's village, he said. But he does not regret trying to visit him.

"Chen Guangcheng represents all that's wrong and unfair when it comes to human rights in China. He lost his freedom - so we want to visit him to show our support," he said.

Others have shown their dissatisfaction with the legal activist's treatment by posting photographs on the internet showing themselves wearing dark glasses similar to ones worn by Mr Chen.

The case has also attracted international attention.

Gary Locke, the US ambassador in China, recently wrote to the Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, to ask about Mr Chen.

The claims of attacks on activists outside Mr Chen's village sound, at the very least, plausible.

Rule of law?

When the BBC visited, it was clear the men who stopped us were well drilled and organised - although it was impossible to say who had hired them.

There appeared to be a chain of command: one man took took some money from our car and put it into his pocket, before someone else told him to put it back.

The men wore plain clothes, showed no identification and refused to answer questions about who they were. They did not ask before taking what they wanted.

After searching our equipment they gave it back and then told us to leave the village.

Beijing-based lawyer Lan Zhixue said the government had offered no legal reason for restricting the activities of the blind activist, and Chinese law gave them no excuse.

"He should have the full range of freedoms - the freedom to move around, the freedom to speak out and the freedom to meet friends," he said.

The government does not appear to have even offered a veneer of legality in this case, a worrying development according to Mr Lan.

"Without the rule of law, how can we talk about harmony and stability?" he added, referring to watchwords often used by the Chinese government to justify its actions.

Other legal experts go further, saying the treatment meted out to Chen Guangcheng is common - and at least known by those at the very top of the Chinese Communist Party, if not authorised by them.

Jerome Cohen, an authority on China's legal system, said: "The leaders of China are very smart guys and they are very knowledgeable about the full scope of unrest and dissatisfaction."

Mr Cohen, a professor at New York University School of Law, said officials used repression because they feared that dissatisfaction, fanned by people like Mr Chen, could undermine their rule.

China likes to say it is a country ruled by laws; government spokespeople regularly repeat this mantra in answer to questions about the treatment of activists and dissidents.

In October, it issued an official document on the development it has made in establishing a "socialist legal system".

This has been "solidly put in place", declared the paper. Chen Guangcheng, and many others, might disagree.

Plainclothes security officials stop the BBC from visiting Chen Guangcheng

>> Original Source

By BBC World News

November 07, 2011

Chinese firms have agreed to increase their censorship of internet content as authorities seeks greater control over the medium.

The heads of 39 companies including Baidu and Alibaba agreed to "curb rumours" and the spreading of "harmful information", official media reported.

Chinese authorities has often been accused of censoring online material to maintain control over its population.

China is the world's biggest internet market.

The move comes just weeks after Communist Party leaders agreed a list of "cultural development guidelines" which included increased controls over social media and penalties for those spreading "harmful information".

Increased scrutiny

The decision was agreed upon after a three-day session hosted by the government and attended by heads of some of the biggest internet and technology companies in China.

The meeting was presided over by Wang Chen, director of the State Council Information Office, the government's propaganda and information arm.

After the session, internet companies agreed to "conscientiously safeguard the broadcasting of positive messages online," Xinhua news agency reported.

China has more than 500 million internet users and authorities have been concerned about the spread of information they deem unsuitable.

Last month a university student was detained after being accused of posting a fake news story about a man killing eight village chiefs in the south-western province of Yunnan.

A Shanghai resident was held in police custody for 15 days after accusations he had posted a falsified income tax document online.

Miao Wei, minister of Industry and Information Technology, called upon internet companies to strengthen their research and development to ensure better censorship of content.

>> Original Source

By Andrew Jacobs | The New York Times

04 November 2011

Membership in the upper ranks of the Chinese Communist Party has always had a few undeniable advantages. There are the state-supplied luxury sedans, special schools for the young ones and even organic produce grown on well-guarded, government-run farms. When they fall ill, senior leaders can check into 301 Military Hospital, long considered the capital's premier medical institution.

But even in their most addled moments of envy, ordinary Beijingers could take some comfort in the knowledge that the soupy air they breathe on especially polluted days also finds its way into the lungs of the privileged and pampered.

Such assumptions, it seems, are not entirely accurate.

