Those convicted were hired by authorities from Changge city in central Henan province to stop petitioners airing their grievances in Beijing, the People’s Daily said on its website, citing a Beijing newspaper.

They held them in rented houses in a Beijing suburb where the petitioners said they were beaten, the report said.

The men wore badges identifying them as employees of the Beijing representative office of the Changge government, it added.

Petitioning officials has deep roots in China, where courts are seen as beyond the reach of ordinary people, who often try to take local disputes ranging from land grabs to corruption to higher levels in the country’s capital Beijing.

Although this sentencing would be a rare judiciary handling of interceptors, the report could not be confirmed, from AP:

Beijing’s Chaoyang District Court sentenced one defendant to a year and a half in prison on Nov. 28 and gave months-long sentences to nine others, according to state media reports. The plaintiffs were not identified and calls to the court rang unanswered.

The report could not immediately be confirmed and it wasn’t clear when the sentences were handed down. The official China Daily newspaper briefly ran a story on its website saying the sentences had not yet been handed down, but later removed the report.

The official Guangmingwang website said the men had detained a number of people from central Henan province who had traveled to the capital hoping to have their complaints settled by the central government. Such petitioners are frequently intercepted by local government agents and detained illegally in shabby hostels commonly known as “black jails.”

The government has recently begun acknowledging the existence of black jails as part of modest attempts to stamp out the most glaring abuses of power, but has met with only middling success. A central government order to close representative offices maintained in Beijing by local governments for the purpose of blocking complaints and lobbying for projects and funding has been mostly ignored.

According to the Global Times, the report circulated about the sentencing was fake:

A Beijing court Sunday denied a report that 10 people who had intercepted and detained petitioners coming to Beijing were sentenced for illegal detention on November 28.

“The court did not pass sentence on a case like that on that day and we are investigating to what extent the story was untrue,” said Huang Shuo, spokesman for Beijing’s Chaoyang District People’s Court, telling the Global Times that the widely circulated report was fake.

A report by Beijing Youth Daily said that 10 suspects, including three minors, from Changge, Central China’s Henan Province, had detained a number of petitioners travelling from Henan to Beijing to petition higher authorities.

Huang admitted the existence of the case but said a sentence has not yet been passed.

Moreover, the court is asking for an apology from the Beijing Youth Daily, AFP adds:

 A Chinese court has asked for an apology from a newspaper which said it jailed 10 “interceptors” who illegally held petitioners attempting to lodge complaints with the government, state media reported on Sunday.

But a court spokeswoman branded the report, which was carried by most major Chinese news websites and widely spread on Chinese social networking websites, as “fake news”, another state-run newspaper, the China Daily, reported.

The spokeswoman, who was not named, “confirmed a case involving city officials from Henan had been heard”, but “denied judges had handed down any verdict”, the paper said.

Beijing’s Chaoyang District Court, which reportedly handed down the verdict, is “in negotiations with Beijing Youth Daily over the printing of an apology and explanation”, the paper said.

See also Inside China’s ‘Black Jails,’ via CDT.

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing youth daily, black jails, illegal detentions, petitioners
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China has barred local newspapers from publicly issuing shares following a corruption scandal last year at IPO pioneer Beijing Youth Daily, according to the sector’s top regulator.

However, the government was “encouraging” book publishing companies to list shares on stock markets in mainland China and Hong Kong, said Long Xinmin, minister at the press and publishing administration.

Beijing’s decision to ban newspaper listings, while approving them for publishing and distribution companies, reflects officials’ attempts to balance commercial development of the media sector without losing political control.[Full Text]

© Mo Ming for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing youth daily, IPO, media censorship, media reform
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As China’s National Day approaches, just when holiday cheer should be in the air, Beijing Youth Daily employees are anything but cheerful. Since June, six of their managers have been detained for involvement in economic crimes, including two vice-presidents and a director of advertising.

Zheng Yijun, vice president of Beijing Media (Hong Kong Stock Exchange: 1000), the Hong Kong-listed arm of Beijing Youth Daily, was detained by prosecutors with Beijing’s Dongcheng District Procuratorate amid an advertising department meeting at Beijing Media on July 9.

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Beijing Media, the first Chinese state-owned media company to sell shares to the public, said two of its vice presidents and four other employees have been detained in Beijing.

Advertising department head Yu Dagong and two of his subordinates were being held on suspicion of bribery while another employee of the department and Vice Presidents Zheng Yijun and Niu Ming were detained for unspecified reasons, Beijing Media said in a statement late on Monday.

All six have been suspended and the company planned to conduct its own investigation and assess any financial impact, the statement said.

Beijing Media is the advertising arm for the Beijing Youth Daily, the Chinese capital’s second biggest-selling newspaper.

See also “Arrests maul Beijing Media” from the Standard.

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“The founders of the Beijing Youth Daily would not have believed it, but their paper — the mouthpiece of the Communist youth league — is about to be the first Chinese newspaper to be listed on an international stock market.

As part of a government plan to reconcile domestic propaganda with global capitalist profit, China’s second biggest daily says it will issue shares on the Hong Kong bourse to finance a modernization and expansion program. Reflecting the political sensitivities of this latest step toward opening up one of China’s last closed markets, the newspaper has declined to reveal when the offering will be made or how much it will be worth. ”

Read the whole article here.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2004. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing youth daily, Rupert Murdoch
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