China is striving to rein in violent security guards with new rules that will prevent them from beating up people or otherwise abuse their positions, state media said yesterday.
The State Council has published draft rules aiming to impose curbs on the tens of thousands of security guards who protect government offices, schools, factories and businesses across China, Xinhua news agency said.
The new rules come in the wake of an incident last month where government-hired guards in Hubei Province bludgeoned to death a man who had videotaped them while they beating up a group of protesters.
The incident caused a nationwide uproar against security guards and led to an investigation into more than 100 city inspectors in Tianmen City.
The draft rules explicitly forbid security guards from restricting the personal freedom of any individual and searching their persons, the report said. Security guards are banned from "insult, assault, battery or inducing others to commit battery," as well as withholding individual property or identification.
Guards will also no longer be allowed to use violence or threaten to use violence to demand payment, infringe personal privacy or leak secrets, it said.
In Shanghai, meanwhile, human-rights lawyer Zheng Enchong (鄭恩寵) was repeatedly beaten by police officers outside his home in recent days, his wife and associates said.
Zheng, who has lived under house arrest for several months, has sustained serious injuries caused by plainclothes police officers who, in one attack, knocked him down, then repeatedly hoisted his body parallel to the ground and dropped him on the concrete, people who have visited him said.
In a telephone interview, Jiang Meili (
"A guy stopped him and pushed him to the ground," Jiang said. "One man held him by the neck, while another kneed him in the stomach. Then five or six men carried him back upstairs, beating him in the elevator, too."
Shanghai police officials declined to comment.
Jiang said that the beatings represented a sharp escalation of a recent campaign by the Shanghai authorities to quiet her husband.
Associates of the lawyer who have spoken with him said the beatings started after he began advising residents who have organized a campaign against a high-tech railroad project that would cut through middle-class neighborhoods in the city.
BUILDUP: US General Dan Caine said Chinese military maneuvers are not routine exercises, but instead are ‘rehearsals for a forced unification’ with Taiwan China poses an increasingly aggressive threat to the US and deterring Beijing is the Pentagon’s top regional priority amid its rapid military buildup and invasion drills near Taiwan, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday. “Our pacing threat is communist China,” Hegseth told the US House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense during an oversight hearing with US General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Beijing is preparing for war in the Indo-Pacific as part of its broader strategy to dominate that region and then the world,” Hegseth said, adding that if it succeeds, it could derail
CHIP WAR: The new restrictions are expected to cut off China’s access to Taiwan’s technologies, materials and equipment essential to building AI semiconductors Taiwan has blacklisted Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯), dealing another major blow to the two companies spearheading China’s efforts to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) chip technologies. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’ International Trade Administration has included Huawei, SMIC and several of their subsidiaries in an update of its so-called strategic high-tech commodities entity list, the latest version on its Web site showed on Saturday. It did not publicly announce the change. Other entities on the list include organizations such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as companies in China, Iran and elsewhere. Local companies need
CRITICISM: It is generally accepted that the Straits Forum is a CCP ‘united front’ platform, and anyone attending should maintain Taiwan’s dignity, the council said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it deeply regrets that former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) echoed the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “one China” principle and “united front” tactics by telling the Straits Forum that Taiwanese yearn for both sides of the Taiwan Strait to move toward “peace” and “integration.” The 17th annual Straits Forum yesterday opened in Xiamen, China, and while the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) local government heads were absent for the first time in 17 years, Ma attended the forum as “former KMT chairperson” and met with Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Chairman Wang Huning (王滬寧). Wang
CROSS-STRAIT: The MAC said it barred the Chinese officials from attending an event, because they failed to provide guarantees that Taiwan would be treated with respect The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) on Friday night defended its decision to bar Chinese officials and tourism representatives from attending a tourism event in Taipei next month, citing the unsafe conditions for Taiwanese in China. The Taipei International Summer Travel Expo, organized by the Taiwan Tourism Exchange Association, is to run from July 18 to 21. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokeswoman Zhu Fenglian (朱鳳蓮) on Friday said that representatives from China’s travel industry were excluded from the expo. The Democratic Progressive Party government is obstructing cross-strait tourism exchange in a vain attempt to ignore the mainstream support for peaceful development
RSS