A Chinese woman detained for a month after protesting about being evicted from her home ahead of the Olympics has been freed, the woman and her son said yesterday.
Zhang Wei said she was released on Saturday on condition that she keep her cellphone on at all times so police can contact her and order her back to jail if necessary.
“There was no reasonable explanation for why those conditions were attached to her release,” Zhang’s son, Mi Yu, said in a separate interview.
Mi said his mother had been told not to talk to reporters.
Zhang has been vocal in the past two years about the pain caused by being forced out of her traditional family courtyard home in the Qianmen area near Tiananmen Square to make way for a commercial strip that opened a day before the Aug. 8 start of the Olympics.
She refused compensation for her home and had gone every Monday to the district government’s offices to plead her case.
During the Games, authorities rounded up activists and others who applied to demonstrate in three areas that had been approved as official protest zones during the Olympics.
Zhang had sought permission to stage a protest at one of the zones in hopes of drawing attention to her plight after years of fruitless wrangling with local officials. Days later, she was taken from her home close to midnight.
Police originally said she would be detained for three days, but later extended it to a month.
The forced relocation of Beijing residents caught up in redevelopment projects is a hot-button issue for the government.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was