Day: October 24, 2022

Military jets bombed a concert northern Myanmar commemorating the founding of an ethnic political group on Monday, killing at least 50 civilians and wounding 100 more, according to residents. 

It was believed to be the deadliest single airstrike since the military seized power in a February 2021 coup.

The attack came just days ahead of a special meeting of foreign ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, in Indonesia to discuss growing violence in Myanmar, one of its members. 

The bombing was the latest explosion of violence in fighting over the past 20 months between the military and pro-junta militias and rebel groups scattered across the country. It was strongly condemned by the United Nations, Western governments and human rights groups.

“The junta dropped four bombs in the middle of a crowd where a thousand people were celebrating,” said Col. Naw Bu, a spokesperson for the Kachin Independence Organization, or KIO, which was marking its 62nd anniversary at the concert, which featured several Kachin celebrities, some of whom were killed.

“It is really concerning that the junta intentionally dropped bombs on an area that was not only not a battlefield, but a place where we were celebrating together with many civilians,” he said.

A month ago, two military helicopters killed more than a dozen civilians, including seven children, at a school in Sagaing region, further to the north, in what was previously thought to be the bloodiest airstrike since the coup.

The attack occurred at the Anan Par Training Ground, about two miles outside of Hpakant township’s Kan Hsee village, residents told RFA’s Burmese language service. The training ground is under the control of the 9th Brigade of the Kachin Independence Organizatin’s military wing, the Kachin Independence Army, or KIA, which has been fighting the government off and on for decades in a bid for greater autonomy.

Among those killed in the attack were KIA soldiers, Kachin celebrities, and civilians, residents of Hpakant said Monday. 

A Kachin artist, who declined to be named, said at least nine Kachin celebrities who attended the concert were among the casualties. Musicians Aurali Lahpai, Galau Yaw Lwi (a.k.a Yungwi Shadang), and Ko King were killed, while Zaw Dain, a veteran actor and the former chairman of the Kachin Artist Association was injured, he said.

The Associated Press reported that as many as 80 people were killed, citing KIO members and a rescue worker.

RFA was unable to independently verify the death toll or the identities of the victims.

Blocked Access

A member of a Hpakant-based relief group, who declined to be named for security reasons, told RFA that providing assistance to the wounded wasn’t possible because junta forces had blocked off the road leading to the site of the attack.

“We cannot go there to provide any relief help,” he said. “Junta forces have blocked several gates to make sure no one can travel to the area,”

Other local relief groups said that although they had requested permission to travel to the Anan Par Training Ground from General Ko Ko Maung, the head of the junta’s Northern Military Command, they had not been cleared to go as of the evening on Monday. The area is located around 15 miles outside of Hpakant.

Win Ye Tun, the junta’s Minister for Social Affairs and the spokesperson for Kachin state, told RFA that he hadn’t received details about the airstrike, but said he is assembling a team to provide assistance.

“I haven’t received any specific information about civilians being killed. I heard some news, but it’s an ongoing battle,” he said. “I am currently networking resources to help. We can’t just take off to go there and help immediately. After the fighting is over and when it is safe to go there, I will follow up.”

International condemnation

The attack prompted a statement on Monday from the U.N. office in Myanmar condemning what it said appeared to be an “excessive and disproportionate use of force by security forces against unarmed civilians,” adding that reports suggested “over 100 civilians may have been affected.”

The statement said that those injured should be “availed [of] urgent medical treatment,” calling such airstrikes “unacceptable” and demanding that those responsible be held to account.

Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, said Monday that Guterres had expressed “deep concern” over reports of the airstrikes in Kachin state.

“We reiterate our call for the immediate cessation of violence and all those who were injured need to be given urgent medical treatment as needed,” he said.

A statement jointly issued by the U.S. Embassy in Yangon, EU member states, Norway, Switzerland, and the U.K., said Sunday’s attack “underscores the military regime’s responsibility for crisis and instability in Myanmar and the region and its disregard for its obligation to protect civilians and respect the principles and rules of international humanitarian law.”

Phil Robertson, deputy head of Human Rights Watch’s Asia-Pacific Division, went further, calling the strike a “war crime.”

“It is outrageous and unacceptable that they have attacked a group of civilians,” he said, adding that the junta knew there was an entertainment event taking place at the site and suggesting the airstrike was “retaliation” against the KIA for its resistance to military rule.

“It shows how completely bankrupt, both morally and ethically, this Myanmar military junta is,” he said. “It’s a clarion call for the U.N. Security Council to finally act … to stop the military junta from these kinds of atrocities against their own people.”

Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government suggested that the military had violated the Geneva Conventions with the latest attack on civilians and called in a statement on the international community and the U.N. to “take effective actions urgently” against the junta.

It noted that the attack came just a month after a Sept. 16 airstrike on Sagaing region’s Let Yet Kone village killed 13 civilians, including seven children, and wounded 12 others. The attack, in which two military helicopters fired on a school for more than an hour, was thought to be the single worst air raid on a civilian area in Myanmar since the coup.

The National Unity Government said that since seizing power, the military had carried out nearly 240 airstrikes targeting the civilian population throughout Myanmar, “resulting in [the] deaths of over 200 civilians and destruction of many houses and religious buildings.”

Later on Monday, the junta issued a press statement denying reports that civilians had been killed in the attack in Kachin state, which it said were “lies” circulated by “fake” online media groups.

The statement said the training ground where the attack occurred was an “active military area operated by terrorists,” and that there were only armed fighters and KIA-supporting businessmen at the site, but no “common civilians.”

It also claimed that junta forces had carried out the operation “according to the law of armed conflict, based on the Geneva Conventions.”

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

Since its founding in 1986, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity has striven “to combat indifference, intolerance and injustice through international dialogue and youth-focused programs that promote acceptance, understanding and equality.” In late January, the human rights organization ran a full-page advertisement in The New York Times calling for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing unless China ended its persecution of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Now, the foundation has added grantmaking to its lineup of activities, focusing on funding advocacy for the Uyghurs. 

The foundation expects to award about U.S. $250,000-$500,000 early next year to two groups, each representing one of its focuses, as determined by relevant advisory committees, according to the Jewish Insider. The funding is significant in that it is coming from ab influential Jewish organization at a time when majority-Muslim countries joined China in voting down a measure for the members of the U.N. Human Rights Council to conduct debate on a U.N. report that China’s atrocities against Uyghurs may “constitute crimes against humanity.”

Adile Ablet of RFA Uyghur recently spoke with Elisha Wiesel, the foundation’s chairman of the board and son of late Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, about the grantmaking activities and what the foundation hopes to accomplish with its focus on the Uyghurs. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

RFA: The Jewish Insider reports that the Elie Wiesel Foundation is considering supporting the Uyghur cause now that the organization is becoming a grantmaker. Why? 

Wiesel: One of the things we’re doing with the Elie Wiesel Foundation today is we’re pivoting from running direct programs, which is what the foundation used to do. It used to host conferences. It used to be [active] particularly in Israel, with Ethiopian Jews who had arrived. We decided we could have a bigger reach and have more partner organizations that we could help supply funding to. We can also supply some of our time and our thoughts. We can help use my father’s name to achieve good in the world. 

We thought a lot about this path that we’re embarking on [in terms of] the hats my father wore during his lifetime. He was so many things to so many people. My father was a teacher, a philosopher, a refugee, a student. And we said, maybe what we can do is for every different type of role that my father played, we can eventually open up a line of grantmaking and partnership. 

When we thought about where to start, my view and the board’s view were that the two most important roles father played were that of an activist and a teacher, so these are the two lanes that the foundation is starting with. Once we decided what that activism would be, the question then became which cause do we want to attach ourselves to in the beginning as we as we start this? 

For me, there’s really no cause that is as compelling as the Uyghur cause, which has a lot of properties that fit the way my father approached the world. Look at the size and the scope of the atrocities that are occurring [to] the Uyghur people — the mass imprisonment of a million Muslims, family separations, the concept of going to jail just because of who you are rather than something that you did. These are terrible human rights violations, and they are being perpetrated by a major actor on the world stage. 

