A Chinese labor rights group on Saturday said that at least 10 of its supporters were detained by police in several cities across China, in the latest apparent crackdown against its advocates.
Student-led campaigning from China’s top universities has surged in recent years, as young college students rally behind labor rights and unions, despite pressure from universities and police.
The Jasic Workers Solidarity group, which supports workers at welding machinery firm Jasic Technology Co, said that the advocates were detained by police on Friday night.
Photo: Reuters
Five were graduates of Peking University — one of the country’s top-ranked institutions.
One of the graduates, Zhang Shengye (張聖業), was “kidnapped” on the school campus, the group said in its statement.
An eyewitness and Peking University student claimed that more than 10 people in dark-colored clothing beat Zhang before dragging him into a black car.
“They hit him hard and quickly got Zhang under control,” he told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A few other students who were passing by were also beaten, he said, adding that they were forced to the ground and stopped from taking photos or speaking.
“Peking University acquiesced to the kidnapping — this is another crime universities have committed against progressive students and the leftwing community,” the group said.
In addition to Zhang, four other Peking University graduates went missing on Friday, after police raided homes in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, the group said.
In Shenzhen, in China’s Guangdong Province, two people who operated a non-profit for young workers, as well as members of their staff, were taken by police as well, the group said.
Three workers who were part of the solidarity group, plus an unspecified number of activists in Guangdong Province, also disappeared in the police sweep, it said.
Reporters could not independently verify the labor group’s claims.
Police in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Shanghai did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In August, a police raid swept up student activists in Guangdong Province, the group’s official Web site said, adding that police beat students and confiscated their phones.
Yue Xin (岳昕), a Peking University student who coauthored a petition demanding the release of details about a probe into allegations of sexual abuse at the school, has not been heard from since she was detained in the August raid.
Two students from Renmin University of China and Peking University were on Friday also taken away by police for several hours after taking photos in front of an Apple store in Beijing.
The students — a group of 10 in total — were protesting the alleged exploitation of workers at a factory producing Apple Watches in southwestern China.
Apple has said it is investigating the claims.
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,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the