“I met Chen Guangfu this morning. His health situation is okay,” said Ding Xikui, a lawyer authorised by Chen Kegui’s wife to represent her husband.

“His family are not allowed to leave the village. Chen escaped secretly. He came here to tell us what happened that night [when people broke in] and seeks help from the lawyer. He also supports the request from Chen Kegui’s wife to engage us as his lawyer in this case.”

Chen Kegui’s wife hired Ding and Si Weijiang after two other lawyers she had appointed were intimidated and harassed. But officials told the men that they could not act for Chen Kegui unless his wife came to the police station to file paperwork. She is currently in hiding due to fears for her safety.

Reuters’ Sui-Lee Wee met with Chen Guangfu to discuss his son’s case, his own reported torture, his brother’s departure, and other events of the past month.

He said he was restricted from leaving the village and that police in Shandong warned him they would increase the sentence for his son, Chen Kegui, who is being held on an attempted murder charge, if he gave interviews.

“I feel since they are already doing this, why can’t I say something?” Chen Guangfu said late on Wednesday in a teahouse in western Beijing. “I have the power to speak up.”

“I told them their claims have no legal basis, but are based on power or by their will to determine Kegui’s sentence. On this point, I’ll never be able to accept it,” he said, adding he planned to return to his village soon.

Local government and public security bureau officials were not immediately available for comment.

Chen Guangfu said that the security presence around Dongshigu has only intensified since his brother’s escape. As Charles Custer commented at ChinaGeeks in the immediate aftermath of Chen Guangcheng’s escape, this security apparatus had become a significant factor in the local economy, which various parties had a strong interest in sustaining. McClatchy’s Tom Lasseter reported from the area last week on the persistent cordon around the village.

A reporter attempting on Wednesday to walk the stretch of farm fields and groves between [Pengjiazhai] village and Chen’s hometown of Dongshigu was intercepted by two guards at a turn on a small dirt track. Their stools were positioned so that they could easily see anyone crossing to Dongshigu across a remaining flat expanse, the length of about six and a half football fields.

On the highway to Dongshigu, police cars and vans still zipped back and forth, their lights flashing. Men lurked in the meadows.

The continued siege of Dongshigu underscores the punishing weight with which China enforces its version of social order. It suggests, too, the steep costs of such an approach – the inertia of an authoritarian system that becomes difficult to change, and a messy legacy that it must then try to conceal.

See also Chen Guangfu’s earlier account of his torture by local security officers, news of Chen Guangcheng’s arrival in New York and the start of his family’s new life there and more on the Chen Guangcheng saga via CDT.

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Beijing’s Municipal Commission of City Administration and Environment said in a statement that the regulations aimed to standardise toilet management at places such as parks, railway stations, hospitals and shopping malls.

An unnamed official from the commission told local media that the guidelines on flies were meant for easy monitoring.

However media reports cast doubt over whether the guidelines could be enforced.

A commentary published in the Beijing News said one central Beijing district implemented a similar rule in 2008 when the city hosted the Olympic Games, but sanitation and hygiene still varied from toilet to toilet.

Effort should be invested on educating the public to use public toilets in a better manner, said the commentary.

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Though some critics argue the Chinese government has been too slow to act, research, public concern and some hefty bills ($35 billion in Shanghai alone in the last 40 years), has sparked some momentum. Recently, the state council approved China’s Land Subsidence Prevention Project, a countrywide initiative to prevent land subsidence. Likewise, Beijing, which has descended more than a foot in the past decade, has also made an effort to reduce underground water extraction, with plans to close 800 water extraction wells in 2012, according to the Beijing Water Authority. By 2014, the city hopes to halt underground water extraction in urban areas altogether as part of the North-South Water Diversion Project. The project expects to bring 3 billion cubic feet of water supply to Beijing from the Yangtze River. This would not only satisfy one-third of the city’s total water demand, but would also cut the extraction of underground water in half.

But Li, who worked at the Chinese Academy of Science for 15 years, says such programs will not be enough. “It’s hard to quantify how much this might help, but the question is, is that a problem solved? The answer is no. The problem lies in the early issue with urbanization,” he says. Scientists expect the regulations to help curb the consumption of underground water supplies, but there a few things the government has less control over, such as global warming. As the land degradation and excessive guzzling of ground water continues, environmentalists predict waters surrounding Shanghai to rise 9 to 27 inches by 2050 as a result of melting ice caps.

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Popular Beijing spots for foreigners, such as Sanlitun and university areas, will be targeted by police in a fresh drive against visitors who commit crimes, outstay their visas or gain illegal employment, authorities said on Monday ….

Foreigners must carry passports and accommodation registration documents at all times in line with Chinese regulations. “We will enforce the rule and make sure that every foreigner knows that,” Lin told China Daily ….

The capital has reported 13,000 cases of illegal entry, overstaying and illegal employment concerning foreigners from more than one hundred countries since 2008, according to exit-entry statistics.

Citizens have been invited to help by tipping off police at a special phone hotline, with a dramatic “striking fist” graphic urging them on. Proper enforcement of immigration rules in itself is uncontroversial and perhaps, as Bill Bishop wrote at Sinocism, “long overdue”. But the vehemence of online approval has startled some observers. While Danwei’s Jeremy Goldkorn told The Wall Street Journal that “the online reaction is a little scary … but I don’t think this necessarily reflects any general rise in anti-foreigner sentiment,” Tea Leaf Nation’s survey of responses from Sina Weibo paints an unsettling picture:

The overall tone of discussion will surely be deeply troubling to anyone who has ever had to be an “outsider.” @魚魚桑 honed in on, and lauded, the dangerous semantics employed by Beijing police: “‘Clean up’…This is really the right word to use. I feel like it’s cleaning up trash from the street.”

Others piled on, in many cases disregarding the original distinction between illegal foreigners and legal foreigners. @Bob_慕小落 wrote, “Clean slowly, so that not a single one is left.” But @味同烂嚼 wanted speed: “We should thoroughly clean up, hurry up and clean up, I don’t want to see these disgusting people anymore.” @山哥SANGER opined, “White-skinned pigs [白皮猪], black devils [黑鬼], sticks [棒子, a slur referring to Koreans], devils [鬼子], Southeast Asian monkeys [东南亚猴子] and other kinds of foreign trash should all be swept out the door ….”

While it would be comforting to conclude the vitriol spewed online represents a minority, if this is the case cooler heads have spent a great deal of time sitting sideline. One culprit behind such anti-foreigner sentiment is the sense that foreigners have been given special treatment for too long. As @Ren类已经无法阻止我了 asked ironically, “Has Beijing begun to pay attention to we second-class citizens?” @Mantarine agreed, “Chinese have been too tolerant of foreigners … some foreigners’ conduct has really been over the top.”

Ministry of Tofu collected and translated some more weibo reactions, including Goldkorn’s:

Jeremy Goldkorn (South African, founder of Danwei.org): I am officially, seriously and sincerely a three-have laowai. Visa, residence permit, and work permit, I have them all. I am also a three-no laowai: I am no rapist, no fraud, and I steal no job from Chinese. Nevertheless, there are surely people who call me “foreign trash” or whatever.

刘仰: In the future, there will just be more and more foreign losers, who fare poorly in their countries and want to come to China to muddle along for food, drink and women. Because some Chinese are cheap and turn China into a paradise for foreign losers. Of course, another possibility cannot be rooted out, which is, some foreign losers are not really losers; they just act like one to disguiser their real identity and are up to something. So, a clean-up is necessary.

痞痞兔: Should also clean up those “foreign nationals’ fathers” (alluding to Chinese cadres whose children are naturalized foreign citizens) who engage in illegal activities in China. Many of those three-have foreign nationals’ fathers have a source of income (large-sum gray income), have fixed and regular abode (several houses), have a formal job (civil servants); some even stay in China for nothing but committing a crime (embezzling public funds and taking bribes).

Resentment of the “free pass” given to foreigners also surfaced, ironically, in chinaSMACK’s collection of responses to a BBC report on China’s growing global popularity:

腾讯网友 夜莺:

Just take a look at the whities getting VIP treatment in China and you’ll know, this problem is inevitable.

腾讯芜湖市网友 白开水:

Foreigners from developed nations enjoy privileged protection in China, or as they say foreigners are first class, officials are second class, minorities are third class and Han are fourth class. Here in China the exact same thing can happen to foreigners and Chinese but will have completely different outcomes, just like differing chemical reactions. It’s very simple, just look at how even big shot officials are ranked behind foreigners and you’ll know just how big the disparity is.

(See ‘Is China Squandering its Soft Power Investments?‘ for more on the BBC survey.)

The campaign comes amid a wave of what Harry Kazianis at The Diplomat describes as “old fashioned jingoism” from Chinese media over tensions with the Philippines in the South China Sea, possibly in an attempt to distract from political controversies at home.

Over the last several weeks, as Western media has followed the unfolding of events of Chen Guangcheng’s dash to the U.S. embassy in Beijing, which came on the heels of the Bo Xilai scandal, Chinese media has shifted its gaze elsewhere. In the South China Sea or West Philippine Sea, depending on which party you ask, tensions are being stoked in the form of provocative editorials, reporting, and the actions of Chinese journalists. Such reporting – nothing more than old fashioned jingoism – sets a dangerous precedent in an area of the world that is already rife with tensions. And, while such coverage is useful for turning the page on China’s internal political soap operas, fueling the fires of Chinese nationalism can only inject a dangerous element that, if left unchecked, could make it harder for either side to compromise ….

Social media is also ablaze with nationalistic and fire-spitting commentary. While Chinese censors are quick to repress any of the latest news or rumors concerning Bo or Chen, matters in the South China Sea seem like fair game. One microblogger named kongdehua declared, “the Philippines have basically been making irrational trouble, if they want to start a war then we will strike, no one fears them.” He went on to say in a widely quoted remark that, “If every Chinese spat once, we could drown (the Philippines).”

While authorities have denied that the campaign is linked to recent video of a British man sexually assaulting a Chinese woman, Josh Chin at China Real Time Report points to this as a turning point after a series of viral stories about foreign Good Samaritans.

The clean-up campaign arrives in the midst of a heated discussion among Chinese social media users about the way foreigners comport themselves in the country. Last week, the stories of two foreigners – one an American who bought French fries for a homeless woman in the city of Nanjing, the other a Brazilian man who was badly beaten by a trio of thieves after trying to stop a woman from having her bag pickpocketed in Dongguan – spread quickly online as Chinese Internet users engaged in a round of soul-searching over the belief that Good Samaritans in China are in relatively short supply.

A similar discussion took place late last year after a foreign tourist, 34-year-old Uruguayan Maria Fernanda, jumped into Hangzhou’s West Lake to save a drowning woman as dozens of Chinese onlookers stood idly by ….

But much of that goodwill has been erased in recent days thanks to the wide circulation online of a video that appears to show a foreigner caught in the middle of sexually assaulting a Chinese woman. In the video, uploaded on Wednesday and viewed more than 10 million times on Chinese video site Youku (warning: disturbing content), the foreigner is pulled away from the woman, scuffles briefly with a Chinese man and is later shown lying motionless in the street, where he is hit and kicked again before police arrive.

Netizens were also outraged recently by reports of a vicious and humiliating attack on two Chinese students on a Sydney train, which has left other Chinese residents deeply ill at ease. At the same time, and notwithstanding the findings of the BBC survey noted above, the attacks and references to the victims’ presumed wealth resonate with tensions between Chinese abroad and local populations elsewhere. In British Columbia, rich Chinese immigrants are widely (and unfairly) blamed for driving up property prices, while a group of Chinese students was stopped by police late last year for racing supercars on a public highway during rush hour. In Singapore on Saturday, a man from Sichuan and two others were killed after his Ferrari collided with a taxi. Shanghaiist’s Kenneth Tan describes the incident’s context and aftermath:

Anti-Chinese sentiment in Singapore is up following the accident, and outraged netizens have left thousands of angry comments on websites, bulletin boards and social networks.

The Temasek Times, a widely-read and largely anti-foreign news website, lambasted journalists from the mainstream media who “did not think nationality is an issue”.

Singapore’s population has exploded from 3.2 million in 2000 to 5.2 million in 2011, as the government ramped up its intake of immigrants. Mainland Chinese migrants have constituted a large part of newcomers due to lower fertility rates among the ethnic Chinese Singaporean community and the government’s belief that it is imperative to maintain the city-state’s current ethnic mix.

Mainland Chinese and other foreigners have been blamed for taking local jobs, depressing wages, pushing up real estate prices, and testing the limits of the public transportation network.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, foreign garbage, foreigners in Beijing, foreigners in China, immigration, philippines, racism, sina weibo, singapore, visa
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Chen is said to have prepared for months for his escape, spending more and more time in bed so that his captors would not grow suspicious at a lack of visible activity; consequently, it took them four days to realise he was gone, according to lawyer Teng Biao. Chen appeared in a 15-minute video posted to YouTube last night by the Boxun Chinese-language news site. In the video, he makes three requests to Premier Wen Jiabao:

CNN’s Steven Jiang posted a full translation on his Enter the News Dragon blog, while the BBC offered some highlights. At The Guardian, Jonathan Watts summarised Chen’s message:

Looking gaunt, Chen blamed his treatment on local officials and the Chinese state’s obsession with maintaining stability at all costs. He said his greatest concern was that the authorities would carry out “insane retribution” on his family, several of whom have already been placed under arrest ….

… Chen confirmed he was beaten and said 90 to 100 local officials were involved in his detention. He expressed “extreme concern” about retaliation against his family. Chen confirmed reports about his maltreatment that have appeared over the years. “The truth was even worse,” he said. “I formally made three requests to Premier Wen Jiabao. First, severely punish criminals. Second, look into this yourself, and third, send a special investigation team to find out the truth.”

“The episode has the potential to embarrass some officials acutely,” said The Economist’s Analects blog, “at both the local level where they failed to stop Mr Chen’s escape, and at the central level. China’s top leaders seldom suffer the indignity of having demands put to them in such public and adversarial fashion.” But Human Rights Watch’s Nicholas Bequelin pointed out that Chen had been “careful to put the blame solely on local authorities … [and] calls Wen Jiabao to defend ordinary people from corrupt officials.” Whatever the truth of the central government’s part in his confinement, Bequelin argued that this approach “leaves ample room for the Chinese gvt to handle the situation intelligently without losing face.”

US Embassy staff in Beijing have repeatedly declined to comment on rumours that the activist has sought shelter there. But Bob Fu, of Christian human rights organisation China Aid, told China Real Time and others that Chen was in a “100% safe location in Beijing”, adding “I can’t say more as there might be some diplomatic issues”. Bloomberg’s Mike Forsythe commented that he could think of only one 100% safe location in Beijing, while Hu Jia expressed the same conclusion to The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts:

A photograph released on Friday night shows him with a friend and fellow activist, Hu Jia, who said Chen was under US protection. “It is my understanding that Chen is in the safest place in China. That is the US embassy,” said Hu.

If confirmed, the incident could overshadow a planned trip to Beijing next week by the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner.

It would be the second case this year of a high-profile figure seeking refuge at a US diplomatic office in China. In February, Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun fled to the US consulate in Chengdu claiming his life was threatened because of his investigation into the death of British businessman Neil Heywood.

He Peirong, who helped Chen escape, had previously said to the Associated Press that Chen was not at the embassy, and told Reuters later that she had lost touch with him and he had “probably fallen into the hands of the police”. He was apparently arrested herself on Friday morning, according to The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Fu said he was talking to Ms. He at 11 a.m. Beijing time when she told him public security agents had arrived at her door and hung up. He has not been able to reach her since, he said. Attempts to reach Ms. He through her cellphone were unsuccessful.

William Farris reports that He’s online name, “Pearlher”, has since been blocked as a search term on Sina Weibo, one of a number of related words and phrases to have been censored. In Dongshigu, a number of Chen’s relatives are said to have been taken into custody. As local authorities repeatedly stated, Chen Guangcheng was legally a free man, so He and others committed no offence in helping him escape. Meanwhile, police continue to hunt for his nephew, Chen Kegui, who was involved in a violent altercation with officials who had broken into his home and seized his father. Charles Custer translated the local authorities’ official account of the incident, together with (now deleted) comments from Sohu. From China Geeks:

On April 26, Dongshigu village resident Chen Kegui injured local government officials and staff workers with knives. At present, Chen Kegui has fled, the injured parties are being treated, and the local public security organs are on the hunt for Chen Kegui. The relevant parties will be dealt with according to the law.

Why would he stab them, why would a commoner want to go stab them, release the facts.

How can you not mention Chen Guangcheng? Please release the location and motive for this incident.

Well done citizen, I support you.

Chen Kegui’s side of the story can be found at Seeing Red in China, where Yaxue Cao has translated her earlier telephone conversation with him.

Attempts to stifle the news online have been predictably unsuccessful. Tea Leaf Nation rounded up some netizens’ reactions:

One account tweeted a poem, not long after the news of Chen’s escape first emerged, titled “Blindness of the Eye and Blindness of the Mind” that is being seen by some netizens as a coded celebration of Lawyer Chen’s role as a beacon for justice despite his disability.

A blind person said to God: ‘Lord, this is unfair, why is it only I who cannot see the light?’ God said, “No, no don’t doubt my justice; though some can see the bustling world, their hearts are forever sunk in darkness; although your eyes are blind, I planted in your heart the seed of light. Use your heart to feel! My child, you yourself are the light, and their eyes are used for gazing up at you!” [2]

One netizen tweeted in response, “This makes me think of Lawyer Chen. I hear he’s gone to a good place and received protection. I hope it’s true.” Another echoed the poem’s sentiment: “The dark night gave me black eyes, but I used them to find the light…” [The entirety of Gu Cheng's 1979 poem, 'A Generation'] One netizen simply tweeted the characters in Chen’s name: “Light, Honesty” 光，诚。

Update: In a similar vein, Ai Weiwei quoted a mutual friend who had met Chen since his escape:

“You know he’s blind, so the night to him is nothing,”“I think that’s a perfect metaphor.”

— 艾未未Ai Weiwei (@aiww) April 27, 2012

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Chinese Human Rights Defenders and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights have all issued statements expressing concern for Chen and his family.

At The New York Times, Andrew Jacobs reported further support for claims that Chen is now at the American embassy (which the embassy itself still neither confirms nor denies), and explained the diplomatic dilemma in which this would place the US:

An official in the Chinese Ministry of State Security on Friday said that Mr. Chen had reached the American Embassy, but American officials would not confirm reports that Mr. Chen had found shelter there ….

The case … poses a major new diplomatic test for the United States. In February, the Obama administration was thrust into an internal Chinese political dispute when Wang Lijun, the top police official from the region of Chongqing, sought refuge in the American Consulate in Chengdu …. American diplomats said they had determined that Mr. Wang’s case did not involve national security, and they turned him over to Chinese officials, prompting criticism in Washington about their handling of the case.

But with Mr. Chen now believed to be on the grounds of the American Embassy in Beijing, administration officials are likely to be far more cautious in handling his case ….

An editorial at The Washington Post urged the Obama administration to protect Chen, regardless of political sensitivities.

It is not clear if Mr. Chen is seeking asylum in the United States. Activists in touch with him say he wishes only to be allowed to live legally and in peace in China, and that he is reluctant to leave the country. But Mr. Chen clearly qualifies for political asylum, and there is a precedent for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing serving as a harbor for a dissident — Fang Lizhi, who lived there for a year following the 1989 Tiananmen square crackdown.

As U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke pointed out in January, China’s respect for human rights “is in a down period, and it’s getting worse.” Ms. Clinton mentioned Mr. Chen by name in a speech last November in which she called on Beijing “to embrace a different path.”

Well-timed or not, the administration’s handling of this affair may tell the new Chinese leadership, and the rest of the world, whether the United States is serious about defending those who seek to push China toward that different path.

Beijing, meanwhile, has been no more forthcoming. From Reuters:

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai said the question did not come within the scope of the news briefing, which was about high level talks next week in Beijing between the United States and China.

Asked whether any issue could force the meeting to be cancelled or postponed, Cui said he had already stated the event would be going ahead as scheduled.

“I don’t know why you’d ask the question,” he said.

chinadialogue founder Isabel Hilton noted at The Guardian that Chen’s escape interrupts a carefully constructed official narrative portraying Bo Xilai’s downfall as a sign of robust rule of law.

[Chen’s] extraordinary escape from house arrest … has all the elements of a police thriller. His astonishing appearance on YouTube provides a reminder of everything the party propaganda machine has tried to play down in recent weeks: police torture, arbitrary detention, abuse of power and the lack of legal protections.

Pro-government media in China this week have followed the party line that all is calm, constitutional and legal in the aftermath of the spectacular fall of Chongqing’s party secretary Bo Xilai and his wife’s arrest on suspicion of murdering British businessman Neil Heywood earlier this month. The pro-government newspaper Global Times on Wednesday accused western media of sensationalism in their reporting of a story that has repeatedly threatened to escape from China’s normally effective government control. “Western disclosure attempts cannot be more authoritative and detailed than the investigation of the central government … waiting for the final results and interpreting Bo’s case based on the authoritative information should be the rational attitude to take,” the paper advised.

At Salon, Human Rights Watch’s Phelim Kine made a similar argument:

The plight of Chen Guangcheng, his family and his supporters is an exemplar of the yawning gap between the Chinese government’s frequent avowals of support for rule of law with the far grimmer reality faced by Chinese citizens who challenge the status quo. Other high-profile victims of such rough justice include the imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, and the recently imprisoned housing rights activist Ni Yulan ….

A betrayal of Chen and his family will only feed popular skepticism about the ruling Chinese government’s 62-year monopoly on power during the current transition to new leadership. As Chen said in the video released on Boxun, “If we have a thorough investigation into my case and announce the result, I think people would appreciate it. If you continue to ignore me, what would the public think?”

See also Tania Branigan’s explanation of Chen and his wife’s activism and persecution at The Guardian, and Murong Xuecun’s account of his attempt to visit Chen late last year via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, Beijing, Chen Guangcheng, China Aid Association, house arrest, human rights watch, illegal detentions, Shandong, United States, Wang Lijun, Wen Jiabao
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The head of India’s Defense Research and Development Organization, Vijay Saraswat, said the missile was launched at 8:07 a.m. from Wheeler Island off India’s east coast ….

“India has emerged from this launch as a major missile power,” he said ….

In Washington, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the United States urges all nuclear-capable states to exercise restraint regarding nuclear capabilities.

“That said, India has a solid non-proliferation record,” he told a news briefing. “They’re engaged with the international community on non-proliferation issues.”

Global Times met the impending launch with an implicit accusation of Western double standards, and a cattily patronising tone towards India.

… India apparently is hoping to enter the global intercontinental missile club, despite intercontinental missiles normally having a range of over 8,000 km ….

… India is still poor and lags behind in infrastructure construction, but its society is highly supportive of developing nuclear power and the West chooses to overlook India’s disregard of nuclear and missile control treaties. The West remains silent on the fact that India’s military spending increased by 17 percent in 2012 and the country has again become the largest weapons importer in the world ….

China understands the Indian desire to catch up with China. China, as the most appropriate strategic target for India, is willing to take India as a peaceful competitor.

The cited 17% growth in 2012 is considerably higher than China’s own planned increase of 11.2%, but some analysts believe that the Chinese defence budget as a whole is understated by around a third. The stated “normal” ICBM range of 8,000 km, on the other hand, appears exaggerated for rhetorical effect: others set the bar at a more modest 5,500 km, still just outside the Agni-V’s reach. But The Diplomat suggested that, in any case, Indian ambitions of “true” ICBM ownership were less clear-cut than the Global Times made out.

There’s a something of a debate in India … on whether the country should seek to enhance the Agni-V to extend its range past the largely symbolic 5,500 kilometer marker. Former President APJ Kalam, who’s often referred to as the “Missile Man of India” for the pivotal role he played in developing New Delhi’s ballistic missiles as an aerospace engineer at DRDO, has suggested he wouldn’t be in favor of doing so.

“An ICBM with 5,000-km range was enough as the potential enemies were well within this range,” Kalam told a group of university students last November. When a student asked him if an ICBM with a longer range should be developed, Kalam simply replied that India didn’t face threats from the transatlantic community, The Tribune reported.

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They say that art imitates life, but so far Hong Kong’s election campaign has most closely resembled one of its seamier low budget movies.

In recent weeks, the two leading candidates have been embroiled in everything from alleged triad links, an illegitimate child, secret mistresses, an illegal luxury basement to government business collusion in a major development tender.

When the mud stopped flying, former financial secretary Henry Tang had taken the most direct hits and was struggling to stay in the race. Leung Chun-ying, a former cabinet member had limped into the lead and is expected to win Sunday’s election.

While both Tang and Leung have received public approval from the mainland, as is the case for all serious contenders for Hong Kong’s top post, The Wall Street Journal reports that Beijing has begun lean towards Leung as its preferred winner:

Beijing’s only official message on the Hong Kong vote has been a comment by Premier Wen Jiabao, who said last week that the city should choose a leader who enjoys the “support of the vast majority of the population.”

But Beijing’s preference has become more apparent in recent days. China Politburo member Liu Yandong, the nation’s highest-ranking female official, flew to Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong, to drum up support for Mr. Leung. Also this week, James Tien, a prominent local politician, said citizens should be prepared for a Leung victory.

While Hong Kong’s two main pro-Beijing papers have long stayed balanced in their coverage of both candidates, they have in recent days begun to tilt toward Mr. Leung. On Tuesday, one paper ran the headline “Leung Conveys Direction for Reconciliation.” On Wednesday, both papers reported how Mr. Leung won 51% of a mock vote among a group of Hong Kong secondary-school students.

In a separate article, The Wall Street Journal warns that unsatisfied electors and a pro-democracy spoiler candidate may push Sunday’s vote to a stalemate:

To win, a candidate needs the votes of a majority of the 1,200 electors—but a number of them have broached the possibility of casting blank votes, which could make reaching that target difficult. If two rounds of voting fail to produce a winner, a new election will be scheduled for May, with freshly nominated candidates.

The pro-democracy camp is backing the third candidate, Democratic Party Chairman Albert Ho, and has said none of its 200 electors will support Messrs. Tang or Leung. If Mr. Tang gets votes from half of the 390 electors who first nominated him, it would take just over 200 blank votes from other electors to hang the election.

For Beijing, already preoccupied with its own once-a-decade power transition later this year, that wouldn’t be its preferred outcome. But given current opinion polls, says Emily Lau, a pro-democracy legislator, a hung vote might be the best result as far as ordinary Hong Kongers are concerned.

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Post tags: Beijing, chief executive, Henry Tang, Hong Kong election, Leung Chun-ying
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Western media has extensively covered the political turmoil: Bloomberg reported on how coup rumors helped spark a jump in credit-default swaps for Chinese government bonds; the Wall Street Journal opinion page called Chinese leadership transitions an “invitation, sooner or later, for tanks in the streets.” The Financial Times saw the removal of Bo, combined with Premier Wen Jiabao’s strident remarks at a press conference hours before Bo’s removal as a sign the party was moving to liberalize its stance on the Tiananmen square protests of 1989. That Bo staged a coup is extremely unlikely, but until more information comes to light, we can only speculate on what happened.

…

Mainland media sites have begun to strongly censor discussion of Bo Xilai and entirely unsubstantiated rumors of gunfire in downtown Beijing (an extremely rare occurance in Beijing). Chinese websites hosted overseas, free from censorship, offer a host of unsupported, un-provable commentary on what might have happened in the halls of power. Bannedbook.org, which provides free downloads of “illegal” Chinese books, posted a long explanation of tremors in the palace of Zhongnanhai, sourced to a “person with access to high level information in Beijing,” of a power struggle between President Hu Jintao, who controls the military, and Zhou, who controls China’s formidable domestic security apparatus. The Epoch Times, a news site affiliated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement (which banned in China), has published extensively in English and Chinese about the coup.

As noted by Foreign Policy and others, coup chatter has centered on a potential standoff between President Hu Jintao, and Premier Wen Jiabao on one side, and domestic security head and Bo supporter Zhou Yongkang on the other. But whether or not the rumors have validity, The Wall Street Journal reports that the Great Firewall of China has noticed:

For several days after his ouster, censors took a hands-off approach to online gossip, letting speculation flow freely. That changed this week as popular microblogging site Sina Weibo reinstated an earlier block on searches for Mr. Bo’s name and additionally blocked a wide range of user-invented code words for Mr. Bo, including the term “not thick”—a play on Mr. Bo’s surname, which means “thin.”

Searches for Mr. Bo’s name, “not thick” and other related terms were also blocked on Tencent Weibo, another of China’s popular microblogging sites, which often impose their own blocks in anticipation of what the government will deem sensitive.

…

“I don’t recall ever seeing anything like this on the Chinese Internet,” said Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of Danwei, a website that tracks Chinese media, of the recent proliferation of political gossip. The presence of so much rumor online is one likely explanation for the stepped-up censorship, he said.

“Things are getting a little too out of control, so they’ve decided to rein it in,” Mr. Goldkorn said, adding that it was difficult to say whether the decision to block searches came from government authorities or the websites’ own in-house censors.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, Bo Xilai, coup, faction, Great Firewall of China, Hu Jintao, microblogging, online rumors, sina weibo, tencent, Web Jiabao, Zhou Yongkang
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In December, the Beijing city government issued rules giving microblog operators based in the city, which include Sina, three months to ensure users register their real identities.

Users must link their mobile phone numbers to their Weibo account and only those verified will be allowed to post messages. Sina has said the regulations would hurt the platform.

The real-name requirement was one focus of Chinese Human Rights Defenders’ 2011 report (PDF), released last week. Almost half of the activists surveyed by the organisation said that they used Sina Weibo in their work on a daily basis, and reported tangible successes achieved through doing so, particularly in quickly spreading word of detentions. But growing numbers of account closures have forced many to ‘reincarnate’, a recourse which the real name policy is intended to block.

The most alarming development in 2011 [in terms of online controls] was the government’s introduction of the requirement that microbloggers use their real names when registering to open an account. The thriving domestic microblogsphere has proved highly effective in exposing government misconduct during the past few years, but it is now threatened with curtailment as a result of this requirement. After much speculation about its introduction, it was announced at the end of the year that it would be implemented in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Since the two main internet companies operating microblogs in China—Sina and Tencent—are based in Beijing and Shenzhen, the new measure is likely to affect most of China’s 250 million registered microblog users …. (p.14)

Given the logistical difficulties, some observers question whether the government will succeed in pushing ahead with the “real-name registration” measure. A similar effort to control the use of cell phones in 2010 went largely unenforced;38 small vendors of SIM cards, for example, bypassed the registration system as it negatively effected their business. However, microblogs are operated by several giant internet companies who have a strong track record of avoiding trouble by complying with censorship requirements. (p.15)

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, cell phones, Chinese Human Rights Defenders, real name registration, sina, sina weibo, social networking
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The Great Wall may not, after all, be visible from space – but Chinese air pollution is.

How are the satellite measures of PM 2.5 derived? In short, scientific instruments aboard the satellites assess something called Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD). This is a measure of the degree to which aerosol particles prevent the transmission of light either through absorption or scattering ….

The figures … reveal telling trends for PM 2.5 data in China. All but four provinces (excluding Taiwan) have average annual exposures to PM 2.5 above levels recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). Figure 1, below, shows a map of population-weighted fine particulate matter concentrations in China’s 31 provinces in 2007. Most provinces exceed the WHO recommendation for PM 2.5 levels, which is set at an annual average of 10 micrograms per cubic metre.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: air quality, Beijing, PM2.5, United States, world health organization
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