The 16-year-old son of a rights lawyer detained in China’s sweeping crackdown on civil society has disappeared in Myanmar after trying to escape to the US, a rights campaigner involved in the plan said yesterday.
Bao Zhuoxuan (包卓軒) and two men helping him were taken away by local police from a guest house in a border town on Tuesday last week, Zhou Fengsuo (周鋒鎖) — a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests — said by telephone from San Francisco, citing information from the guest house in Mong La, Myanmar.
“The plan was for him to travel to Thailand, and I would meet him there and help him seek refugee entry into the United States,” Zhou said, adding that friends of Bao’s family who live in San Francisco want to adopt him.
“He has expressed his will to study abroad and eventually study law, like his mother,” Zhou said.
Bao is the son of Wang Yu (王郁), a lawyer who disappeared on July 9 amid a round-up of dozens of rights lawyers and social activists in a broad crackdown on civil society in China.
Wang has represented people involved in politically sensitive cases and earlier this year was the legal counsel for one of five women’s rights activists jailed over a planned event against sexual harassment.
Bao and his father were detained on the same day by police at Beijing Capital International Airport on their way to Australia, where Bao was to attend high school. Bao was released after two days, but his passport was revoked, Zhou said. His parents are still missing.
The two men helping him to leave China were Tang Zhishun (唐志順), 40, an engineer from Beijing, and Xing Qingxian (辛清賢), 49, a human rights activist from Chengdu, Zhou said.
“We are really worried now. He is just a 16-year-old boy,” said Zhou, who lives in San Francisco. “We know that the intention is to use him as a hostage against his parents, both of them famous human rights defenders.”
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