The brother of a Chinese activist whose escape from house arrest last year angered authorities said yesterday that harassment of his family has intensified, with his wife facing possible indictment and his home being pelted with dead chickens, bricks and stones.
Legal activist Chen Guangcheng (陳光誠), who is blind, slipped out of his closely guarded farmhouse in April last year and fled to the US embassy in Beijing, setting off a diplomatic crisis with the US. Chinese authorities later allowed him to go to the US, where he continues to draw attention to the intimidation of his relatives back home.
His brother, Chen Guangfu (陳光福), said Yinan County prosecutors questioned his wife, Ren Zongju (任宗舉), 59, on Wednesday for an hour-and-a-half and then notified her that they planned to charge her with harboring a suspect.
Chen Guangfu said the person who had allegedly been harbored was their son, who had fled authorities after attacking officials who had barged into his house and beat him.
The brother says harassment of his family has grown in recent weeks with dead chickens and ducks being hurled into his yard — at a time when avian influenza concerns are high — and stones cast at his house, breaking windows and roof tiles. He says posters put up in his village call his family traitors.
Chen said the authorities’ threat of prosecution against his wife was groundless and that the harassment was part of continued efforts by local authorities to punish Chen Guangcheng for his continued activism overseas by targeting his relatives.
“Guangcheng offended them, but they find themselves helpless against him,” Chen Guangfu said. “So instead, they use these rogue and terror tactics against his family to try to punish Guangcheng.”
Calls to the county’s prosecutors’ office and police rang unanswered yesterday, while a woman who answered the telephone at the county’s Chinese Communist Party propaganda office said she did not know anything about Chen Guangcheng or the case.
The brother said he planned to hire lawyers, but that he knew that authorities, who routinely harass rights lawyers, might prevent the attorneys from defending his wife.
Chen Guangfu’s son, Chen Kegui (陳克貴), was convicted in November last year of attacking officials who stormed his house to search for his uncle, and was sentenced to three years and three months in prison. The family says he acted in self-defense.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion