Chinese police shoot Tibetan dead during protest two weeks ago

BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese police “accidentally” shot dead an ethnic Tibetan during a protest in south-western China two weeks ago, state news agency Xinhua said Monday…….(more details from Reuters)

China warships dock in Myanmar

AFP, Aug. 30, 2010 -

YANGON — Two Chinese warships have made a rare visit to military-ruled Myanmar to spend several days promoting ties between the allied countries’ armed forces, Chinese state media said Monday.

The ships from the People’s Liberation Army Navy docked at Yangon’s Thilawa port on Sunday afternoon and will launch a series of exchanges with Myanmar’s navy, Xinhua news agency reported.

“The five-day mission is aimed at promoting friendly relationships between the two armed forces of the two countries and exchange between the two navies,” the report said.

A Chinese defence ministry official confirmed the ships’ arrival to AFP.

The warships, which Xinhua said were welcomed with a “grand ceremony”, have arrived as Myanmar prepares for its first election in twenty years on November 7, which has been widely criticised by activists and the West as a sham.

While numerous Western nations direct sanctions at Myanmar, which has been military ruled since 1962, China is the junta’s key ally, trading partner and an eager investor in the isolated state’s sizeable natural resources.

In November China’s top oil producer began construction of a pipeline across Myanmar.

The Asian economic powerhouse has long helped keep Myanmar afloat through trade ties, arms sales, and by shielding it from UN sanctions over rights abuses as a veto-wielding, permanent member of the Security Council…….(AFP)

North Korea’s leader Kim and son confirmed in China

Reuters, BEIJING | Sat Aug 28, 2010 -

BEIJING Aug 28 (Reuters) – North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and his son are in China to visit the school of senior Kim’s father, Kim Il-sung, a source with knowledge of the secretive trip told Reuters on Saturday.

“Trust me, it’s 100 percent both are here,” the source said, declining to give further details when asked.

There had been no conclusive sightings in China of the 68-year-old Kim, who has appeared frail and gaunt since reportedly suffering a stroke in 2008.

- Reuters

China: Alarming trend of violence against journalists (3)

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Censorship favouring companies

Here are some other recent cases in which the authorities have protected companies and businessmen at the expense of media freedom:

Tang Jun’s spurious doctorate claim The Propaganda Bureau in Beijing banned the media on 12 July from repeating allegations that Tang Jun, one of the former CEO of Microsoft’s operations in China, had not obtained the US university doctorate listed in his résumé. The allegations caused a major stir online and led journalists to check the authenticity of the diplomas claimed by other prominent Chinese figures.

The magazine Business Watch and the state power company Grid Corp The magazine Business Watch was suspended for a month in early May over an article it had published in March about the state power company Grid Corp. The authorities did not like the magazine’s user of internal company documents for the story.

Explosion in a Nanjing factory When there was an explosion at a Nanjing factory with a toll of 300 injured and 10 missing on 28 July, a Jiangsu TV crew went there and began broadcasting reports until an official intervened and told them to stop, threatening them with “serious problems” if they did not. The footage that had already been broadcast was then removed from the Internet.

Attack on Zhongguo Shibao reporter When Chen Xiaoying, a reporter for the newspaper Zhongguo Shibao (China Times), arrived at the place in Shenzhen where she was supposed to meet an anonymous source on 29 July, a man punched her hard in the face several times. She had gone there because she had been told she would be given information about the Shenzhen International Enterprise Co., a company she had already written about on 8 July. Chen thinks the attack was linked to that story, in which she suggested that the company’s CEO was involved in illegal activity. The CEO had told her after its publication that: “This kind of story will not be good for you.” The company denied any role in the assault.

Exemplary support for Qiu Ziming

Cases of this kind can sometimes have a happy ending. Economic Observer reporter Qiu Ziming went into hiding in July after being placed on a list of most wanted criminals by the police in the eastern province of Zhejiang, for allegedly defaming Kan Specialties Material Corporation, a Suichang-based company that is one of China’s biggest battery manufacturers. The Zhejiang authorities finally rescinded the warrant for his arrest on 29 July after he won a great deal of support online thanks to his blog, in which he said he stood by the allegations of improper practices that he had levelled against the company.

These cases show that more and more journalists are testing the limits of press freedom in China. But, with increasing frequency, they are running up against solid resistance from the government and both state and private-sector companies.

- from the Reporters Without Borders

China: Alarming trend of violence against journalists (2)

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Dangerous for health, dangerous for journalists

Reporters Without Borders reiterates its call for an exhaustive investigation into an assault on Fang Xuanchang, a science reporter for the magazine Caijing, as he was returning home on 24 June in Beijing. Beaten over the head and back with a steel bar by two unidentified assailants, Fang had to be rushed to hospital. Until now, the police have conducted no more than desultory enquiries into what appears to have been a murder attempt.

Fang told the US magazine Foreign Policy (www.foreignpolicy.com) that his mysterious assailants clearly tried to kill him. But who tried to kill him and why? Fang does not know the identity or motives of his attackers but he has some theories. He thinks for example that they might have been hired by a doctor he criticised in one of his articles. Fang has written about medical charlatans, fake discoveries and the questionable practices of several small health-sector companies.

There are other possible motives for the attack. Fang exposed the presence of genetically-modified cereals in China. In a TV programme, he challenged a scientist’s claim to be able to predict earthquakes. And he exposed a doctor who claimed to have found a miracle cure to cancer.

In another case, on 13 August, the Propaganda Department imposed censorship on reports about Synutra, a brand of milk-powder produced by a company based in the northeastern city of Qingdao. Several media reports had blamed the powder for hormonal problems in young girls. The health ministry issued a denial on 12 August, claiming that the powder had been analysed by nine experts and that no link with the hormonal problems had been established. Thereafter the media were told they could only use the official news agency Xinhua’s dispatches on subject.

Meiri Jingji Xinwen (National Business Daily), a newspaper based in Shanghai, has also paid the price for questioning a product’s quality. A Hong Kong-based newspaper claimed in June that Bawang, a famous herbal shampoo endorsed by film star Jackie Chang in ads, contained a very high level of a carcinogen called dioxane. After Meiri Jingji Xinwen reported these allegations, four people from the Bawang company stormed into its offices on 30 July and threatened the editor and staff.

In May this year, Bao Yueyang was moved from his job as editor of the newspaper Zhongguo Jingji Shibao (China Economic Times) to another post within the Development Publishing Company as a result of his coverage of allegations about contaminated vaccines in Shanxi province. It had been a big story in the Chinese press since March until the authorities restricted reporting on Chinese websites and ordered the traditional media to just use Xinhua’s dispatches. Bao, who refused to comment on his demotion, had a reputation for encouraging his reporters to investigate sensitive issues……(Reporters With Borders)

China bars banks, other companies from using foreign security technology

The Canadian Press, Aug. 25, 2010 -

BEIJING, China — China has ordered its banks and other major companies to limit use of foreign computer security technology, setting up a possible trade clash with the United States and Europe while adding to strains over high-tech secrecy as some nations threaten to curtail BlackBerry service.

