China casts wide security net ahead of leadership show

China’s President Hu Jintao (L) and US President Barack Obama inspect honour guards during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in this file photo of November 17, 2009. China is locking down droves of people it fears could spark social unrest and tightening media controls ahead of the annual session of parliament.

China is locking down droves of people it fears could spark social unrest and tightening media controls ahead of the annual session of parliament, worried that uprisings in the Middle East could encourage dissent.

Protests that have toppled authoritarian Arab governments have reinforced Chinese leaders’ vigilance about defending one-party control, a priority since the Party crushed pro-democracy protests in June 1989.

Those official anxieties are sure to multiply as President Hu Jintao prepares to hand power to a successor generation from late 2012.

Some foreign reporters were assaulted over the weekend in central Beijing, where an online message from abroad had urged a pro-democracy gathering inspired by the “Jasmine Revolution” in the Arab world. Police smothered the designated area and no protest happened.



But recent directives on many Chinese government websites show the country’s citizens themselves – from dissidents to ex-soldiers and the mentally ill – face strict controls.

“Foreign journalists are having a taste of the recent escalation of the security crackdown against anyone or anything considered potentially politically sensitive by the authorities,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher in the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group.

“This is an across-the-board attempt to asphyxiate all critical voices ahead of the leadership transition,” Bequelin said today.

The Party has become adept at orchestrating campaigns of control around major events, such as the National People’s Congress starting on Saturday. This year’s directives tell officials nationwide to be extra vigilant ahead of the parliament, meant as a picture-perfect show of political unity.

“We must strengthen control over the whole range of target people so they are under constant watch and prevented from going to Beijing to gather and stir up trouble,” said one such order, found on the website of Jincheng, a city in Shanxi province, 580km from Beijing. (http://www.jcei.gov.cn)

“Strengthen monitoring and control of the Internet and prevent hostile elements at home and abroad, and other malicious-minded people, from exploiting the internet to collaborate and incite others,” it said.

Dozens of similar calls for tight security could easily be found on other local government websites.

“This year it’s even more tense than before because of the Jasmine Revolution stuff,” said Liu Feiyue, a human rights activist in the central province of Hubei, who monitors cases of confinement and detention. He said he knew of six or so people detained on subversion charges, which are often used to jail dissidents.

“This will escalate control and monitoring of people in China,” Liu said of the calls for “Jasmine” gatherings promoted on Boxun.com, an overseas Chinese-language website that Beijing blocks. “The vast majority of ordinary people wouldn’t know about it, but the authorities are always on edge.”

President Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao have vowed to build a more “harmonious society” by narrowing inequalities and improving the incomes and welfare of farmers and workers. Those efforts have helped dilute tensions, and most observers dismiss the idea that China risks imminent massive unrest.

But Hu has recently said the government must craft smarter, smoother ways to control an increasingly mobile and vocal population. He and other leaders see their country entering a turbulent time of political transition, urbanisation and economic transformation, and they resist relaxing controls.

Local governments often deal with what are called “destabilising elements” by putting them under guard.

The targets of detention, monitoring and house confinement go beyond dissidents, human rights advocates and other obvious targets. Directives also single out decommissioned soldiers, ex-prisoners, petitioners with grievances over land confiscations and home demolitions, and even people believed to have mental illnessness – all seen as potential sparks of unrest.

“Strengthen stability control of decomissioned soldiers, former prisoners and labour-reeducation inmates, mentally ill people and others who may affect social stability,” said a directive on the government website for Gaoling County, about 1,200km from Beijing. (www.gao-ling.gov.cn)

The Communist Party spends heavily on domestic security, and experts have said that budget now rivals spending on the military. Liu, the rights activist, said security spending was likely to keep rising.

“These social controls have been in place before, but now there’s a sense that they becoming more institutionalised and permanent,” said Liu, whose own website was recently shut down.

China still at war over Nobel Peace Prize

One week on, and China is still smarting from the "hurt' it suffered when jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

"Can anyone expect a country to stay silent when its sovereignty and dignity are violated?" Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu demanded Thursday.

He told reporters that giving Liu the prize "is equivalent to encouraging crimes in China," and "a violation of China's judicial sovereignty."

