A student leader of the 1989 democracy protests in China has been arrested on fraud charges, his brother said yesterday, as authorities brace for the 20th anniversary of the demonstrations.
Zhou Yongjun (周勇軍) was a leader of the Beijing Students’ Autonomous Union, one of the most visible groups in the protests at Tiananmen Square, which ended on June 4, 1989, in an army crackdown that killed hundreds, possibly thousands.
Zhou’s family was told of the charges against him yesterday by police in southwestern China, more than seven months after he was reportedly seized while trying to return from the US, his brother Zhou Lin (周林) said.
“They told us the charges concerned fraud, but we are still unclear on the situation. We are waiting for more information,” Zhou Lin said by telephone.
He said his brother was charged in the family’s home city of Suining in Sichuan Province.
He said Zhou has a US “green card” denoting permanent residence status there, a fact that could make his arrest a potential source of friction with Washington.
A spokesman at the US embassy in Beijing said it had no comment on the case “at the present time.”
Zhou, now 41, has lived in the US for many years, his brother said.
Zhou was seized by authorities in the southern city of Shenzhen on Sept. 30 as he tried to enter China to visit his family, according to reports by the China Human Rights Defenders, a network of domestic and overseas activists.
Zhou Lin said he did not know how his brother could have committed fraud in China given that he had been out of the country for so long.
Several telephone calls to police headquarters in Suining went unanswered.
In related news, an estimated 30 men remain in prison for clashes with China’s military when it suppressed the Tiananmen Square democracy movement, a rights group said yesterday, sharply lowering its estimate of those still jailed from the crackdown.
The Dui Hua Foundation previously estimated that 60 Tiananmen prisoners were still in jail, but new information about prisoner releases from the Chinese government and a Chinese human rights campaigner prompted the San Francisco-based group to revise the figure.
The prisoners were jailed for burning army trucks, stealing equipment or attacking soldiers as the military advanced toward student-led protests on Tiananmen Square in central Beijing.
Most of the prisoners were young workers at the time of the demonstrations. Their continued imprisonment underscores the way the communist leadership handled the crackdown — harshly punishing the ordinary Chinese who joined the protests, while mainly giving lighter treatment to the students and others in the educated elite who led them.
In a statement, Dui Hua gave the names of 16 men either confirmed or believed to still be in jail based on information from the Chinese government or former inmates. It said there are likely about a dozen additional June 4 prisoners whose names are still not publicly known.
Dui Hua called on China to release the men, noting that many were sentenced to death or to life in prison after being convicted of counterrevolutionary sabotage and hooliganism — charges that were removed from China’s criminal code in a 1997 revision.
Indonesia yesterday began enforcing its newly ratified penal code, replacing a Dutch-era criminal law that had governed the country for more than 80 years and marking a major shift in its legal landscape. Since proclaiming independence in 1945, the Southeast Asian country had continued to operate under a colonial framework widely criticized as outdated and misaligned with Indonesia’s social values. Efforts to revise the code stalled for decades as lawmakers debated how to balance human rights, religious norms and local traditions in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. The 345-page Indonesian Penal Code, known as the KUHP, was passed in 2022. It
‘DISRESPECTFUL’: Katie Miller, the wife of Trump’s most influential adviser, drew ire by posting an image of Greenland in the colors of the US flag, captioning it ‘SOON’ US President Donald Trump on Sunday doubled down on his claim that Greenland should become part of the US, despite calls by the Danish prime minister to stop “threatening” the territory. Washington’s military intervention in Venezuela has reignited fears for Greenland, which Trump has repeatedly said he wants to annex, given its strategic location in the arctic. While aboard Air Force One en route to Washington, Trump reiterated the goal. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it,” he said in response to a reporter’s question. “We’ll worry about Greenland in
PERILOUS JOURNEY: Over just a matter of days last month, about 1,600 Afghans who were at risk of perishing due to the cold weather were rescued in the mountains Habibullah set off from his home in western Afghanistan determined to find work in Iran, only for the 15-year-old to freeze to death while walking across the mountainous frontier. “He was forced to go, to bring food for the family,” his mother, Mah Jan, said at her mud home in Ghunjan village. “We have no food to eat, we have no clothes to wear. The house in which I live has no electricity, no water. I have no proper window, nothing to burn for heating,” she added, clutching a photograph of her son. Habibullah was one of at least 18 migrants who died
Russia early yesterday bombarded Ukraine, killing two people in the Kyiv region, authorities said on the eve of a diplomatic summit in France. A nationwide siren was issued just after midnight, while Ukraine’s military said air defenses were operating in several places. In the capital, a private medical facility caught fire as a result of the Russian strikes, killing one person and wounding three others, the State Emergency Service of Kyiv said. It released images of rescuers removing people on stretchers from a gutted building. Another pre-dawn attack on the neighboring city of Fastiv killed one man in his 70s, Kyiv Governor Mykola
RSS