Beijing’s restrictions cite security concerns but are also consistent with its efforts to build up Chinese technology industries by shielding them from competition and pressing global rivals to hand over know-how.

The United States and the European Union have raised questions in the World Trade Organization about the rules. An American industry group is criticizing them as an attempt to shut competitors out of a promising market. Authorities are inspecting companies to enforce the restrictions and some have been told to replace foreign technology.

“These are legitimate security concerns, but the Chinese are going way too far,” said Steven Kho, a trade lawyer for law firm Akin Gump in Washington. “You cannot say from the outset, ‘All foreign products are a security risk.’”

Washington and Europe, which hope technology sales to China will help drive their economic recovery, want Beijing to scale back plans to enforce the rules on a wide range of industries including oil and gas, banking, utilities and telecommunications.

The rules, dubbed the Multi-Level Protection Scheme, or MLPS, come as Beijing tries to protect its fledgling technology companies by favouring them in procurement, promoting Chinese standards for mobile phones and prodding foreign competitors to disclose encryption technology.

The restrictions add to pressure on foreign companies that accuse Beijing of squeezing them out of key industries in violation of its free-trade pledges.

They cover products such as network firewalls and digital identity systems — a market dominated by Western companies such as Cisco Systems Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc. and Taiwan’s Trend Micro Inc.

Beijing announced plans for the curbs in 2007 and authorities and government-licensed private inspectors began visiting companies last year to enforce them.

A manager of an inspection company said 10 to 20 per cent of enterprises that its technicians looked at in higher security tiers used technology from Cisco and other foreign providers. He said they were told to switch to or add Chinese-made firewalls or other technology.

“We asked clients to make changes and warned them they would fail to pass the inspection if they don’t,” said the manager at Guangdong Southern Information Security Industrial Base Co. He would give only his surname, Chen.

Chen said entities inspected by his company included financial institutions and other state-owned companies. He declined to say which companies had to make changes or how extensive changes from foreign to Chinese technology were.

Use of foreign security technology already was declining due to a 2008 government directive that was not publicly released, according a manager at another inspection company, Guangzhou Zhongbang Information Engineering Co. He would give only his surname, Ma.

“The government had unpublished policies that the information security products for classified information systems needed to be domestically made or purchasing priority should be given to domestically made products,” Ma said.

The effect on sales so far is unclear. A Cisco spokesman in Beijing declined to comment and spokespeople for Juniper Networks and Trend Micro did not respond to questions.

“If China’s MLPS is fully implemented and applied broadly to commercial sector networks and IT infrastructure, it could have a significant impact on sales by U.S. information security technology providers,” said an American Embassy spokesman, Richard Buangan, in a written response to questions.

The EU wants Beijing to apply the curbs only to companies involved in national security, said the EU mission in Beijing in a statement.

China has tried for a decade to control encryption and security technology even as it promotes Internet commerce and other industries that rely on it. Beijing is ahead of India, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which are starting to grapple with the technology and say they may shut down BlackBerry’s corporate email…….(More details from The Canadian Press)

China’s change you can believe in?

economist.com, Aug 26th 2010 | Beijing -

CHINA is enjoying its new status as the world’s second-largest economy, but the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, is refusing to relax. During a visit to a southern boomtown he declared that economic gains could yet be lost without reforms to the political system. One official newspaper called his speech one of “extraordinary importance”, but sceptics abound.

His remarks on August 20th and 21st in the city of Shenzhen have been compared by some optimists to those made by the late Deng Xiaoping during a tour of the same city in 1992. Deng’s calls for market-oriented reforms sent central-planners scurrying and unleashed the entrepreneurial energy that has helped China to grow at giddy rates since. During his trip Mr Wen laid flowers before a statue of Deng, who turned Shenzhen into a test bed for economic change exactly 30 years ago.

Mr Wen’s remarks on political reform were striking. China, he said, had to “resolve the issue of the excessive concentration of unrestrained power” and “create conditions for the people to criticise and supervise the government”. It was necessary, he said, to build a society with “fairness and justness”. Chinese leaders have spoken before about the importance of political reform (while ushering in very little), but Mr Wen’s emphasis was unusual.

This has caused a flurry of excitement in some state-controlled newspapers. Southern Daily, in Guangdong Province where Shenzhen is located, published a commentary saying a new wave of “leftist” thinking was blocking reforms in some places. It said it was time for a “breakthrough”, and called for “a new generation of reformers to stand up”. Yangzi Daily added that social stability in China would be unsustainable without political change. Global Times quoted a Communist Party academic as saying that the “slow pace” of political reform in China was the “root cause of growing social conflict”.

Heady stuff, but Mr Wen is no Deng. Most Beijing newspapers have reported Mr Wen’s remarks without comment. One enthusiastic group of 15 or so intellectuals gathered outside Beijing to discuss their import. The arrival of two suspected security agents and an unexpected power cut at the venue hastened proceedings to a close. …… (more details from The Economist)

China: Alarming trend of violence against journalists

Reporters Without Borders, 26 August 2010 -

Chinese journalists and media are increasingly finding themselves the targets of threats and censorship by private-sector companies (and some state companies as well). Several cases with serious implications for press freedom in China have illustrated this privatisation of censorship and violence against journalists in the past few weeks. The phenomenon is not new, but it is tending to grow in an alarming manner.

In one case, two journalists had a run-in with the police for writing a story about a biotech company. In another case, a respected Beijing journalist was physically attacked a few weeks ago after several articles about doctors and health sector entrepreneurs had a big impact.

Reporters Without Borders condemns the way certain companies harass journalists. Often accused of corrupting local media, many Chinese companies are nowadays using their influence over the authorities (including the police and Propaganda Department) to avoid negative coverage. Paradoxically, this is taking place at a time when the Chinese public is taking more interest in consumer rights and the quality of goods and services.

“We urge the government to take energetic measures to protect Chinese journalists who sometimes put their lives in danger to cover these companies,” Reporters Without Borders said. “We welcome the statement that the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) issued on 30 July expressing its support for journalists. It is time the authorities investigated all these cases thoroughly.”

Reporters Without Borders has gathered information about all the main press freedom cases involving Chinese companies.

One of the latest was the interrogation of journalist Liu Hongchang on 9 August by police, over an article he wrote together with a colleague, A Liang, about the internal problems of Hanlin, a Laiyang-based company based in Laiyang, in the eastern province of Shandong, and its ambitions to become a biotech giant. The article was posted on the Qianlong.com website, which was ordered to withdraw it after the Laiyang Propaganda Bureau alerted the authorities in Beijing.

The police who interrogated Liu Hongchang questioned him above all about his sources and the bribes they suspected he and A Liang were given to write the article. A Liang was not interrogated because he was absent from Beijing at the time. The police threatened to issue a warrant for his arrest if he did not respond to the summons. Several Chinese journalists have publicly expressed their support for Liu Hongchang and A Liang and accused the police of violating press freedom……. (to be cont’d)

Lieutenant General Liu Yazhou Lambasts China’s Political System

By Zhang Haishan, Epoch Times Staff, Aug 25, 2010 -

A prominent Chinese military commander has lambasted the Chinese political system in a recent interview and predicted a political transformation toward democracy within the next ten years.

Lieutenant General Liu Yazhou is the Political Commissar of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) University for National Defense. He is also the son-in-law of former Chinese President, Li Xiannian. His public statements make him the first senior active-duty military officer to publicly criticize the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) policies without backlash from the regime.

In a recent interview with Hong Kong’s Phoenix Weekly, Liu said, “A system that does not allow its citizens to breathe freely, nor to maximally unleash their creativity, nor puts those who can best represent the people in leadership positions, is doomed.”

He further pointed out that the former Soviet Union also used to stress [social] stability above all else and regarded it as the ultimate goal.

“Stressing stability as a principle of overriding importance, and moneymaking as the only way to settle everything, will only lead to contradictions being aggravated, and everything will come against you.”

Liu also predicted that a political transformation from authoritarianism to democracy will inevitably take place within ten years.

Expressing reprehension for the “money diplomacy” and “economic powerhouse” concepts embraced by the CCP, Liu said “having more money does not mean having more soft power.”

He also criticized the money worship that defines contemporary mainstream Chinese society, arguing that it has damaged China’s international image.

Liu’s statements were published in the latest Phoenix Weekly issue, in an article entitled “On the West.” An editorial statement said that the content was compiled from the interview with Liu and published without Liu’s final review or approval…….(more details from the Epochtimes)

42 dead in Northeast China plane crash

BEIJING — A Chinese airliner crashed and burst into flames while attempting to land in northeast China, killing 42 people on board, state media reported on Wednesday.

The Henan Airlines plane broke into two pieces late Tuesday before it smashed into the ground while trying to touch down at an airport in the city of Yichun in remote Heilongjiang province, the official Xinhua news agency said.

There were 91 passengers, including five children, and five crew on board, Xinhua said, citing a source at the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC).

More than 40 bodies had been found, Xinhua said, and the rest on board had been rushed to hospital.

Some passengers were thrown out of the cabin before the turbine jet hit the ground.

The crash occurred shortly after 9:30 pm (1330 GMT) near Yichun’s Lindu airport, around 40 minutes after the plane took off from Harbin, the provincial capital.

Rescue crews at the crash site were seen putting victims’ remains in body bags, Xinhua reported, while the charred wreckage of the plane, which came to rest two kilometres (a mile) from the runway, remained cordoned off.

Anxious relatives waited on open ground near the airport, Xinhua said, but dense fog was hampering the rescue effort.

Books, rubbish and cabin debris was scattered across the muddy crash site…….(more details from AFP)

Chinese Christian Lawyer Gao Zhisheng Confirmed Tortured

By Dan Wooding, Founder of ASSIST Ministries, Aug. 24, 2010 -

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (ANS) — ChinaAid is reporting that at the annual American Bar Association conference, held in San Francisco on August 6, 2010, 17-year-old Grace (Ge Ge) smiled as she walked to the podium to accept the International Human Rights Lawyer of the Year Award on behalf of her missing father, Gao Zhisheng.

“I am so very proud of my father,” she said. “This is the first time that this award [has been] granted to a Chinese person. If my father knew that I accepted this award for him, he would be very happy.”

The President of ABA expressed warm regards toward Gao Zhisheng, praising him for his breadth and depth of work for human rights in the Chinese legal system. Ge Ge then shared her admiration for her father and his devotion to his work.

“Deep in my heart,” she said, “my father is the type of person I admire very much. He can get over any difficulties, and he is not afraid of anything. I feel that my father is an outstanding father.”

Though proud of her father’s accomplishments, Ge Ge admitted, “I have been really worrying about my dad’s situation.” Ge Ge and her family continue to dread the reality that Gao continues to be held hostage by the Chinese government and may never return home.

ChinaAid told the ASSIST News Service that it “refuses to back down in the call for freedom for Gao Zhisheng, and all other human rights defenders like him.”

Reliable sources in China recently confirmed that Gao Zhisheng was severely tortured last year in Xinjiang, following his family’s escape to the United States. After briefly resurfacing this March, Gao Zhisheng was able to talk to his family and visit his brother and father-in-law, before being kidnapped again by the authorities from Beijing. No one has seen or heard from him since April 20, 2010.

“Gao’s continued forced disappearance is a blatant disregard of the basic human rights of the Chinese people,” says Pastor Bob Fu, who visited Gao’s family in June.

“If there is no regard for even a well-respected, human rights attorney’s dignity, what stops the Chinese Government from exploiting the dignity of its citizens? We will not stop until Gao’s rights are restored, as a law-abiding citizen of China. We will not rest until Gao Zhisheng is allowed to be reunited unconditionally with his family in the U.S.”

A spokesperson for ChinaAid said, “Urge your friends and family to Sign the Petition and Donate today to help Free Gao Zhisheng! Visit http://www.freegao.com/index.html?refnum= to learn more.”

- assistnews.net

Chinese netizens meet in Beijing suburb to discuss a speech on political reform by China’s premier Wen Jiabao

Radio Free Asia, Aug. 23, 2010 -

HONG KONG— Chinese netizens met for a rare in-the-flesh political discussion forum in a northern Beijing suburb Monday, inspired by calls from premier Wen Jiabao for political reforms to stem rampant official corruption and abuse of power.

“This afternoon (Aug. 23), ordinary people from all walks of life and from the Greater China region will meet in Beijing for a discussion forum on Wen Jiabao’s remarks in Shenzhen,” wrote blogger and journalist Wen Yunchao, known online by his nickname “Beifeng.”

“Among the participants are well-known scholars including Xu Youyu, Cui Weiping, and Luo Shihong, as well as a large number of well-known names on Twitter,” he announced via the microblogging service Twitter.

The forum, chaired by Beijing Film Academy professor and social critic Cui Weiping, went ahead as planned via Twitter, although netizens reported a sudden power cut following the arrival of “a man and a woman wearing sunglasses” at the Miyun Shanshui Resort.

“A man and a woman wearing sunglasses arrived at the Miyun Reservoir discussion forum,” tweeted user “leewua” at around 5 p.m. local time. “The electricity was cut, and we had pretty much finished talking, so everyone left.”

Previous political discussion forums in Beijing have been raided by police and their participants pursued for “incitement to subversion.”

Call for reform

Wen Jiabao was quoted in a report by the official Xinhua news agency Saturday as saying that it is important to “guarantee the people’s democratic rights and legitimate rights and interests.”

“We must resolve the problem of excessive concentration of power, create conditions that allow people to criticize and supervise the government, and firmly punish corruption,” he was quoted as saying.

“We not only have to push forward reform of the economic system, but we also have to push forward reform of the political system,” the premier said, according to Xinhua.

Cui told assembled netizens that Wen’s speech was consistent with the demands of the controversial “Charter 08″ document, which called for sweeping reforms to China’s political system, and whose co-author Liu Xiaobo is currently serving a jail-term for subversion…….(more details from Radio Free Asia)

China’s Premier calls for political reform: state media

AFP, Aug. 22, 2010 -

BEIJING — China’s Premier Wen Jiabao has said reform of the political system is necessary to sustain the nation’s breakneck economic growth, state media reported.

“We not only have to push forward reform of the economic system, but we also have to push forward reform of the political system,” Wen was quoted as saying by the Xinhua state news agency on a trip to the southern boomtown of Shenzhen.

“If there is no guarantee of reform of the political system, then results obtained from the reform of the economic system may be lost and the goal of modernisation cannot be achieved,” he said, according to the report Saturday.

Wen added it was important to “guarantee the people’s democratic rights and legitimate rights and interests”.

“We must resolve the problem of excessive concentration of power, create conditions that allow people to criticise and supervise the government and firmly punish corruption,” he was quoted as saying.

Wen did not elaborate but his comments reflect wider concerns among the leadership that corruption and abuses of power are becoming the biggest threat to the ruling Communist Party.

The soft-spoken Premier is also widely seen as the populist and progressive face of the nation’s leadership.

He came to prominence when he appeared with then-party head Zhao Ziyang in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the 1989 pro-democracy protests that were brutally crushed by the military only days later.

But whereas Zhao was ousted, Wen rose to prominence to be named prime minister in 2003. (AFP)

First Batch of China’s Torture Victims’ Personal Account Video- Case 3, Wu Yueqing

First batch of 7 (seven) videos documenting the tortures suffered by Falun Gong practitioners in China has been released by WOIPFG (World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong). Most of these video recordings were done after 2007, with the latest ones done on August 2008.

Some of the victims could no longer speak, some of them died shortly after video taping was done due to severe injury.

The personal account of the victims reflects just how savage and brutal the torture has been over the past 10 years and is still going on today in China.

Case 3

Name: Wu Yueqing (吴月庆)
Gender: Male (男)
Status: deceased
Location: Shuangyashan city (双鸭山市), Heilongjiang province (黑龙江省), P.R.China (中国)

Brief (简介):

Mr. Wu Yueqing was a Falun Gong adherent from the city of Shuangyashan, Heilongjiang province.

He was abducted numerous times because of his cultivation in Falun Gong. In January 2002 he was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and was detained at the 23rd unit, 11th ward at the Mudanjiang prison in Heilongjiang province.

He was tortured during detention, resulting in muscular dystrophy, and deteriorating of multiple organs.

He was persecuted to death on December 23 2007. At that time, his sister Wu Yuexia was also imprisoned at the labor camp because she practiced Falun Gong.

Their 13 years old son was orphaned without anyone’s care after Wu’s wife died later, he was sent to the Jiamusi Orphanage. The video was recorded before Wu’s death.

Full Report of this case:

English: http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articl…
Chinese: http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/20…

Related:
- International Investigation Organization Releases First Batch of China Torture Victims’ Personal Account Video- Case 1
- First Batch of China’s Torture Victims’ Personal Account Video- Case 2, Wang Xinchun

Containing China in new cold war

By Paul Lin (林保華), The Taipei Times, Taiwan, Sunday, Aug 22, 2010 -

On Monday, the US and South Korea held their second joint military exercise in a month. The scale of the drill outstripped that of the first drill, held late last month, by three times. Despite both Chinese and North Korean threats, the US and South Korean insistence on the drills was a response to North Korea’s alleged sinking of the South Korean Cheonan warship. It was also a reaction to China’s recent claim that the Yellow Sea and the South China Sea are part of its core interests.

North Korea denies responsibility for the sinking, and China pretends to remain neutral. However, the North launched its invasion of the South 60 years ago with Chinese and Soviet backing, but China covered up its support with lies and has never admitted or apologized for its backing. How, then, can we possibly believe China’s denial and profession of neutrality today?

The Korean War should not be forgotten because it was the first war in which the communist camp tried to expand their influence by force after World War II, and the free world successfully beat them back. It also marked the beginning of the Cold War era.

To block the communist expansion, NATO developed an integrated military structure in Europe and the East Asian region developed the “crescent-shaped” island chain defense line consisting of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines. However, the two were unable to join up and form a single defense line against communism because China made every effort to co-opt India, Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). In 1955, China called the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, to form a third international force. Meanwhile, China and the Soviet Union were to various degrees inciting Middle Eastern countries against Western democracies.

After the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died in 1953, China and the Soviet Union started to fight for dominance of the international communist movement, and their discord could not be resolved during the 1960s. Later, the Soviet Union tried to use the chaos of the Cultural Revolution to tame the arrogant former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東).

This led to the Sino-US cooperation in the 1970s. Finally, the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s, partially because its national strength was consumed by the arms race against the US.

The Chinese Communist Party is extremely tricky. After the Cultural Revolution ended, it pretended to be an ally of the West.

In the 1980s, former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) ordered the party to keep a low profile, and in the 1990s, then-Chinese leader Jiang Zemin’s (江澤民) US policy of “increasing trust, reducing trouble, promoting cooperation and demoting confrontation” duped Western democracies into offering Beijing economic assistance.

In the 21st century, especially after financial crisis struck in 2008, the true face of the “Chinese empire,” described by China expert John Tkacik, then started to gradually show.

For example, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) was overbearing and arrogant toward US President Barack Obama at an international conference, saying that the Chinese army would lay down the rules for the US. Eventually, the US Department of State and the Pentagon gradually synchronized their views on the issue.

China’s toughness did not scare the US, but it did frightened its neighbors, and South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and India clearly hoped the US would stay in Asia. Even communist Vietnam hopes so.

As a result of China’s domestic crackdown on Muslims, Middle Eastern countries have also distanced themselves from China. Mongolia, which shares its southern border with China, has become a democracy. Former Soviet countries are also transforming into democracies and they are increasingly cautious about China. Russia no longer sells advanced weapons to China and the operations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization have ground to a halt.

China is no longer contained by a crescent-shaped defense line, but it is now completely surrounded. The only exceptions are Myanmar and Iran, which adopt a firm anti-US stance. However, the domestic situation in both those countries is relatively unstable. Today, a new cold war between China and the US has replaced the old one between the US and the Soviet Union.

China is not unaware of the current international situation and that is why Chinese President Hu Jintao’s (胡錦濤) adviser Zheng Bijian (鄭必堅) has reshaped China’s “peaceful rise” into “peaceful development.”

However, Jiang and Hu, who both tried to curry favor with the Chinese military to bolster their power, have spoiled it with luxury and pleasure. In terms of economic development, totalitarian rule is causing social tensions to increase steadily. The question is, will the multinational corporations will stand by the totalitarian rulers for their own economic benefits once China descends into turmoil?

Although Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) was notorious for cooperating with the Russians and suppressing provincial autonomy, he said in a famous remark that the global trend toward freedom and democracy was going forward with great strength. Those who follow the trend will survive; those who do not will perish.

Which side should President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) take? From a long-term perspective, Taiwan’s path is twisted, but our future remains bright.

Paul Lin is a political ­commentator based in Taipei.

- The Taipei Times

Businesses forced to hand over technology and accept Chinese partners

By He Qinglian, Chinese economist, Via The Epochtimes, Aug. 21, 2010 -

Foreign businessmen in today’s China live in fear. Other businesses smugly observed and waited out the face-off between Google and the Chinese regime, assuming Google had overestimated its clout.

If Western businessmen were smirking at Google’s predicament, the publication of the Chinese regime’s “Several Opinions of the State Council on Further Doing a Good Job in the Utilization of Foreign Investment” wiped that smirk off their collective faces. The gist of the article: “The age of unconditional priority given to foreign investments in China” is now over.

Differing Opinions

Some foreign investors still dream of yesteryear’s privileges, hoping Chinese officials would listen and reconsider. This time they aired their dissatisfaction publicly instead of resorting to private lobbying.

The American Chamber of Commerce (China) and the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China have published reports. These reports show the deep concern from the American and European business community over China’s protectionist policies.

On July 7, The World Bank Group published its 2010 report “Investing Across Borders,” listing China as one of the countries with the greatest limits on foreign investment. In mid-July, a number of international companies publicly criticized China’s commercial climate in a meeting with Premier Wen Jiabao. The companies included Siemens and BASF.

The foreign companies’ chief dissatisfactions falls in three areas.

First, their intellectual property is not protected. New rules force foreign companies to hand over trade secrets and new technologies to their Chinese partners in exchange for a market share.

Second, foreign investment companies, unlike their Chinese counterparts, are treated unequally in state bids.

Third, China has many rules applying to mergers and acquisitions. Foreign companies are required to partner with Chinese businesses, and the split must be 50-50.

Chinese officials, led by Premier Wen Jiabao, have disputed these barriers. Liu Yajun, director of the Department of Foreign Investment Administration of the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, rejected the World Bank’s findings at a press conference.

Minister of Commerce Chen Deming told the U.K.-based Financial Times that China repeatedly lowered the entry barrier for foreign companies since it joined the WTO, and many international companies severely affected by the global financial crisis have found new revenue sources in China…...(more details from The Epochtimes)

Waiting for WikiLeaks: China’s Seven Secrets

Perry Link, The New York Review of Books -

While people in the US and elsewhere have been reacting to the release by WikiLeaks of classified US  documents on the Afghan War, Chinese bloggers have been discussing the event in parallel with another in their own country. On July 21 in Beijing, four days before WikiLeaks published its documents, Chinese President Hu Jintao convened a high-level meeting to discuss ways to prevent leaks from the archives of the Communist Party of China.

Party archives in China exist at local, provincial, and central levels and have always been secret and extremely closely guarded. At local levels, some, in recent years, have been digitized, but at the highest levels the original paper is guarded physically, and rules of access are complex and extremely rigid.

The importance of the July 21 meeting, which was officially called an “All-China Work Meeting on Party History,” is plain from its list of attendees, which included not only President Hu but his heir-apparent Xi Jinping, chief of propaganda Li Changchun, and dozens of other high officials. In his widely-publicized keynote, Xi Jinping said:

We must resolutely oppose any mistaken tendency to distort or defame the Party’s history [and] must use only authorized Party history to educate Party members, officials, and the masses, especially the young.

Very little else about the meeting was shared with the Chinese public. But three days later, the main content of this anti-leak meeting was leaked, apparently by a reporter from the Communist Party’s official Xinhua news agency. The leaked account went to the overseas boxun (“broad information”) network, from where it spread around the world. The Chinese government has not (as it has in similar cases in the past) claimed the boxun report to be inaccurate or a “fabrication.”

The report says that two worries dominated the secret meeting: one was the matter of how archives can be kept secure. What would happen, the officials wondered, if they were raided during “social disturbances” such as the recent riots in Guangzhou protesting the central government’s effort to end Cantonese-language broadcasts in Cantonese-speaking areas. (The number of such “disturbances” has grown steadily in recent years, to more than 230,000 in 2009.) Should emergency incineration equipment be supplied at all archive sites, just in case? What if archive staff realize that they can sell things for profit? Should the staff be paid more, to buy their loyalty?

The second major worry was the growing problem of retired party officials writing unauthorized memoirs. Recent examples of this genre include Zhao Ziyang’s 2009 memoir and the “June Fourth Diary” of Li Peng, the Chinese premier at the time of the Tiananmen Square protests. (Li’s diary was refused publication in China, leaked to Hong Kong, published there, and then leaked back to the mainland on the Web. Bloggers on the whole have excoriated Li, who doesn’t appear to have been involved in the Web publication, because his motive from the beginning was probably not to try to win public opinion but to show for history that Deng, not he, ordered the Tiananmen Square killings.) General Yang Baibing, perhaps still smarting from his purge in 1992, reportedly has penned memoirs as well, as has Tian Jiyun, a former politburo member and long-time critic of his hard-liner colleagues. Altogether, an unnamed “54 high-level officials” have requested to see archives for the purpose of writing memoirs, and many of these people are believed to be preparing two versions—one to submit for official approval and the other to keep separately.

