Day: July 27, 2021

Authorities in the flood-hit Chinese province of Henan are preventing relatives and supporters from laying public wreaths for those who died in the Zhengzhou flood disaster of July 20, RFA has learned.

Officials set up barriers at an entrance to the Shakou Road station on Zhengzhou’s No. 5 Metro Line, as mourners got ready to mark the seventh day after the deaths of people trapped in trains, stations, and tunnels as the waters swept through the city.

At least 69 people have died in the Henan floods so far, with five reported missing, government officials said.

Some of the floral offerings for the dead were inside the barrier, and people arriving later grew annoyed and pushed the barrier aside, saying it was preventing the souls of the dead from finding their way home.

Further barriers were set up by Tuesday lunchtime — seven days after the tragedy — by construction workers guarded by police.

An employee who answered the phone at the Zhengzhou Metro said the two-meter barriers were there for reasons of “traffic safety.”

“Floral offerings are allowed,” the employee said. “The barriers mean that people need to place their flowers within a certain area, so it doesn’t affect passing traffic.”

“The concern is that they will walk along the edges of the road, but it’s not a huge issue.”

A Zhengzhou resident surnamed Zhou said the authorities had acted inappropriately.

“Offering flowers is a comfort to the victims’ families,” Zhou said. “We did this spontaneously, and it didn’t affect the traffic or the cleanliness of the city.”

Zhou said he believed that the death toll was being played down, amid growing public anger of the lack of action to protect city residents following meteorological warnings, and reports that the floods were caused by a discharge of waters from a failing dam upstream, with warnings to local officials arriving hours after the floods had descended on the city.

Local journalist Hong Tao said state-run media had been ordered to focus on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)’s role in the province-wide rescue effort, after the floods left millions cut off from road supplies, or with limited supplies of food and water.

‘Public opinion management’

The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s propaganda department has an ongoing program of directives and “public opinion management” strategies aimed at ensuring that the government’s view is the only one available during breaking news stories.

Around half a million people have been evacuated after tens of thousands of homes were destroyed in the floods, which came after unprecedented rainfall in mid-July.

“The government is doing public opinion management … all we can see [on state-run media] is ‘nothing to see here, move on’,” Hong said. “They won’t let us see what is going on, and they stifle the voices who should be heard.”

Much of the relief effort is being financed by private donors, rather than through official relief recipients like the Red Cross, an official said.

“Organizations like the Red Cross don’t have a good reputation,” a Red Cross employee surnamed Yang said.

But he said the government was countering private fund-raising by requiring people install an “anti-fraud” app on their phones, to track the source of funding.

A resident of Henan’s Jun county said the danger from further flooding is still ongoing.

“The floods are quite bad right now,” the resident, who gave only a surname, Wu, told RFA. “There are places where the water is overflowing from the … Wei river, and the water levels in our village are high, which is a bit dangerous.”

“One person was washed away,” she said. “There is water on all sides now, so it’s bad.”

“None of the villages near us have been evacuated, and we have been told by the army not to evacuate, but to stay home,” Wu said. “If nothing happens, that’s fine, but it’ll be pretty major if something does happen [here].”

Repeated calls to the Henan provincial flood control headquarters rang unanswered during office hours on Tuesday.

Foreign journalists harassed

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC) hit out on Tuesday at the harassment of foreign journalists covering the aftermath of the floods in Zhengzhou.

“In one particularly alarming incident, Henan’s Communist Youth League asked its 1.6 million followers on Chinese social media site Weibo to report the whereabouts of BBC Shanghai reporter Robin Brant, after he became the target of viral online harassment,” the club said via its Twitter account.

“Rhetoric from organizations affiliated with China’s ruling Communist Party directly endangers the physical safety of foreign journalists in China and hinders free reporting,” it said.

It accused the CCP of encouraging a climate of “growing hostility” against foreign journalists, warning that Chinese journalists working for foreign news organizations often bore the brunt of official persecution and online harassment.

At least 20 foreign journalists have been expelled or forced to flee China in the past year or so, while Australian TV anchor Cheng Lei and Bloomberg journalist Haze Fan are currently detained on unspecified national security charges.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

A rights activist in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong has proposed marriage in an open letter to his girlfriend, a Hong Kong rights lawyer and activist who is currently in prison on remand for “inciting” others to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.

Ye Du, whose birth name is Wu Wei, proposed to barrister and rights activist Chow Hang-tung, who is accused of “inciting” others to take part in activities commemorating the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen massacre, vowing to wait for her regardless of how long she remained in prison.

“We have never stopped fighting the good fight. We have never turned aside from the path we should take, and we have kept the faith,” Ye wrote in a letter to Chow published in the Ming Pao newspaper.

“In this absurd world, if there is no love that lasts a lifetime, no unforgettable love, then what is the point of our lives?”

“There are always people who come up with all kinds of weird ways to propose marriage, but what could be better than me proposing to you in a smaller prison while I am in a bigger prison,” he wrote, in a reference to the constant restriction and surveillance of his daily life by state security police he experiences in mainland China.

“There is also anger towards the accomplices of the totalitarian machine that is persecuting you,” he wrote.

“When your ancestors escaped from behind the iron curtain [mainland China] and came to Hong Kong, they never imagined their own descendants would … stoop this low, becoming executioners for the regime for their own self-interest … and abandoning the freedom they had pursued in their lifetimes.”

Ye vowed to remember everyone involved in Chow’s case.

“Tong, will you marry me?”

Ironic fears

In an earlier letter, Chow speaks about the irony of her fears that Ye would be sent to prison, only to find that she is the first to be incarcerated.

“I remember that when I came to Guangzhou the first time, you pointed out the countless cameras facing your windows and doors, and the police who were surveilling you in particular,” she wrote.

“When we went out to eat, that tall plainclothes policeman sitting at the table next to us kept staring at us,” she said.

“I learned to get used to you being taken away on [vacation] and placed under house arrest on sensitive days,” Chow wrote.

“I learned to prepare myself for the possibility that, one day, you would suddenly disappear into the black hole of China’s judicial system,” she wrote. “That I might not hear from you for two or three years.”

“Just being there for you is enough,” she added.

Later the letter, Chow quipped that the couple — who have already been apart for two-and-a-half years — may need to speed up their plan of ending dictatorship if they are to meet again.

Vision of the future

Ye said he proposed to offer Chow a “vision of the future,” and to bolster the relationship in the face of her incarceration.

“She has received my letter, and has said that she will reply,” he said. “I think there’s a good chance she will say yes.”

He said Chow had been targeted after she chose to speak according to her personal values, rather than keeping quiet to protect herself.

“I will respect that choice,” he said, likening the couple to “paving stones” on the road to democracy.

“I am not worried about her psychological condition,” Ye said. “She is optimistic and strong, but it’s also true that the Hong Kong she lives is isn’t the Hong Kong of the past.”

“I am worried that the message of optimism and persistence she has been sending out has made certain people want to persecute her,” he said.

“I will not forgive anyone who does her wrong,” Ye said. “Liu Xiaobo said that he had no enemies, but for me, anyone who hurts Hang-tung is my enemy.”

Former lawmaker and veteran activist Shiu Ka-chun, who visited Chow in prison on July 24, said she seemed in good spirits, although she didn’t discuss Ye’s proposal with him.

“She laughed and said she is young and strong, and that she can eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom, but that it is a bit hot,” Shiu told RFA. “She said she had encountered a lot of injustice while in custody, and had been writing letters.”

“She said … people shouldn’t worry about her, and try to keep the flame of hope alive,” he said.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

A court in Hong Kong on Tuesday convicted the first person to be tried under a draconian national security law imposed on the city by Beijing of “terrorism” and “inciting secession” after he flew a banned protest slogan from his motorbike during protests against the law on July 1, 2020.

Tong Ying-kit, 24, was arrested by a group of police officers as he rode a motorbike at a protest against the law, carrying a flag bearing the words “Free Hong Kong, revolution now!”

A panel of three judges, but no jury, found Tong guilty of having incited secession with his banner reading “Free Hong Kong, Revolution now!”

The judges found that while the slogan of the 2019 protest movement may mean different things to different people, the fact that it can represent resistance to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s control over the city was enough to convict Tong.

Prosecutors had argued that the “Free Hong Kong” part of the slogan on Tong’s flag implied the city needed to be rescued from an enemy, the CCP, while “Revolution now!” implied a rejection of Chinese rule over the city.

“We have no difficulty in coming to the sure conclusion that the slogan as at 1 July 2020 was capable of carrying the meaning of separating [Hong Kong] from [mainland China] and was capable of inciting others to commit secession,” the judges said in their ruling.

“We are also sure that the defendant fully understood the slogan to bear the meaning of Hong Kong independence and by displaying, in the manner he did, the flag bearing the slogan, the defendant intended to convey the secessionist meaning of the slogan as understood by him to others and he intended to incite others to commit acts separating [Hong Kong] from [mainland China].”

The once-ubiquitous 2019 protest movement slogan was banned under the national security law, which criminalizes public criticism of the authorities.

Tong appeared calm as the ruling was passed, raising his hand to wave to his family in the public gallery. A woman shouted back “Hang in there! Love you!”

Impact of verdict feared

Outside the court, a supporter who gave only the surname Lee said she had worn black clothing and a T-shirt with an image of Tong riding a motorcycle to show her support for him.

“It seems that if you’re young, you’re guilty now,” Lee said, adding that she wasn’t optimistic about the sentence.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he got more than 10 years; they are going to sentence it more harshly because it’s the first ever case, and they want to scare the people of Hong Kong,” she said.

Eric Lai, a Hong Kong law fellow at the Asia Law Center of Georgetown University, said the verdict was arrived at under an unreasonable system, which denied Tong a jury trial.

“The court found that Tong Ying-kit’s actions, his driving, and his behavior towards police officers coupled with his political opinions constituted the crime of terrorism,” Lai said. “Such a threshold for conviction is quite worrying.”

“The scope of crimes that can be regarded as terrorism is [now] quite extensive.”

He said the ruling will likely also affect judgments in cases not brought under the national security law.

Tong, who has been held on remand for nearly a year, with repeated applications for bail and a writ of habeas corpus rejected by judges, pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.

First aid kit

National security judges Esther Toh, Anthea Pang and Wilson Chan also found that Tong’s actions were aimed at “intimidating the public in order to pursue a political agenda,” and also found him guilty of “terrorism.”

“In our view, a blatant and serious challenge mounted against the police force which is charged with the responsibility of maintaining public safety and security, and thus a symbol of law and order, will certainly instill a sense of fear amongst the law-abiding members of the public, in particular, apprehension of a breakdown of a safe and peaceful society into a lawless one. In that event, grave harm would certainly be caused to the society,” the judgment said.

The defense told the court during the trial that Tong had tried to avoid driving into the police officers, and noted he had in his possession a first-aid kit, far from the action that would be expected of a terrorist.

The charges carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

The national security law, which saw China’s feared state security police set up a headquarters in Hong Kong to oversee “serious” cases, has been widely criticized by governments, rights groups, and lawyers as an assault on Hong Kong’s traditional freedoms of speech, association, and political participation.

It bans both words and actions deemed “secessionist,” “seditious,” “subversive,” or linked to “terrorism,” as well as speech that is critical of the Hong Kong government or the CCP, on pain possible life imprisonment.

On Jan. 6, 2021, 53 pro-democracy activists and former opposition lawmakers were arrested for “subversion” under the law after they held a democratic primary designed to maximize their chances of winning seats in the Legislative Council (LegCo).

The authorities responded by postponing the election and arresting those who took part in the primary.

Of those arrested, 47 currently await trial on “subversion” charges, with 12 granted bail — some only after several months in detention — and the rest remaining in prison pending trial.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.