On day one of US President Donald Trump’s “state visit-plus” to China he was treated to a tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, a night at the opera and an intimate dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
“Beyond terrific,” he boasted.
Li Wenzu (李文足) got a loud knock at the door from a man claiming to represent the domestic security agency tasked with suppressing political dissent.
Photo: Reuters
“The US president is in town,” the 32-year-old mother-of-one said she was informed by the agent. “Do not go anywhere … you must cooperate with our work.”
Li is the wife of Wang Quanzhang, (王全璋) a crusading human rights lawyer whom she has not seen since the summer of 2015, when he was spirited into secret detention during a roundup of attorneys and activists known as Xi’s “war on law.”
With China’s leader out to impress his US guest, Li and dissidents like her said they have been placed under house arrest or heavy surveillance in a bid to stop them from spoiling the show.
“[The authorities] are afraid of us meeting with foreign leaders, of our stories being heard by people all over the world and of the truth being uncovered,” she said by telephone yesterday morning as Xi rolled out the red carpet for Trump in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
After the knock on her door at about 7am on Wednesday, Li said about a dozen plainclothes agents had camped outside her apartment in west Beijing.
When she tried to go out with her young son, she said one group member “pushed me with his body and prevented us from going.”
“Shame on him!” Li said. “Just think about it, I don’t have the right to go anywhere in the country. It is ridiculous. I felt so powerless.”
Beijing-based activist He Depu (何德普) told Radio Free Asia, a US-backed broadcaster, that other activists were also feeling the pinch because of Trump’s arrival.
“All political dissidents are under surveillance right now,” he said.
Peter Dahlin, a Swedish human rights campaigner who was expelled from China last year after 23 days in secret detention, said that authorities saw Li — who has campaigned relentlessly on behalf of her imprisoned husband — as a “constant thorn in their side.”
He called her treatment “unusual even for China” and symptomatic of a wider breakdown in the rule of law under Xi.
Dahlin, a friend of Li’s husband, said that Wang had spent so long in secret detention that “at one point people were seriously wondering if he was even alive any more.”
Wang is now thought to be behind bars in Tianjin.
Trump has enraged human rights activists by courting China’s authoritarian leader despite what they call the government’s worst crackdown in decades.
Trump has called Xi a friend and recently praised his “extraordinary elevation” and “great political victory” after he was anointed China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong (毛澤東).
On Wednesday, US Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican, rejected that description.
“President Xi’s further consolidation of power, in a one-party communist state, was not a political victory. It was a tragedy for human rights advocates, reformers and thousands of political prisoners,” he tweeted.
“I hope [Trump] can show concern for human rights issues in China… He should think carefully about dealing with a country that does not care about human rights and violates the law,” Li said.
“It’s just like when we are making friends, we must first look at the character of the person [we are befriending],” she said.
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
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.