One of the things to know about my father is that he was not afraid of speaking truth to power. It’s very hard to imagine getting the Chinese government to change course and doing something more humane, but it’s not impossible. We were inspired as we looked at the Soviet Union which was treating Soviet Jews in a certain way, but many people thought you never were going to be able to change it; the best you can hope for is that you can help a few people by reaching out to people in power, but to try to achieve something on a massive scale just wouldn’t happen. 

My father disagreed. He disagreed with many important people, and he worked with students in this country to build a movement from the ground up. There were many great leaders there who ultimately had great impact with the Soviet Union. That’s why I think the Elie Wiesel Foundation is inspired by big projects that seem impossible — ones that seem really difficult, but ones that we feel are very important. 

RFA: What do you expect to achieve with the organizations that the foundation works with? 

Wiesel: The goal is ultimately to have an impact, but how you measure impact is very difficult. Is anything that we fund in this first year and our activist players’ focus on the Uyghurs going to change the world and move it upside down in one year? I think we’re more humble than that. 

One of the things that my father said about the Holocaust was that it was important for the people who were suffering to feel heard and know that people cared, even if the world couldn’t do anything about it. One of the things that hurt the most was that there was a sense that the world didn’t care. If we can do anything to raise the stature of the story, and if we can find a partner organization to work with that, it would make the Uyghurs’ suffering more a part of our daily consciousness so that the Uyghurs feel heard. Then they would say, “OK, maybe the world isn’t fixing everything right away for us, but at least we haven’t been forgotten. At least, we know that somebody is thinking about us.” Even that for us would be a very significant accomplishment. 

Our approach is a humble approach. [Part of] the way that we think about it is that we don’t know what the right answer is. We don’t know what the strategy is, but we want to hear ideas. That’s why what we’re really hoping for is that many different organizations doing work in a Uyghur space will go to our website and send us their ideas — tell us what they’re doing, so that the more ideas we have, the better the chance of our finding the one that is right for us to partner with. 

RFA: Which criteria will you use to select partner organizations? 

Wiesel: I can’t say that there’s one particular criterion, but the boldness of the vision is important — the idea that it’s something that is unlikely to happen unless we get involved. We want to be involved with emerging efforts, ones that we can help grow and bring others into. The quality of the people doing the work [also matters]. Do we believe that it’s being sponsored by people who are visionary but also capable of executing, that this is a partner that can really deliver on the sorts of things that they want to achieve? These are the things that we will try to sort out. … But the truth is that the paper application process is only the beginning, and with ideas that we think look interesting, we’re going to want to have many conversations with the grantees. We have an excellent staff at the foundation that is trained and ready to have those conversations. 

RFA: One of the members of the advisory board for the Uyghur grants is Gulhumar Haitiwaji, the daughter of Gulbahar Haitiwaji, who wrote a memoir about the three years she was detained in a “re-education” camp in Xinjiang. What role will the advisory board members play?

Wiesel: I’m really glad you mentioned the advisory boards because they are not going to be permanent board members of the Elie Wiesel Foundation. …We’re going to convene one-time advisory groups. We’re very glad to have [Gulhumar] join the advisory group for [Uyghur grants]. We very much wanted someone from the community with strong connections. I read her mother’s book, and I was fortunate enough to interview her and the daughter. They are unbelievable. There are very clear thinkers with such strong messages to send. We’re very fortunate, but we’re also lucky to have a number of other great stars join us. We have Mark Hatfield, who is the executive director of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. This is the society that some 70 years ago helped my mother find somewhere to live when she came over with her family as a refugee from Europe. We also have Natan Sharansky, a close friend of my father’s, who was a refusenik. He was imprisoned by the Soviets and went on to become a major human rights activist himself. We have very notable and thoughtful people to help us. We know we need a lot of advice and a lot of opportunities to find the best [partner]. 

RFA: What message would you like to send to China? 

Wiesel: My message is that history is something you want to be on the right side of. Future generations will look back at this time and they’ll say, “OK, who did what? Who was on which side here?” 

A documentary called “The U.S. and the Holocaust” by [American filmmaker] Ken Burns recently came out, and so many people are watching it because it’s fascinating to see in the 1930s and the 1940s – what different people were doing, what different countries were doing, what different groups were doing, and where they were aligning on this issue. For those people who did everything they could do to prevent a war with Germany and those who did everything they could to prevent saving the Jews, they don’t look good in retrospect in history. Now, the message is simply that [people are] doing things that are expedient because they have trade relationships or there’s a deal on the line or there’s money involved. And then there is doing things that are right for the generations and for the long term. I hope in time that the thinking will shift. 

I was invited to speak to the U.N. on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, and I was given only three minutes. I gave my last minute 100% to the Uyghur cause before the Beijing Olympics. I was warned beforehand that everybody was so angry [that the foundation had issued a message]. They’re like, “You can’t do these things; how can you put out this message?” There was a lot of pressure to not give that message because I think the United Nations itself is a little conflicted on how it feels about this. But the good news is that months later, [former U.N. human rights chief] Michelle Bachelet actually went [to China] and came back with some findings that there are human rights violations. So, even the U.N., which is the slowest of these organizations, the most bureaucratic, and [one with] the most voices, is potentially capable of coming around and seeing this more clearly, which gives me confidence that the world will follow.

Five alleged Chinese intelligence officials have been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice in two separate cases, one of which reportedly involves an ongoing criminal investigation into Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, according to indictments unsealed on Monday.

A further seven people were also charged – and two already arrested – as part of a third case linked to Beijing’s “extralegal” efforts to repatriate dissidents under the “Operation Fox Hunt” program, an official said.

The first indictment accuses two spies of trying to buy documents about a probe into a “global telecommunications company” – identified by Bloomberg as Huawei – from an FBI double agent, while the second accuses three spies and a fourth person of unrelated work for Beijing.

U.S. Attorney-General Merrick Garland said at a press conference that the first case involved a botched attempt to buy criminal prosecution documents from an employee of a U.S. law enforcement agency.

“The defendants believed that they had recruited the U.S. employee as an asset, but in fact the individual they recruited was actually a double agent working on behalf of the FBI,” Garland said, adding they wanted files from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York.

The pair had hopes of “obtaining the prosecution’s strategy memo, confidential information regarding witnesses, trial evidence and potential new charges to be brought against the company,” he said.

The indictment identifies the alleged spies as Guochen He and Zheng Wang and says they paid about $61,000 to the FBI double agent.

Garland said the double agent provided documents that “appeared to provide” the information, but were in fact fake. He called it “an egregious attempt by PRC intelligence officers to shield a PRC-based company from accountability,” referring to the People’s Republic of China.

Huawei is being investigated for racketeering and conspiring to steal trade secrets, with the Department of Justice accusing the company in 2020 of “using fraud and deception” to try to steal U.S. technology.

The second case accuses three spies and a fourth person of using “the cover of a purported Chinese academic institute to target, co-opt and direct individuals in the United States to further the PRC’s intelligence mission,” including sending “technology and equipment” to China, Garland said.

In a third case, seven other people were charged for taking part in Beijing’s Operation Fox Hunt, the attorney-general said. 

Two people have already been arrested over the “campaign of harassment, threats, surveillance and intimidation” aimed to coerce a dissident to return from the United States to China, he said, including warnings that their family would face “endless misery” until they returned.

Father Truong Hoang Vu, a Catholic priest assisting disabled veterans who fought for the South during the Vietnam War, has been temporarily banned from leaving the country, he said Monday, ahead of church leadership elections.

Vu, a member of the Can Gio Redemptorists Church under the Archdiocese of Ho Chi Minh City, told RFA’s Vietnamese service that he was stopped by security at the Tan Son Nhat International Airport prior to boarding an 8:45 a.m. flight to Manila, where he had planned to change planes and proceed on to the United States.

“I was temporarily banned from leaving the country while on a business trip to the U.S.,” he said in an interview by phone. Authorities told him “the ban was for social order and safety reasons.” 

He was instructed to contact the Ho Chi Minh City Police Department with any inquiries about his exit suspension, but said he had no plans to do so as “it will just be a waste of time.”

Vu runs a program at the church named “Paying Tribute to Disabled Veterans of the Republic of Vietnam,” referring to the short-lived country formed in the wake of the 1954 division of Vietnam with Ho Chi Minh City – formerly known as Saigon – as its capital. It was reunified after North Vietnamese troops seized control of Saigon in April 1975, at the end of the war.

Vietnam’s government provides no social benefits to the disabled veterans of the Republic of Vietnam, who are estimated to number around 20,000 individuals, according to Vietnamese state media. Unable to work, many are forced to earn a living by selling lottery tickets or begging.

The program Vu oversees was created to provide material assistance to the veterans on holidays, as well as occasional checkups from volunteer doctors, nurses, and social workers. Its funding comes from both inside and outside Vietnam.

Vu hopes to provide New Year’s gifts to more than 6,000 disabled veterans of the former republic between December 2022 and March 2023, and said he was traveling to the United States to seek funding for the campaign.

Influencing Redemptorist elections

While the government has shown little interest in supporting the veterans of its former enemy, Father Le Ngoc Thanh of the Long Xuyen Redemptorist Church suggested that Vu’s exit suspension could be related to this week’s election of the Provincial Conference of the Redemptorists.

“The key thing is that [authorities] want to influence the Redemptorists’ 2022 annual meeting,” which starts on Tuesday, he said. “This meeting will elect the new Conference of the Redemptorists in Vietnam for the term beginning in 2023.”

Thanh said that by blocking Vu’s travel, authorities were sending a message to the conference’s delegates that they should select a moderate leader who will be more receptive to efforts by the government to exert control over the Redemptorist order.

He said officials had recently contacted several delegates with messages of support for the existing Redemptorist leadership and calling for the selection of similar candidates in the coming term.

Vu is one of six priests banned from leaving Vietnam over the past few years. Others include Fathers Le Xuan Loc and Nguyen Ngoc Nam Phong from the Ky Dong Redemptorist Church, Father Dinh Huu Thoai from the Ba Ria Vung Tau Diocese, Father Le Ngoc Than from the Long Xuyen Redemptorists Church, and Father Pham Trung Thanh – the former Provincial Superior in Vietnam.

All were suspended from traveling abroad for “national security” or “social order and safety reasons.”

Father Thanh told RFA that Ho Chi Minh City police seized his passport in 2015 and have yet to return it to him.

Translated by Anna Vu. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

Ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s next five years will likely see more hard-line policies out of Beijing on the economy, foreign relations, human rights and public dissent, analysts told RFA.

Germany-based ethnic Mongolian rights activist Xi Haiming said the fact that Xi had packed the Politburo Standing Committee with his close allies showed that he can now act as he pleases.

“This is the last madness,” Xi Haiming told a recent political forum in Taiwan. “Xi has emerged, naked, as Emperor Xi, as a dictator.”

“Too many people in China are lining up to be his eunuchs, kowtowing to him, waiting for the emperor to ascend to the throne.”

A senior Chinese journalist who gave only the surname Geng, for fear of political reprisals, said China is now firmly back in the Mao era.

“This 20th National Congress is the beginning of the Mao era,” Geng said. “People used to say it was the 9th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that was bad, because it hailed Mao Zedong as the red sun.” 

Twitter commentator Cai Shenkun said Xi will now likely take China further away from Deng’s market reforms.

“The reform and opening up started by Deng Xiaoping will be totally abandoned,” Cai tweeted. “The state-owned economy will replace the market economy, and we will see an erosion of the private sector in every field under [Xi’s] common prosperity.”

“The middle class will soon disappear altogether … and freedom of speech will be further squeezed,” Cai wrote. “Even our limited freedom to travel will be gone forever.”

Overseas current affairs commentator Wen Zhigang said the old system of “collective leadership” in which power is shared among the party leader, the National People’s Congress chair and the premier, is well and truly dead.

