The vessel’s owner, Yu Xuejun, called the Chinese Embassy in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, on May 10 to seek help, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a brief statement issued through Sina Weibo, the country’s Twitter-like microblog service. Mr. Yu was not on the boat when it was seized.

“The embassy immediately made representations to the consular affairs bureau of the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, asking that North Korea release the vessel and the crew as soon as possible, and ensure the safety of the lives and property of the detained crew, as well as their legitimate rights,” the Chinese ministry statement said.

…

The Chinese media reports said the boat was seized on May 5, with 16 men onboard, and North Korean authorities demanded payment of 600,000 renminbi, equal to about $98,000, to release them and the vessel, apparently on the grounds that it was fishing in waters claimed by North Korea. The deadline for payment was Sunday, The Beijing Times newspaper said.

[Source]

China’s state-run Global Times reported on Monday that those responsible were “highly likely from the North Korean army,” with one expert speculating that North Korea may be retaliating for sanctions imposed by the United Nations in March after the rogue state’s third nuclear test. But the Guardian’s Tania Branigan speculates that local North Korean forces took on the heist to make money. The boat’s owner received a call from North Korea claiming that his boat had entered North Korean waters, she reports, though he insists the boat had not left Chinese territory:

“This is not the first time it has happened and it won’t be the last,” said Cheng Xiaohe, an expert on Sino-North Korean relations at Renmin University.

North Korean forces and Chinese fishermen often played a cat-and-mouse game, with incursions over the line by both sides, he said. Other cases had not become public because boat owners simply paid up but this time the ransom appeared to be much higher than usual.

“This issue will complicate an already troubled relationship between the two countries but I don’t think the impact will be significant or lasting. I think with the Chinese government intervention it will be settled quickly,” Cheng said.

But he added: “The Chinese side needs to rein in fishermen to make sure they stay in Chinese waters and the DPRK also needs to impose discipline on local military forces.”

[Source]

For Foreign Policy, Isaac Stone Fish doubts that the kidnappers acted with the full backing of the North Korean military command:

But if the “pirates” were actually members of the North Korean military acting in concert with Pyongyang, why the laughably small ransom? Yu told a Chinese journalist that he can’t pay the “sky-high price” of $100,000 — that may be true, but the sticker price for international incidents is usually higher than that of a luxury car. (By comparison, in 2010, the average ransom demand from Somali pirates was $5.4 million.)

It’s not the first time this has happened. A year ago almost to the day, North Koreans abducted 29 Chinese fishermen; the identity of the North Koreans, or whether they were authorities or autonomous kidnappers, remains unknown. The fishermen were returned and relieved of all their possessions, in some cases even including their clothes and the pencils in their pocket. Is the North Korean army so starved of resources that it would steal writing utensils from Chinese fishermen?

[Source]

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: fishing, kidnapping, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, North Korea, North Korea relations
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The authorities have launched several crackdowns over the past two decades, but the crime has persisted. Since a renewed effort began in 2009, more than 54,000 children have been rescued and 11,000 trafficking gangs “smashed”, Xinhua, the state news-agency, reported in December. Officials claim the problem has become less rampant.

Given the patchiness of official data, this is hard to prove. Individual cases of abduction are rarely reported by the state-controlled media. But Deng Fei, a Beijing-based journalist and prominent campaigner on behalf of victims and their families, believes the number of children being abducted is falling. Mr Xiao estimates that the price of abducted boys has risen in recent years from around 40,000 yuan to about 90,000, perhaps because the supply of abducted children has been affected by the police crackdown.

Social media may also have played a role. In recent years, parents and activists have been using websites and microblogs to share information about cases and draw public attention to child abduction. Their efforts have put pressure on the police, who have responded (unusually, given their suspicion of internet activism) by using the internet themselves to contact the families of victims.[...]

Earlier this month, The Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore reported on family planning officials suspected of trafficking children:

Wang Yiping is the head of the village family planning committee in Anxi county, Fujian, and a mother of four, according to the China Youth Daily newspaper.

