Day: July 15, 2022

Thousands of Laotians are once again leaving their home country to work in the Malaysian fishing industry, where they are susceptible to abuse from employers due to their illegal status, the fishermen told RFA.

The Lao Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare estimated that about 2,000 Laotians had recently traveled illegally to Malaysia for fishing jobs. During the pandemic, 700 Lao migrants had returned home from Malaysia, but most have since gone back as economic conditions in their home country worsen due in part to high inflation.

Though the pay is sometimes better there than what they could earn in Laos, illegal migrants are often exploited by their employers, a Lao fisherman who has been working in Malaysia’s Pahang state told RFA’s Lao Service, on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“There’s no fairness,” he said. “The main drawback is that we, as fishermen, don’t know the total weight of the fish we catch and we don’t know how much money our employers make. We just get whatever they give us. The information about the total catch and revenue is not known to us.” 

To ensure their rights are protected, the Lao government is working on finding ways for more migrants to go to Malaysia legally.

“We recently sent about 70 Lao workers to Malaysia, legally, for a pilot project. We are requesting that the Lao Ministry of Foreign Affairs send more workers to Malaysia, as we know many Laotians are going there to work illegally,” an official of the ministry’s Department of Labor Skill Development and Employment Service told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

Despite the risks, Malaysia is attractive to migrants because it is a relatively easy country to work in, the fisherman said.

“The main reason so many choose to come here is because we don’t have money. Most of us don’t even have enough to make a passport,” he said.

“In my case, the employer sent some money to me in Laos to apply for a passport and pay for all my documents. If I had gone to, say, South Korea instead, I would have had to pay for everything myself. I’d have to borrow money to fly over there,” he said.

The fisherman said that he came to Malaysia via a land route through Thailand. The trip cost 100,000 baht (U.S. $2,800), which he repays through deductions from his paycheck. 

“More than one thousand Lao fishermen are working here …, about 60 percent more than there were last year. Most of these new fishermen, who have never even been on the sea, come from the Vientiane suburbs or from nearby Borikhamxay province,” he said.

Another Lao fisherman told RFA how he came to work in Malaysia.

“Nobody told me to come here, but I came because in Laos, there are no jobs and labor is cheap,” he told RFA. 

“I didn’t come here via the Lao Labor Department. At first, I came to Malaysia as a tourist. I took a bus to the town of Nong Khai in Thailand, then I traveled by bus to Pattani Province in southern Thailand where my employer’s bus was waiting to take me to Malaysia. Then, in Malaysia, my employer obtained all the necessary documents including a work permit for me, so I can work,” the second fisherman said.

A third fisherman told RFA that the pay was good.

“We make at least 3,700 ringgit, or about 30,000 baht [$836] per month, but in some months when the catch is big, we can earn up to 7,000 ringgit, or 50,000 baht [$1,581],” he said.

“There are about 100 Lao fishermen working here … That’s not a lot. There are also Thais, Burmese and Cambodians too and we mingle together,” he said.

The Lao government is making efforts to protect the migrants by making it easier for them to go to Malaysia legally, thereby making them harder to exploit.

Authorities are collecting information in hopes of entering into an agreement with Malaysia to allow Laos to send more workers, Anousone Khamsingsavath, the director of the Department of Labor Skill Development and Employment Service, said at an August 2021 meeting that discussed workers’ rights in Southeast Asia.

He acknowledged widespread exploitation in Malaysia’s fishing and seafood processing industries.

Lao fishermen in Malaysia support the effort between the countries to reach an agreement, because it would increase the likelihood that their rights would be protected, a fourth Lao fisherman told RFA.

BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news source, sent inquiries on this issue to the Malaysian government but received no response.

Translated by Max Avary. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Chinese internet giant Sina Weibo says it is banning the use of puns, homophones and other word-play claiming to be “typos” by people wanting to get around automated blocks and filters and refer to politically sensitive topics behind the Great Firewall.

“In order to clean up cyberspace and maintain a civilized and healthy online community, this site will focus on rectifying violations of the site’s policy regarding the use of homophones, variants, and other “typos” to publish and disseminate low-quality content,” the platform said in a July 13 statement on its official Weibo account.

Weibo said it will “intensify investigations and … illegal behaviors” around puns and soundalike phrases, and “standardize the use of Chinese characters.”

Mandarin Chinese has tens of thousands of characters but only about 400 pronunciations, lending itself readily to puns and soundalike expressions.

Social media users have long made use of this capacity by substituting in different characters that sound similar to banned phrases, which include references to ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders and sensitive keywords like June 4 (for the 1989 Tiananmen massacre) and anything else the authorities don’t wish to see online.

“This platform calls on the majority of netizens to express their views in a civilized manner and standardize the use of Chinese characters when participating in community discussions,” Weibo said. “If you find relevant illegal content, please report it … and we will deal with it in a timely manner.”

More recently, the phrase “narrow-necked bottle,” which uses characters with the sound “xi jing ping” has been used to reference CCP leader Xi Jinping.

Meanwhile, the Chinese name of the Dutch financial institution ABN-AMRO, which directly translates as “Dutch bank” has come to mean “Henan banks,” because of the similar sounding Mandarin words for the Netherlands and Henan. The term references recent protests by locked-out depositors in the central Chinese province.

While not a pun, the phrase “535,” or May 35th, has also long been used to reference June 4, or the Tiananmen massacre, Hunan dissident Ouyang Jianghua told RFA.

“June 4th is a sensitive word, so we write May 35th,” Ouyang said. “Do the math. There are only 31 days in May.”

The letter “S” has long been used to express the Chinese word for “death.” It was unclear whether acronyms, which often depict expletives or insults, like “NMSL” for “ni ma si le,” which means, “your mother is dead,” would also be targeted.

Independent political analyst Wu Zuolai said the use of homophones also brings cheer to some people’s day.

“This phenomenon is a cultural phenomenon that makes people laugh,” Wu told RFA. “Netizens use numbers, homonyms, or other well-known ways to obscure certain expressions.”

“It has caused mayhem when it comes to the use of Chinese characters. Nobody uses Chinese characters normally any more,” he said. “If you write the truth, you offend the government.”

Wu said the move was likely in response to the successful circumvention of censorship during the Henan rural bank protests of recent weeks, as well as the Shanghai COVID-19 lockdown.

“People gathered or protested offline in many ways, which aroused the vigilance of the authorities,” Wu said. “The [CCP] 20th National Congress is about to start, and people could use a lot of deformed characters and homophones to poke fun.”

“This would deconstruct the authority of the CCP and make a mockery of serious and high-minded mainstream voices,” Wu said, adding that he expects people to come up with other ways to communicate their thoughts despite the crackdown on puns.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Five years after the death of Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo from advanced liver cancer during an 11-year prison sentence for subversion, concerns remain for the health of many other free speech advocates who remain behind bars in China, a Paris-based press freedom group has said.

“In China, detained journalists are almost systematically subjected to mistreatment and denied medical care,” Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in a statement on the fifth anniversary of Liu’s death.

The statement cited the case of political commentator Yang Tongyan who died from an untreated cancer while in detention, and that of Kunchok Jinpa, a leading source of information about Tibet for journalists, who died in 2021 as a result of ill-treatment in prison.

“Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the international community to finally step up pressure on the regime for it to put an end to its policy of censorship and media surveillance,” the group said.

Liu’s sentence came after he co-authored Charter 08, a document calling for sweeping changes to China’s political system that was signed by more than 300 fellow activists on Dec. 10, 2008.

“Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom to choose where to live, and the freedoms to strike, to demonstrate, and to protest, among others,” the document demanded.

“Without freedom, China will always remain far from civilized ideals.”

Humanitarian China director Wang Jianhong, who founded the Zhang Zhan Concern Group in support of jailed citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, said Zhang’s health is a matter of grave concern.

“We have no news about Zhang Zhan in nearly six months, and we are actually very worried about her health there in prison,” Wang told RFA.

“While her family saw Zhang Zhan in a video call at the end of January, and said they saw her condition had improved and she could walk by herself, but there was no exact indicator [provided to them], such as her weight,” Wang said.

Zhang is currently serving a four-year jail term for “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble” after she turned up in the central city of Wuhan and started reporting from the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, then in its early stages.

At one point, campaigners said she was on the verge of dying after months of partial hunger strike and forced feeding.

Her family have been denied permission for another video call or an in-person meeting, Wang said.

Jewher Ilham, daughter of jailed Uyghur professor Ilham Tohti, says she fears her father could share Liu Xiaobo’s fate.

“I always feel that my father and Liu Xiaobo were soulmates,” she told RFA. “They have very similar views and expectations, that is, peaceful coexistence; and their experiences are also very similar in that they have been jailed. The experiences of the two of them are also very similar, that is, they were both controlled and detained by the Chinese government.”

“On the anniversary of Mr. Liu Xiaobo’s death, I am not only heartbroken for Liu Xiaobo and his family, but also very worried about my father,” she said.

“I didn’t know what happened to Mr. Liu Xiaobo. And what happened to my father?”

“In a Xinjiang prison, with such a high-pressure environment and very poor hygiene, it is really hard to predict what will happen to my father’s health,” Jewher Ilham said. “I honestly don’t think he will be in very good health in there.”

RSF published a list of 15 free speech defenders currently behind bars whose health is worsening, including China Rights Observer founder Qin Yongmin, dissident Yang Hengjun and Zhang Haitao, Swedish Hong Kong-based bookseller Gui Minhai and Huang Qi, founder of the 64 Tianwang rights website.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Around 4,000 locals were forced to flee junta airstrikes on around 15 villages in Myanmar’s northwestern Sagaing region on Thursday. The attacks are part of a three-day scorched-earth campaign that continued Friday. It involved around 100 troops, targeting residents of a township that has fiercely resisted military rule.

Four helicopters carried out raids on the villages in Depayin township, killing a man, identified as Khin Maung San, and injuring another man and a woman.

“Khin Maung San died on the spot and the injured woman was critically wounded in the bladder. She was treated by military council forces,” a local told RFA on condition of anonymity. “The residents fled and didn’t return until the military left. The conditions on the ground are very bad.”

The local said around 100 residents who could not flee were interrogated and had the contents of their mobile phones searched by the military to check whether they had contacted People’s Defense Forces (PDFs).

These are not the first air strikes on Depayin this month. Residents said two military helicopters fired on three villages on July 2.

Township residents have fiercely resisted the junta that have been ruling the country since the Feb.1, 2021 coup, offering support to local PDFs. The junta has tried to control opposition by cutting off mobile phone and internet access.

More than 100 residents of Sagaing region were killed by junta forces in the first 15 months after the coup. Casualties across Myanmar have risen above 2,000.

Calls to the military council spokesman by RFA to ask about the raids on Depayin went unanswered on Friday.