Day: October 19, 2022

Britain’s government will appear in court at the end of October to answer charges it has failed to block products made with forced labor in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang from entering the UK, rights groups said in a statement Wednesday.

The Oct. 25-26 hearing in Britain’s High Court follows a suit brought by the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) — a rights watchdog with offices in the UK and  Ireland — and the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC), both groups said in a joint statement.

”Customs authorities are failing to live up to their obligations under international law to stop imports of products made in conditions so appalling and coercive they amount to crimes against humanity,” GLAN Legal Officer Siobhan Allen said on Oct. 19.

“The time has long [passed] for burying their heads in the sand: the evidence of what is happening in the Uyghur Region is so overwhelming, authorities must take action — now,” Allen added.

Forced labor in Xinjiang has been tied to the region’s cotton industry, China’s largest, which exports textiles and other products to international markets, including in the UK, GLAN and WUC said in their statement.

“For too long, the UK government has allowed the products of Uyghur forced labor to enter British markets,” said WUC UK Director Rahima Mahmut, speaking to RFA. “It is shameful that cotton picked using the modern slavery of my people, within a context of atrocity and genocide, continues to flood this country’s supply chains.

“The Government could take leadership and ban the products of Uyghur forced labor from entering Britain. Instead they have refused to implement legislation to tackle the crisis,” Mahmut added.

“This hearing is a historic opportunity for us to secure accountability on the UK government’s inaction, and to strengthen our calls for change.”

As many as 1.8 million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim ethnic groups are believed to have been held by China since 2017 in a network of internment camps where inmates have been subjected to forced labor, torture, and the rape and forced sterilization of female detainees.

China has described the camps as vocational training centers set up to prevent “religious extremism” and “terrorism” in the restive Xinjiang region, and says that the facilities are now closed.

The United States and nine Western parliaments have declared that the repression of predominantly Muslim groups in Xinjiang amounts to genocide and crimes against humanity.

Written in English by Richard Finney.

Amid a rare public protest during the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th National Congress, Chinese nationals who amplify or respond to anti-Xi Jinping feeling said they are increasingly concerned about bringing trouble down on the heads of loved ones back home.

Overseas social media among the Chinese diaspora — where information flows more freely than inside the Great Firewall of internet censorship — has been abuzz with the news of a protester who hung a banner calling for the removal of leader Xi Jinping on a Beijing overpass on the eve of the party congress.

While censors of China’s tightly-controlled internet quickly deleted posts, comments and accounts mentioning the banners, many outside the country hailed the man, named as Peng Lifa, as a hero.

Slogans and comments expressing solidarity with the “bridge man” protest began appearing on college bulletin boards outside China, including the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago, New York University, Johns Hopkins, Emory and McGill, as well as at UCL and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and at Seoul’s Korea University.

Many of the comments were supportive of the protest, but anonymous, according to a U.S.-based Chinese student who gave only the surname Wang, for fear of compromising loved ones back home.

“Most of them are Chinese nationals with most of their friends and family back in China, so they want to make sure they’re not affected [by their comments overseas],” Wang told RFA.

Wang said Chinese students also fear being contacted by officials from their local Chinese embassy or consulate, or being reported to authorities by one of their Chinese classmates.

Some anonymous solidarity with Peng’s protest has also been spotted in China, where public signs of dissent are extremely rare and punishable by detention and jail, or other forms of official retaliation like incarceration in a psychiatric hospital like Dong Yaoqiong, a young woman who splashed ink on a public portrait of Xi Jinping on July 4, 2018.

Photos of anti-Xi graffiti scrawled in public toilets in mainland China echoing Peng’s call for direct elections, an end to the zero-COVID policy and to Xi’s dictatorship have been circulating on Twitter since last week. 

One of the photos said the graffiti was seen in the men’s toilets of the Beijing Film Archive movie theater.

Another, which largely repeated the slogans on one of Peng’s banners, was attributed to the men’s toilets at the Nanhu Interchange on the Chengdu Metro, in the provincial capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan. 

“Free Chengdu, revolution now!” the slogan added, in a variation on the signature slogan of the 2019 anti-extradition and pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

Social media users posted photos of similar graffiti in Xuzhou, in the eastern province of Jiangsu.

As local governments started hastily hiring guards to post a round-the-clock watch on all traffic flyovers in Beijing for the duration of the party congress, the Beijing police department issued an order to print and photocopying shops requiring them to review all content before printing orders.

“All printed and copied material must be reviewed by store staff,” said the order, a copy of which was circulating on social media.

Unconfirmed reports that anyone buying paint or more than a foot of fabric in Beijing must now register with their real names have also been circulating on social media. RFA was unable to verify the reports independently.

Overseas Solidarity

Chinese internet celebrity Xu Qingen, who currently lives in France, said he was among the first to support Peng’s protest openly.

