A Chinese investigative journalist who accused officials of corruption has been released after almost a year in detention, his lawyer said on Sunday.
Liu Hu (劉虎), a reporter with Guangzhou-based newspaper New Express, was arrested on a charge of defamation in September last year.
His lawyer Zhou Ze (周澤) said prosecutors had called him to say that Liu was being released as they were “unable to proceed with the case within the legal detention limits.”
Writing on his microblog, Zhou said: “I have always believed that Liu Hu was innocent.”
Liu was first detained in August last year on suspicion of “fabricating and spreading rumors” after accusing a deputy director of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, a business regulatory body, of dereliction of duty while serving as Chinese Communist Party secretary of a district in southwestern Chongqing.
Zhou had called the charge a “speech crime” and said the government could be targeting Liu because he had detailed specific allegations against a number of officials, including some in senior positions, in many provinces.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has made fighting graft a priority of his administration, and has specifically targeted extravagance and waste to quell public anger over corruption and restore faith in the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
The government had encouraged the use of the Internet to expose graft, but has detained activists who called for officials to publicly disclose their assets and cracked down on what it calls “rumor-mongering” in what is widely seen as an effort to halt criticism of the party.
Wary of threats to its authority or social stability, the party has also stepped up its already tight control over social media to limit public discussion of sensitive political issues.
High-profile bloggers and investigative reporters have said the campaign’s effect has been to force them to curtail sensitive postings for fear of detention.
Lawyers and activists have called the crackdown a significant if crude expansion of powers to police the Internet and a blow to those who use microblogs and the Internet to disseminate information in the belief that they are not monitored as strictly as traditional media.
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