Day: April 11, 2022

North Korea appears to be restoring tunnels at its Punggye-ri nuclear testing site, nearly four years after Kim Jong Un publicly closed it in a move that observers said was an attempt to ease tensions in the region.

Foreign journalists who attended the closing ceremony Kim Jong Un presided over in May 2018 in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong reported that tunnels used for testing had been destroyed. But later reports noted that only the entrances to the tunnels were demolished and that maintenance activity at the site had resumed.

The Open Nuclear Network (ONN), a non-profit organization headquartered in Vienna, Austria, reported last week that North Korea is believed to have built an entrance to tunnel 3, south of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site. The ONN report was based on satellite imagery taken between March 24 and April 6.

Residents of the province who were near the Punggye-ri test site told RFA’s Korean Service that they too have seen evidence of construction activities.

“A few days ago, I went to my relative’s house in Kilju county close to Punggye-ri, and I saw trucks carrying construction debris,” a resident of Musan county, in the same province, told RFA’s Korean Service April 7 on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“The trucks unloaded the construction debris in the open space at nearby Chaedok rail station. Then the construction waste was loaded onto a freight train using a forklift. As soon as it was loaded, the freight train departed,” she said.

Access to the part of the station where the debris is stored and loaded is very limited due to a military presence there, the source said.

“I heard from my relative who works at Chaedok station that the debris area is surrounded by armed soldiers and is off-limits to the public,” she said.

“According to my relative, the rocks carried by the freight train are from the tunnel restoration site of the Punggye-ri nuclear testing site, but no one knows why the debris is loaded onto freight trains … instead of being dumped at the nuclear test site,” said the source.

Restoration work at the site has been ongoing around the clock at the site.

“Soldiers from the engineering units under the General Political Bureau of the Ministry of Defense are mobilized day and night to excavate and restore the Punggye-ri nuclear test site.”

A former high-ranking North Korean official who escaped and resettled in South Korea told RFA that it was likely that the orders to restore the tunnels came from the very top.

“The engineer corps under the General Political Bureau is in charge of important construction projects promoted by the party’s Central Committee. If they were the people mobilized to restore the Punggye-ri nuclear test site, it must be considered that this order comes from the supreme commander,” the former official said, referring to Kim Jong Un.

Local residents noticed when construction equipment and materials rolled into Kilju county at the beginning of this year, one county resident told RFA.

“I don’t know when the tunnel restoration of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site started, but it was in mid-February that we saw things like trucks and excavators loaded with rebar and wood and other construction materials entering the village at Punggye-ri,” the Kilju resident said on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“The nuclear test site tunnels are located in the mountains,” he said. “As trucks loaded with construction materials and excavators are heading toward the tunnels in the mountains where the nuclear test site is located, it seems that the tunnel restoration started in earnest from mid-February.”

The Kilju resident also said he had no idea where they were taking the debris after it was loaded at Chaedok rail station.

“No one can go near the debris because it is so heavily guarded.  If you take a tiny stone from the pile of rubble at the station, you can be treated as a spy and accused of trying to sell it … to hostile countries, “he said.

The two sources both said they were able to see debris unloaded and loaded at the station from a distance of about 100 meters (109 yards) away.

RFA reported in March that movement had been detected in satellite imagery of the test site, and experts predicted the site could be completely restored in six months at the latest.

Of the four tunnels at the test site, all except the first, which was heavily damaged during North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006, could possibly be restored, Joseph Bermudez, a senior fellow for Imagery Analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told RFA in March.

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

Hundreds of family members of detained Uyghur residents of a small community in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region have been forced to work in local government-run factories, a source with knowledge of the situation and a local police officer said.

At least 100 residents from Sheyih Mehelle hamlet in Ghulja (in Chinese, Yining) county have been imprisoned by authorities, a security guard from the area told RFA in an earlier report. The hamlet has a population of more than 700 people and is part of Cholunqay village, which has more than 10,000 residents.

Authorities have been transporting their relatives, mostly women and some elderly men, by bus to the factories where they work 10-12 hours a day under the watch of staff assigned to oversee them, a source familiar with the situation said.

During the first two years of the detentions from 2017 to 2019, Chinese authorities forced the family members of those who had been incarcerated or taken to internment camps to attend political study sessions, the source said. But in the last three years, they have forced the hamlet residents to work in factories for monthly wages of 1,000-2,000 yuan (U.S. $157-$314).

China is believed to have held 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim Turkic minorities in the camps since 2017. Beijing has said that the camps are vocational training centers and has denied widespread and documented allegations that it has mistreated Muslims living in the region.

Authorities take the family members to factories in Yamachang on the outskirts of Ghulja city, a police officer in Cholunqay village said.

“There are around 500 people working in that [place]. … There are factories there that make clothes, socks and gloves,” he said.

RFA previously reported that Yamachang comprised more than 20 internment camps set up in 2017 and 2018.

The officer, who said he did not know if the residents were paid for their work, told RFA that government officials are assigned to take the families of the detainees to the complex at 6 a.m. The residents are returned to the hamlet at 6 p.m. so they can take care of their children and elderly parents.

Besides the mostly women and a few elderly men who work at the complex, at least one ill resident has been forced to work there, he said.

“They are mostly women and elderly,” he said. “There’s even one who is always ill.

“They have school-age kids, and some have elderly to take care at home,” he said. “That’s why they are brought back in the evening.”

Some of the hamlet residents are also working in factories in Aruz farm field, the police officer said.

The Chinese women’s affairs director in Cholunqay village said that people who have “graduated from re-education” are among the laborers who work in the factories in Yamachang and at the Aruz farm fields.

Gulzire Awulqanqizi, an ethnic Kazakh Muslim who was held at the Dongmehle Re-education Camp in Ili Kazakh (in Chinese, Yili Hasake) Autonomous Prefecture’s Ghulja city from July 2017 to October 2018, told RFA that after her release, she had been forced to work at a glove factory in the Aruz farm fields.

The woman, who now lives in the U.S. state of Virginia, said authorities transported her by bus from her dormitory to the factory, where she received only 600 yuan a month for her work. When she returned home at the end of the day, she had to undertake political studies and was subjected to police interrogations.

“We went to work from 7 a.m. onwards, and we had 40 minutes for lunch,” she said. “After the factory work, we went to our dormitories.”

Translated by RFA’s Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Malaysian police announced the arrest of a suspected criminal leader who is said to be close to the Chinese underworld, following his surrender to law enforcement here on Monday after more than a year in hiding.

Nicky Liow Soon Hee, who faces 26 counts of money laundering according to the police, had been on the run since March 2021 when authorities smashed his syndicate and arrested more than 60 suspects, including some law enforcement officers, police said.

Nicky is alleged to be close to the United States-sanctioned Chinese triad leader Wan Kuok Koi (commonly known as Broken Tooth), the head of the 14K Triad, one of the largest Chinese organized crime gangs in the world.

“[Nicky] Liow Soon Hee also known as Nicky Liow was arrested at 11 a.m. at the Federal Police Commercial Crime Department office in Jalan Tun Razak after he turned up and surrendered to police,” Commercial Crime Director Kamarudin Md. Din said.

“Liow will be charged with 26 counts of money laundering under … the Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Terrorism Financing and Proceeds of Unlawful Activities Act 2001,” he added.

Liow is scheduled to be produced at Shah Alam court in Selangor on Tuesday. He is staring at a prison sentence of 15 years and hefty fines, if convicted.

Last month, the Federal Police Commercial Crime Department obtained an arrest warrant for Liow after it filed charges against him at the Shah Alam Court for money laundering offenses under the instructions of the Attorney General’s Chambers, according to Kamarudin.

