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The Standard
January 28, 2011
By:  Dennis Chong

Two former leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen protests who were refused entry into Hong Kong this week said their exclusion exposes Beijing’s strengthening grip on the territory.

Wang Dan and Wu’er Kaixi, who live in exile in Taiwan, have been refused entry to Hong Kong, where they planned to attend the funeral of democracy icon Szeto Wah tomorrow.

“The Beijing authorities should provide an explanation as to why they did this, which is a humiliation to the deceased and to Hong Kong taxpayers,” Wu’er said yesterday.

The two said their exclusion shows Bejing has tightened its grip on the officially autonomous territory, and called on Taipei to include human rights and democracy in its renewed dialogue with the mainland.

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The incident shows that “one country, two systems” is dead and should never be applied to Taiwan, they said.    [FULL  STORY]

HRiC
January 24, 2011

[Chinese / 中文]

Shortly after He Depu (何德普), a veteran dissident and activist, walked out of a Beijing prison today after completing his eight-year term, he was beaten by four police officers when he resisted being shoved into a police vehicle. He was injured in the neck and hands, according to an eyewitness.

The eyewitness said that He Depu was then taken to Zhanlan Road Public Security substation in Beijing’s Xicheng District, where he was read the provisions of his two years of post-release deprivation of political rights, which include a prohibition on criticizing the government. According to an informed source, He Depu said that he was not afraid, and would speak out.

In November 2002, He Depu was detained after joining 191 other dissents in an open letter to the 16th Party Congress that called for political reforms, including reassessing the 1989 Democracy Movement, releasing all prisoners of conscience, ratifying the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and expanding democratic elections first to the county level and eventually to the national level. He was convicted of “inciting subversion of state power” on November 6, 2003, and served his sentence at the Beijing No. 2 Prison.

According to the informed source, He Depu said that during his imprisonment, his wife and mother endured great humiliation and pain, and that he deeply regrets not having been able to fulfill his duties as a husband, son, and father. The source reports that He Depu also stressed the importance of ending the one-party dictatorship and building a free China, and that death is preferable to the loss of freedom.

The source also said that He Depu recounted episodes of torture during his detention and after his trial. He said that when he was first detained, he was made to lie on a wooden bed for 85 days, with his wrists and thighs chained to the bed such that his body formed the shape of the character da (大, or “big”). And in the Beijing holding center (遣送处) where He Depu was held before being sent to prison, a police officer named Liu told He Depu to say that he was guilty; when He Depu refused, the police officer ordered four prisoners to beat him. The prisoners kicked He Depu in the back and legs and all five of them pinned him to the ground, face down, for 20 minutes.  [FULL  STORY]

How a staged self-immolation manipulated public opinion, a 10-year retrospective

Epoch Times
Jan 26, 2011
By Matthew Robertson

China was bewildered one morning in late 1971 when it awoke to find that Lin Biao, Chairman Mao’s trusted successor, had actually been a “political swindler,” an “intriguer,” and a “man with foreign connections” all along.

The Chinese press later said that he had masterminded a scheme to assassinate Mao, but that it had been thwarted, whereupon he tried to escape to the Soviet Union. On the way, they said, his plane crashed. Photos were circulated but could never be verified. All of Lin’s revolutionary slogans were dropped, rallies were organized, songs were sung, and Party newspapers went to great lengths explaining why the plot of the “renegade and traitor” had somehow not been uncovered earlier.

No one will ever know what really happened to Lin Biao—it is believed that Mao saw him as a threat and had him liquidated—but his case is one of many in a history of political stunts enabled by a controlled media environment and relentless propagandizing. Lin’s story is also an important object lesson in the enigmatic and often deadly world of the Chinese communist propaganda campaign, a form of mass persuasion that persists to this day.    [FULL  STORY]

Case exposes dark side in China

Epoch Times
By Cheryl Chen
Jan 26, 2011

New eyewitnesses to the death of a village chief on Christmas Day have come forward, saying that they saw the man murdered by local authorities. The man, Qian Yunhui of Zhaiqiao Village, Zhejiang Province, was an open opponent to forced demolitions in the area.

The photo of Qian’s contorted body, showing the neck crushed under the front wheel of a heavy construction truck on Dec. 25, 2010, has spread across China’s Internet and media.

The case exemplifies how violent forced demolition has become a systemic problem in China, condoned and carried out by government officials, who work in league with police and gangsters, experts say. It is believed that Qian was killed to be silenced.

Qian’s daughter told Civil Right and Livelihood Watch that her father left the house on Christmas morning after receiving a phone call from the Deputy Mayor of Puqi Township. Shortly afterwards he was killed.

From the outset, rumors had it that the chief had been murdered because of his years of fighting local authorities over land grabs in his village. But only two days later, on Dec. 27, after a hasty and irregular investigation, Yueqing City authorities held a press conference and said the chief’s death was the result of a traffic accident. Wenzhou City Public Security Bureau also held a press conference on Dec. 29 and stated the same thing.    [FULL  STORY]

The Epoch Times
Jan 26, 2011
By Michelle Yu

The Chinese regime is selling off the people’s land at a furious pace to hike up the state’s gross domestic product (GDP) index, fill its coffers, and line officials’ pockets. Meanwhile, millions of ordinary people have become land grab victims, faced with displacement, destitution, and violent assault by callous officials if they resist eviction. The general public is becoming increasingly sensitive and outspoken.

In an online poll 7,500 Chinese were asked to summarize what the year 2010 meant to them. One fourth of respondents expressed their sentiments with the Chinese character “chai,” which means “demolish.” It indicates how forced demolition in China has become a profound and ever-present threat for ordinary people there.

All land in China is owned by the state. When one buys a home in China, technically one only owns the house—but only so long as it suits the government. At any time, the government can tell you that it wants its land back, as it has a more profitable use for it, and that your home will be bulldozed. Farmers can only lease the land, and when told to vacate, their livelihood is also threatened.    [FULL  STORY]

AP
January 11, 2011
By CARA ANNA

BEIJING – The continued use of torture, illegal detention, censorship and other offenses means China has failed to deliver on its first human rights action plan, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.

The New York-based rights group evaluated China’s official two-year plan that ended last month. It said China’s government deserves praise for openly publishing a human rights plan, but said its many failures left it “largely a series of unfulfilled promises.”

China’s human rights were fully in the spotlight last year when imprisoned author and critic Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, has been under house arrest and out of contact since shortly after the award was announced in October. Dozens of his supporters were harassed, detained or blocked from leaving China to attend the ceremony in Norway last month.

Among other notable cases of rights abuses was the disappearance of activist lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who emerged briefly last spring and discussed how he was beaten by security agents for hours at a time, before again going missing.    [FULL  STORY]

Computerworld
Dec 31, 2010
By Gregg Keizer

China may soon ban Skype, the government’s official newspaper said, potentially putting the popular Internet chat and phone service in the same boat as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

According to the People’s Daily , Chinese authorities have said that only China Telecom and China Unicom will be allowed to provide Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services to customers.

Both China Telecom and China Unicom — the former is the largest land-line telephone company in the country, the latter is the nation’s second-largest 3G mobile carrier — are state controlled.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), which published the ruling earlier this month, has not set a timetable for implementing the new VoIP restrictions.

When it does, Skype will probably be barred. “[This] is expected to make services like Skype unavailable in the country,” the Communist Party’s official paper said.    [FULL  STORY]

Epoch Times
By Quincy Yu

A teacher at a private kindergarten in Xinghua City, Jiangsu Province, chose an unusual and painful form of punishment for seven young children who had spoken out of turn in her class on Dec. 14: she applied an electric iron to their faces. Two of the children had to be taken to hospital.

Local Communist Party authorities in a press conference on Dec. 18 explained that the teacher had assumed that the iron was no longer hot when she pressed it on the faces of the children, since it had been unplugged for a while.

Some reports in Chinese media said that Yi, the teacher, had told the parents of the injured children that they had fallen in the crowded bathroom due to a slippery floor. The two children with serious injuries are still undergoing treatment in Shanghai; it is unclear whether the burns will scar.

In the press conference, authorities said the teacher will be detained for ten days and fined 500 yuan (US$75.07). No compensation was offered the victims. They said that the kindergarten is a privately-owned facility, and that the teacher was hired by the kindergarten owner, not the local government.    [FULL  STORY]

As more Chinese people going online, China’s censorship will struggle to keep pace, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said

PC World
Nov 4, 2010
By Michael Kan, IDG News

China’s strict controls on its Internet usage will eventually fail as more of the country’s people go online and express themselves, said Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

“Ultimately, the people will win over the government. The yearning is so strong,” he said on Wednesday during a talk hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Schmidt’s comments come several months after Google announced it would stop censoring its search results in China. But even as Google has attempted to provide unfiltered search results by redirecting users in China to the company’s Hong Kong search engine, the Chinese government continues to block certain searches.

China currently has 420 million Internet users, according to Chinese government statistics. But certain sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are blocked. At the same time, China heavily invests into policing the web, using a large organization of regulators that are estimated to number from 30,000 to 50,000, Schmidt said.    [FULL  STORY]

Taipei Times
Oct 29, 2010
AFP, BEIJING

The 17-year-old daughter of missing Chinese rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng (高智晟) has appealed for help from US President Barack Obama, saying Beijing had kidnapped him and that police beat her as a child.

Grace Geng (耿格), who now lives in the US with her mother and brother, urged Obama to ask Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) for information about Gao’s whereabouts when the pair meet next month at a G20 summit in Seoul.

The plight of human rights activists in China has come under the spotlight since the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this month to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), with the West pressing for the release of all political prisoners.

“President Obama, as the father of two girls yourself, please ask President Hu to tell this daughter where her father is,” Geng wrote in an opinion piece published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. “I know my father is just one man, but I also know that if the Chinese government is allowed to blatantly violate its own law with respect to my father, it is only a matter of time before the next father disappears.”    [FULL  STORY]