Beijing-based artist Hua Yong (華湧) has been detained by police after documenting the mass eviction of migrant workers, his friends said yesterday.
“His current situation is unknown. We have contacted his family and lawyer and legal formalities are being processed,” a handwritten statement posted on Hua’s Twitter and signed by artists Ji Feng (季風) and Guo Zhenming (郭珍明) said.
In the weeks before he disappeared, Hua uploaded dozens of videos on YouTube and Chinese social media platform WeChat documenting the destruction of migrant neighborhoods on the outskirts of Beijing.
Since setting up a YouTube account only two weeks ago, his videos have been viewed tens of thousands of times and some have been translated by others into English.
Hua was taken from a friend’s home in Tianjin early on Saturday after fleeing Beijing to evade police, other friends said.
“Police grabbed him. Didn’t you know? Nobody is able to contact him,” one of them said on condition of anonymity.
The Tianjin Public Security Bureau could not be reached for comment.
Hua’s videos, usually shot with a selfie stick, brought viewers into demolished migrant neighborhoods and recorded his conversations with displaced low-income workers.
In one he walks between heaps of rubble, gesturing around him and saying: “The sky is very blue today, but look at what’s behind me, all ruined in an instant.”
Hua on Friday night posted several videos on Twitter entitled “They’re Here.” In the videos he said police were at the door and he would soon have to leave with them.
“Daddy is using these last minutes to sing you a song: ‘Happy birthday to you’ ... Daddy wants our country to be better; it should be just, fair, free and democratic with free speech,” Hua said, addressing his three-year-old daughter.
Hundreds of millions of migrants who moved from China’s countryside to its cities has fueled the nation’s dramatic economic boom, but some are no longer welcome in overcrowded Beijing, which seeks to cap its population at 23 million by 2020 and demolish 40 million square meters of illegal structures — mostly shops and homes for migrants — by the end of the year.
Authorities say that they need to clear dangerous buildings after a fire killed 19 people last month. A blaze in another migrant area killed five people last week.
Fire safety is a major problem in the city’s cheap migrant housing, which often has jerry-rigged electrical wiring and an absence of emergency exits, but the brutal efficiency of the demolitions and mass evictions has provoked an unusual public outcry that has put officials on edge.
Amnesty International China researcher Patrick Poon said authorities are “very concerned” that discussions about the topic would harm China’s image.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has since taking power in 2012 led a sweeping crackdown on civil society, targeting everyone from human rights lawyers to celebrity gossip bloggers.
Activists have been jailed on charges such as “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” “subversion of state power” and defamation for spreading “false rumors” online.
“Ironically, by targeting Hua Yong, it further hurts China’s image when even documenting what happened could be justified as a crime,” Poon said.
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
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
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of