CDT is run
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out of the
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From RConversation:
Zhou Shuguang, aka "Zola," reports that he is home safe in Changsha after being detained in Shenyang, interrogated, made to write detailed reports on everybody he met and everything since arriving in Shenyang to blog about the Yilishen "ant-farmer" protests, had his ID and money confiscated, punched around the head and neck a little when he objected to being forced to return by air (and pay for his own ticket) rather than travel by train, and then escorted by two state security police on the plane back to Changsha. He has been told not to go far, that they hope he will focus on his vegetable-selling business, and to report to the local police if he needs to go anywhere. [Full Text]
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From Global Voices:
Is publicly notarized proof that your internet service provider has blocked your company website strong enough to seek damages? Just a week after National Legal System Propaganda Day, Shanghai-based IT blogger Du “Yetaai” Dongjin will have his second day in court where it is expected the defendant, China Telecom, will continue to challenge Du's evidence: courtroom 12, 5/F, #1 Intermediate People's Court at #1200 Hongqiao Rd., Shanghai, 1:45pm on December 11, 2007. [Full Text]
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From The Economist:
Labour conditions in China can be notoriously lousy. Reports abound of sweatshops, workers' protests and this year even of officials condoning the luring of children into slavery. A new law on employment contracts, coming into effect on January 1st, will in theory improve workers' lots, but is creating more headaches.
The law is supposed to provide greater job security. Workers with ten years or more of service will have open-ended contracts and companies will have to inform unions before sacking anyone. Employers fear the law will mean bigger severance payments. The unions will also have the power to negotiate collective contracts.
But the law has many detractors. Some allege it will take China back to the “iron rice bowl” era of Maoist days when jobs were for life and the economy was crippled by a lack of incentive. Others, conversely, argue that it will strengthen state-controlled unions but do little for downtrodden workers. [Full Text]
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From The Wall Street Journal:
The respected Chinese blogger Hong Bo, known as Keso, last week posted a question to an online discussion forum in China. "If one day Taiwan goes independent," he wrote, "what harm will it do to us?"
That is a sensitive topic in a country that still treats Taiwan as a breakaway province. Shortly after Keso raised the point, the discussion was cut short. His online censor wasn't the notorious "Great Firewall of China," the filtering software put in place by the Chinese government to stifle online dissent. Rather, Keso was reprimanded by another writer in the general-interest forum. "No discussion of politics here!" his fellow netizen insisted. "
In China, people are not in the habit of expressing their ideas very publicly," says Keso. [Full Text]
[Image source: Isaac Mao and Hong Bo, from Duowei.com]
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The Toronto Star tells the story of Liu Jie, who organized a petition against "re-education through labor" camps, and as a result ended up in a camp herself:
Given the ongoing debate about the camps, the timing of Liu Jie's petition seemed perfect.
It was late summer when she and other public-spirited citizens launched the signature drive. They planned to send the petition to President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao and delegates attending the 17th Communist Party Congress in Beijing that began Oct. 15.
The congress is the pinnacle of decision-making power in Chinese political life and occurs just once every five years. What better time for citizens to bring their concerns forward?
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Rebecca MacKinnon gives an update on the current status of the "Internet revolution" in China. From her RConversation blog:
Contrary to misperceptions by many outsiders, the situation in China today is not "the people vs. the government." Chinese people themselves - not only regulatory authorities or people who manage internet and telecoms businesses but also many others - are helping the government to police each other because they somehow believe that doing so is in their own interests.
Back when Michael Anti's blog got censored by Microsoft, an essay started making the rounds in the Chinese blogosphere whose point was, essentially, that Chinese people themselves are ultimately responsible for allowing their fellow countrymen to be censored - and that the ultimate solution is going to have to be initiated by the Chinese themselves. [Full text]
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China Media Project and Global Voices have updates in the case of journalist/blogger Zhai Minglei, who has been harassed by police since he spoke out about the closure of his magazine, Minjian. From CMP:
Last week CMP reported on the troubles facing veteran journalist Zhai Minglei and the ill-fated Minjian magazine. Yesterday, Zhai posted an urgent message on his blogpaper, Yi Bao (壹报) saying police had raided his home, confiscating his last remaining copies of Minjian and taking away Zhai’s hard drive [coverage by John Kennedy at Global Voices here].
According to Zhai Minglei’s post, police should be proceeding with their investigation against him today. [Full text]
Read also an interview with Zhai about the police raid of his home, via Radio Free Asia.
[Image of Zhai Minglei via CMP]
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As tensions rise inside Tibet between the local population and Han Chinese migrants, the Dalai Lama has raised the ire of Beijing by suggesting that a referendum could determine whether or not he is reincarnated before his own death. From The Times:
The exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader proposed yesterday to hold a referendum among his 13-14 million followers around the world — before his death — on whether he should be reincarnated or not.
If the majority vote against it he said he would simply not be reborn, ending a lineage that tradition dictates dates back to the late 14th century, when a young shepherd was appointed the first Dalai Lama.
If the vote was in favour he said that he might appoint a reincarnation while he was still alive, breaking the 600-year-old tradition of being reborn as a small boy after his death. [Full text]
Also related: "China hits out at Dalai Lama comments on successor" and "Dalai Lama tries to use Olympics to lever Beijing," both from AFP.
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Shanghaiist reports on a recent violent attack against NGO workers who support the legal rights of migrant workers:
Two weeks ago, when we told you that China's new labour law was going to be a big, big thing, we had no idea it would also be the cause of some serious blood-letting. Local gangs and triads have been attacking the Shenzhen Dagongzhe Migrant Worker Centre which has been instrumental in providing legal advice for rural migrant workers and informing them about their rights under the new labour law. In separate attacks, they shattered the glass door and destroyed all computers and equipment in the centre. Apparently, in one attack, patrolling policemen did nothing to stop the attack. [Full text]
This comes as the government calls on local NGOs to increase their capacity building to help build a "harmonious society."
[Image via Shanghaiist]
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From AP:
The number of people arrested in China on charges of endangering national security more than doubled last year, a rights lobbying group reported Wednesday in a finding that underscores the communist government's sustained clampdown on dissent.The San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation said a recently published Chinese government yearbook showed that state security charges — commonly used against political critics — were filed against 604 people in 2006, compared with 296 the year before.
The state security arrests were the highest number since 2002, Dui Hua added.
Only a few of the highest profile prosecutions have been publicized, either by China's government or rights groups, while more than 90 percent of the defendants were not publicly known, Dui Hua said. [Full Text]
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On October 13th this year, Ma Shaofang, one of the student organizers of the 1989 Tian'anmen hunger strike and now a businessman in Shenzhen, was invited to "tea" by local authorities to warn him of the sensitivity of his plans to attend a writers conference in Beijing during last month's 17th Party Congress. Ma published the conversation he had with the agents of Ministry of State Security online. CDT translates part of Ma's account of that conversation:
State Security Agents (State): You must be busy lately? Is the business doing well?
Ma: Enough of this. I heard from the "relevant departments" that people like us are not allowed to make big bucks. We're just doing enough to make a living.
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Global media have blanketed French President Nicolas Sarkozy's first official visit to the Middle Kingdom, with the French government describing Sarkozy's meeting with Hu Jintao as a "nice pingpong game." The results of game so far? Unprecedented successes for French business, vague promises on currency reform, and even vaguer promises on human rights. To wit:
Aircraft giant Airbus has signed a contract worth $14.8b to sell China 160 aircraft French nuclear reactor company Areva has agreed on an $8b deal with Guangdong Nuclear Power Corp to build two 3rd generation nuclear reactors Alcatel-Lucent has signed telecom deals with China Mobile and China Unicom worth €750m Hu Jintao has pledged to "evolve" the criminal system in a way that will "reduce the number of cases in which the death penalty is applied."
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An update of the Ant Farmers' protest, via Reuters:
Tensions have eased after thousands of people in northeast China besieged government offices demanding help to get their money back from a get-rich-quick scheme to raise ants to make an aphrodisiac tonic.
Several thousand irate investors from across Liaoning, a rustbelt province striving to attract investment, demonstrated on the streets and surrounded the provincial government offices in the capital city Shenyang on Wednesday...
Chinese media have said the scheme collected more than 10 billion yuan from hundreds of thousands of Liaoning residents. Some reports said the ants were a useless ruse for an illegal fund-raising scam. [Full Text]
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Mure Dickie of the Financial Times writes about the censorship of his views as a panelist on a Chinese television show:
While courageous Chinese journalists continually test the boundaries, they swim against a regulatory tide. The collapse of the government's attempt to cover up the deadly Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome epidemic in 2003 raised hopes Beijing might ease censorship, but Hu Jintao, president, appears even more keen to control than his predecessor Jiang Zemin...
Some visitors to China - and, indeed, many Chinese - say free-speech advocates overstate the censors' power. But local media look much freer than they really are - in part because of the role dupes such as me play in creating a false impression of genuine debate. No one watching Reform Dialogue could have known that my real views never got past the editing room.
The party propaganda department wisely suppresses discussion of its work (my comments about the difference between western and Chinese media were among those excised, for example). But it leaves every journalist, editor and television producer in no doubt that there are boundaries they should not cross. [Full text]
For more on Chinese people's views of the media, see "Chinese trust the Internet above ALL information sources, including MSM" from Thomas Crampton's blog.
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The Chinese government has responded to the Dalai Lama's statement that he could hand-pick his successor before his death in order to avoid China's influence over the process:
China has accused Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, of violating the religious rituals and historical conventions of Tibetan Buddhism by suggesting he might appoint a successor before his death instead of relying on reincarnation.
Beijing's latest broadside against the Dalai Lama is a sign of heightening tensions between the central government and the man Tibetans see as a god-king. While reincarnation sounds like an esoteric concept to those of other belief systems, it is a deeply political issue in the isolated Himalayan enclave. [Full text]
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From The Reuters, via theage.com.au:
A provincial Chinese government adviser has urged Communist Party leaders to lift a ban on new political parties, halt suppression of a spiritual sect and let exiled dissidents return home.
In a bold move by an establishment figure, Wang Zhaojun made his requests in an open letter to President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. He said dramatic political reforms were needed to deal with a plethora of problems: a roller-coaster stockmarket, inflationary pressures, rising real estate prices, regional imbalances and dire poverty.
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Dalai Lama says that he could possibly name his own successor while he is alive, instead of accepting a Chinese-picked one, via BBC News:
Usually, following the death of a Dalai Lama, senior Tibetan Buddhist officials, guided by dreams and signs, identify a young child to succeed him. But the Dalai Lama said he feared China would try to influence this process. He said he was considering whether his successor should be picked by him, or elected by high ranking Buddhist monks.
"If the Tibetan people want to keep the Dalai Lama system, one of the possibilities I have been considering with my aides is to select the next Dalai Lama while I'm alive," he told the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun during a visit to Japan....[Full Text]
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From AP:
Imprisoned Chinese journalist Li Changqing has been awarded the World Association of Newspapers' annual press freedom prize, the Paris-based organization said Tuesday.The award marks the second straight year an imprisoned Chinese journalist has won the Golden Pen of Freedom - underscoring China's continuing harsh press restrictions despite the flourishing economy and rapid social change.
Li, a former newspaper editor, was sentenced last year to three years in prison for "spreading false and alarmist information." His arrest followed an inquiry into a graft-busting bureaucrat that Li promoted in his writings who was later sentenced to life in prison on bribery and embezzlement charges. [Full Text]
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What defines a "dissident" in China? Tim Johnson looks at the case of imprisoned activist Guo Feixiong:
In Guangzhou, Guo and I chatted, along with my assistant, and he offered some details about his life in detention. But then I spelled out to Guo that I wanted to investigate prison labor, what products are made in prisons, and who benefits from the huge cost advantages of such low-cost labor, Guo basically went mum.
To paraphrase, he said such a story would be harmful to China’s image and he would not collaborate. I was surprised. Stunned really. I thought that a fellow of his sensitivities would be interested in shedding light on the prison labor practice. But he was adamant in saying he thought such a story would end up hurting legitimate industries, and would do more harm than good. Thus, Guo’s patriotic and nationalist stripes emerged. It was an eye-opener. [Full text]
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In the International Herald Tribune, Richard Bernstein writes about the debates inspired by James Mann's book, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression:
...Because Mann's book accuses China policy makers of a kind of broken promise, it seems to have generated an especially angry response on the Internet and in such specialty journals as The China Quarterly, which published a lengthy exchange between Mann and David Lampton, a leading figure on China who is also at the School for Advanced International Studies.
Mann also touches what may be a sore point in stressing that, with a few exceptions - Nathan one of the most prominent among them - China scholars and policy makers have tended to be rather silent on Chinese human rights abuses, though many of them say that they bring these matters up forcefully with Chinese officials in private.
And this, in turn, has long been part of a complicated debate about how to apportion priorities on China. Administration after administration has come to power in Washington pledged to be tougher on China only to retreat once it needed China's cooperation on other matters. [Full text]
See also CDT's interview with Mann about his book, and a debate between Mann and David Lampton.
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From Forbes.com:
Despite the extent of Internet censorship, gaps remain:
--A recent study found the system is less effective when more people are online, enabling banned terms to slip through.
--Other studies have reported the erratic nature of censorship--for example, at certain times, users in particular locations are able to browse the Internet with few restrictions.
--Costs and logistical difficulties also have limited the system--the government this year was forced to abandon a plan to mandate registration of individual users on blogs because of the complexity and likely failure of enforcing registration among China's 20 million bloggers. [Full Text]
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This is an Editorial from Seattle Times:
Yahoo's apology and financial settlement with the families of two prisoners in China are warnings to American business. Ethical behavior does not begin and end with the law.
That is not a lesson confined to China, but it may be easier to see through a Chinese lens. In China, the state reserves the right to control information. A U.S. company that offers Internet service there has to follow China's rules. One rule is screening out anti-government messages from Internet search requests. Type in "Tiananmen Square" to google.com and google.cn, its Chinese page, and you will get politically different results. Some such compromises are necessary to operate in China. It is better for Yahoo to offer a service that is 90 percent of the real thing than zero — better for Yahoo and better for China.
But it cannot be right for a business to join in the political persecution of its customers. [Full Text]
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Yahoo's settlement with the families of jailed Internet writers hasn't changed the outlook for many dissidents in China, according to The Times:
Yesterday dissidents wanting to share their thoughts with others in China said that the settlement would not reduce the dangers they faced. One man, who has spent most of the past 18 years in jail, said that Chinese wanting to exercise freedom of expression had no choice but to use the internet and thus expose their writings to China’s cyberspace police.
He said: “The point is, the authorities know exactly what is being said and being written by people with dissenting views. They know all these people. The only question is whether they want to pick someone up and jail them.” [Full text]
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From AP:
A Chinese dissident lawyer was sentenced to five years in prison Wednesday after publishing a book about a political scandal and helping villagers lead a campaign to unseat local officials accused of corruption, his attorney said.Guo Feixiong, convicted of alleged illegal business activity, was also fined US$5,300 in a district court in the booming southern city of Guangzhou, his lawyer, Mo Shaoping, told The Associated Press.
The dissident, also known as Yang Maodong, was arrested in September 2006. He was tried last July in Guangzhou after publishing a book about the scandal in the northeastern city of Shenyang, the New York-based Human Rights in China said Wednesday in a statement. No other details were given about the book. [Full Text]
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Yahoo! has reached a settlement in the case of writers Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning, who were imprisoned after Yahoo! handed over their personal information to Chinese authorities. From Wired:
Terms of the settlement weren't disclosed. But a source at Yahoo said the company has been "working with the families, and we're working with them to provide them with financial, humanitarian and legal assistance."
Yahoo has also agreed to establish a global human rights fund to provide "humanitarian relief" to support dissidents and their families. The source said that details still have to be worked out. [Full text]
Read interviews with Shi Tao's mother and Wang Xiaoning's wife, via RFA.
[Image: Wang Xiaoning's wife, Yu Ling, via Wired]
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From Washington Post:
A few weeks ago, Pang Jiaoming's career as a reporter ended, just two years after it began.The Communist Party's Central Propaganda Department and the official All-China Journalists Association issued a directive ordering Pang's employer, the China Economic Times, not only to fire him, but also to "reinforce the Marxist ideological education of its journalists." In a separate notice to news organizations across China, Pang said, propaganda officials announced that he was also banned from further work as a reporter at other publications.
Pang's offense was a pair of articles reporting that substandard coal ash was being used in construction of a showcase railroad, the $12 billion high-speed line running 500 miles between Wuhan, in Hubei province, and Guangzhou, an industrial hub just north of Hong Kong. The ash is a key ingredient in concrete used for tunnels, bridges and roadbed, Pang wrote, and a substandard mix raised the specter of collapsing structures and tragic accidents. [Full Text]
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That is AFP's read on Chinese government plans, announced in the China Daily today, to manage foreign journalists who come to Beijing for the 2008 festivities. The plan, described by the head of the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP), aims to maintain a "clean journalism environment" by chasing down and expelling unlicensed journalists.
Reuters takes a less alarmist approach to the news, concentrating on GAPP's announcement that it will share information about foreign journalists registered to cover the Olympics with interviewees.
Both articles quote China Daily's paraphrasing of GAPP minister Liu Binjie, who insists the plan is part of an effort to solve China's problem with bogus journalists: "Fake reporters, especially those representing overseas-registered media, harm society and deserve severe punishment."
Interestingly, while the China Daily article mentions the recent shut down of the "fake"
Social News (社会新闻报 ) newspaper, it doesn't cite any cases of fake reporters working for overseas media.
The AFP article is here.
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The following was originally posted on Beijing based lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan's blog and translated by CDT:
On the afternoon of November 2, a lawyer named Mr. Li received a phone call from a lawyer friend with another law firm, notifying him that a funeral for Mr. Bao would be held at Dongjiao Funeral Parlor. Li was asked whether he would like to go along to honor the old man who fought for democracy and civil rights.
Around 7:30 that night, our landlady came up to ask us to renew the lease, three months shy of expiration. She said we're supposed to renew the lease three months in advance. Also, she said, there will be a hike in the rent.
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From AP, via International Herald Tribune:
Outraged Beijing Olympic organizers sought Thursday to refute allegations of religious intolerance, saying Bibles and other religious items for personal use are welcome at next year's Beijing Olympics.That latitude, however, does not extend to the Falun Gong spiritual movement, banned eight years ago as an "evil cult" and persecuted mercilessly ever since.
Recent reports by a religious news agency and European media that Bibles would be banned at the Olympics touched off an outcry that prompted a U.S. senator to call the Chinese ambassador for an explanation and a Christian athletes group to protest the "deep violation." [Full Text]
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From Los Angeles Times:
Which company has committed the greater evil? Yahoo Inc. helped send a reporter to prison by revealing his identity to the Chinese government. Cisco Systems Inc. helps send thousands of Chinese dissidents to prison by selling sophisticated Internet surveillance technology to China.If bad press is to be the judge, the "stool pigeon" Yahoo is clearly the bigger villain. In 2004, after the Chinese government ordered the country's media not to report on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, journalist Shi Tao used his Yahoo e-mail account to forward a government memo to a pro-democracy group. When China's Internet police -- a force of 30,000 -- uncovered this, it pressured Yahoo to reveal Shi's identity. Yahoo caved quicker than you can say Vichy France, and Shi is doing 10 years in a Chinese slammer for one click of his subversive mouse. [Full Text]
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For China Media Project, David Bandurski writes about the frequently-heard argument that Chinese people aren't interested in politics and don't have much use for democracy:
If I had a jiao for every time someone’s told me the Chinese don’t care about politics or democracy, I’d have enough chunk change to fund an American presidential campaign. “The new middle class is young, rich and happy. Just don’t mention politics,” Time reported not long ago. And we are elsewhere informed that “new-generation Chinese”, who exist in a “parallel universe,” “do not want democracy.”
...The answer, the oft-neglected missing piece, is expression. These assumptions about the Chinese and their shallowest convictions fail to account for the salient fact that real dialogue about politics or civic life is now and has historically been suppressed in China. Speech, the basic condition of public participation in political affairs, is something the Communist Party has historically monopolized.
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From AP:
Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Jerry Yang testified to lawmakers on Tuesday that the company has been "open and forthcoming" about its role in a Chinese government investigation that led in 2005 to a journalist's imprisonment.
"We have answered every question, provided every requested piece of information and worked with you in good faith," he said in prepared testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Lawmakers have accused the company of holding back information in its role regarding the arrest of Chinese journalist Shi Tao. The Chinese government accused Shi of leaking state secrets and sentenced him to 10 years in prison. [Full Text]
Here is a video link for the hearing from LA Times. Read also Yahoo executives grilled by Congress over China policies: Live-blogging by Declan McCullagh, Searching for an Explanation: No Results Found by Dana Milbankand and Statement of Chairman Lantos at hearing, Yahoo! Inc.’s Provision of False Information to Congress:
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The Independent reports from Xiahe, Gansu Province, where hundreds of Tibetan monks celebrated the awarding of the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama:
Eyewitnesses, who cannot be named for fear of retribution, told of how the monks met stiff opposition from the police, and the celebrations on the night of 17 October quickly turned into a confrontation.
The demonstration of support was a brave and significant display of dissent by the Dalai Lama's supporters in China and offers a rare insight into the tensions that exist between the three million Tibetans who live in Chinese territory outside the Tibetan Autonomous Region and the Chinese authorities, who insist that Tibet is part of China. [Full text]
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From Financial Times:
A top Yahoo official who has come under fire for the company’s role in the 2004 imprisonment of a dissident in China apologised on Thursday for failing to tell US lawmakers that Yahoo knew more about the case than he initially acknowledged in testimony last year.Michael Callahan, Yahoo’s executive vice president and general counsel, said in a statement ahead of a congressional hearing next week that he “realised” that Yahoo had additional information about the nature of the probe into one of its users, Shi Tao, a journalist now serving a 10-year prison sentence in China, months after he testified that Yahoo had “no information” about the investigation. [Full Text]
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From Canadian Press:
China will not tolerate unauthorized parades, demonstrations or other gatherings during next year's Beijing Olympic Games, a police spokesman said in statement published Thursday.
The announcement by Public Security Ministry press officer Wu Heping puts on notice a range of groups from religious rights activists to environmentalists who hope to harness the Games' visibility to publicize their causes.
"Any group or individual who stages a gathering, parade, or demonstration during the Beijing Olympic Games period must respect Chinese law," Wu said at a news conference, transcripts of which were posted on official websites Thursday. [Full Text]
Meanwhile, Beijing Newspeak reports that "Olympic 'large-scale mass activities' won’t be banned!" Read also U.N. adopts truce resolution for Beijing Games by Nick Mulvenney.
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From AP:
China denied a report Thursday that its border police fired upon a group of Tibetans trying to cross a mountain pass to exile in Nepal.China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said at a regular briefing that he checked into the report and found it was "made up, fabricated news."
Liu was responding to claims by the International Campaign for Tibet, which said Tuesday a group of more than 30 Tibetans, including Buddhist monks, nuns and two children, came under attack from China's People's Armed Police while trying to enter Nepal using the icy Himalayan Nangpa Pass last month. [Full Text]
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Reuters reports on U.S. Congressional testimony by Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer:
China's government is forcibly moving young women of the ethnic Uighur minority from their homes in Xinjiang to factories in eastern China, a Uighur activist told the U.S. Congress on Wednesday.
Rebiya Kadeer, jailed for more than five years for championing the rights of the Muslim Uighurs before being sent into exile in the United States in 2005, called for U.S. help in stopping a program she said had already removed more than 240,000 people, mostly women, from Xinjiang.
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At a New York opening of the film Nanking, Wendi Murdoch, wife of media mogul Rupert, expressed her views on China today. From the New York Observer:
Mega-mogul Rupert Murdoch’s wife, Wendi (née Deng), is very proud of the progress her native China has made over the past few decades. “Economically, everybody is doing well; Chinese people are very natural business people,” said Ms. Murdoch, 39.
...What of the Chinese government’s well-documented brutality in Tibet? “I don’t think anyone got killed there!” Ms. Murdoch asserted. “I haven’t been there recently, but today, everybody in Tibet have mobile phones and the ability to send a message.”
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From AP via Inquirer.net:
Hundreds of people making stuffed toys for The Walt Disney Co. at a factory in southern China are working up to 16 hours a day with only a few days off a month, a Hong Kong-based labor activist group said Wednesday. "During the peak season, before Christmas, workers at the factory start at 8 a.m. and don't finish until midnight," said Jenny Chan, an activist with the Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior .
Chan said the Tianyu Toys factory in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan regularly holds back workers' wages for up to 45 days, and paid overtime of 3 yuan (US$0.40) an hour, less than half the rate set by Chinese labor laws. She said this prompted a mass strike in September, but that management had only increased overtime pay to 3.5 yuan an hour. [Full Text]
[Image: A Mickey Mouse stuffed toy and placards are displayed during a demonstration outside the Hong Kong Disneyland Tuesday, by Vincent Yu from AP.]
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From RFA Unplugged blog:
Six villagers’ representatives from Wanglou village, Funing County in the eastern Chinse province of Jiangsu were detained on the night of Oct. 28 over a land compensation dispute, sources told RFA’s Cantonese service(ZH).
The wife of one detained man, Yang Jiaren, said: “About 7 or 8 policemen intruded into our house and brought Yang away saying that Yang was making trouble. They have totally arrested 6 representatives. My husband and others only requested compensation for our land. We have to live. We have not committed any crimes. The police even did not tell me where they took my husband,” she said. [Full Text]
[Image source: A protester sits near a banner reading: "I want to eat, pay for land use" at the site of an aquatic venue being planned for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Photo: AP via theage.com.au]
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From the China in Transition blog:
There are signs that public discussions on the Internet in China have been put under tighter control lately.Bullog.cn, a blog site featuring intellectuals’ discussion over political, society and cultural topics, is suspended. Currently on its homepage is nothing but one notice that reads: “Bullog is going through additional procedures, and will reopen very soon. Please don’t worry.”
The website does not articulate what kind of “additional procedures” it is going through, but it’s not hard to imagine that they are likely related to government regulations over blog sites. Essentially, this note is suggesting that Bullog has been ordered by the authorities to stop operation and has to gain permission to reopen, probably after some adjustments to its content.
[Full Text]
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Please click to watch this four-part BBC series: China from the Inside, from 2006, via video.google.com:
＊ Power and the People
＊ Women of the Country
＊ Shifting Nature
＊ Freedom and Justice
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Richard Spencer reflects on arguments that critics of China's human rights record are just reacting to the country's economic might:
The rise of Chinese industry as manufacturing shuts down in the west, the bullishness of Asia, including its financial markets, while meltdown threatens everywhere else, the general rise of China while American and British indebtedness looks chronic and incurable... all this prompts a nervous west to cry foul. The foul is, of course, China's human rights record.
That's the claim...
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From Los Angeles Times:
Bao Zunxin, an activist who was jailed for his role in the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement, has died, a fellow dissident said Monday. He was 70.Once considered one of China's leading intellectuals, Bao died Sunday in Beijing from a brain hemorrhage, said Liu Xiaobo, a former professor at Beijing Normal University who also spent 20 months in jail for joining the 1989 protests.
Formerly a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' history institute, Bao edited a series of influential publications during the 1980s that promoted Western social science theories. [Full Text]
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“What happens when an authoritarian government and thousands of activists go head-to-head at the Olympics? China is about to find out.“ From Foreign Policy:
You can always count on the Olympic Games to provide drama. Next year’s games in Beijing will be no different; they too will produce powerful stories and riveting television. But this time the images will not just be athletes overcoming the odds or breaking records. They will also focus on the clashes between the Chinese police and the activists who will arrive from all around the world. The causes that motivate their activism range from human rights to global warming, from Darfur to Tibet, from Christianity to Falun Gong. The clashes outside the stadiums are likely to be more intense and spectacular than the sports competitions taking place inside. And the showdown will be captured as much by the videocameras in the cell phones of protesters and spectators as any news agencies’ camera crews. In fact, the Beijing Olympics will not just offer another opportunity to test the limits of human athletic performance; it will also test the limits of a centralized police state’s ability to confront a nebulous swarm of foreign activists armed with BlackBerries. A governmental bureaucracy organized according to 20th-century principles will meet 21st-century global politics. Lenin meets YouTube.
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Unreported World, the critically acclaimed Channel 4 foreign affairs stran, published a video report entitled: China's Olympic Lie: A journalist looks into Beijing's so called 'Black Jails'.
Click this link to watch.
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An update of a CDT post, from Global Voices:
On Hong Kong Democratic Party founder and Legco member Martin Lee being labeled a race traitor and running dog after his WaPo article, which proposed engagement with Beijing in lieu of Olympic boycott, was widely interpreted by some as a call for American intervention in China's human rights situation just days after he met with president George Bush's National Security Advisor and “cold warrior” John Negroponte, readers of NetEase Olympic Report's series of reports documenting furor and backlash aimed at Lee over the weekend made the following comments:On Tsang Hin-chi's criticism of Lee for lacking ‘the bravery of Chinese blood':
网易青海西宁网友 ip：220.167.*.*：
2007-10-28 19:07:13 发表
作为一个香港人，到其它国家要求外国来干预我们中国事务,这是不对的
回复 精华推荐 支持(9) 反对(1) 举报Qinghai
As a Hong Konger, to go to another country and demand it intervene in our China's affairs, is wrong.
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(Image of Martin Lee)
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Since July this year, the crackdown in Chinese cyberspace has been widely reported. Here is the latest example. SINA.com is China's largest news portal and blog hosting service. Like every other blog hosting service in China, SINA hires human censors and uses key-word filtering technologies to censor blog posts on its servers. The bloggers on sina.com often receive messages like the one below to inform them that their posts have been deleted by the SINA "System Administrator"
"Sorry. Your post ‘ＸＸＸＸＸ’ has been deleted by the System Administrator. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have questions, please email us and we will get back to you within 24 hours. "
However, some bloggers on SINA.com have found themselves under much tighter censorship recently. When their posts are deleted, they also receive an additional text from the "System Administrator." Here is an example:
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In the New York Times, Howard French looks at the complexities of the Tibet issue, which often get overlooked in the arguments presented by both the Chinese government and Tibet's Western supporters:
As with most long-running disputes, the facts that underpin the Tibetan question are full of nuance and subject to competing interpretations. That no major party to this situation has been particularly generous in acknowledging this has only reinforced the overall air of intractability.
China's rulers, accustomed to controlling the flow of information and ideas, and hence how history is taught, skim over - or edit out - parts of Tibet's past that are inconvenient to their narrative. [Full text]
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Hong Kong Legislative Council member Martin Lee wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling on the U.S. to pressure China on human rights issues in the run-up to the Olympics. ESWN has reposted the full essay, followed by articles about protesters who gathered outside the LegCo offices to call Lee a "running dog". From Lee's article:
In accepting the invitation to attend China's Games, President Bush said this would be "a moment where China's leaders can use the opportunity to show confidence by demonstrating a commitment to greater openness and tolerance." Instead of a "moment" of change, China needs structural and long-term reforms: placing the Communist Party under the rule of law, unshackling the media and Internet, allowing religious adherents to freely practice their faiths, ceasing harassment of civil-society groups that work on AIDS and the environment, and addressing modest calls for accountability in the political system. Mr. Bush and other world leaders planning to attend the Olympics should not wait for the opening ceremony, but must start now with sustained efforts to achieve this agenda.
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Far Eastern Economic Review writes about progress made by journalists in China, despite official censorship:
Chinese newsstands get more impressive by the day: So much is on offer that most of them have opted to add a few extra magazine holders on the pavement. Here, a holder brimming with publications on collecting and the arts, interior decoration, and architecture. Opposite, another one with magazines on golf and various sports, cars, aviation, video games and so on. Conspicuous consumption publications abound, taking pride of place among the plethora of fashion magazines that becomes ever larger: all the famous international names are there, from Vogue to Cosmopolitan, busy "educating the taste" (as they claim) of contemporary Chinese urban women...
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Tibet expert Robert Barnett writes about relations between Beijing and the Dalai Lama:
After all, it’s the Dalai Lama who persuaded the vast majority of Tibetans to accept autonomy within China instead of independence. He stopped the exiles from using violence, spoke out against calls for boycotts against Beijing, and convinced them to accept a democratic constitution and the separation of politics from religion.
Still, the Dalai Lama has held out on two issues: an insistence that Tibet was historically independent, and a claim that “meaningful autonomy”—allowing Tibetans to run their own cultural and economic affairs—should apply to all Tibetan-inhabited areas. Beijing says these demands are insurmountable. But if negotiations ever take place, even these could be reworked into language that would satisfy both sides. [Full text]
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From Reuters:
Human Rights Watch urged China on Thursday to use its U.N. Security Council membership to help end state repression in Myanmar after last month's crackdown on street protests.The New York-based rights group noted that the auspicious date August 8, 2008, chosen as the opening day of the Beijing Olympics, marked the 20th anniversary of the 1988 pro-democracy protests in Myanmar, also crushed by the military a month later.
