Day: November 15, 2022

Migrant workers whose movements have been restricted by rolling lockdowns and compulsory COVID-19 testing under China’s strict zero-COVID policy have taken to the streets of the southern province of Guangdong in recent days, according to video clips uploaded to social media.

One video clip reportedly shot in Haizhu district of the provincial capital Guangzhou on Monday night showed hundreds of people surging along a street, shoving over traffic barriers and arguing with police and disease prevention personnel in protective gear.

It was the latest outpouring of resentment in China over restrictions aimed at containing the spread of the virus.

In another clip posted to Twitter, people are shown smashing barriers before flinging what appear to be plastic crates at workers and officials in protective gear, while a woman exclaims from behind the camera: “Wow, that’s going too far! So scary!”

Dissatisfaction with the frequent lockdowns was the main reason driving the protests, said a man who gave only his name as Xu. “They’d been locked up so long and couldn’t do business, and so they just rushed out,” he told Radio Free Asia.

“Last night a ton of people broke through the quarantine barricades. Seems like special police were sent in,” he said. “I don’t know how many people were there.”

Xu said people have been locked up for weeks in areas where the protests broke out. Long-term closure and inability to work, coupled with insufficient supplies, were the main reasons for people’s protests.

Local authorities did not respond to requests for comment.

In another video, dozens of people face off in an alleyway with dozens of disease control personnel and police across fallen traffic barriers, before the camera pans to show police holding down a man restrained by cable ties with a foot on his neck.  

Footage sent to Radio Free Asia showed hundreds of people running along two different streets, trampling traffic barriers and shouting, while another shot showed hundreds standing still and facing off near a COVID-19 testing station, with some people pushing over barriers.

‘Love of freedom’

And in a clip sent to RFA’s Cantonese Service, people apparently confined to apartment buildings in Guangzhou sing the anthem of the 2014 Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, “Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies,” by Hong Kong rock band Beyond, to the night sky.

“Forgive me, my whole life I’ve had a love of freedom,” the crowd sings in Cantonese, the lingua franca of both Guangdong and Hong Kong.

Chinese media outlet Interface News reported that the protests had prompted local leaders to hold an emergency meeting on Monday night to tweak the way the zero-COVID policies are being enforced.

The Guangdong province health commission said via its official WeChat account on Tuesday that “adjustments” would be needed to local policies, slashing quarantine periods from seven days at a quarantine camp plus three days observation at home to five days in quarantine and three days at home.

Local officials must arrange for the “timely release” of people once their quarantine and home isolation periods are completed and the necessary negative tests completed, the commission said.

Local officials should avoid being overly rigid in enforcing restrictions, and do a good job of preventing and responding to risks, the statement said.

China’s health ministry reported 17,772 new locally COVID-19 cases on Monday, including 1,621 confirmed cases and 16,151 asymptomatic infections, the biggest spike since late April.

Of those, 5,633 new locally transmitted infections were in Guangdong. Two sub-districts of Haizhu district have been locked down, including Liwan and Panyu.

Translated and written by Luisetta Mudie, edited by Malcolm Foster.

A Lao Christian preacher who had previously been arrested for evangelism was found dead and badly beaten a few days after disappearing, villagers told Radio Free Asia.

A few days before his body was found with signs of torture, two men believed to be district authorities visited Sy Seng Manee, 48, they said. His corpse was found on Oct. 23 with his motorbike in a forest near a road to Donkeo village in Khammouane province.

Local residents said they believe Sy was murdered because of his religious beliefs and preaching.

A villager, who is also a soldier and lives in a community north of Donkeo, told RFA that he witnessed the preacher’s abduction. He saw three men get out of a black truck with no license plates, grab Sy and violently push him into the vehicle and drive away.

The villager who requested anonymity for safety reasons said at the time he believed the men were authorities arresting a drug dealer or criminal, so he went on his way. But after hearing about the preacher’s death, he realized that the man was Sy. He then informed others in his community about what he had seen, and they, in turn, told Sy’s family.

Lao police said they are still investigating the death.

The Law on the Evangelical Church, which took effect in December 2019, gives Christians in Laos the right to conduct services, preach throughout the country and maintain contacts with believers in other nations. 

But they still often face opposition from residents or local authorities in this predominantly Buddhist nation.

In March, officials in Savannakhet province ordered a Christian family to remove social media posts and videos of villagers attacking a man’s coffin during his funeral in December 2021 because they opposed the family’s faith and struck mourners and pallbearers with clubs, RFA reported.