Against this background, the WikiLeaks story, which broke the day after the boxun leak, took on a special significance. In emails, tweets, and web postings, Chinese bloggers, both inside China and overseas, began listing key episodes in recent Chinese history that have remained shrouded in mystery and for which they would love to see archives opened:

1. The famine during the Great Leap Forward in 1959-62. Somewhere between 20 and 50 million people died because of bad policy, not “bad weather.” What exactly happened? What policies caused the famine and what policies suppressed information on it? How much grain was in state granaries while people starved? Is it true that Mao sold grain to the Soviet Union during those years in order to buy nuclear weapons?

2. The death of Mao’s military commander General Lin Biao in 1971. The official version of events, which to this day exists only in bare outline, strains credulity: Mao’s “closet comrade in arms” suddenly plotted a coup, failed in it, tried to flee to the Soviet Union, and was shot down in his plane. What really happened? Why? Why shouldn’t we know more?

3. Mao’s will and personal lockbox. Mao’s wife Jiang Qing said at her trial (as part of the “Gang of Four”) that Mao had a written will that mentioned her. Did he? What did it say? Mao also apparently kept his own lockbox of “most core secrets” that, in his later years, not even Jiang Qing could see. Mao’s mistress Zhang Yufeng kept the key until September 21, 1976, twelve days after Mao’s death, when Hua Guofeng, Mao’s anointed successor, is said to have taken it from her. What’s in the box?

4. The Beijing Massacre of 1989. The basic story is fairly well known from The Tiananmen Papers, Zhao Ziyang’s memoirs, and Li Peng’s diary. But the records of some key meetings still are classified, and responsibility for the massacre remains an extremely sensitive question in Chinese politics.

5. The brutal suppression of the Falun Gong after 1999. Falun Gong claims there are concentration camps for their members and that internal organs of executed believers are surgically removed and sold. True? Untrue? What do the records say?

6. Beijing’s huge but secret “stability maintenance” budget. The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences reports that Chinese government spending on domestic “stability maintenance”—the monitoring, intimidation, roughing-up, and illegal detention of petitioners, aggrieved workers, religious believers, professors, bloggers, twitterers, and other sources of “trouble”—now exceeds what the government spends in any category except the military. What are the details of this budget?

7. Bank accounts of Communist Party officials. Corruption and graft are widely viewed to be problems at every level of Chinese government, but exactly how much money have officials squirreled away? How much have they sent abroad?

Broadly speaking there are two kinds of reasons why Chinese officials have been so assiduous in guarding archives. One is that the prestige of the regime as a whole depends upon the image of the Party as heroic, patriotic, and the definition of modern China. The young must be taught to love the Party. Stories about internecine strife? About causing a huge famine? The people might not love us anymore, and might rebel.

The other kind of reason is much more personal. Each official has to watch out for his or her own self and family. A political “mistake” can ruin your career, even land you in prison, and archives are where your enemies can go to look for grounds to charge you with “mistakes”. Mao allowed his people to open archives to look for material on Liu Shaoqi and other enemies during the Cultural Revolution; a few years later archives were opened again as people looked for material on the Maoist “Gang of Four.”

The anonymous reporter who leaked the contents of the July 21 meeting commented on a looming atmosphere of demise at the meeting. The underlying mood, he suggested, was, We had better get control of these archives, and perhaps destroy them, before a day of reckoning is upon us.

- The New York Review of Books

Speech: Ending Abuse of Organ Transplantation in China

Revised remarks prepared for delivery to The Transplantation Society Congress, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Aug. 17, 2010, By David Matas -

I am amazed it has taken this long.  Finally people are starting to take the abuse of organ transplant surgery in China seriously. There have been isolated pockets of concern before.  But an abuse which dates from the 1980′s is only now, twenty five years too late, generating widespread notice.

China, from the very moment it began transplant surgery, killed non-consenting donors for their organs.  The law even allowed for it.

The Regulations on the Use of Dead Bodies or Organs From Condemned Criminals, dated October 9, 1984, contemplated involuntary organ sourcing from prisoners sentenced to death and then executed.  The law set out three events which could allow for harvesting of organs.

One event was consent of the source, the prisoner.  A second event was consent of the family.  A third event was the refusal or failure of the family to collect the body of the executed prisoner.

The law, then, allowed organ harvesting with consent, but did not prohibit organ harvesting without consent.  That meant that, even where there was an express refusal of consent, both by the prisoner before death and the family after death, but the family refused or even just neglected to collect the body, then organs could, according to the law, still be harvested.

In 1984, when this law was enacted, China was still in the early stages of its shift from socialism to capitalism.  As the shift progressed, the health system became a major part of the shift. From 1980, the Government began withdrawing funds from the health sector, expecting the health system to make up the difference through charges to consumers of health services.

The sale of organs for transplants became the primary source of funds.  There is global demand for organs because of shortages everywhere.  The sale of organs became for hospitals a way to keep their doors open, and a means by which other health services could be provided to the community. This dire need for funds led to a rationalization that selling the organs of prisoners who would be executed anyway was acceptable and to a desire not to question too closely whether the donors wheeled in by the authorities really were prisoners sentenced to death.

Organ price lists were posted on Chinese websites. Hospitals boasted openly on their websites about the money being made from the sale of organs.

China began the organ trade by selling the organs of prisoners sentenced to death.  But the global demand for organs and the health system need for money eventually outgrew the available death row supply.  The Falun Gong community became the next source.

Falun Gong is a simple set of exercises with a spiritual foundation which started in China in 1992.  The belief behind the exercises is a blending and updating of the Chinese Buddhist and Tao traditions.

The Chinese Communist Party/state at first encouraged the exercises because they are healthful.  With official encouragement, the practice of the exercises spread rapidly to the point where there were more practitioners than members of the Communist Party.

The Party then, in June 1999, out of jealousy and fear of losing ideological supremacy, banned the exercises.  When practitioners persisted and protested, the Party/state in November 1999 got vicious — vilifying the practice through propaganda, arresting practitioners, torturing them to elicit recantations, and disappearing them if they did not recant.

Practitioners of Falun Gong quickly became the number one victims of repression in China — two thirds of the torture victims, according to the United Nations rapporteur in torture; one half of those in the slave labour camps, according to the United States Department of State Human Rights reports.  Many of those Falun Gong practitioners who were arrested and refused to recant also refused to identify themselves, in order to protect their friends, family and workplaces back home who otherwise would have been victimized for not having denounced them.  The depersonalization of the Falun Gong, their huge numbers in detention and their vulnerability as an unidentified population made it easy for them to become the next source of organs for sale.

According to research David Kilgour and I did, first in a report released in July 2006 and updated in January 2007, and then in a book titled Bloody Harvest released in November 2009, we concluded that Falun Gong were killed in the tens of thousands so that their organs could be sold to foreigners, generating a billion dollar business for China.  We launched a global campaign to attempt to end the abuse we identified, speaking in over forty countries and eighty cities about our research.

