Category Archives: Headlines

Family Demands Information After Chinese Activist Dies in Police Custody

2015-11-04

860BFEB9-1051-43CE-9D6A-F28DAC41E9DD_w268_r1Chinese paramilitary police march near Tiananmen Square in Beijing, March 7, 2014.
AFP
A Chinese rights activist from the southern province of Guangdong has died in a police-run detention center, in what his family says are suspicious circumstances.

Zhang Liumao was reported dead by authorities in the Guangzhou No. 3 Detention Center in the early hours of Wednesday morning, but his family has been prevented from viewing his body, they told RFA.

Zhang had been charged with “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” Continue reading

Hong Kong Journalists Slam University’s Injunction as Doubts ‘Deepen’ Over Interference

201511030135taiwan1 2015-11-03

Journalists in Hong Kong have hit out at an injunction barring them from broadcasting secret recordings of a meeting of the University of Hong Kong (HKU)’s governing body.

The university applied for the injunction and called on Commercial Radio, which broadcast two secretly made recordings from a meeting of the HKU Council in which some members rejected liberal scholar Johannes Chan as a candidate for a high-ranking managerial post.

The recordings emerged after Chan was rejected for Continue reading

China’s New Crimes Will Stifle Public Expression, Erode Channels of Complaint

2015-11-02
New amendments recently in force to China’s criminal law have added more than 20 crimes to the statute book, including many critics say could further erode freedom of speech and place even more power in the hands of the state.

The amendments, effective Sunday, make it a crime to ‘insult a judge,’ ‘disrupt court order,’ post ‘rumors’ online and cheat in exams, while scaling back the death penalty on some crimes.

New criminal offenses include “fabricating, deliberately Continue reading

More Than We Wish to Know: Chen Guangcheng and the Truth about Chinese Human Rights Abuses

by Arthur Waldron
within Book Reviews, Foreign Affairs

October 30th, 2015

We hear endlessly of “change” and “reform” in China, and the United States has premised its policies on these promises. The memoirs of Chen Guangcheng paint a very different portrait.

Strength—a simple but seemingly superhuman strength of both conscience and body—is the great uniting theme of the story of Chen Guangcheng. Yet his deeply revealing memoirs, titled The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man’s Fight for Justice and Freedom in China, not only give us a glimpse into Continue reading

Ilham Tohti Documentary

 

 

ILHAM TOHTI
A professor at Minzu University in Beijing and the foremost Uighur public intellectual in the People’s Republic of China, he was sentenced to life in prison in September 2014 for advocating basic economic, cultural, religious and political rights for the Uighur people.

Inside:

— Interviews with Ilham Tohti
— Commentaries by Sakharov Prize laureate Hu Jia; Continue reading

Author on Trial in China’s Jiangxi Over ‘Brainwashing’ Book

2015-10-30

84e47fd2-2681-4ce8-8f73-bf15e1d8ed13Author and filmmaker Fu Zhibin is shown in an undated photo.
Photo courtesy of Independent Chinese PEN Center

A court in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangxi on Friday wrapped up a one-day trial of an outspoken author and Internet commentator on charges of “running an illegal business,” his lawyer said.

Fu Zhibin, 51, stood trial at the Qingshanhu District People’s Court in the provincial capital Nanchang alongside two unnamed print workers and an assistant.

“We argued that Fu Zhibin is not guilty of running an Continue reading

Great Firewall rising: How China wages its war on the Internet

 

By James Griffiths, CNN

Updated 0129 GMT (0929 HKT) October 26, 2015

It was a visit he had been dreading for almost six months, since he began working on a tool to help Chinese Internet users get around the vast censorship apparatus known as the Great Firewall.

Crowded inside his apartment in a northern Chinese city, Continue reading

China to ‘Strike Hard’ Against Illegal Overseas TV, Internet Content

658c1286-a7f0-4a64-aff7-ffbddebca12c2015-10-27

Netizens surf the web at an Internet cafe in China’s Zhejiang province in a file photo.
AFP

China’s media regulator on Tuesday issued new rules pledging to crack down on its citizens’ reception of overseas television and Internet content, to protect “national security.”

In a recent directive, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) ordered provincial and regional government, police departments, and judicial agencies at all levels to “strike hard” at any form of illegal television or Internet content and equipment.

It listed 81 content providers offering Continue reading