Day: April 9, 2023

A Nov. 24 fire in an apartment block in Xinjiang’s regional capital, Urumqi, sparked protests across China, with many people expressing condolences for the victims of the fatal lockdown blaze and others hitting back at ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy.

Huang Yicheng was among them, turning up at a spontaneous protest at Shanghai’s Urumqi Road, only to be detained and mistreated by cops, who hung him upside down at one point, as he described in an earlier interview with Radio Free Asia given under the pseudonym Mr.Chen.

Now in Germany, Huang spoke to RFA Mandarin about his plans for the future:

Huang Yicheng: I’m from Shanghai. I am 26 years old and a graduate of the Chinese department of Peking University. I am currently a postgraduate student at the University of Hamburg, Germany. On Nov. 27, 2022, I was arrested by the police on Urumqi Middle Road, Shanghai, put onto a bus, and then escaped from the bus. Then a white man helped me escape the scene. 

RFA: You were interviewed by me on Nov. 27, the weekend when the “white paper” movement took place. You were interviewed anonymously then, so why did you choose to disclose your real name and appearance now?

Huang Yicheng: This is because I have now left China. I saw that there were so many people around the same age as me who took part in the white paper movement with me, who have been arrested and imprisoned. So I feel that I will always be in pain and have uncontrollable anxiety if I don’t stand up and speak out on their behalf, even though there are great risks involved in doing so.

I hope that everyone can call for the release of Cao Zhixin and the other peaceful demonstrators who are now behind bars. 

The government should tell us how many people were arrested in each city after the white paper movement, and issue a complete list of names for each city, so the rest of the world knows exactly what is going on.

RFA: You just said that you are aware of the great risk of doing so. How would you deal with this risk?

Huang Yicheng: This is very hard to think about, because now I have revealed my true identity, educational background and my true appearance. But I want to use this to encourage others in the same boat. But I also think it’s almost impossible to remain entirely anonymous in the current online environment. So instead of talking about how scared we are, we should face up to the risk and the fear.

In that way, I hope that the next generation, or our own generation, within the next 10, 20 years or even sooner than that, will get to live in a society without the need for such fear, where we are free to express our thoughts without fear.

RFA: Did you decide to study abroad due to safety concerns, or were you planning to do that anyway?

Huang Yicheng: I had originally planned to study abroad, but it was very, very difficult to get a visa during the zero-COVID restrictions. I started this application before the Shanghai lockdown [of spring 2022], and it took more than a year to come through.

This delay was one of the reasons that I took part in the white paper protests in the first place, as well as the three-month lockdown in Shanghai. It was an experience that changed my life.

RFA: Were you worried that you might be prevented from leaving the country because you had taken part in the protest?

Huang Yicheng: Yes, yes I was. I think everyone else had similar worries. They had already taken away two busloads of detained protesters from Urumqi Road in Shanghai between the evening of Nov. 26 and the early morning of Nov. 27. The video clips being shot at the time were very worrying. I never thought going into it that I would get detained. That’s why I want to speak out in support of the people who were detained. Hopefully we can put some pressure on [the authorities] and get them released.

RFA: When I interviewed you on Nov. 27, when you had gotten back home, you said that you were very worried that the police would come looking for you, so you asked for anonymity. Did they come looking for you?

Huang Yicheng: No, they didn’t. My identity was kept well hidden, and they didn’t find me.

RFA: How did you manage to protect yourself?

Huang Yicheng: I just hid at home and cut off all contact with friends at home and abroad. I don’t know if they used facial recognition or anything like that. I also made a video statement to be posted in case I got arrested and gave it to a friend I trust. He would have posted it if I had been detained.

RFA: Given that you were actually caught by the police and put on the bus, it’s pretty lucky that you managed to escape – a fluke, wasn’t it?

Huang Yicheng: When I think about it now, I can hardly believe it. It was a bit dream-like. When I was detained and put on the bus, it was parked on the southwest side of the intersection between Urumqi Road and Wuyuan Road. I was probably in the second row, near the door.

The policeman got off the bus and went to detain other demonstrators, but he didn’t handcuff us. We could see from the Twitter account “Mr Li is not your teacher” that there was a trans woman at the back of the bus. The police attacked her repeatedly then closed the bus curtains to stop people filming the attack from outside. Some people filmed the attack with their phones and posted the video of the violence against the transgender person. Some people might think it incredible that we could still shoot video like that after being detained on the bus. But they didn’t handcuff us and they didn’t watch us very closely, which meant I had an opportunity to escape.

RFA: You mentioned the Twitter account “Mr Li is not your teacher,” which is run by a Chinese student studying in Italy. Do you think the videos he posted were credible?

Huang Yicheng: All the photos he posted were real, and I think at least two were taken by me. One was a street sign of Urumqi Middle Road with someone holding flowers and a candle. The other was a white placard calling for artistic freedom. I sent both of those photos to him. I didn’t dare to shoot the video of the police attacking protesters, as the atmosphere was very tense at the time. But I basically saw everything that he posted [on the ground].

RFA: Did anyone you know get arrested?

Huang Yicheng: No one I knew directly was arrested. However, Cao Zhixin works at Peking University Press, so I can confirm that Cao Zhixin is indeed still in custody through my connections with Peking University alumni, and that she hasn’t been released yet.

RFA: We have confirmed this via other channels, too. Did you ever expect to be treated like this by the Chinese government?

Huang Yicheng: No, no, because I was thinking about the situation in Hong Kong [during the 2019 protest movement], where they had the brave defenders on the front line, with the peaceful demonstrators behind them. The only reason I went there was to call for the release of those detained. I didn’t even hold up a blank sheet of paper, and I didn’t shout any slogans other than calling for them to release people. I stood further back to protect myself.

I met a lot of inexperienced people there who went to stand in the front row, but I told them not to stand there, that they should try to protect themselves, because they always start detaining people who are in the front row. 

What makes me want to cry the most is that all of the people standing in the front row were women. All the people holding up the sheets of blank paper were women, standing there in front, facing off with the police. There were almost no men there. They took away about one woman every 10 minutes on average. Some men were detained, but very few – it was almost all women. They went for the women every time, not always the ones in the front row.

There was a tall plainclothes cop … people were talking about him on Twitter because he was the one who said “I just can’t understand you people.” He was communicating with someone via a walkie-talkie, and he would suddenly point at a person, maybe in the second or third row, and then all the officers with earpieces would rush to grab them. That’s how I got detained.

RFA: Why do you think it was mostly women in the front row and not men?

Huang Yicheng: It wasn’t just young women, but also queer people and other sexual minorities. They had the strongest presence in the white paper movement, maybe because China’s political system is highly patriarchal. So I think they weren’t just challenging the government, but also the patriarchy.

One thing that made a huge impression on me was three women hugging each other and crying on the eastern sidewalk of Urumqi Road. I asked them, “Why are you crying? Did your friend get taken away yesterday?”

But they replied: “No, none of our friends were taken away, but we saw on Weibo that there was a little girl who burned to death in Urumqi, part of the Uyghur family.”

RFA: This wasn’t the first time your classmates were detained, was it?

Huang Yicheng: A whole bunch of people from the Peking University Marxist Society were detained in 2018, maybe a dozen or as many as 20. Out of them, I had the closest relationship with [labor activist] Yue Xin. I have so many memories of her. I want to write more about that, so we can remember what happened. So many young people in China have lost their personal freedom just because of their thinking … including Cao Zhixin mostly recently. 

I burst into tears when I saw Cao Zhixin’s video, because I feel that, if she is in prison, then so am I. She’s the same age as me. So now I’ve managed to get away, I should say a few words for her.

RFA: Would you call yourself a young leftist?

Huang Yicheng: I did take part in the Peking University Marxist Society, and I made some posts to their official social media account. But gradually I moved further away from that stance. The white paper movement wasn’t just about leftists. It was mostly young people who were dissatisfied with the zero-COVID policy.

RFA: Do you think that the white paper movement was a political movement?

Huang Yicheng: I think so. We can see from the slogans of various cities that Shanghai’s slogans were relatively radical, but we still saw a number of … political appeals in other cities. Human rights were a very important issue, because countless tragedies were caused by the lack of human rights during zero-COVID. The white paper movement that followed had solid public support. Even though not that many people took part in Shanghai, there was a huge base of support there.

RFA: Do you think that the white paper moment brought about the end of the zero-COVID policy?

Huang Yicheng: I think it must have. Because the zero-COVID policy in China had totally ended just two weeks after the white paper movement. It was a total U-turn. 

But the heartbreaking thing is that while the Chinese government may actually meet our demands, they still insist on punishing everyone. I think this has been their logic for thousands of years, not just under the Communist Party. So it means that all of our bravest people, who are willing to stand up and plead on behalf of ordinary people, and push for freedom, get eliminated [from further social activism].

So who will speak up the next time we get such insane government policies in China? We have to keep the focus on those people, and call on the rest of the world to put pressure on China.

We have to stand up bravely, and express our true thoughts, and then people all over the world will respect us. If we all just go along with their lies, then as a nation we won’t be worthy of respect.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

For years, Hanoi’s “Railway & Coffee Street” has attracted tourists who come to see the trains run through the alley, barely clearing the shops that line either side.

But now authorities in Vietnam’s capital have banned tours to the site, saying they have become dangerous, state media reported.

The city’s tourism department said that tourists tend to cluster at certain choke points, causing traffic to back up and increasing the potential for accidents.

The department ordered travel firms not to take tourists, especially foreigners, to the area.

It wasn’t clear if there has been an increase in accidents along the route, but in September, local authorities closed one section of the rail line and put up barricades around it after a Korean tourist collided with a train while taking photos in the Railway & Coffee Street.  

The tourist sustained only minor injuries because the train had been running at a low speed.

The report said this was the first time that authorities have enacted safety measures related to the street.

According to the tourism department, Hanoi has received nearly 1 million foreign visitors in the first three months of this year, six times higher than that of the same period last year.

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

In Brief

A short Weibo video produced by China Business Network (CBN) on March 21 reported on the alarming spread of a fatal fungal disease in the United States. Citing the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the video said “nearly half of those infected with Candida auris will die within 90 days” and “an estimated 30 percent to 70 percent of infected hospitalized patients will ultimately die.”

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) found the statements by CBN to be misleading.

While the CDC has sounded the alarm about C. auris’s “rapid rise” and its resistance to antifungal medications, the CBN video cited CDC figures out of context and failed to mention that the fungus typically only infects specific populations, such as the very sick or those in healthcare facilities. 

Experts said most patients who died had suffered from other ailments, making it difficult to ascertain if C. auris was the primary cause of death. In addition, studies to date have involved small numbers of cases and may not be representative.

In Depth

On March 21, CBN produced a short video that ran on the popular Chinese social media site Weibo about C. auris in the United States, proclaiming that “#Candida auris has spread to more than half of the U.S. states.” Related posts with similar hashtags soon gathered more than 130 million views on Weibo alone, and about 100 Chinese media outlets posted related content.

Accompanied by a chilling soundtrack and microscopic images of the fungus, the video noted that the pathogen has spread at an “alarming rate.” It quoted a Chinese medical expert as saying that the disease is highly contagious and has a high death rate, and the CDC as saying that “nearly half of those infected with Candida auris will die within 90 days.”

Discussion of the issue continued on Twitter, with some users mocking the United States for “once again spreading poison”—possibly referring to the spread of harmful ideas or to Beijing’s claim that the COVID-19 virus originated in the United States. Other Twitter users described C. auris as “the new American hitman.”

Did the CDC issue a warning about C. auris?

All the hoopla in China over the fungus appears to stem from a March 20 news release issued by the CDC flagging the threat posed by the emerging Candida auris pathogen. The CDC, referencing one of its papers published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, noted the “alarming rate” of the disease’s spread in healthcare facilities between 2020 and 2021.

The paper reported that the total number of clinical cases (cases where infection was present) tripled to 1,471 in 2021 from 476 in 2019, while that of screening cases (where the fungus was present but not causing infection) tripled in just one year to 4,401 in 2021. The CDC news release also referenced the pathogen’s increasing resistance to traditional treatments.

Other data cited in the CBN video also appear to have some basis in reports by the CDC and mainstream U.S. media. According to an official CDC tracking chart, in the 12 months through December 2022, the United States had registered a cumulative 2,377 C. auris clinical cases across 27 states and the District of Columbia, with higher concentrations in California, Florida, Nevada, and New York. A recent New York Times article reported that the fungus “is now in half the 50 states.” 

Both the CDC and the Times reports suggested that less attention to screening for C. auris during the Covid-19 pandemic may have contributed to the rising number of cases. 

How high is the mortality rate?

While the CBN video accurately echoed the CDC’s warning about an “alarming” spread of the C. auris fungus, it erroneously painted a more dire situation by failing to cite the data in proper context.

For example, the video’s claim that “an estimated 30 percent to 70 percent of infected hospitalized patients will ultimately die” may have been based on a CDC “General Information” sheet saying “30–60% of people with C. auris infections have died.” Significantly, the video neglected to mention, per the information sheet, that these data were based on a limited number of patients, many of whom had other serious illnesses and were at a heightened risk of death. 

The video also appeared to infer that these percentages apparently based on past death trends would continue into the future when it suggested that an estimated 30 percent to 70 percent “will ultimately die” (AFCL italics). The CDC data clearly referred to previous cases (“have died”), and the agency did not make any predictions about future mortality rates.

Likewise, the CBN video’s claim that “nearly half of those infected with Candida auris will die within 90 days” may sound similar to the Times article observation that “nearly half of patients who contract C. auris die within 90 days.” But by adding an extra character—“会”（meaning “will”)—the video again turned a statistical observation into a forecast of future cases.

Both the CBN video and the Times article referenced the CDC in mentioning “90 days” but neither provided a specific citation. AFCL found a CDC paper published in 2018 that may have been the source of this number. That paper noted that 23 of 51 patients (45 percent)  who were infected with C. auris in New York City between 2013 and 2017 “died within 90 days.” Notably, the study was focused on cases in an “interconnected web of affected healthcare facilities, and all the infected patients had serious concurrent medical conditions. 

 

Dr. Waleed Javaid, director of Infection Prevention and Control at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, confirmed to AFCL that most patients with C. auris infections already have other medical conditions. As a result, “in many cases, it is difficult to determine whether Candida auris is the direct cause of death,” he said. He added that patients with implanted medical devices such as catheters are also at a much higher risk of fungal infection than the average healthy adult.

Conclusion

The rapid spread of Candida auris cases is unquestionably concerning. However, AFCL found CBN’s claims about the disease’s high overall death rates to be misleading, given that the video used CDC data on past cases as a risk predictor for future case trends. The video also ignored the fact that most patients who died from the fungal infection had multiple other health issues that may have contributed to or hastened their death. 

Indeed, the pathogen appears to pose little threat to healthy adults. And intensive efforts by some states to stop the fungus appear to have successfully contained its spread within their healthcare systems.