Gao Zhisheng Interviewee, Middle-aged Chinese Woman, Dies Due to Torture, Photo Shows Emaciated Body

Falun Dafa Information Center, Oct 31, 2010 -

Ms. Sun Shuxiang, emaciated from prolonged torture, photographed tens days after her release from a forced labor camp.

NEW YORK— A 53-year-old woman, whose testimony of excruciating and professionally-administered torture attorney Gao Zhisheng relayed in one of his open letters to China’s leaders, died in mid-October as a result of abuse in custody.

According to sources inside China, Ms. Sun Shuxiang (孙淑香), a Falun Gong practitioner from Changchun, died on October 10, four months after her release from a labor camp, where she was shocked with electric batons, injected with unidentified drugs, and forced to perform hard labor. A photo taken immediately upon her return home and smuggled out of China shows her emaciated body.

Chinese Anti-Japan Student Protests Get Anti-Regime Flavor

The Epochtimes, Oct 30, 2010 -

More Chinese students held “anti-Japanese” protests in several cities—all far away from Beijing—last weekend, after tens of thousands had taken to the streets on the previous weekend. And while these protest marches were not as large, the focus at some of them has begun to shift from the disputed Diaoyu Islands toward China’s domestic problems.

After the large-scale protests during the middle of October, Hong Kong’s Apple Daily said that these were not spontaneous outpourings of common sentiments, but instead were organized by government-supported student organizations. Some predicted that this politically calculated move could get out of control and turn against the regime. In some areas this is exactly what has happened, and the regime is now doing everything it can, short of using violence, to prevent further protests.

Elementary School Teacher Tortured to Death Within One Month of Detention in Chinese Police Custody

the Falun Dafa Information Center, Oct 29, 2010 -

New York—An elementary school teacher was killed in detention in early October in Shandong province, approximately one month after she was abducted into custody on September 2 for practicing Falun Gong. Over the past eleven years, she and other family members, including her teenage daughter, have been repeatedly detained, tortured, and harassed.

Ms. Hu Lianhua (胡连华) worked as an elementary school teacher in Hebei Province. On August 28th, 2008, Ms. Hu was discovered handing out information about the persecution, and was sent to a detention facility where she was reportedly tortured. Authorities ransacked her home, confiscated electronics, Falun Gong books, and took her son and daughter into detention. Ms. Hu was released only after the torture had rendered her weak and in ill-health.

Two Chinese Lawyers blocked US visit for meetings with congressmen, judges and scholars

China Aid, Oct 30, 2010 -

BEIJING — Two prominent Chinese rights lawyers said security officials blocked them Saturday morning from flying to the United States for meetings with congressmen, judges and scholars.

Pressure on Chinese activists has increased in the weeks since imprisoned author Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize. Liu’s wife has been under house arrest since he won the award, and several other activists and lawyers have reported being threatened, harassed or not being allowed to leave their homes.

Also, more than 200 Chinese Christians have said they were stopped from leaving China to attend a religious conference in South Africa.

A fearful view of China

By John Pomfret, Via The Washington Post, October 29, 2010 -

IN DETROIT It’s 2030 in Beijing. A professor addresses a class of students. “Why do great nations fail?” he asks. “The Ancient Greeks, the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the United States of America.”

“They all make the same mistakes, turning their back on the principles that made them great,” he says, speaking in a high-tech lecture hall festooned with portraits of Mao Zedong.

“America tried to spend and tax itself out of a great recession. . . . Of course, we owned most of their debt,” he says with a chuckle, then turns more serious. “So now they work for us.”

The class erupts in self-satisfied snickers.

Rural communities pay price of China’s boom

by Peter Day, BBC News, Hubei province, China, Friday, 29 October 2010 -

China’s economic progress is being powered by huge projects to supply the booming cities with water and power – but that comes at a price for rural communities displaced by the new infrastructure.

I was sitting under a sweet tomato tree in a tiny hamlet in the province of Hubei, in the middle of China, 800km (500 miles) due west of Shanghai.

I was eating the squishy bright orange sweet tomato flesh, on a comfortable low-back leaning chair, dragged out for my benefit by the welcoming farmer’s wife. Let us call her Mrs Peng .

China continues crackdown on activists

By Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post Foreign Service, Friday, October 29, 2010 -

BEIJING – Three weeks after jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was named the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the government in Beijing has continued its crackdown on human rights activists and lawyers in defiance of international criticism.

The ongoing duress – which includes confining some to their homes, following and harassing others and alleged secret detentions – has prompted calls for President Obama and other leaders to raise the issue of Liu’s release and human rights in general with Chinese President Hu Jintao during an upcoming summit in Seoul.

Outcry as China billionaire gets housing subsidy

AFP, Oct 29, 2010 -

BEIJING — Internet mogul Ma Huateng is number nine on Forbes magazine’s list of the richest people in China, with a fortune of 4.4 billion dollars. But he gets 450 dollars a month in official housing subsidies.

Ma, 39, is the chairman of Hong Kong-listed Chinese web portal Tencent and has been deemed a “local leading talent” by the government in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen on the border with Hong Kong, where the company is based.

Chinese Teachers decry Textbooks for Youngsters as poor quality, bland, and false

The Epochtimes, Oct 27, 2010 -

A group of Chinese elementary school teachers has recently decried the textbooks used for teaching children in China as poor quality, bland, and false.

In a recent book they published on the subject titled Save Our Children: A Critique of Elementary School Language Textbooks, they argue that “our children are still being fed poison” in the Chinese mainland education system.

The authors are Chinese elementary school language teachers and founders of the “Frontline Educational Research Group.”

China’s Premier Wen Jiabao May Be The Attack Target of Communist Editorial in People’s Daily

The bloomberg, Oct 27, 2010 -

China’s Communist Party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, disputed criticism that political reform is lagging behind economic growth, in what analysts said may be an attack on calls for greater openness by Premier Wen Jiabao.

“The idea China’s political reform is seriously lagging its remarkable economic development and achievements is contrary” to “objective facts,” the Beijing-based paper said in a front-page editorial, excerpts of which were read on yesterday’s evening news on state television. Political change can’t have “pompous and empty slogans,” the article said.

People’s Daily editorials have been used for decades — including during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and 1989 Tiananmen Square protests — as a platform for party factions to air views and attack rivals. Today’s piece contrasts with remarks made by Wen, who said in a speech in Shenzhen in August that economic achievements were in danger of being lost without greater political reform.

Letter: Please Return My Father

By GRACE GENG, 17-year-old daughter of Chinese human-rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, via Wall Street Journal, Oct 27, 2010 -

Six months ago last week, the Chinese government kidnapped my father, Gao Zhisheng. He was abducted for exercising his right to freedoms of speech and association, rights enshrined in the Chinese constitution. My father’s exercise of these most fundamental of freedoms cost our family our livelihood, our country, and now, I fear, my father’s life. As President Barack Obama heads to the Group of 20 meeting in Seoul next month and meets with Chinese President Hu Jintao, I beg him to raise my father’s case.

My father is a lawyer, an increasingly dangerous profession in China. As all lawyers should, he defended his clients vigorously. He exposed the torment faced by oppressed religious minorities in China. He demanded rights guaranteed by law for disabled children, coal miners and other vulnerable groups. But in return, the government shut down my father’s law firm. They took away his access to the courts, effectively taking away his livelihood. But even that wasn’t enough.

Again, Where Is Gao Zhisheng?

Wall Street Journal, Oct 27, 2010 -

Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize has brought much-need attention to the struggle of others working for liberty in China. Gao Zhisheng, a human-rights lawyer who has been missing since April, is another example of how Beijing silences troublemakers. Mr. Gao hasn’t had the privilege of courts and jails but has simply disappeared, without any official word on the circumstances of what his family and most observers believe to be his detention by the government.

Last week Mr. Gao’s older brother was turned away when he went to a Beijing police station to ask about his whereabouts. Officers refused to file a missing persons report or take a written statement from the brother. “They dismissed me entirely; there was nothing I could do,” he told us by phone.

Reporters Without Borders calls on China to produce evidence that lawyer Gao Zhisheng is alive

Reporters Without Borders, Oct 26, 2010 -

Reporters Without Borders is deeply concerned by the lack of transparency in the case of human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, one of the first “barefoot lawyers,” who has been missing again since April. The press freedom organization calls on the Chinese authorities to quickly produce evidence that he is still alive. It also urges the international community to press the authorities to shed light on the matter without delay.

His brother, Gao Zhiyi, went to Beijing last week to report his disappearance again to the police and request information.

“I went to see the Beijing authorities in the Chaoyang district last week with two friends of my brother’s, Teng Biao and Li Heping [both well-known human rights lawyers],” he said. “The police told us they knew nothing about my brother’s situation. The authorities then said they were not involved in the matter and did not know where he was. I have no idea where my brother could be.”

Chinese iPhone workers poisoned by chemical: report

AFP, Oct 26, 2010 -

SYDNEY — Workers who say they were assembling Apple computers and iPhones in southern China have spent months in hospital after being exposed to a harmful chemical, an Australian media report said Tuesday.

An Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist said he gained access to the Number Five People’s Hospital in Suzhou where he spoke to a group of women who said they were left unable to walk after being exposed to n-hexane.

“At first the symptoms were pretty obvious,” one woman said of her reaction to breathing in the chemical, which was used to clean and stick logos on products. “My hands were numb. I could hardly walk or run,” she added.

The report said the women had been in hospital for more than six months after working in a cramped and airless factory producing what they believed to be genuine Apple laptops and iPhones.

China halts Burma war crimes inquiry

Colum Lynch, WASHINGTON POST, Washington, Via  The Age, October 27, 2010 -

A DIPLOMATIC campaign by the Chinese government appears to have thwarted the Obama administration’s plan for an international probe into possible war crimes by Burma’s military rulers.

The US initiative was designed to raise the political costs to Burma’s junta for failing to open its November 7 elections to the country’s opposition.

But a senior US official was pessimistic about securing international support for a probe and made it clear Washington had no immediate plans to introduce such a proposal.