And, just hours after Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan joined the ranks of world leaders, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. President Barack Obama, calling for Liu's release, Ma questioned their motivation.

"I wonder what their true intention is?" he demanded. "Is it because they resent China's development path and hate China's political system?"

Protesters in Hong Kong show their support for jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was awarded the Nobel Prize last week. Beijing has expressed anger over the award.

China's English-language media continued its assault on the award, too, with the Global Times saying in an editorial that the prize was part of a plan by developed nations to "harass China's growth."

It added: "Discrediting China is a way to maintain the moral superiority of the developed world."

In a column on the editorial page of the official People's Daily, Li Hongmei scoffed at the "Oslo elites" who selected Liu and said: "Yes, China has always wanted a Nobel Prize. But we will never want a prize subjected to abasement."

Ordinary Chinese are allowed to hear some of the government's denunciations and name-calling, but nothing about the winner except that he is a criminal and certainly nothing about how the rest of the world has reacted.

Only netizens with the wherewithal to bypass the Chinese censors have even a chance of getting a balanced view of the controversy the award has spawned or any sense of what Liu, who is serving 11 years in prison for daring to propose Beijing move gradually towards democracy and rule of law, did to merit his honour.

The advocacy group Reporters without Borders said in a statement: "The (Chinese) government's credibility will be badly damaged if it denies the Chinese people access to any information about Liu's Peace Prize except its own hostile reactions. Why do the Communist Party's leaders not let Chinese citizens judge the award's historic significance for themselves?"

The group said the independent Chinese PEN Centre has reported that 40 journalists and rights activists have been "held or questioned" since the prize was announced last Friday." Their crime was to try to celebrate Liu's win.
       

Jailed Chinese dissident Liu wins Nobel Peace Prize

Jailed Chinese pro-democracy activist Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize today for decades of non-violent struggle for human rights, an award that Beijing had anticipated and bitterly criticised.

The prize puts China’s human rights record in the spotlight at a time when it is starting to play a bigger role on the global stage as a result of its growing economic might.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised Liu for his “long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China”.

Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo smokes a cigarette in this undated photo released by his family



“The ... Committee has long believed that there is a close connection between human rights and peace,” it said.

Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said China, the world’s second biggest economy, should expect to be under greater scrutiny as it becomes more powerful, just as the United States was after World War Two.

“We have to speak when others cannot speak,” Jagland told reporters. “As China is rising, we should have the right to criticise ... We want to advance those forces that want China to become more democratic.”

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao did not take questions from journalists at a news conference in Turkey after the award was announced.

Earlier this year, Deputy Foreign Minister Fu Ying had warned the head of the Nobel Institute against granting the prize to Liu, saying it would damage ties between China and Norway as they negotiate a bilateral trade deal.

China also strongly criticised Norway after the 1989 prize went to Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

The last dissident to win the Nobel Peace Prize was Iranian lawyer and human rights campaigner Shirin Ebadi, in 2003.

JAILED FOR SUBVERSION

Liu was jailed for 11 years last December for subversion of state power, a year after being arrested as lead author of Charter 08, a manifesto issued by Chinese intellectuals and activists calling for free speech and multi-party elections.

The former literature professor rose to prominence as a strike leader during protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989.

He was later jailed for 20 months and then spent three years in a “labour re-education” camp during the 1990s, as well as months under virtual house arrest.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said last month that Liu’s actions were “diametrically opposed to the aims of the Nobel Prize”.

Norway says the Nobel committee, picked by parliament and comprising former politicians, is fully independent.

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish crowns (RM4.63 million) and will be awarded in Oslo on Dec. 10. It was not immediately known who would collect the prize if Liu could not do so

Nobel euphoria fails to mask tough reality in China

The euphoria overseas and in some domestic circles at dissident Liu Xiaobo’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize has failed to mask deeper unease that his victory will likely bring little change in Communist Party-ruled China.

Liu, 54, has been a thorn in the government’s side since 1989 when he joined student protesters on a hunger strike days before the army crushed the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement and has been in and out of jail ever since.

Protesters demonstrate outside the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Hong Kong October 8, 2010 demanding the release of jailed Chinese pro-democracy activist Liu Xiaobo. Liu won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010





Yet in today’s booming and bustling Beijing – with its luxury boutiques, well-dressed residents and sleek new subway lines – the heady days of 1989 are a distant memory and public discussion is taboo. Few people know who Liu is.

