Six Death Crimes Within Seven Days, All in Beijing

China has seen a slew of crimes in a single week, all occurring in Beijing.

Chinese Hackers Attacked NY Times in the Past 4 Months

Chinese hackers have carried out attacks on The New York Times’ computer systems for the past four months, stealing account information and passwords of reporters and others who work at the U.S. paper, it said in a report this week.

The Times said that after “surreptitiously tracking” the hackers for a time, the paper’s computer security experts set up better defenses and then ultimately kicked them out of its networks. Customer accounts with the newspaper were not compromised, it said, citing its security experts.

Southern China Shaxi Riots Escalates, Police Crackdown Ordered, 30 Died

Security forces in southern Guangdong province have reportedly been cleared to use deadly force in an escalating riot in Shaxi township.

Hong Kong’s Apple Daily reports that paramilitary forces and police are to stop the riots and demonstrations that began this Monday with guns if necessary.

Migrant workers are clashing with local residents. The riots began after the son of a migrant worker was beaten by security officials after getting into a fight with a local boy. Riots have been escalating as workers from nearby towns converge in Shaxi.

The Darker Hu(e) of China’s investment

The visit by President Hu brings economic prosperity, cultural cooperation, environmental agreements and … suppression

As Danish business interests walked away from last week’s visit by China’s president, Hu Jintao, with lucrative contracts, critics were accusing the government of bending over backwards to ensure that the visit was not disrupted by protestors.

Blue chip Danish companies including Carlsberg, Novozymes and Arla negotiated business deals during the three-day visit to the tune of 18 billion kroner that could help hoist Denmark from a recessive economy, but the cost of those contracts, protestors claim, was their freedom of speech.

Video purports to show Tibetan nun self-immolating

BEIJING (AFP) — Dramatic video footage that purportedly captures the moment a Tibetan Buddhist nun burned herself to death in southwest China has emerged after it was smuggled out and given to a campaign group.

The video, which AFP cannot independently verify, was posted online by Students for a Free Tibet and shows a figure being engulfed in flames in the middle of a street before collapsing to the ground.

The group says the figure is Palden Choetso, a 35-year-old Buddhist nun who self-immolated on November 3 in a Tibetan-inhabited town in Sichuan province.

The Tibetans shown in the footage had “risked everything” to smuggle it out of China, said Tenzin Jigdal, programme director of Students for a Free Tibet, which has offices in New York and Dharamshala, the Indian town that is home to the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

Officials Blamed for Tax Riots in East China

Workers in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang have hit out at excessive fees and fines heaped upon ordinary people by local officials, after the city was rocked by rioting over tax increases this week.

Textile workers in Zhejiang’s Huzhou city took to the streets, torching cars and smashing government buildings, after the government announced a rise in local taxes.

“”It was frightening, terrifying,” said a Huzhou resident surnamed Wu following two days of intense unrest in her hometown. “All the factories are closed, and the schools have halted classes too.”

Authorities sent large numbers of armed police into the city to quell the unrest, which was sparked by an announcement that a monthly tax on textile workers would rise from 250 yuan (U.S.$40) to 638 yuan (U.S$100) per person.

RSF Condemns China on Media Coverage Restrictions of the High-speed Train Crash in Wenzhou

Reporters Without Borders condemns the severe restrictions that the Propaganda Department has imposed on media coverage of the high-speed train crash on 23 July in the southeastern city of Wenzhou, in which 39 people were killed.

Wang Qinglei, a producer with state-owned China Central Television (中國中央電視台), was fired on 27 July because of his investigative coverage of the crash. The previous day, his News 1+1 programme was suspended without advance warning and without explanation after it criticized a transport ministry spokesman.

Chinese journalists suspended for reporting train disaster

(Independent)– Two leading journalists have been suspended in China after their candid coverage of a train crash amid anger at the government for trying to muzzle critics of the country’s vaunted high-speed rail project.

One of the journalists was reportedly suspended for his reports on the crash on 23 July, when a high-speed train ploughed into the back of a stationary one, killing at least 40 and injuring more than 190. He had questioned whether China was putting too much emphasis on technological advance at the expense of safety.

The government has faced a wave of criticism over what caused the crash, and the delay by the country’s leaders in visiting the scene of the crash at the eastern city of Wenzhou.

Chinese TV producer Wang Qinglei suspended for crash reportage

New York, August 2, 2011 (CPJ)–The suspension of a state television producer for his coverage of last week’s fatal train crash sends a disturbing message to Chinese media outlets, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Information authorities intensified media restrictions at the end of last week in an effort to restrain the unusually probing media treatment of the July 23 disaster. But their initial propaganda directives were widely ignored and the railway ministry’s response to the crash launched a flood of online criticism.

Chinese journalists reported that China Central Television’s “24 Hours” news producer  was suspended for his July 26 coverage of the crash. The show questioned the cause of the collision, featured footage of the victims in hospitals, and asked whether the country was putting progress before the welfare of the people. It is not clear whether the journalist’s suspension amounted to a permanent dismissal.

Thousands of Taxi drivers protests hit two Chinese cities

SHANGHAI(AFP) — Thousands of taxi drivers in China’s eastern city of Hangzhou went on strike Monday over high petrol prices and traffic congestion, while drivers in Shanghai also protested over benefits.

In Hangzhou, drivers parked their cars at several locations in the city, a major tourist centre, while others simply stayed on the road and refused to take passengers, state media and taxi company officials said.

Some media estimates put the number of strikers as high as 4,000 drivers. Police declined to comment.

China’s Government Struggles With Outcry Over Train Wreck

The Internet and Chinese state media continue to ask a steady stream of questions about last Saturday’s deadly high-speed rail accident. The persistent calls for answers come despite government assurances of a thorough investigation.

And the questioners are challenging the government and its ability to control public opinion.

Caught on microblog

For the past week, the Chinese microblog, China’s version of Twitter, Sina Weibo has been a steady source of information, assistance and nonstop criticism of the government’s handling of the rail crash.

China is on the fast train to disaster

(The Guardian)– China’s high-speed rail network seemed to symbolise the nation’s unstoppable rise: since the first line opened in 2007, it has built more than 6,000 miles of track and seemed poised to spread the magic into overseas markets, bidding aggressively against established international players. Yet this week, families were mourning the 39 dead and tending the 200 injured in Saturday’s crash, the latest and worst episode in the high-speed rail fiasco. A project said to show China was poised for leadership in advanced technologies is collapsing in death, anger and embarrassment.

How it went so badly wrong carries some dark lessons for China. It’s a story of corruption and corner-cutting and of responsibility passed around an opaque and untouchable bureaucracy. It is also a lesson in a nationalistic habit of “digesting” foreign technology, as one railway official put it, then changing it, so as to claim the result as a Chinese invention.

Riot in south China after officials beat to death a disabled fruit vendor

(Reuters) – Angry residents in a southern Chinese city went on the rampage after officials apparently beat to death a disabled fruit vendor, a state media said on Wednesday, in the latest incident of social unrest in the world’s second-largest economy.

The China Daily said that thousands of people gathered on the streets of Anshun in Guizhou province on Tuesday afternoon, throwing stones at police and overturning a government vehicle.

The riot was sparked after urban management officers — a quasi-police force that enforces laws against begging and other petty offences — were suspected of beating the vendor to death, the newspaper said.

Anger mounts as China is accused of a cover-up over high-speed train disaster

BEIJING: Chinese authorities face growing public fury over the high-speed train crash that killed at least 38 people and injured 192, with the disposal of wreckage and attempts to control coverage of the incident prompting allegations of a cover-up.

The railway ministry has apologised for the collision in eastern Zhejiang province and announced an inquiry. Spokesman Wang Yongping said: ”China’s high-speed rail technology is up to date and up to standard, and we still have faith in it.”

Web users attacked the government’s response to the disaster after authorities muzzled media coverage and urged reporters to focus on rescue efforts. ”We have the right to know the truth!” wrote one microblogger ”kangfu xiaodingdang”. ”That’s our basic right!”

Chinese Version of ‘Bloody Harvest’ Released in Taiwan

The two authors of the book Bloody Harvest, who were also 2010 Nobel Peace Prize nominees, attended the launch for the Chinese translation of Bloody Harvest, held at the Legislative Yuan (the national legislature) in Taiwan on June 28.

Each of the two authors, David Kilgour, who was the former Canadian Secretary of State (Asia-Pacific), and David Matas, the award-winning international human rights lawyer, spoke.

David Kilgour said that since 2006 he and David Matas had traveled to four continents and more than 40 countries, breaking through various obstacles to collect evidence, and arrived at the conclusion that large-scale live organ harvesting from Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) practitioners did happen and continues even today.

