Day: April 17, 2023

Two individuals were arrested in New York on Monday on federal charges that they operated a police station in lower Manhattan for the Chinese government, prosecutors said. 

“Harry” Lu Jianwang, 61, of the Bronx, and Chen Jinping, 59, of Manhattan, both U.S. citizens, worked together to create an overseas branch of the Chinese government’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS), federal officials said. They opened the station in an office building in Chinatown, a neighborhood in Manhattan. The station was closed last year, according to the prosecutors.

Federal officials also filed complaints against more than three dozen officers with the MPS, accusing them of harassing Chinese nationals living in New York and other parts of the United States. The officers, who remain at large in China, targeted individuals in the United States who expressed views contrary to the position of the Chinese government, according to the federal officials. 

The Chinese Embassy in Washington has not replied to queries about the announcement regarding the arrests of Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping. It isn’t clear if the two have lawyers. 

A Justice Department official said that the police station was part of an effort by the Chinese government to spy on and frighten individuals who live in the United States. 

“The PRC, through its repressive security apparatus, established a secret physical presence in New York City to monitor and intimidate dissidents and those critical of its government,” said Matthew G. Olsen, an assistant attorney general with the Justice Department’s National Security Division, referring to the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.

Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping were charged with conspiring to act as agents of the Chinese government and of obstructing justice through the destruction of evidence of their communications with a Chinese ministry official, according to a complaint filed in a federal court in Brooklyn.

They allegedly destroyed emails that they had exchanged with an official at the MPS, according to federal officials.

Lu had been responsible for assisting the Chinese security ministry in various ways, according to the federal officials. They said that Lu had helped apply pressure on an individual to return to China and assisted in efforts to track down a “pro-democracy activist” also living in the United States.

The existence of a police station in Chinatown came to light last year. According to federal officials, Chinese security officials ran the outpost, as well as dozens of other stations in cities and towns around the world.

The FBI’s arrest of individuals in connection to the Chinatown police station is the latest effort by U.S. officials to curtail what they describe as the Chinese government’s activities in the United States. 

The arrest of the two individuals in New York is also a reminder of the tense relationship between the two countries. Lately, U.S. officials have highlighted the Chinese government’s influence operations and attempts to sway people’s opinions so that they view Chinese government policies in a more favorable light.

“We’ve been hearing a lot about China’s influence campaigns – the idea that China is on the move in the United States,” said Robert Daly, the director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center in Washington. “But this potentially puts Chinese agents right in downtown Manhattan.”

The European Union has lodged a protest with China after police detained veteran rights lawyer Yu Wensheng and his activist wife Xu Yan ahead of a meeting with its diplomats during a scheduled EU-China human rights dialogue on April 13.

“We have already been taken away,” Yu tweeted shortly before falling silent on April 13, while the EU delegation to China tweeted on April 14: “@yuwensheng9 and @xuyan709 detained by CN authorities on their way to EU Delegation.”

“We demand their immediate, unconditional release. We have lodged a protest with MFA against this unacceptable treatment,” the tweet from the EU’s embassy in China said, referring to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell had been scheduled to travel to China from April 13-15 for the annual EU-China strategic dialogue with Foreign Minister Qin Gang, and to meet with China’s foreign policy chief Wang Yi, as well as the new Defense Minister Li Shangfu.

The visit, during which Yu and Xu had an invitation to go to the German Embassy for the afternoon of April 13, was to have followed last week’s trip by European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen and French President Emmanuel Macron.

But Borrell postponed the visit after testing positive for COVID-19, according to his Twitter account.

The EU Delegation said rights attorneys Wang Quanzhang, Wang Yu and Bao Longjun have also been placed under house arrest, but gave no further details.

Police officers read out a notice of detention to Xu and Yu’s 18-year-old son on Saturday night, giving the formal date of criminal detention as April 14, but didn’t leave any documentation with him or allow him to take photos of the notice, Wang Yu told Radio Free Asia on Monday.

Catch-all charge

Citing fellow rights attorneys Song Yusheng and Peng Jian, who visited the family home on Sunday, Wang said: “[The son] said that his parents were detained on the charge of picking quarrels and stirring up trouble” – a catch-all charge used to target critics of the Communist Party.

