Day: November 3, 2021

Satellite imagery of Namyit Island, a Vietnamese-held feature in the Spratlys, shows construction underway at its western tip. An image from Oct. 30 shows a barge and construction platform that was not visible on Sept. 29. (Imagery: Planet Labs Inc. Analysis: RFA)

Vietnam is carrying out construction and land-filling on another island under its control in the South China Sea, commercial satellite imagery analysed by RFA shows.

The imagery shows an extension is being developed to the western tip of Namyit Island in the northwest of the Spratly Islands.

The then-Republic of Vietnam first took possession of Namyit, which it calls Nam Yet, in 1973. North Vietnam’s army took over the island in 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War.

Planet Labs imagery on Oct. 30 show building activities in Namyit, with a barge and a construction platform that were not visible Sept. 29.

Sources familiar with the development plan, who were not authorized to speak publicly about it, said the Vietnam may be building a ship dock to facilitate access to the island.

Vietnamese experts said their country carries out works to prevent erosion and landslides to protect but not to expand or change the structures of features under its control.

At the same time as Namyit, construction work is also being carried out on Pearson Reef, another Vietnam-controlled feature in the Spratly Islands. Imagery taken on Oct. 30 and Oct. 31 show what appears to be dredging work at the southern tip of the reef, RFA has revealed.

Vietnam has 49 or 51 outposts in the South China Sea spread across 27 features including ten islets, according to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI). Two of the ten islets, Amboyna Cay and Namyit Island, have seen no discernible reclamation work until now, AMTI said.

Namyit is a natural-occurring coral island with a total area of 13 acres, the fifth largest among Vietnam-administered islands in the South China Sea.

It is also one of the more developed, with an array of new civilian facilities including a Buddhist temple, a medical center, a “cultural house” and a nature reserve which is under construction, local media have reported.

Namyit is also claimed by China, the Philippines and Taiwan.

China, which claims most of the South China Sea for itself, has been criticizing other countries, especially Vietnam, for their island building. However, by 2016 Vietnam had created just over 120 acres of new land in the South China Sea compared to almost 3,000 acres created by China, AMTI said.

A North Korean soldier fell from a tree and broke his arm after authorities mobilized his unit to harvest chestnuts to be sold below cost in Pyongyang to demonstrate leader Kim Jong Un’s love for the privileged citizens of the capital, his father told RFA.

Forcing soldiers and civilians to provide free construction or farm labor is common practice in North Korea, but usually they eat some of the food they grow and use the buildings they construct.

However, units stationed near Pyongyang are being mobilized to collect 30 kg (66 lbs) of chestnuts daily, or roughly 2,500 to 3,000 nuts, and are not allowed to eat even a single chestnut.

Instead the nuts are used for a propaganda scheme in Pyongyang, sold below market value to the capital’s citizens, who are vetted for political reliability and enjoy privileges and a lifestyle unobtainable by rural North Koreans.

Sources said making the underfed soldiers collect food for more privileged citizens was unfair.

“Last week I went to the hospital after receiving a call that my son, who is serving in the military in Songchon county, South Pyongan province, was hospitalized with an arm injury,” a resident of the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA’s Korean Service Monday.

“My son was in a cast with a broken arm. His entire military unit was picking chestnuts to be sent to Pyongyang when he fell from a chestnut tree,” said the soldier’s father, who requested anonymity for security reasons.

According to the soldier’s father, the mobilization orders from the military’s General Staff Department specify that each soldier is responsible for collecting 30 kg of chestnuts daily to be sent to Pyongyang in the name of Kim Jong Un. Other units near Pyongyang were also mobilized, he said.

“When I went on a business trip to Pyongyang, I bought roasted chestnuts from a stand. A bag of roasted chestnuts with their shells still on, weighing about 200 grams, was sold for 2,000 North Korean won (U.S. $0.39) about half the price of the local marketplace.”

“I didn’t feel comfortable knowing that the chestnuts were picked by young soldiers like my son… How hard it must have been for them to climb up and down trees every day to pick 30 kg of chestnuts,” the soldier’s father said.

Soldiers on chestnut detail were often injured from falls in the unit of a former soldier stationed in Pyongyang’s Samsok district, who is now a refugee living in South Korea, he told RFA.

“Until I was discharged in 2016, the whole unit was mobilized to pick chestnuts every autumn. Chestnut trees are weaker than other kinds of trees, so every year there were many soldiers who fell off the trees and got hurt,” said the refugee, who declined to be named.

“There is an orchard that specializes in supplying chestnuts to the Pyongyang vegetable wholesale center, which manages the chestnut stands, but it does not produce enough. So, every fall, military units around Pyongyang are mobilized to supplement the orchard,” the source said.

The mountains near Samsok district are rich with wild chestnut trees, and the former soldier and his unit hiked far from the military base for harvesting, he said.

“Sometimes, our daily task was to stop children from leaving the village to prevent them from going out to get ‘our’ chestnuts. I still feel sorry for them,” the refugee said.

“We picked so many chestnuts every year, but during my 10 years of military service in Pyongyang, I was never able to buy chestnuts from chestnut stand,” he said.

“They are all over TV and in the newspaper saying that the roasted chestnut stands, which can only be found in Pyongyang, are examples of the party’s love for the people. To be honest though, it’s not the party’s love at all, it’s the sweat and sacrifice of so many soldiers.”

Still technically at war with wealthier South Korea, North Korea makes every male serve at least eight years in the armed forces according to South Korean intelligence. From 1993 until this year, service time was 10 years.

According to the CIA’s World Factbook there are approximately 1.1 to 1.2 million active troops in the North Korean military, more than 90 percent of whom serve in the army.

Reported by Chang Gyu Ahn for RFA’s Korean Service. Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

A number of endangered animals and plant species in East Asia face extinction unless steps are taken soon to protect them, according to a new study.

The study, published in the journal Agriculture Ecosystems and Environment, states that as many as one in five species around the world now face the danger of extinction.

According to the website Sapiens, Southeast Asia should be the world’s priority for averting imminent species extinctions.

Compared with other regions, Asia has the highest proportion of plant, reptile, bird, and mammal species listed as threatened on the “Red List” produced by the IUCN, or International Union for Conservation of Nature, a Swiss-based international monitoring organization.

The 2010 IUCN Red List includes 2,380 animal species in Asia threatened to vanish forever, from Asian elephants to primates to wild cattle to frogs.

Southeast Asia has the world’s fastest recent habitat-loss rates due largely to a demand for wild species to be used as luxury food, medicine, tonics, and trophy parts. Much of the demand for these items comes from Chinese consumers.

Bumblebee species in East Asia are being threatened by climate change and vegetation change, according to a recent Chinese study.

As many people know, bumblebees are pollinators, which play an important role in agricultural and natural ecosystems. Due to the impact of environmental change, the number of bumblebees has declined sharply in several areas, including Europe and North America.

Bumblebees in Asia

East Asia is a region abundant in bumblebees, but investigations of their condition in the region have been relatively late in coming.

However, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences have now evaluated 29 bumblebee species endemic to East Asia.

The researchers predicted that an estimated 59 to 93 percent of bumblebees in East Asia will experience range loss in 2050 due to climate change and vegetation changes.

By then some three percent of the species are predicted to be critically endangered” with about 10 to 17 percent categorized simply as “endangered.”

The researchers also proposed measures to protect the bumblebees that include improving the grasslands, forests, and farmlands that the bumblebees inhabit.

Mark Green with the U.S.–based Wilson Center recently brought much-needed attention to the researchers’ study.

According to Green, a United Nations report in 2019 “sent shock waves through the conservation community when it stated that more than one million animal and plant species now stand on the brink of extinction.

The good news is that a number of citizens around the world are volunteering to help protect endangered animals.

Poaching and habitat loss

One example can be found in Vietnam where a critically endangered species of monkey has quadrupled in numbers under the protection of the Van Long Nature Reserve, inspiring hope for conservationists.

In the spring of this year, The Christian Science Monitor Weekly reported that when German primatologist Tilo Nadler first visited Vietnam in the early 1990s, he found only 50 of the Delacours langurs.

The Monitor’s main source for its story is the environmental website Mongabay.

Nadler teamed up with local communities to establish the Van Long Nature Reserve in 2001, and most of the country’s langurs, estimated to number between 235 and 275, live there today.

Outside the reserve, the species is still under pressure from poaching and habitat loss, but Van Long’s success gives conservationists a roadmap for the langurs’ future.

Nadler hopes to open a second reserve in 2021 and 2022 in an area north of Van Long where some 30 other langurs currently live and he wants to relocated primates from unprotected  areas to Trang An, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In another positive development, USAID is working with the Vietnamese government to combat wildlife trafficking by strengthening policies and law enforcement.

But persistent challenges to countering the illegal wildlife trade include conflicting administrative regulations and the limited capacity of Vietnam’s legal enforcement force.

Meanwhile, Indonesia, the largest and most populous nation in Southeast Asia, has announced a number of steps to halt illegal wildlife trafficking. But here again the problem is a limited enforcement capacity as well as corruption in the government system.

Scientists say that in the end, in Indonesia and elsewhere, “bio-sensitive urban development” will be required for the world to slow the rate of animal and plant species extinction

Extinction is not primarily due to climate change, the scientists say, although climate change does contribute to extinction. It is mostly human agricultural development and other activities, they say, that disrupt the eco-system.

Dan Southerland is RFA’s founding Executive Editor.

The brothers of a Uyghur based in the Netherlands have been arrested by authorities in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region for contacting a sibling abroad deemed a “terrorist” during officially sanctioned phone calls, officials confirmed to RFA.

Ghopur Ebey, 46, left his family in Baytoqay village of Ghulja (in Chinese, Yining) city in 2019 and moved to the town of Alkmaar in the Netherlands.

Ghopur told RFA in September that two of his brothers, Ehtem and Shakir Ebey, were taken away after they talked to him using a phone provided by local authorities who gave them permission to call Ghopur abroad.

A third brother, Shukur Ebey, was arrested in 2017 and detained for two years in an internment camp after he took a group trip to Turkey, though he had received permission from officials to travel to the country, which is considered a safe haven for persecuted Muslim Uyghurs and a defender of their rights.

When RFA contacted village officials to confirm the identities of Ghopur’s brothers and ask why they were apprehended, a judicial office employee responded, “They are Ehtem Ebey and Shakir Ebey.” Authorities arrested them for talking to Ghopur in the Netherlands, he said.

When asked why authorities allowed Ghopur’s family members to call him abroad but then punished them for doing so, the official said he could not answer further questions and suggested that RFA obtain additional information from the Communist Party command headquarters.

But when RFA contacted that office, officials there declined to comment.

Other local officials in Baytoqay village told RFA that they did not know Ehtem and Shakir Ebey and were unaware of their cases.

Ghopur told RFA that his three brothers were ordinary citizens who were arbitrarily arrested and repressed simply because of their ethnic identity as Uyghurs.

Chinese authorities allowed Shukur, the eldest of the brothers who is a businessman in Ghulja, to travel to Turkey in 2013 as part of an officially approved tour group.

But in 2017, authorities arrested Shukur in the middle of the night, placing a black hood over his head and taking him to an internment camp because he had traveled to Turkey, Ghopur said.

In early 2018, Ghopur provided video testimony about Shukur’s arrest, after which Shukur and a number of other relatives who had been detained in the “re-education” camps were released.

China has held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and others in internment camps since 2017, while dismissing evidence that it has mistreated the Muslim minority, including testimony from former detainees and guards describing widespread abuses in interviews with RFA and other media outlets.

China has said that the camps are vocational training facilities where Uyghurs and other Turkic people learn skills to find jobs under policies aimed at preventing religious extremism and terrorism in the region.

News of the release of Shukur and others was conveyed to Ghopur through a special arrangement by local authorities who appointed Ehtem to communicate on behalf of his family using a government-provided phone.

In January 2019, Baytoqay village officials allowed arranged for Ehtem to call Ghopur on a dedicated phone line whose number ended in 113, Ghopur said.

“They called me while they were surrounded by Chinese police, and after that the police told my relatives that they could call me and contact me,” he told RFA.

“Then, my first younger brother was allowed by the authorities to contact me on behalf of all my family members,” he said.

During their conversations, they were very careful not to speak about anything political or sensitive because they knew that authorities were listening to the calls, Ghopur said.

After Ghopur suddenly lost contact with Ehtem, one of his contacts living in China told him that Ehtem had been detained in December 2020 on charges that he had “spoken with his separatist brother in the Netherlands.”

Sometime later, Ghopur learned that his youngest brother Shakir had also been arrested for the same reason.

When RFA called the number ending in 113, an official who answered did not comment when questioned about the Ehtem and Shakir’s detentions, but did not deny that they had used the same government-issued phone to call Ghopur.

“We cannot tell you the details without seeing you in person,” said the official when asked who was present when Ehtem and Shakir called Ghopur on the phone.

Translated by the Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Tennis star Peng Shuai has accused a former ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader of pressuring her into a sexual relationship, according to a screenshot of a post made to her verified social media account late on Tuesday.

“I know this won’t come out right, and there’s no point in saying it. But I still want to. I know I’m a hypocrite,” the post said. “I freely admit that I’m not one of the good girls.”

“Former vice premier Zhang Gaoli, you contacted me about three years ago, after you’d retired … saying you wanted to play tennis with me at Tangming Mansions in Beijing,” the post said, referring to an encounter in 2018.

“We played in the morning, and when we were done, you and your wife Kang Jie took me back to your home, then into the bedroom. It was the same scenario as in Tianjin more than a decade ago. You wanted to have sex with me.”

“I was pretty scared and very cautious … I couldn’t stop crying … After dinner, when I still didn’t want to, you said you hated me! You said you’d never forgotten me from seven years ago, and that you’d been waiting [to get back together with me again]. So, pressured by the weight of these feelings you’d been carrying around for the past seven years, I consented,” the post said.

“And, yes, we had sex … You said you couldn’t get a divorce because of your position, that if you’d met me when you were [CCP party secretary] in Shandong, you could have. So I thought I would be your companion in the shadows,” it said, before detailing humiliation, mostly from Zhang’s wife, and a sense of social isolation caused by being made to keep the affair secret.

She described Zhang as paranoid, and obsessed with the idea that she could be bringing hidden recording devices to their meetings.

“Then you ghosted me again, just like you had seven years earlier. You’d had your fill and now you were done. You denied that there was anything between us, and you were right: the only things we had were sexual attraction, money, and power, but no actual relationship,” the post said.

Censors erase story

A Weibo search for “Peng Shuai” on Wednesday yielded only items dating to Sept. 10, suggesting that censors have now erased the story from China’s tightly controlled social media platforms. But screenshots of the post have been circulating widely, both inside and outside China.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin declined to comment on the story, saying it had nothing to do with foreign affairs.

China’s #MeToo movement made headlines in 2018, when Beihang University fired a professor, Chen Xiaowu, after he was publicly accused by his former PhD candidate Luo Xixi on social media of sexual harassment and assault.

Luo’s #MeToo whistleblowing was among the first to make headline news in China, and Chen’s dismissal represented an “initial victory” for Chinese women, she has said.

But government censors and CCP propagandists have clamped down on the country’s feminist movement, detaining five feminists on International Women’s Day 2015 after they planned a campaign targeting sexual harassment on public transportation.

Worship of power, money

Southern Metropolis Daily founder Cheng Yizhong said Peng’s alleged affair with Zhang would have taken place in an atmosphere that worships power and money around the CCP elite.

“Peng Shuai may have acted out of a sense of obedience to power, or a kind of worship of it,” Cheng said. “Maybe that doesn’t make it right or justifiable, but it happens.”

“To this day, she may feel that she has been massively humiliated.”

Some commentators pointed out that the timeline referred to in the now-deleted post suggests that Peng was 19 years old when the initial sexual encounter happened in Tianjin. Zhang would have been 59.

Veteran journalist Liu Chengkun said the fact that the post references a former member of the Politburo standing committee will rock the CCP leadership.

“This is something nobody would dare to speak about, even in private, because it involves a member of the Politburo standing committee,” Liu told RFA. 

He said Peng could now be targeted via the CCP-controlled judicial system.

“There is an atmosphere of red terror in this country right now, and this woman is very likely to be subject to retaliation via the criminal justice system for smearing the name of a national leader,” Liu said. “If they charge her with picking quarrels and stirring up trouble, she could get up to 10 years’ imprisonment.”

Zhang, now 75, served as vice premier between 2013 and 2018 and was a member of the Politburo standing committee between 2012 and 2017.

Peng was the world No.1 doubles player in 2014 after taking doubles titles at Wimbledon in 2013 and the French Open in 2014.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.