Violence is the only language Beijing understands

Violence works -- it blew the lid off Hong Kong’s simmering discontent. It’s about time

While peaceful mass protests went nowhere, violent unrest got Beijing to acknowledge the problem of unaffordable housing in the city, forced some concessions from Carrie Lam, and spurred overdue soul-searching
By Michael Chugani   

A fire burns on September 8 at one of the entrances to Central MTR station, in the business and financial heart of Hong Kong, during yet another weekend of violent protests. 

Who says violent protests don’t work? 

They do and have done so in ways unimaginable before the petrol bombs flew. 

Without violence, would Chinese state media have empathised with Hong Kong’s young protesters by blaming unaffordable housing as the root cause of the unrest?
State media had at first accused foreign forces and independence advocates for the uprising. 

But, with the violence escalating, they’re now blaming Hong Kong’s property tycoons.
Aren’t these the same tycoons who long cosied up to Beijing in return for business opportunities? Didn’t they just recently obey Beijing’s orders to place newspaper advertisements to condemn violent protests and support Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor?
Didn’t former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa explicitly accuse the United States and Taiwan of orchestrating the unrest? 

So why is the state media suddenly heaping blame on the tycoons, accusing them of greed, hoarding land and sucking every cent out of young aspiring homeowners?
It just goes to show that bowing to Beijing doesn’t mean you are accepted as a true loyalist. 

A Reuters report even quoted an unidentified mainland source as saying the Hong Kong elites were not one of them.
Could you have imagined the staunchly pro-government Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong buying a front-page newspaper ad demanding that the government
resume rural land held by tycoons to build public housing? 

The DAB had in the past rejected such use of government power, to appease the tycoons. 

Could you have imagined state media likewise demanding the government seize tycoon-owned farmland? 

They did that last week.
What does all this tell you? 

It tells you violent protests work. 

In early June, an estimated one million people marched peacefully against Lam’s extradition bill after she dismissed concerns by the legal and business sectors. 

She responded to the peaceful protest by pressing ahead with the bill.
Then the violence started. 

Protesters stormed the Legislative Council, defaced the national emblem at Beijing’s liaison office, threw a national flag into the harbour, hurled petrol bombs at police, and trashed MTR stations.
It was only after the violence that Lam’s “let them eat cake” arrogance gave way to humility. 

First, she suspended the extradition bill, then declared it dead, and finally withdrew it. 

Violence forced her to back down, not mass peaceful protests.
It is now obligatory for people to say they don’t support violence. 

I have obliged in the past but will give myself a one-time pass. 

Yes, I will be criticised for doing this, but in today’s toxic political environment, it’s water off a duck’s back.
Saying violence has worked is stating the truth. 

Without it, would our chief executive have agreed to hold free-flowing town hall meetings, which will kick off next week? 

Political correctness should not silence the truth.
Petrol bombs are out of sync with Hong Kong’s character. 

But so are police tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannon, and Cathay Pacific being forced by Beijing to limit the free speech rights of staff. 

To me, all that has happened in the past 100 days is part of a cleansing process that had to come sooner or later. 

Hong Kong’s soul needed baring. 

We needed to know public sentiment after 22 years of reunification.
Violence exposed the truth to Beijing, the government, the tycoons, and the people about our governance system under “one country, two systems”. 

It is broken. 

Those who say otherwise are lying to themselves.
Without the violence, we would not have reached this necessary point of soul-searching. 

The ticking time-bomb would have been kicked down the road to explode another day, as happened after the Occupy movement.
I feel a mixture of exhilaration and gloom now that the time bomb has finally exploded – exhilaration because the violence brought out public sentiment in a way no opinion poll could have done. 

My gloom comes from the fear that, when the protests ebb, Beijing will further tighten Hong Kong’s autonomy instead of loosening it.

China is showing its true nature in Hong Kong. The U.S. must not watch from the sidelines.

By choosing violence and intimidation to silence Hong Kong, the Chinese Communist Party is once again showing its true nature. 
By Marco Rubio

Demonstrators at Tamar Park in Hong Kong on Tuesday.

Beijing recently reinforced its People’s Liberation Army garrison in Hong Kong with thousands of troops and authorized a new wave of arrests to intimidate peaceful demonstrators. 

In parallel, it blocked the Hong Kong government’s proposal to work out a compromise with the city’s massive and grassroots pro-democracy movement.
What began as a protest against an unjust extradition bill backed by China has now become a fight for Hong Kong’s autonomy and future. 

Yet what’s happening in Hong Kong is not simply China’s internal affair. 

The United States and other responsible nations are not watching from the sidelines.
The extradition bill is only the latest example of China’s many broken promises to the Hong Kong people and the world. 

Most obviously, the Chinese Communist Party is preventing the city’s government from acting with the autonomy that Beijing had promised it in a legally binding 1984 international treaty with Britain, under Hong Kong’s Basic Law, and in China’s diplomatic outreach to the United States and other nations.
In 2014, Beijing also backed off its commitment to allow Hong Kong citizens to choose their city’s chief executive through universal suffrage, a provocation that sparked the city’s massive Umbrella Movement protests. 

And in 2016 and 2017 , the High Court disqualified a total of six democratic lawmakers from their Legislative Council seats using a controversial interpretation of Hong Kong’s constitution.
Thirty years after People’s Liberation Army troops massacred reform activists and ordinary Chinese citizens on the way to Tiananmen Square, Beijing now appears poised to intervene overtly and aggressively in Hong Kong.
The paramilitary People’s Armed Police — built up in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre — has thousands of personnel and vehicles in Shenzhen, just across the boundary between mainland China and Hong Kong.
Chinese officials and state media have steadily escalated their warning rhetoric and outlined what they describe as the legal case for intervention based on “signs of terrorism.”
An unsigned editorial in Xinhua, a state-run news agency reflecting the institutional voice of the party center, claimed that Hong Kong is engaged in a “color revolution.”
The world ignores these warning signals at the peril of the Hong Kong people and the hundreds of thousands of foreigners — including roughly 85,000 U.S. citizens — living in the city.
China’s communists today are using the same messaging playbook that they have followed since they intervened in North Korea in 1950. 
We were surprised then; we should be prepared now.
The United States and the international community must make clear to Chinese leaders and power brokers that their aggression toward Hong Kong risks swift, severe and lasting consequences.
In particular, the administration should make clear that the United States can respond flexibly and robustly in Hong Kong.
Our options are much more than just a “nuclear option” of ending Hong Kong’s special status under U.S. law.
The Hong Kong Policy Act, authored by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and enacted in 1992, allows the president to apply to Hong Kong those laws that address the People’s Republic of China.
The law’s power is selective and flexible, however, and not necessarily all-or-nothing for Hong Kong’s special status.
For example, the Tiananmen sanctions could be applied to target the city’s police force, which has collaborated with organized crime, instigated violence and now is torturing detained demonstrators.
Hong Kong’s special status — and therefore Beijing’s ability to exploit and benefit from it — depends on the city being treated as a separate customs area, on open international financial connections and on the Hong Kong dollar’s peg to the U.S. dollar.
The United States both administratively and diplomatically can constrain these conditions.
The administration also can impose sanctions against individual officials who have committed serious human rights abuses under the Global Magnitsky Act, which enables sanctions against foreign individuals or entities.
In addition, Congress should pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, a bill that I co-authored with Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), James E. Risch (R-Idaho) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.).
The bill, among other things, would mandate that officials in China and Hong Kong who have undermined the city’s autonomy are vulnerable to such sanctions.
The United States and other nations have options precisely because Beijing benefits from Hong Kong’s special status. 
Indeed, the city has proved irreplaceable as a gateway for international finance, even as China attempts to build up a mainland alternative.
China’s leaders must either respect Hong Kong’s autonomy and rule of law or know that their escalating aggression will inexorably lead them to face swift, severe and lasting consequences from the United States and the world.
Today, that choice is theirs.

State hooliganism: BBC team forced to sign confession

By John Sudworth

The plan was a simple one.
We'd arranged to meet a woman in her village in China's central Hunan Province and to then travel with her by train to Beijing, filming as we went.
But we never did get to meet our interviewee.
The story we ended up with, however, reveals more about the exercise of power in China than any interview ever could.
It is one that involves violence, intimidation and a forced confession -- my first in my long reporting experience in China -- in which I found myself apologising for "behaviour causing a bad impact" and for trying to conduct an "illegal interview".

Thugs, sanctioned by the authorities, attacked us
Yang Linghua was planning to take the train to Beijing because she is what's known in China as a "petitioner".
Every year, many tens of thousands of Chinese people -- denied the possibility of obtaining any justice through the local Communist Party run courts -- head to the capital, taking their grievances to the "State Bureau of Letters and Calls".
Corruption cases, land-grabs, local government malfeasance, medical negligence, police brutality, unfair dismissal -- all are documented in the bundles of papers -- the petitions -- they carry with them.
The system is also Communist Party run, of course, and the chances of success are tiny.
But for many, it's the only chance they've got, and they often continue to petition, in vain, for years.

The BBC interviewed Yang Quinghua, sister of Yang Linghua, three years ago

Just like Yang Linghua's family.
The BBC interviewed her sister, Yang Qinghua, three years ago on a petitioning trip to Beijing.
The women allege that their land was stolen from them and their father, in the ensuing dispute, was beaten so badly he eventually died.
But there's a particular reason Ms Yang was trying to reach Beijing this week.
On Sunday, China begins its annual parliamentary session, The National People's Congress (NPC).

The National People's Congress is held, like the Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (depicted), in Beijing's Great Hall of the People

The event is like a magnet for petitioners who hope to use the grand occasion to promote their cause.
Beijing, though, has other ideas.
It would rather keep this ragged army of the dispossessed away from its carefully choreographed piece of political theatre and so provincial officials the length and breadth of the land, are tasked with stopping petitioners making the journey.
We knew that Ms Yang's sister and mother had already been placed under unofficial house arrest.
But as she herself had never been to Beijing to petition before, she felt she would be free from suspicion and, at the very least, able to board a train.
She was wrong.
As soon as we arrived in Yang Linghua's village it was clear they were expecting us.
The road to her house was blocked by a large group of people and, within a few minutes, they'd assaulted us and smashed all of our cameras.

Our equipment was smashed -- Ms Yang says her father received far worse when he objected to land theft

While such violence can be part of the risk faced by foreign reporters in China, what happened next is more unusual.
After we left the village, we were chased down and had our car surrounded by a group of about 20 thugs.
They were then joined by some uniformed police officers and two officials from the local foreign affairs office, and under the threat of further violence, we were made to delete some of our footage and forced to sign the confession.
It was a very one-sided negotiation, but it at least gave us a way out -- a luxury denied to the petitioners who find themselves on the receiving end of similar intimidation and abuse.
A video sent to us by Yang Linghua's sister shows her being detained by some of the same people who threatened us.

Warnings not to travel
In the course of researching this story we spoke to one woman, now in her seventies, who has been petitioning since 1988 for a longer prison sentence for her husband's murderer.
She told us that every year during the National People's Congress she is put under house arrest for 10 days.
A man we contacted, petitioning over the abduction of his son, had been warned not to travel this week.
He went ahead and booked his tickets anyway but was prevented from boarding the train in Guangdong Province.
Even for those who do make it to Beijing, the threat of being caught remains.
Outside the petitioning office this week, hundreds of "interceptors" have gathered, the squads of goons sent from each province to search out and cajole or coerce their petitioners to return home.

Official and volunteer security officers are everywhere during the Congress
Of course, many petitioners do still make it and are able to lodge their claims, particularly first-timers who are not yet known to the system.
But the irony is, the harder China works to stem the flow during its national parliament, the more incentive there is for people to come.
Most petitioners are not so naive as to believe they'll be able to get anywhere near the senior officials attending the parliament.
But the desperation of their own provincial governments to catch them gives those who make it to Beijing a certain leverage.
Ignored all year round, often by the same officials they're petitioning against, they suddenly find themselves on the receiving end of offers to negotiate.
One petitioner showed us the text message exchanges she has had with the interceptors trying to track her down, with one even offering to take her on holiday. 

Anything to get her out of Beijing.
We have heard nothing from Yang Linghua or her family since they disappeared.
We have asked government officials in Beijing whether they can provide an assurance that they are safe and well.
Meanwhile, on the eve of China's parliamentary gathering, many of its citizens -- often those, it could be argued, who are most in need of parliamentary representation -- face similar abuse.
And despite having signed that confession I make no apology for trying to interview them.

Rogue Nation

Human rights lawyers in China beaten, arrested
By NOMAAN MERCHANT

Lawyers who defend human rights activists and dissidents targeted by China's communist government have increasingly themselves become subject to political prosecutions, violence and other means of suppression, according to a report released Thursday.
The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a coalition of groups working within and outside China, identified six occasions last year that lawyers were beaten by plaintiffs, police officers or assailants hired by authorities. 

In more than a dozen cases, the report found, detainees were pressured to fire their own lawyers and accept government-supplied attorneys.
"The government is trying to give this impression that it's abiding by the rule of law," said Frances Eve, a researcher for the network. 

"In fact, it's just legalizing repressive measures."
Under Xi Jinping, China has widely suppressed independent organizations and dissenters, as well as lawyers defending people caught in its crackdown. 

The report says 22 people have been convicted since 2014 of subversion or other crimes against state security, including 16 last year alone.
Dozens of lawyers have been questioned or detained in an ongoing campaign against dissident lawyers known as the 709 crackdown launched in July 2015.
Wang Quanzhang, who defended members of the Falun Gong meditation sect banned by China, was charged with subversion of state power in January 2016 after previously being beaten and detained. His wife, Li Wenzu, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Wang is now under indictment and being held without access to family or lawyers.
"We have to wait until the sentencing to see him in jail," she said.
Four people associated with Wang's law firm, Fengrui, were convicted in August of charges that they incited protests and took funding from foreign groups.
China last year also passed a law tightening controls over foreign non-governmental organizations by subjecting them to close police supervision, a move critics called a new attempt by authorities to clamp down on perceived threats to the ruling Communist Party's control.
NGOs can be blacklisted if they commit violations ranging from illegally obtaining unspecified state secrets to "spreading rumors, slandering or otherwise expressing or disseminating harmful information that endangers state security."
Ordinary Chinese who share audio or video of a protest or other news event may be detained, and authorities can shut down phone and Web networks in response to perceived threats to "national security" and "social order".
Chinese Internet censors already exercise tight control with the so-called "Great Firewall" that blocks many foreign news sites and social media platforms.
Prominent activists have frequently been taken into custody without notice to their family or legal teams. 

One was Liu Feiyue, the founder of a website that detailed local corruption cases, veterans' issues, and allegations that perceived troublemakers were being detained in mental hospitals. 

After his disappearance in November, Liu's family was told he was charged with subversion.
Despite its well-publicized record, China was re-elected last year to the United Nations' Human Rights Council. 

But even as China reported its membership on the council through state media, it refused to let banned activists attend United Nations events, the report said.
When Philip Alston, the UN's special rapporteur for human rights, visited China in August, authorities forbade him from meeting several activists and tightly controlled his schedule. 

One activist who did meet with him, lawyer Jiang Tianyong, was arrested three months later and charged with inciting subversion of state power.
Eve, the researcher for Chinese Human Rights Defenders, said some activists believed after Xi became president in 2013 that they might find common cause over his stated goals of rooting out government corruption. 

But those limited hopes have not come to fruition, she said.
"It's gone completely the opposite direction," she said. 

"And it's a tragedy, because those are the kinds of alliances that can make real impact."
The Chinese foreign ministry did not respond to faxed questions.

Greatest Enemy of Press Freedom

Foreign journalists working in China face increased harassment
By Roy Greenslade

Chinese police push away journalists during the trial of Pu Zhiqiang in Beijing in December 2015. 

Working as a foreign journalist in China has always been difficult but the situation appears to be getting even worse, according to the latest working conditions survey conducted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC).
Of the respondents to this year’s survey*, 98% said reporting conditions rarely meet international standards, with 29% saying that conditions have deteriorated since 2015.
Reporters say sources are being intimidated, as are their local staff. 

Among the major challenges they face are growing cases of harassment and obstruction.
A European correspondent said police often ask her assistant why she is willing to help the foreign press with its “anti-China bias”. 

She has been told that by doing so she is a traitor.
Some point to what they call “an alarming new form of harassment” which involves being called by State Security Bureau to unspecified meetings.
The survey also reveals an increase in the use of force and manhandling by authorities against journalists trying to go about their work.
Some 57% of the correspondents said they personally had been subjected to some form of interference, harassment or violence while attempting to report in China.
Josh Chin, of the Wall Street Journal, told of being “shoved roughly and repeatedly by unidentified men wearing smiley face stickers while trying to cover the trial of lawyer Pu Zhiqiang in Beijing.”
A US broadcaster told how “several secret police” arrived at his apartment and tried to get him to sign a document about following the rules of being a journalist in China, which he had already agreed in order to obtain his visa.
They wouldn’t allow him to photograph the document nor would they allow him to tape the meeting. So he refused to sign and was told it might hurt his visa renewal.
As for sources, they face persistent problems that violate their human rights by denying their freedom of expression. 

Some 26% of the survey’s respondents said their sources were harassed, detained, questioned or punished.
Associated Press reporter Joe McDonald said: “In the most extreme case, a woman who talked to us about losing money to a P2P lending website was detained by police for a number of days.”
Censorship of foreign media organisations continues, with authorities having blocked internet access in China to The Economist and Time magazine in April 2016 following cover articles about Xi Jinping.
Other media outlets, which were previously blocked, include the Wall Street Journal, South China Morning Post, Bloomberg, Reuters and New York Times.
People have also become reluctant to talk to foreign journalists because of intimidation, a further denial of press freedom. 

One FCCC member said: “More people (mostly academics, NGOs) tell you straight up that being interviewed by foreign media is not an option. One NGO specified: ‘out of self-protection.’”
And a US brodcaster said: “Many old sources, particularly scholars, who have long been media-friendly, are now too scared to be interviewed.”
Then there is the controversy over “staged press conferences” in which reporters must submit questions to be approved in advance.
Officials sometimes justify this process on the grounds of screening out irrelevant questions. 

The survey found that 75% of respondents did not think they should participate in such conferences, which they regard as subject to censorship.

*Survey invitations were sent to 200 correspondents, and the FCCC received 112 responses.

Hooligan Sparrow: A Harrowing PBS Doc About China's Child Rape and State-Sanctioned Rape Culture

THE CHILLING STORY ABOUT THE CHINESE STATE’S INTIMIDATION AND VIOLENCE AGAINST HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST YE HAIYAN
By Inkoo Kang

Even if your awareness of global news barely extends beyond the headlines, the phrase “government repression” pop ups with such frequency and ubiquity that it’s lost what little force it had in the first place. 

