Conversations on Vietnam Development
BEIJING — The ominous images in the video pile up, set to darkly urgent music. Refugees fleeing failed uprisings in the Middle East. Western diplomats and politicians cast as puppet masters of subversion in China. Chinese lawyers abjectly confessing to subversion in show trials. Protests erupting in Hong Kong.
Thomson Reuters Foundation Dec 16, 2016
HONG KONG/BEIJING – Living in Beijing for 23 years, Li Xue has never attended school, not even for a day.
China provides a free, nine-year education to every child but Li was not included. For the past 23 years, she has had no access to any form of social welfare. She has not been allowed to get married, find a job, or open a bank account.
Li was the second child born to her parents. Due to the nation’s one-child policy that ran from around 1978 until 2015 to curtail population growth, she didn’t exist in the Chinese government’s database. Tiếp tục đọc “Lost lives: China’s invisible children fight to recover their missed years”
After the Chinese authorities blocked the Canadian beauty queen Anastasia Lin from attending the 65th annual Miss World pageant in China last year, the event’s British organizers offered her a consolation prize, of sorts: They promised to allow her a chance to compete in the 2016 finals, which are currently underway in suburban Washington.
Tiếp tục đọc “Pageant Silences Beauty Queen, a Critic of China, at U.S. Contest”
HONG KONG — Three prominent Chinese rights activists appear to have been detained in recent weeks by the police, part of a continuing crackdown on groups operating outside the umbrella of the state, advocacy groups say.
The three men, Jiang Tianyong, Huang Qi and Liu Feiyue, all disappeared within days of each other in November, each in a different province. The police have charged only Mr. Liu with an offense. Rights groups say he was detained on Nov. 17 or 18 in the central province of Hubei on suspicion of subverting state power, which can carry a sentence of life in prison.
Tiếp tục đọc “3 Chinese Rights Activists Disappear in Apparent State Crackdown”
One of China’s most prominent human rights campaigners, Jiang Tianyong, has disappeared during a trip to visit relatives of a detained rights lawyer, Jiang’s wife said.
Jiang, a legal activist, has not been heard from since Monday, when he was due to board a train to return to Beijing, his wife, Jin Bianling, said on Thursday.
Jiang’s defence work involved some of China’s most politically sensitive figures in recent years, including the dissident lawyer Gao Zhisheng and blind activist Chen Guangcheng. Tiếp tục đọc “Chinese rights activist Jiang Tianyong missing”
I still remember the first time I talked about the Tiananmen incident with my university roommates. It was the eve of the 20th anniversary of June 4.
“Do you girls know what day is it today?”
“June 4.”
“Anything else?”“I know what you mean,” said the girl whose bunk bed lay under mine. “It’s the anniversary. But what can we do?” Tiếp tục đọc “China’s Youth Think Tiananmen Was So 1989”
Time.com – In late November, Ren Jianyu, once a budding civil servant in China’s southwest, received his results for China’s National Judicial Examination: a sterling score well above what he needed to pass China’s bar. The triumph was bittersweet: for 15 months, Ren, like tens of thousands of others, had been forced to undergo “re-education through labor,” as time spent in China’s gulags is known.Ren’s offense was to have reposted on his microblog comments critical of China’s government and its leaders. He also purchased online a T-shirt emblazoned with the motto: “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death.” For these transgressions, the now 28-year-old was never given the courtesy of a proper trial. He spent his days assembling cardboard for boxes and lived 11 people to a room in a camp filled with more than 1,000 inmates. But after a local justice board deemed his case improperly handled, Ren was released early in 2012 and later compensated less than $15,000 for his suffering. “After experiencing so many things all these years,” he says, “I am not afraid anymore.”
Despite — or perhaps because of — this injustice, Ren decided that he needed to familiarize himself with China’s legal system. After he was released, families of other legal victims came to him, asking for counsel. “At the time, I didn’t understand the law,” says Ren. “When I read the piles of materials they showed to me, I didn’t know which parts were useful, which were not.” Tiếp tục đọc “Beijing is currently pushing a rule-of-law campaign, but the reality is drastically different”
CVD 