Thursday, April 30, 2009
China Cracks Down on Rights Activists
Chinese authorities have intensified the crackdown on human rights activists across the country in the lead-up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests.
Amnesty International has documented at least 100 cases of activists who have been detained or faced violence from authorities. Several of these cases are related to the surveillance of activists ahead of the anniversary.
In the first four months of 2009, Amnesty International has documented at least four cases of lawyers who were threatened with violence by the authorities as they defended their clients, at least ten cases where lawyers were hindered from meeting or representing clients, and at least one case in which a lawyer has been detained for doing his work.
“If anything, the crackdown on human rights activists is escalating as we approach the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Beijing pro-democracy protests,” said Roseann Rife, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific deputy director. “Most worrying is the complete disregard for national laws and the obstructions thrown in front of lawyers trying to do their jobs.”
Detentions and Violence
Activists across the country have been arbitrarily detained and have faced violence when defending land rights, housing rights, and labor rights. Signatories to Charter 08, a petition calling for legal and political reform, continue to face questioning across the country. Liu Shasha, a young woman signatory and an oil plant worker in Henan, was detained for four days for printing and disseminating the charter on the street.
Qi Zhiyong, who was left disabled by a gunshot injury during the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, told reporters in a recent text message that he had been detained by the police. He has previously been threatened with arrest if he did not leave Beijing prior to the start of the Olympic Games. It’s believed Qi’s treatment and detention were associated with the 20th anniversary of the death of Hu Yaobang, a reformist leader. Hu’s death marked the beginning of the pro-democracy protests twenty years ago.
Beijing lawyers Cheng Hai and Zhou Peng were recently attacked by at least four individuals who claimed to be from a government agency charged with coordinating the offices of the police and courts. The lawyers were on the way to meet their client’s family when they were attacked.
Police Surveillance
On the same day, another two lawyers, Wu Jiangtao and Li Renbin, were also blocked from meeting the family of their client, Falun Gong detainee Wei Cheng, when they arrived at northern Changchun city in Jilin province. Police put Wei Cheng’s family and relatives under surveillance and threatened them with imprisonment if they hired a lawyer.
Activist Chen Yunfei, based in Chengdu city, Sichuan province was questioned for six hours, and warned not to try to organize activists during the June 4 anniversary. Police have had his living compound under surveillance since April 20, 2009.
“Authorities must stop this harassment of people trying to address legitimate human rights issues in China,” said Rife. “Issues like environmental rights, the right to participate, the right to a fair trial and rights of the person, which were all reaffirmed in the recently released National Human Rights Action Plan.”
Amnesty International is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning grassroots activist organization with more than 2.2 million supporters, activists and volunteers in more than 150 countries campaigning for human rights worldwide. The organization investigates and exposes abuses, educates and mobilizes the public, and works to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied.Could China's Black Book Put Bankers Behind Bars?
According to China Confidential sources in Asia, a unit of China's Ministry of State Security has assembled a "black book" of financial crimes that could put some Wall Street bankers behind bars in the United States. The database supposedly documents alleged complicity by U.S. investment bankers in fraud and corruption involving Chinese companies that sought to raise capital in the United States during the boom years that preceded the global economic bust.
Knowledge of phantom profits and phantom or suspect assets (e.g. large sums of cash kept in company safes), multiple sets of books, and use of front, dummy, and offshore shell companies to hide beneficial ownership interests and funnel profits and payoffs to Communist Party officials are all detailed, sources say.
The information, if accurate, could constitute violations of U.S. securities laws and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits American citizens and companies from bribing foreign officials.Henan Workers Block Major Road, Demand Money
Workers have staged demonstrations for money they say their factory owes them, vowing to take their protest to Beijing. Radio Free Asia reports:Hundreds of workers, including former soldiers, drafted to work at a factory in the central Chinese province of Henan have brought traffic to a standstill after they staged a sit-in outside the factory gates to demand payments and benefits they say they were owed after being laid off.
Continue here.Maritime Confrontation Focuses Attention on Troubled State of US-China Defense Diplomacy
The recriminations that flared between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United States over the latest Sino-American maritime confrontation makes evident how little progress has been made in Sino-U.S. defense dialogue during the past two decades. Clashes between U.S. and Chinese military units operating in the sea and air near China have become a recurring disruption in the bilateral relations. They will burden the Obama administration as it seeks to develop Sino-American security relations in the coming years.
Click here to continue.China-Kuwait Petro-Project Plagued by Politics
China's largest joint venture with a foreign company is plagued by politics and environmental concerns.
The proposed $9 billion Sino-Kuwaiti oil refinery and petrochemical complex in Guangdong province has been held up by mounting concerns over the environmental impact on the area, which is home to 95 million people. The proposed site in Nansha, a suburb of Guangzhou, is close to state protected wetlands and the densely populated and already polluted Pearl River Delta region, including Hong Kong and Macao.
Kuwait Petroleum International has teamed up with China’s biggest oil refiner Sinopec Corp. to develop the project. But powerful Communist Party officials have turned it into a political football, according to China Confidential sources in Hong Kong. They say one official wants the site moved again--it was already forced out of Huangpu, another Guangzhou suburb--to benefit a group of well-connected investors.
Another party official is said to be using the project, which has been mired in controversy since its inception in 2005, to press for the ouster of some Sinopec senior managers.
The planned refinery will be capable of processing 300,000 barrels per day of Kuwaiti crude. An ethylene cracker unit will have an annual production capacity of 1 million tons.
Kuwait’s crude oil exports to China increased 43% in March from a year earlier to 177,000 bpd, providing 4.6% of China’s total crude oil, according to government data.Women Fleeing Hell-on-Earth Enslaved in China
During the Holocaust, many Jews who managed to escape the death camps and the ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe were hunted, killed, and betrayed by anti-Semitic members of the local populations, including, even, non-Jewish partisan groups. A similar nightmare appears to have unfolded in China with respect to refugee women from North Korea's Hitlerian hell-on-earth.
AFP reports:North Korean women who escaped the sex trade in China have appealed for global action, saying the Chinese treat them like "livestock" and they face brutal treatment if they return home.
The women traveled to Washington as part of a week of activism to raise attention about human rights abuses in North Korea, which is embroiled in a standoff with the United States over its nuclear and missile programs.
Bang Mi-Sun, who was an actress with a propaganda troupe in her impoverished homeland, said she fled to China with her two children after her husband, a miner, starved to death in 2002.
She said a broker sold her for 4,000 yuan (585 dollars) to an older disabled man, the first of a number of Chinese "husbands."
"The Chinese would even refer to North Korean women as pigs. We are forced to do farmwork and household chores by day and at night we were subjected to subhuman experiences," she said tearfully at a news conference.
"The world needs to know what is happening. If I had a chance to meet President Obama, I would tell him that North Korean women are being sold like livestock in China," said Bang, who escaped to South Korea in 2004.
China, fearful of a long-term economic burden or shift in ethnic makeup, considers North Korean defectors to be economic migrants and routinely deports them.
Click here to read the entire article.Wednesday, April 29, 2009
CNPC Eyes Petro-Canada's Syrian, Libyan Holdings
Petro-Canada yesterday denied rumors that the company has received an approach from China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) concerning the Canadian firm's oil and gas assets in Libya and Syria.
That may be technically true. But China Confidential has learned that the company that is acquiring Petro-Canada, Suncor Energy, is aware of CNPC's serious interest in buying Petro-Canada's natural gas properties in Syria and offshore oil holdings in Libya.
CNPC is China's largest integrated oil and gas company.
Friday, 1 May 2009
Writing for the Jamestown Foundation, Richard Weitz of the Hudson Institute says a recent maritime incident highlights the "troubled state of China-U.S. defense diplomacy." Dr. Weitz:
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