The police said she is suspected of assisting in the illegal sale of four babies, including the recent sale of a baby boy from Yunnan province for 52,000 yuan (£5,200).

[...]In December, 12 family planning officials in Hunan were suspected of selling orphans abroad, and were found to have “seriously violated regulations”, but were later cleared of any wrongdoing.

For more on child trafficking in China, see prior CDT coverage. Also visit the website for “Living With Dead Hearts“, a forthcoming film by Charlie Custer and Leia Li,  for much more information on the topic, including links to charity organizations dealing with this cause.

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Child trafficking is widespread in China, many say, because of the country’s one-child policy and the demand it creates for sons.

[...] The Chinese preference for a son and a male heir is another factor. Meanwhile, some children are abducted and then sold as slaves or forced into working in sweatshops.

And though boys are the main victims of child abduction, girls can sometimes be sold as wives. In some parts of rural China, buying a wife is not seen as a crime but as a part of Chinese tradition.

The article cites Dale Rutstein, the China spokesperson for UNICEF, suggesting that the regional wealth gap also plays a crucial role in child abduction:

“The real issue for China is [how to deal with] the difficulties of the extremes of poverty and wealth. Trafficking of children is very much associated with poverty and, because of the migrant population, [a] very large number of people who are leaving rural areas and looking for opportunities in urban areas, this affects both adults, young people and at times children.

A previous Al Jazeera report looked at the crackdown on child traffickers:

See more on child trafficking in China via CDT.

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Post tags: child abduction, child trafficking, kidnapping, one-child policy
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Two years ago, on June 4 — the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre and the most sensitive date in the Chinese political calendar — Ji Pomin received a text message from a high-placed friend: It said that former president Jiang Zemin had been taken to a military hospital in a critical condition. Ji fired off a coded message to hundreds of people in his address book to seek confirmation, asking: “The Supreme Old Master ascended to heaven?” Many of Ji’s politically connected friends forwarded the text to their friends, who misinterpreted the cryptic question as a statement. By June 6, overseas Chinese websites were reporting that former president Jiang Zemin was dead.

[...] A few days after Ji’s text message, he received a phone call from someone claiming to be from a parcel delivery service. They said the package was too big to fit down the lane in which he lived, so he walked to nearby Dongdan, one of Beijing’s busiest shopping areas, to collect it. Standing there, he said, in the blind spot between two security cameras outside an upmarket wedding photography store, were two burly men. They pulled a cloth hood over Ji’s head and bundled him into a car.

[...] The daylight abduction of a princeling like Ji, in downtown Beijing, shows just how delicate the subject of elite politics has become. That Ji wasn’t tortured, that he felt emboldened to speak his mind, and that his captors politely drove him back to where they found him two days later, shows the privileges afforded by his status. The secret police had originally lured him out on to the street, says Ji, so they would not disturb his then 86 year-old mother, who had joined the revolutionary struggle with his father at the age of 14 in 1938. By contrast, Ji says they ransacked the homes of several people who received his message. And a historian whose work had influenced Ji’s negative views on Jiang was reportedly arrested and convicted of subversion in May 2011.

See more on “princelings“ and illegal detentions via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: illegal detentions, Jiang Zemin, kidnapping, princelings, rumors, stability maintenance, state security
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As many as 70,000 children are kidnapped and sold in China each year. This film follows three sets of parents in their struggles to locate their missing children.

[…] The film focuses primarily on the experiences of the parents and what the loss of a child does to a family, but it also delves into what happens to the children after they’re kidnapped. An adult male who was kidnapped and sold as a toddler in the 1980s tells the story of how he was raised in the household of a family that purchased him. A Chinese journalist shares the tale of how he uncovered a massive scandal in which local Chinese government officials were found to be forcibly confiscating children and selling them to orphanages, where they were then adopted by unwitting foreign parents. And China’s only independent rescue center for street children breaks down how kids live when they’re sold onto the street.

