Word of the death spread on the Internet in the days after the woman, whose surname was Yuan, was initially said to have committed suicide by jumping from a top floor or roof of the mall, called Jingwen, last Friday. Rumors on the Internet said Ms. Yuan, a migrant worker from Anhui Province, had been raped by private security guards in the mall, where she worked, and might have been thrown to her death.

A witness told The Wall Street Journal that the protest had swelled by 10 a.m. and had ended by 5 p.m., though a heavy police presence lingered on the scene. CDT’s “Sensitive Words” project also noted that photos of riot police and police helicopters had spread on Weibo, while footage of the demonstration had emerged on Tencent.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Kaiman had more on the protests:

A shopkeeper who gave his name only as Mr Li said that some police had arrived at around 10am, followed by around 200 people who paraded down the street shouting “Protest! Protest!”

The rapidly growing number of officers then closed the road for the rest of the day, he said. Photographs of the scene posted online showed hundreds of people on the street, although it was not clear how many were protesters and how many were onlookers.

One bystander said that officers had clashed with protesters, beating them and dragging them into vans.

While police said a preliminary investigation and autopsy did not indicate foul play, and that the woman did not have any interaction with other people during the hours before she fell to her death, the state-run Global Times reported that the demonstrators demanded a more open investigation:

Rumors have been circulated online that Yuan was gang raped in a enclosed room inside the building by seven security guards, which led to her suicide, or that they even pushed her out. Yuan’s mother visited the Dahongmen Police Station supervising the market but was not allowed to see the surveillance footage, some Web users said.

Leslie Hook of the Financial Times wrote that the protest, which halted traffic in southern Beijing for hours, “highlights mounting social pressures facing China’s leaders:”

The area where Ms Yuan worked is poor and is mostly populated by “outsiders” such as herself who work in the garment trading industry, according to residents. Scepticism of the police is widespread in China and many smaller protests across the country have been sparked by allegations of malpractice.

By Wednesday evening, the protest had dissipated amid heavy rain, but a large military presence was still visible, with dozens of parked buses carrying special forces, soldiers and police.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Anhui, Beijing, mass incidents, migrant workers, murder, protest, rape, suicide, women's rights, Yuan Liya
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They have occupied factories and taken to the streets. But Chinese workers chose a more unusual form of protest when they highlighted their unpaid wages by dancing Gangnam Style outside the nightclub they had built.

The construction workers from Wuhan said they had concluded it was the only way to draw attention to their problems.

[...]The leader of the dancers, who gave his name only as Mr Lu, told the Wuhan Evening News that in total 40 workers were owed 233,000 yuan (£23,300).

“There have been many creative protests over the last few years. Younger workers in particular are very media-savvy and clued-in,” said Geoff Crothall of the Hong-Kong-based China Labour Bulletin.

For a picture of the PSY-inspired protest, see Chinese-language coverage.

As workers in Wuhan dance Gangnam Style, LinkAsia relays video footage from a CCTV broadcast showing more drastic methods of protest over unpaid wages, which in more than one case included suicide:

ChinaSMACK has translated Chinese news coverage and subsequent netizen commentary on the migrant worker in Guangzhou who detonated a suicide bomb while demanding his wages:

At 3:53pm this afternoon [January 18], an explosion happened in an apartment building in Guangzhou’s Tianhebei Road Dushi Huating Community. Upon report, Guangzhou Police quickly dispatched police officers and firefighters to the scene to handle the situation, evacuate the surrounding people, and immediately take the injured to the hospital for emergency treatment.

According to the preliminary investigation by the police, in the afternoon, a man arrived at a company in Tianhebei Road Dushi Huating Community to ask for his salary, then detonated the explosive strapped to his body. The man died of his severe injuries. At present, this incident has already caused 1 death and 7 wounded. Police are currently investigating this incident.[...]

Meanwhile, China Daily reports on a ruling by the Supreme People’s Court that may work to help migrants receive their due compensation:

A judicial interpretation that went into effect on Wednesday aims to defend migrant workers by preventing their employers from defaulting on their wages.

A judicial interpretation issued by the Supreme People’s Court (SPC), China’s top court, clearly defines specific applicable situations in which employers who default on wages can be sentenced to prison for up to seven years.

A 2011 amendment to the Criminal Law classifies failure to pay laborers properly as a crime, specifying a prison sentence of three to seven years for employers whose failure to pay their employees results in “serious consequences.”

However, the “serious consequences” are not specified in the law.

[...]The payments mentioned in the interpretation refer not only to employee wages, but also to bonuses and overtime pay.

However, employers can have their penalties relieved or be exempted from punishment entirely if they render payments to their employees before being prosecuted, the interpretation said.

The interpretation is hoped to discourage wage defaults, especially those that impact migrant workers.

For more on migrant workers, unpaid wages or Chinese interpretations of the Gangnam Style meme, see prior CDT coverage.

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Post tags: Gangnam style, judicial action, migrant workers, protest, protests, Supreme People's Court, unpaid wages
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You can have your so-called “freedoms,” but only because they have the freedom to punish you afterwards. Be it literature, news, films or television, you spend tonnes of energy trying to win their approval. Even though you want some clear rules to go by, they never tell you what they are – so everybody assumes they’re breaking the rules somehow. The only way for you to completely abide by their rules is to become like them. We end up censoring ourselves, always apprehensive, always afraid, always guessing. They grab you by your collar, clamp you by the neck, yet at the same time encourage you to run faster, sing better, and win them more honour.

We hardly have any world-class writers, directors, newspapers, magazines or films. Of course, you can blame that on the incompetence of the professionals. You could also point to Iran and say, hey, their censorship is much stricter than ours, yet they still produce world-famous works of art. You can question why we have to bend ourselves to other people’s standards. Maybe I am indeed not talented enough, but still I don’t appreciate other people censoring me, revising me, or tying me down. So, my solidarity statement today, is not just for my favourite newspaper or those journalists I respect. It is also for those in worse conditions, those media outlets and journalists who come to much more violent and miserable ends. It is also for ourselves.

Southern Weekend has informed me a lot as a reader. It gives power to the weak and hope to the hopeless. So, in its moment of weakness and desperation, I hope we can all lend them some strength, even if just a little, and help it carry on.

Witnesses said up to 200 people had joined the demonstration outside Southern Weekly’s Guangzhou newsroom, according to The Telegraph’s Tom Phillips. The New York Times’ Edward Wong reported that other celebrities and commentators chimed in on the Internet as well:

“Hoping for a spring in this harsh winter,” Li Bingbing, an actress, said to her 19 million followers on a microblog account. Yao Chen, an actress with more than 31 million followers, cited a quotation by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian Nobel laureate and dissident: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

…

A well-known entrepreneur, Hung Huang, said on her microblog that the actions of a local official had “destroyed, overnight, all the credibility the country’s top leadership had labored to re-establish since the 18th Party Congress,” the November gathering in Beijing that was the climax of the leadership transition.

One journalist for Southern Weekend said Monday afternoon that negotiations between the various parties had been scheduled later in the day, but there were no results from any talks as of Monday evening.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Guangdong, Guangzhou, media censorship, microblogs, political reform, press freedom, protest, sina weibo, Southern Weekly, southern weekly protest 2013
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It is the first time in more than two decades that the editorial staff of a major newspaper has openly staged a strike against government censorship.

The decision was made after the newspaper management took over the department’s official microblog account, and issued a statement claiming that a controversial front-page New Year editorial had been written by its staff and was not a last-minute alteration by Guangdong propaganda officials. The management also blamed a blunder in the article on an editor.

The staff later issued a statement via another microblog denying the management’s account and announced a strike. Unlike two previous open letters issued by the department, last night’s statement was signed.

“The statement [on the official microblog] does not represent the opinion of the editorial staff. It is a result of pressure applied by the authorities on the … management,” the department said. “The editorial staff will fight against the falsified statement … Until the issue is resolved, we will not do any editorial work.”

Physical or “offline” protests were also scheduled to take place today at Southern Weekly’s offices in Guangzhou and Beijing, according to John Kennedy at the South China Morning Post, who has been posting and tweeting live updates and photos (including the ones below) on the developing situation:

Official statements of protest were issued by students at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and Nanjing University School of Journalism and Communication. Middle school students were also reportedly joining the protest at the newspaper offices, while popular actress Yao Chen, who has more than 30 million followers on Sina Weibo, posted one sentence in support of Southern Weekly:

Actress Yao Chen quoted Solzhenitsyn—”One word of truth outweighs the whole world”—in support of Southern Weekend – bit.ly/UuzSs5

— Austin Ramzy (@austinramzy) January 7, 2013

Yao Chen’s Southern Weekend message has been re-posted 30,000+ times in the past hour or so on Sina Weibo

— Austin Ramzy (@austinramzy) January 7, 2013

David Bandurski of the China Media Project, who calls the incident “without a doubt one of the most important we will witness in China this year,” details the weekend meetings between Southern Weekly editors and newspaper management which led to the strike:

According to an internal account CMP obtained from a source at the Nanfang Daily Group, which publishes a constellation of top magazines and newspapers, including Southern Weekend and Southern Metropolis Daily, an expanded meeting (编委扩大会议) of the editorial committee at Southern Weekly was held at 7 p.m. on Saturday, January 5. The meeting was voluntarily attended by many members of the paper’s editorial staff.

At the meeting, editorial staff demanded that a special investigative team be appointed to look into the “New Year’s Greeting” incident and produce a report to be issued publicly. Wang Genghui (王更辉), the deputy editor of Nanfang Media, and Huang Can (黄灿), a member of the group’s editorial committee and acting editor-in-chief of Southern Weekly, described to those present how the New Year’s special edition of the newspaper had been “altered in violation of the rules” (违规删改), particularly in the addition of an introduction to the edition. They promised that there would be no settling of scores and that the censorship process would be “returned to normal.”

At the insistence of the editorial staff, Wang Genghui and Huang Can agreed to the immediate formation of an investigative team and said they would relay the staff’s demands to their superiors. The meeting concluded at around midnight.

At around 12:30 a.m. yesterday, January 6, editorial staff learned from reliable sources of an instant message (短信) reportedly ordered by Huang Can and passed on by the paper’s general manager, Mao Zhe (毛哲), ordering that a statement be issued via Southern Weekly‘s official Sina Weibo account. The core content of that message was as follows: “The January 3 New Year’s Message and its introduction in the New Year’s edition of this newspaper were written by editors at the paper to conform to the theme of ‘seeking dreams.’”

The deliberate distortion of the truth in the instant message was a shock to the paper’s editors, especially to those editors who had been responsible for the issue in question.

The New York Times’ Ian Johnson writes that the unrest at Southern Weekly “is posing an early challenge” to new Chinese leader Xi Jinping:

The turmoil at the Guangzhou-based newspaper resonates especially strongly among politically aware Chinese because Mr. Xi chose southern China for a tour after taking power in November. He made a pilgrimage to nearby Shenzhen, where the father of China’s economic reforms, Deng Xiaoping, kick-started them two decades ago.

Indeed, Mr. Xi seems to be casting himself in the mold of Deng, who was known for bold economic reforms but who also brooked no opposition to the rule of the Communist Party.

The latest indication was a speech Mr. Xi made that also was published in newspapers on Sunday. Speaking to senior leaders, Mr. Xi repeatedly invoked Deng, especially on the need to adhere to “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” a phrase often used to mean a combination of pragmatic policies and one-party rule. He also praised the pre-reform era, in what appeared to be an effort to appeal to harder-line Communists.

But part of the reason for the clamor for reforms are hopes that Mr. Xi himself has raised. So far he has won praise by calling for China’s constitutional protections to be put in effect, ordering officials to cut pomp and setting in motion an anticorruption campaign.

Update: John Kennedy of the South China Morning Post, who covered the Southern Weekly story through the evening on Sunday and into Monday as protesters gathered in front of the newspaper’s Guangzhou office, has continued to tweet updates from himself and other netizens:

2:00PM

Southern Weekend supporters picking up scattered chrysanthemum petals. twitter.com/wenyunchao/sta…

— John Kennedy (@28wordslater) January 7, 2013

Large crowd still gathered and things remain peaceful, says one attendee. twitter.com/meowdan/status…

— John Kennedy (@28wordslater) January 7, 2013

1:30PM

Tianya.cn’s Liang Shuxin: Quite a few police/undercovers/guards at the scene now, flowers have all been confiscated, starting to get tense.

— John Kennedy (@28wordslater) January 7, 2013

The Sydney Morning Herald’s John Garnaut has more on the implications of the walkout on Xi Jinping’s agenda:

It poses an early test of China’s direction under the new leadership of Xi Jinping, who has made strong and seemingly contradictory calls for the country to press forward with reform while also returning to the revolutionary legacy of its Maoist past.

“Everybody knows that the system stands naked and that the system is aware that the public knows that it is naked,” said political commentator Zhang Lifan, who is close to several liberal-leaning “princeling” children of revolutionary leaders.

“The question is whether it wants to put on clothes, or not,” he said.

Read more about Southern Weekly and press freedom in China via CDT.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, Guangdong, Guangzhou, media censorship, microblogs, political reform, press freedom, protest, sina weibo, Southern Media Group, Southern Weekly, southern weekly protest 2013, Tuo Zhen, Xi Jinping
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A pro-Tibet protester tries to take the Olympic torch, Paris 2008. (Yang Zhen Dong)

This week’s featured directive, issued in April 2008 by the Heilongjiang Province information portal, shows the power of “guidance” (引导) over protest in China. At that time, the Olympic torch relay was plagued at every stop by human rights groups and Tibet independence supporters. After a wheelchair-bound torchbearer was attacked in Paris, netizens called for a boycott of the French hypermarket Carrefour. “The biggest shareholder of Carrefour donated huge money to the Dalai Lama,” fumed the netizen demanding the boycott, “and even the French president has announced boycott of the Beijing Olympics.”

The directive below instructs provincial websites on how to direct online discussion of the boycott. Read the original Chinese here:

On-duty staff at the Internet propaganda office: Each website in every locality must adopt measures concerning netizens boycotting Carrefour and related propaganda management prompts to properly tamp down online discussion and prevent a loss of control from influencing domestic stability. Prepare your reports, guidance and management according to the following requirements:

(1) Give protection to the patriotic fervor of netizens who support the Olympics, who oppose “Tibet independence” and who denounce Western media’s distorted reporting and insults to China. Direct the discussion at the Dalai clique’s secessionist forces, as well as the vile material produced by CNN and a small number of other Western media.

(2) Comprehensively and nimbly guide netizen discussion of boycotting Carrefour and French products in a logical direction. Direct netizens’ patriotic fervor such that you fulfill your duties and the Olympics are successfully launched. Each website in every locality must organize commentaries to carry out guidance, but they should be limited in number and not stray in focus. After a related article is posted, please send the link to the domestic affairs work inbox of the Internet Research Center.

(3) Websites will not report specific “boycott activities” in any locality, will not exaggerate “escalating boycott activities” and the like and will not report “opposition to the ‘boycott’” or similar extreme speech or activities. Do not republish this type of reporting from traditional media; a lock-down on online publication of this type of material goes into effect from now until May 15.

(4) Comments and posts calling for seizing this opportunity to incite demonstrations, marches, assemblies, “group walks,” “group shopping” and other group activity must be deleted without exception. Comments and posts which ceaselessly negate and criticize the patriotic fervor of netizens, echo or support foreign anti-Chinese forces, or which cause trouble, add oil to the fire, create conflict among netizens and oppose [the voices we are supporting] must be deleted without exception. All those in charge of information portals and the 13 city portal websites which have already been notified will execute these instructions. They will also conduct thorough searches of all Heilongjiang information portals and delete related information; they will together delete one post calling for boycotts and five related comments. (April 18, 2008)

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. The original publication date is noted after the directives; the date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Beijing Olympics, Boycott, Boycott Carrefour, carrefour, censorship, Censorship Vault, cnn, Dalai Lama, Directives from the Ministry of Truth, France, Heilongjiang, Internet censorship, media censorship, Ministry of Truth, netizens, Paris, patriotism, propaganda, protest, stability, Tibet
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Xinhua Shizhaizi Co, Ltd (XHS) remitted more than 14 million yuan ($2.2 million) as an overdue payment for a real estate project, including over 8 million yuan in overdue wages for 500 migrant workers, to the intermediate people’s court in the prefecture of Dali.

Ma Zhonghua, mayor of the city of Dali, where the prefectural seat is located, said the government will ensure that relevant contractors and subcontractors pay their workers in full and on time.

The case drew public attention after 13 of the workers’ children, ranging from 5 years of age to 20, jointed their parents in protesting the company’s failure to pay last Tuesday. Photos of the protest taken by tourists were posted online, triggering calls for the protection of migrants’ rights.

[...]After the children joined their parents’ protests, the Dali city government demanded that XHS settle the issue.

Wall Street Journal’s China Realtime Report translates a message from one little girl’s sign, and describes how the sentimentality that the children brought to the rally affected netizens:

“My name is Gao Jia,” read the sign held by one little girl. “I want to eat, to go to school, to drink milk, to eat cookies.”

[...]The appearance of the children appears to struck a chord with China’s sometimes jaded Internet users, prompting new interest in an issue that had fallen out of the headlines in recent years.

[...]While conflicts over unpaid wages have become routine, the children’s protest hovered near the top of Chinese search engine Baidu’s trending topics list throughout the day on Friday and garnered widespread sympathy from Internet users.

“While [a lot of us] are living cotent and happy lives, there are millions out there with no food to eat, no milk to drink,” wrote one user of Sina Corp.’s Weibo microblogging service Weibo.

Not everyone was thrilled with the use of children, including a disapproving microblogger who asked: “What kind of parent lets their five year-old demand their unpaid wages?”

Two photos of the picketing tots can be seen in Chinese language coverage of the protest.

For more on the struggle of China’s migrant workers, see prior CDT coverage. Also see “The Uncertain Future of Beijing’s Migrant Schools” and “Migration Pattern’s Change, Children Still Left Behind” for more on how the lifestyles of migrant laborers affect their successors.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: children, labor rights, migrant labor, migrant workers, protest, protests, unpaid wages
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Chinese people power has arrived. As China’s top officials meet in Beidaihe to finalize their selections for the country’s new leadership, they are being overshadowed by a different, and increasingly potent, political class—the Chinese people. From Beijing to Jiangsu to Guangdong, Chinese citizens are making their voices heard on the Internet and their actions felt on the streets.

[...]

One of the events that Economy uses to underscore this trend is the flood that continues to wreak havoc on Beijing after last weekend’s torrential rains. While the government’s manipulation of death tolls and censorship of media and micro-blog coverage of the event led to serious public anger at the offical response to the disaster, the incident allowed citizens an opportunity to effectively stand up for themselves in the relief effort. China Media Project provides an in-depth media survey to show how the government has been trying to mitigate the fallout of negative public opinion by highlighting “positive” stories:

As we approach the critical one-week anniversary of the floods in Beijing last Saturday that claimed at least 77 lives, according to the latest official numbers — and as Chinese continue to heap criticism on the government via social media — China’s propaganda leaders are moving aggressively to contain negative coverage.

[...]

While Weibo has proven a potent means for civic interaction, it has also become a valuable government tool to survey public opinion. An op-ed run in China Daily and the Global Times calls attention to the need to reconcile a discrepancy in digital literacy between officials and the public:

A recent local public servants’ selection test highlighted Chinese officials’ poor knowledge of Weibo.

[...]The situation of Chinese officials and governmental agencies not being able to keep up with the public’s demands needs to be changed. It’s worrying that they don’t know how to properly use this platform. Learning Weibo and other Internet applications should be a required course for civil servants and governments in the future.
More importantly, a “real life” interaction model between the government and the public also needs to be established. The government should learn to listen to the people rather than merely issue administrative documents. It needs a thorough reform. Perhaps a Weibo post of 140 words is a starting point.

The past year has been rife with incidents in which citizens have taken to the streets and to the Net to voice their concerns. For a few examples, see prior CDT coverage of the Wukan uprisings on the ground and in the blogosphere, or the Shifang protests and social media’s role within.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: civil society, Elizabeth Economy, protest, public opinion, public opinion guidance, sina weibo, weibo
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Concerning the Explosion at Beijing’s Taiyanggong power plant on June 6:

• Taiyanggong + explosion (太阳宫+爆炸)
• Taiyanggong + thermal power station (太阳宫+热电厂)
• thermal power station + explosion (热电厂+爆炸)
• Beijing + loud sound (北京+巨响)
• Beijing + explosion occurred (北京+发生爆炸)

 
People:

• Li Wangyang (李旺阳): The democracy activist, on medical release after 22 years in prison, was found dead in his hospital room on June 6, his neck in a noose tied to the window bars. The hospital staff and security personnel insist Li committed suicide, but his family contends this is impossible, given Li’s fragile state and that he was found with both feet on the ground.

• Tang Can (汤灿): Known for singing patriotic songs, an online rumor has spread that Tang has received a 15-year prison sentence for corruption and espionage. Her assistant denies the allegation.