“I was the first to speak up for Mr. Peng, because it is very difficult for people in China to speak up for him,” Xu told RFA. “Chinese abroad need to lend their unconditional support … because they have the geographical advantage of being relatively free.”

“Not like in China, where the CCP has total control over public discourse and ideology, and over the whole country,” he said.

U.K.-based rights activist Wang Jianhong agreed. “This kind of overseas solidarity is very, very, very important,” Wang told RFA. “It’s great to see. Anyone who still cares about China’s future … and also about their parents back in their hometown, should do something.”

“The Sitong Bridge protest touched people deeply, because everyone feels the same about the harms of the zero-COVID policy,” she said. “If there is no freedom at this point, then anyone could wind up dying in a quarantine hospital. The lack of food and emergency medical treatment affects everyone in China.”

The protester, seen in a video being loaded into a police car Thursday, has been named as Peng Lifa. He used the handle Peng Zaizhou on social media in a reference to an ancient essay describing the people as the water that holds up the boat of government, and might overturn it if they are unhappy with its rule.

While RFA has been unable to confirm the identity of the protester independently, content posted earlier to Peng’s social media accounts was consistent with the tone of his banners, which were displayed from the Sitong flyover on Beijing’s Third Ring Road on Thursday.

“Remove the traitor-dictator Xi Jinping!” read one banner, video and photos of which were quickly posted to social media, only to be deleted. A post linked from the account called for strikes and class boycotts to remove Xi.

“Food, not PCR tests. Freedom, not lockdowns. Reforms, not the Cultural Revolution. Elections not leaders,” read the second, adding: “Dignity, not lies. Citizens, not slaves.”

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

With inflation surging to 34 percent in Laos, many households are struggling to pay for basic necessities, and some government employees are taking second jobs or quitting to earn more in the private sector to just to put food on the table, sources in the country told Radio Free Asia.

September’s year-on-year inflation rate was the highest in 22 years, Xinhua reported. That, combined with an ongoing devaluation of Laos’ currency, the kip, have caused prices of food and gas to climb ever higher, and people are tightening their belts as they are able to afford less and less.

Meanwhile, paychecks have not risen. The basic salary for state employees is 1.2 million kip, or $69, per month – equivalent to minimum wage. An increase to 1.3 million is scheduled for May 2023. 

“Faced with this heavy burden, the cost of living is too high. For example, rice, if we compare that with last year, is higher, but our salary is the same,” a state employee, who requested anonymity to speak freely, told RFA’s Lao Service.

RFA reported in June that runaway inflation had caused prices of many foodstuffs to double in price since June of the previous year and over the same period of time, the kip had depreciated by about 48 percent against the U.S. dollar, raising the price of imported goods. Since then, food prices have continued to rise and the kips value has continued to fall.

The rampant inflation, the kip’s devaluation and shortages of food and gas are all interrelated. Laos relies heavily on imports and requires foreign currency to buy goods from abroad. As supplies of baht, yuan and dollars dwindled, importers began paying more for them.

“Our salary is not enough, especially for most state employees. With a bachelor’s degree you get paid only 1.8 million kip, or about $104, per month, and can’t afford daily expenses like groceries and gas,” the state employee said.

“Anything that is not a necessity will have to be reduced,” another state employee, from the northern province of Luang Prabang, told RFA. “We have been bringing our lunch to eat at the office every day instead of eating out, and other expenses that aren’t so important, we should reduce. The government had plans to solve the problem but up until now it cannot be solved.”

“People are clamoring on social media for the government to do something about this, but nothing changes,” he said.

Some government workers are quitting their jobs to move to the private sector, a state employee from the southeastern province of Kham Mouane told RFA on condition of anonymity for security reasons. Many private sector jobs pay between 2 and 5 million kip per month.

“My husband and I are state employees who rely only on our salaries, about 1.4 million kip per month,” she said. “That’s not enough to feed the family because the price of food is too high.”

A bank employee who earns 5 million kip ($289) per month told RFA that the family spends the equivalent of between $5 to $10 per day on food.

“I have to pay for milk, noodle soup, these things we must buy every day. Larger families are in a worse situation and they probably have to pay 1 million kip per month,” he said. “If the economic situation does not stabilize, we will have to buy more food for stockpiling.”

According to a report by the Lao Statistics Bureau, the country’s inflation rate climbed to 12.8 percent on the year in May, its highest rate in 18 years. Since then, the on-year inflation rate increased each month, reaching as high as 30.01 percent in August, then breaking the 22-year record in September.

RFA reported in June that the government had taken to blaming the devalued kip on black market money changers and introduced measures to maintain the value of its currency, none of which have seemed to work.

The dollar to kip exchange rate had been relatively stable until mid-2021, and it rose to 10,000 kip per dollar for the first time since 2005 in October 2021. The sharp decline continued and the kip now sits at nearly 17,000 per dollar. 

