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.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema