Archive for the ‘China’ Category
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
10/3/10
A 62-year-old Uighur who has lived in Sweden as a political refugee for the past 13 years has been jailed for spying on Uighur expatriates on behalf of China. Babur Maihesuti, a Swedish citizen, was found guilty of ”aggravated illegal espionage activity” and was on Monday sentenced to 16 months, the Stockholm District Court said. From January 2008 until June 2009, Maihesuti collected personal information about exiled Uighurs, including details on their health, travel and political involvement. He passed the information on to a Chinese diplomat and a Chinese journalist who, on assignment from the Chinese intelligence service, carried out operations in Sweden for the Chinese state. ”The activity has taken place in secret through a special system of telephone calls [and] was also deceptive since the man did not tell the Uighurs he was dealing with he was working for the Chinese state,” the court said.
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Tags: China, Human Rights, Sweden
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Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
3/3/10
The US supreme court has refused to rule on whether judges have the power to order the government to release Guantanamo prisoners to live in the US, when no other country will take them. The court said on Monday that it would not decide on an appeal by seven Chinese Uighurs held for years at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, because they had received at least one offer to go to another country. Without ruling on the issues at the heart of the appeal, the country’s highest court sent the case back to an appeals court to decide what further proceedings are now “necessary and appropriate for the full and prompt disposition of the case in light of the new developments”.
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Tags: China, Human Rights, USA
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Thursday, February 25th, 2010
25/2/10
Like most rivers in this country which are fast drying up under the scorching summer sun, the Mekong is no exception. This otherwise mighty river has shrunk substantially in size and its once forceful flow is now down to a trickle in many lower stretches of the river, to the extent that navigation has become impossible. Although the drying up of the Mekong River in the dry season has become a normal phenomenon, the situation this year appears to be much worse than that in previous years. The impact has already been felt by people depending on the river for water, transport and food. The Irrigation Department of late has reported that the river in Loei, Nong Khai and Nakhon Phanom provinces has already reached critical levels even though the peak of the dry season is still a month away. Tour boat operators in Chiang Rai’s Chiang Saen district have suspended their services because the water level is too shallow for navigation. Fishermen have reported fewer catches prompting many of them to turn to other manual jobs to make a living. Less rainfall as a result of climatic changes may be partly to blame. But non-governmental organisations which have been closely monitoring ecological changes in the Mekong River have been quick to point accusatory fingers at China. They blame China for storing up water, especially at the newly-completed Xiaowan hydro-electric dam, to generate electricity. That is just part of the sad story. The damming of the Mekong’s tributaries in Laos and northeastern Thailand, such as the Pak Moon dam, also contribute to less water flowing into the Mekong.
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Tags: Asia, China, Environment
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Saturday, February 13th, 2010
Xinran talks to Linda Morris; 13/2/10; (2 Items)
Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love is published by Chatto & Windus.
It is only in the final chapter of Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother that its author, Xinran, confesses the secret of her “unforgotten” daughter and her intense personal motivation for documenting the untold stories of mothers and daughters in modern China. Her name was Little Snow, born in a Nanjing hospital 20 years ago. The newborn’s forehead was stained by a dark pink birthmark, which the nurses said was the tear her dying mother had shed as she held her daughter. The father, a doctor, had taken sleeping pills and slashed himself with a scalpel, lying down to die next to the wife he could not live without. Xinran, a radio journalist at the time, was interviewing victims of a snowstorm at the hospital when she heard the whispered story of the orphaned girl. “I thought to write a story – it was a drama to me – and I was curious to see the baby,” she says on the phone from London. “At first the baby was very quiet. The nurse put her next to the window. The snow was falling and it makes shadows on the baby’s face like the tears of her mother. My hands started to touch her little fingers. I don’t know about fate, and I can’t put it into words, but her body language seemed to be saying that she recognised me and it was like we were mother and daughter.”
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Tags: Australia, Children, China, Womens Rights
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Friday, February 5th, 2010
Barbara Demick; 5/2/10
The telephones kept ringing with more orders and, although Duan Yuelin kept raising his prices, the demand was inexhaustible. Customers were so eager to buy more that they would ply him with expensive gifts and dinners in fancy restaurants. His family-run business was racking up sales of as much as $US3000 a month, unimaginable riches for uneducated rice farmers from the southern Chinese province of Hunan. What merchandise was he selling? Babies. And the customers were government-run orphanages that paid up to $US600 each for newborn girls for adoption in the United States and other Western countries. ”They couldn’t get enough babies. The demand kept going up and up, and so did the prices,” said Duan, who was released from prison last month after serving about four years of a six-year sentence for child trafficking.