“The police showed his son the notice of criminal detention, but he was not allowed to take pictures, and they didn’t leave the notice for him. He was only shown it,” Wang Yu said. “They carried out a search of their home.”

Around seven officers searched the family home and took away a number of personal belongings without showing a warrant or issuing receipts, according to the rights website Weiquanwang.

Wang Yu, who received a call from the couple’s son on April 16, said the young man is now also under surveillance.

“The authorities sent people to stand guard over Yu Wensheng’s son, both inside and outside their home,” Wang said. 

Defense lawyers blocked

She said police had prevented lawyers Song and Peng from representing the couple as defense attorneys.

“Song Yusheng and Peng Jian went to Yu Wensheng’s house and took his son to dinner,” she said. “They wanted his son to sign a letter instructing them as attorneys, but Peng Jian told me that the police refused to sign off on it.”

“Yu Wensheng’s brother told me that the police told him that Xu Yan has already hired a lawyer,” she said. “This is the same as the way they handled the July 2015 crackdown, preventing family members from instructing lawyers, and stopping the lawyers from defending [detainees].”

Since a nationwide crackdown on hundreds of rights attorneys and law firms in 2015, police have begun to put pressure on the families of those detained for political dissent to fire their lawyers and allow the government to appoint a lawyer on their behalf, in the hope of a more lenient sentence.

Wang Yu said the charges against the couple were trumped up.

“Criminal detention is legally equivalent to being suspected of a crime,” she said. “But according to the information we have from family members and online, there is no evidence that Yu Wensheng or Xu Yan engaged in any illegal activities.”

Wang Qiaoling, wife of rights lawyer Li Heping, said her family is currently also under surveillance.

“When we were taking our kids to class on Sunday morning, we saw that there were cars following us, and they followed us onto the expressway,” she said Monday. “It was the same today.” 

“They always place us under surveillance whenever a foreign leader visits China, but we don’t understand why they are doing it now, when the [scheduled] visit is over,” she said.

The Spain-based rights group Safeguard Defenders said the couple’s disappearance should be a matter for EU-China relations, noting the use of “residential surveillance” to prevent fellow rights lawyers from defending the couple.

“[Residential surveillance] is growing in use and new legal teeth have made it a far harsher experience,” the group said via its Twitter account.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

A Vietnamese blogger who is believed to have been abducted from Thailand by secret agents last week has turned up in police custody in his native country.

Police in Vietnam’s northern province of Ha Tinh announced Sunday that they found a person without identification illegally entering the country via trails on its border with Laos. They were able to confirm that the person was named Duong Van Thai, born in 1982.

Duong Van Thai, also known as Thai Van Duong, is a blogger who in 2018 fled to Thailand fearing political persecution for his many posts and videos that criticized the Vietnamese government and leaders of the Communist Party on Facebook and YouTube.

Duong had been in Thailand, applying for refugee status with the United Nations Refugee Agency office in Bangkok. 

He went missing on the morning of April 13 after he left his rental home in Bangkok to pick up a friend at the airport. Calls to his mobile phone that afternoon went unanswered, several of his friends said.

According to one of his acquaintances, who wished to remain anonymous for security reasons, Duong had just finished a virtual immigration interview with the UNHCR several hours before going missing.

Duong’s friends began to claim publicly that he was likely kidnapped by Vietnamese security forces and brought back to Vietnam after no one answered the door at his house on the evening of the 14th.

Similar case

They said his case was similar to that of blogger and Radio Free Asia contributor Truong Duy Nhat, who was kidnapped by Vietnam’s security forces when he was applying for refugee status in Thailand in 2019. 

Two months later, Nhat surfaced in Vietnam and he was sentenced to 10 years in prison in March 2020 for “abusing his position and authority,” charges the U.S. State Department said were “vague.”

In 2019, human rights activist Bach Hong Quyen told RFA that he and his family narrowly escaped a similar fate. While in an immigration detention center in Bangkok, the Vietnamese Embassy requested their extradition, but with the UN lobbying hard for his case, they were allowed to travel to Canada.

RFA contacted Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security and the Vietnamese Embassy in Bangkok to inquire about Duong’s case, but received no responses.

Also on Friday, Vietnam sentenced dissident blogger and RFA contributor Nguyen Lan Thang to six years in prison for “spreading anti-state propaganda.” 

