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China news tagged with: protests (159)

• New Tax Plan Sparks China Protest

  

  From BBC:

  Protesters in the south-eastern Chinese city of Nankang have overturned police cars and blocked roads over plans to more strictly enforce payment of taxes.

  Officials in Nankang said several hundred protesters blocked a major road while others delivered a petition to a local government office.

  [...]China’s official Xinhua news agency said the local government’s plan to more strictly enforce payment of taxes from the furniture makers and dealers has been suspended in the face of the opposition.

  Danwei has more details, including a video which seems to have been just recently pulled from the Internet.

  Zuihulu has posted photos of the crowds and overturned police cars on Fanfou:

  

  Hundreds of people block the main roads and overturn police cars in Nankang in protest over stricter tax enforcement on local furniture businesses.

  » Read more
  • June 16, 2009 1:58 PM

• China Moves to Quell Anger After Protest March

  

  AFP reports on the grievances of workers from Baoding:

  More than 1,000 workers were prevented Friday from marching 140 kilometres (90 miles) to Beijing from the city of Baoding to protest the closure of their textile factory.

  But on Saturday the chairwoman of the Baoding Yimian Textile Ltd’s board of directors was suspended from the post and authorities launched an investigation into alleged malfeasance by the factory’s Hong Kong-based owner, Xinhua news agency reported.

  Employees angered by the closure of the factory, which had employeed 4,000 people, set out on bicycle and foot from Baoding in Hebei province to Beijing to present a petition to the government, a centuries-old tradition.

  » Read more
  • April 4, 2009 9:13 PM

• Three Set Fire to Themselves Over Lost Home

  

  The family of 3 that set themselves on fire in Beijing’s Wangfujing apparently did so after losing their home. From AP, via MSNBC:

  Three people who set themselves on fire in downtown Beijing came from China’s western region of Xinjiang after their “unreasonable” demands for compensation for a lost home were not met, a governor of the region said.

  Xinjiang Governor Nur Bekri told reporters at a news conference on the sidelines of the annual legislative session in Beijing on Friday the family’s home was destroyed to make way for a school.

  The couple and their son set fire to themselves while inside their car on Feb. 25 at the southern end of the Wangfujing shopping street in central Beijing. The fire sparked alarm because it happened just several blocks from Tiananmen Square.

  For more on petitioners, see this CDT post.

  » Read more
  • March 7, 2009 2:25 PM

• Tibetan Monks Protest In Restive West China - Report

  

  From Reuters:

  Tibetan monks in a restive area of western China took to the streets calling for more religious freedom after they were banned from holding a traditional New Year’s prayer ceremony on Sunday, activists said.

  About 50 monks demonstrated outside the Sey Monastery in an ethnic Tibetan part of Sichuan province that was roiled by violent protests last year and where a monk set himself on fire on Friday, the Students for a Free Tibet group said.

  Earlier, a large group of monks had streamed into their main temple hall to hold banned Monlam Chenmo prayers, a key part of ceremonies to mark the Tibetan New Year, but those were broken up, said the group’s executive director Lhadon Tethong.

  As they left the hall some went onto the street where they shouted slogans calling for religious freedom. Police stopped the protests, the monastery is now sealed and there is a heavy police presence, Tethong said, citing witnesses.

  Read also China tensions high after Tibet monk sets himself alight from AFP.

  » Read more
  • March 1, 2009 7:59 PM

• Jeffrey N Wasserstrom: China’s Anniversary Tempest

  

  On openDemocracy, Jeffrey N Wasserstrom writes about boycotts in Chinese history and more recently:

  In the perspective both of China’s 20th-century history and its last year, the spreading language of boycott offers two hints about what is likely to occur in 2009.

  The first is that modern Chinese history is full of moments when groups with very different agendas employ parallel tactics. In the late 1940s, for example, the Kuomintang and the Communist Party backed demonstrations against (respectively) Russian imperialism and American imperialism that looked virtually identical (see Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China, Stanford University Press, 1991). In 2008, there was the sense of an overlapping retaliatory tinge to the east-west boycott “dialogue” - the call for Chinese to stop shopping at the French Carrefour chain mixing with the French president’s consideration of a boycott of the Olympics (or at least its opening ceremony). 2009 is shaping up to be another year when different groups employ the same basic approach even as their aims clash.