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Tags: Children, China, Global, Trade
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Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
13/1/10
The Chinese tradition of families favouring boys over girls has led to a worrying gender imbalance that could see millions of men unable to find marriage partners, a report has found.According to the study by China’s Academy of Social Sciences, the imbalance means that more than 24 million men looking to marry will be unable to find a wife by the year 2020. The study by the government-backed academy said the situation among newborns was the most serious demographic problem for the country’s 1.3 billion people. Both the traditional fertility culture and prenatal sex selection had contributed to the problem, Wang Guangzhou, a researcher on the project, was quoted as saying by the state-run Global Times
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Tags: China, Human Rights
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Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Michael Sainsbury; 7/1/10
If there are still shadows of violence in the Chinese city of Urumqi six month after sectarian riots which saw 197 dead and thousands injured, they stretch a long, long way ? 1500 kilometres south east to the Uighur cultural capital Kashgar. While there were no protests or riots in this ancient city during July, the Silk Road trading mecca that nestles near the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan has been a key focus of the Chinese government’s response to the unprecedented unrest. Wang Li, a senior Communist Party official in Kashgar, described the situation as “tense”. Here, home to China’s largest mosque, the population is 80 per cent Uighur – the nine million strong Turkic-speaking Muslim minority whose protests in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi turned deadly on July 5 last year.If you can ignore a seven-metre statue of Mao Zedong, the centre of Kashgar is not one scintilla Chinese.
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Tags: China, Human Rights
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Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
6/1/10
China’s Yellow River tributaries have been “seriously polluted” by an oil spill last week, further contaminating badly-tainted drinking water resources, state media has said. Last week a ruptured pipe operated by China’s oil giant, PetroChina, sent 150,000 litres of fuel down two major tributaries of the Yellow River, Chishui and Wei. China National Petroleum Corporation, the parent company and the country’s largest oil producer, said the leak was caused by a “third party” during construction work. The pipeline is supposed to transport diesel from northwest China’s Gansu province to central parts of the country.
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Tags: China, Environment, Trade
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Saturday, January 2nd, 2010
Michael Sainsbury; 2/1/10
The bright winter sun bouncing off the green and gold decorated mosque in the remote northwestern Chinese city of Urumqi is deceptive. It’s minus 6C as thousands of the city’s male Uighur population slip off their shoes and lay down their prayer mats for Jumu’ah, the sacrosanct Friday service. Worshippers have been gathering for the past hour and at 2pm the Imam begins his sermon, preparing the faithful for their ritual. Men in a wide variety of hats spill beyond the front fence into the street. This is the biggest of Urumqi’s 265 or so mosques. The Uighurs are not the only Muslims in this fast-growing Chinese city – there are members of the Hui, Kahzak, Uzbek, Tajik, Kirgiz, Khalkhar and Sala ethnic groups here as well. But because of a long history of tension with the Chinese government, which erupted into deadly riots on July 5 when 197 people died, they are its best known.
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Tags: China, Human Rights, Muslim, Uighur
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Friday, January 1st, 2010
Cameron Stewart & Mike Steketee; 1/1/10; (3 Items)
The Fraser government in 1979 secretly feared that the arrival of refugee boats would divide Australian politics and society for decades, posing a continuing threat to national unity, according to newly declassified cabinet documents. In an echo of the challenges now facing the Rudd government, the Fraser cabinet admitted it was caught between its moral obligation to accept genuine refugees and the political danger of a public backlash against taking large numbers of boatpeople. But the Fraser government was substantially more generous towards the mostly Vietnamese refugees seeking asylum at that time than the Rudd government has been, with cabinet accepting 20,000 refugees in 1978-79 compared with the 12,000-13,000 Australia has taken in recent years. Both Mr Fraser and his foreign affairs minister, Andrew Peacock, said yesterday Australia had benefited as a nation as a consequence of a sympathetic approach to refugees during the Fraser years, and whatever concerns might have been raised in 1979 turned out to be unfounded.