See also Custer’s related articles at Danwei and Foreign Policy, via CDT.

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Post tags: adoption, child abduction, child trafficking, documentaries, films, kidnapping
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Ms. Tang’s daughter was kidnapped in October 2006 in Yongzhou city in Hunan, raped, beaten and forced to work as a prostitute in a spa until her rescue in December of the same year.

Unhappy with the first round of convictions meted out in 2008, Ms. Tang has been fighting for harsher penalties for the defendants in her daughter’s case.

In June, the Hunan Provincial Higher People’s Court handed down tougher sentences, including death sentences for two of the men, life in prison for four others and a 15-year jail sentence for one. But Ms. Tang continued to fight for death penalties for all the men.

Last week, the distressed mother was sentenced, without trial, to 18-months in a labor camp for “disturbing social order and exerting a negative impact on society”. This led to public outrage, expressed in a variety of public venues: from the blogosphere – where an overwhelming majority of surveyed netizens demanded the abolishment of re-education through labor, to official media – in reference to the local authorities that sentenced Tang, the Global Times demanded that officials “bear in mind that they are public servants, and not above the people”.

Yesterday, Tang was released from the labor camp in Hunan province. From The Wall Street Journal’s China Realtime Report:

Tang Hui is free.

The mother sentenced to a labor camp for pushing hard for tougher punishment of the men who allegedly raped her daughter was released on Friday, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported. News of Ms. Tang’s release followed shortly after an outpouring of support for her on Chinese microblogging sites, offering yet another illustration of the growing power of social media in China.

[...]“Tang Hui, this is China – a China with hope,” Deng Fei, a journalist with Phoenix Weekly magazine who’s been following Ms. Tang’s case, wrote on Sina Corp.’s Weibo microblogging service.

“This really would have been unimaginable without the Internet,” wrote Sun Yueli, a lawyer. “I just hope the next step in defending her rights goes as smoothly.”

An AP report further notes that the intensity of public pressure likely led to this quick release:

Chinese authorities on Friday released a woman sent to a labor camp for campaigning for harsher sentences for the seven men convicted of abducting, raping and prostituting her 11-year-old daughter, with officials apparently bowing to public pressure in the highly emotional case.

Without drawing attention to public reaction, a Xinhua report claims that the reason for her release had to do with her young daughter’s need for care:

Tang filed an appeal on Aug. 7. After considering her appeal, the center decided to allow her to leave, since her daughter, now 17 years old, is still a minor and requires her mother’s care, provincial publicity officials said.

The public’s vocal outrage, and ultimately Tang’s release, could be viewed as another example of what Elizabeth C. Economy has called “China’s New Political Class: the People”. Also see prior CDT coverage of re-education through labor in China, and the case of Tang Hui.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: kidnapping, netizens, online public opinion, public opinion, rape, re-education through labor, Tang Hui
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The fishermen returned to the Chinese port of Dalian on Monday morning, the New China News Agency reported.

Chinese media suggested that Beijing did not pay a ransom for the boats. The news agency report credited China’s ambassador to Pyongyang, Liu Hongcai, with securing the release through “negotiation and close contact” with the North Korean government.

The release of the boats does little, however, to clear up questions about whether impoverished North Koreans are engaging in Somalia-style piracy to raise money. Following the death of leader Kim Jong Il in December, North Korea elevated his 28-year-old son, Kim Jong Un, to replace him, and some believe the transition has not gone smoothly.

Chinese fishery officials were quoted Monday as demanding an investigation into who in North Korea was behind the seizure of the boats. The state-run Global Times newspaper said hundreds of Chinese fishing vessels had been ordered to retreat westward to avoid another incident.

This incident comes amid tensions about Pyongyang’s nuclear activities and missile tests. Although China, Japan, and South Korea have agreed to work together on dealing with North Korea, China has seemed to launch it’s own investigation on the incident. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The report said the Koreans took whatever they could, and that one boat wasn’t enough to hold all of the booty and that a second boat was called in.

The fishermen were later taken ashore and given cigarettes before being forced at gunpoint to sign a document while they were filmed. According to the report, the contents of the document read : ”We entered DPRK waters and were working there illegally. The DPRK treated us in a friendly manner and all was normal during our stay there.”

The report makes the point that it is still unclear who actually detained the Chinese fishermen, with the crew insisting that the boats were boarded in the early morning and the fishermen were unable to see for sure. They did not say whether they had any other opportunities to identify the gunboat.

The North Korean embassy in Beijing declined to comment, but China Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei offered Beijing’s most extensive comments on the incident to date at a regular press briefing Tuesday afternoon. Here is what he said: “The Foreign Ministry attaches great importance to the incident. The Foreign Ministry and Chinese Embassy in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea maintained close communication with the DPRK in Beijing and Pyongyang, securing the release of the fishermen and fishing boats. The Chinese side urged the DPRK to observe agreements, including those on consular visits and notifications. China also demanded the DPRK ensure safety and humanitarian treatment of the fishermen. Based on our understanding, the Bureau of Fisheries is conducting investigation.”

Beijing is Pyongyang’s closest political ally, and this incident has sparked tension among netizens that call Pyongyang “ungrateful.” The BBC adds:

The allegations, which have been circulated widely on Chinese social media, caused anger among netizens, who slammed North Korea for its “ingratitude” and accused the Chinese authorities of being weak.

On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging platform, more than a million posts have been published on the incident since the detention was publicised last week.

“North Koreans, do you still deserve our help? Is this how you repay us?” said Kong Lingquan, a Shanghai-based event director.

“After such a shameful incident, why doesn’t our government demand an explanation from North Korea?” a Weibo user said.

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: fisherman incident, kidnapping, maritime boundaries, netizens, North Korea, North Korea relations
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The captors have asked for payment by Thursday for the release of the men and boats, the newspaper reported.

China’s foreign ministry said it was in touch with North Korean authorities and hoped to resolve the situation soon.

“We urged the North Korean side to guarantee the legal rights of the Chinese fishermen,” the ministry’s spokesman Hong Lei said.

[...] It is not clear if the boats were seized by North Korean authorities or kidnappers as some reports have suggested.

In recent meetings with Japan and South Korea, Chinese officials to pledge to work together with those countries to prevent provocation by North Korea on the nuclear issue. Recently, China has become more outspoken in opposing North Korea’s plans for a third nuclear test. From Reuters:

If North Korea goes ahead with the test, China would consider taking some retaliatory steps, but they would not be substantive, a source with ties to Pyongyang and Beijing told Reuters.

North Korea has almost completed preparations for the test, Reuters reported in late April, a step that would further isolate the impoverished state after last month’s failed rocket launch that the United States says was a ballistic missile test.

“China is unhappy … and urged North Korea not to conduct a nuclear test near Changbai Mountain,” said the source, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

China feared a radiation leak and damage to the environment from a blast, the source added.

Read more about China’s relations with North Korea via CDT.

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Post tags: kidnapping, North Korea nuclear, North Korea relations
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Media reports said yesterday the project’s biding process will start soon. The system will be set up at Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station, Tianjin W. Railway Station and Jinan W. Railway Station.

The equipment will be set up at security check areas in the stations, according to the China Academy of Railway Sciences.

“The quick identification system will enable the police to recognize faces via surveillance cameras and comb criminal databases on computers for the final match,” authorities said.

Researchers added the technology works when people are moving and is helpful even if suspects have had cosmetic surgery.

The South China Morning Post, however, reports that the notice calling for bids on the project was quickly removed, apparently in response to online criticism:

Since the academy pulled the notice, no further details about the project have emerged, including its cost. Attempts to find how why the notice was removed were unsuccessful yesterday, as the academy’s office did not answer phone calls.

Many online commentators responded negatively to the proposed system.