“Collective leadership no longer exists, and the leader sits, aloof … a leader of the people who is above the party,” Wen said, adding that Xi used the word “people” 17 times in his closing speech to the party congress.

“‘People’ is used as code for political legitimacy,” he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin sent congratulations to Xi on his re-election as Communist Pary general secretary, adding that the result confirmed Xi’s high level of political authority and the unity and cohesion of the party he leads. Putin said he was willing to continue a dialogue with Xi on the development of the bilateral “comprehensive strategic partnership.”

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un also congratulated Xi on the conclusion of the party congress, North Korean state news agency KCNA reported, describing his re-election as “an epoch-making milestone.”

Rockier Relations?

Meanwhile, Oriana Skylar Mastro of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University said the next five years will likely be even rockier for U.S.-China relations, and other countries with security concerns in the region.

“Xi Jinping has been relatively clear since he took power in 2013, where his goals were in terms of promoting territorial integrity, is trying to define that and resolving a lot of these territorial issues, enhancing their position in Asia to regain their standing as a great power,” she said.

“It had already been decided that there was going to be conflict with the United States if China wanted to be number one in Asia.”

Denny Roy of the East-West Center in Hawaii said China will likely continue to push for increased global influence and standing.

“This is a continuation of a reassessment reached late in the Hu Jintao era, and which Xi Jinping has both embraced and acted upon,” Roy said.

“There is no hint of regret about Chinese policies that caused alarm and increased security cooperation among several countries both inside and outside the region, no recognition that Chinese hubris has damaged China’s international reputation within the economically developed world, and no sense that damage control is necessary due to adverse international reaction to what has happened in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea,” he said.

“Instead, Beijing seems primed to continue to oppose important aspects of international law, to resist the U.S.-sponsored liberal order, and to extol PRC-style fascism as superior to democracy.”

“Human rights crisis”

William Nee, Research and Advocacy Coordinator at China Human Rights Defenders, agreed, saying that human rights defenders will continue to be “systematically surveilled, persecuted and tortured in prison.”

“China is experiencing a human rights crisis … There are crimes against humanity underway in the Uyghur region, with millions of people being subjected to arbitrary detention, forced labor, or intrusive surveillance,” Nee told RFA.

“The cultural rights of Tibetans are not respected. And now, Xi Jinping’s ‘Zero-COVID’ policy is wreaking havoc on China’s economy, and particularly the wellbeing of disadvantaged groups, like migrant workers and the elderly.”

Meanwhile, Xi’s new leadership line-up is a stark indicator of the lack of checks and balances on his power from within party ranks, analysts said.

“The era of [former leaders] Deng, Jiang, Li and Hu is over, and [Xi Jinping] reigns supreme,” overseas current affairs commentator Zong Tao told RFA.

“The Chinese economy will now be experiencing the expansion of the state sector at the expense of the private sector,” he said. “It’s all about red genes and a red regime.”

Wu Guoguang, a senior research scholar at the Center for China Economics and Institutions at Stanford University and the author of a book on party congresses, said Xi has more say over who gets to be premier — his second-in-command Li Qiang — even that late supreme leader Mao Zedong did.

“Xi Jinping wields greater power to appoint his preferred premier than Mao Zedong did,” Wu told RFA.

“Li Qiang, as the No. 2 figure in the Communist Party, will soon be premier, which shows us that Xi Jinping wields more power from the top than Mao did,” he said.

While rival factions like former president Hu Jintao’s Youth League faction still exist, they no longer present much of an obstacle to Xi, Wu said.

However, new factions could yet form from among Xi’s trusted bureaucrats, he said.

“Factions will naturally form within the administration, because these leaders have different experiences and come from different backgrounds, and have different networks,” Wu said.

“They will keep using the people they trust, who are capable, and there are faint signs of this happening,” he said.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Chinese government censors on Monday limited keyword searches for former president Hu Jintao, who was unceremoniously removed from the ruling Chinese Communist Party congress over the weekend.

Seated at the leaders’ rostrum on Saturday, a confused-looking Hu was physically lifted from his seat by a security guard and firmly escorted past leader Xi Jinping, whom he tried to talk to, and out of the hall.

The incident prompted rampant speculation that Hu’s removal was a political statement from Xi and to show the total destruction of Hu’s political faction, which is closely linked to the Communist Party Youth League. Xi was later voted in for an unprecedented third five-year term in office, making him the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.  

No discussion of the incident was allowed on Chinese social media platforms after the event, while keyword searches for “Hu Jintao,” “Granddad Hu” and “Xi Jinping” were blocked, or only showing very limited results.

A keyword search for “Hu Jintao” on the Weibo social media platform on Monday resulted in just a couple of generic posts from the party congress, which ran from Oct. 16-22 in Beijing, with comments turned off on both.

State news agency Xinhua later tweeted that Hu had turned up to the session despite feeling “unwell,” and was escorted out due to his health.

Some messages managed to get around censors for a brief time by referring to Hu as a “former principal” who had been sent out by the current principal.

Clues from photos

Ming Chu-cheng, professor of political science at National Taiwan University, said important clues could be found in news photos of the incident, broadcast by the Spanish-language channel ABC Internacional.

“In the first photo, Hu Jintao is about to open the file [on the desk in front of him], but [outgoing Politburo standing committee member] Li Zhanshu stops him,” Ming told a recent discussion forum in Taiwan.

“In the second photo, Li Zhanshu takes the file away from Hu Jintao, who tries to take it back, but Li won’t let him.”

In the third and fourth photos, party leader Xi Jinping indicates to the security guard that Hu should leave. Hu is escorted out, but tries to talk to Xi on his way out.

“Xi doesn’t give him the time of day,” Ming said, saying that Xi’s behavior was rude according to Chinese culture’s veneration of elders. “The leaders … on either side stay expressionless throughout … they didn’t dare show any expression due to Xi’s power.”

But he added: “I think it was likely an emergency of some kind [rather than a premeditated gesture target the Youth League faction].”

Wu Guoguang, a senior research scholar at the Center for China Economics and Institutions at Stanford University, agreed that Xi’s treatment of Hu was disrespectful.

“Regardless of why he was leaving, the least the leaders on the rostrum could do would be to at least get up, shake hands, and say goodbye,” Wu said. “There was a total absence of that etiquette.”

“Why do former leaders come at all? Generally, as a platform for them to show unity with the current leader, but … the [treatment] of Hu Jintao shattered those illusions,” he said.

U.S.-based popular science writer Fang Zhouzi said via Twitter that the man who escorted Hu outside the hall was Xi’s personal bodyguard.

The man following along behind was named by the Associated Press’s Beijing correspondent Dake Kang as Kong Shaoxun, deputy director of the Communist Party’s general office, which is in charge of practical arrangements, housing and other services for leaders past and present.

Japanese journalist Akio Yaita, Taipei bureau chief for the Sankei Shimbun, said rumors of a coup attempt were far-fetched. “It’s more likely that Hu Jintao had an opinion on the … amendments to the party charter,” he said. “Hu’s departure showed that Xi Jinping rules over everything, but also made public contradictions within the party.”

After Hu left, the party charter was amended to enshrine Xi Jinping as a “core” party leader.

Protests

Signs of anti-Xi protest were largely confined to overseas cities during the party congress, with 1,000 people turning out in London on Sunday to protest Xi’s rule and the beating of a Hong Kong protester by Chinese consular officials in the northern city of Manchester.

A video clip circulating on social media on the evening of Oct. 23, after Xi announced a new leadership line-up packed with his most loyal allies, showed two young women walking through a Shanghai street carrying a banner that read, “We don’t want,” repeated several times.

The banner appeared to be a reference to the “Bridge Man” banner protest on the eve of the party congress, which called for elections, not leaders, and an end to COVID-19 lockdowns, as well as for Xi Jinping to step down.

As the young women walked past the camera on Xiangyang North Road in Shanghai’s Jing’an and Xuhui districts, someone could be heard playing the Internationale — a tune that played a prominent part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest movement — on a kazoo.

One of their companions commented: “We’ve always wanted to do this.”

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.