Day: December 7, 2021

Editor’s note: This story contains graphic descriptions and images that may be disturbing to some readers.

Myanmar junta troops massacred 11 civilians in northwestern Sagaing region on Tuesday, reportedly burning them alive in apparent retaliation for militia attacks, local residents and militia said.

Villagers told RFA that the victims were farm workers although at least one news report that named the fatalities said most were members of a local People’s Defense Force (PDF) militia fighting the junta.

Graphic video footage of the aftermath of the atrocity went viral on social media inside Myanmar, provoking outrage. The video showed smoldering, blackened corpses lying in ash, with charred, outstretched limbs.

The victims were local workers living in tents outside Don Taw village in Sagaing’s Salingyi township and had not been involved in recent fighting in the area, one villager told RFA on Tuesday.

“Some had been hired for working in betel nut plantations, and some were workers in the palm forests outside Don Taw,” the villager said, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“They were poor day-wage workers and lived in the shelters where they worked,” the villager said.

The workers were attacked by a column of government troops who fired heavy weapons into the village Tuesday morning as they advanced from the North Yamar Bridge along the Monywa-Pathein Road, the villager said.

“When we fled the village this morning, we saw smoke billowing up, and later when we went back to look we saw that the men had been burned to death.”

Another villager said the workers had been found with hands tied behind their backs and had struggled to free themselves before they died.

“They appeared to have been tortured and then set on fire while they were still alive. They were tied with wire and not with ordinary rope,” the villager said, also speaking on condition his name not be used.

“There were 11 of them, all from the village,” he said.

The troops’ assault on Don Taw followed an attack the previous night by PDF fighters against a column of around 150 soldiers near Kyae Zakya village, along with a separate PDF assault on government forces near a hospital in Yinmabin, a local PDF member said.

“They must have suffered some casualties during those attacks last night,” said one the PDF member who also did not want to be named for security reasons.

“A convoy was attacked with mines near the Yinmabin 16-bed hospital, and there were some casualties and some vehicles were destroyed. And the killings today in Don Taw appear to have been carried out in revenge for those attacks.”

“But the men they killed were not PDF members. They were just ordinary villagers,” he said.

However, media outlet Myanmar Now (warning: hyperlink to a graphic image) cited an unnamed leader of the anti-junta Done Taw PDF as saying all but one of the 11 victims, a 40-year-old paraplegic man, were members of that PDF. It listed the names and ages of all the victims, who were all male and included four teenagers aged under 18.

That PDF member said the 11 victims were unarmed and had been burned alive after soldiers beat them to the brink of death.

It was not immediately possible to reconcile the conflicting accounts.

Junta spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun did not pick up calls seeking comment Tuesday.

The atrocity is sure to deepen the growing domestic and international revulsion over the conduct of Myanmar’s military against opponents of its Feb. 1 coup against the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi.

In Sagaing alone, hundreds of civilians have been killed in the past 10 months as the area has become a center of armed resistance to the junta.

Reported by RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Richard Finney.

Reported by RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Richard Finney.

A North Korean man has died after taking fake medication for his flu-like symptoms, one of many such casualties as the country struggles with a severe medicine shortage, sources told RFA.

Most medicines in North Korea are imported from China, but the two countries have not been trading for almost two years, since they closed their border at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in January 2020.

Counterfeit medicines have flooded North Korea’s markets, and as cold and flu season draws near, desperate people have no choice but to buy medicines they suspect are fake, on the off chance that they might be real.

“Not long ago, a man in his 60s living in Kilju county suffered from cough and chest pain for more than a month. He bought medicine at the market, but died within a few days,” a resident of the county in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA’s Korean Service Dec. 1.

“His daughter couldn’t believe the hospital, so she relied on drugs sold at the market. When her father eventually died, she cried and said she found out the hard way that the drugs were all counterfeit,” said the source, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

Kilju county has been hit hard by the flu this year, and the pharmacies are stocking up on the counterfeit drugs, because that is all they can get, according to the source.

“Pharmacists as well as drug dealers claim that counterfeit drugs are equally effective as the real ones because they are made locally with the same ingredients,” the source said.

“There is no way to know what was put in the fake medicines. Usually, the symptoms do not improve even after taking several doses, so it is clear that the counterfeit medicine is a sham. It is very difficult for the public to tell the difference between the genuine drug and a counterfeit because they have the same packaging and shape and are sold at the same price,” said the source.

Among the drugs sold on the market are penicillin and myocilin said to be from various origins, as well as cold medicines resembling products sold in South Korea and Germany. The medicines can go for about 5,500 won (U.S. $1.10) for 100ml on the high end, and 2,000 won on the low end, according to the source.

“Most of these drugs are likely to be counterfeit, as imports of all these drugs have been cut off for years,” said the source.

In the nearby city of Chongjin, hospitals and pharmacies have completely run out of medicine, a resident of the city’s Cheongam district told RFA.

“Patients and their families are struggling to find even a single pill,” said the second source, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

“Flu patients are in every region, complaining about the pain. Even if they go to the hospital, they aren’t treated. They can’t get a single pill from the hospital. They only get a prescription for antibiotics or painkillers to take to the market,” the second source said.

Since many of these patients are severely ill, their family members desperately scour the market for the prescribed medicines, knowing that counterfeits are everywhere.

“They are all counterfeit drugs, so you won’t be cured quickly even if you do take them,” the second source said.

“The most popular cold medicines in the market are a Chinese pain reliever called ‘zheng tong pian’ and antibiotics. However, imports of the medicines from China have stopped after the border closure, so residents are begging pharmacies or drug dealers to find them,” said the second source.

Fake zheng tong pian has saturated the market and family members of the ill have no choice but to buy it and hope for the best, the second source said.

“If you are lucky enough to get a real drug from someone you know at a pharmacy or hospital, it can be effective, but in the case of a counterfeit drug that is difficult to distinguish from the real drug, the counterfeits do not work, and the symptoms worsen rapidly and can eventually lead to death.”

It was not clear to RFA whether any of the illnesses described in this report were COVID-19, which North Korea continues to claim has not reached the country.

People who die of COVID-19-like symptoms are hastily cremated before the coronavirus can be determined as the cause of death. RFA previously reported the government does however keep an internal tally of “suspected cases.”

Translated by Claire Lee. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Social media users have been berating China state-owned media, which is tightly controlled by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), over their failure to report on a deepening scandal surrounding a jailed Shanghai entrepreneur who raped and enslaved women, holding them captive in a brothel for the rich and famous.

Zhao Fuqiang, a former tailor who started out forcing rural women to work in low-cost brothels disguised as hair salons in Shanghai, before expanding to offer a glitzy bordello experience to higher-end clients, was sentenced to a suspended death sentence in September 2020 for rape and other offenses.

But the full horror of his “Red Mansion,” described in recent media exposes as a “hell on earth built from the blood and tears of women,” has only just been made known, prompting social media users to demand why state media has so far remained silent on the story.

According to the articles, Zhao would lure women to the brothel for “job interviews,” sometimes raping them, forcing them to have sex with his clients, and threatening to make public videos and photos of these encounters, should they try to leave. He also forcibly harvested their eggs and sold them on the black market, leaving at least one woman infertile due to botched procedures.

“You didn’t dare to report on the Red Mansion story in Shanghai … instead you just keep banging on about the U.S. and the U.K. the whole time,” user @harpistwhopedals wrote under a story posted by the CCP’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, on Tuesday.

“This country is getting more and more like North Korea; you really take us for fools.”

User @AL De Niro agreed.

“Leave the BBC alone,” they said under a People’s Daily post about criticism of the U.K. broadcaster from foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian.

“No-one cares about them; everyone cares about when your newspaper will speak out on behalf of [the victims of] the Red Mansion in Shanghai!”

User @yutianzuilekounaigair wondered if the media really was on the side of victims, and the least powerful in society.

“The media, in the final analysis, is a part of the system that rules over us, and represents the will of the powers that be,” the user wrote. “I really feel that we have a long, long way to go to being civilized, democratic and equal.”

“The media has lost its voice, and the platforms are pulling hot search topics, all about a huge crime story that everyone already knows about, because it breaks the relevant regulations.”

Methods of coercion, control

A user with the handle @Worry-free sister called on women to ignore attempts to use slut-shaming as a method of coercion and control.

“Countless female murder cases have shown us that men can do whatever they want with their victims, just because they have taken nude photos or videos of them,” the user wrote, citing the Shanghai Red Mansions case.

@Take the moonlight 22V added: “So far, neither the Women’s Daily, the People’s Daily nor CCTV news have had a single report on this.”

Some said they were afraid to be critical, while @qimoshanrenruyushenglizhe commented: “Don’t be afraid. I am posting too. We are in the right. If everyone stays silent, then this country is finished.”

@Pogalazi commented: “Nowadays all the news media and movies we can see just preach politically correct content, and yet there is all this complicated stuff going under under the so-called beauty.”

“Such a network of dark forces and vested interests.”

Zhao was found guilty of rape, organized prostitution, fraud and “forced transactions,” by the Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court on Sept. 22, 2020, as well as a host of property-related rule-breaking and bribing local officials.

He was handed a death sentence suspended for two years, which typically gets commuted to life imprisonment, while his accomplices were handed jail terms ranging from two years and six months to 20 years, state media reported at the time.

But while online comments seemed to focus their ire on state media, many others were asking how such an operation could have flown under the radar of law enforcement for so long.

On Dec. 6, user @blueprinttone commented: “This is fucking 2021!!! In Shanghai!!! That metropolis with its big surveillance net to protect everyone!!!!.”

“Now they’ve pulled the hot search topic, I heard,” the user wrote. “Who is responsible for those women held under house arrest by Zhao Fuqiang, who were abused and turned into sex slaves, had their eggs harvested … and for the innocent kids born as a result?”

Among those who were jailed alongside Zhao were former Yangpu District Committee standing committee member Lu Yan, who headed the district branch of the CCP’s powerful legal and political affairs committee, which directs law enforcement agencies, and Ren Yongfei, a former president of the Yangpu District People’s Court, who sheltered him.

Criminals, police often tied

A former cop from the southern city of Guangzhou, who gave only the nickname Alex, said close ties between the criminal underworld and local law enforcement aren’t uncommon in China.

And yet, the Shanghai case still shocked him, he told RFA in a recent interview.

“If I’m honest, there was a cop in Guangzhou 10 years ago who was involved in something similar, but it was nowhere near as bad as this,” Alex said. “This case kind of blocked out the sun, it was so huge.”

“From the point of view of the local police, it’s hard to see why they would take such a huge risk for a pimp, for so little benefit.”

A former Shanghai police officer, who asked to remain anonymous, said that once local officials have themselves become implicated in such operations, either as clients, or for accepting bribes to look the other way, the ties that bind them can persist for many years.

“People are ruled by emotion, and after more than 10 years of conditioning, it’s easy to get them [on board],” the person said. “After that, it becomes entrenched, and all kinds of vested interests get entangled in it.”

“[Zhao] must have spent a long time operating in Yangpu District, to the point where he had all of his connections where he wanted them, including his intelligence networks,” the former Shanghai police officer said. “At a certain point, [Zhao] must have felt omnipotent.”

To run his underworld empire for more than a decade, Zhao must have co-opted not just police officers, but judges, members of the CCP’s political and legal affairs network, and government officials, including from local industry and commerce bureaus, the former Shanghai cop said.

“It’s definitely not enough to sort out the local Public Security Bureau alone,” they said. 

“You would need to get other legal and political agencies on side too, including the courts, and the prosecutor’s office.”

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

The Chinese military has deployed some of its most advanced strategic bombers in a live-fire exercise in the South China Sea as an apparent message of deterrence to Taiwan and its allies.

Several H-6J bombers, the latest type of bomber to enter service with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy, recently practiced bomb dropping and sea mine-laying on islands in the South China Sea, according to the Global Times, sister publication of China’s Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily. It did not disclose the exact location of the exercise.

The drills, conducted on an unspecified date, “displayed the aircraft’s traditional bombing capability in addition to its standoff strike competence,” reported the Global Times, adding that it involved “the actual use of high-explosive aerial bombs and sea bottom mines.”

China conducts frequent military drills in the South China Sea, where its sweeping territorial and maritime claims overlap with those with several of its neighbors. But it’s unusual for China to deploy warplanes to drop bombs and lay mines in a live-fire exercise.

A video clip by China Central Television (CCTV) posted on YouTube on Dec. 2 shows bombers taking off at night and flying through heavy clouds to a designated area of the South China Sea to conduct two air raids.

The planes are seen dropping sea mines and bombs to the sea, causing large columns of explosion. “The bombs hit targets on islands and reefs,” CCTV reported.

The exercise, performed by a regiment affiliated with the PLA Southern Theater Command’s Navy Aviation Force, “could serve as a deterrent at a time when foreign forces and Taiwan secessionists are making provocations,” the Global Times quoted anonymous analysts as saying.

John Blaxland, professor of International Security and Intelligence Studies at the Australian National University, said the action is consistent with “the approach the PLA has taken in recent months to ratchet up the intimidation on the Taiwanese people.”

“This is not surprising, but does not mean that an attack is imminent,” Blaxland said.

While ratcheting up its rhetoric and tactics, according to the Australian analyst, China is expanding its “grey zone” warfare against Taiwan, which “includes cyberattacks, repeated incursions of its air space and territorial waters, and diplomatic isolation to undermine Taiwan’s resolve and ability to resist.”

Beijing regards Taiwan, a self-governing island located about 100 miles (160 kilometers) off the mainland, as part of China, although it views itself as a sovereign state. Taiwan is also a claimant in the South China Sea, along with Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

‘Blockade with mines’

Qi Leyi, a Taipei-based military analyst and commentator for RFA Mandarin, said the tense situation across the Taiwan Strait “has not reached the stage of near war yet.”

“However, the blockade of Taiwan by mines is one of the main ways for the PLA to invade Taiwan, when and if it will invade Taiwan, and the Chinese military is certainly seeking to strengthen this capability,” Qi told RFA.

The H-6J strategic bomber was just unveiled by the PLA Navy a year ago. It can carry seven YJ-12 supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, with six under the wings and one in the weapon bay, Chinese media reported.

The Global Times quoted military experts who said that the H-6J has a combat radius of about 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles) and the capability “to conduct all-weather combat missions and is also capable of accurately attacking moving maritime targets.”

“Compared with U.S. bombers, the H-6J is actually not that advanced,” said Qi.

“However, it seems to be able to lay mines from the air very fast, and this would be difficult to deal with effectively,” he added.

The PLA has conducted a large number of military exercises across all major sea areas around China this year, with one taking place in the Bohai Strait and the North Yellow Sea at the moment.

Recently, one of China’s most powerful Type 055 large destroyers – the 10,000-ton Nanchang – held intensive anti-submarine drills “in an undisclosed area in the Yellow Sea,” the Global Times said.

The Type 055 large destroyer is a class of stealth, guided-missile destroyer with air defense, anti-ship, land-attack and anti-submarine capabilities.

China has reportedly built eight Type 055s, three of them are already in service, Chinese media reported.

U.S. allies said they were considering their positions on Tuesday following yesterday’s announcement that the Biden administration will boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing in February, citing human rights “atrocities.”

While U.S. athletes will compete, no government officials will go to the Chinese capital for Games, which run from Feb. 4-20.

Rights groups have opposed Beijing’s hosting of the Games since its 2008 hosting of the Summer Olympics failed to have much impact on the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s rights record, citing ongoing abuses of Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hongkongers and domestic critics of the regime.

Australia said on Tuesday it has yet to make a decision on whether to send government officials to the event, while Japanese prime minister Kishida Fumio said his government would make its own decision on the matter.

Officials in the Netherlands gave a similar message, saying the government would “talk to our European partners to see what we can do together.”

However, the E.U.’s top diplomat Stefano Sannino has said Olympics boycotts are a matter for individual member states, not common EU foreign policy, to decide.

Canada’s foreign ministry said it “remains deeply disturbed by the troubling reports of human rights violations in China.” Officials there said they would continue to discuss the matter with partners and allies.

New Zealand deputy prime minister Grant Robertson said Wellington wouldn’t be sending any officials, but citing the pandemic rather than Beijing’s rights abuses.

“The entire international community, represented by the United States, is keeping up its focus on human rights issues in Xinjiang, and its attitude towards China’s holding of the Winter Olympics next year has undergone a fundamental shift,” Chinese political commentator Wei Xin told RFA on Tuesday.

“The scandal of Peng Shuai being sexually assaulted by a very senior official was undoubtedly a huge catalyst,” Wei said.

‘Resolute countermeasures’

Wei said the threat from Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian of “resolute countermeasures” against Washington could mean Beijing boycotts future Olympics held in other countries.

“It will further escalate and expand China’s diplomatic resistance to the U.S. government, using symbolic diplomatic actions that are unlikely to cause economic losses for China,” Wei said.

“It could lead to a form of diplomatic warfare … I think this will cause irreversible damage to Chinese diplomatic interests,” he said. “It could mean the international community isolates China diplomatically.”

But Beijing-based commentator Zha Jianguo said there is actually little Beijing can do to retaliate.

“It won’t have much of an impact on the hosting of the Winter Olympics per se, but it will have a hugely negative impact on China’s status internationally, and on its people,” Zha told RFA.

“But there are very few options for countermeasures.”

Japanese invited to Xinjiang

Meanwhile, hundreds of Japanese nationals have signed up for a junket to Xinjiang run by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), state media reported.

The Global Times newspaper, a nationalistic tabloid with close ties to CCP mouthpiece the People’s Daily, reported on Monday that 435 people had applied to go on a trip to Xinjiang, which was billed as offering “beautiful scenery,” “delicious food,” and “beauty.”

It said media reporting, citing former inmates and official documents, of the CCP’s mass incarceration of Uyghurs in Xinjiang was “slander and lies.”

“The Consulate-General in Osaka is recruiting Japanese tourists to travel to Xinjiang next year,” the paper said, although it added that some people are concerned that a trip to Xinjiang could be a “one-way trip,” or that they could be monitored the whole time.

Prime minister Fumio Kishida recently said he was “deeply concerned” about human rights issues in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, where China is believed to have held around 1.8 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities since 2017 in what it calls “re-education” and “vocational training” facilities.

Xiang Lin, who was born in China, but who has lived in Japan for more than 30 years, said Beijing is also trying to entice Japanese people to visit Xinjiang in a bid to preempt such isolation.

“After the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen massacre, Western countries completely froze diplomatic ties with the CCP,” Xian told RFA. “Former vice premier Qian Qichen wrote in his memoirs that China used the visit of the Emperor of Japan to successfully break through that diplomatic isolation.”

He said some Japanese leftists could be happy to take up the offer.

“They’re not pro-China so much as pro-CCP,” Xiang said. “They want to use this group of people to get [more Japanese] to Xinjiang.”

“Given the CCP’s capacity to mobilize, it’s no problem for them to find 400 people … who will then come back and say that everything in Xinjiang is just fine under the CCP,” he said. “It’s like using International Olympics Committee chairman Thomas Bach to say Peng Shuai is safe.”

“It’s pure farce.”

He said social media comments had warned that anyone going on the trip would have their personal details taken and could be subject to surveillance on their return to Japan.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.