As it turns out, the homes and offices of many top leaders are filtered by high-end devices, at least according to a Chinese company, the Broad Group, which has been promoting its air-purifying machines in advertisements that highlight their ubiquity in places where many officials work and live.

The company's vice president, Zhang Zhong, said there were more than 200 purifiers scattered throughout Great Hall of the People, the office of China's president, Hu Jintao, and Zhongnanhai, the walled compound for senior leaders and their families. "Creating clean, healthy air for our national leaders is a blessing to the people," boasts the company's promotional material, which includes endorsements from a variety of government and corporate leaders, among them Long Yongtu, a top economic official who insists on bringing the device along for car rides and hotel stays. "Breathing clean air is a basic human need," he says in a testimonial.

In some countries, the gushing endorsement of a well-placed official would be considered a public relations coup. But in China, where resentment of the high and mighty is on the rise, news of the company's advertising campaign is stirring a maelstrom of criticism. "They don't have to eat gutter oil or drink poisoned milk powder and now they're protected from filthy air," said one posting on Sina Weibo, the country's most popular microblog service. "This shows their indifference to the lives of ordinary people."

News that Chinese leaders are largely insulated from Beijing's famously foul air comes at a time of unusually heavy pollution in the capital. In recent weeks, the capital has been continuously shrouded by a beige pall and readings from the United States Embassy's rooftop air monitoring device have repeatedly registered unsafe levels of particulate matter.

But those very readings, posted hourly on Twitter or through an iPhone app app, have prompted a public debate over whether the Chinese government is purposely obscuring the extent of the nation's air pollution. Unlike the American Embassy readings, Chinese environmental officials do not publicly release data on the smallest particulates, those less than 2.5 micrometers, which scientists say are most harmful because they are able to penetrate the lungs so deeply. Instead, government data covers only pollutants larger than 10 micrometers -- a category that includes sand blown in from the arid north and dust stirred up from construction sites.

Environmental officials prefer to focus on air quality improvements of recent years, largely achieved by replacing coal-fired stoves with electric heaters and closing heavy industry in and around the capital. Driving restrictions have slightly eased the environmental injury of the 700,000 new vehicles that last year joined the capital's jammed roadways.

But when pressed, those same officials acknowledge that their pollution metrics willfully ignore the smaller particles, much of them generated by car and truck exhaust. In fact, the American Embassy's monitor has become an unwelcome intrusion into China's domestic affairs, according to a diplomatic cable released this year by Wiki Leaks, which said a Foreign Ministry official had requested that the Americans stop publicizing the data.

The director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a nonprofit organization in Beijing, said many government officials feared that publicly revealing such data could stymie development or dent the image of cities that had been trumpeting their environmental bona fides.

"I don't agree with this philosophy," said the director, Ma Jun. "The government's more urgent priority should be to warn the public when the air quality is dangerous so people susceptible to poor air quality, like children or the elderly, can make decisions to protect their health."

The government does appear to be moving in that direction. In September, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said it planned to amend the nation's air quality standards to include the smallest particulates, although it has not released a timetable for adopting the new standards.

Officials in Beijing, however, are apparently not quite ready to embrace it. In response to criticism over the heavy smog of recent weeks, a spokesman for the city's environmental protection bureau, Du Shaozhong, assured the public that they should feel secure in the government's own readings, which termed the city's air "slightly polluted" even as the embassy monitor found it so hazardous that it exceeded measurable levels. "China's air quality should not be judged from data released by foreign embassies in Beijing," he said.

According to the Broad Group's Web site, it did not take much to convince the nation's Communist Party leaders that they would do well to acquire the firm's air purifiers, some of which cost $2,000. To make their case, company executives installed one in a meeting room used by members of the Politburo Standing Committee. The deal was apparently sealed a short while later, when technicians made a show of cleaning out the soot-laden filters. "After they saw the inklike dirty water, Broad air purifier became the national leaders' appointed air purifier!" the Web site said.

 Edy Yin contributed research.

>> Original Source

By Radio FREE Asia

November 04, 2011

Chinese authorities move to restrict expressions of Tibetan national culture.

Chinese authorities in the Tibetan capital Lhasa have closed an exhibition of Tibetan art amid growing efforts by Tibetans to assert their cultural and national identity in a region increasingly dominated by Han Chinese.

