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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS