Police in riot gear on Friday stormed an apartment in southern China where about 40 student labor-rights advocates and others supporting factory workers seeking to form a labor union were staying, according to people who said they received a video of the raid as it was taking place.
The footage, which was shared with reporters, showed police wearing shields and helmets bursting into the students’ accommodation and scuffling with the occupants.
The footage appeared to show an apartment where the students were staying in Huizhou, near the southern city of Shenzhen, that had been previously visited by reporters.
The video could not be independently verified.
It was not immediately clear what happened to the students.
Calls to police in the area and five people who had been staying at the apartment went unanswered.
Labor rights advocates in other parts of the country who are following the case and had been in touch with people on the scene said they were unable to contact them.
The raid is the latest step by the Chinese authorities to clamp down on a growing labor movement in Guangdong Province that started brewing last month when workers at a welding machinery company, Jasic International, were fired when they tried to create a union.
Labor rights are viewed as a challenge by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, which opposes independent unions and punishes protesters.
On July 27, police detained 29 people, including laid-off workers, their families and supporters. Fourteen people remained in detention.
Since then, support has poured in, with about 50 labor rights advocates, most of them students, traveling to Guangdong to back the workers.
A person who shared the footage of Friday’s raid with reporters said it took place just after 5am.
The person, who declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the footage, said the images were received directly from students in the room when the police entered.
Pressure had been mounting on the group.
In interviews a day before the raid, 15 activists involved in the Jasic case described a multi-pronged effort to force them to disengage from the workers’ cause.
The authorities have flown many of the young people’s parents to Guangdong and put them up in hotels to undergo “training sessions” about how to raise their children, several students said.
Authorities lectured the parents on text messages to send to their children.
They also arranged to have parents show up at various places where their children were, including the apartment and shopping areas where protests have been staged, they said.
The Chinese Ministry of Education issued a notice early this week to universities across the nation telling them to stop students from traveling to Guangdong to participate in the protests, screenshots of messages sent by universities to students showed.
The universities gave a range of explanations to students about why it was unsafe for them to go to Guangdong, including an approaching typhoon and the risk of being recruited into a pyramid scheme, several students said.
Reporters were unable to verify the order and the ministry did not respond to faxed questions.
The hashtag “what’s up with Guangdong?” was trending on microblogging sites as the ministry’s notice spread.
Several of the students’ university advisers had apparently also flown to Guangdong to try to persuade them to leave, some of the activists said.
The protests have spread to Beijing where, on Wednesday and Thursday, a group of 20 students, labor rights advocates and two worker representatives from Jasic submitted petition letters at the headquarters of the All-China Federations of Trade Unions and the All-China Women’s Federation.
‘TERRORIST ATTACK’: The convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri resulted in the ‘martyrdom of five of our armed forces,’ the Presidential Leadership Council said A blast targeting the convoy of a Saudi Arabian-backed armed group killed five in Yemen’s southern city of Aden and injured the commander of the government-allied unit, officials said on Wednesday. “The treacherous terrorist attack targeting the convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri, commander of the Second Giants Brigade, resulted in the martyrdom of five of our armed forces heroes and the injury of three others,” Yemen’s Saudi Arabia-backed Presidential Leadership Council said in a statement published by Yemeni news agency Saba. A security source told reporters that a car bomb on the side of the road in the Ja’awla area in
PRECARIOUS RELATIONS: Commentators in Saudi Arabia accuse the UAE of growing too bold, backing forces at odds with Saudi interests in various conflicts A Saudi Arabian media campaign targeting the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has deepened the Gulf’s worst row in years, stoking fears of a damaging fall-out in the financial heart of the Middle East. Fiery accusations of rights abuses and betrayal have circulated for weeks in state-run and social media after a brief conflict in Yemen, where Saudi airstrikes quelled an offensive by UAE-backed separatists. The United Arab Emirates is “investing in chaos and supporting secessionists” from Libya to Yemen and the Horn of Africa, Saudi Arabia’s al-Ekhbariya TV charged in a report this week. Such invective has been unheard of
US President Donald Trump on Saturday warned Canada that if it concludes a trade deal with China, he would impose a 100 percent tariff on all goods coming over the border. Relations between the US and its northern neighbor have been rocky since Trump returned to the White House a year ago, with spats over trade and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney decrying a “rupture” in the US-led global order. During a visit to Beijing earlier this month, Carney hailed a “new strategic partnership” with China that resulted in a “preliminary, but landmark trade agreement” to reduce tariffs — but
SCAM CLAMPDOWN: About 130 South Korean scam suspects have been sent home since October last year, and 60 more are still waiting for repatriation Dozens of South Koreans allegedly involved in online scams in Cambodia were yesterday returned to South Korea to face investigations in what was the largest group repatriation of Korean criminal suspects from abroad. The 73 South Korean suspects allegedly scammed fellow Koreans out of 48.6 billion won (US$33 million), South Korea said. Upon arrival in South Korea’s Incheon International Airport aboard a chartered plane, the suspects — 65 men and eight women — were sent to police stations. Local TV footage showed the suspects, in handcuffs and wearing masks, being escorted by police officers and boarding buses. They were among about 260 South
RSS