The exhibition, which was shut down two hours after it opened, included modern paintings and a display of wooden writing boards called jangshing, traditionally used to teach the written Tibetan language.

"[On Oct. 16] there were many people browsing through the exhibition," said a Lhasa resident, speaking to RFA on condition of anonymity.

"Among them were police and other security officials," the man said.

"Since it was really crowded, I left with the intention to return when fewer people were there. But when I came back on Oct. 17, the exhibition had closed with no word of explanation."

"I heard later that it was ordered to close," the man said.

Authorities may have shut down the exhibition by Tibetan artist Kalnor because of the "sensitivity of Tibetans displaying traditional cultural themes," he said, adding, "There are heavy restrictions on all Tibetans living in the Lhasa area now."

Modern and traditional themes

The exhibition, arranged in three rooms, had included displays of old and modern styles of writing and contemporary paintings done on traditional backgrounds, the man said.

In one painting, a Buddhist Wheel of Life was depicted with a lamp placed at its center, and with moths flying into its flame. In another, monks were shown flying in the sky.

A third picture showed the 21 Taras, popular female divinities, painted on butterfly backgrounds.

The main section of exhibition contained the jangshing, wooden boards used for practicing Tibetan writing, the man said.

"These were arranged as if for a class, with writing boards, bamboo sticks for writing, and bags containing white power used to trace the lines shown on the boards."

"It was an interesting display of Tibetan art," he said.

"I wanted to see more of it in detail, but the crowd was so overwhelming that I couldn't view all of the items."

'A critical role'

Speaking in an interview on the state-controlled Xinhua Television Network, artist Kalnor said that in old Tibet, wooden writing boards had played "a critical role" in teaching the Tibetan language.

"Now we have computers and paper to write with, but for Tibetan writing practice, we have to depend on jangshing," said Kalnor, who learned traditional writing from his father and now teaches art at the Toelung Dechen Middle School outside Lhasa.

"I want to revive the old tradition of practicing writing and initiate further improvements," he said.

The Xinhua interview aired on Oct. 20 and did not mention that the exhibition had been closed.

Tibet's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama recently called on the Chinese government to change its "repressive" policies in Tibet, citing China's crackdown on monasteries and policies curtailing use of the Tibetan language.

Eleven Tibetans inside Tibet have self-immolated so far this year in protest against Chinese rule.

Tensions in the Tibet Autonomous Region and in Tibetan-populated areas in China's provinces have not subsided since anti-China riots swept through the Tibetan Plateau in March 2008.

Reported by RFA's Tibetan service. Translations by Karma Dorjee. Written in English by Richard Finney.

>> Original Source

By BBC World News

November 01, 2011

Chinese authorities have served Ai Weiwei with an official demand telling him to pay 15m yuan ($2.3m; £1.4m) within 15 days, the artist has said.

He said he had rejected the notice, and was not sure whether he would pay.

The artist, one of China's most famous people, was held for almost three months earlier this year before being accused of "economic crimes".

His supporters say the accusations are part of a plot to silence Mr Ai, who is an outspoken critic of the government.

Mr Ai said he would pay the money if it was proved to be a tax issue.

But he said he had not been able to review his company's account books because they had been taken by the authorities.

"I am only a designer of the company. I never signed any of the company's contracts, nor did I ever read any of the company's finance reports, so I have no idea," he told the BBC.

Mr Ai was picked up by police in April as authorities rounded-up activists, following calls on websites for a Middle Eastern-style Jasmine revolution in China.

The state news agency Xinhua said in June that Mr Ai had been released "because of his good attitude in confessing" to tax evasion and because he had agreed to pay back the money he owed.

But on Tuesday he said: "It was not true that I admitted to tax evasion charges. I was never formally arrested and never charged."

"If they really want to prove that I am a bad guy, why don't they behave themselves to make the process more transparent?" he later added.

Since his incarceration, he has won numerous art awards, and was recently named the world's most powerful artist in a poll carried out by an art magazine.

His case has also become a cause celebre for rights activists and critics of China's Communist Party.

And he said he had not seen any evidence showing that the firm had evaded tax.

>> Original Source