“A government that treats its whole population like suspects is worse than a few criminals on the run,” a Beijing-based commentator wrote on 163.com a major Chinese internet portal ….

In 2006, rail authorities in Beijing set up a still-image face-recognition system at the city’s West Station and they said it helped police catch more than 100 fugitives within the first month.

But the process of scanning each person severely impeded passenger flow, and it is now rarely used.

The new system, if reliable and widely deployed, could be used and abused against other targets. Charles Custer pointed out its potential for identifying kidnapped children (the subject of his forthcoming documentary, Living With Dead Hearts), while Tom of Seeing Red in China warned that the system could aid the interception of petitioners.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: high-speed rail, kidnapping, petitioners, police equipment, privacy, railways, surveillance, transportation
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A report from the ministry said police rescued 8,660 abducted children and 15,458 women in 2011 as nearly 3,200 human trafficking gangs were broken up.

It did not give any figures for the total number of women and children abducted last year. Exact numbers of victims are difficult to obtain as China’s vast size, rural poverty and population of 1.3 billion mean many such cases never get reported beyond local areas.

The rescued children are usually put into orphanages while authorities try to reunite them with their families. In order to identify the rescued children, an “anti-abduction” DNA database has been set up to match missing children with their families.

“Public security organs across China will deepen the campaign against abductions to save more women and children and work hard to reduce the number of abduction and trafficking cases,” the ministry said.

Read more about the plight of kidnapped children in China via Charles Custer of China Geeks, who is producing a documentary film on the subject.

Update: Custer responds to the PSB report and compares their findings with his own:

That said, as someone who has spent the last year talking to the parents of kidnapped children, it is difficult to read the report without getting angry. It states, for example, that the disappearances of children are uniformly treated as criminal cases, and that these cases are to be “swiftly developed and investigated” with the same urgency the PSB might use in pursuing a murder case. But in actuality, everything we’ve heard from parents indicates that this is not how things work in practice. In every case we’ve looked into, police initially tell parents to look for their children themselves, assuming the child has run away or is visiting friends, and telling parents they won’t take the case until the child has been missing 24 hours2. When they do take the case, investigations are slow and remarkably lazy. In the 2011 disappearance of Lei Xiaoxia (one of the subjects of our film), it took police months to request surveillance footage from the school where Lei went missing — by which time it was already deleted — and nearly a year after her disappearance, the police still haven’t interviewed any potential witnesses.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: children, human trafficking, kidnapping
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A team of officials China sent to seek the release of the workers will conduct negotiations with South Sudan’s officials in the South Sudan capital of Juba, according to an “authoritative source” cited by the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party.

“At the same time, (the group will) go through the African Union and other third or fourth parties to mediate,” the report said. “The purpose is to ensure fully that the 29 compatriots will be able to come home safely.”

China has sought to maintain good relations with both Khartoum, a long-time ally, and newly independent South Sudan, home to investments by state-owned Chinese oil giants China National Petroleum Corp and Sinopec. As the biggest investor in oilfields in South Sudan, Beijing could wield some clout in the negotiations.

See more about the kidnapping via a previous CDT post. Also related, China’s gift of a new $200 million African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa has generated controversy.

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Post tags: Africa relations, diplomacy, kidnapping, Sudan
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Police in China say they have rescued nearly 200 children after uncovering two child-trafficking gangs.

More than 600 people were arrested in raids in 10 Chinese provinces.

A BBC correspondent in Beijing says the staggering numbers in the investigation reveal the scale of the country’s child-trafficking problem.

Critics blame China’s one-child policy and lax adoption laws, which they say have created a thriving underground market for buying children.

While this may seem a small victory for the authorities, an article in The Telegraph explains just how widespread this problem is:

As many as 70,000 Chinese children are thought to be kidnapped each year, often snatched from rural areas in the north of the country and then funnelled south to families in the provinces of Fujian and Guangdong. Last year, Chinese police managed to rescue some 6,000 of them.

Some children are sold to would-be parents, who have either failed to conceive themselves or been limited by the one-child policy. Others have ended up on the streets, being enlisted as beggars by gangs.

The Guardian reports on recent intensified police efforts to eradicate this problem, and on a public lack of faith in the efficacy of those efforts:

Parents have complained of police inefficiency and indifference. In many cases their search for their missing children has relied primarily on their own efforts and those of others who have been affected.

Microbloggers have also sought to reunite families by sharing pictures of missing children and those seen begging on the streets.

Authorities stepped up efforts to tackle the problem two years ago. The ministry’s statement said police had cracked more than 7,000 trafficking rings since April 2009, rescuing more than 18,500 children and 34,500 women.

They have also launched a DNA database to help match children with parents, since many are snatched as babies or toddlers.

For further coverage, read about Charles Custer’s campaign against child kidnapping in China via CDT. Also, be sure to visit ‘Living With Dead Hearts‘ to help in the on-going production of Custer’s documentary dealing with this issue.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: child trafficking, kidnapping
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In the city of Tianjin, over the course of one summer afternoon in 1870, thousands of residents, led in part by local volunteer militia known as the “Fire and Water Brigades,” stormed the French consulate and a cathedral before turning their sights on an orphanage run by a group of Catholic nuns. Before the day ended, 21 foreigners – including all 16 of the nuns – had been killed, many of them brutally stabbed, beaten, burned, or simply ripped apart by the furious crowd. Three decades of foreign aggression and unequal treaties had created a lot of anger and hostility toward foreigners, and there had been a few instances of foreigners being killed in local disputes, but never before had there been such a display of rage and violence against the foreign presence in China and it didn’t take long for the overseas press to dub the event “The Tientsin Massacre.”

What sparked such fury? Well, the short answer is that you can build concessions, sell opium, and burn a few palaces and people might be pissed off about it, but there are few quicker ways to get a man to take action and do battle than to mess with his kids.

Note the accompanying image of a ‘souvenir fan’ decorated with a picture of the burning cathedral, and compare with the made-in-China Free Libya memorabilia now available in Tripoli.

Kidnapping remains a threat to children in China today, alongside dangers such as road accidents and food contamination: see the trailer for ‘Living with Dead Hearts‘, a forthcoming documentary on child kidnapping in China by Charles Custer, who is currently raising funds for its completion.

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Post tags: child safety, child trafficking, Christianity, France, history, kidnapping, qing dynasty, riots, Tianjin
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Since at least the 1980s, kidnapping and human trafficking have become a problem in China, and most often, the victims are children. Estimates vary on just how bad things have gotten. The Chinese government reports that fewer than 10,000 children are kidnapped each year, but the U.S. State Department says it’s closer to 20,000. Some independent estimates put the number as high as 70,000 (compared with 100 to 200 children kidnapped per year in the United States, for example).

The vast majority of kidnapped children will never see their families again. In China, kids are abducted not for ransom but for sale. Often, they come from poor and rural families — the families least likely to be capable of tracking their kids down or fighting back. Some children are then sold to new “adoptive” families looking for children. Others are sold into slave labor, prostitution, or a life on the streets. In some cases, healthy children are brutally crippled by handlers on the theory that a child with broken legs or horrific boils looks sadder and can earn more money begging on the street.

Some children are even sold into adoption overseas. Chinese adoption agencies seeking the substantial donations foreign parents make when they adopt — in some cases, as much as $5,000 — have been known to purchase children from human traffickers, though these cases appear to be relatively rare.

Custer describes one case in a guest post at Danwei:

By the time Liu Jingjun was two, the parents had decided they didn’t want more children, and both had operations to ensure there would be no further pregnancies. Shortly after this, Liu Jingjun was kidnapped.

On April 11, 2010, Mr. Liu went to work and his wife stayed home to watch the children. Jingjun, who was not even two at the time, was outside in the alley playing with some older neighborhood children, and his mother was inside the apartment. Around 10:30 A.M., she went to look for Jingjun and discovered he was missing. She called Liu, who came home, and together they called the police.