The United States has urged China to do more to lean on its junta ally and the two have differed over what action the Security Council should take. [Full Text]
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Yomiuri Shimbun interviews author Zhou Qing, whose expose "What Kind of God: A Survey of the Current Safety of China's Food" was nominated for the Lettres Ulysses Prize:
Though I intended to ask for his opinion on freedom of speech in China, Zhou apparently thought I lacked a proper understanding of the situation in the country.
"I find your [question] absurd. [So-called liberalization] is not the result of changes made by the Chinese government. It's a result of pressure from the international community," he said. "Dictators will never change."
Zhou, who took part in the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, was later arrested and imprisoned for nearly three years. [Full text]
Read an excerpt of Zhou's book, via OpenDemocracy.
[Image: Zhou Qing, via Lettres Ulysses site]
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From CNet News.com Blog:
The chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee is summoning Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang to Washington to talk about "how the Internet company gave false information to Congress about its role in a human rights case in China that sent a journalist to jail for a decade," according to a release from the committee chairman's office.Chairman Tom Lantos has asked Yang and Yahoo General Counsel Michael Callahan to appear at a hearing on November 6.
"Our committee has established that Yahoo provided false information to Congress in early 2006," Lantos said in the statement. [Full Text]
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KQED's Forum program is interviewing CDT's Xiao Qiang and Sophie Richardson from Human Rights Watch about the ongoing Party Congress:
This week, Chinese leaders are converging on Beijing for the Communist Party congress, held every five years. We look at the government's ongoing efforts to control information as internet access expands and as the population gets more affluent and educated. Guests include Xiao Qiang, director of the Berkeley China Internet Project and professor of journalism at UC Berkeley; and Sophie Richardson, deputy director of the Asia Program at Human Rights Watch. [Listen here]
The program can be heard live or will be archived online later today.
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From The Christian Science Monitor:
As China's ruling Communist Party holds its most important conclave in five years, the government has launched an unusually harsh crackdown on potential troublemakers, say Chinese and international human rights groups.
Scores, perhaps hundreds, of petitioners, democracy activists, religious figures, and human rights workers have been abducted, imprisoned, or confined to their homes over the past six weeks, according to rights monitors.
"This definitely seems to be the worst in years," says Phelim Kine, a Hong Kong-based researcher with Human Rights Watch. "It is much, much more comprehensive and wide-ranging" than earlier sweeps. [Full Text]
On the topic of human rights and the Olympics, this cartoon is making the rounds online:
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Hangzhou-based journalist and blogger Zan Aizong (昝愛宗) seizes on the arrival of the 17th CPC National Congress, now underway in Beijing, to issue a call for a law guaranteeing journalists' rights. Translated by CDT (with thanks to Global Voices for pointing out the link):
It’s up to the nation to do what news organizations cannot: A call on the 17th National Congress to pass the “Press and Publication Law”
The establishment of a Press Law is an extremely urgent matter. Roads and bridges the quality of soy pulp (豆腐渣 ), unsafe food, mine accidents, wave after wave of high-level corruption, the beating of journalists, chaos in the publications market, fake news…appalling problems like these seem to occur on a daily basis. Our society requires order, and so it urgently requires a Press and Publication Law (新闻出版法 ).
Under a Press and Publication Law, whatever the government can’t do, whatever the nation itself is powerless to handle, will fall to the press as the representative of public opinion. True mass media monitors and limits the power of government. At the same time, it safeguards, standardizes and prevents the abuse of the right to a free press.
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From RFA Unplugged blog:
MC: Li Heping, a lawyer from Beijing Gaobo Longhua law firm, has engaged in quite a few rights-protection legal activities. On Saturday, he was suddenly kidnapped by a group of unknown gangsters. It was reported to the RFA station that the kidnappers took Li Heping to an unidentified building and beat him up. They plundered his mobile hardware from his computer and the chip from his cell phone, and they copied the contents of his laptop. After about six hours, Li Heping was dropped by the kidnappers in the outskirts of Beijing. He returned home afterwards.
The lawyer, Li Heping, told the RFA reporter over the phone that he was kidnapped around 5:00 Saturday afternoon. [Full Text]
[Image source: Li Heping (left), from Epoch Times]
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From Time:
Next summer's Olympics will showcase a China of glittering skyscrapers and overstuffed store shelves. But the government responsible for this economic miracle continues to imprison political activists, restrict religious freedom, tightly control the media and Internet, and protect its citizens only haphazardly from pollution and unsafe food and consumer products, a congressional panel reported Friday.The Congressional-Executive Commission on China credited Communist Party leaders with increasing legal protections for those who abstain from unauthorized political and religious activities, but noted the safeguards are selectively enforced. "Against persons the Party deems to pose a threat to its supremacy, officials wield the legal system as a harsh and deliberately unpredictable weapon," the panel concluded in its annual report on the state of human rights and rule of law in China. [Full Text]
