Day: March 11, 2022

North Korean state media on Friday reported the results of this week’s presidential election in South Korea, surprising citizens not used to hearing political news from the South so soon after the new leader was chosen, the residents told RFA.

“Yoon Suk Yeol, a candidate of the conservative opposition ‘People Power Party’, won by a narrow margin in the 20th ‘presidential election’ held in south Korea on March 9,” the state-run Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) reported Friday on the English-language version of its website.

A Korean version similarly emphasized the name of the party and the word “president.”

The brief report did not mention Yoon’s 0.8 percent margin of victory or his opponent, Lee Jae-myung of the ruling Democratic Party.

The website of the Rodong Sinmun newspaper carried the same Korean-language report.

The citizens did not expect to see news in their local media so soon after the election, a resident of the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFA’s Korean Service Friday.

“Authorities are usually reluctant to publicize information about South Korea’s democratic, free election system,” said the source, who requested anonymity for security reasons.

“Usually when a conservative party candidate is elected, the name of the winner is not mentioned, or it is reported late. That is why today’s Rodong Sinmun report… is regarded as unusual,” she said.

While some residents in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong reacted to the news with indifference, others were jealous, a resident there, who requested anonymity to speak freely, told RFA.

“They could not hide their envy at the democratic system in South Korea in which the Supreme Leader is directly elected by the people,” said the second source, using the term by which North Koreans call their generational, dynastic leaders.

“Retired officials and college students who confirmed the results of the 20th presidential election in South Korea had a bitter look on their faces. We also have elections here in North Korea. However, there is only one candidate, pre-selected by the party, and we have to vote for the only candidate.”

Yoon will be sworn in as the South Korean president on May 10, 2022. Analysts predict that his North Korea strategy will be more hawkish than his predecessor Moon Jae-in, who prioritized engagement with the North.

Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Public anger over widespread trafficking in women and girls, mostly for “marriage” to men who can’t find willing partners, is running in high in China since a woman was found chained by the neck in a freezing outbuilding in the eastern province of Jiangsu in January.

The ministry of public security announced a “strike hard” campaign against trafficking in women and children to run from March 1 to the end of the year, while premier Li Keqiang called in his annual work report this week for a “severe crackdown” on the crime, and for greater protection of the rights of women and children.

But despite the unprecedented public attention being given to this form of organized crime, analysts and activists said this “strike hard ” campaign isn’t the first, and that the political will is lacking at local level to eradicate its systemic causes.

Part of the problem is the systematic disempowerment of victims, many of whom are abducted, trafficked and subjected to regular abuse from a young age, according to Zhang Jing, the New York-based founder of Women’s Rights in China.

Zhang said abducted women are often kept locked up by their persecutors, leaving them with severe trauma and other mental illness.

“They suffer physical and mental trauma and abuse, so if they weren’t mentally ill before, they will be after that,” she told RFA.

Some women develop Stockholm Syndrome, a state of intense dependence on and emotional attachment to abusers by victims of kidnap and prolonged incarceration and abuse, she said.

“People who have been abused for a long time become habituated, so they just see it as a part of their lives, and may not realize it is abuse, and may even think it’s justified,” Zhang told RFA.

“Then, one day their abuser will bestow a small favor on them, like a new dress to wear, or something nice to eat, and they will feel grateful.”

Low success rate

In several years of running an anti-trafficking rescue operation to rescue bought brides and other abuse victims, Zhang says her organization has only managed to rescue 28 women and children.

“The rate at which we are rescuing them is very, very low,” she said. “It’s very sad, because there are so many victims.”

Investigator Yao Cheng, who works for Women’s Rights in China, said huge numbers of trafficked women and girls wind up in similar situation to the woman identified on her “marriage certificate” as Yang Qingxia, who was found in Jiangsu’s Feng county.

“A lot of these kids wind up just like the chained woman in Feng county after they are abducted and sold,” Yao said. “So when we look for missing children, more than half of the people we find are women, who are now [in a forced marriage] with children of their own.”