The Chinese government reacted to our work, but not always in ways which countered our concerns.  The Government took down Chinese internet information we referenced.  We archived it all so that you can see it on our website.  However, because of official blocking, internet users can no longer see it in China.

The Government through its embassies, consulates and front organizations, made every effort, wherever we went, to prevent or cancel our speaking engagements, and to bar or discourage people from meeting with us.  The Party/state churned out hostile propaganda, mostly by attacking Falun Gong or us personally, without dealing with the substance of our research.

At this Congress, the reaction of a delegate from China to my presentation, expressed during the question period, was typical of the Communist Party.  He stated that the organizers should not have allowed me to speak and attacked my presentation at a personal level without offering a hint of rebuttal.

The Chinese speaker did, to a certain extent, get his way.  Congress rules were enforced selectively to impede attendance at the event where I spoke.

At the door of the room to the Congress session where I presented, unlike any other event I and others observed at the Congress, there was an astounding number of eight security people turning away those who were registered at the Congress but who did not have blue colour coded delegate badges.  People who had stayed in the corridor outside the room during the session informed me that large numbers were denied entry.  At other Congress events, including lunch, registered attendees without blue color coded badges entered unimpeded, even though in theory the colour coding on their badges did not entitle them to entry. ….. (more details from The Epoch Times)

David Matas is an international human rights lawyer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

First Batch of China’s Torture Victims’ Personal Account Video- Case 2, Wang Xinchun

victim-wangxinchun

First batch of 7 (seven) videos documenting the tortures suffered by Falun Gong practitioners in China has been released by WOIPFG (World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong). Most of these video recordings were done after 2007, with the latest ones done on August 2008.

Some of the victims could no longer speak, some of them died shortly after video taping was done due to severe injury.

The personal account of the victims reflects just how savage and brutal the torture has been over the past 10 years and is still going on today in China.

Case 2

Name: Wang Xinchun (王新春)
Gender: Male (男)
Status: released from police custody
Location: Yichun city(伊春市), Heilongjiang province (黑龙江), P.R.China (中国)

Brief (简介):

Mr. Wang Xinchun was a Falun Gong practitioner from Yichun city, Heilongjiang province. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. After he started cultivating Falun Gong in 1998 his health was completely recovered.

He was sent to labor camp after he went to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong. In early 2002, while Wang Xinchun was distributing Falun Gong truth clarification flyers, the police spotted him and chased after him. He ran into a remote mountain area in minus 30 degrees Celsius weather and his two feet suffered frostbite. The police later captured him.

Wang Wei, the police station chief and others forced Mr. Wang to put his injured feet into hot water (which is the wrong thing to do and will aggravate frostbite and cause severe injury). As a result he lost both feet.

After Wang Xinchun became handicapped, the police continued persecution by harassing and beating him, as well as cutting off his financial support.

Detail reports of this case:

English: http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2005/9/21/65138.html
Chinese(中文) :http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2005/9/4/109741.html

Related:
- International Investigation Organization Releases First Batch of China Torture Victims’ Personal Account Video- Case 1

Explosion attack of police kills 7, in Xijiang, Northwest China

By Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post Foreign Service, Thursday, August 19, 2010 -

BEIJING — An attacker riding a three-wheeled vehicle attacked a contingent of security volunteers Thursday in Aksu city, in China’s restive western region of Xinjiang, killing seven people and wounding 14 others in the first such incident since bloody ethnic rioting shook the area a year ago.

A statement posted late Thursday on the Web site of the autonomous Xinjiang regional government said the volunteers were on patrol and standing in a line when the attacker struck. The statement said five security force members died at the scene, and two others died later in a local hospital.

The attack occurred in Yoganqi township, on the outskirts of Aksu city, on the highway linking Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital, to Kashgar in the west, the statement said. ……(more details from The Washington Post)

‘Mao’s Last Dancer’ tiptoes through China’s forgotten history

By Maria Puente, USA TODAY, Aug. 19, 2010 -

Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to remind Americans how good they have it. Australian-born filmmaker Bruce Beresford and a Chinese-born former ballet dancer named Li Cunxin are happy to oblige.

On Friday, Beresford’s latest film, Mao’s Last Dancer, based on Cunxin’s best-selling 2003 autobiography, arrives in U.S. theaters, following a successful opening last year in Australia and a fistful of nominations and awards. Besides spectacular dancing and music, the film packs an emotional wallop about the power of art and love to transcend borders and America’s continuing allure to freedom-seekers.

“It may be the only pro-America film done in 25 years,” says Beresford (Breaker Morant, Driving Miss Daisy), exaggerating just a little. “I was aware when I was making the film that a lot of people, at least in the Australian press, think life in China under Mao was better than life in America under Bush (either one).

“I’d like to tell them they’re wrong,” he adds. “This film shows someone’s amazing dedication to his art and the value of the freedom to practice it, which is what he had in America.”

But with U.S. movie audiences dazed by Inception, breathless from Salt, or chuckling over Dinner for Schmucks, can a small biopic about a forgotten era and a little-known dancer get any traction? After all, it’s likely most Americans know more about Dancing With the Starsthan they do about classical ballet.

Besides, in a youth-skewed moviegoing audience, how many remember the era of defectors, 30 to 40 years ago, when scores of artists from behind the Iron Curtain (the what?) escaped to the West to pursue their art? Nowadays, with the Soviet Union in the dustbin of history and communist China a rising capitalist world power, most artists come and go as they please, and almost no one defects anymore except Cuban baseball players and Iranian nuclear scientists.

A difficult choice

“I was the first and the last, the first person from the cultural field ever allowed out of China to come to America,” says Cunxin, now 49. “After that, China began to open up.”

But not in 1981, when Cunxin, then a 20-year-old Chinese exchange student at the Houston Ballet, stood up to the madness of China’s Cultural Revolution and refused to return to China as ordered. Legally, he did not defect: He had fallen for and married an American dancer and sought to remain under immigration law.

But like the famous and acclaimed Soviet dancer-defectors before him —Mikhail Baryshnikov (in 1974) and Rudolf Nureyev (in 1961) — Cunxin chose his heart and his art, while fearing for the safety of his family still living in China.

“I thought I’d never see them again. I had lots of nightmares,” says Cunxin, who is retired from dancing and lives in Australia, where he is a stockbroker and motivational speaker. “That guilt, that pain, the emotional uncertainty really haunted me.”

At the time, Chinese officials did not react well. As international headlines blared, Cunxin was held in a Chinese consulate in Houston for 21 hours while Chinese and American officials dickered. Meanwhile, Charles Foster (Kyle MacLachlan), Cunxin’s politically connected lawyer, gets on the phone to then-vice president George H.W. Bush, a patron of the Houston Ballet.

Mao’s Last Dancer tells what happened to Cunxin (played by Chi Cao, a young Chinese-British dancer and the son of two of Cunxin’s former teachers), and also how he got to that point, itself an “incredible journey,” MacLachlan says.

Compelling true story

It’s the story of how Madame Mao’s party minions plucked him at age 11 from his family in rural China and sent him to the Beijing Dance Academy, whether he liked it or not. How he hated the training at first, and how an inspiring teacher helped him, despite the risks. How he became passionate about dance after watching a smuggled video of Baryshnikov given to him by his teacher. And how at the age of 18, he was discovered during a visit to China by the artistic director of the Houston Ballet, Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood).

“It’s a story of tremendous risk and fortitude … and a reminder that the freedom we enjoy is precious and fragile,” says Greenwood, who took dance lessons to play the British-born ballet master. “It’s a very human story, incredibly touching. When it premiered in Houston, there was a lot of sniffling.”……(USA Today)

Canada Calls on Chinese Embassy to Give Back Journalist’s Passport

By Matthew Little & Jason Loftus, Epoch Times Staff, Aug. 18, 2010 -

TORONTO— The office of Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon has called on the Chinese embassy in Ottawa to return a Canadian journalist’s passport, which he said was withheld when he refused to provide details about his personal life in Canada.

Zhang Zhaopei applied for a visa to visit China from the Chinese consulate in Toronto on Friday, submitting his Canadian passport as part of the process. But when he went to pick up his visa, he was given a blank sheet of paper and told to list extensive personal information about his work, family, and personal history.

Mr. Zhang refused, saying he would abandon his visa application. But Zhang says he was told he still wouldn’t get his Canadian passport back if he didn’t provide the requested details.

“I never thought they can do this thing,” said Zhang, a reporter for New Tang Dynasty Television and a Falun Gong practitioner.

On Wednesday, a spokesperson for Minister Cannon said Canada had asked for the passport to be returned.

“We are aware that the individual in question had requested a visa on Friday to travel to China and that his passport has not been returned,” spokesperson Melissa Lantsman told The Epoch Times.

“A Canadian passport is the property of the government of Canada. We have made a formal request to the Chinese embassy that the passport be returned into our possession.”

Ms. Lantsman said her office had read Mr. Zhang’s story earlier this week in The Epoch Times and that the coverage had brought “much needed attention” to his case.

Zhang was attempting to return to China to visit his family who he has been unable to see in nine years.

Zhang had tried to return to China from Singapore in 2002 and 2004, only to be sent packing once he landed in Beijing and Shanghai, respectively. At that time, he was told it was because he practiced Falun Gong, a traditional Chinese meditation practice that became the target of persecution in China in 1999 and has since put up a spirited defence of human rights.

Mr. Zhang immigrated to Canada in 2005 and is now a citizen. He said he wasn’t surprised he was denied a visa this time around, though having his passport withheld did come as a shock.

New Tang Dynasty Television has encountered interference from the Chinese authorities in the past. The regime previously pressured a European satellite carrier to drop the station’s signal into China and has also attempted to exclude NTDTV from a press event inside Canada’s Parliament Hill earlier this year.

NTDTV and The Epoch Times made headlines in the lead-up to the G-20 this June when a press conference with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Chinese leader Hu Jintao failed to take place due to the regime’s insistence that both media outlets be prohibited from attending, a request the Parliamentary Press Gallery refused to accommodate.

Zhang said the information the consulate requested would have made it easier for the consulate to interfere and monitor his daily activities—something he didn’t want to facilitate.

“I think they just want to control everything of myself, including my work and everything … They want to control everything,” he said.

Zhang told the consulate worker handling his case that if they didn’t return his passport, he would contact the police. A supervisor there told him to go ahead, he said.

Zhang did contact police, but both the Toronto Police and RCMP told The Epoch Times they were at a loss for how to handle the situation.

“This is an unusual practice; this is not something that we have heard of,” said RCMP Const. Dave Banham, a media relations officer.

Banham surmised that the situation was due to a misunderstanding but could not offer any specific reason the police would not get involved, instead referring the matter to Passport Canada.

Passport Canada said Monday the document should be returned to the Canadian government.

“The Government of Canada remains the owner of all passports and if it has been seized it should be handed over to Passport Canada,” said Veronique Robitaille, spokesperson for Passport Canada.

Joel Chipkar, a spokersperson for the Falun Dafa Association of Canada, said the case was an example of the Chinese regime’s interference in Canada.

“The Chinese regime needs to understand that it is not the government of Chinese Canadians, and the Canadian government should make this point clear once and for all.”

Ms. Lantsman said the Canadian government has now provided Mr. Zhang a limited validity passport, which would allow him to travel “until the matter is resolved.”

The Chinese consulate did not answer repeated calls for comment.

- The Epochtimes

International Investigation Organization Releases First Batch of China Torture Victims’ Personal Account Video- Case 1

World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) -

WOIPFG recently released partial video recordings documenting the tortures suffered by Falun Gong practitioners in China. Some of the videos give personal account of the torture suffered by individual Falun Gong practitioners, some of them could no longer speak. Some of them died shortly after video taping was done due to severe injury. Most of these video recordings were done after 2007, with the latest ones done on August 2008.. Many of the incidents of persecution against Falun Gong practitioners in these videos have been reported on the Clearwisdom.net. Upon release of this report we will provide all related web links for reference.

The personal account of the victims reflects just how savage and brutal the torture has been over the past 10 years and is still going on today. By releasing this evidence, WOIPFG hopes to gather world wide attention and to jointly work to stop this crime against humanity. WOIPFG will continue collecting evidence as before, tracking down those who initiate, instigate, promote and carry out this persecution, and to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law.

This batch of videos covers the accounts of seven Falun Gong practitioners.

Case 1

Name: Yu Fengchun
Gender: Female
Status: deceased
Location: Shuangyashan city, Heilongjiang province, P.R.China

Details:

Yu Fengchun was a Falun Gong practitioner living in Shuangyashan city, Heilongjiang province. Previously she had fluids in her abdomen. After cultivating in Falun Gong, she benefited both mentally and physically, and her health fully recovered. She had been abducted and detained 5 times since July 1999. On August 31, 2007, Police Chief and four of his men from Shuangyashan Public Security Bureau broke into her home, ransacked the hose, and seized all personal belongings. They threatened and intimidated her. Prolonged mental and physical persecution caused her condition to deteriorate, and she was persecuted to death on December 27, 2007. Video recording was her personal account before her death.

Full story of this case:

English: http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2008/1/4/92916.html
Chinese(中文): http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2008/1/2/169453.html

…….(more details from The World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong)