Day: October 12, 2022

Cambodia’s Supreme Court ordered the Court of Appeals to retry the case of Kak Sovanchhay, the autistic teenage son of opposition activists, who was last year sentenced to eight months in prison for incitement and insulting public officials.

Kak Sovannchhay, 17, is the son of Kak Komphear, a jailed senior official of the banned opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP). 

He was arrested at his home in Phnom Penh on June 24, 2021, over a Facebook post and voice messages in which he was critical of the government in response to someone calling his father a traitor.

The Phnom Penh Municipal Court sentenced him on Nov. 1, but credited him four-and-a-half months for time served and commuted the remainder of his sentence, thereby allowing his release a little more than a week later. Additionally the court ordered he remain under judicial supervision for two years.

He appealed the conviction but it was upheld on March 14, 2022.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday accepted the facts from the appellate trial but rejected the conviction and six conditions set on Kak Sovannchhay while under judicial supervision.

Prum Chantha, Kak Sovannchhay’s mother, told RFA’s Khmer Service that her son’s imprisonment was a threat from the government because her family continues to promote democracy.

She said the Court of Appeals should drop the sentence because her son, who was only 16 at the time of his arrest, was a child. Additionally the sentence leaves a mark on his record that could seriously affect his future.

“First, it affects his opportunities to learn, second he gets discrimination, and third, when he goes to find work, his name will be associated with the conviction, so it is a very serious punishment,” said Prum Chantha.

“He is just a minor and he has a disability,” she said, referring to his autism. “He is very young.”

Kak Sovannchhay’s lawyer Sam Sokong told RFA he believes the verdict is a violation of his client’s human rights.

“I urge the authorities as well as the Royal Government to consider the case of this child and to consider the interests of the child as enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other rights related to children’s rights,” he said.

Based on Cambodia’s Penal Code and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Cambodia is a party, judges should be highly considerate and refrain from convicting children, opting for rehabilitation or education instead of imprisonment, Sam Sokong said.

Am Sam Ath of the local Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (Licadho), a local NGO, told RFA that he believes the Supreme Court handed the case back to the appellate court because it is skeptical about certain aspects of the law and how they were applied in Kak Sovannchhay’s case.

He urged the Court of Appeals to retry the case as soon as possible and drop all charges.

“We look at first the interests of the child,” he said. “Secondly, this child has a chronic disability called autism, and thirdly, if we look at the dialogue in social media used to convict him was a private conversation,” he said.

Kak Sovannchhay had been previously arrested in October 2020, then in April 2021, two men attacked him with bricks while he was driving a motorbike, leaving him with a fractured skull. Police never found either attacker.

The conviction and sentence of an autisitic child was neither necessary nor proportionate,  a May 2022 report on the trial by the American Bar Association said.

“Sovannchhay’s conviction further shows the lengths to which the Cambodian government will go to silence dissenting voices as well as the urgent need to reform Cambodia’s ‘incitement’ law, which has been a crucial tool in the authorities’ crackdown on civil society,” the report said. 

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

Hong Kong police have expressed “strong concerns” to the city’s Ming Pao newspaper over what a spokesman called a “misleading” cartoon by political satirist Zun Zi that lampooned authoritarian education policies, media in the city reported.

Zun Zi’s cartoon, published on Tuesday, shows a police officer fully-clad in riot gear at a school asking “What have the students done today, headteacher Chan?” 

The teacher lists the students’ various offenses including losing erasers and talking back to teachers. 

The cartoon was published in the wake of A widely-publicized case in which 14 secondary school students were suspended for three days for  failing to show up to a flag-raising ceremony at St Francis Xavier’s School in Tsuen Wan district.

Under a national security law imposed by Beijing in mid-2020, authorities in Hong Kong have conducted a wide-ranging crackdown on pro-democracy activists, many of whom are students at universities and other educational institutions. 

Students are among the dozens of activists arrested, campus activism has been banned, and schools are under pressure to adjust their curriculum to inculcate nationalism and fealty to the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

Zun Zi’s cartoon could give readers the misleading impression that Hong Kong police would be deployed to handle small campus issues, police spokesman Joe Chan wrote to Lau Chung Yeung, Ming Pao’s executive chief editor, reports in the city said.

“The false descriptions in [the cartoon] might make the public misunderstand police work. They not only damage the Force’s image, but also harm the cooperation between the police and the public, as well as our effectiveness on cracking down crimes,” said Chan’s letter, quoted in the Hong Kong Free Press.

The cartoon  remained on Ming Pao’s website on Wednesday, while Ming Pao’s editorial board issued a statement saying that the paper would “continue to provide accurate and credible news content to readers in a professional spirit and support columnists in providing professional work.” 

Hong Kong has plummeted in global press freedom rankings following a citywide crackdown on dissent under the national security law.

Speaking to RFA Cantonese when Hong Kong’s national security law was first enacted in 2020, Zun Zi said that the local Hong Kong government cooperated with Beijing to pass the national security law, which had a chilling effect on society. 

“Now we have to be careful when we laugh. We need to be skillful when laughing. We can’t draw fists or point fingers everyday,” he said.

“Only when you integrate politics, incidents, with people’s life stories and the culture of the society, can you create top-rated and inspiring works of art,” Zun Zi said, vowing to keep drawing despite the crackdown.

“As to when is the time to stop, if someone holds a knife, and puts my hand on the chopping board and tells me that he will cut off my hand if I continue to draw. If this happens, I will stop. This is the only way (to stop me).”

Zun Zi is the pen name of Wong Kee-kwan, a 40-year veteran cartoonist who initially contributed to the pro-Beijing New Evening Post and Takungpao publications before moving to Ming Pao. 

His cartoons have also appeared in the pro-democracy Apple Daily, which has been shut down by national security police since the passage of Hong Kong’s national security law. At least three Hong Kong cartoonists who published their work  in Ming Pao, Hong Kong Worker, vawongsir and Ah To, have announced their plans to leave the city amid the crackdown.

Translated by RFA Mandarin. Written by Nawar Nemeh.

A more assertive approach to foreign policy has come at a price for ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping, who has shown signs of backing away from the aggressive, “wolf warrior” diplomacy seen from Beijing in recent years.

Wolf warrior diplomacy first grabbed international media attention on social media, with state-run media figures like former Global Times editor Hu Xijin, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian and Chinese ambassadors around the world all taking to Twitter to push the CCP’s line overseas.

In March 2020, at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a think tank not far from the Kremlin, a young scholar named Temur Umarov published his first article on China’s expansion into Central Asia, exploring how Beijing’s influence deeply pervaded the region via cultural soft power exchanges, trade, military cooperation and infrastructure investment in recent years.

Umarov’s article also looked at the regional anxieties sparked by growing Chinese influence in Central Asia.

It was quickly forwarded among scholars of Chinese foreign policy, before coming to the attention of Jiao Huaixin, a senior diplomat at the Chinese embassy in Kazakhstan.

Jiao commented on the article: “What kind of retard analysis is this? The academics here are just idiots.”

Umarov said he was terrified for the first time in his career.

“The language he used was so weird and aggressive. It surprised me,” he told RFA. “Actually, it was around that time that the wolf warrior diplomatic operation was being activated all over the world.”

The roots of the campaign can be traced to comments by Xi as vice president, who once described foreigners who criticized China as having full bellies and nothing to do.

‘Chinese Dream’

By the time Xi took the helm of the CCP in 2012, he had openly rejected the diplomatic policy pursued by China since 1979, summarized as “hiding our strengths and biding our time.”

For Xi, the time had now come for China to become more than just an economic powerhouse: he wanted it to be a major global power as part of his vision for the “Chinese Dream of the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation.”

“The most obvious example is that time when Obama visited China shortly after Xi took office,” U.S.-based political commentator Xi Yeliang told RFA.

“Xi Jinping invited Obama for an evening chat in Zhongnanhai [the headquarters of the Chinese leadership]. What did he want to talk about? How glorious China’s ancient history was, and to say that China was the most powerful country in the world a few thousand years ago,” he said.

“The point he was making was that the future world order would need to be negotiated between the U.S. and China.”

By 2013, Xi was ordering diplomats, state journalists and officials at all levels: to tell good stories about China, and to amplify Chinese voices.

“Contemporary China has no professional diplomats,” Xia said. “They are all of them political voices.”

And Xi backed up that order with plenty of funding. A 2015 study found that China spends an estimated U.S.$10 billion a year on propaganda activities.

Government censorship moved from directing traditional media on what not to report and deleting troublesome social media posts to a far more ambitious approach: that of orchestrating public opinion.

The operation succeeded in creating a far more homogenous pool of content on social media, with scant room for voices who diverged even slightly from the party line.

Overseas opinion targeted

It then set its sights on the management of public opinion overseas, picking hot topics like the international financial crisis, racism in the U.S. and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan as grist to the propaganda mill that had now spread to overseas platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

The aim of most of the comments and posts was similar, according to New Zealand China expert Anne-Marie Brady: to portray China’s authoritarian political system as inherently more stable than Western-style democracies.

The rhetoric was ramped up further as the trade war with the U.S. began to bite in 2018, with foreign spokespeople digging up U.S. social problems and historical events as a way to fight back against sanctions over its human rights record.

When the U.S. Senate passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act in 2019, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying hit back with the U.S.’ treatment of Native Americans and the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

“On the issue of ethnic minorities, U.S. congressmen and politicians are ignorant, shameless and hypocritical,” Hua said. “It’s not been that long since 9/11.”

But China’s global image also took a “precipitously more negative” turn after President Xi Jinping took office in 2013, with Beijing taking the blame for the COVID-19 pandemic while also facing criticism for its human rights record, military posture and economic policies, research data from the Pew Research Center showed.

China’s perceived mishandling of the pandemic affected global opinion, but negative feelings toward China were already on the rise prior to 2020, it said.

When Xi took office during President Obama’s second term, roughly four in 10 in the U.S. had a “favorable” view toward China, while between 30-40 percent of respondents held an “unfavorable” view of the country, the report found.

Deteriorating image

But as friction in the bilateral relationship grew due to Chinese land reclamation efforts in the South China Sea and the U.S.’s negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the percentage of Americans who looked at China unfavorably rose to more than half.

Opinion of China showed slight improvement during the first half of the Trump presidency but quickly turned sour as the trade war began in 2018. Among Republicans alone, negative views of China increased by 20 percent between 2018 and 2019.

Joshua Kurlantzick, a senior fellow on Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a U.S. think tank, said China’s image had taken a battering due in part to the rise of authoritarianism, but also its initial cover-up of the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, and its brutal repression in Hong Kong and .

China’s ongoing zero-COVID policy had also isolated it from the rest of the world, he said.

By 2021, Xi was calling on people to work hard to forge an international image for China that is “credible, lovely and worthy of respect.”

But the ‘wolves’ may not prove so easy to rein in, as their momentum has been fueled by China’s growing military capabilities, Lin Yingyou, assistant professor of international affairs at Taiwan’s Tamkang University, told RFA.

“They are extending their capabilities through all of these exercises,” he said.

“China is a huge political organization. When a train has gathered huge forward momentum, it will take more time to slow it down, especially if you’re only doing it with a horse’s bridle,” he said.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

The world is at an “inflection point” as China seeks to rewrite the rules of the global order, and the next decade will prove “decisive” for the rivalry between Beijing and Washington, U.S. President Joe Biden says in a new national security strategy released by the White House on Wednesday.

The 48-page strategy, which was delayed due to the Ukraine war, outlines Biden’s national security priorities and describes China as “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.”

“In the competition with the PRC, as in other arenas, it is clear that the next ten years will be the decisive decade,” it says, using an acronym for the People’s Republic of China. “We stand now at the inflection point, where the choices we make and the priorities we pursue today will set us on a course that determines our competitive position long into the future.”

The document’s release comes ahead of the Chinese Communist Party’s National Congress this weekend, which is expected to anoint President Xi Jinping to a norm-shattering third term and cement a policy program meant to usher in “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” by 2049.

Beijing’s increasingly assertive foreign policy under Xi led earlier this year to the announcement of a “no limits” relationship with Moscow prior to its Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, as well as pledges to rewrite global rules of governance.

Biden’s national security document notes that while Russia and China “are increasingly aligned with each other,” the challenges that they present to the United States are distinct, with Beijing the more important long-term focus as it moves to “layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy.” 

“We will prioritize maintaining an enduring competitive edge over the PRC while constraining a still profoundly dangerous Russia,” it says, noting that Beijing has clear ambitions “to become the world’s leading power.”

“At the same time, the PRC is also central to the global economy and has a significant impact on shared challenges, particularly climate change and global public health,” it says. “It is possible for the United States and the PRC to coexist peacefully, and share in and contribute to human progress together.”

But the strategy document also reiterates U.S. government support for the idea of “one China” and rejects any support for Taiwanese independence. 

“We have an abiding interest in maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, which is critical to regional and global security,” it says, noting U.S pledges to defend Taiwan. “We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side, and do not support Taiwan independence.”

At an event to launch the strategy at Georgetown University on Wednesday, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said that the strategy was not an ideological manifesto for a free world against a rising tide of authoritarianism.

Sullivan said the United States was building “the broadest possible coalition of nations to leverage our collective interests” in defending a rules-based order, whether or not all involved are democracies, or agree with U.S. policies.

“Even if our democratic partners and allies don’t agree on everything, they are aligned with us – and so are many countries that do not embrace democratic institutions, but nevertheless depend upon and help sustain a rules-based international system,” Sullivan said. “They don’t want to see it vanish.”

With leader Kim Jong Un looking on, North Korea’s air force launched 150 planes in a rare drill over the weekend that required a month’s worth of intensive pilot training and burned through precious jet fuel that has been in short supply since the 1990s, military sources in the country told RFA.

Saturday’s exercise appeared to be largely meant for propaganda purposes, as state TV and radio carried repeated programs about the event since Monday, a national holiday marking the founding of the ruling Korean Workers’ Party, according to a military source from the northern province of Ryanggang, who asked not to be identified.

“For this training exercise, the entire air force has made a fuss and conducted intensive training since last month,” said the source. “Despite the shortage of jet fuel these days, many aircraft participated in the drill. The drill was directly observed by Kim Jong Un and the air force command officials came to each division to supervise practice for over two weeks.”

The planes appear to have taken off from several bases around the country, though state media did not disclose exact details.

The state-run Korea Central News Agency praised the “gallant combat pilots,” who showed  “the might of the people’s air force and creditably carried out the Party’s order of training by displaying matchless bravery and indomitable fighting spirit in the large-scale air attack combined drill unprecedented in the army-building history.” 

The Rodong Sinmun newspaper meanwhile cited the return of the USS Ronald Reagan to the region as the reason for the drill. The aircraft carrier participated in naval exercises with the South Korean navy on Friday in response to North Korea launching a missile over Japan earlier in the week. 

The North Korea’s aging air force has a fleet of 572 front-line warplanes, many of which were manufactured in the 1950s and ‘60s, according to a 2021 Forbes report, including hundreds of Soviet-era MiG-17s, MiG-19s and MiG-21s, or Chinese copies of them. 

The exercise was an attempt to downplay the shabbiness of the North Korean air force, according to another source, a resident of Orang county in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong, who once served as an air force officer. “The public is aware of the poor condition of our air force, including the outdated airplanes and lack of jet fuel,” the source said. 

The pilots participating in the exercise had to live away from their families for a month to train, according to the source. “The reason pilots did not go to their homes and lived as a group is because of the lack of nutritious food,” the first source said. 

In North Korea, on-duty pilots receive the highest level of monthly rations, which include luxuries like meat, cooking oil, eggs, butter, chocolate, beer, and cigarettes. 

Those resources are also in short supply after two years without imports from China due to the coronavirus pandemic between 2020 and 2021, and only spotty rail freight from China in 2022. 

“Pilots often share their rations with their families because there are nationwide food shortages,” the source said. “The family can also sell some of the rations on the market, such as the cigarettes and beer.” 

The attack drill was the first in years, the second source, the former air force officer, said. 

“Residents became worried when they saw the MiGs training and heard their loud roar every day at Orang airport,” he said. “Media reports yesterday showed that the flight practice was for the big drill that Kim Jong Un attended.”

“Pilots rarely train these days due to a lack of fuel dating back to the ‘Arduous March’ in the mid-1990s,” said the source, referring to the 1994-1998 North Korean famine which killed millions, as much as 10 percent of the population by some estimates.

“There is only a little flight training when the pilots first learn to fly, and then the regular flight training that is supposed to happen every quarter, but has not always been done properly,” he said. “Tactical training is often done using toy airplanes on the ground.” 

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

A Uyghur former internment camp inmate is suing the United Kingdom’s trade secretary for allowing imports of cotton he believes were obtained through forced labor in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region.

Erbakit Otarbay, an ethnic Kazakh, was arrested in Xinjiang in 2017 for watching illegal videos on Islam and installing the WhatsApp instant messaging service on his cell phone, amid a crackdown there by the Chinese government on Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities. 

The next year, Otarbay was detained in an internment camp, where he was tortured and forced to work in an apparel factory, he said.

“There was an auto repair shop, a bakery, a sweet shop and a barber shop,” he told Radio Free Asia. “I told them I was not good at baking, and that I liked sewing.”

Otarbay joined a group of mostly women at the garment factory, who included not only Uyghurs, but also other ethnic minorities such as Kazakhs, Uzbeks and Kyrgyz. He produced cloth loops for belt buckles.

After he was released in 2019, Otarbay wanted to call attention to the suffering of detainees and those being forced to work, he said.

“If you ever get out, go as far as you can to every country and call for our release and tell them what the Chinese government is doing to us,” he said.

As many as 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslims are believe to be held in network of internment camps that China has set up to prevent purported “religious extremism” and “terrorism.” Inmates have been subjected to torture, rape, forced sterilizations of female detainees and forced labor.

Beijing has insisted that the camps were vocational training facilities and that they are now closed. 

Call for import restrictions

In a pre-action letter to Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch, Otarbay called on the U.K. government to address an “ongoing failure” to impose any restrictions on cotton imports from Xinjiang, the U.K’s Sky News reported on Oct. 9.

China is a major cotton producer, with most of it coming from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights issued a report at the end of August saying that China’s repression of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang province “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”

But China has vowed to fight any U.N. action on human rights abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang cited in the OHCHR report. 

In December 2021, an independent tribunal in London found that China committed genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, based on testimony from dozens of witnesses, including formerly jailed Uyghurs and legal and academic experts on China’s actions in the region. 

Otarbay also testified at the tribunal about his detention, saying that authorities confined him to a metal tiger chair, used to immobilize suspects during interrogations, for hours.

Otarbay emigrated from China’s Xinjiang to Kazakhstan with his family in 2014, but returned three years later. He was arrested and sent to a “re-education camp.” After a year, he was taken to another detention center where he was forced to work without pay in a clothes factory inside the facility, until he was released in May 2019.

“What I tell the U.K. government is ban all the goods from Xinjiang,” Otarbay told RFA. “They have to take measures. They should globally expose the genocide that China is committing.”

“They have to inspect all the imported goods from China, where they were manufactured, who made them and so on, and they should take actions to stop the forced labor,” he said. 

Though the U.K. government has measures in place to ensure that its companies are not complicit in alleged forced labor practices in Xinjiang or involved in the region’s supply chain, but critics say enforcement is lax.

“It is very disappointing that the British government have not taken a lead in this issue,” said Otarbay’s attorney, Paul Conrathe. But he said he is hopeful that the court will recognize that the government’s actions are “unlawful.”

14 days to respond

The trade secretary now has 14 days to respond, he said. Their next steps will depend on the reply.

Rahima Mahmut, U.K. director of the World Uyghur Congress, or the WUC, said the British government has not gone far enough to stop goods made with Uygur forced labor from entering the U.K.

“Even though the U.K. government openly and loudly criticized China’s horrific treatment of the Uyghurs, so far it has not taken any meaningful actions in terms of ending Uyghur forced labor,” she told RFA. “It has not stopped the flow of products [made with forced labor] into [the UK].”

Otarbay is “the best plaintiff to pursue this case” against the U.K. trade secretary, and WUC is working closely with him, she added. 

To address concerns about Uyghur forced labor, the United States enacted the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in 2021, which assumes goods made in Xinjiang are produced with forced labor and thus banned under the U.S. 1930 Tariff Act. The law requires U.S. companies that import products from the region to prove that they have not been manufactured at any stage with Uyghur forced labor.

The European Union has proposed a total ban on all goods produced using forced labor at any stage of production, harvest or extraction, including clothing, cotton and commodities, irrespective of where they have been made.  

“It is very commendable that the American government has taken a lead in effectively banning imports that derive from Xinjiang, and also that the European Commission is looking at doing something similar,” Conrathe said. “This is a very important case dealing with one of the most appalling situations in terms of human rights abuses in the world today.”

Translated by Mamatjan Juma and Alim Seytoff. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.