appresearch 's List: China society

• The three Uighurs were brandishing sticks and knives and chasing after another Uighur when the police tried to stop them at 2:55 p.m. on Liberation South Road, according to the Xinhua account, and the three turned on the police when confronted.

• SHANGHAI — On July 5, officials from China’s Ministry of State Security took four employees of the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto into custody here.

• ”5月19日晚8时左右，身在湖北省恩施州巴东县的凯迪网友“超级低俗屠夫”在电话中告诉记者。他4天前从河北辗转来到这个偏僻小城，不是旅行，为的是一个与他完全不相干的案子—近日网络给予了极高关注度的邓玉娇案。
• 5月19日晚8时左右，身在湖北省恩施州巴东县的凯迪网友“超级低俗屠夫”在电话中告诉记者。他4天前从河北辗转来到这个偏僻小城，不是旅行，为的是一个与他完全不相干的案子—近日网络给予了极高关注度的邓玉娇案。
• 邓玉娇是巴东县野三关镇“雄风”宾馆休闲中心“梦幻城”的服务员，5月10日晚，该镇政府官员邓贵大、黄德智酒后陪他人到“梦幻城”消费，与21岁的邓玉娇发生争端，邓玉娇用刀刺破邓贵大颈部动脉血管及胸部，致其不治身亡，随后邓玉娇打电话向警方自首，警方以故意杀人罪将其刑事拘留。
• 随后《长江商报》对此案进行了报道，旋即，“女服务员”、“娱乐城”、“政府官员”、“刺杀”等具有强劲冲击力的字眼涌入人们视线，这一在鄂西偏僻小镇发生的凶案很快成为各大网站网友关注的热点。
• 5月12日，长江巴东网首先披露了相关案情。
• 5月14日中午，“超级低俗屠夫”吴淦在凯迪“猫眼看人”论坛上发帖，认为此案是邓玉娇在面对几个男人对她的强奸威胁时，做出的正当防卫。并“建议大家一起用行动来帮助这个用修脚刀捍卫尊严的姐妹！”
• 当日下午，在发表了一通声明后，这位网友将自己的真实姓名、身份证号，乃至身份证原件等信息悉数公布。随后，公布了自己接收捐款的账号，并率先出资2000元，立意筹得钱款前往案发地帮助邓玉娇。不少网友慷慨解囊。
• 14日下午，吴淦从河北前往北京联系律师，15日出发前往武汉，辗转来到巴东。从其博客内容可以获知，他在抵达巴东的第二天即见到了邓玉娇的爷爷及父母，随后说服他们让律师介入。17日，在与另一位叫陈万的网友在恩施州会合后，吴淦与邓玉娇父母一起前往优抚医院，与院方进行沟通后，探望了邓玉娇，并拍摄了邓的近身照片。
• 在获得邓玉娇家人委托后，吴淦联系了北京律师，最后通过公盟(北京公盟咨询有限责任公司)联系到了北京华一律师事务所律师夏霖、夏楠，免费帮助邓玉娇。18日晚上，两位律师抵达巴东，夏霖律师告诉记者，19日下午4时，他们已经把会见邓玉娇的法律手续提交给公安部门。
• 19日下午，吴淦在凯迪网“猫眼看人”论坛发表新帖《屠夫：第一阶段小结及新动向！》，叮嘱网友：“我们现在回归司法层面，让专业人士去说话，我们要做的就是把它阳光化！”，“只要公平，公正，公开，屠夫愿意接受任何结果！”这位36岁的网友饱含激情，却也不乏理智。
• 5月18日下午巴东县公安局再次通过长江巴东网发布 “5·10”案件情况通报，更多细节展露出来，细心的网友发现，与前一次的通报相比，黄德智向邓玉娇提出的“特殊服务”被代之以“异性洗浴服务”；邓贵大两次“按倒”邓玉娇被代之以“推坐”；凶器由修脚刀，变成水果刀……两份案情通告中措辞的差异网友也没有放过。

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• Deng Yujiao, 21, a waitress who fatally stabbed a Communist Party official as he tried to force himself on her in May, resting in a hospital in Hubei Province.
• 21-year-old waitress who fatally stabbed a Communist Party official as he tried to force himself on her
• her arrest last month on suspicion of voluntary manslaughter erupted into an online furor that turned her into a national hero and reverberated all the way to China’s capital, where censors ordered incendiary comments banned. Local Hubei officials even restricted television coverage and tried to block travel to the small town where the assault occurred.
• On Tuesday, a Hubei court granted the woman, Deng Yujiao, an unexpectedly swift victory, ruling that she had acted in self-defense and freeing her without criminal penalties.
• the Internet has cracked open a channel for citizens to voice mass displeasure with official conduct, demonstrating its potential as a catalyst for social change.
• China’s estimated 300 million Internet users, experts say, are awakening to the idea that, even in authoritarian China, they sometimes can fight City Hall.
• Xiao Qiang, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who tracks China’s Internet activity.
• “Netizens who are now sharing those more democratic values are using these cases, each time making inch-by-inch progress.”
• late last year, online tempests have blown up over a video of an official in Guangdong Province who assaulted a young girl and bragged that he was above punishment, and a Nanjing city official who was spotted wearing a $14,500 Vacheron Constantin watch and smoking $22-a-pack cigarettes, evidence of a lifestyle well beyond his means.
• Early this year, an online outcry exposed prison officials’ cover-up of the beating death of an inmate.
• At the moment, outrage is focused on officials in Yunnan Province who battled a rabies outbreak by dispatching “killing teams” that, according to news reports, beat 50,000 dogs to death.
• Ms. Deng’s case eclipsed them all, racking up four million posts and counting, he said. Her story resonates with millions of Chinese who not only are fed up with low-level corruption but also prize chastity in young women, causes that transcend politics.
• “Deng Yujiao is a metaphor for someone who fights back against officials, and of course the officials are those who spend the taxpayers’ money, who are so abusive to ordinary citizens and so corrupt,” he said. “It’s almost a stereotype of the online image of officials. That’s why this case becomes so big.”
• Ms. Deng was a waitress in a karaoke parlor in rural Badong County, a Hubei Province backwater along the Yangtze River. Like more than a few such venues, this one offered “special services,” or prostitution, in a backroom spa, the only room with hot water.
• May 10, Ms. Deng said, she was in the room washing clothes, when a local official, Huang Weide, came in and demanded that she take a bath with him. She refused, and after a struggle fled to a bathroom.
• Mr. Huang and two companions — including a second official, Deng Guida, who was not related to Ms. Deng — tracked her to the bathroom, then pushed her onto a couch. As they attacked, Ms. Deng said, she took a fruit knife from her purse and stabbed wildly. Mr. Deng fell, mortally wounded.
• Ms. Deng was arrested, investigated for involuntary manslaughter and, after the police reportedly found pills in her purse, variously described as sleeping pills and antidepressants, sent her to a mental ward.
• blogger, Wu Gan, publicized her case, a cascade of posts crowned her a national hero for resisting official abuse of power and demanded a fair trial.
• Hubei officials freed her on bail. Mr. Wu helped recruit a prominent Beijing law firm to represent Ms. Deng.
• Four days later, television and the Internet were cut off in Yesanguan, the town where the attack occurred.
• May 22, Beijing censors ordered Web sites to stop reporting on the case.
• The official explanation for the shutdown was as a “precaution” against lightning strikes.
• Chinese journalists had converged on Badong County. But after censorship was imposed, local officials began screening outsiders, and some journalists seeking to report there were beaten.
• Mr. Wu’s blog was shut down by censors.
• Yangtze River boat service to Badong was suspended, ostensibly because the docks needed repair, after protesters vowed to hold a demonstration there.
• The two surviving local officials who were involved in the assault have been fired, but no charges were brought against them.
• Last month, a group of young people abruptly appeared in the middle of downtown Beijing, carrying on their shoulders a woman wearing a mask and wrapped in white cloth. They laid her on the ground and arranged signs around her, then took pictures.

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• Last year, Beijing postponed direct elections — to 2017 for the chief executive and 2020 for the full legislature — and its critics say China is wielding a heavier hand in Hong Kong’s affairs.
• Last year, nearly 17 million mainland Chinese visited Hong Kong, compared with just over 2 million in 1997.
• More than half the postgraduate students studying here are from the mainland, up from barely one-third in 2003.
• Hong Kong Journalists Association take a different view, saying the number of media outlets willing to take on topics that might anger Beijing has been shrinking.
• Mak Yin-ting, a freelance journalist and former chairwoman of the association, said the owners of more than half of Hong Kong’s media outlets — many of whose owners have business interests in China — have been given advisory posts to the National People’s Congress and People’s Political Consultative Conference, which rubber-stamp decisions made by the Communist Party.
• The result, Ms. Mak said, is that some reporters engage in self-censorship, while editors sometimes bury stories that might be unflattering to Beijing. “When your boss is a delegate to the National People’s Congress,” she said, “then you know it’s better not to criticize China too loudly.”

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• “Comrades, to start with, such action is fundamentally not necessary,” he told them briskly. “Our dictatorial force is fully able to knock out the evildoers, so there is no need to take such action.”
• Mr. Wang, 64, the Communist Party secretary and absolute power in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, is largely unknown outside China, and until lately stayed in the shadows even at home.
• China’s leadership elite, and perhaps especially his patron, President Hu Jintao, have put their faith in him: they have let him run Xinjiang for 15 years, well beyond the usually strict limit of a decade in one powerful post. They have elevated him to the Politburo, the ruling party’s inner sanctum.
• They have made him their go-to expert on policies toward minorities, which account for the more than 100 million of China’s 1.3 billion citizens who are not ethnically classified as Han.
• Those in power are reputed to have given him leading roles on senior advisory groups that coordinate and oversee ethnic policies. They have placed his protégé, Xinjiang’s former deputy party boss, in charge of restive Tibet.

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• the Uighurs, Rebiya Kadeer is displaying the tenacity and sense of destiny that drove her improbable climb inside China in decades past, from laundry girl to famed business mogul.
• The Beijing government that hailed her as a model citizen in the 1990s, before imprisoning her for stealing state secrets and sending her into exile in the United States in 2005
• vilifies her as the unseen hand behind protests that erupted Sunday in the Uighur homeland of western China.
• “All the difficulties in my life prepared me for the tough times we face now,” said the woman, who is happy to be called the “Mother of the Uighurs,” in an interview on Tuesday.
• several of her 11 children, two of whom are now in prison in China.
• They were sentenced to long terms after she came to the United States and resumed work for Uighur rights.
• Ms. Kadeer led a march to the Chinese Embassy on Tuesday, no more than several dozen supporters, mainly fellow exiles, showed up.
• her autobiography, “Dragon Fighter,” which came out this year
• Ms. Kadeer described her survival through famine, persecution during Mao’s Cultural Revolution and then — as she threw herself into black-market trading of cloth, underwear and other items — the repeated seizure of her goods and money by corrupt or overzealous officials.
• In accordance with tradition, her father went to bury the bloody birth linens. As he dug a hole, he suddenly shouted, “Gold!” From that moment on, she wrote, her parents said, “You don’t belong to us; you belong to the people.”
• As China’s economy opened up in the 1980s, she expanded into real estate and flourished. By the 1990s she was running trading companies all over Central Asia, had built a famous women’s bazaar and then a seven-story department store in Urumqi, the capital of the region of Xinjiang, and ran a charity for Uighur women.
• In an unthinkable violation of Uighur custom, and angering her relatives, she traveled for months at a time, leaving young children with a working husband or relatives. “Of course it was difficult for me as a woman to leave my children,” she said. “But I found out that money is very important to the destiny of a nation, and I decided to find that money.”
• Five of her children are now in the United States, and have been working computers and phones night and day this week, she said. Another five, including the two in prison, remain in China, and one lives in Australia.
• In the mid-1990s, as Chinese officials heralded her as an example of ethnic success and even made her a member of the national legislature, she tried to work for change and never lost sight of her political dream, Ms. Kadeer said.
• “I was sincere in my interactions with the Chinese government. I was hoping to solve the problems of the Uighurs,” she said. “I still believe we can solve the problems.”
• But she started speaking out about Uighur grievances and she kept ties with her husband, by then a dissident living in the United States. In 1999 she was imprisoned.
• Ms. Kadeer dismisses Beijing’s charge that she planned last Sunday’s protests.
• she and the two organizations she heads, the Uighur American Association and the World Uighur Congress, both of which receive financial support from the National Endowment for Democracy, mobilized exile groups around the world to protest an episode in Guangdong Province in late June.
• Chinese officials say that two Uighur workers were killed by a small group of Han Chinese, who have been detained; Ms. Kadeer says, with evident sincerity, there is evidence that a mob killed up to 60 Uighurs while the police did nothing. But her version has not been independently verified, and Chinese authorities accuse exiles of exaggerating the matter to incite anti-Chinese feelings.
• The world congress, based in Munich, has just one paid staff member but is in touch with some 51 exile groups around the world. Ms. Kadeer said that by June 30 she had called all of those groups to encourage demonstrations outside Chinese embassies.
• The rumors about mass killings in Guangdong were one trigger for Sunday’s protests, but Ms. Kadeer challenged Beijing authorities to release the transcript of a call she made to a brother in Urumqi on Saturday in which, she said, she urged him not to become involved in any demonstrations.
• “Instead of blaming me, the Chinese government should start listening to the complaints of the Uighur people and choose dialogue,” Ms. Kadeer said.
• “I’ve been looking for someone like me who can take over,” she said on Tuesday. For now, she said, “The people will not let me stop because my goal is their liberation.”
• “Until I lose my consciousness, I’ll stay on as the leader.”

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• the effective colonization of Xinjiang only started after 1950s, when Beijing began to settle People’s Liberation Army soldiers who had put down the short-lived independent East Turkestan Republic (1944-1949) on military state farms.
• For most Uighurs, Xinjiang increasingly became a police state, where they lived in fear of arrest for the slightest sign of disloyalty toward Beijing.
• Even prison officials started to complain to Beijing that prison and labor camps across the region had become jam-packed. Isolated acts of anti-state violence, such as the assassination of Uighur “collaborators,” attacks against police stations and the explosion of two bombs in Urumqi buses in February 1998 only reinforced the determination of the state to increase its repression.
• After the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S., the Chinese began to justify its campaigns in Xinjiang as a contribution to the global war on terror. China also used its growing international influence to secure cooperation from neighboring states to arrest and deport Uighurs who had fled persecution.
• Xinjiang Party Secretary Wang Lequan’s declaration in 2002 that the Uighur language was “out of step with the 21st century,” the government started to shift the entire education system to Mandarin, replacing Uighur teachers with newly arrived Han Chinese.
• The authorities also organized public burnings of Uighur books.
• Control over religion was extended last year to prohibit traditional customs such as religious weddings, burials or pilgrimages to the tombs of local saints.
• Earlier this year, the government suddenly announced plans to raze the city of Kashgar, the centuries-old cultural center of the Uighur civilization and one of the only remaining examples of traditional central Asian architecture. In a few weeks, the old city will have almost entirely disappeared, forcing out 50,000 families to newly constructed, soulless modern buildings.
• This is the backdrop against which Uighurs reacted to graphic images circulating on the Internet last week of Uighur workers being beaten to death by Chinese coworkers in a Guangdong factory. They took to the streets.
• Nicholas Bequelin is a senior Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch.

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