The sentence came just hours before U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken landed in Hanoi for an official visit.

The U.S. State Department condemned the sentence and urged the Vietnamese government to “immediately release and drop all charges against Nguyen Lan Thang and other individuals who remain in detention for peacefully exercising and promoting human rights.” 

Bill Hayton from the British think tank Chatham House said that Duong’s abduction was “clearly a message from the Ministry of Public Security, demonstrating its power in the face of the United States.”

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

Photo in folder

ENG_VTN_BloggerReturns_04172023

Vietnamese blogger Duong Van Thai. Credit: Thái Văn Đường YouTube account

Heavy traffic on Cambodia’s major roads over the three-day Khmer New Year weekend saw speeding, overloaded taxi cabs and at least 43 accidents that resulted in 18 deaths, authorities said. 

Roads were jammed with people returning to their hometowns for the first real new year celebration since the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 shut everything down. All of the major national routes leading into Phnom Penh were choked with motorbikes, cars and trucks on Monday. 

That included National Road 6, which travels from Siem Reap province – home to the famous Angkor temples – through Kampong Thom province and into the capital. Too many drivers were seen driving dangerously, said Yoeung Nim, who works for the independent election watchdog, Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia.

“I request our people who are traveling back to Phnom Penh not to drive over the speed limit and respect one another,” she said after returning to the capital from her hometown in Kampong Thom’s Baray district.

The higher rate of traffic accidents over the weekend was no surprise. There are always reports of deaths and injuries as people travel to visit relatives for Khmer New Year in April, or for the Pchum Ben festival – the festival of the dead – in September.

On Monday alone, there were 23 traffic accidents, with 14 killed and 52 injured, according to a preliminary report by the National Police General Commissariat. Causes of accidents included speeding and failure to comply with traffic rules.

Major cause of death

Sokun Kanha, a private school teacher, told Radio Free Asia that she started her trip back to Phnom Penh early on Monday to avoid the traffic. She still saw drivers failing to respect others and causing accidents, she said. 

“I urge everyone not to drive overspeed,” she said. “Don’t overtake one another and always respect your lanes. Please wear a helmet and a seat belt.” 

Road traffic accidents are a major cause of deaths in Cambodia. In 2022, the country saw at least 2,980 cases of road traffic accidents, resulting in 1,709 fatalities and 4,026 injuries, according to a National Police General Commissariat report. 

A 2021 UNDP study determined that Cambodia loses between $420 million and $450 million annually as a result of road traffic accidents – mostly due to loss of life and associated lifetime earnings.

San Chey, executive director of The Affiliated Network for Social Accountability-Cambodia, urged the government to expand major roads and build more access roads leading to Phnom Penh to avoid traffic jams during major holidays. The government should also increase the number of traffic police officers, he said. 

“Traffic police officers are only stationed in downtown Phnom Penh, but not in other areas,” he said. “Some people when they don’t see police presence, they violate traffic rules.”

More than 13 million people traveled around the country last weekend, and at least 55,000 foreigners visited the country during the holiday, according to the Ministry of Tourism. 

The most visited province was Siem Reap, where Prime Minister Hun Sen and his youngest son, Hun Many, kicked off an extravagant festival on Friday. Other top visited provinces were Battambang, Kampong Cham and Phnom Penh municipality.

Translated by Keo Sovannarith. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

The death toll from a military airstrike in northern Myanmar’s Sagaing region on civilians has nearly doubled to an estimated 200 people, a local member of the People’s Defense Forces told Radio Free Asia on Monday.

During the April 11 attack, jets bombed and helicopters strafed the opening ceremony for a public administration building in Pa Zi Gyi village. It was the latest example of the junta’s increased use of air power in their conflict with armed resistance groups amid falterning progress on the ground.

“Nothing was left of some people who died in the air strike,” said a member of a local People’s Defense Force, who declined to give his name so he could speak freely. 

“As far as we can confirm, there were over 170 people dead up to yesterday’s update, but when we can take the missing people into account, we can say that the total is about 200,” he said.

He said it would be difficult to ascertain an exact toll given that many body parts were missing, and because surviving villagers had fled. The village had about 300 residents.

About 70 Pa Zi Gyi residents who fled their homes remain sheltering in forests, and resistance groups and aid workers are providing them with food supplies from nearby villages, he said. 

And as of Sunday, six more of the injured people died, while others are being treated by medical teams linked to the shadow National Unity Government, or NUG, a group of former civilian leaders and others opposed to the junta’s rule.

Now, local resistance fighters will advise other villages not to open administrative offices and will instruct residents about defending themselves should the junta launch further air attacks and  build air raid shelters.

“We are going to pass it on to as many villages as possible,” the member of the People’s Defense Force said. “The military junta’s attack on these defenseless villages with no presence of resistance is entirely unacceptable.” 

The new count comes a day after the National Unity Government reported that 168 people, including 40 minors, had been killed in the air attack.

At a news conference on Sunday, the NUG said that the dead included six children under the age of 5, 19 children between ages 5 and 14, five children between ages 14 and 18, and 10 children whose ages could not be identified.

The shadow government also said that medical personnel had been sent to treat the 16 civilians who were injured, including children.

The NUG said it would make efforts to ensure justice in the deadly assault, which forced more than 300 villagers in all to flee.

Pa Zi Gyi villagers whose family members were killed in this attack are asking the international community to take effective action against the perpetrators and not to sell jet fuel, weapons or ammunition to the junta.

Translated by Myo Min Aung for RFA Burmese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

It was almost midnight, and the full moon appeared an eerie burnt orange above the streetlights that were clouded by the smog hanging in the air. 

“Our nose burns, our throats get stuck and our eyes turn teary. It has been this way since February,” said Phattanik Masa, a resident of Mae Sai, in northern Thailand, who was wearing two face masks as she stood in line with others to offer alms to monks.

“This Buddhist ceremony is a significant event. We do it for good luck,” she explained. “That’s why we are all here despite the horrible air.”

For the past two months, residents across northern Thailand and Laos as well as Shan state in Myanmar have been suffering from the worst smog in years.

Thousands have gone to hospitals with respiratory problems, and workers in Chiang Mai, Thailand – ranked among the most polluted cities in the world in recent weeks – have been told to stay indoors and work from home.

The two main culprits behind the hazardous pollution – 16 times worse than healthy levels in some areas – are out-of-control wildfires and the burning of ever-wider fields of corn stubble after the February harvest to clear land for planting season in May. 

The wildfires are fanned by drier-than-usual weather. Many are in hilly, inaccessible areas and Thailand’s fire-fighting efforts are under-funded.

Farmers, meanwhile, have carved growing swathes of farmland from the forest to raise corn, grown mostly for animal feed. Demand for meat is increasing, which means greater demand for corn – and higher prices, which drives the farmers to plant, grow and burn more. 

“The situation is the culmination of many years of bad agricultural practice,” said Rattanasiri Kittikongnapang, a Greenpeace food and ecology campaigner. “This is the worst haze in more than 10 years.”

Unenforced zero-burn policy

Corn fields are spreading all over the region. Between 2015 and 2019, 1.7 million hectares of land was converted from forest to maize cultivation, she said.

The Thai government announced a zero-burn policy in March, but it has not been enforced. Authorities in Bangkok are “hoping it will all go away by itself since they are getting ready for an election,” said Rattanasiri.

Achoo, a Thai farmer with corn fields in Doi Sa-Ngo village in Chiang Rai province, sees no problem with burning. “It’s natural. After you collect the harvest, you burn the rest,” she said. “Everyone does this, and we have been doing this for years.”

But there are economic forces at work here, too. 

Previously, villagers grew mostly vegetables, cassava, pineapple and edible flowering plants. In recent years, they have switched to maize, especially after one of the farmers became a middleman to transport it to animal feed companies.

“We don’t have to do anything. We get seeds and fertilizers from this person, even if we don’t have any money,” Achoo said. “After the harvest, he collects it from us and takes it to the city.”

The growing number of so-called hot spots – areas where fires burn or are likely to burn – are linked to deforestation and growing more corn for animal feed. And the increasing demand for corn can be linked directly to the expansion of the meat industry, says Alliya Moun-Ob, an air pollution campaigner for Greenpeace Thailand.

According to government figures, Thailand needs at least 8 million tonnes of maize for animal feed but produces about 5 million tonnes. It means the rest has to be imported. 

Corporate demand

Two decades ago, Thailand set up cross-border contract farming programs with farms in Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia under which it imports corn at zero tariffs. Since then, the region has spiked in open burning, Alliya said.

Alliya and other activists say much of the demand for corn is driven by Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand Group, or CP Group, the world’s largest animal feed producer, with an annual production of 27,650 metric tons. 

“The Thai government supports one particular company – CP – which is responsible for contract farming maize in the north and neighboring countries,” Rattanasiri said.

To convince rice farmers to switch to corn, CP said it would provide interest-free financial support, if needed, and promised it would buy the product at a guaranteed price in a pilot program announced in December by the Royal Initiative Discovery Institute, a palace project promoting sustainable agriculture in the countryside.

Many farmers “who don’t have any resources or capacity, also don’t have a choice” but to do contract maize farming, Alliya said.

“What is missing in legal and policy-making mechanisms is the liability of industrial sectors linked to environmental impacts while gaining benefits from maize,” Alliya said.

CP says it is implementing a program to trace and verify if its source of maize for feed production is cultivated in a sustainable manner, including from areas that were not deforested and farms that do not resort to burning the stubbles. 

Paisarn Kruawongvanich, a company executive, said the group has “always prioritized building a sustainable food production chain while also mitigating transboundary haze pollution.” 

CP did not respond to an RFA question about what it would do if farmers failed to follow their advice to stop burning stubble.

The increasing demand for livestock feed has been lifting corn prices. In February, local corn prices were 26% higher than a year ago, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service grain and feed report, “due to insufficient locally produced corn and uncertainty in the global corn trade.”

Wildfires

Apart from that, wildfires are burning wildly out of control in many parts of the region this year, experts said, due to the start of the dry season after the end of La Nina, in which low sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean results in cooler and wetter conditions in parts of Asia.

In Laos, air quality has remained “unhealthy” to “hazardous” for over four weeks. IQAir said the PM2.5 concentration in the capital Vientiane on Friday was 150, more than 11 times the WHO guideline.

Residents told RFA Laos Service the smoke was coming from all directions, as experts blamed open burning and weather changes for this year’s fire problem.

“The visibility is low. We have to wear masks when going outside. My kids are getting sick and have itchy noses and eyes. It’s like having a cold or flu,” a resident of the capital Vientiane told RFA’s Lao Service earlier this month.

A doctor at a Vientiane hospital said they were receiving “a lot of patients with respiratory problems.” 

In Myanmar’s Shan state, residents in Tachileik, which borders Mae Sai, told RFA’s Myanmar Service they had been badly affected by smog since Mar. 24, forcing flights to be canceled.

Local residents said that in the past, the haze lingered for a couple of days, but this time it has been longer and denser.

In Southeast Asia, El Nino – warmer ocean surface temperatures – brings drier, warmer weather and increases the risk of forest fires and smoke haze, according to the ASEAN Specialized Meteorological Center, or ASMC.

“There was also likely no controlled burning management to maintain the forest’s health. If you don’t manage it properly, a small fire could easily be huge and uncontrolled,” said Prof. Ekbordin Winijkul, head of the energy, environment, and climate change department at the Asian Institute of Technology,

Thai authorities would not say the suspected causes for wildfires, though many people have been arrested for suspicion of starting the fires. 

Activists told RFA that the reasons could be to clear forests to create new farmland or for mushroom-hunting. The destruction caused by the fire creates a nutrient-rich environment conducive for fungi to grow almost immediately afterward, which farmers hunt to collect and sell in the market.

If nothing is done about addressing the smog, more people will die, experts say

Air pollution was among the top 10 risk factors for death in all Southeast Asian countries in 2019, with about half a million premature deaths attributed to exposure to air pollution, said Mushtaq Memon, UNEP Coordinator of Chemicals and Pollution Action for Asia and the Pacific.

“Immediate challenges on addressing the open burning of crop residues include providing timely and sufficient resources” to farmers, he said.

Ekbordin said transboundary haze “is not one country or one company problem.”

“We must address it collectively. If we do not take concrete actions soon, then the situation will worsen,” he added. “And it will happen every year.”