Chinese authorities detained another activist amid increasingly intense efforts to suppress commemorations of next week’s 25th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, his lawyers said yesterday.
Wang Aizhong (王愛忠), a founder of the Southern Street Movement, which calls for an end to one-party rule, was detained in the southern city of Guangzhou on suspicion of picking quarrels and provoking trouble, according to his lawyers Zhang Xuezhong (張雪忠) and Wu Kuiming (吳魁明).
Wang is at least the 20th person detained ahead of the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, military attack on pro-democracy protesters, according to Amnesty International. Others have been put under house arrest or reported missing.
The Chinese Communist Party detains and harasses activists every year ahead of June 4, but this year’s efforts to suppress China’s small number of active dissidents are unusually severe.
In Beijing, human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang (浦志強) and four others were detained after they attended a private forum to commemorate the 1989 protest and its crackdown.
“In the past, these activists got no more than warnings, but formal detentions show the political climate has grown tenser,” Zhang said. “There are no grounds to persecute those who discuss in private a historic event that happened in our country.”
The grounds the authorities used to accuse Wang of breaking the law were not clear, but the government wants to control activists such as Wang ahead of the anniversary on Wednesday, Zhang said.
“It is a political detention,” Zhang said. “The motivation to detain him and the charge are not the same.”
Participants in Wang’s movement have protested in the street, holding up signs and banners to declare their demands. Several of them also have been detained ahead of the anniversary.
Most of those detained have been charged with picking quarrels and provoking trouble, a charge critics say is used to disguise political persecution.
Amnesty International has criticized Beijing for this year’s persecution of activists and said it is contrary to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) promise of openness.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of