Traffickers make use of a range of strategies to lure girls and young women into their net, including violent kidnap, drugging and deception.

The majority of victims are removed from their hometowns without their consent, although they may have the consent of their families, who have received money in return.

Then, they become increasingly hard to trace, as traffickers have a pre-packaged new identity waiting for them, complete with ID card and household registration documents, procured by bribing the local police, he said.

“Then they have a household registration somewhere else with a fake name, date of birth and so on, which means you can’t find them.”

Girls are in greater demand than boys, Yao said.

“They will buy a girl for a few thousand yuan, keep her at home as free labor, then she can become a daughter-in-law when she grows up, which saves money [on a dowry or betrothal gift],” he said. “Some traffickers want to make money out of the girls and send them off to [adult] entertainment venues.”

He cited the case of Deng Lurong, a woman he found at the age of 19 in 2011, sheltering in a woodshed in Dabeishan in the eastern province of Anhui.

‘Excess birth’

Deng, who may have an intellectual disability, was an “excess birth” disowned by her parents who had been raped by a teacher in her village at the age of 13, then abducted by her uncle at 14 and sold to a man in his 40s in nearby Beiyu township.

“She was forced to offer sex to men in the village, whose ages ranged from 30 to 60, for 20 yuan a time,” said Yao Cheng.

“People in the village said she ran away often, and would stay in the fields, foraging from the crops and sleeping in a haystack, because of her abuse at the hands of so many men,” he said, drawing a parallel with the Revolutionary Model Opera, the White-Haired Girl, a communist horror story of the commodification and abuse of women in “the old society,” before the CCP took power in 1949.

“She was a modern-day White-Haired Girl,” he said.

When Yao found her, she was barely able to speak, but wanted to go back to the village to fetch her blind son.

“Things got pretty dangerous,” said, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) veteran who, like the other anti-trafficking activists, volunteers his time and finances his own search and rescue operations. “A lot of people came to the door armed with poles and hoes.”

“They knew we want to expose such things, and that if we did, that they would be regarded as criminals,” he said.

Ultimately, Deng chose to stay where she was to protect her son.

“Sometimes when we can’t save people,” Zhang said. “Like in Deng Lurong’s case, we found her and called the police for her. We did so much, but we still couldn’t save her.”

Colluding officials

Trafficking gangs often rely on intricate webs of colluding officials, police officers and other government employees to exist, all of whom close ranks when do-gooding investigators come to town.

They include police, doctors, civil affairs bureau officials, family planning bureaus, staff in sub-district offices and township governments, and CCP village committees, Zhang said.

“Usually they won’t let you [go looking for victims],” she said. “They tell you to leave, and say your publicity materials aren’t allowed there.”

“If you don’t leave, they tear down your posters, then the police in the hometowns where the children went missing will summon their parents to the local police station for questioning.”

Chinese AIDS activist Wan Yanhai, who is famous for his public health work among Chinese sex workers in the 1990s, said many of the women he worked with at that time had been abducted or trafficked.

“Many of them had been brought away from their hometowns as young girls by women from the same town or village, who seemed to them to be successful older sister figures,” Wan told RFA.

“They only found out when they arrived in the city that they were there for sex work,” he said. “Some would resist, some would be forced into it, and some of them may have accepted it. This happened a lot.”

Wan said there is scant incentive for public health officials or even non-government groups to report victims of trafficking to the police, because they need to maintain good relationships with venue owners if they are to help the women working there.

Tens or hundreds of thousands?

According to a 2018 article by Zheng Tiantian, professor of anthropology at New York State University, more than 90,000 women and girls were trafficked in China in 2008 alone, although Zheng says the true figure is likely to be much higher.

Yao had his own estimate based on his years of experience in the field.

“From 1980 to 2016, when the one-child policy ended, 200,000 children were being abducted every year at the peak,” he said. “On average, 100,000 children are kidnapped every year, which is one million every decade and more than three million over three decades.”

A 2016 report published by the United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crime, 96 percent of trafficked people in 71 countries in 2014 were women or girls.

A senior Chinese police officer with experience of anti-trafficking operations said one of the biggest problems in China is that anti-trafficking statistics aren’t included in performance evaluations for local police stations or individuals officers.

“There is no assessment of anti-trafficking results,” the officer told RFA. “The powers that be don’t pay much attention to it, and police are so busy with other work.”

He said many police officers are engaged in what he termed “non-police work,” citing the CCP’s “stability maintenance” program, which aims to control and silence dissenting voices at politically sensitive times, and prevent any social activism from taking off in the first place.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Authorities in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh again detained more than 100 striking NagaWorld Casino workers Friday, in the latest in a series of brutal mass arrests since the strike started more than three months ago.  

Some of the 158 strikers who were detained this time told RFA’s Khmer Service that they were forced into buses and taken to a quarantine facility on the outskirts of town but were not allowed to leave the buses for several hours, enduring extreme heat until the point that some of them began to vomit.

“It was awful. We are just workers. They used such brutal measures. The authorities pushed me into a truck and my arm was injured when they detained me,” Pov Raksmey told RFA.

Lay Sopheaktra, another detained worker, told RFA that she felt the authorities wanted to torture the workers so that they would not dare to gather for more protests.

“I am very sad that we are protesting for our jobs, but the authorities are denying our rights and assaulting us,” she said.

Thousands of NagaWorld workers walked off their jobs in mid-December, demanding higher wages and the reinstatement of eight jailed union leaders, three other jailed workers and 365 others they say were unjustly fired from the hotel and casino, which is owned by a Hong Kong-based company believed to have connections to family members of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Cambodian authorities have called the strike “illegal” and alleged that it is supported by foreign donors as a plot to topple the government. But a series of mass arrests in recent weeks have been attributed to alleged violations of pandemic health regulations in Cambodia’s capital. Activists said the charges were trumped up to break up the strike.

RFA reported Wednesday that 147 of the fired workers accepted compensation, but the remaining strikers are still calling for their union leaders to be released and for the company to negotiate with them.

RFA attempted to reach Phnom Penh Municipal Police spokesman San Sok Seiha for comment about Friday’s arrests, but he was not available.

A Cambodian labor advocacy group told RFA that the authorities have used similar tactics to break up peaceful protests.

“The authorities and NagaWorld Casino need to seek a solution. If they continue violence, the crisis will be deepened,” said Khun Tharo, the labor program manager for Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights

He urged the Ministry of Labor to intervene the release of 11 union leaders and workers who are being jailed to allow the workers and the NagaWorld to resume talks.

The workers arrested Friday said authorities released them from the quarantine center after detaining them without medical attentions for a few hours. They said they will continue their fight if there is no solution. 

RFA reported Tuesday that Cambodia’s Minister of Interior Sar Kheng was planning to lead a meeting of governmental officials on Wednesday to resolve the dispute.

Also on Wednesday, Phnom Penh authorities released around 200 strikers detained a day earlier while they were protesting.

On Thursday, an appeals court denied bail to the eight union leaders on the grounds that their case is still under investigation by the Phnom Penh Municipal Court.

Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been amplifying Russian government propaganda claiming that the U.S. is financing biological weapons labs in Ukraine, as the two countries embark on a “no limits” alliance that appears to include a global disinformation war.

Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian referred to the claim as if it were factual when speaking to reporters in Beijing on Thursday.

“This Russian military operation has uncovered the secret of the U.S. labs in Ukraine, and this is not something that can be dealt with in a perfunctory manner,” Zhao told a regular news briefing. “It is not something they can muddle through by saying that China’s statement and Russia’s finding are disinformation, and are absurd and ridiculous.”

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby has dismissed the claim as “Russian malarkey.”

But CIA Director William Burns said there is grave concern that Russia might be laying the groundwork for a chemical or biological attack of its own, which it would then blame on the fabricated lab operation.

“This is something, as all of you know very well, is very much a part of Russia’s playbook,” Burns told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. “They’ve used these weapons against their own citizens, they’ve at least encouraged the use in Syria and elsewhere, so it’s something we take very seriously.”

Moscow has also claimed that its invading forces had found evidence of hasty attempts to conceal biological weapons research in Ukraine.

Russian military figures and foreign minister Sergey Lavrov have repeated the claims, saying they are “ethnically targeted.”

The story has been picked up in Chinese state media, which has been ordered to publish only pro-Russian material since the start of the war, while video footage of Russian defense officials repeating the claims had garnered more than 10 million views on the Chinese social media platform Sina Weibo.

Changchun lockdown

The story was amplified in China as authorities placed the northeastern city of Changchun — home to some nine million people — under lockdown, amid a wave of new COVID-19 infections.

Residents must stay home, with one person allowed out every two days to buy essential supplies only, and public transportation, schools and businesses shut down.

China reported 1,396 new cases of COVID-19 during the past 24 hours, compared with less than 100 just three weeks ago.

Meanwhile, authorities in Shanghai have shut down schools, and are requisitioning properties in one residential district, possibly to use as enforced quarantine facilities.

The Xuhui district government issued an emergency notice on Thursday, requisitioning a long-term apartment-style hotel, making the current residents homeless overnight, they told RFA.

Tenants who used the hotel were typically highly-salaried professionals who wanted a place close to the office, and were ordered to leave with no compensation or alternative arrangements, staff said.

“Xuhui district government imposed a requisition order,” a member of staff who answered the phone on Friday told RFA. “If they are paying monthly to stay, that costs around 10,000 yuan a month.”

“I don’t know anything else about it.”

A Shanghai resident surnamed Wang said local officials had reported 11 newly confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 64 asymptomatic infections.

Reporters pressed to spread conspiracies

Repeated calls to the Shanghai municipal health commission rang unanswered during office hours on Friday, while an official at the Xuhui district health bureau referred inquiries to the district-level center for disease control and prevention (CDC).

Calls to the Xuhui CDC also rang unanswered on Friday.

One journalist told RFA they had been ordered not to carry out their own reporting into the COVID-19 wave, but instead to repost claims that the U.S. funded a biolab in Ukraine specializing in the study of pathogens that can be transmitted from bats to humans.

Media worker Liu Xiao said China’s zero-COVID strategy is looking less and less realistic in the face of the new wave of omicron variant infections, which is better able to escape China’s homegrown vaccines than imported vaccines.

“You can’t get the Pfizer jab; they’re not approving it,” Liu told RFA. “Everyone I know, including the director of a hospital, have all been given the Chinese-made jabs.”

“My son is still pretty sick, and he’s saying that the Chinese-made vaccines aren’t effective … Also, a lot of people are getting their immunity levels tested, but nobody is managing to get a Pfizer jab,” he said.

“Not even people in Beijing, who are very well-connected.”

Liu said nobody knows why it’s impossible to get imported jabs.

“We daren’t talk about it too much,” he said.

Political, not scientific policies

Cases continued to surge in Laixi city near the eastern port city of Qingdao, with a number of local officials punished for “allowing” the disease to spread at the No. 7 High School.

Shandong province had 121 newly confirmed cases on Friday, including 103 in Qingdao.

A Qingdao resident who gave only the nickname John said it made no sense to blame officials when the omicron variant is so highly transmissible.

“I don’t think it makes any sense, because … the virus will always spread faster than the speed of human prevention and control,” he said. “But after they did that, local officials were walking through the streets every day to oversee prevention and control efforts.”

Most flights have been canceled at Qingdao International Airport, with online video showing rows of empty check-in desks.
 
Current affairs commentator Zhang Jianping said the zero-COVID policy is political rather than scientific.

“This virus will keep coming back, and they always use political means to deal with what should be a matter for science,” Zhang said.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping has referred to Russian president Vladimir Putin as his best friend. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has cast doubts on whether Beijing is a more opportunistic partner wrong-footed by the global backlash against Putin, or a long-term cast-iron ally of the Kremlin. The bilateral relationship is complicated by the fact that China imports a good deal of grain from both Russia and Ukraine, and is facing a poor harvest of its own this year due to heavy rains. Rita Cheng of RFA’s Mandarin Service spoke to Tong Zhao, a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program, about the strategic implications of Russia’s war for Beijing:

RFA: It’s said that Putin and Xi Jinping have similar personalities, and the relationship between China and Russia is largely determined by the personal friendship of the two leaders. What is your observation?

Zhao: Russia’s political decision-making mechanism is similar to China’s. That’s to say, there is a strong core leader whose authority is basically absolute and rarely questioned. Those who work for them express strong personal support for them. It’s hard for them to understand the concept of different voices, and hard for them to hear ideas different to their own. There are also similarities in the way domestic public opinion works in China and Russia, in that it’s carefully managed by the authorities and state media.

RFA: Did Putin say anything about his plans to invade Ukraine when he met with Xi Jinping in Beijing at the start of the Winter Olympics? To what extent has China misjudged its strategy?

Zhao: My personal belief is that China was likely worried at the outset. It may have believed that this would be a low-intensity, small-scale military operation. But most people in China know that Putin wields geopolitical influence with the build-up of troops, and uses soldiers to achieve his diplomatic and security goals.

China may have … thought this would be a quick-fix war — more of a surgical strike. I don’t think they can have predicted this full-scale invasion, let alone the strong reaction from the international community, nor how badly things would go for the Russian forces.

RFA: How will the Russian-Ukrainian war affect China’s strategic environment? Have its diplomatic and security circles reached any kind of view on that?

Zhao: I am guessing that Chinese foreign and security policymakers haven’t reached any consensus at all, and that they are still engaged in heated debate about what to do. No one can predict the outcome of the war, nor what kind of impact it will have on the political situation in Europe, let alone the rest of the world.

Some experts believe that the longer the war goes on, the more Russia and the West will be dragged in and consumed by European security issues, which will give China much more strategic space in the Asia-Pacific region.

But there are also concerns that this war has had a huge and negative impact on China’s international image, and that China is being dragged down by Russia, and that this will make Western countries even more concerned about China. Those of this school of thought say China’s economy is very large — Russia’s isn’t even as big as that of Guangdong province —  and its hostility to the West is at least as deep as Russia’s, so there is even more potential threat there. They think this could make the West even more determined to contain China.

I don’t think China will make significant adjustments to major strategic issues and foreign policy in the near future, because they have yet to make a final judgement on the way this war will turn out.

RFA: But are there channels open for these kinds of policy debates, when China and the West are basically living in parallel universes when it comes to the fundamental facts of this war?

Zhao: The channels through which Chinese citizens get their information are different from those in the West. The Chinese government carefully manages their access to information, and living in such a society will definitely put their academics under pressure, too. Anyone whose thinking or suggestions sound too much like the Western point of view won’t have their opinions conveyed upwards, and will also face social pressure as an individual.

Everyone wants their suggestions to be seen and given recognition by the country’s leaders, so academics lack incentive to make policy suggestions that are inconsistent with the CCP line. They will also fear being regarded by higher-ranking officials or the general public as biased towards the West, if they don’t speak out for China. So this kind of pressure reduces the diversity of public discourse. It will have a systemic impact, although there are certain risks [to China] in the long run.

RFA: What sort of risks?

Zhao: Well, in the event of an international dispute, it’s quite possible that the international community would regard a decision made by the Chinese leadership as unpredictable and incomprehensible, although it might be very popular within China. So the risk of mutual misunderstanding is quite high.

RFA: The late former Chinese ambassador to France, Wu Jianmin, once said that whenever China sees events in the world wrong, its domestic policy will also go wrong. Permitted opinion in China right now is one-sided support for Russia, perhaps more for Putin than the Russians, and they’re not talking about past Soviet aggression against China. What do you think of this phenomenon?

Zhao: These historical facts exist objectively, but when the mainstream narrative in society is systematically managed, and the government obviously does not want everyone to examine this history too much .. they’re not going to make much of an impact.

The mainstream consensus in Chinese society at this stage is that Western countries pose a strategic and all-round challenge to China’s national rejuvenation and national rise. On this issue, there is no doubt that Russia is China’s strategic partner, and Russia can provide China with strategic support; they are seen as like-minded brothers.

Mainstream thinking in China believes that there are no permanent partners, only permanent interests, and the interests of China and Russia in this regard are highly consistent. They are ‘abandoning past suspicions, not looking back on the past, and consolidating current strategic tasks.’ So it doesn’t seem as if China is willing to look back at past Soviet aggression.

RFA: What kind of lessons can Chinese policymakers learn from this war?

Zhao: Well, the outside world has been speculating about whether China will take advantage of the West’s focus on Eastern Europe to take unexpected action against Taiwan. I think this is looking less likely, though, because the Russian war in Ukraine has shown everyone how war is never that simple. China will rather want to think about how to run Taiwan after a military invasion. This is more of a constraint on Chinese military action, because if a quick solution can’t be achieved, the international community has time to intervene. Military aid and economic sanctions, over time, all take their toll, and possible trigger socioeconomic problems inside China. That’s the thing the Chinese government is most worried about. A possible challenge to the security of the CCP regime would be a far worse outcome than not invading Taiwan. So I think there are a number of considerations that will very likely make China recalculate, and rethink its strategy on Taiwan.

RFA: Based on the current situation, do you think Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the beginning of World War III? How likely is it to turn into a nuclear war?

Zhao: Personally, I don’t think it’s appropriate to use World War III to describe the nature and potential violence of this war. It is confined to Eastern Europe, and Russia’s current strategic intention is not to provoke a larger all-out war with Western countries.

The only risk is that Russia faces a huge setback in this war, whether it be the conventional battlefield or the economic system, or even political stability at home. When Putin, as a strongman, is forced into a corner, will he escalate the war in an unexpected way, or even introduce a nuclear factor? I think this risk cannot be completely ruled out, but at present the absolute value is not high. Putin is still a rational man; it’s just that his cost-benefit calculations are different from other people’s.

He has placed Russia’s nuclear weapons to a state of high alert. From his point of view, that was to deter military aid and economic sanctions from Western countries, not to initiate the use of nuclear weapons. I don’t think he intends to create a nuclear leakage crisis at a nuclear power plant to escalate into a nuclear war. He is still relatively rational. But I do worry that as the war turns more and more unfavorable for Putin, he will start to make unexpected moves.

RFA: Ukraine, the United States and the European Union have all called on China to exert influence on Putin. Could China play the role of mediator?

Zhao: I think that would be pretty hard for them to do, for reasons of self-confidence and resources. It’s not clear whether China has enough resources to wield that kind of influence. What it has said it will do is provide a certain amount of support within its capacity, such as humanitarian aid. But that’s a long way from playing mediator.

China’s views on Russia are complicated. For a long time, China has viewed Putin with admiration and adulation, calling him ‘Emperor Putin.’ He is regarded as a powerful geopolitical master with great strategic means and is lionized by the Chinese people. China has played the role of younger brother in the Sino-Russian bilateral strategic relationship for a long time. And while that relationship is changing rapidly, particularly with the war … Beijing doesn’t seem to think it can exert influence on Russia, particularly not a figure like Putin, via the bilateral relationship.

China doesn’t actually seem to understand what kind of strategic goals Putin was hoping to achieve in the war in Ukraine. How could they then put any pressure on Putin or mediate in any way?

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.