Translated by Sidney Khotpanya. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Not long after the beginning of China’s 1966-69 Cultural Revolution, late Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Mao Zedong is famously said to have highlighted the contributions of women to the nation by pointing out that “women hold up half the sky.” So why is it that, nearly six decades later, we see so few women actively involved in China’s party congress?

This year’s event kicked off on Oct. 16 with yet another leadership rostrum filled with row upon row of dark-suited men, served by young, slender red-clad women pouring tea and water.

Meanwhile, the CCP’s 25-member Politburo currently only includes a single woman, with vice premier Sun Chunlan, 72, likely to take retirement after the current 20th National Congress.

Just three women, trade minister Wu Yi, former United Front Work Department chief Liu Yandong and “Iron Lady” Sun have served on the Politburo since the 1990s.

Even during the early days of the People’s Republic of China under Mao, high-ranking women like Deng Yingchao, Ye Qun and Jiang Qing never made it onto the all-powerful Politburo standing committee, and gained the clout they did via powerful husbands.

Feminists say the lack of representation at the very top is hardly surprising, given that gender discrimination is still rampant in the workplace at all levels of employment, political or not, in China.

“There are severe restrictions on women’s participation in politics,” Wang Ruiqin, a former member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference from Qinghai province now living in the United States, told RFA.

“It’s very common for female comrades to be restricted by a glass ceiling because they are women,” Wang said. “This occurs everywhere.”

“They never say you didn’t get the job because you’re a woman; they’ll use any other excuse they can think of instead,” she said.

“But it’s pretty clear that it’s because of limitations on women.”

And it’s not just women in politics. In the wider world, Chinese women still face major barriers to finding work in the graduate labor market and avoid getting pregnant if they do land a job, out of concern their employer will fire them, a common practice despite protection on paper offered by China’s Labor Law.

Likely women candidates

According to an unwritten convention, at least one seat in the Politburo must be given to a woman.

After Sun Chunlan retires, any woman entering the Politburo will need to be promoted from the middle ranks of the party.

Likely candidates include Chen Yiqin, secretary of the Guizhou provincial party committee, and Shen Yueyue, vice chair of the National People’s Congress (NPC) standing committee and head of the CCP-backed All-China Women’s Federation.

Lower down the ranks, the numbers are slightly better.

Currently, there are 619 women delegates at the current party congress out of 2,296 — 27% in all, and an increase of 2.8% compared with the 19th party congress five years ago.

According to figures from the International Parliamentary Union (IPU), 31.2% of European parliamentary seats are held by women, on average, with the proportion falling to 21% in Asian parliaments and 16.8% in the Middle East.

However, women hold just 8% of seats in the CCP’s 371-member Central Committee, while only two women hold provincial leadership rank out of a total of 31 posts.

While the proportion of female CCP members rose from 24% in 2012 to 29% in 2021, gender parity is still a long way off.

Women’s rights worse under Xi

Despite lip service to women’s rights from high-ranking officials, and supposed protections for gender equality in the Chinese constitution, women’s rights have worsened during CCP leader Xi Jinping’s decade in power.

A slew of high-ranking sexual assault and harassment allegations under the Chinese #MeToo campaign, the detention and prolonged incarceration of five feminist activists on International Women’s Day and high-profile incidents of violence against women, including the Tangshan restaurant attacks and the Jiangsu “chained woman” scandal, have brought the issue to the forefront of public opinion.

An ongoing crackdown on non-government groups and feminist activists including journalist and #MeToo researcher Sophia Huang has sent out a clear message that the CCP under Xi will brook no challenge to the absolute authority of a patriarchal state, however.

“China has always been a patriarchal society, and there has been no change,” U.S.-based feminist writer Xiang Li told RFA. “The current leadership of China is very clearly suppressing the feminist movement.”

She said a lack of women in policy-making roles only exacerbates the problem.

“Women have first-hand experience of their own needs and of the degree to which they are oppressed by society,” Xiang said.

“Without more preferential treatment of women in the formulation of policy, I’m certain that Chinese women will face increasing difficulties when it comes to protecting their rights and interests,” she said.

National ‘baby machines’

Instead, women’s bodies are viewed by the CCP as the instruments of state power and the “national interest.”

Data from China’s 2020 census showed that the country is currently facing a population decline and falling fertility rates, prompting the government to shift to a “three-child” policy in 2021, after abolishing the decades-long “one child” family planning policy in 2016.

Yet women have responded in interviews with RFA and on social media by saying they lack the time, money or energy for more children, with others slamming the government policy for treating them like “baby machines.”

Meanwhile, hundreds, possibly thousands, of Chinese women are still seeking redress after their health was destroyed by botched or untested reproductive procedures aimed at keeping births within targets set by Beijing, victims told RFA in April.

Xiang said that both limiting births and encouraging them is a violation of women’s reproductive rights.

China currently ranks 102nd out of 146 countries in the World Economic Forum’s gender gap ranking, down from 69 in 2012, when Xi Jinping came to power at the 18th party congress.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.