Video of Jasic workers protest: as workers continue to voice their demands to unionise, the local ACFTU held a meeting with company representatives and announce the efforts to establish enterprise union enter a new stage “after 2 months of working together.” #unionAccountability pic.twitter.com/5CeTQbnE7W

— CLB (@chinalabour) July 24, 2018

After generations of teaching Lenin and Marx in schools, many students have taken the lessons to heart, willing to come to the aid of the proletariat. They had their opportunity after a strike broke out in a Shenzhen factory, a strike which led to an arrest of workers in late August, the largest such arrest since 2015.

Factory workers at Jasic Technology, which exports welding machine parts to U.S. companies, had been demanding the right to form a union but the company rejected their efforts. Learning the news, students from leading universities around the country decide to join the fight and organized rallies, which only really made sense given their education.

5天了，我们的兄弟姐妹——岳昕、梦雨等左翼青年，尚杨雪、唐向伟等被取保候审的工友，小胡、吴大哥等声援团中的工友，冯歌、展振振等进步学生依旧下落不明！腐朽的反动势力进行暴力清场是要一条道走到黑的。我们不再心存幻想，张圣业已发布清场事件亲历书，吹响了重新战斗的号角！黑暗不散，斗争不息！ pic.twitter.com/AJYpfpQ7MT

— 岳昕 (@yuexinmutian) August 29, 2018

(In this tweet posted by members of the student movement, they reiterate their “solidarity with the workers,” refer to their arrested “brothers and sisters,” and call the authorities “reactionary forces.”)

In fact, the very symbols of their resistance were ripped from old communist icons:  they carried portraits of Mao, sung socialist anthems, and repeated old party slogans such as one in a petition that reads, “Our ancestors’ baton is firmly in our hands. Long live the working class!” Like early party activists, they spoke out against poverty, worker rights and gender equality. They also point to the nation’s constitution which dictates that the country is to be led by the working class.

However, despite this, authorities have been reacting more like it was 1989 and quickly moved to crush their efforts, detaining several dozen of the student activists and working to erase their presence online. However, the students appear to be undaunted, arguing that they are only doing what they were taught was right.

#jasic #北科大黑社会事件 #北京科技大学 #高校打压进步社团 #Beijing #marxism #PKU
【紧急快讯】这是北科现场发来的打人视频这些北科的黑社会推搡，抢夺，谩骂，打人，真是无所不用其极！这难道就是一个211高等院校的风采？ pic.twitter.com/CBHFo4gHyE

— 佳士声援团 (@jasicworkers) September 27, 2018

“What we are doing is entirely legal and reasonable,” said Chen Kexin, a senior at Renmin University in Beijing who took part in the protests. “We are Marxists. We praise socialism. We stand with workers. The authorities can’t target us.”

Ironically, it was President Xi Jinping who, most recently, implemented a policy to teach more Mao and Marx in schools. It would appear, as is characteristic of students in China, they took their lessons seriously.

施英：一周新闻聚焦：深圳佳士工运维权遭当局镇压，数十名工友和学生被抓https://t.co/htj5tDBCCd
持续数月的深圳佳士科技公司工人维权运动，因毛派势力介入，受到海内外人士关注，也令广东当局高度紧张，在互联网及微信群，相关文字及图片均遭屏蔽。 pic.twitter.com/4GTr7A831v

— Cai Chu (@caichu88) August 27, 2018

While this is shocking and unexpected it is not common for people to disappear in China. The nation has a standing reputation for kidnapping its own citizens for many reasons including alleged corruption or any kind of human rights collaboration against the government.

Citizens that have been abducted usually show up months later having been tried in court and prosecuted without representation if they even show up at all.

The arrest opens the latest chapter in what activists are calling China’s “War on Law.” The BBC reports that more than 300 lawyers, legal assistants and activists have been questioned for their roles in anti-government activity and more than two dozen have been the subjects of formal investigations.

Amnesty International called Jiang’s trial a “Sham.” Speaking to Reuters from the United States, his wife Jin Bianling said she will not accept the verdict. She adds that she has not seen her husband since November 2016, when he disappeared while visiting the family of fellow rights lawyer Xi Yang.

In August, Jiang was put before state media during his trial when he read a confession which stated he had traveled overseas to receive training on dismantling China’s political system.

Before he was arrested, Jiang had a long clientele list of fellow rights lawyers, activists, Falun Gong supporters and Tibetan protesters. He was a vocal critic of the government’s suppression of descent, as well as its imprisonment of those seen by the ruling Communist Party as a threat to maintaining power and support.

Last year, the State Department then led by John Kerry decided to hand China a waiver to stay in Tier II for showing some improvement. But this year, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson decided China won’t get another “get-out-of-jail free card.”

Among a list of reasons he bumped China out, Tillerson said the government “has not taken serious steps to end its own complicity in trafficking, including forced laborers from North Korea that are located in China.”

The report accused China of being the source of several forms of trafficking including forced labor, forced begging, sex trafficking and trafficking of people from outside countries into China.

The U.S.’s move comes amid a shaking of Sino-American relations. In recent weeks, President Donald Trump seemed to lose patience with China after he announced that efforts to encourage China to take a tougher stance on nuclear-armed North Korea have “not worked out.” And his recent meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi probably didn’t raise many smiles among the Communist Party leadership.

Lobsang Sangay, the president of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), said the invasion and occupation of Tibet has failed because the Chinese thought they would defeat Tibetans or force them into assimilation. “But it did not work,” he said.
“Since 1980s, we have rebuilt voluntarily mainly by Tibetans inside Tibet and Buddhism has revived. And our sense of culture, civilization and identity has also been revived in Tibet,” Sangay said yesterday at a public event organized by The Heritage Foundation, an American think-tank.
“Buddhism has revived. Tibetans in Tibet are not just embracing Buddhism even the second and third generation of Tibetans are very much conscious of their identity,” he proclaimed. Still, he acknowledged China’s “hellbent” intention to drive Tibetan culture to the ground.

“Unfortunately, what is happening is that the Chinese government is reviving something akin to the cultural revolution in Tibet,” he said pointing out monasteries in Tibet “from where monks and nuns are being expelled” including the Larung Gar monastery home to 12,000 monks.

Although he says the … discourage setting oneself on fire, he added: “Because of this and other repressive policies of the Chinese government, 149 Tibetans have committed self- immolation of which nearly 130 have died.”

He noted that not a single Chinese person has been harmed by Tibetans and reiterated the “middle way” of the Dalai Lama in resolving the dispute. Nonetheless, Sangay called for Tibetans to be granted “genuine” autonomy within China, within the framework of the Chinese Constitution.

“If the Chinese government implement their own laws listed in the Constitution and minorities nationalities act, we could take that as genuine autonomy,” he concluded.

These companies will have to follow rules and “information security protocols”, including “emergency response” and vetting following disasters, according to the state news agency Xinhua.

Going into effect June 1, these regulations are meant to bring online media in line with traditional news outlets.

Those subject to the new rules include websites, applications, forums, blogs, microblogs, public accounts, instant messaging tools and internet broadcasts,” according to the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). The organization says these measures would “strengthen management of information” and “promote the healthy and orderly development of internet news, in accordance to law.”

Those who don’t pass the government’s jumping jacks and aren’t awarded with a license will not be allowed to post news or commentary about the government, economy, military, foreign affairs, or “other areas of public interest.”

This marks the latest in a long-running effort by Beijing to be head gate keeper of the information traveling into and outside its borders.

In recent years, CAC has been focused on tightening online media regulation with a razor sharp focus on live streaming and video blogging, both becoming increasingly popular.

In July 2016, it fined various news outlets for sharing independent news stories.

But those granted these prized licenses are instructed to do their best to keep them. Failure to follow these rules would result in fines of up to $4,350 and license termination.

Lee Ming-Che has not been heard from for 23 days. On Monday, China revoked his wife’s travel permit shortly before she got on a flight to Beijing where she was planning to speak with authorities about her husband’s whereabouts.

According to China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, Lee is being held on suspicion that he engaged in activities that endangered national security. But Taiwanese officials want to know more.

This conflict further damages the already strained, nearly non-existent, relationship between Beijing and Taipei. Neither party has formally recognized the other for more than 70 years and China still regards Taiwan as a breakaway province under its control.

“We urge the mainland Chinese side to look at this issue correctly and respond immediately including with a speedy disclosure of the real reasons and location of detention as well as let family visit as soon as possible to avoid complicating matters and even causing impacts that neither side wants to see,” Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said in a statement Monday.

Lee is long-time activist, a philosophy scholar, and a former worker for Taiwan’s ruling party – one that many critics view as independence leaning, even though President Tsai Ing-wen never publicly endorsed autonomy. China and Taiwan have not exchanged official dialogue since she took office last May.

Lee’s colleagues say he went missing on March 19 after taking a flight from Taipei to the Chinese territory of Macau. They say he was on his way to Guangzhou to visit friends and buy Chinese medicine for his mother in-law.

But his activities in Taiwan were quite extensive, according to some of his contacts. One fellow human rights worker said he visited China once a year in the past decade to assist Chinese lawyers in human rights cases. Since July 2015, Chinese authorities have targeted more than 200 human rights lawyers and activists in a nationwide crackdown, says the advocacy group Amnesty International.

The organization’s latest global report on the death penalty indicates that the Chinese government sanctioned more than 1,032 executions worldwide in 2016. But the real score on the mainland remains property of the Communist state.

Still, Amnesty speculates that thousands of people could have been subject to capital punishment in China that year. Dui Hua, an American human rights group, puts the figure at about 2,000 based on court research and communication with government officials and scholars.

The Secretary general of Amnesty International has called on China to loosen the noose.

Salil Shetty says “China wants to be a leader on the world stage, but when it comes to the death penalty it is leading in the worst possible way – executing more people annually than any other country in the world.

“The Chinese government has recognized it is a laggard in terms of openness and judicial transparency, but it persists in actively concealing the true scale of executions. It is high time for China to lift the veil on this deadly secret and finally come clean about its death penalty system.”

Still, the rights group notes that the worldwide record on China’s card has dropped by 63% from 2015, when it executed at a record high.

Chief Justice Zhou Qiang has told China’s top legislative body that capital punishment applies only for “an extremely small number of criminals for extremely serious offenses.” Nonetheless, public criticism of the death penalty has risen due to a few high-profile cases involving victims who were later found to be innocent.

Known for taking politically sensitive cases and defending dissident scholars and sexual abuse victims, Zhou was sentenced to seven years in prison for subverting state power, which drew much criticism from international human rights groups. It was part of a widespread crackdown on activists that kicked off in 2015.

Chief Justice Zhou Qiang also applauded Chinese President Xi Jinping’s for leading his long-running, anti-corruption crackdown. Chinese courts heard 45,000 corruption cases in 2016 involving 63,000 people — up from 34,000 cases the previous year, according to figures given by Zhou.

He highlighted how the Supreme People’s Court had heard 23,000 cases in 2016 with just 1,076 defendants being found not guilty. That’s a 99.2% conviction rate.

He further commended the justice system for punishing “violent terrorism” and crimes against state security.

China was in the news again this week for its inhumane crimes. The non-profit global human rights organization Human Rights Watch published a new report Tuesday saying that China is “using torture” in its war on corruption. Irony at its best (or worst, rather). The report said that government officials caught up in President Xi’s corruption crackdown are beaten, forced into stress positions for hours on end, and deprived of sleep, food, and water. The report also stated that these torture tactics are commonplace in China’s parallel extrajudicial justice system.  

Extrajudicial punishment oftentimes goes hand-in-hand with politically authoritarian regimes, sadly. In China, this system has punished more than one million officials in the four years since President Xi took office, British news source The Telegraph reported. Chinese state media said at least eleven people have died since 2010 in this horrific parallel system.

President Xi’s massive campaign to “break corruption” makes all 88 members of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) vulnerable to his conniving parallel system and its disturbing acts of torture. Many experts criticize the lack of transparency of Xi’s campaign, and also claim he uses it as a front so he may remove rivals from key government positions.

Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said, “President Xi has built his anti-corruption campaign on an abusive and illegal detention system.”

“Torturing suspects to confess won’t bring an end to corruption, but will end any confidence in China’s judicial system,” she added.

HRW’s report on the matter, titled “‘Special Measures’: Detention and Torture in Chinese Communist Party’s Shuanggui System,” stated that officials often detain people without notifying their family or friends, forcing them into padded cells without windows.

A former detainee spoke to Human Rights Watch, detailing the hellish experience: “If you sit, you have to sit for 12 hours straight, if you stand then you have to stand for 12 hours as well. My legs became swollen, and my buttocks were raw and started oozing puss,” the detainee said.

Another prisoner spoke to a Beijing-based lawyer, telling him that he was forced to stand for 23 hours a day for more than a week with a book on his head until he confessed.

“After he said it, he was allowed two hours of sleep every day,” the lawyer said.

“At that point his feet were swollen like an elephant’s, and he could no longer urinate.”

This parallel justice system – which is anything but just – is called “shuanggui”, which translates in Mandarin to having to report to authorities at a “designated time” and “designated location”.

Hopefully the Human Rights Watch’s 102-page report will shed light on “Shuanggui”, putting President Xi’s system of torture and cruelty in the global spotlight and force him to be held accountable for his human rights violations.