  The second point is that the battle of the boycotts between the Chinese state and the dissident intellectuals and writers who signed Charter 08 can be considered the initial salvo in the kind of fight that has often occurred in years ending with a “9″: a struggle for the right to don the mantle of patriotic concern with the nation embodied by the May 4th Movement.

  » Read more
  • February 26, 2009 1:48 PM

• China Fire Protesters Were Uighurs

  

  Reuters reports that the three people who apparently set themselves on fire on Wangfujing in Beijing were a Uighur family who had come to Beijing to petition lawmakers during next week’s National People’s Congress meetings:

  The family had come to Beijing to petition, apparently related to a dispute over housing, the Beijing-based source with knowledge of the situation said Thursday.

  The husband and wife, aged 59 and 58, were hospitalised with burn injuries, the man’s serious, the Xinhua news agency said late Wednesday without specifying their identities.

  Their son, aged 28, was not injured and is in police custody, the source said.

  See also a China Daily report.

  » Read more
  • February 26, 2009 11:20 AM

• ‘Tibetans Held’ In China Protest

  

  From BBC News:

  Chinese police have detained several people after pro-Tibet protests in south-west China, campaign groups say.

  The protests flared at the weekend in Litang county, in Sichuan province.

  A number of Tibetans were beaten and 21 detained, the Free Tibet group and the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) said.

  The incident comes ahead of the 50th anniversary of the exile of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, and follows violent protests last year.

  » Read more
  • February 18, 2009 7:11 PM

• China’s Wen Urges Leniency for Cambridge Shoe Thrower

  

  Reuters reports that Premier Wen Jiabao is supporting leniency for the student who threw a shoe at him during a speech at Cambridge University:

  “Education is best for a young student, and I hope he will have the opportunity to continue his education. The return of a prodigal is worth more than gold,” said the message from Wen, posted on the Foreign Ministry website over the weekend.

  “I hope the student recognises his mistake and uses his developing eyesight to recognise the real China.”

  The gesture “aroused the strong indignation of the audience and the entire Chinese people, and hurt the image and reputation of Cambridge in China,” read the message, which was conveyed through Fu Ying, the Chinese ambassador to Britain.

  » Read more
  • February 8, 2009 11:30 PM

• China’s Rural Teachers Join Rumble Of Unrest

  

  From Reuters:

  They are old, angry and have mobile phones, and they worry China’s protest-wary leaders.

  Teachers across rural China, many long retired or forced from classrooms, have joined a recent surge of protests, with hundreds, sometimes thousands, besieging local governments to demand better treatment and denounce official privilege.

  This week teachers in Xinning county in the central province of Hunan signed a petition demanding wages, pensions and health care, and decrying government officials’ repeated pay rises, said Xu Disu, one of the organisers. In December, hundreds besieged the county government office there, he said.

  “The officials promise to solve our problems but they never do, so we’ll keep petitioning and petitioning until they do,” said Xu, a retired elementary school teacher in his late sixties.

  » Read more
  • February 6, 2009 8:35 AM

• Workers Protest As Italian Sofa Maker Folds In China

  

  From AFP:

  Over 2,000 factory workers in China launched a protest after their employer, an Italian maker of luxury sofas, closed down in the wake of the global financial crisis, local authorities said Thursday.

  DeCoro, a leather upholstery producer with a factory in the southern city of Shenzhen, ran into liquidity problems last year and from November was unable to pay wages on time, the Shenzhen government reported.

  On January 8, the workers went on strike in protest over not having been paid for two months, according to a statement from the city government faxed to AFP.

  » Read more
  • February 5, 2009 7:08 AM

• Protester Sentenced In China

  

  From The International Herald Tribune:

  A legal advocate who was arrested after applying to hold a legal protest in Beijing during the Olympics in August has been sentenced to three years in prison, said a lawyer who has been asked to represent the advocate in the appeals process.

  The legal advocate, Ji Sizun, 58, was sentenced on Jan. 7 by a judge in the city of Fuzhou for forging official seals and documents, the lawyer, Lin Kaihua, said Wednesday.

