Authorities in China have arrested 19 people suspected of “provoking incidents” during three days of riots in the country’s southern industrial heartland, state media said yesterday.
The violence in Guangdong Province was the latest in a series of flare-ups in the country, which analysts say highlight resentment towards an unresponsive government.
The clashes in Xintang, a district in the greater Guangzhou area, began on June 10 after rumors spread that police had beaten a street hawker to death and manhandled his pregnant wife.
“On June 15 the judicial authorities arrested 19 people suspected of obstructing the work of the police, provoking incidents and deliberately destroying property,” the Zengcheng Daily said onFriday in an article published on a local government Web site.
The article stressed that nobody was killed in the clashes and said “armed police did not carry lethal weapons or fire a single shot.”
“There was no confrontation between police and the civilian population, nor between the local population and migrants,” the article said.
But television images of the unrest showed hundreds of officers and armored vehicles deployed, with people hurling bricks and bottles at local officials and police, and vandalizing ATMs and police posts.
The Xinhua news agency ran a long article yesterday highlighting wealth inequalities and social division between locals and migrant workers in the area.
Official statistics show that Xintang has a local population of around 200,000 but as many as 500,000 to 600,000 unregistered migrant workers without access to public services, Xinhua said.
The Guangzhou riots followed hot on the heels of a mass protest in the central Hubei Province on June 9, when 1,500 people clashed with riot squads following the alleged death in police custody of a local legislator.
Earlier this month, hundreds of people battled police and destroyed cars in another incident in Guangdong, after a factory worker was wounded in a knife attack over a wage dispute.
And in late May, thousands of ethnic Mongols protested in northern China for several days after the killing of a herder laid bare simmering anger over what some perceive as Chinese oppression.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday declared martial law in an unannounced late night address broadcast live on YTN television. Yoon said he had no choice but to resort to such a measure in order to safeguard free and constitutional order, saying opposition parties have taken hostage of the parliamentary process to throw the country into a crisis. "I declare martial law to protect the free Republic of Korea from the threat of North Korean communist forces, to eradicate the despicable pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people, and to protect the free
The US deployed a reconnaissance aircraft while Japan and the Philippines sent navy ships in a joint patrol in the disputed South China Sea yesterday, two days after the allied forces condemned actions by China Coast Guard vessels against Philippine patrol ships. The US Indo-Pacific Command said the joint patrol was conducted in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone by allies and partners to “uphold the right to freedom of navigation and overflight “ and “other lawful uses of the sea and international airspace.” Those phrases are used by the US, Japan and the Philippines to oppose China’s increasingly aggressive actions in the
A string of rape and assault allegations against the son of Norway’s future queen have plunged the royal family into its “biggest scandal” ever, wrapping up an annus horribilis for the monarchy. The legal troubles surrounding Marius Borg Hoiby, the 27-year-old son born of a relationship before Norwegian Crown Princess Mette-Marit’s marriage to Norwegian Crown Prince Haakon, have dominated the Scandinavian country’s headlines since August. The tall strapping blond with a “bad boy” look — often photographed in tuxedos, slicked back hair, earrings and tattoos — was arrested in Oslo on Aug. 4 suspected of assaulting his girlfriend the previous night. A photograph
‘KAMPAI’: It is said that people in Japan began brewing rice about 2,000 years ago, with a third-century Chinese chronicle describing the Japanese as fond of alcohol Traditional Japanese knowledge and skills used in the production of sake and shochu distilled spirits were approved on Wednesday for addition to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list, a committee of the UN cultural body said It is believed people in the archipelago began brewing rice in a simple way about two millennia ago, with a third-century Chinese chronicle describing the Japanese as fond of alcohol. By about 1000 AD, the imperial palace had a department to supervise the manufacturing of sake and its use in rituals, the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association said. The multi-staged brewing techniques still used today are
RSS