China’s state security goon show: comedy or tragedy?

By Peter Foster, The Telegraph, UK, October 26th, 2010 -

China is currently experiencing a series of anti-Japanese protests which have been popping up every other day or so in cities across the south.

Today it was the turn of Chongqing where 2,000 or so people marched calling for a boycott of Japanese goods and chanting “down with the Japanese devlis!” according to local news reports.

The Chinese government doesn’t normally tolerate protests but is making an exception for these which, according to the Foreign Ministry spokesman are “the spontaneous acts by some Chinese people to express indignation for Japan’s recent erroneous deeds and acts.”

The government is playing with fire, however, since the protests are also being used by some people to air internal grievances.

China reports first three cases of South Asian superbug

AFP, Oct 26, 2010 -

BEIJING — China said Tuesday it had detected the nation’s first three cases of a multi-drug resistant superbug that surfaced in South Asia and has triggered a global health alert, state media reported.

The nation’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention said that bacteria carrying the NDM-1 gene were found in samples taken from two babies born in March in the northern region of Ningxia, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Chinese woman arrested for tweeting intention to march with a banner praising jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner

Tania Branigan in Beijing and agencies, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 -

Chinese police seized a woman from her house in the middle of the night after she tweeted her intention to demonstrate with a banner congratulating jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo on winning the Nobel peace prize, a friend said today.

The news comes amid a crackdown on Liu’s friends and supporters that has raised questions about who will collect his award next month.

His wife Liu Xia, who is under house arrest, has invited more than 140 dissidents, activists and celebrities to accept the prize because she fears she will be unable to go.

Time to reboot our push for global Internet freedom (esp. in Country such as China)

By Jackson Diehl, Via The Washington Post, Monday, October 25, 2010 -

Last Tuesday 215,646 Internet users in Iran evaded their regime to visit sites such as Facebook, Twitter and RadioFarda.com, the U.S.-funded Persian-language news service. In Syria, 14,886 people freely surfed; in Vietnam, 10,612; in Saudi Arabia, 14,691; in China, 18,000.

I know this because I saw the internal logs of a company called UltraReach, which created and manages a firewall-breaching system that is allowing as many as half a million people a day to visit Web sites banned by their governments, and circumvent or avoid detection. To watch the traffic stream through the company’s servers is to see a parade of the world’s most oppressed people. In the few minutes I watched I also saw Cubans, Burmese, Uzbeks, Belarusians, Algerians, Cambodians and Libyans traveling via an Internet link to Northern California, where they were able to visit any non-pornographic site without being blocked or identified.

Five other prominent Chinese activists locked up for criticising the government

(Excerpt) The Amnesty International -

The human rights defence movement in China is growing, but those who attempt to report on human rights violations or challenge politically sensitive government policies face serious risk of abuse. The authorities make frequent use of vaguely-worded charges to silence and imprison peaceful activists, such as “endangering state security”, “subversion of state power” and “separatism”.

Liu Xiaobo’s wife, Liu Xia, became another victim of this crackdown when she was placed under house arrest after she returned home from visiting Liu in prison after he had won the Nobel prize.

Amnesty International profiles five other prominent Chinese activists who have been locked up for daring to criticise the government. (They are Liu Xianbin, Gao Zhisheng, Tan Zuoren, Hairat Niyaz, Dhondup Wangchen )

Police Director’s Son Kills Girl in Drunken Hit Run On University Campus

The son of a high-ranking security official killed a female student and hit another while driving drunk on the campus of Hebei University on Oct. 16.

Li Qiming, the driver, kept going after hitting the students, and after he was pulled over boasted that his father was a public security director. Students were angered by the incident, many demanding punishment for the driver.

Chen Xiaofeng, 20-years-old, died on Oct. 17; the other, 19, suffered a fractured left leg and is in stable condition.

Tibetan Students’ Protests Spread to Beijing Over China’s Language Education Policy

Radio Free Asia, Oct 22, 2010 -

Tibetan students protesting against China’s education policies brought their campaign to the nation’s capital, with some 400 of them holding demonstrations at the Beijing National Minorities University.

The protests in Beijing on Oct. 22 came on the heels of demonstrations by thousands of Tibetan high school and college students this week in the remote western province of Qinghai amid fears they will be forced to adopt a Chinese-language-only curriculum.

Missing Lawyer Gao Zhisheng’s Brother Appeals in Beijing, Police refuse to file the case

ChinaAid, Oct 22, 2010 -

BEIJING — On the afternoon of October 20, 2010, Gao Zhisheng’s oldest brother, Gao Zhiyi tried to speak with police about the disappearance of his brother. The police officers were very evasive and would not file anything about this case.

Accompanied by attorneys Teng Biao and Li Heping, Gao Zhiyi traveled to Xiaoguan Police Station in Chaoyang District on the afternoon of October 21, 2010. Gao Zhisheng has been missing since April 20 of this year and ever since then, there has been no information on him whatsoever. Gao Zhiyi is extremely worried about him, and often finds himself in tears since his brother vanished.