The family buried the patriarch in their own rice field, but authorities and residents continued to harass them. Authorities expropriated their land in February, and other villagers torched their home, relatives and other sources said in an earlier report.

Former arrest

Local authorities first arrested Sy in August 2018 because he held weekly meetings in his house to preach to the villagers, locals said. Authorities tried to force him to sign a document denouncing the Christian faith and pledging that he would stop preaching, but he refused and was jailed for three days and fined. 

A few years after his release, Sy began preaching again until he disappeared this October and turned up dead.

“His death was due to his belief in Christianity,” said a village resident who declined to be identified out of fear for his safety. 

The resident said he heard that authorities may have arrested Sy when they went to a gathering. “They don’t like the Christian religion, so that’s what they do,” he said. 

A Christian preacher in Nakai district, where Donkeo village is located, said he believes that Sy was murdered because his Christian belief displeased local residents.

“Each district is different in terms of other religious beliefs,” said the preacher, who declined to be named for fear of his safety. “Some provinces are strict and some are loose when it comes to harassment.”

One Christian villager said he now feared for his own safety because the same might happen to him and other believers in the village. He called on police to quickly arrest the murderers.

 “If the murderers are not arrested, it will strongly affect the Christian community,” he told RFA.

“In the past, each time a situation like this happened, there was a related sector responsible for thoroughly investigating the case.”

 Translated by Sidney Khotpanya for RFA Lao. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden struck a conciliatory tone in their highly anticipated November 14 summit on the Indonesian island of Bali. The two leaders stressed the need to avoid letting disputes over trade, technology, security and political influence spill into superpower conflict, but the meeting also underscored fundamental differences over the self-governing island of Taiwan that could spark military hostilities.

The creator of a popular Tibetan language video-sharing app abruptly announced on Thursday he was shutting it down for financial reasons, a source inside the Tibetan Autonomous Region said.

But a group advocating for greater rights for Tibetans said it was more likely that the Chinese government ordered the app’s closure because it has ratcheted up efforts to restrict Tibetans from using their own language.

The GangYang app is a short-video social media platform that can be used to record videos, livestream and shop online. Chinese authorities granted permission for Tibetans living inside the far-western region to create a social media app in their own language, and GangYang was launched in about 2018 as a legally registered social media app.

The app was very popular, partly because all the function keys were in the Tibetan language, said the source, who declined to be named for safety reasons.

“Despite the significance of such a Tibetan app that caters to the Tibetan community, due to growing expenses in order to keep up with the app, I have no choice but to close the GangYang App,” the notice of closure said, according to the source.

The Chinese government’s restrictions on use of the Tibetan language have spread to video services and other online platforms, as Beijing continues to push for the assimilation of China’s ethnic minorities, including Tibetans, into the dominant Han Chinese culture, RFA reported in March.  

“The notification also thanked every user for supporting the app all the while and encouraged everyone to preserve the Tibetan language,” the source said.

Pema Gyal, a researcher at London-based Tibet Watch said he believed that the Chinese government played a role. 

“Since the social media platforms that entertain the Tibetan language have become major platforms for Tibetans to communicate among themselves, Chinese authorities are retracting the Tibetan language from these social media platforms,” Gyal said.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibetan. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s ambitious plan to build 50,000 new homes in the capital of Pyongyang has ground to a halt due to a lack of funding, sources in the city told Radio Free Asia.

Pyongyang, with a population of about 3 million, suffers from a severe housing shortage. Kim promised at the ruling Korean Workers’ Party Congress in January 2021 to build 50,000 houses by the end of 2025, with a target of 10,000 new homes by the end of each year.

Husks of apartment buildings 50 floors or higher now dot the skyline in the city’s Hwasong area, but none of their interiors are anywhere near completion, a source from the capital told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“They completed the [exterior] frames in September. Construction started in February but the interior finishing work has stopped due to financial difficulties,” said the source. “We need to import electric cables, lighting, tiles, and aluminum window frames to proceed, and we need foreign currency to import these materials.”

RFA reported in February that North Korea celebrated the start of Phase Two of the project – a second batch of 10,000 homes in the Hwasong area–despite having not yet completed the first batch of 10,000 in the Songsin and Songhwa areas. Delays stemmed from a lack of Chinese construction materials, which were hard to come by while the border remained closed during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rail freight between the two countries resumed earlier this year, and Phase One was finally completed in April, but the problem now is that funds are running low. 

The 10,000-home construction project is a major priority for the North Korean government. RFA reported in June 2021 that authorities routed electricity away from other regions of the country to keep Pyongyang fully powered so construction workers could work through the night.

But working on the project has been grueling and dangerous for the workers, mostly soldiers who are forced to work for free. Pyongyang residents complained in May 2021 that the underfed workers were mugging civilians to get money for food. Additionally, a fire in a workers’ dormitory killed 20 workers in April of that year, RFA reported.

‘Extremely important’

Despite all the problems, the underfed and overworked soldiers are expected to complete the interiors of the Hwasong buildings by the end of December, the source said.

“This is a construction project promoted by the Highest Dignity, so it is extremely important,” he said, using an honorific term to refer to Kim Jong Un.

The central government is aware that there is a lack of supplies, but they have ordered that the organizations in charge of construction must resolve their supply issues, according to the source.

“The Capital Construction Commission directed each organization to sell some of the apartments from the earlier phases of construction to raise funds for the interior construction,” he said.

Hwasong lies on the outskirts of Pyongyang, and a newly completed apartment could sell for about U.S. $50,000. A unit with an incomplete interior can maybe get $10,000, according to the source.

There are around 25 high-rise apartments, each with 50 to 70 floors that are still incomplete inside the Hwasong area, in the Taesong and Ryongsong districts, a second Pyongyang resident explained.

“The internal construction on these 10,000 homes is a project under the absolute control of the Highest Dignity, so it must be completed by the end of the year,” he said. “Each ministry in charge of the construction is busy trying to secure funds by selling some bare apartment units to rich individuals. These are homes with only exterior frames.”

Sources said that because the government is forcing construction companies to come up with money for materials, and the companies are state-run and therefore funded by taxes, the tax burden on residents will likely increase.

This is leading to criticism of the project, as people who will never even see the apartments have to sacrifice for them so that Kim Jong Un can count it on a list of his achievements for propaganda purposes, the sources said. 

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

A boat carrying more than 100 weak and hungry Rohingya landed in a coastal village in Indonesia’s westernmost Aceh province on Tuesday, local authorities said, adding that the refugees were at sea for over a month.

Authorities have not yet determined where these members of Myanmar’s stateless minority had fled from, but many Rohingya groups previously landed in Indonesia while en route to neighboring Malaysia or other destinations.

North Aceh regency spokesman Hamdani said the 111 refugees – 65 men, 27 women, and 19 children including a toddler – were transferred to mosques in Meunasah Baro village. Some news reports said the boat was carrying 110 refugees.

“Their condition was weak. We are currently checking their health,” Hamdani, who uses one name, told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

He said local fishermen saw that the Rohingya had reached the shoreline at 3:25 a.m.

“The fishermen immediately contacted village officials to rescue the Rohingya refugees, then they were transferred to mosques in the village,” Hamdani said.

North Aceh police chief Herman Saputra said the Rohingya had been drifting at sea for nearly six weeks.

“They were 40 days at sea but we don’t know yet where they came from yet,” Herman told BenarNews.

The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said staff were in touch with the National Refugee Task Force, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and activists to assist the latest Rohingya arrivals.

“UNHCR really appreciates the Indonesian government for granting permission to land for more than 100 Rohingya in North Aceh this morning,” Mitra Salima Suryono, UNHCR spokeswoman in Indonesia, told BenarNews.

Mardani Ali Sera, an Indonesian MP, urged the government and civil society to help resolve the root causes of the Rohingya issue.

“The ASEAN-led communiqué calling for isolating the military junta leadership is good, but it’s not enough,” Mardani told BenarNews.

“There needs to be decisive action to stop the humanitarian crisis, for Rohingya in particular, and Myanmar in general.”

About 740,000 Rohingya fled to and are living in refugee camps in and around Cox’s Bazar, a district in southeastern Bangladesh, after the Myanmar military launched a bloody offensive against the community in the Rakhine state on Aug. 25, 2017.

The sprawling Cox’s Bazar camps are home to about 1 million Rohingya.

Hundreds of refugees have paid smugglers to transport them to Thailand and Malaysia, hoping to find work away from Myanmar or the crowded refugee camps of Bangladesh.

Indonesia is not a destination country for Rohingya, but they make the country a stopover before leaving for third nations such as Malaysia or Australia, says the UNHCR.

In March, a group of 114 Rohingya arrived in the Aceh region after spending 25 days at sea. Another group was rescued off the North Aceh coast in December 2021 after their boat engine failed.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.