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Tags: Australia, China, Migrants & Refugees, UK
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Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Michael Sainsbury; 30/12/09
China has ignored last-minute pleas by the British government and executed its first European national for 50 years, putting convicted drug courier Akmal Shaikh to death yesterday. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was “appalled and disappointed” after Shaikh, 53, died in the northwestern city of Urumqi for possessing 4kg of heroin. The British government and Shaikh’s family had claimed the former minicab company chief and father of three should not have stood trial because of a severe bipolar disorder. He had been denied an independent mental examination since his arrest in 2007.
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Tags: Capital Punishment, China, Drugs
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Saturday, December 26th, 2009
Rowan Callick, 26/12/09
China has issued an extraordinarily harsh Christmas message to all who wish even to discuss reform, by jailing the country’s leading dissident for 11 years. It chose Christmas Day (a normal working day in China) to diminish the international impact of the crushing sentence, following a trial lasting a mere three hours, even though Liu Xiaobo pleaded not guilty. He received the longest sentence for “inciting subversion” ever suffered since this crime was listed in 1997. He has already been held in custody for more than a year. Liu was a co-author of Charter 08, a document that in Western terms would be viewed as advocating liberal social democracy – in carefully calibrated rather than pugnacious language. It was signed by 303 people from a cross-section of China, including top intellectuals as well as editors, lawyers, artists, and people who described themselves as peasants and workers.
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Tags: China, Human Rights
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Thursday, December 24th, 2009
24/12/09; See: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/religious-crackdown-sparks-fear-in-china/story-e6frg6so-1225813279484
In Linfen, northern China, 10 religious leaders have been jailed in recent weeks and their church closed. Five church leaders were given prison terms of up to seven years while three were sentenced to two years in labour camps. Their crimes were “illegally occupying farm land” and “disturbing transportation through a mass gathering”. “The authorities are clearly sending a message to the Christians,” says lawyer Li Fanping, who is shocked at the severity of the punishment. “They’ve convicted them of these specific crimes. “As Christmas is coming, a lot of Christians will want to gather to worship, but the authorities have made it clear what can happen if they gather.” At the heart of the Linfen case is the giant Golden Lamp Church, which is capable of accommodating thousands of worshippers at a time. “Local officials at the village level have been tolerating and even helping the Linfen church,” says Bob Fu from the US-based group ChinaAid. But more senior Chinese religious authorities became nervous at the size of the church, and feared its ability to organise people into mass anti-government movements, Fu says.
Tags: China, Religion
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Thursday, December 24th, 2009
Michael Sainsbury; 24/12/09
China has begun sentencing 20 more ethnic Uighurs – some to death – for their part in riots which left 197 people dead in the remote western city of Urumqi on July 5, as the second batch of trials of more than 1200 people arrested as a result of the carnage began today, with at least one man sent for execution. In early December five people were sentenced to death and a further eight given prison terms, bringing to 17 sent to be executed in trials of the first two groups of people from the bloody unrest. Nine have been executed so far. The province of Xinjiang, of which Urumqi is the capital, remains locked down with internet, text messaging and international phone access cut off.
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Tags: Capital Punishment, China, Muslim
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Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
22/12/09
China has praised a Cambodian decision to deport 20 ethnic Uighurs who had sought asylum after fleeing unrest in China’s troubled western region of Xinjiang. In a statement the Chinese foreign ministry welcomed the move as a model of international cooperation and said the deportees would be treated “in accordance with the usual practices”. The 20 Uighurs were deported on Saturday on a flight back to China, in a decision that was criticised by human rights groups and the US government. The US state department said on Sunday that it was “deeply disturbed” by the forcible deportations, which it said would affect Cambodia’s relationship with the US.
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Tags: China, Human Rights, Terrorism
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Thursday, December 10th, 2009
Frank and Andreas Sieren; 10/1209
A river used to flow at the site where Yan Hongmei stands with her daughter. She remembers it well; 20 years ago, the river carried clear cold water and her father caught fish there big enough to eat. But, slowly the sand began to encroach. At first it was just a little blown in by the wind. But the wind grew into more frequent storms and the air became yellow with sand. People wrapped scarves around their faces to guard against it. The Gobi desert was infringing on Huailai, the area where Yan lives, and the trees lost their strength to fight it. It rained less and less. “And when it rained, it caused a storm flood,” says 28-year-old Yan.
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Tags: China, Environment
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