Day: March 22, 2023

As she had done several times before, Gonpo Kyi went to the prison in Tibet’s capital of Lhasa on Monday to appeal for the release of her brother, former businessman Dorjee Tashi, who is serving a life sentence.

When police told Kyi to stop, she refused. So they grabbed her and detained her overnight, during which she was beaten and tortured, two Tibetans with knowledge of the situation said. 

Kyi was released on Tuesday, and her other brother, Dorjee Tseten – who has also repeatedly campaigned on his brother’s behalf – took her to the hospital for treatment of injuries she suffered, one of the sources said.

“While Gonpo Kyi was pleading with the Chinese authorities to allow relatives to visit her jailed brother, she was tortured and then arrested by the police,” said a Tibetan inside Tibet, who declined to be identified for safety reasons. “She was detained for a night and released the day after.” 

Radio Free Asia obtained a video in which Kyi, also known as Gontey, describes the beatings and shows bruises on her shoulders and upper arms.

In the video, she displays a legal document about a Chinese business couple who were imprisoned for 15 years on fraud charges around the same time Tashi was arrested. 

“But the Chinese couple has been released after 10 years,” Kyi says. “And it is not fair that my brother, Dorjee Tashi, has still not released though he has already paid off all the money that he was allegedly charged with [stealing] through loan fraud.”

“This is illegal and discrimination against the Tibetans,” she said, though she did not explain how she obtained the document about the Chinese couple.

Former hotel chain tycoon

Before his arrest, Dorjee Tashi, 48, was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and a successful businessman who owned a luxury hotel chain and real estate companies in Tibet, according to International Campaign for Tibet, a rights group. 

He was praised for his philanthropic activities that contributed to poverty alleviation and economic development in the region.

Tashi was arrested in July 2008 following mass Tibetan protests against Chinese rule that spring and branded a “secessionist” for alleged covert support to the Tibetan protesters and for political connections with the Tibetan community in exile, which he later denied. 

Though the political allegations against him were dropped, Tashi was indicted for loan fraud and sentenced to life in in Drapchi Prison in Tibet’s capital Lhasa on what rights groups and supporters say were politically motivated charges.

Sibling support

Both Kyi and her brother, Tseten, have protested Tashi’s imprisonment. 

Tseten has posted videos of himself pleading with prison authorities to let him and other family members visit his brother, although all his requests have been denied.

In December 2022, Kyi staged a peaceful protest calling for her brother’s release outside a courthouse in Lhasa until security guards took her into custody. She also staged sit-ins outside another courthouse in the capital in June 2022.

“Though the police told her to stop the protest, she continued with her appeal to meet and to get her brother, who has been serving a life sentence in Drapchi Prison since 2010, released,” said a Tibetan who lives outside China’s Tibet Autonomous Region.

Drapchi Prison, or Lhasa Prison No. 1, is the largest detention facility in Tibet, housing Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns detained for their political beliefs. It has a reputation for its poor conditions, brutality and use of torture on inmates, according to the human rights group Free Tibet.

Tibet was formerly an independent nation until it was invaded and incorporated into China more than seven decades ago. Chinese authorities maintain a tight grip on the region, restricting Tibetans’ political activities and peaceful expression of cultural and religious identity.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibetan. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

A court in Shanghai has handed a seven-year jail term to the author of a programming and politics blog who evaded government detection for around 12 years after finding him guilty of “incitement to subvert state power,” Radio Free Asia has learned.

Ruan Xiaohuan, the 46-year-old author of the formerly anonymous blog ProgramThink on the Blogger.com platform, was detained by the authorities in May 2021 after publishing several posts on evading the Communist Party’s internet censorship and tracking protocols.

The move comes after Apple removed a Twitter-like social media app linked to the Nostr social media platform, which enables users to evade control or censorship by governments or private companies, from its China app store, one day after it was launched.

The court judgment against Ruan referred to more than 100 “political posts” made by Ruan, his wife told Radio Free Asia on Wednesday.

“They didn’t say what my husband had written, but said that the charge was based on more than 100 political posts he made,” said Ruan’s wife, who gave only the surname Bei.

“It said that he had set up this blog in 2009 and expressed dissatisfaction with the government over a prolonged period, prompting many people to imitate [his ideas] and circulate them,” she said.

“They said the crime was of a serious nature because it had a very bad impact [on society],” she said.

Information security specialist

Ruan, a former information security specialist during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, set up his blog the year after the Games, Bei said.

“My husband basically admits that he wrote the posts, but said he did it in order to make things better,” she said. “He also submitted evidence of his contributions to the nation, and never expected that the court would treat it as a serious crime.”

“The punishment of seven years is at the lighter end of the possible range of 5-15 years,” she said.

Program-Think was nominated for best Chinese blog in the 2013 Deutsche Welle International Best of Blogs awards, or BOBs.

Ruan told the station at the time that he had never set out to write political content to begin with, but just wanted to share his years of experience in programming.

But the blog gradually became popular with people wanting ways to get around government censorship, and later branched out into information security tips and political analysis, the station reported at the time of the blog’s nomination.

Party leaders’ wealth

One of Ruan’s associates told Radio Free Asia at the time of his detention that he was likely detained over an in-depth analysis of party leaders’ wealth following the publication of the Panama Papers in 2016, and his political theorizing and anti-brainwashing campaigns.

The person said Ruan’s blog had turned him from an uncritical supporter of the government to someone who “longs for freedom and democracy.”

Zhou Fengsuo, chief executive of the U.S.-based NGO Human Rights in China, said Ruan had also provided his readers with in-depth instructions about how to circumvent the Great Firewall of government internet censorship.

“A lot of his blog was about how to circumvent the Great Firewall, and how to ensure digital security from online surveillance,” Zhou said.

“A considerable amount of space was also dedicated to the history of the 1989 democracy movement, and the writing was very factual and powerful,” he said.

Zhou said Ruan was considered a threat to Communist Party rule under leader Xi Jinping due to his valuable technical expertise.

“Technological innovation is of itself a challenge to a dictatorship,” he said. “[Ruan’s expertise] was thorough-going, broad-reaching and long-lasting.”

“He kept taking up new technologies to challenge the regime, which inspired a lot of other people,” Zhou said. “It’s kind of a miracle that he was able to do so much public activism over so many years.”

Ruan has appealed the verdict, his wife said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken pushed the Senate on Wednesday to approve $2 billion in spending for infrastructure projects worldwide, but appeared to be rebuffed with a key Republican senator questioning the chances such money could be found.

Amid a Republican-led push to cut spending and bring the U.S. federal budget into the black for the first time since 2001, it marked the latest roadblock in long-running U.S. government efforts to establish even a modest alternative to Beijing’s $1-trillion Belt and Road Initiative.

Blinken said the State Department was seeking $400 million in mandatory spending “to counter specific actions by China” in the Indo-Pacific and $2 billion for “high-quality infrastructure projects to more effectively compete with the work that China does.”

He said the funding was needed to help private U.S. businesses offer an alternative to the extravagant infrastructure spending by Beijing, noting an opportunity as countries grapple with associated debt.

“We’ve seen something of a backlash against this in country after country, where it turns out that taking this money is not necessarily leaving countries in the best place,” he said. “It’s been a double-edged sword for a lot of people. Nonetheless, the resources are significant.”

The top U.S. diplomat was speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to defend the State Department’s portion of the Biden administration’s 2023 proposed budget, after earlier also testifying to the Senate Appropriations Committee about the funding request.

Tight purse strings

During his testimony, Blinken acknowledged that the State Department’s request for $2 billion for infrastructure paled in comparison to the loans and grants offered by Beijing.

But he said many countries would prefer U.S.-built projects, if that were an option, and said the proposed spending was only meant to augment much larger investments by the American private sector.

“We need to be able not, of course, to match them dollar for dollar, which we’ll never do,” Blinken said of the Chinese government, “but [we need] to be more effective in catalyzing private sector investment, and doing it in a more coordinated way with allies and partners.” 

He said that China’s authoritarian system allowed its Belt and Road Initiative to “mobilize all of the resources of the state” to invest around the world “in loss-leader projects, because it’s strategically important to them.” That was not an option for the U.S. government, he said. 

“Our comparative advantage is finding ways to catalyze – more effectively – private-sector investment,” Blinken added. “We need to be able to do that by putting some of our own money down.”

The Center for Global Development has estimated that the Belt and Road Initiative– a state-led program for infrastructure projects tying countries across Asia and beyond to China – could end up costing Beijing some $8 trillion by the time it is completed, a figure that dwarves Blinken’s $2 billion proposal.

Senators on the foreign relations committee, led by Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, its ranking Republican, said they agreed with the principle of the proposal. But Risch wondered if the $2 billion would be approved once the House and Senate finish negotiations on the federal budget.

“Fair enough,” Risch said of the proposal. “Although I think you would agree with me that the $2 billion in mandatory [spending] is going to be tough to do. It’s probably going to be a heavy lift for the appropriators.”

“We’re going to have, you know, some top-line budget challenges,” Blinken replied, “depending on how these funds are apportioned.”

“That’s an understatement,” Risch said.

Taiwan defense

Risch also questioned why the State Department budget proposal only included $16 million in aid to Taiwan, which he said was too low.

“I was deeply disappointed when I saw what was proposed,” Risch said. “The $16 million doesn’t even pay the carfare over there.”

Earlier in the day, Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina and the party’s ranking member on the appropriations committee, had raised a similar question. Graham asked Blinken why the Biden administration was not learning from the Ukraine war and further arming Taiwan now in advance of any potential invasion.

Another member of the appropriations committee, Sen. Bill Haggerty, a Republican from Tennessee, also asked why there was a $19 billion backlog in arms sales to Taiwan as Beijing threatened an invasion.

“We had an opportunity for deterrence with Ukraine. We didn’t take it,” Haggerty said to Blinken. “We have the opportunity here.”

Blinken said Taiwan was not in need of aid. He noted that Taipei had in fact purchased about $10 billion in arms from the United States since 2019, and recently increased its own defense budget by 11%. 

“When it comes to Taiwan, what we’ve been focused on is foreign military sales,” Blinken told the foreign relations committee in the afternoon. “It has significant means to acquire this technology.”

Instead, the issue was U.S. capacity to manufacture arms.

“One of the challenges we have has little to do with our budgets or our authorities,” he said. “The long pole in the tent in providing equipment to Taiwan to defend itself is the production capacity here, and this is something of course that we’re working on.”

Vietnam told the United Nations that it has no information regarding the whereabouts of Chinese activist Dong Guangping, who was arrested in Hanoi in August 2022.

“After the verification process, the authorities in Viet Nam have had no information regarding Dong Guangping in Viet Nam,” Hanoi said in a diplomatic note dated March 15.

It was in response to a Dec. 15 letter from three U.N. special rapporteurs on human rights that raised questions about the Chinese activist’s situation. 

They said they were informed about the Vietnamese police’s arbitrary arrest of Dong and that Dong was last seen on Aug. 24, 2022, handcuffed and hooded,  entering a police car and escorted by about a dozen Vietnamese police officers.

The official reason for his detention is unknown. At the time, Dong was seeking political asylum status in a third country.

Dong, a former police officer from Henan province, was criminally prosecuted in China three times for his work in support of human rights and democracy, including advocacy for activities commemorating victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Chinese authorities freed Dong in August 2019, and he sought refuge in Vietnam in January 2020. Vietnamese authorities arrested him while he was waiting to be resettled in Canada, where his family resides.  

The diplomatic note also claimed that there was no “arbitrary detention” or “enforced disappearance” in Vietnam.

“In Vietnam, only those who violated the law are detained and prosecuted in accordance with the proceedings regulated in the law; their rights shall be fully ensured in line with national laws and international covenants on human rights of which Viet Nam is a member,” it said.

‘Blatant lies’

Human Rights Watch said Vietnam was lying.

“Despite all of their denials, the fact remains that Vietnam knew exactly where Dong Guangping was during the entirety of his stay in the Hanoi area,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at the New York-based group.

He said that Vietnam even negotiated with several other governments about enabling Dong to leave the country so he could receive protection somewhere else.

“All these denials by Vietnam are blatant lies to cover up the reality that the authorities arrested and disappeared him, presumably by sending him back to China where he will face severe persecution and punishment,” said Robertson. 

“Once again, despite the popular sentiment of the Vietnamese people against the Chinese government, the Vietnam Communist Party can’t seem to resist doing secret deals with its neighbor to the north, often abusing human rights in doing so,” he said.

Sheng Xue, vice chairperson of the Federation for a Democratic China and editor-in-chief of China Spring Magazine, told RFA that the Vietnamese government was being irresponsible and untransparent regarding Dong, whom she considers to be a close friend.

According to Sheng, Dong was to be resettled to Canada with his wife and daughter from Thailand in November 2015. However, he was taken back to China from a Thai prison and was sentenced to four years, being released in August 2019. He came to Vietnam in January 2020, then went missing in August of last year.

“I am so disappointed by this response from the Vietnamese government,” Sheng said. “This response completely ignores the facts.”

Appeals to Canada

Sheng said that upon learning of Dong’s disappearance on Aug. 27, 2022, she immediately asked three different friends to go to his home to ask his landlord and neighbors about his whereabouts.

According to the information she obtained from different friends, Dong was taken away from his residence by more than a dozen Vietnamese police officers.

“[He] was handcuffed, and his head was covered by a black hood,” said Sheng. “Since then, I have never heard any further information about [him].”

Sheng also said that she has provided the information to the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and called on Canada to protect Dong and to protest against Vietnam’s handling of the case.

The Toronto Association for Democracy in China said that if Dong Guangping is returned to China, it is likely that will face arbitrary detention, torture, ill-treatment, and an unfair trial.

According to Spain-based Safeguard Defenders, over the past few years, the Vietnamese government has arrested and deported three Chinese activists, including Dong Guangping, who had fled to the Southeast Asian country to avoid China’s persecution.

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

Vietnamese police have released four flight attendants detained for transporting cocaine and other illegal drugs in their luggage on a flight from Paris because of a lack of evidence, state media reported Wednesday.

The female flight attendants said they agreed to transport the toothpaste tubes for an individual who approached them in Paris and paid them more than 10 million dong, or about U.S.$424, to take the tubes on the flight to Ho Chi Minh City.

The women said they were unaware of the narcotics, and that they did not know the identity of the person who asked them to transport the toothpaste tubes.  

Upon arrival in Ho Chi Minh City on March 16, authorities found more than 11 kilograms (25 lbs.) of MDMA, commonly referred to as ecstasy, ketamine and cocaine in tablet and powder form in the tubes in their luggage.

On Tuesday, police searched their homes, but found no illegal drugs.

Meanwhile, police have opened a case to further investigate the illegal transportation of narcotics and to hold the perpetrators to account, said a statement issued the same day by Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security. 

From Jan. 1 to March 14, customs officials at Tan Son Nhat International Airport detected eight cases of drug trafficking and confiscated nearly 15 kilos (33 lbs.) of various illegal narcotics.

Translated by Anna Vu for RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

Prime Minister Hun Sen defended the recent promotions of his two eldest sons to senior military posts, revealing that he secretly worked with the Minister of National Defense to elevate the pair ahead of general elections later this year.

The eldest son, Hun Manet, has been tapped to be Hun Sen’s political successor. He is expected to resign from the military in the coming months to compete in the election, which is scheduled for July. 

The prime minister said he and Minister of National Defense Tea Banh agreed to promote Hun Manet from a three-star general to four stars. The 45-year-old Hun Manet is currently the deputy commander in chief of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF).

“Hun Manet should have been promoted to be a four-star general from 2018 but he refused to accept it,” Hun Sen said at a graduation ceremony for the Vanda Institute in Phnom Penh on Wednesday. “He didn’t know that he was promoted.”

The second eldest son, Hun Manith, was appointed on March 17 to be the deputy commander of the RCAF’s infantry. He is also the military’s spy chief. 

The moves are more evidence that Hun Sen – who has been in office since 1985 – intends to hand power over to his son and is willing to violate the military’s impartiality and independence to ensure that the transfer takes place, said Ros Sotha, the executive director of the Cambodian Human Rights Action Committee, a coalition of 22 local NGOs.

People are becoming fearful that the military is losing its neutrality and would use force if the ruling Cambodian People’s Party has a poor showing in July’s elections, he said. 

“Our country belongs to every one of us. It is not a private company,” he said. “If power is concentrated only with a group of people, it is not good. It will not serve the interest of the whole nation.”

Hun Sen wants Hun Manet to retain influence over the military when he goes into politics, said Um Sam An, a senior official in the banned Cambodia National Rescue Party who lives in the United States. And if he becomes the prime minister, his brother, Hun Manith, will be in a better position to protect him, he said.

Brothers and relatives

Hun Manith could eventually take over as the RCAF’s top commander, said Duong Chantra, a senior CNRP official who lives in Thailand. 

“Building up and strengthening military power – dictatorial regimes always do this by putting brothers and relatives in positions of control,” he said.

The appointments are an indication that Hun Sen no longer trusts anyone other than his relatives, said Keut Saray, the president of the Khmer Intellectual Students Association. Cambodia will continue to become a nepotism- and patronage-based system, instead of a democracy, if appointments like this continue, he said.

Responding to nepotism allegations in the past, Hun Sen has boasted that his children are qualified to carry out their duties.

“They are all capable of performing their jobs,” he has said. “My children hold PhDs and master’s degrees. Should I trash them or what?”  

On Wednesday, he said that Hun Manith won’t be appointed to Hun Manet’s military post when he resigns. That position will go to RCAF Infantry Commander Mao Sophann, the prime minister said.

Army spokesman Mao Phalla declined to comment on Hun Manith’s appointment, saying it was the responsibility of the Ministry of National Defense’s spokesman, Chhum Socheat.

Radio Free Asia was unable to reach Chhum Socheat for comment. Government spokesman Phay Siphan and CPP spokesman Sok Isan also didn’t respond to requests for comment on the appointments.

Translated by Samean Yun and Sok Ry Sum. Edited by Matt Reed and Josh Lipes.