Inner Mongolia protests prompt crackdown and censorship

(The Guardian)– A communist official tipped as a future leader of China is moving to defuse a wave of protests in Inner Mongolia by choking information, tightening campus controls and promising to reform the mining industry.

A demonstration by ethnic Mongolians on Monday in the regional capital, Hohhot, was the latest test for Hu Chunhua, whose appointment as party chief of the resource-rich region last year was widely seen as a step towards top office in 2020.

Censors have blocked information about the biggest surge of unrest that the northern region has experienced in 20 years, with witnesses and rights groups claiming to have seen rallies in at least six communities over the past week.

Protests erupt after China’s Inner Mongolian herder run over by coal truck as he tries to stop mining convoy driving across prairie land

(The Guardian)– Outside the closed gates of the Xilingol Mongolian high school, Chinese police watch warily as hundreds of students perform calisthenics in a yard from where the previous day they left to march through the streets. A short drive away, another police unit monitors a middle school that has become a source of concern. On the grasslands, patrol cars block access to a troubled community of herders and miners.

Security forces in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China, are on high alert after the biggest wave of demonstrations in 20 years, sparked by a killing that symbolises the traumatic transition of Mongolia’s nomadic grasslands into a mining powerhouse.

Amnesty urges China to exercise restraint over Inner Mongolia protests

Chinese authorities must avoid a violent crackdown on demonstrations in the country’s Inner Mongolia region, as martial law was declared in some areas to quell a fifth day of protests, Amnesty international said today.

“The Chinese authorities must respect freedom of expression and assembly for protesters. Given the heavy handed repression of similar protests in other regions, like Xinjiang and Tibet, there are real grounds for concern about the situation in Inner Mongolia,” said Catherine Baber, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific deputy director.

In a rare show of defiance, hundreds of ethnic Mongolians from the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR) marched to a local government building in Shuluun Huh Banner county on Friday, calling on Chinese authorities to respect the rights and traditional way of life of Mongolian herders, including access to grazing land.

Forced Eviction Death in Eastern China Sparks Clashes with Police

Clashes broke out between police and residents in a forced eviction stand-off in Lianyungang city in northeastern Jiangsu province on Friday after an evictee died, officials and local residents said.

The standoff began after hundreds of demolition workers approached the home of Shizhuang village resident Liu Zengluo early Friday, relatives and local residents said.

Liu died after confronting the demolition gang, but the official version of his death and those of his relatives differed sharply.

Foreign Journalists Physically Assaulted by Beijing Police and Rebuked by Chinese Foreign Ministry

Rather than reporting news, foreign reporters in China have recently become the news. After being physically assaulted and harassed by Chinese police for standing in the streets, they were later subjected to an hour and a half of scolding by a Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) spokesperson at a news conference.

The actions taken against foreign reporters have made it clear that this is a “highly sensitive” time for the CCP. The formerly “relaxed” rules for foreign journalists in China seem to no longer apply, and neither does the regime veil its disdain of the world’s free press.

On Ten Year Anniversary, Tiananmen Square Self-Immolation Continues to Be Deadly Frame-up

NEW YORK – Ten years ago this Sunday, a deadly piece of stagecraft unfolded on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. At the behest of the Communist Party, five people set themselves on fire with cameras rolling.

China’s state-run media immediately pronounced that the individuals were adherents of Falun Gong, claiming they had been driven to suicide by the spiritual practice. Two of the participants died in connection with the self-immolation. The event was used to turn public opinion against Falun Gong, and to justify the mass imprisonment and torture of its adherents.  

A Villager’s Death Exposes Chinese Government Credibility Crisis

Wall Street Journal, Dec. 28, 2010-

On Christmas Day, Qian Yunhui, a villager in eastern Zhejiang province with a long history of petitioning against alleged abuses by local government, was crushed to death under the wheels of a heavy truck. That much is fact. Gruesome pictures of his mangled body circulated widely on the Internet within hours of his death.

But the online uproar that followed–and the response of local officials–offers a window into a new political reality in China, one that has profound implications for how this country is governed.

Kindergarten Children punished by applying electric iron on faces- Teacher Not Properly Punished, Parents Say

By Quincy Yu, Epoch Times Staff, Dec. 26, 2010 –

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

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