Liow’s Nicky Gang operated a telecommunication scam where it tricked victims, mostly in China, into handing over large sums of money, allowing the gang to allegedly amass millions of ringgit, police said. The syndicate would also target investors from China by promising them huge returns through investments in cryptocurrency, real estate and the foreign exchange market.

During a series of raids in March 2021 to take down the Nicky Gang, police arrested more than 50 people and seized 773,000 ringgit (U.S. $187,500) along with 35 vehicles valued at 8.86 million ringgit ($2.14 million) under provisions of the Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Terrorism Financing and Proceeds of Unlawful Activities Act of 2001.

Among those arrested were Liow’s two brothers, Liow Wei Kin and Liow Wei Loon, but they were later freed after prosecutors dropped charges against them.

A series of sanctions by the U.S. Treasury Department on Wan Kuok Koi, the Macau underworld kingpin allowed the Royal Malaysia Police to establish links to the Nicky Gang, Ayob Khan Mydin Pitchay, then the police chief of Johor state, told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service, in an interview last April.

“It was crucial information as based on the tip of the iceberg. We were able to study the serious and extensive operations of the local syndicate, which has international connections,” Ayob told BenarNews. “It is very serious and we are very concerned what would have happened should we have failed to react accordingly and slam the brakes on their operation.”

He described Liow’s and Wan Kuok Koi’s relationship as close.

“Liow and Broken Tooth are as close as siblings,” Ayob said.

“They have known each other since 2018 and Broken Tooth … had since been providing Liow with patronage and security assurance under his 14K Triad.”

A Vietnamese political dissident granted refugee status by United Nations is being detained in an immigration detention center in Thailand and faces possible deportation, he told RFA on Monday.

Chu Manh Son said that authorities detained him on April 8 when he went to the headquarters of the Royal Thai Police in Bangkok to request a police report for an immigration application to relocate to Canada with his family members, who already have obtained U.N. refugee status.

Thai police asked Son to present his passport, but he did not have it as he was forced to flee Vietnam in 2017 after being sentenced by a court in Nghe An province to 30 months in prison for “conducting propaganda against the state.”

The authorities arrested Son with four other Vietnamese refugees when they went to police headquarters for the same reason, he said.

“When I and my friends, Mr. Them and Ms. Luyen, went to the Judicial Department of Royal Thai Police to get our criminal records, they asked for my personal papers,” he told RFA from the Immigration Detention Center (IDC). “I gave them my U.N. card. Then they asked for my passport, but I did not have it.”

Nguyen Van Them, Nguyen Thi Luyen and their two children — Nguyen Tien Dat, 16, and Philip Nguyen Nhat Nam, five months — did not have passports either, said Son.

“After that, they asked us to stay and called the immigration police,” he said, adding that the police accompanied the group to the IDC.

Vietnamese dissidents often flee to Thailand to avoid persecution by the government for political and religious reasons. But Thailand has not signed the U.N.’s 1951 Refugee Convention, which prohibits sending refugees back to their home countries if they face threats to their life or freedom. People running to Thailand to escape persecution therefore face the risk of being arrested by immigration authorities and treated as illegal immigrants.

A day after their arrest, the five attended a court hearing during which they were charged with illegally residing in Thailand, Son said.

“On the morning of April 9, the police accompanied us to a hearing during which we were fined 10,000 baht [U.S. $300] each,” he said. “I had to pay an extra 1,000 baht fine because I had entered the country illegally. After paying the fines, we were taken back to the IDC to wait for a deportation order.”

Son’s case in Vietnam also involved 14 young Catholics and Protestants. He said that his family left Vietnam and entered Thailand illegally in 2017 to avoid jail.

“As a former political dissident chased by the Vietnamese police, if I am repatriated to Vietnam, I will face a very tough sentence,” he said.

RFA has not been able to reach Thai authorities to find out if Son and the others will be deported.

The Refugee Protection Department of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Thailand declined to provide information on the five for confidentiality reasons.

Translated by Anna Vu for RFA’s Vietnamese service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Patients in Shanghai are being locked out of life-saving medical treatment as the city pushes ahead with Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy, RFA has learned.

As large swathes of the city remain under lockdown and thousands of new infections are reported every day, hospitals are increasingly closing their doors to patients, even those in need of dialysis and cancer treatment.

Jiading district resident Wang Zhumin’s 77-year-old father — who would typically need dialysis three times a week — hasn’t been able to get it for seven days, she said.

“I keep seeking out the neighborhood committee and the municipal government, but they tell me they can’t get him into Jiading Central Hospital, and that we can’t come in,” Wang said. “I said, so does that mean he has to stay home and wait for death?”

Wang’s father once received dialysis three times a week at Haihua Hospital near his home, but that facility was initially hit by staff shortages and a lack of beds, then announced it was shutting down the dialysis clinic because of a COVID-19 outbreak.

Neither the neighborhood committee, the city government nor emergency services have been able to help, she said.

“They told me to find a hospital myself … like kicking a ball around,” she said. She later took her father to the Jiading Central Hospital and waited all day on the off-chance of a dialysis slot, but went home with nothing.

“I didn’t see hide nor hair of a doctor,” Wang said.

Repeated calls to the Haihua Hospital and the Jiading Central Hospital ER rang unanswered on April 7 and April 8.

According to Haihua Hospital’s WeChat account, the hospital has dispatched more than 500 people to “the front line” to support the mandatory, city-wide COVID-19 testing effort.

The Jiading Central Hospital also sent some 100 medical staff to Pudong to support the PCR testing operation there on March 28, according to publicly available information.

More than 20,000 patients in Shanghai rely on regular dialysis to stay alive, and new appointments were already few and far between.

A report in the China News Weekly said many dialysis facilities have been shut during lockdown, with their staff in compulsory isolation centers after testing positive for COVID-19.

Desperate patients — including those needing dialysis, cancer treatment or those with complex chronic illnesses — frequently post appeals to social media calling for help from somewhere; anywhere.

Shen Ruiyin, a 77-year- old Shanghai resident, died on the evening of March 28 due to heart failure caused by going without kidney dialysis for a prolonged period. His son Shen Li took to Weibo to complain that his father had been transferred between three difference hospitals after testing positive for COVID-19 on March 26.

He died alone in the hospital, with no family at his side, without the medication he needed, and with no dialysis, Shen Li wrote.

Qi Guoyong, a 79 -year-old Shanghai resident, lost his wife Zhang Siling at the end of March.

“I am very saddened by the death of my wife, but I can’t do anything about it,” Qi told RFA. “I hope the hospital can give me some kind of answer… I just want them to give me an explanation.”

Qi said the hospital is “too busy” to worry about his wife’s death, with a huge backlog of cancer patients awaiting chemotherapy.

But he wants to know if Zhang, who was passed around three different hospitals after presenting with abdominal pain on March 22, was misdiagnosed; if anything could have been done to save her.

Zhang was initially treated for pancreatitis, before developing sepsis likely caused by a bowel obstruction, Qi said.

A Hangzhou resident surnamed Lei, 33, said she had brought her terminally ill mother to Shanghai to seek treatment at the Shanghai Fudan Cancer Hospital on March 23, and surgery was scheduled within seven days from her admission.

But lockdown hit, and Lei’s mother’s surgery was repeatedly postponed, with doctors telling Lei that her mother had to wait two weeks because they weren’t Shanghai residents.

“We are really desperate,” Lei said. “My mother’s metastatic tumor could still be surgically removed, but it’s been more than 60 days since her last chemotherapy, and the tumor could grow … or metastasize at any time.”

“My mother has diabetes, and there is no food or medicine available around here … this has been devastating for my mother’s mental health.”

It’s a humanitarian disaster that has rippled through Shanghai since lockdown came.

At least two asthma patients have died after being refused treatment by medical staff on the grounds of disease prevention, according to online reports.

Miao Xiaohui, former chief physician at Shanghai Changzheng Hospital, wrote in an April 7 article that the government should be taking steps to address the issue of non-COVID excess deaths caused by the restrictions.

He cited figures reported in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) as saying that the mortality rate from diabetes in China increased by 83 percent during 2021, while the suicide rate has risen by 66 percent, compared with before the pandemic.

Meanwhile, local officials charged with imposing draconian stay-at-home restrictions have been resigning en masse, citing a lack of understanding of the impact of the zero-COVID policies on the ground, and a lack of support for those tasked with enforcing them, many of whom are retirees and volunteers.

Wu Yingchuan, branch CCP secretary at Shanghai’s Changli Garden residential compound, said in a resignation letter that the committee were resigning as they were unable to meet testing and contract-tracing requirements as required by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“There are too many things that we grassroots officials needed to know from the start, but we weren’t told,” Wu wrote, adding that his neighborhood committee had tried their hardest to arrange transportation for chemotherapy and dialysis patients, but had been told repeatedly not to send them to hospitals.

The Hancheng neighborhood committee sent an open letter to residents on April 9, saying that its members had been separated from their families since March 17.

“We are also doing our best to comply with all of these government policies, which every department expects us to understand and cooperate with, but nobody understands us,” the letter said. “We have also gotten to the point where we can’t take it any more.”

Many neighborhood committees have accused CDC of failing to send test personnel and failing to make arrangements for those who did test positive.

Meanwhile, residents are increasingly taking matters into their own hands as the neighborhood committees are swamped with complaints about food shortages amid a city-wide supply-chain crisis and lack of delivery personnel to serve people ordered to remain home.

Social media clips have shown long queues of trucks on highways in Jiangsu, Shandong, Hebei, Guangdong and other provinces, with some drivers trapped for days while they await PCR tests.

Taiwan’s Central News Agency said some 30 million drivers are believed to be stranded on expressways in China, accounting for around 76 percent of China’s freight and logistics industry.

Former Chinese Red Cross executive Ren Ruihong said CCP leader Xi Jinping has become personally associated with the zero-COVID policy.

“Why do they keep saying that Xi Jinping is personally directing disease control and prevention work? It’s because they want to reinforce the idea that this is a political task to anyone who may oppose the policy, and that it’s not up for debate,” Ren told RFA.

“[This is] related to long-term dissatisfaction and secret opposition among various Shanghai vested interest groups to the central government’s zero-COVID policy.”

Ren said the problems caused by these policies have shown no signs of abating.

“We can see that the situation in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai has taken a sharp turn for the worse,” Ren said.

State media reported on Thursday that Shanghai is speeding up the construction of centralized isolation and treatment facilities, including a facility at the National Convention and Exhibition Center that is expected to provide a further 40,000 beds on completion.

Tens of thousands of contacts of infected people have been transferred to isolation facilities in neighboring Zhejiang province.

Shanghai on Sunday registered 914 locally transmitted COVID-19 cases and 25,173 local asymptomatic infections. The city has now reported over 200,000 positive cases since March 1, the CCP-backed Global Times newspaper reported.

Some 7,500 residential compounds have had some restrictions lifted, enabling a limited amount of movement within districts, it said.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

New evidence has emerged that may help support Vietnam’s claims over the Paracel islands in the South China Sea, currently occupied by China.

A copy of a birth certificate issued in June 1940 claims that Mai Xuan Quy, a girl, was born at 3 p.m. on Dec. 9, 1939, on Pattle Island to Mai Xuan Tap, a Vietnamese meteorologist and his wife, Nguyen Thi Thang.

The paper was witnessed by Nguyen Tang Chuan, a medical doctor, and Do Duc Mui, head of the local radio communication station.

As such, it indicates that French Indochina, of which Vietnam was part, had administration of the island and Vietnamese people worked there. That could be significant evidence as claimants to disputed features in the South China Sea may seek to show they were the first to have an official presence there.

Pattle is a coral island, part of the Crescent Island group of the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. It served as the main base for the colonial-era French Indochinese and later, South Vietnamese occupation of the Paracels.

Vietnam, Taiwan and China all claim sovereignty over the entire Paracel archipelago but China has occupied it since 1974.

Peaceful life

During the 1930s, the French colonial government built some infrastructure including a weather station, a medical facility and a post office on Pattle Island.

Mai Xuan Tap, father of Mai Kim Quy, was among the civilians sent there to man the weather station when it was first set up in 1938. He brought with him his wife and two daughters, Mai Thi Phi, then two years old, and a newly born baby, Mai Thi Phuong.

The eldest daughter, Mai Thi Phi, who is now 86 and lives in Ho Chi Minh City, said: “Our family lived in Pattle four years, from 1938 to 1941. My sister Mai Kim Quy was born there.”

“Unfortunately Quy died in 1942 after we returned to the mainland.”

“Our life on Pattle Island was quiet and peaceful. The Vietnamese living there were mainly civil servants working at the weather station, the post office and the hospital,” Phi recalled.

“We had never seen any Chinese person on the island during the whole time we were there,” she said.

Mai Xuan Tap died in 1983, his wife died much earlier in 1954. After returning to Saigon, the couple had seven more children including three sons and four daughters.

The birth certificate of Mai Kim Quy was passed to the eldest son, Mai Xuan Phu, for safekeeping.

“My family has donated the birth certificate to the Vietnamese foreign ministry,” said Mai Thi Phi.

“The ministry said this is a valuable document that can play an important role in defending the country’s territorial claims in the South China Sea,” she added.

‘Useful evidence’

The Paracel archipelago is now occupied and fully controlled by China, with the biggest feature – Woody Island – being extensively developed. China has also carried out land reclamations and substantial upgrades of its military infrastructure there, according to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Yet disputes remain over the islands’ ownership.

Contested territorial claims are hard to verify, especially because until the 20^th century, there was no permanent military nor civilian presence of any country there. 

China, Vietnam and Taiwan all have ample historical documents to back up their claims, including maps, declarations and different materials.

Vietnam, which was part of French Indochina, said the troops of Annam (the then-name of colonial Vietnam), and after that, civilian administrators, set up base on the Paracels before anybody else.

Mai Xuan Quy’s birth certificate may serve as a historical evidence of physical acts of administration on the Paracel islands, said Bill Hayton, associate fellow in the Asia-Pacific Program at Chatham House, an independent U.K. think tank.

“My argument would be that this [the birth certificate] doesn’t swing the argument decisively but it is very useful evidence that Annam was in effective occupation of some of the Paracels at that time,” Hayton said.

“If the case ever went to a tribunal of some kind, the Chinese would put forward their own evidence and the judges would decide which case was stronger.”

“Such cases aren’t decided by vague claims or printing names on maps but on proving that a state had administrative control over a feature – and registering a birth on the island to a civil servant is quite strong evidence of that,” the British analyst said.

His argument, however, is being rejected by some historians who point out that China’s stance would be to stick to historical claims.

“The French Government stated at the time that they only occupied the Paracels ‘before any other Power did so’, meaning Japan. This was widely reported in the press,” said Mark Hoskin, an independent researcher and lecturer on China’s maritime history and law.

This action was taken because the Japanese had occupied Hainan and implemented a blockade of the Southern Chinese coastline. Japan was threatening France due to the transport of arms via Indochina to China.

“So the French occupation of the Paracel islands had strategic and military reasoning, but was not sovereignty related. The French statements themselves negate any potential for a sovereignty claim,” Hoskin added.