  Ji was one of many victims of a ploy by the central government during the Beijing Olympics that has angered human rights advocates and has raised questions about whether the International Olympic Committee should have put more pressure on the Chinese government to respect human rights and freedom of speech.

  » Read more
  • January 19, 2009 10:18 AM

• Cracking Down on Dissent

  

  The Economist offers a view on why the timing of Charter 08 limits its chances for success:

  Authorities are currently tracking at least two unwanted developments. One is an Internet campaign to bring together parents of thousands of babies made sick or killed by melamine-tainted milk to press for free treatment. Police on January 2nd detained its chief organiser in Beijing, just before he was to take the case to government officials. The second—and more alarming—development for Chinese leaders is a document circulating on the Internet called Charter 08. Released on December 10th on the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Charter 08 is a potent political manifesto signed by hundreds of Chinese intellectuals and even some government officials calling for sweeping democratic reforms in China.

  The article then ties these actions into broader protests breaking out around the country, such as those staged by unemployed workers and taxi drivers:

  [...] As long as protests remain small in scale and do not become wider movements, they do not represent a threat to the central government. However, given that Chinese media reporting on such events is becoming freer and access to information is becoming harder to control, the government feels it cannot afford to be complacent. Newspapers, online commentators and websites are expanding the range of subjects they feel free to comment on, testing the government’s barriers. That is why Chinese censors seem eager to hit the delete button on all kinds of troublesome information. An outbreak of major social violence would undoubtedly lead to a rollback of the trend towards more aggressive journalism.

  Likewise, Chinese leaders’ instinct will be to force the people agitating for faster political reforms to fall in line until the economic and social climate improves.

  » Read more
  • January 13, 2009 11:03 AM

• As China’s Jobless Numbers Mount, Protests Grow Bolder

  

  From Washington Post:

  For months, the Communist Party had been able to deflect anger about factory closings toward the companies themselves. The party managed to come off as the benevolent savior by handing out cash to make up for unpaid salaries. The strategy stopped working at the Jianrong Suitcase Factory in late December.

  When offered 60 percent of their wages to disband their protest and go home, the workers pushed back at riot police sent to keep them locked in their factory compound in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan. According to several witnesses, more than 100 irate workers broke through the cordon, some shouting, “There are no human rights here!”

  As a global recession takes hold and China’s economy continues to slow, growing legions of unemployed workers are becoming increasingly bold in expressing their unhappiness — expanding a debate over how to protect the Chinese economy into long-fought disputes over other issues such as freedom of expression and equality before the law.

  » Read more
  • January 13, 2009 7:36 AM

• China Blocks Travel for Parents Planning Quake Protest

  

  From New York Times:

  The local police stopped parents who were trying to travel secretly from southwest China to Beijing this week to ask the central government for a full investigation into school collapses that killed their children during the May earthquake, several of the parents said Thursday.

  A leader of the grieving parents, Sang Jun, who lost his 11-year-old son, said in a telephone interview that he had been detained overnight and released only after more than 60 other parents gathered at the gates of the town government building to demand his release.

  The restrictive measures taken by the local government show that the widespread destruction of schools during the devastating earthquake on May 12 in southwest China continues to be a delicate political issue. The number of students who died in the May earthquake is unknown, although estimates suggest the figure may be as high as 10,000. They died when schools crumbled during the powerful tremor, while in many cases buildings around the schools remained standing.

  » Read more
  • January 8, 2009 9:38 PM

• Chinese Protest Chef’s Death From ‘Overwork’

  

  From Reuters:

  Chinese workers protested outside a garment factory in the southern manufacturing hub of Guangdong on Monday after the death of a colleague they said was from overwork, local media reported.

  The worker, a chef in a Dongguan factory in his 40s, had worked more than 10 straight days before his death on Friday, the Guangzhou Daily said on its website amid rising factory closures sparked by the global economic crisis and government concern about escalating unrest.

  “The chef’s family and the workers were not satisfied with the compensation given by the factory,” the report said, adding that there were hundreds of protesters. “They threatened to protest further this afternoon.”

  » Read more
  • December 29, 2008 4:49 AM

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