The police did come, but told them to calm down and have a look around themselves, assuring them that the child had probably just wandered off or been taken into some neighbor’s house. So the couple searched on their own until the evening, when Mr. Liu discovered one of his neighbors had a surveillance camera with an unobstructed view of the alley. He got his neighbor to let him review the recordings and watched in horror as he saw a man walk onscreen, grab his son, and carry him into a van at the end of the alley.

Custer is working on a film, ‘Living With Dead Hearts‘, about child kidnapping in China, and is currently seeking funding to continue production. Please take five minutes to view the following pitch and trailer, and share it widely:

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: adoption, beggars, child trafficking, children, kidnapping, prostitution
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A man who allegedly kept six women as sex slaves in a dungeon for two years and killed two of them in a central China city has been sacked from his post and stripped of his Party membership.

Li Hao was fired from the inspection team under the Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision of Luoyang, Henan Province, after he was detained for forcing the women into prostitution and to feature in porno videos uploaded on the Internet to make money, Guangzhou Daily reported today.

Yu Hongwen, Li’s supervisor and head of the inspection team, was also suspended.

The reporter who unveiled the case has taken issue with the New York Times’ account of local authorities’ subsequent actions. From the Index on Censorship:

The journalist in question, Ji Xuguang, posted a message on Weibo saying that, contrary to online rumours, he had not been “arrested” (although his previous Weibo postings stated he had indeed been accused of revealing state secrets). Yet the term “arrested” was never used in the New York Times’ article: Jacobs stuck with “detained”.

In an email conversation, the article’s author, Andrew Jacobs, told me that the issue boils down to a “parsing of language.” … Jacobs added he believed Ji had been “detained” in the sense that “he was not allowed to waltz away from his questioners, which is why he asked his Weibo followers for help.” […]

“[Ji] said he was sorry if his “Weibo clarification” had caused us any trouble, but he had to tweet his clarification because the Henan authorities were using this “dispute” against him. He said he was hauled out of bed by his boss early one morning because Henan authorities accused him of getting the New York Times to exaggerate the story, so he had to come out and tell the truth, which is that he was not arrested.”

The New York Times was also accused in March of exaggerating the extent of telephone monitoring in China. The newspaper’s dramatic anecdote about a call being disconnected in response to an innocuous Shakespeare quote quickly took flight across the Internet and morphed into, for example, “Chinese censorware nukes any voicecall that contains the word ‘protest’“. Numerous attempts to reproduce the disconnection failed, however.

People’s Daily, meanwhile, reports that a Beijing lawyer was wrongly identified as Li Hao by a TV news report:

Shangdong Television used the picture of Wang Jin, of Beijing City Linkzone Law Firm, in a news program about the sex slave scandal last Friday, claiming the face was that of suspect Li Hao ….

Wang said: “I received numerous calls from friends and relatives asking me whether I had any relationship with the case and the suspect.”

He said his picture was available only on the law firm’s website alongside his name and an introduction, so using it wrongly was carelessness on the part of the TV station.

He said: “They must have picked the picture randomly from the Internet and used it because a picture of the suspect is unavailable.”

Luoyang police have apologised for failing to end the abducted women’s captivity sooner. From CNN:

Police didn’t act and raid Li’s home, until September 3 after one of the supposed “sex slaves” escaped and one of her relatives talked with police.

On Saturday, Guo Congbin — who directs the public security bureau in Luoyang, which is in Henan province — said the lag time between when Li began abducting the women and police discovered him indicates that community patrols were ineffective and police had lost their sense of responsibility.

He noted four police officers have been suspended; entertainment venues, Internet cafes, beauty parlors, saunas and the like are being more closely examined; and an “online cleansing” effort is targeting porn websites.

“I beg the people of Luoyang to give us another chance,” Guo said. “We will show you the results of our actions.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Henan, kidnapping, Luoyang, murder, new york times, police, pornography, prostitution, rape
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