Stuff about Shanghai cop killer Yang Jia （杨佳）

Some interesting statements during the court proceedings:

　杨佳当庭直言：我是无罪的，是他们违法，有罪的是他们。（指警察，发人深思啊）
[Yang Jia: I am innocent, is they who are guilty of breaking the law.]

　法官问：你有什么补充意见？杨佳说：“这些警察之所以敢这样，都是因为他们的背后有你们”。
[Judge asks: do you have any thing to add to your statement? Yang Jia: "the reason the police dare to act the way they do is because
you guys stand behind them."]

　法庭最后陈述，杨佳说：“被这样的警察管理着的国家，一个遵纪守法二十几年的公民最后都会被判刑坐牢。” （说出了绝大多数民众的心里话）

杨佳最著名语录：你不给我一个说法，我就给你一个说法。

[Closing statement. Yang Jia says: "a country run by policemen such as this will force someone who has been law-abiding for twenty some years to end up going to jail." The blogger says: (these are the true feelings of the overwhelming majority of people).

Yang Jia's most famous quote: If you don't give me an explanation, I will give you one.]

Elsewhere, citizen blogger and journalist Zola reposts a general letter calling for amnesty for Yang. The letter states a few reasons for this, beginning with some general reasons (the world is generally moving away from capital punishment, even some war criminals were pardoned in China) and then moving to some specific issues relating to how the case was handled (judicial mishandling, interference). Zola states what most others have said about this case: that the tragedy of Yang is that he was an ordinary fellow that was driven to homicidal rage by the pigs. Left with no legal recourse, stymied by a system that was patently designed to thwart demands like his, he had no other choice but to exact his revenge in blood. This open letter was signed by the following people:

中华人民共和国公民：（按签名顺序排，第一批签名人员名单）

艾未未（北京艺术家）、茅于轼（北京经济学家）、杜光（北京离休人员）、于浩成（北京法学家）、戴晴（北京学者）、张祖桦（北京学者）、王俊秀（北京学者）、古川（北京编辑）、陈永苗（北京律师）、李苏滨（北京律师）、江天勇（北京律师）、黎雄兵（北京律师）、唐吉田（北京律师）、杨凤春（北京学者）、王治晶（北京自由撰稿人）、夏业良（北京学者）、冉云飞（四川编辑）、廖亦武（四川作家）、张博树（北京法学家）、萧默（北京学者）、刘序盾（北京学者）、李智英（北京学者）、李槟（南京教师）、孙岩力（北京教师）、王卫星（北京记者）、谭洪安（北京编辑）、于赤阳（黑龙江公民）、张辉（山西民主人士）、贾瑞明（河北农民）、谢军（深圳设计）、王靖禹（旅英学者）、华乔（上海摄影师）、释妙觉慈智（广东法师）、林树坤（瑞士出版人）、范冲（北京学生）、张志强（北京打工之友）、李勉之（深圳工程师）、曹王澜（广东民工）、张赞宁（江苏教师)、龚光云(广东学者)、郭玉闪（北京学者）、周曙光（楚国人）、淮生（北京自由职业者）、马萧（北京记者）

2008年10月20日

YOu can see that Ai Weiwei (Mr. I hate my bird nest and the fake Olympics) among many other scholars, writers, and intellectuals from around the country. There was only one person from Shanghai that signed it, and that was photographer Hua Qiao.

The story has gathered some steam and AFP and a bunch of other western media sources are running this story, noting that there were protests in Shanghai outside the courtroom where Yang’s trial was held:

Huang Xuemin, a grey-haired protester, complained police beat her when she tried to enter the court premises.

“You see how police were treating us, and you could imagine how badly Yang Jia must be treated,” she said, showing the assembled crowd scratches on her forearms that she said were from her scuffle with police.

Obviously, this is only the tip of the iceberg, and there are vast amounts of debates going on online … personally, I just want to know the truth about what happened to the guy. I want there to be an investigation into whether or not he was mistreated by the police. I think that’s what most of his supporters want. As to whether or not he should die–well, he did kill a lot of people, and I don’t think there is any justification even if you were insulted or beaten or otherwise felt your dignity to have suffered as a results of other people’s actions. That said, I am *almost* categorically against the death penalty, because I feel uneasy with the idea of the state arrogating to itself to mete out this kind of brutal punishment.

Oh well. Yang Jia will face the firing squad, a dead chicken for all the rebellious monkeys lurking in the underbelly of Chinese society. And for those that support or otherwise sympathize for Yang, that will just prove what they’ve been saying all along.

Technorati Tags: yang jia, 杨佳, crime, shanghai, murder, police, expression china, chinese, media, newspaper, reporters, journalist, government, corruption

Chinese journalist Jing Jianfeng to go on trial

Just saw this on a Xici thread.

Basically, the story goes like this: Cheng Weixiu (成维秀), a migrant worker from Lin county in Shanxi province（陝西臨縣) was supposedly beaten to death by a coal mine boss Xue Sanwei (薛三卫) in 2007. Cheng’s relative (cousin?) Cheng Yunqiang (成运强) and some other relatives paid a visit to a hotel that Xue owned to seek redress, conflict ensued, and the local police detained Cheng Yunqiang on the grounds that they were inciting violence or crime. However, Cheng managed to escape to Beijing, where he got in touch with civil law journalist Jing Jianfeng (景剑峰) to discuss his case. However, the Lin county police came to Beijing and discovered Cheng’s whereabouts, detained him, and since Jing Jianfeng was there, detained him as well.

After Jing was taken, various rumors were spread around; some say he was extorting the mine boss for 7 million RMB.

The post then encourages people to pay attention to Jian’s case, because he is going on trial October 24, 2008 in Lvliang City, Shanxi province (山西省吕梁市临县) on three counts: obstruction of justice, hiding known fugitives, and receiving a bribe of a 8700 RMB valued laptop computer.

The writer of the post then encourages people to pay attention and stand up for Jian because, as a reporter, anyone of us could be next!

After reading this, I decided to find and read some other reports that Jian has written. The few that I have cursorily read are all quite interesting. There is one written this year about Foshan in Guangdong province, where a former village named Buxin (布心) was made part of Foshan city and all the former villagers given city hukous. However, they lost their livelihood in this process: formerly collectively owned agricultural land has been requisitioned by the government. This happened in 1992, and according to the report, the people of Buxin feel that their standard of living has suffered since then: one person said “before 1992, our lives were getting better day by day. And since 1992, our lives have been getting worse day by day.“

The developers are associated with the government. They gave the villagers compensation for the property and objects on the land, but crucially, not the land itself: in 1992 the land was worth 35,000 rmb per mu, and with 4000 mu or so that comes out to 150 million RMB. The price of land now is worth 450,000 RMB per mu, which means that their former land is now worth about 1.8 billion RMB.

In the beginning, the two development companies had given the villagers some jobs, but after some SOEs went bankrupt or laid off workers, most of the villagers lost their jobs, and being unemployed were not qualified for any compensation. Despite their low incomes they were not given any basic social welfare. Even though they have the hukous, they don’t have basic medical insurance, unemployment insurance, or retirement/old age insurance.

It is quite telling that many of the villagers in Buxin are actually envious of the neighboring villages, which have not become part of any cities, and therefore are able to keep their agricultural land, which provides a basic source of income, and which allowed them to create several enterprises as well.

There’s another interesting report Jian wrote about the so-called Guangzhou phenomenon, which basically means that down in Guangzhou, the representatives/legislators are encouraged to speak the truth. They are encouraged to openly communicate rather than repeat the same tired cliches and nostrums. They are encouraged to speak their minds, even if what they say could be–gasp!–wrong, or erroneous.

Further proof that in many regards, Guangzhou is the vanguard of Chinese political culture.

I don’t think that Jing is a real muckracker, but in a place like China, one wonders if not this whole business has not been vetted or at least conveniently ignored by the powers that be, and if that has anything to do with what Jian writes. I don’t know enough about Jian or his work to say. I think it’s safe enough to say that he is being placed on trial on account of this Cheng Yunqiang business, even though that is absurd as it is.

jian jianfeng, press, reporters, freedom, china, chinese, media, crime, coal, miners, mine, law, trials, court

Shanghai man leaves his mentally disabled wife on the side of the road

Where she got into an traffic accident and was killed.

Li Jun and his wife Zhao Xue were married nine years ago. He knew that she had a history of mental illness but they decided to get married anyway.

Later on, she became too unstable. When she got pregnant, he had her committed to an institution so that she wouldn’t do harm to their child. A few years pass and Li Jun still doesn’t have the means (economic or otherwise) to deal with her and so places her in a “pig cage” and feeds her a couple of times a day.

He meets another woman: they fall in love and he wants to divorce his wife to be with the new woman. The trouble is that you’ve got a person suffering from mental illness, you need to get their legally appointed representative to make that decision and sign that paper — in this case, his wife’s little sister. However the little sister had always been recalcitrant in this manner and even pretended to “disappear” so that Li Jun wouldn’t be able to find her. At wit’s end, Li decided, along with his father, to leave his wife by the side of the road. He put the little sister’s number on a piece of paper hung around his wife’s neck. He told her was going to buy something to eat and then left.

After a few days, they started getting nervous: no word of Zhao Xue, no calls from Zhao’s sister. Finally they contacted the police, filed a missing persons, and learned that on the very day he left his wife, that there was a traffic accident. A woman was killed and her body had not been identified. Father and son Li confessed to the crime, which in China lessens the sentence. They may just do one year in jail for their crime.
How much time they might do in hell for their sins is another matter.

mental, disease, illness, crime, death, traffic, shanghai

Guizhou: throwback to Cultural Revolution days

贵州桐梓举行公捕公判大会_网易新闻中心 via kwout

贵州桐梓举行公捕公判大会_网易新闻中心 via kwout

Throwback? Maybe they never quite got out of the Cultural Revolution. Some commentators support such measures, but I think that the distinction has to be made between fighting crime (which is naturally a good thing to do, unless that crime involves marijuana, in which case it is a waste of taxpayer money) and holding these public “trials”. These public trials are there to show the good people that the cops are on the job, and show the baddies that this is what happens to you, but of course the main point is that we should not have public “trials” of this sort in this day and age.

An addendum:

One of the comments on the first page of that post:

向各位记者提供社会新闻线索：贵州省丹寨县正在修一条通过长青乡龙塘村翻瓮村我不知名的公路，当地的苗族农民不知道什么叫赔偿，只知道土地等一切都是国家的，他们只有也只能跪在田埂上为这一季已抽穗的稻谷而嚎啕大哭。各位记者：苗族农民不是为土地被占而哭（因为他们只知道土地是国家的，国家怎么做就得认命），而是为抽穗的稻谷而哭（象已养大的孩子一样心疼）。在广东打工的我，不能为家乡父母出力和出气，我真的想撞墙。求求为社会主持或反映社会正义的记者深入到：贵州省丹寨县长青乡龙塘村翻瓮村采访。

The commenter says that in the place where he/she is from, in Guizhou province, there is a new road being built that runs through former agricultural land. That the land must be requisitioned and claimed by the government is not the issue, he/she says: the peasants understand that the land belongs to the government, and the commies that giveth can taketh away. The tragedy is that they don’t understand the concept of compensation — not for the land, but for their wheat and rice crops. The commenter says that his peasant families are not sad about the land per se, but about the rice that they grew, which must now be destroyed. The commenter hopes that the journalists reading this will head over there and do some reporting. Fat chance. But perhaps someone like me could…slip in there incognito?

china, guizhou, cultural revolution, chinese, society, trial, laws, public, justice, crime, mafia

ATM scams in China…this is how they do it

银行因挂失电话冗长误事 赔偿客户1万元(图)_网易新闻中心 via kwout

Never deposit a huge wad of money in the bank machine, at least not in Guangzhou, and definitely not in front of strange men that you don’t know. The scam is interesting: Mr. Shu puts the money in, and just as he’s about to finish, a guy next to him says “you dropped some money” and as he bends down to look, another man on the other side puts another bank card into the slot. Shu gets up and thinks that is his card, and walks off. Well maybe he doesn’t walk off—the article says that he was strongly encouraged to leave by the criminals, so it’s hard to say when Shu first noticed something was wrong.
The men, now having access to his account (the real card was still inside), transfer 50,000 RMB out of Shu’s account and also take out some money.

Shu has sued the bank for several reasons. Firstly, there was the phone system: it took him a long time to get through the maddening voice prompt system to the point where he could report the loss of his card. By the time he got someone on the phone and got through with reporting the loss, the money in his bank had long since disappeared. He argued that it was the fault of that system for making him lose precious time and money. He also sued the bank for placing the machines too close together.

The court ruled that the bank had to pay Shu 20% of his losses, which amounted to a bit over 10,000 RMB. The rest, it decided, was his fault for not being more careful and for falling for the old switcheroo.

The troubles in Weng’an and Jiang Jie He village: gangs, dams, mines, gambling, death

I was reading Southern Weekend’s investigation into the Weng’an region: the common wisdom now is that the problems didn’t begin or end with the June 28 incident, but that the latter was merely what happened when long simmering problems reached the boiling point. This report about a place called Jiang Jie He Village (瓮安县龙塘乡江界河村), where there has been a long-standing antagonism between the local government and the people.

The situation is this: the village was moved because of a hydropower project (dam), and as you might imagine, the compensation became the focal point for the villagers affected. They were offered a lump sum of around 18,000RMB. The villagers asked why people in other villages and counties were offered more–500rmb per square meter, for example, when they were only given 232. For every orange tree they lost, people in neighboring places were given 1000 rmb, while the people in Jiang Jie He were only given 100 rmb per tree.

The stand-offs predictably became violent, and the villagers gathered en masse. They held a couple of gov’t cars hostage, and eventually the government brought in 400 police. Thirty-four villagers included women and children were injured. Some of the injured sought treatment in local hospitals and were refused. Many of them had to treat themselves or cross the river and go back home. Incidents like these were not rare.

The article also mentions the effect of sulfur mining. The mining began in 1998, and sometime around 2003, the water levels in the soil began to drop, which made it difficult for the peasants to irrigate their fields. Furthermore, local sources of potable water began drying up, or the water would turn murky white. In fact there are loads of different kinds of mines all around Weng’an:

除了磷矿之外，瓮安还拥有煤、铁、硫铁、铅、锌、铝、硫磺、硅石、重晶石、钾页岩等矿产。这些矿产遍布瓮安，因此各地矿群纠纷不断。而多数时候，当地政府都是出动警力，采取高压手段.

Another problem they have over there is general lawlessness: illegal or “black” taxis, gambling dens, etc. Most of the young people are in some form of gang. The police report that members of at least six gangs were involved in the June 28 events. The article says that women have their own “gangs,” one of which is called the “Auntie Society” (姨妈会).

I haven’t read this article that in-depth, but it does manage to paint an interesting and much more subtle picture of Weng’an and the surrounding areas than we got at first. While other media outlets mention it mostly as some kind of vague anti-CCP anger, there is so much more in it. There are criminal elements, general lawlessnes, and yes, anger at the government that seems to be good at ignoring certain problems and exploiting other problems to their advantage. I don’t envy the people that have to live there.

Movies I’ve watched: Cassandra’s Dream

Is there any reason why Woody Allen should continue subjecting us to these morality tales? If you want to see the Abel and Cain-esque moral fallout that happens when two brothers once so close get in over their heads, you’d be better off watching “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” with Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Woody Allen can still weave a good yarn, but he’s still too talky, and not in a good way. Woody Allen is a natural comic talent, yet he has this more “serious” side that deals with the choices that you make. This is Allen attempting to be Dostoyevsky, attempting to tease out what happens when you murder someone. Do you, like the Ewan McGregor character, move on and get on with your life, or do you, like the Colin Farrell character, get beset by personal demons and fear of God’s censure?

Movies I’ve Watched: In Bruges

In Bruges Movie Reviews, Pictures – Rotten Tomatoes

If you take a cursory look at what the people on Rotten Tomatoes are saying you’d find htat most people have a generally positive take on this film, starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes. I don’t know if I could anymore that hasn’t already been said by people who actually get paid to write about film. Personally, I enjoyed watching Ralph Fiennes and Colin Farrell the most. Colin Farrell has a comic flair that isn’t always well exploited in the Hollywood movies he does, where he’s paid to be dark, manly, sexual, and tough. His character in Bruges is isn’t short on machismo but that’s not the main thing, by far: it’s a personal crisis he has after accidentally killing a young boy after his first hit–on a priest no less–goes somewhat awry. What I like about him, though, is how stupid and opinionated he is (especially regarding the topic of midgets, a topic that seems to really fascinate him). Ralph Fiennes was intriguing for the same reason: he got to play against type. He plays a gangster boss that’s strangely religious (if you kill a little boy by accident, you ought to commit suicide right there and then–as if the murder of innocent children was that much worse than the murder of adults) and who follows his particular code of honor and ethics to the tee. I would bet that the image of Ralph Fiennes that most of us have etched in our minds is one of the quintessential Englishman. He’s elegant, educated, diffident and reserved–and yet underneath that surface there is something very sensitive, something smoldering–and the mystery of what that is varies with each character he has, but is what makes him so compelling to watch (insofar as you might think he’s compelling to watch).

However, when we first meet Fiennes’ character in this movie, it’s through his voice on the other side of the phone, and not his person. When I heard his voice I whispered to my girlfriend that must be Michael Caine in a cameo, because the voice was so Cockney and dirty. But of course, it was Fiennes talking, and that’s what so fun about his character–he got to be so bad, but not without sacrificing the intelligence and refinement to each character that he plays. I just don’t think he’d be able to play a completely inane, macho type gangster even if they decked him out with fake muscles. He’s just too sensitive looking.

Anyway, the film is dark comedy and has a few twists and turns, nothing special, nothing hard to follow. In terms of pacing it keeps an even keel, with plot points and jokes interspersed quite evenly, which makes it that much more enjoyable. Check it out–entertaining and funny in that inimitable British way.

Sichuan officials punished for earthquake relief related issues

Just saw this on Sina. In the city of Ya’An in Sichuan has “fired” three township level party
secretaries and given serious warnings to several other cadres. This was over irregularities
in how the relief efforts were coordinated and handled; for example, how things were
distributed, the speed and efficiency with the work was done, etc. The article states that
the amount of people filing complaints with the local xin fang was, as of June 19,
already 679. I wonder if it was just poor planning, general idiocy, or corruption at work? Or
some combination of all of the above?

Jiaxing: Thieves in the ceilings

The title piqued my interest: a thief in Jiaxing had been living in the area above the ceiling of a hotpot restaurant, in an area that was almost 600 square meters and was also above a fast food restaurant and a noodle shop. Thus if he ever wanted to steal things, he had his pick of three stores to get it from. He had once worked at the hotpot place, but then got fired after the boss suspected him of stealing other employees’ wages. Without an income, he decided to live up above the ceiling, and for the next three months just took whatever he wanted at night. When the police asked him to recount what he had taken and when, he said that he done it so many times that he couldn’t even remember clearly everything that he’d stolen.

Oh well, it was good while it lasted…