 
Concerning the Alleged Liaison between Zhang Ziyi and Bo Xilai:

• Zhang Ziyi + restricted from leaving the country (章子怡+限制出境)
• Zhang Ziyi + accept investigation (章子怡+接受调查)
• Big Mac (巨无霸): retest

 
Concerning April Demonstrations in Chongqing’s Wansheng district (Retest):

• protest (抗议)
• Qijiang (綦江): The Chongqing district to be merged with Wansheng.
• Chongqing (重庆)
• Huang Qifan (黄奇帆): Mayor of Chongqing.
• Zhang Dejiang (张德江): Succeeded Bo Xilai as Chongqing Committee Secretary in March.

 
Other:

• Chinese Human Rights Defenders (维权网): U.S.-based human rights monitor.

Note: All Chinese-language words are tested using simplified characters. The same terms in traditional characters occasionally return different results. CDT Chinese runs a project that crowd-sources filtered keywords on Sina Weibo search.

CDT independently tests the keywords before posting them, but some searches later become accessible again. We welcome readers to contribute to this project so that we can include the most up-to-date information. To add words, check out the form at the bottom of CDT Chinese’s latest sensitive words post.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chinese Human Rights Defenders, Chongqing, filtered keywords, li wangyang, protest, Sensitive Words Series, sina weibo, weibo, Zhang Ziyi
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Angry villagers protesting a local mining operation in southwest China attacked security forces with machetes and clubs, leaving one policeman dead and 15 injured, local authorities said on Friday.

[...]“Suddenly villagers attacked the police with machetes and wooden clubs, leaving 16 injured, one of whom died later while receiving treatment,” said a statement released by the government of Lijiang – which oversees Renhe.

[...]Earlier this month, locals from Xiaoganqing village complained that the development of a local coal mine was endangering their lands and demanded their homes be moved and that they be compensated, the statement said.

A spokeswoman for the Lijiang government told AFP those complaints went unanswered and so the villagers moved their protest to the Renhe government building, where they stayed one week until the violence on Wednesday.

China Daily has news of yet another demonstration in Yunnan, sparked by the mysterious death of a local in custody:

The party secretary of Laodian township has been suspended from his post and a special work team has been set up to look into the case, according to a statement from the Qiaojia county government, which administers Laodian.

A conflict broke out on Tuesday when authorities in Laodian attempted to demolish an illegally constructed building owned by villager Ding Fachao.

Ding died on Wednesday morning after a half-day stay in a township government office.

Villagers had been rallying outside the township government’s offices since Wednesday to demand an explanation for Ding’s death. The crowd dispersed on Thursday after negotiating with local officials, the statement said.

China Daily’s focus on the investigation of local officials reflects a point recently raised in the Asia Pacific Memo:  local protest in China is sometimes a sign of faith in the central government, not opposition to it:

Protests in China are often assumed to be ultimately aimed at regime change. But while protests reflect grievances, they also demonstrate faith that the state will respond to protesters’ demands.

Local authorities are directly responsible for the welfare and livelihood of the people in the area they govern. The central state makes its preference for local resolution of complaints abundantly clear: officials who do not prevent collective complaints originating in their areas from reaching higher levels face disciplinary consequences that can affect their careers.

[...]Local protest followed by some accommodation can act to reaffirm the system. While oppositional dissent faces harsh state repression, not all protest is treated in this way. Some protests—perhaps many—are a routine feature of negotiations in local politics.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: land grabs, protest, protests, Yunnan
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Whereas “Occupy” movements planted themselves in financial districts around the world to protest against economic unfairness, in China a new target for occupation has emerged: men’s public toilets. The Occupiers? A group of young women who have tired of standing in long queues for the ladies’ loo only to watch their male compatriots traipsing casually in and out of the gents’. They are fighting for what their American counterparts have called “potty parity”. In an ideal state of public convenience, the thinking goes, women would not have to endure the long queues created by a simple 1:1 allocation of toilet space, female-to-male. It is waiting times, not toilet seats, that should be shared equally. The Occupiers are calling for a corrective adjustment.

The first Chinese Occupation happened in Guangzhou on February 19th. The protest’s organiser, a university student named Li Tingting, helped stage another in Beijing a week later. She has since mentioned plans to carry out a third in Shenzhen. These are just the type of attention-grabbing mass events that tend to get noticed by the country’s ruling officials, who are gathering at the opening of their annual National People’s Congress early next week.

NBC’s China-focused blog “Behind the Wall” went to Guangzhou to talk with the campaign’s organizer:

Li Maizi, the 23-year-old campaign organizer who insisted on using a pseudonym, told a local newspaper that the purpose was to raise the awareness of the public and the government.

“It seems like women and men are equal with the same amount of public bathrooms built for them. But the physical differences make them spend a different amount of time in the toilet – so it’s just not fair,” said Li.

Li, along with a few other young women, asked male passers-by who wanted to use the guy’s bathroom “do you mind waiting for a few minutes because the line in front of female toilet is too long?” They held signs reading “love women, starting with convenience” and “the more convenience, the more sexual equality.” Convenience in Chinese also means “to use a toilet.”

 [...]When asked where the idea of “occupying” originated, Li said she borrowed it from “Occupy Wall Street.”“It echoes the campaign over there, although we are not connected at all,” she said.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: gender equality, occupy, protest, women's rights
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Tibetan sources in exile said at least one man was reported killed and many more were injured when police opened fire on Tibetan protesters who tried to stop them from detaining a person who had put up a poster challenging Chinese rule.

[...]Ngaba is one of several Tibetan-populated regions of western China that have been rocked in recent years by protests, including 17 self-immolations, against rule by Beijing.

The poster declared that “Tibetans will never abandon their struggle and will continue to organize more campaigns until the demands of Tibetans who have self-immolated are met,” Tsering and Yeshe said.

An article in The New York Times mentions press restrictions in the area:

Foreign journalists in Sichuan who tried to drive to the affected region were turned back at security checkpoints that had been erected more than 60 miles from where the shootings took place. One overseas activist group, Free Tibet, said its informants in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, had reported a heavy increase in Chinese security forces there as well.

Lobsang Sangay, the Prime Minister of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile released a video to the AFP, calling on the international community to intervene on behalf of Tibetans in China.

In a recently published interview on the Houston Chronicle’s website, Lobsang Sangay spoke to the English-speaking international community about Tibetan self-immolations. He talks about what is leading Tibetans to take such drastic measures, and the Buddhist view of self-immolation as an act of protest:

Q: Why are monks and nuns self-immolating in Tibet?

A: Repressive policies of China have pushed them to the brink of desperation. Members of the Communist Party of China dictate what monks and nuns should do, how they should pray, and who should be allowed into the monasteries.

[...]

Q: Does Buddhism allow self-immolation?

A: It’s a complex issue. One could refer to Jataka tales, which concern the previous births of the Buddha. In one story, the Buddha, in a previous incarnation, gives up his body to feed a starving tigress and her four cubs. Some other stories also talk about self-sacrifice by the Buddha.

Although suicide is violent and prohibited in Buddhism, some Buddhists believe it depends on the motivation. If you do it out of hatred and anger, then it is negative. But if you do it for a pure cause … it’s such a complex theological issue. You can’t go either way or have a definitive answer. But the action is tragic, so painful.

New Tang Dynasty TV posted a video today, in which they outline a policy that will bring an abundance of CCP symbols to Tibetan populated areas. From the transcript:

January 22nd, 2012, the eve of Chinese New Year. Chinese officials in the Tibet Autonomous Region held a ceremony to unveil a portrait of four Communist leaders: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. They go on to state that they will send these portraits, as well as Communist flags, to villages, homes, and temples in the region.

[...]In December 2011, authorities in Tibet introduced the “Nine Must-Haves” policy. It dictates nine items that all temples must display or carry portraits of Communist leaders, the Communist flag and a copy of the state-run People’s Daily.

Crazy Crab, the artist responsible for the Hexie Farm satirical cartoons, has been aiming many of his recent pieces at the situation in Tibet. His latest addition ridicules the “Nine-Must-Haves” policy:

For translations of Chinese Twitter comments about the protests in Tibet, see Oiwan Lam’s recent post for Global Voices. Also see previous coverage of Tibetan protests, via CDT.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: police violence, protest, self-immolations, Tibet, tibet protest
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China, infamous for its methods of controlling online activity and guiding online opinion, has served as ammunition in the battle against SOPA/PIPA. Commentators the world over are pointing to it as an example of the future that SOPA and PIPA might usher in. In a Global Voices post, Weiping Li translates some comments from Mainland China and Taiwan:

“Now they’re copying us to build up a wall. It’s like after climbing over the wall, we then bump into another one. It’s crazy!! (現在等於他們自己也照著我們這樣造個牆，於是我們以後翻牆出去，又被他們的牆牆住[，]這簡直瘋了嗎！)”

On China’s Sina Weibo microblogging service a Chinese Internet user with nickname “gap foreseeable (落差可見)” expresses concern over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which expected to [be] brought to a vote in U.S. House of Representatives before the end of the year. The Chinese government has long been criticized by Americans for obstructing the free flow of information through a filtering system popularly known as the Great Firewall. Now it is Chinese neitzens’ turn to sneer at proposals for a Made-in-America Great Firewall.

An article at Wired.com, one of the websites involved in the blackout campaign, also likens these bills to the situation in China:

We’ve blacked out the headlines on our website homepage today as part of a global internet protest against two radical anti-piracy bills pending in Congress — legislation that threatens to usher in a chilling internet censorship regime here in the U.S. comparable in some ways to China’s “Great Firewall.”

The Dyn.com page explaining why they oppose SOPA also uses the Great Firewall as a warning:

Are you familiar with the Great Firewall Of China? Sometimes referred to as the Golden Shield project, it’s a Chinese government censorship and Internet surveillance project kicked off in 1998 and put into action in 2003. Simply put, it enables the government to restrict what content its citizens can read and view via IP blocking and DNS filtering. If they don’t like a site request a user makes, it won’t get viewed.

Many dismiss what’s happening in China and chalk to up to their communist political system. That could never happen in a free speech-driven, rights for all society like we have in the United States, right?

If the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) introduced this week gets enacted into law, things could change negatively for Americans which is why Dyn opposes the bill.

But is the Great Firewall an accurate parallel to draw in the campaign against these bills? In a sobering blogpost for Foreign Policy, Isaac Stone Fish points to today’s blackout campaign itself to illustrate the disconnect in using China to warn of the future:

American websites have the right to protest and protect their content because they exist in a country that respect the rule of law. America couldn’t create a “Great Firewall” comparable to China’s, because it wouldn’t be backed by a Chinese-style system where the Communist Party hovers above the law. Comparing the Chinese and American internet is akin to saying that a kitten that scratches furniture and a lion that eats people are both members of the cat family. True, yes, but it completely misses the point.

Update: Echoing comments made by Foreign Policy Isaac Stone Fish, The Los Angeles Times notes that bloggers in China scoff at comparisons between SOPA/PIPA and the Chinese web censorship regime:

“Only an American company could protest the way Wikipedia or Google has to the government,” said Zhao Jing, a closely followed blogger in Beijing who uses the pen name Michael Anti. “A Chinese company would never get away with that.”

Indeed, China’s Internet sector has no choice but to submit to government pressure -– be it by censoring its own users or implementing whatever happens to be the state initiative of the moment (the latest may require the real-ID registration of 250 million micro-blog accounts despite threats to privacy and the cost burden on Web firms).

Another distinction Chinese activists note is that the proposed legislation in Washington is being debated openly in public and ultimately has to adhere to U.S. law. Chinese censorship, on the other hand, operates in an opaque space where no one really knows what’s banned, what isn’t and who is calling the shots.

Similarly, The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos highlights the discussion that has emerged on the Chinese Internet:

After Chinese Web users got over the strangeness of hearing Americans debate the merits of screening the Web for objectionable content, they marvelled at the American response. Commentator Liu Qingyan wrote:

We should learn something from the way these American Internet companies protested against SOPA and PIPA. A free and democratic society depends on every one of us caring about politics and fighting for our rights. We will not achieve it by avoiding talk about politics.

There was little expectation that Chinese Web sites would ever band together to express their opposition to censorship: “Baidu, would you dare do something like this?” one asked.

The most eloquent response to the controversy, perhaps, was one that nobody saw at all. Commentator Shi Han wrote about trying to post a comment to Tencent, the giant Chinese portal. “I’ve written a short article about SOPA. But when I tried to put it up, Tencent replied with a message: ‘Your content has not passed review.’”

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activism, censorship, Great Firewall, Internet censorship, Pipa, protest, SOPA
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That day, I woke up at about 6.30am and knew what I had to do. I’d seen the news of the brothers and sisters inside Tibet burning themselves, and I knew that is what I needed to do to get the world’s attention.

[...]Before leaving home, I put a statement on Facebook and then I left. I was not frightened. I felt proud to be doing something for my nation. I was ready to die.

[...]I suffered bad burns and I still have some dressings on one leg. There will always be scars there, of course. But I did not die. All the same, I would be ready to do it again. That is how strongly I feel about the situation there in Tibet.

In a recent post on her personal blog, Mumbai based journalist Priyanka Borpujari mentions Sherab Tsedor and the importance of Facebook in keeping the Tibetan community in Mumbai connected:

[...]On November 4, 25-year-old Sherab Tsedor had set himself on fire outside the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi, in solidarity with the 11 monks who had immolated themselves. Alert cops managed to rush him to a hospital. Today, Tsedor updates his progress in healing on Facebook.

“Facebook is one of the best mediums for us in Mumbai to stay connected,” said Dolkar Tenzin. She created the ‘Tibetan Mumbaikars’ community page on Facebook, and updates it with news and events pertaining to Tibet.

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Post tags: protest, self-immolations, Tibet, tibet protest
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Workers at a Foxconn Technology Group campus in China staged a protest last week, threatening to jump off a building if the company did not meet their compensation demands, according to local Chinese news reports.

[...]Working conditions at Foxconn’s factories in China have been under the spotlight since 2010, when a string of suicides occurred at the factories, that involved employees jumping off buildings. During that year, there were a total of 18 suicide attempts, with 14 deaths, according to watchdog group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior.

The Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore provides us with an inside account of what drove the workers to these measures:

“We were put to work without any training, and paid piecemeal,” said one of the protesting workers, who asked not to be named. “The assembly line ran very fast and after just one morning we all had blisters and the skin on our hand was black. The factory was also really choked with dust and no one could bear it,” he said.

Several reports from inside Foxconn factories have suggested that while the company is more advanced than many of its competitors, it is run in a “military” fashion that many workers cannot cope with. At Foxconn’s flagship plant in Longhua, five per cent of its workers, or 24,000 people, quit every month.

“Because we could not cope, we went on strike,” said the worker. “It was not about the money but because we felt we had no options. At first, the managers said anyone who wanted to quit could have one month’s pay as compensation, but then they withdrew that offer. So we went to the roof and threatened a mass suicide”.

The protestors were eventually talked down from the rooftop by Wuhan mayor Tang Liangzhi. Visit Malcolm Moore’s Google+ page for more musings on the situation and the media’s reactions to it. Photos of the demonstration can be seen @shunqiziranba’s Tencent Weibo page.

A Foxconn factory in Shenzhen was the focus of this week’s episode of Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life. When devout member of the “cult of Mac” Mike Daisey sees his faith in all-things-Apple shaken, he travels to China for further investigation. The episode – in two acts – first tells Daisey’s story, and then examines the methods he utilized in his reporting. Visit This American Life’s homepage to hear the entire podcast:

Mike Daisey was a self-described “worshipper in the cult of Mac.” Then he saw some photos from a new iPhone, taken by workers at the factory where it was made. Mike wondered: Who makes all my crap? He traveled to China to find out.

[NOTE: This American Life has since retracted Mike DAisey's report after it was discovered that much of it had been fabricated. See more here.]

For more on Foxconn, protest and labor conditions in China, see prior CDT coverage of undercover journalism within the confines of a Foxconn factory, a documentary film about Chinese factory workers, or Foxconn’s plans to automate their assembly-line, minimizing the potential for suicidal workers.

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Post tags: Apple, Foxconn, labor conditions, protest, suicide, workers rights
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The man died as riot police moved to quell a longstanding dispute in Wukan village on the coast of the booming province and economic powerhouse, where commercial and industrial development has consumed swathes of rice paddies.

Villagers say hundreds of hectares have been acquired unfairly by corrupt officials in collusion with developers.

The government in Shanwei, an area that includes Wukan, said that Xue Jinbo fell ill on Sunday, his third day in detention. Hospital doctors later pronounced him dead.

In an apparent effort to head off further trouble in the area that saw hundreds of riot police fire tear gas to disperse protesting, rock-pelting villagers on Sunday, officials immediately notified Xue’s family and offered aid.

Xue, along with four others, was detained for his alleged role in protests that simmered for four days in September. Relatives disputed the official account of his death, according to Reuters, claiming that he had been beaten and tortured. Guangdong, the epicenter of opposition to corrupt land grabs in recent months, has seen both violent riots and peaceful demonstrations as officials have wavered over the most appropriate way to deal with the frequent incidents of unrest. Today, a villager told AFP that police have blocked access to the roads surrounding Wukan and cut off the local Internet connection. From The Telegraph:

“People can’t come in and we can’t go out … We won’t survive if the situation keeps going, as we have no food,” he told AFP by phone in an account confirmed by another resident.

“We normally have to buy food from outside, but we are blocked, so we can’t buy it,” he said.

…

The Shanwei government said in a separate statement that police had gone to Wukan on Sunday to clear away trees and nail-studded planks laid across roads leading to the village by “criminals”.

One villager told AFP they had put up the blocks to try and stop police from coming and arresting more people.

The government made no mention of police blocking people from coming in or out of the village, and calls to various government and Communist Party departments in the area went unanswered.

Update: The Telegraph’s Malcom Moore has reported from inside Wukan that the village is “now in open revolt” and “for the first time on record, the Chinese Communist Party has lost all control”:

The last of Wukan’s dozen party officials fled on Monday after thousands of people blocked armed police from retaking the village, standing firm against tear gas and water cannons.

Since then, the police have retreated to a roadblock, some three miles away, in order to prevent food and water from entering, and villagers from leaving. Wukan’s fishing fleet, its main source of income, has also been stopped from leaving harbour.

The plan appears to be to lay siege to Wukan and choke a rebellion which began three months ago when an angry mob, incensed at having the village’s land sold off, rampaged through the streets and overturned cars.

ChinaGeeks has also posted photos from Sina Weibo netizens giving updates from Wukan, as Charles Custer explains the significance of the situation:

I don’t think I need to explain the ways in which this event is amazing, and I mean that in the literal sense of the word. Anyone with a funtional brain and half an eye on the Chinese media is aware that local government land grabs are a huge source of discontent, but if you’d told me a few months ago that a Chinese town would band together, run the local officials out of town, resist a force of 1,000 police officers intent on entering the town again (but, thankfully, not willing to use lethal force to do so, at least not yet), establish their own makeshift government, and keep the whole thing running even this long, I would have told you you were nuts.

Before we go any further, I want to get this out of the way: no, this is not the first spark in some nationwide rebellion that will see the national government overthrown. In fact, it’s not even a rebellion against the central government, as you can tell from the pleas for help from Beijing in Moore’s article.

Still, it puts Beijing in an awfully interesting position. As I see it, they have three basic options:

1. Come to the rescue of the down, declare the local government officials corrupt, put them on trial and restore order peacefully. This is, I suspect, exactly what the people in Wukan want.

2. Come to the rescue of the officials and provide them enough manpower to completely crush the rebellion. This would be easy, but would attract a lot of negative attention internationally, and there’s a risk of it leaking online domestically, too.

3. Do nothing for the time being, and see if the officials can regain control on their own, or if the rebellion spreads.

Update: Malcom Moore, the Telegraph reporter embedded inside the police blockade of Wukan, writes that villagers claim they have enough food to hold out for ten more days:

Almost all the village’s roadside restaurants are shut, but at the market around half the stalls are open. “We think we can last for ten to 12 days,” said Zhang Xiaoping, one stall owner. “We are using a corridor to the next village to smuggle in meat and vegetables on the back of motorbikes, but each trip takes an hour,” she added. “The main problem is rice, but we are taking each day as it comes.”

At the harbour, Wukan’s fleet of fishing boats has also been shut in. “There are some police patrols to stop us leaving the bay, these have gone on for ten days,” said one fisherman, who asked to be named as “United Wukan”. He added that he had already cut down to two meals a day and was prepared, like everyone else in the village “to starve myself to death”.

A video has also surfaced on YouTube of a mourning demonstration held Monday following the news of Xue Jinbo’s death. The crowd chants “Blood debt must be returned by blood,” according to the comment of one viewer.

For more on the ongoing situation in Wukan, follow @MalcolmMoore on Twitter, who is providing details using hashtag #Wukan. Also, Google Plus users can read additional details on how Moore slipped through the roadblock and into Wukan.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: corruption, detention, Guangdong, land grabs, mass incidents, protest
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