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Just got this courtesy of a fanfou feed: the Chinese government is sending “stability” teams to local governments to help maintain social stability. Of course, as this fanfou person pointed out, this year marks several sensitive anniversaries: uprising in Lhasa, 20th anniversary of June 4th, etc. The news reports even mention how impt this year is, in particular: 今年维护国家安全和社会稳定工作面临的任务繁重而艰巨.
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
This too is a thread from Xici, and in it a reporter talks about the various things that he/she has seen or done in a ten year career as a journalist in China.
说不清我为什么要告别记者生涯，尽管在几年前我已厌倦了这份工作，但真正咬牙下定决心离开，还是年初的事。我揣着记者证，我的社会身份是“记者”，可是这些年来我何尝有机会做过真正的记者？两千多年前太史公秉笔直书不讳君恶，我们今天都做不到。不能真实地记录，不能自由地表达，我还算什么记者？无非是为稻粱谋而已！这样的“记者”生涯，为什么不向它说再见？
[rough trans: I left this work because even though I had been tired of it for awhile, I hadn't worked up the courage to leave until earlier this year. 2000 years ago, Taishigong could directly criticize the rulers, but we cannot do that now. We cannot truthfully record or express what happens, so in what sense are we journalists?] (More …)
The Financial Times has a series of reports on the different government organizations and agencies in China that control the use of its massive, 1.8 trillion USD forex reserve. The State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) is more secretive and has far deeper pockets than CIC, the China Investment Corporation, which is merely the country’s $200bn sovereign wealth fund.
FT reports that SAFE has used its vast wealth as an arm of Chinese foreign policy: it purchased $300m in government bonds from Costa Rica. Costa Rica then ended its 63-year old diplomatic ties to Taiwan. Supposedly, this switch was one of the necessary conditions the Chinese placed on the purchase.
The reports suggest that the Chinese wanted to keep the thing on the DL, despite Costa Rican diplomats’ advice to the contrary.
Ring the alarm bells! If the purpose of the shadowy SAFE is to use money to buy political influence, we better watch out where they are investing. Here’s a list of SAFE investments in the UK.
Blogger and author Chen Xingzhi on Bokee talks about his experiences at the Chinese Communist Party School, where they study Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Deng, and Jiang Zemin. He is, of course, a Party Member and no doubt in some kind of leadership position. He spent four months as in the Party School, attending lectures, taking part in discussions, reading, writing reports, etc. This essay is a philosophical reflection on his experiences there, and I found out it to be one of the most moving things I’ve read, in Chinese, in a while. It gets to the heart of the political culture of the Party, but goes beyond that—that is, one reads it and realized how deep the problem is. I hope everyone gets a chance to read it, and if you read Chinese, I hope you read the original. I unreservedly recommend it.
The writer starts off with some light-hearted banter about how dead-boring some of the lecturers and their lectures are: (More …)
These two pictures, from Hunan province, have been making the rounds on the internet because of what it says on the banners: the first one says “谁不依法信访就打击谁” which means “whoever unlawfully petitions the government will be attacked” while the second one says “违法上访，坐牢罚款”, which means “illegal petitions will be result in jail sentences and fines”. There are, evidently, even more. It’s amusing, in a completely depressing way: there’s an inherent contradiction in telling people that there are both legal and illegal ways of having recourse to the law. For example, going to the provincial petition office, or even more sinfully, Beijing—that would be a loss of face for local government, and that’s exactly what operates behind the linguistic facade here—there are “laws”, but calling a spade a spade, they are really “rules” for well-behaved and docile citizens that can be, if necessary, be imposed by state force
Characters painted on walls and banners in prominent places have always been one of the government’s more friendly ways of reminding the people where the lines are. I’m reminded of the one-child policy banners and slogans, where people were told that they would be punished if they had more than one, etc. The not so subtle message, of course, is that the state can use the various and sometimes violent means of keeping the troublemakers and rabble-rousers down.
It makes me pessimistic to even think about it, because the distance between China and true social progress is not measured in what treaties it signs or what “ism” holds power, but in how the state perceives itself vis-a-vis the hoi polloi: as a deferential servant, or as its master. Of course, it’s never completely one or the other, even at its best or most abysmal—but as I am currently reading The Age of Revolution by Eric Hobsbawm, it strikes me the historical struggles of the Europeans, in the 19th c. and beyond—manifested in their (sometimes failed) revolutions, insurrections, and political mass movements—were precisely about this, about carving out this space for the people that the violent arms of the government could not reach. This is the practical, day-to-day meaning of the universalistic conception of rights—it’s our protection against the arbitrary violence that the king, emperor, and state can use against us.
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.
What’s interesting about this is that their land was taken and used for a police sub-station (pai chu suo), but that was not something recent, but rather happened way back in 1974. They felt they were shafted then, and kept apply for some kind of hearing on the matter of this land but to no avail. On June 6, 2008 the government rejected another appeal from Lin Hongqi, one of the elderly protesters, saying that her papers and materials were not acceptable. By law there is a 60 day period in which the applicant can appeal for a second hearing. However, before the 60 days was even close to being up, the gov’t decided to unequivocally give the land-use rights to the police, who planned on constructing a larger building on the same site. Driven to desperation these elderly protesters felt they had nothing left to lose, and so lay down on the ground as a form of protest.
据一位其称为土地产权所有人之一的林树芬亲属林鸿祺介绍，他们全家几辈已在海口市博爱南横路12号居住了60多年。该宅地为祖上林天就于1948年8月置下并具有当时合法的土地所有权证。解放后该宅地也没有被政府没收或征用，土地所有权一直由其家所拥有。1957年3月26、27和28日，林家曾连续3天在《新海南日报》刊登海口市民政局公告，重新确定了土地所有权。1974年8月16日海口市公安局博爱派出所（原为海口市红坎坡派出所）在未与林家及其他拥有该地土地合法产权人办理任何手续、也未作任何补偿的情况下，强行拆除该地上的草房和基础庭院，建起了派出所办公用房（即海口市公安局博爱派出所所在地）。多年来，林树芬等人多次口头和书面向省市有关部门反映申诉土地所有权的问题，一直未能解决。
Read it to believe it. This is a list of all the criminals in the Bush administration. And they didn’t even include all of them. You can find the exact methodology and standard of inclusion from the link.
FOARP 2:43 am on August 18, 2008 Permalink |
Thanks a lot for the translation, a really fascinating portrayal.