Day: December 2, 2022

A man in Cambodia has filed a criminal complaint against a private hospital in Kampong Speu province after a midwife removed part of his wife’s intestines while performing a procedure to remove her dead fetus, prompting a wider probe into illegal abortions in the country.

On Nov. 2, Chheang Srey Oun, a 22-year-old factory worker, underwent an operation at the Doeum Angkorng Maternity Clinic to remove a five-month-old fetus that had died in her womb, leaving her lower intestine severely damaged. 

A preliminary investigation found that she had been operated on by a licensed midwife named Ung Thearin, who had never been trained to perform an abortion.

Chheang Srey Oun is now being monitored at Calmette Hospital in Phnom Penh, where she remains in critical condition. Cambodia’s Ministry of Health has temporarily closed the Doeum Angkorng Maternity Clinic pending further investigation.

News of the case has received national attention after the woman used Facebook to appeal for help, saying she is in need of urgent treatment. 

Speaking to RFA Khmer from Calmette Hospital on Thursday, Chheang Srey Oun’s husband Pheng Voeun confirmed that a criminal complaint had been filed in his wife’s case. He called on the courts and relevant institutions to help bring justice to his wife.

He said he has been receiving assistance from the Red Cross to pay for his wife’s treatment.

In a statement on Thursday, Health Minister Mam Bun Heng said that the Doeum Angkorng Maternity Clinic had acted recklessly for allowing an untrained midwife to perform an abortion on Chheang Srey Oun.

The clinic must “face the consequences” of its actions according to the law, he said, adding that Ung Thearin’s license had been suspended for two years. The midwife has so far failed to cooperate with the investigation and is currently on the run from authorities.

He also ordered a probe of all private clinics and other facilities, adding that those found to perform abortions illegally will be punished accordingly.

The President of the Cambodian Trade Union Confederation, Rong Chhun, told RFA that the Ministry of Health needs to present a clear explanation for what happened to Chheang Srey Oun because it affects the lives of all Cambodians.

“The midwife must be held responsible for the cost [of her treatment], according to the law,” he said.

According to the latest figures from the World Bank, Cambodia’s maternal mortality rate was 160 for every 100,000 live births in 2017, a 4.76% decline from 2016. The mortality rate had declined for three consecutive years from 189 in 2014.

Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Joshua LIpes.

The victims who died in last week’s apartment block fire in Urumqi – which triggered protests across China against harsh anti-virus restrictions – were all Uyghurs, two officials confirmed to Radio Free Asia.

At least 10 people perished in the Nov. 24 blaze in the regional capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region amid reports that local lockdown measures impeded the rescue and escape of people trapped inside.

News of the fire – and the delays in fire trucks reaching the scene – struck a chord among the Chinese public fed up with the government’s zero-COVID policies, and sparked protests in at least a dozen cities across China.

News of the fire – and the delays in fire trucks reaching the scene – struck a chord among the Chinese public fed up with the government’s zero-COVID policies, and sparked protests in at least a dozen cities across China where crowds called for greater freedom of movement as well as freedom of expression. 

Some even called for the removal of President Xi Jinping in the most strident protests since the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

Chinese media has not reported the identity of the victims who died in the fire. But an official at the Urumqi fire department and a staffer at the Urumqi State Security Bureau confirmed to RFA that the dead were all Uyghurs.

This corroborates the description of Uyghurs living outside the country who were familiar with the apartment building that caught fire.

Hebibulla Izchi, who had lived in the building but is now residing in Switzerland, said all the residents of this building all were Uyghurs. He said his cousin, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law all live in the residential building.

“Before I left the motherland in 2016, I knew all the residents were Uyghurs, and there were no Chinese people,” he said. “That building’s clients were mainly Uyghurs.”

Abdulhapiz Memtim, also living in Switzerland, is the nephew of a woman who died in the fire. A woman, surnamed Qemernisa, died along with her four children Abdurahman, Imran, Shehide, and Nehdiye.

While the official death toll from the fire is 10, there have been reports of higher numbers. When asked about the number of dead, the latter official said 15, and the former official said he didn’t know. A policeman at Chang Jiang Road police station in Urumqi revealed that even the authorities did not report the police station the number of deaths in the disaster.

For years, Chinese authorities have persecuted Uyghurs, subjecting them to arbitrary arrests and restrictions on their religious practice and culture. China also has held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and others in “re-education” camps since 2017.

 

 

 

 

Chinese protesters, mourning lives lost in a fire in the Xinjiang capital Urumqi and rallying against the strict COVID-19 lockdowns that contributed to that tragedy, gathered on Shanghai’s Urumqi Road to make their point.  Police in response removed the street sign, but authorities still face symbolic blank sheets of paper held aloft by demonstrators across the country to voice opposition to anti-virus lockdowns, censorship and restrictions on free speech.

The death of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin on Nov. 29, 18 years after his retirement from top leadership positions, evoked responses ranging from nostalgia for the rapid economic growth, bold reforms and relative openness of his years in power to denunciations for human rights abuses on his watch.

Radio Free Asia sampled and translated comments on Twitter and other social media, including tweets sent in reply to a request for thoughts on the 96-year-old Jiang’s legacy. Twitter and other U.S. media platforms are blocked in China but some people skirt the ban with VPNs.

Jiang Zemin has just passed away. Shouldn’t be relevant news in 2022, but it is. – Phillip Wong @Tetracarbon

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Jiang Zemin implemented many policies in Tibet that destroyed Tibetan culture and Religion. – A Tibetan in Spain

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I don’t want to mourn you, Jiang. – A Tibetan Netizen

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When he went up, there were a lot of people on the street; when he left, there were still a lot of people on the street. – Keypad @XiaoJianpan624

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A considerable number of people miss the opening up and development in the 1990s. – ruby@XiaoJianpan624

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The dictator who came up after drinking 6.4 blood imprisoned good people like his predecessor Zhao Ziyang to death. – youlinhui @wuhua595

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Going to hell, too, in my opinion. – youlinhui @wuhua595

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Objectively speaking, he promoted reform and opening up, took the market economy route, joined the WTO, and opened up the most opportunities for all. An age of opportunity! – Martian @ChanHannah4

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From a historical point of view, since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the era of Jiang Zemin is the golden age of China. If the rule of law had been strengthened, it would have been an era that met the expectations of the people. – Old week @HYnZlxwWoIr05wo

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A friend pointed out that when HK govt turned their website grayscale for Jiang Zemin they accidentally turned it into the Black Bauhinia flag. Ah the self own – Xun-ling Au @XunlingAu

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They miss a happy face on the #CCP #JiangZemin made nice with the world and smoothed the ruffles feathers after the #TiananmenMassacre He brought back #HongKong under a treaty broken by #XiJinping . #Taiwan beware you’re next. – Jonny@jonnytheheat

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Millions of them, with their organs harvested, when they were still alive… in the eye of some western politicians, biz men, they call it “complicated.” keep in mind, when you dance w/ Hitler, Jiang Zemin, Xitler…you are vibrating w/ evil, and it will drag you to hell… – SoaringEagle @GaryJWater

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Former CCP leader Jiang Zemin, who ordered the persecution and forced organ harvesting of millions of religious and ethnic minorities in China, passed away today from multiple organ failure. – Debbie Grimmer @DebbieGrimmer

Chinese citizens described wildly varying COVID-19 prevention measures following anti-lockdown protests across the country this week, with some areas still locked down and others easing back on restrictions.

The top ruling Communist Party official in charge of the zero-COVID policy, Sun Chunlan, told local, regional and municipal governments to “optimize” their attempts to contain the virus on Thursday, saying the response to the coronavirus is now “facing a new situation.”

State media quoted experts as saying that “optimization” allows a better balance between containing COVID-19 outbreaks and allowing people to live normal lives.

“Effective medicine, especially traditional Chinese medicine, vaccination of more than 90 percent of the whole population, and declining pathogenicity of the Omicron virus, have created the condition for further optimizing COVID-19 responses,” the English-language Global Times paraphrased Sun as saying.

She urged frontline workers to properly handle COVID-19 prevention and quickly respond to people’s concerns, the report said.

‘White paper’ protests

Sun’s comments came after a wave of “white paper” protests across China sparked by a deadly lockdown fire in Xinjiang’s regional capital Urumqi.

RFA’s affiliate, Asia FactCheck, found after an investigation that at least five people who died in the blaze were under a lockdown at the time.

Authorities in Beijing loosened testing requirements for people staying home and reopened shopping malls to people with a negative COVID-19 test in the past 48 hours, the Global Times said.

But Beijing residents said the official announcement wasn’t being implemented where they lived.

“It’s lies – don’t listen to them,” a resident of Beijing’s Fangshan district surnamed Tang told RFA. “They said yesterday it would be lifted today, but it was a lie.

“We’ve been under lockdown for more than a month now,” she said.

Shanghai officials said lockdowns would be lifted in 24 areas previously designated as “high-risk.”

However, residents told RFA that areas remain under lockdown, with no loosening of COVID-19 controls across the board.

“The people of Guangdong feel like we’re on a roller-coaster at Disneyland,” said Liang Songji, who lives in the province in the city of Guangzhou. “Shanghai issued a directive on Nov. 29 telling people to stockpile enough food for two months, while the U.S. Embassy was telling Americans to lay in food stores for 14 days.

“Then, Guangzhou unexpectedly lifted its lockdown on Nov. 30. I was drinking beer downstairs when I saw all the COVID-19 enforcers running to and fro like crazy,” Liang said. “About 15 minutes later, at 2.30 p.m., people from the city and district sanitation teams came to tear down the barriers” that block people from going in and out of homes and businesses.

Lockdown changes

A video clip uploaded by a social media account in Guangzhou showed workers dismantling traffic barriers.

“These were installed secretly in the middle of the night, and now they are being dismantled openly,” a person comments on the video. “All [PCR] test stations are suspended as of now.

“The lockdown is really over – we don’t need passes any more,” the user said. “They told me that the disease isn’t really that terrible; what’s terrible is not being able to go to class, not having any money, or any food to eat.”

Around the same time, authorities in Shanghai lifted restrictions on Tang township in Pudong and the Daning Road area of Jing’an district.

“The district government sent out a directive telling us to stockpile enough supplies for a two-month pandemic [lockdown],” a Shanghai resident who gave only the surname Chen for fear of reprisals told RFA. “So I started to think they might lock us down again.

“Then I found out that they’re not locking down districts any more, only buildings,” he said. “They used to lock down an entire district if they found a single case, then only lift the lockdown after [several] days of zero cases.”

Some residents of the central city of Wuhan and the southern city of Shenzhen said they were still under lockdown, however.

“Our compound is still locked down, and we’re heard nothing,” a resident of Wuhan’s Jiang’an district who gave only the surname Li told RFA. “We’re not allowed to leave the building – hundreds of households are unable to go out.

“They come door to door to do the PCR tests,” she said. “I just asked my classmate in Shenzhen, and she said they’re still having to do daily PCR tests there too.”

Herd immunity

The loosening of restrictions has been accompanied by online speculation that the authorities are experimenting with the notion of “herd immunity” in the southwestern province of Sichuan.

Two recordings that apparently discussed the roll-out of a new approach at three educational institutions in Shifang city were posted by social media influencer “Mr. Li is not your teacher” on Twitter, and have been circulating on the WeChat social media platform in recent days.

In the recordings, speakers cite a “secret document” from the central government in Beijing calling for a test-run of the herd immunity approach in Shifang.

“Sichuan province was assigned this task by the central government, and issued a secret document to Shifang, requiring us to carry out preliminary experiments under closed-loop management,” the students are told in one recording. “This means that all of the teachers and students in the school will become infected [with COVID-19].”

RFA was unable to verify the content of the recordings independently. Shifang city issued a directive on Friday lifting COVID-19 “temporary control measures” across its jurisdiction, saying that areas designated “high-risk” would still be locked down.

In one recording, a man is heard telling students that “the whole country needs this big data.” The “experiment” as described in the recordings appeared to consist of lifting all restrictions, then testing everyone three times on day 14.

Potential risks

Herd immunity with the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has been described as unlikely by immunology professor Danny Altmann, who described Omicron in a July 1 article in The Guardian as “a kind of stealth virus that gets in under the radar without doing too much to alert immune defenses.” 

“Even having had Omicron, we’re not well protected from further infections,” Altmann wrote.

Former Chinese Red Cross Director Ren Ruihong said China should be very cautious about allowing mass COVID-19 infections.

“Europe and the United States have high vaccination rates, and properly functioning healthcare systems,” Ren told RFA. “Respiratory infections on a large scale squeeze medical resources, and China has such a huge population that local healthcare facilities wouldn’t be able to keep up.”

“If [the reports of an end to zero-COVID restrictions are] true, the consequences of letting it rip will be unimaginable,” Ren said. “Chinese people have been protected so far, and its vaccines aren’t very effective, so people are very vulnerable.

“It will be unfair on vulnerable groups if there is large-scale infection, and the healthcare system could collapse.”

The Caixin news site quoted sources on Dec. 2 as saying that China plans to step up vaccination rates among the elderly, setting a target of 90% of people over the age of 80 by next month.

Just over 65% of people in that category are currently fully vaccinated, with only around 40% having received a booster jab, compared with more than nearly 69% of the over 60s, 86.4% of whom are fully vaccinated, immunization czar Xia Gang said at a Nov. 26 news conference.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

As protesters took to the streets in more than a dozen Chinese cities last weekend in anti-lockdown protests sparked by a deadly fire in Urumqi, amid calls for Communist Party leader Xi Jinping to step down, students in overseas universities soon followed suit.

While Chinese nationals who amplify or respond to anti-government sentiment overseas risk bringing trouble down on the heads of loved ones back home, some have said they were inspired by recent protests to the point of responding with actions of their own.

Guo Hu, a 42-year-old Chinese man currently studying computing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently spoke to RFA’s Mandarin Service about why he helped to organize a rally in solidarity with recent protests in China at which demonstrators held up blank sheets of paper in a mute protest at COVID-19 restrictions and curbs on freedom of speech:

RFA: How did you come to organize this protest?

Guo Hu: Strictly speaking, I wasn’t the only organizer, because there were students at Duke who were involved too. The first time I dared to express my views on political events was after Mr. Peng Lifa’s protest on the Sitong Bridge. His actions made me feel like a coward. I was very encouraged by the fact that Peng was able to accomplish this all by himself, in a regulatory environment with strict controls on speech, under the kind of ‘stability maintenance’ system they have in mainland China. 

Back then, I was still a little hesitant. I didn’t want to show my face. I just printed out some posters and put them up around campus. While I was doing that, I found that I wasn’t alone, and that several of my fellow students were doing the same thing.

So why did I decide to show my face after the fire in Urumqi on Nov. 24? Partly due to the courage given to me by Mr. Peng Lifa and partly by the young woman who was the first to hold up a blank sheet of paper at the Nanjing Institute of Communication. That’s why I decided to do this, so we held a rally at Duke … to show our support [for the protesters] and our opposition to the unscientific and barbaric zero-COVID policy.

The next day I saw in Duke’s college newspaper that around 100 Chinese students from various universities had shown up, as well as Chinese people from the local community. None of us expected so many to come.

So now we know. The desire of the Chinese people for freedom and democracy has never gone away. It has just been suppressed by the Communist Party’s brutal stability maintenance system and by internet censorship. 

RFA: As a Chinese student studying abroad, what do you think of the calls for Xi Jinping and the Communist Party to step down? 

Guo Hu: I never expected to hear those slogans. Back when I left China to come to the United States, it was because I was very disappointed with the way things were in China. I never thought I would hear anyone shouting such slogans in my lifetime. It was exciting to hear protesters shouting these things in China.

In the past, the Communist Party was like a big banker sitting at a poker table and controlling the game. Thirty-three years ago, at the time of the June 4, 1989 crackdown, it ignored what the students opposing it were saying … and called in the tanks. But the general public in mainland China has earned the right to equal dialogue in this white paper revolution, and we’re in the game. The bankers daren’t turn the tables on us this time.

The most important thing about the white paper movement is that it has shown us a very effective way to fight back against the Communist Party, and win.

RFA: What do you think of the government’s blaming of the protests on “foreign forces?”

Guo Hu: This is obviously just one of the Communist Party’s set phrases. In one video posted to Twitter from Beijing, the protesters on the ground were laughing back [at someone saying this] saying “how are foreign forces supposed to contact us, if we can’t even get online?”

RFA: Will the white paper revolution become a color revolution like those in eastern Europe and Central Asia?

Guo Hu: I think that would be hard from a practical point of view. This is a decentralized movement, and it’s hard for a decentralized movement to have a revolutionary impact in the face of a powerful centralized machinery like that of the CCP. I will say that it is of historical significance. It’s just a prelude. I don’t think it will turn into a color revolution in the short term, but maybe in the future.

RFA: Now that you’ve appeared in public, do you still plan to return to China? Do you worry that your family and friends will be targeted by the Chinese government?

Guo Hu: It could make it hard for me to go back to China, to be honest. I’m a little worried about my family and friends back in China, but I’m an adult now. I’m in my forties, and I take full responsibility for my actions. I’m free to express my views – I’m giving this interview, after all. If the Communist Party wants to target me, they should deal with me directly, not my family or friends.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.