“I’ve never heard of him,” said one Beijing businessman waving his hand dismissively, who gave his family name as Han, in comments typical of those heard on the street when Liu’s name is mentioned. “I’m too busy to watch television.”

The award was largely ignored by Chinese media, apart from a few brief newspaper articles carrying the Foreign Ministry’s condemnation of the decision as an “obscenity”.

The popular tabloid the Global Times, however, published an angry commentary saying the Nobel Peace Prize was in danger of becoming “a political tool of the West”.

“It is disrespectful to the majority of Chinese and another arrogant display of Western ideology,” it wrote of the award.

The government’s grip on power is as tight as ever, and it has shown no signs of relaxing its stance towards the small band of Chinese “rights defenders” who continue to mount seemingly futile legal challenges against the Party.

Many signers of the “Charter 08” petition which called for sweeping political reforms have either been locked away, put under house arrest or otherwise harassed. Perhaps the most famous of whom is Liu, jailed last Christmas Day for 11 years.

“Is China going to bow to international opprobrium? I think it very unlikely,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher on China with Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group.

“But the prize will add fuel to continued pressure on the Party to adapt further to respond to social demands, which now include a functioning legal system, rule of law, greater freedom of expression and freer media.”

Where once human rights were a hot topic of discussion during meetings between Chinese leaders and their counterparts in the West, these days the lure of China’s red hot economy amid a global downturn has muted criticism.

“Liu’s winning will put more of an international spotlight on the situation in China which has been lacking and that’s good,” Xinna, the wife of imprisoned ethnic Mongolian rights activist Hada, said from the northwestern city of Hohhot.

“But controls on us are tougher than even a few years ago. Things I could once read on the Internet are no longer accessible,” she added, speaking by telephone.

“The restriction on the flow of information means that some activists I know had never heard of Liu until yesterday. This does not give me much hope going forward,” said Xinna, whose husband is one of China’s longest-serving political prisoners.

The mobile telephone of Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, was turned off on Saturday. She said yesterday that the police were forcing her out of town to prevent her from talking to reporters, and that she was being taken to see her husband in jail.

There was a heavy security presence outside Liu’s jail in the northeastern city of Jinzhou, some 350km from Beijing, with police searching passing cars and preventing people getting close to the drab detention buildings.

Still, some long-time activists see a glimmer of hope, pointing to comments by Premier Wen Jiabao in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen in August calling for political reform to safeguard the country’s economic health.

“If Wen is clever, he should use Liu’s winning of the peace prize to exert pressure on the conservative faction in the Party,” human rights lawyer Mo Shaoping said.

“There are those who think that the leadership does not speak with one voice on this issue. Liu’s prize could act as a starting point for reform.”

Meet Zhu Jianqiang, the two-legged pig who's become a celebrity in China

A pig which was born with just its two front legs has become an unlikely celebrity in Henan Province, China.

The 10-month-old animal, known by villagers as Zhu Jianqiang, which means Strong-Willed Pig, was born with only two front legs, which it now uses to walk on.

According to owner Wang Xihai, Zhu Jianqiang was one of nine piglets born in a litter this January.


He recalls: 'My wife asked me to dump it but I refused as it's a life. I thought I should give it a chance and unexpectedly it survived healthily.'

Zhu's owner Wang Xihai was offered a high price to sell her to a circus, but he turned it down

That'll do, pig: Wang said it took Zhu just 30 days to master the art of walking upside down

Several days after Zhu's birth Wang decided to train the two-legged female piglet to walk by lifting it up by its tail. 'I trained her a while each day. After 30 days she could agilely walk upside down.'

Wang said his home has been besieged by visitors since the birth of the pig, which currently weighs 110lbs. A circus even offered a high price for the pig, but he refused to sell.
'She proved to us that no matter what form life is it should continue to live on,' he said. 'I won't sell her no matter how much the offer is.'

Two legs good: 10-month-old pig Zhu Jianqiang survived against the odds and has now become famous

Going up: Wang taught Zhu Jianqiang how to walk on two legs by lifting up her tail