Studies / Reports: January 2008 Archives
By Jim Yardley | The New York Times
30 January 2008
When state security agents burst into his apartment last month, Hu Jia was chatting on Skype, the Internet-based telephone system. Mr. Hu's computer was his most potent tool. He disseminated information about human rights cases, peasant protests and other politically touchy topics even though he often lived under de facto house arrest.
Mr. Hu, 34, and his wife, Zeng Jinyan, are human rights advocates who spent much of 2006 restricted to their apartment in a complex with the unlikely name of Bo Bo Freedom City. She blogged about life under detention, while he videotaped a documentary titled "Prisoner in Freedom City." Their surreal existence seemed to reflect an official uncertainty about how, and whether, to shut them up.
That ended on Dec. 27. Mr. Hu was dragged away on charges of subverting state power while Ms. Zeng was bathing their newborn daughter, Qianci. Telephone and Internet connections to the apartment were severed. Mother and daughter are now under house arrest. Qianci, barely 2 months old, is probably the youngest political prisoner in China.
For human rights advocates and Chinese dissidents, Mr. Hu's detention is the most telling example of what they describe as a broadening crackdown on dissent as Beijing prepares to play host to the Olympic Games in August. In recent months, several dissidents have been jailed, including a former factory worker in northeastern China who collected 10,000 signatures after posting an online petition titled "We Want Human Rights, Not the Olympics."
"This is a coordinated cleansing campaign," said Teng Biao, a legal expert who has known Mr. Hu since 2006. "All the troublemakers -- including potential troublemakers -- are being silenced before the Olympic Games."
With fewer than 200 days before the Aug. 8 opening ceremonies, Beijing is in the full throes of preparations. Roads and subway lines are being completed, and the city's new stadiums are nearly finished. But with more than 20,000 journalists expected for the Games, Beijing is also tightening controls over information.
Early this month, the authorities announced that only state-sanctioned companies would be allowed to broadcast video and audio files on the Internet, although the practical effect of that edict remains unclear. China has also extended a crackdown on Internet pornography and "unhealthy" content, a move some rights groups consider a tool for arresting online dissidents.
China has jailed 51 online dissidents -- more than in any other country -- and last year blocked more than 2,500 Web sites, according to Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom advocacy group.
Mr. Hu used his own Web site to post updates about other dissidents or peasant protests. He also did not hesitate to describe his semi-regular encounters with the police and state security officers assigned to monitor him.
"The police force mobilized is much, much larger than before," Mr. Hu told Agence France-Presse in October as the Communist Party clamped down on dissidents during an important political meeting. "Now, they just arrest people very publicly and arbitrarily, without the necessary legal procedures."
Last year, Mr. Hu became involved in the case of Yang Chunlin, the former factory worker who organized the "We Want Human Rights, Not the Olympics" petition drive, part of an effort to help local farmers seek legal redress over confiscated land. Mr. Yang was arrested last summer and charged with subverting state power, according to human rights groups.
Mr. Hu told Agence France-Presse that Mr. Yang's arrest was part of a government effort to "clean up" politically touchy cases before the Games.
"I'm helping Yang Chunlin to hire a lawyer," Mr. Hu said. "The authorities have threatened Yang's family and relatives. Yang's wife dares not speak to anyone because of the threats."
January 24, 2008
The Beijing Olympics this summer were supposed to be China's coming-out party, celebrating the end of nearly two centuries of weakness, poverty and humiliation. Instead, China's leaders are tarnishing their own Olympiad by abetting genocide in Darfur and in effect undermining the UN military deployment there. The result is a growing international campaign to brand these "The Genocide Olympics."
This is not a boycott of the Olympics. But expect Darfur-related protests at Chinese embassies, as well as banners and armbands among both athletes and spectators. There's a growing recognition that perhaps the best way of averting hundreds of thousands more deaths in Sudan is to use the leverage of the Olympics to shame China into more responsible behavior.
The central problem is that in exchange for access to Sudanese oil, Beijing is financing, diplomatically protecting and supplying the arms for the first genocide of the 21st century. China is the largest arms supplier to Sudan, officially selling $83 million in weapons, aircraft and spare parts to Sudan in 2005, according to Amnesty International USA. That is the latest year for which figures are available.
China provides Sudan with A-5 Fantan bomber aircraft, helicopter gunships, K-8 military training/attack aircraft and light weapons used in Sudan's proxy invasion of Chad last year. China also uses the threat of its veto on the Security Council to block UN action against Sudan so that there is a growing risk of a catastrophic humiliation for the United Nations itself.
Sudan feels confident enough with Chinese backing that on Jan. 7, the Sudanese military ambushed a clearly marked UN convoy of peacekeepers in Darfur. Sudan claimed the attack was a mistake, but diplomats and UN professionals are confident that this was a deliberate attack ordered by the Sudanese leaders to put the United Nations in its place.
Sudan has already barred units from Sweden, Norway, Nepal, Thailand and other countries from joining the UN force. It has banned night flights, dithered on a status-of-forces agreement, held up communications equipment and refused to allow the United Nations to bring in foreign helicopters. The growing fear is that the UN force will be humiliated in Sudan as it was in Rwanda and Bosnia, causing enormous damage to international peacekeeping.
By RADIO FREE ASIA
January 8, 2008
Ordinary Chinese have left numerous support messages online for detained AIDS activist Hu Jia and his wife and baby, who remain under tight restriction at the couple's Beijing apartment. Authorities are meanwhile clamping down on blog posts and comments about Hu, who some believe was detained for his outspokenness around the Beijing Olympics.
"I am a neighbor," read one comment to Zeng's blog, which has now been blocked. "Please tell me how I can deliver baby formula to you."
"This is to add my comment to the others, and to tell the world that the Chinese people love justice and we love the light," said another. "We are praying for you."
The authorities have cut off Hu's wife Zeng Jinyan from telephone and Internet access, effectively detaining her and her baby daughter under house arrest.
Video taken by the couple in recent months shows a team of national security police camped outside the couple's apartment round the clock; the police are turning away any journalists who try to visit Zeng, but she was briefly captured by a UK television crew peering from the window, her baby in her arms.
Chinese blogger Isaac Mao said it had taken some time for the news of Hu's Dec. 27 detention for "subverting state power," to filter through to Chinese netizens, but that now they were reacting.
"They have almost certainly got wind of the news via the overseas media," Mao told RFA's Mandarin service. "Now, a lot of grassroot media in China are reporting Hu Jia's detention."
"Some are even getting together to send Zeng some baby milk powder. There is a lot of concern, because some of the milk powder was not delivered but was intercepted by those guarding the door," Mao said.
"People are not only sending the milk powder but are also making a public record of the fact. People have got used to much more intellectual freedom in the past year or so they are willing to make judgments and even to play a part in spreading the news of events like this," said Mao, a keen proponent of citizen journalism and grassroots Web development.
By David Barboza | The New York Times
January 18, 2008
More than 100 people are under investigation and several government officials have been detained or removed from office in central China after a dispute in early January in which a group of city officials beat a bystander to death.
The government investigation, which was reported by state-run news outlets here, was touched off by bloggers in China who were outraged that a 41-year-old man had been fatally beaten while trying to use his cellphone to photograph a dispute between villagers and city inspectors.
City officials in Tianmen in Hubei Province in central China are being punished and investigated for their role in the killing of the man, Wei Wenhua, the general manager of a construction company, and the beatings of five villagers during a dispute on Jan. 7, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported.
The episode is the latest in which bloggers and others have used the Internet to force Chinese authorities to investigate beatings and other abuses by government officials.
With China's economy booming and developers transforming big cities and even small villages with huge building projects, clashes between angry residents and public officials have increased, partly because China's legal system is so ineffective and government corruption is perceived to be widespread.
Large public protests are outlawed in China, but when they do occur, local governments and even big cities often call in the police or other security teams to quash them. Occasionally, the battles become deadly.
On Jan. 7, the government says a dispute in a village near Tianmen broke out because villagers were angry over the dumping of heaps of garbage near their homes. Apparently, some villagers had tried to stop a truck from dumping garbage in their neighborhood.
To put down the protest, the government says, local officials called in a large group of parapolice officials, who are often used to quell uprisings or deal with unlicensed business operations in cities.
Mr. Wei apparently drove by in a car and stopped to photograph the skirmish with his cellphone. He was confronted by government inspectors and beaten to death. It is unclear what happened to the images captured on his cellphone.
Soon after, several large protests took place in Tianmen as residents demanded justice.
Once word of the beating spread, bloggers expressed outrage. One posting asked whether the officials had been city inspectors or a mob.
"Where is justice?" one bulletin board posting read. "Where is the law? Aren't there any rules in China?"
Within days, the government detained the leader of the inspection team and removed Qi Zhengjun, director of the Urban Administration Department in Tianmen.
By Howard W. French | The New York Times
January 13, 2008
YANGMIAO, China -- When she gets sick, Li Enlan, 78, picks herbs from the woods that grow nearby instead of buying modern medicines. That is not a result of some philosophical choice, though. She has never seen a doctor and, like many residents of this area, lives in a meager barter economy, seldom coming into contact with cash.
"We eat somehow, but it's never enough," Ms. Li said. "At least we're not starving."
In this region of southern Henan Province, in village after village, people are too poor to heat their homes in the winter and many lack basic comforts like running water. Mobile phones, a near ubiquitous symbol of upward mobility throughout much of this country, are seen as an impossible luxury. People here often begin conversations with a phrase that is still not uncommon in today's China: "We are poor."
China has moved more people out of poverty than any other country in recent decades, but the persistence of destitution in places like southern Henan Province fits with the findings of a recent World Bank study that suggests that there are still 300 million poor in China -- three times as many as the bank previously estimated.
Poverty is most severe in China's geographic and social margins, whether the mountainous areas or deserts that ring the country, or areas dominated by ethnic minorities, who for cultural and historic reasons have benefited far less than others from the country's long economic rise.
But it also persists in places like Henan, where population densities are among the greatest in China, and the new wealth of the booming coast beckons, almost mockingly, a mere province away.
"Henan has the largest population of any province, approaching 100 million people, and the land there just cannot support those kinds of numbers," said Albert Keidel, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on Chinese poverty. "It is supposed to be a breadbasket, but there has always been major discrimination against grain-based areas in China. The profit you can get from a hectare of land from vegetables, or a fish farm or oils, is so much more."
Other experts say Henan and other heavily populated parts of the Chinese heartland are often excluded from the financial support that goes to the coastal areas, and what antipoverty measures there are have little effect. Typically, residents of those areas say, money intended for them is appropriated by corrupt local officials, who pocket it or divert it to business investments.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | The New York Times
January 12, 2008
Ron Rust and Beve Kozub were poking around the toy booths at China's biggest trade fair two years ago when something caught their eye: pouty-faced baby dolls snuggling in light blue and pink fleece blankets, their eyes tightly shut or gazing with a newborn's woozy stare.
The American dealers plunked down $22,052 for a shipment of 2,740. But the lifelike dolls turned out to be knockoffs. Rust and Kozub were slapped with a lawsuit that could have cost them their home in Harmony, Pa.
Despite getting burned, they were back in China this fall. For new products at the right price, China is ''the only option at this time,'' Rust said.
The Americans fell prey to one of the many dangers of China's rough and raw capitalism. It's a cutthroat, predatory world where many factories cut corners to make an easy buck or just stay ahead of the thousands of others vying for their business. Safety scares, copyright ripoffs and outright thuggery are endemic.
Yet, foreign buyers keep snapping up toys, clothes, laptops and a myriad of other products that the world's factory floor churns out. Getting your hot product made in China is seen as a sure moneymaker. In the first 11 months of 2007, China's exports totaled $1.1 trillion, up 26 percent from the same period in 2006, according to China's Commerce Ministry. Chinese exports to the U.S. totaled $212.7 billion, a 15 percent increase from 2006, the ministry said.
The buyers are not blameless: Many breeze in on buying missions and don't stick around to ensure the goods are made right.
For consumers, it can be a dangerous and even deadly game. Chinese-made toy trains coated with lead paint ended up in playrooms worldwide. Cough syrup containing a poisonous chemical used in antifreeze killed dozens in Latin America. A tainted pet food ingredient killed dogs and cats in North America.
Chinese officials defend their factories, saying only a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars in exports each year have problems. But it takes just one bad batch of toothpaste to cause deaths.
By Radio Free Asia
04 January 2008
China's government has issued a stringent new set of rules which will ban all but state-owned corporations from making and uploading video to the Internet.
The new regulations were issued jointly Dec. 31 by the Ministry of Information Industry and the Bureau of Film and Television under China's cabinet, the State Council.
"Companies or individuals who do not have an operating license issued by the relevant department, or who have not submitted an application for such a license, must cease to offer online video services," said the regulations, which come into effect Jan. 31.
The move will make it difficult for Chinese netizens to post video to their blogs or to Web sites, or to Chinese video-sharing sites similar to YouTube, including citizen journalism of the kind which has proliferated amid growing civil unrest across the country.
Fears of unrestIndustry experts estimate that there are currently around 160 sites offering such services in China, and that the majority of them are private enterprises financed by venture capital. Quite a few of them operate without any kind of license from the government.
"There is only one point to these rules, and that is to step up controls over any possible political dissent that might emerge in China," Shaanxi-based cyberdissident Deng Yongliang told RFA's Mandarin service.
"Now that the standard of living is rising for many people, they are beginning to demand more intellectually as well as materially, and such ideological freedom would be a challenge to the current political system," Deng said.
"We are also about to hold the Olympic Games, and so the authorities will continue to step up controls on freedom of expression."
It is currently possible to see video of incidents of social unrest in China, circulating alongside hard and soft porn, and home movies people make to amuse each other.
In one video uploaded to the popular sharing site 56.com, an ordinary citizen visited Beijing's "Petitioner Village", a now-demolished shantytown once housing hundreds of destitute people who lost everything, and who now spend their lives trying to win redress for grievances against the government.
By Michael Bristow | BBC News
January 02, 2008
A few days ago, about 30 police officers broke into the home of Chinese activist Hu Jia and took him away.
His wife, fellow activist Zeng Jinyan, is now under house arrest. At least 10 security personnel guard her home.
Mr Hu's arrest comes as China celebrates the start of one of its most important years in recent history.
This summer, all eyes will be on it as it plays host to the Olympic Games.
Foreign campaigners say Beijing has not fulfilled its promise to improve human rights ahead of the Olympics - a charge the Chinese government flatly denies.
But the country's human rights record - including Mr Hu's case - will be under scrutiny as much as its sporting endeavours.
'Inciting subversion'
Mr Hu was arrested two days after Christmas, during the afternoon, as he sat at his computer in the dining room of his home.
When officers barged into his flat, his wife was in the bedroom, feeding their two-and-a-half-month-old baby.
According to his arrest warrant, issued by the Beijing Public Security Bureau, the 34-year-old is accused of inciting subversion.
His wife has not been told where he is being held.
Mr Hu is a well-known HIV/Aids activist who also helps publicise other human rights cases in China.
He has been arrested several times before.
On the night he was taken away, six police officers stayed at Mr Hu's home to guard his wife, her mother and their child.
Telephone lines and internet access to the home, in an eastern Beijing suburb, have been cut off.
When the BBC visited the couple's flat, we found Ms Zeng was being closely guarded by at least 10 public security officers.
We arrived as three of them were escorting her as she walked her baby in a shared garden next to her apartment.
After a lengthy check of our identification papers, officers finally refused to allow us to interview Ms Zeng, who also publicises Chinese human rights abuses.
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