The POV documentary Hooligan Sparrow, premiering Monday, October 17, on PBS, restores to that neutral term the chilling fear and visceral paranoia it should instill, piecing together evidence of the Chinese state’s intimidation and violence against human rights activist Ye Haiyan through secretly recorded footage. 

A compelling biography, a tense mystery, an infuriating exposé, and a dread-filled experience all at once, it’s a must-watch for its diaristic chronicling of the heartbreakingly high costs of fighting against state-sanctioned rape culture.
Named after Ye’s nom de guerre, Hooligan Sparrow begins with a shockingly brazen crime. 

A principal absconds with six girls aged 11 to 14, who are sexually assaulted in a hotel room in a different town. 

Rapists are imprisoned for life or given the death sentence, while child sex trafficking garners a far lesser sentence of 5 to 15 years, and so the girls are paid $2,000 by the principal and labeled prostitutes by the police. 

Swooping in to combat this gross injustice are Ye and a small cadre of her fellow protesters, who hold up provocative signs like “Get a room with me; leave the kids alone” designed to go viral, even on the censored Chinese internet. 

The mysterious man who gets a little too close while recording the demonstration is terrifying enough. 

But they don’t compare to the videos Ye and her colleagues make just before going public. 

China's human rights activists are committed to mental hospitals, forced into detention centers, or worse. 

“To prevent [such fates],” one protester explains, “we do a testimony in advance stating that we won’t commit suicide.” 

Another pleads for her loved ones to look for her should she disappear after the rally.
For Hooligan Sparrow, filmmaker Nanfu Wang embedded herself with Ye, a divorced single mother, and her movingly resilient 13-year-old daughter, Yaxin, for several months. 

Visually, the portrait of mother and child are disrupted by the director’s own fugitive status after her affiliation with Ye made her a target of the government as well. 

But Wang’s first-person narration and outsider status within the accommodating but secretive activist community are assets to her thematically dense tale. 

Her naïveté shows, as when a police officer instantly notices that her glasses double as a camera. 

But the surreal dystopia that is Ye’s China comes into greater focus through Wang’s eyes, as the filmmaker discovers a foreign land within her country.
A few days after the child-rape protest, over a dozen people break into Ye’s apartment and beat her. 

A group of demonstrators — Ye thinks they’re paid by the government — stand outside her building to protest against her, while the police do nothing. 

That is, until they arrest Ye a few days after for assault. 

The activist fought against her attackers with a knife, and now an ostensible victim wants justice from her, though Ye and her faithful lawyer, Wang Yu, don’t know that other injured party’s name, the scope of his lacerations, or if the man whose photos are being used against Ye was ever in her apartment in the first place. 

No matter: Ye and her daughter are evicted. 

When they move 300 miles away, they’re dragged out of their new home and told by the local police there, “If I ever see you again, I’ll break your legs.”
The Ye family’s situation reaches more harrowing lows after that, but their story isn’t an altogether depressing one. 

Wang skimps on the activist’s personal history, but it’s clear that Ye strives for a full life, complete with lighter moments with her colleagues, a supportive boyfriend, and karaoke sessions with her friends and her daughter. (The teenager finds the parade of threatening policemen that regularly flip her life inside out “ridiculous.”) 

It’s rare that we want political docs to be more heavy-handed, but Hooligan Sparrow could bear to be, especially when the backstory behind the group rape of those preteen girls proves even more evil than the horrific surface details alleged.
Despite the brief running time (83 minutes), there’s much to nitpick about the film. 

Its framing device — about how Wang would get her footage out of China — is perhaps its least effective story line, and the timeline of events could use more firming up. 

The story flabs in the middle, as Ye, Wang, and their group are chased from one not-so-safe-house to another, and the intense focus on Ye’s travails neglect other key details, like the unexplained, months-long imprisonment of her attorney. 

But Hooligan Sparrow’s greatest limitation is the one shared by most documentaries: Now that we know about these atrocities, what can we do about them? 

Its filmmaker seems content to shoot and share. 

Our howling impotence demands more.