Day: June 22, 2023

She knew she was being sought by authorities for reporting on anti-junta protests. 

In the seven months since the military had carried out a coup d’etat in February 2021, Myanmar had descended into chaos, Her husband, a former journalist, had been detained for four days before being released.

Fearing for her safety, Thuzar San decided to buy a bus ticket from Yangon for the Thai border town of Mae Sot, due to depart on Sept. 2, 2021.

But two days before she was to leave, she was arrested by police while her taxi was stopped at a traffic light by plain clothes police officers.

“We were asked to put our hands on our heads on the side of the road while they searched the car and then they handcuffed us, forced us to get into a truck at gunpoint, and blindfolded us,” she told Radio Free Asia. 

Thuzar was one of the locally-hired reporters at RFA Burmese Service’s Yangon office from 2013-2014.

“There was another woman with us. When we arrived at the [interrogation] center, they said, ‘Let the lady exit first,’ so I asked if it was me they were talking about. All of a sudden, they slapped me in the face.”

During that first night, Thuzar’s interrogators subjected her to brutal mental and physical abuse in a bid to learn what she knew about the junta opposition and other journalists who had covered the protests.

“Four guys circled me and whipped me with a bundle of three [bamboo] canes bound together,” she said. “They asked me the names of the two young men I met during the protest. I was friends with them on Facebook, but I didn’t know much about them.”

Her captors beat her five times with a bamboo sapling that evening and said the wounds on her thighs took “more than a year” to heal.

“I will never forget the pain of being beaten with the bamboo sapling,” she said.

Ruthlessly whipped

Later, she was taken from her cell, blindfolded and led outside, where she was made to kneel on the pavement. Again, her captors beat her, demanding to know how she planned to travel to Thailand, which organizations she had ties to and which reporters planned to flee along with her.

“Three guys circled me and whipped me with canes – it was so painful,” she said. “This time, they pierced my flesh with the [sharpened] tip of the bamboo sapling and it was agonizing.”

When Thuzar told the men that she had nothing to divulge about her fellow reporters, they threatened to videotape her forced confession as “evidence” that she was a junta informant and hold her daughter hostage.

“They told me that they could make me talk and said, ‘We’ll bring in your daughter and beat her in front of you,” she said. “After that, I couldn’t stop crying. Finally, they sent me back to my cell.”

Over the course of several days, Thuzar was interrogated by several people. 

On the ninth day of her detention, her captors took her fingerprints and sent a statement to the local police station, saying that she took part in anti-junta protests while covering the event as a reporter.

To Insein Prison

She was kept in police custody for nearly a month on charges of reporting fake news and inciting the public against the government. On Nov. 22, 2021, she was sentenced to two years in Yangon’s notorious Insein Prison with hard labor.

Thuzar described life at Insein Prison as a constant violation of her human rights.

“I stayed in Female Ward No. 9, which was like a hall with closed circuit cameras installed in it,” she said. “We had to change our clothes and use the toilet there [in front of the cameras]. The prison officials regularly scolded us and used harsh words. Our rights were severely violated.”

Thuzar was released as part of a general amnesty on Jan. 4, 2023, after spending 15 months in prison. 

As she was no longer safe in Myanmar, she fled to Thailand along with her family in March.

While she feels unmoored as a refugee in a foreign country, Thuzar said she stays strong thinking about the sacrifices of those who have given their lives in opposition to junta rule.

She vowed to return to Myanmar as soon as possible so that she can join together with those fighting for democracy and a better future in her home country.

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

Facial recognition technology in China is increasing the risk that North Korean escapees in China will be caught, and raising the prices charged by smugglers who assist them, sources who work closely with escapees told Radio Free Asia. 

Most North Koreans who escape do so by crossing the northern border into China. But facial recognition systems there are spreading – with cameras installed on street corners and train stations – and used by Chinese police to keep track of the population on the streets.

While face of nearly every Chinese resident is registered in a government database, North Koreans escapees are not, and turn up nothing when scanned, Seo Jae-pyoung, head of the Association of the North Korean Defectors, a support group based in South Korea, told RFA’s Korean Service.

When the face does not match a profile, the police are quick to check on the person to determine why, he said.

While it’s difficult to know for sure if the software has led to North Korean refugees getting captured in China, it has clearly raised the risks and costs for those trying to escape, those familiar with the situation say.

In March, the surveillance software appeared to be a key factor in the capture of five or six North Korean refugees and a local broker helping them move within China, Seo said. They were caught by Chinese police near the northeastern city of Dalian.

“It seems that those North Korean escapees were already tracked down,” he said. “It is highly likely that they were caught because they were unaware of the dangers of facial recognition technology and tracking.”

Seo said that artificial intelligence-based facial recognition technology has increased the risks facing North Koreans who want to escape. Typically, they travel discreetly through China all the way to Southeast Asia, where they take a flight to Seoul.

Sharp decrease

This may be one reason that the number of North Koreans who successfully reach the South are down, experts say. 

Between 2001 and 2019 more than 1,000 North Koreans arrived in the South each year, reaching a peak of 2,914 in 2009. But this dropped to 229 in 2020 and then to the double digits in 2021 and 2022, data from the South Korean Ministry of Unification showed.

Much of the rapid decline is due to the COVID-19 pandemic, during which North Korea and China closed the entirety of the 1,350-kilometer (840-mile) Sino-Korean border, but experts say that facial recognition tech is also responsible.

The issue was raised before a U.S. Congressional hearing this month.

“The AI-based facial recognition program has made the North Korean refugees’ internal movement by public transportation within China almost impossible while the authorities have been using surveillance technology to monitor and intercept the escapees attempting to flee China,” Ethan Hee-Seok Shin, a legal analyst at the South Korea-based Transitional Justice Working Group, told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on June 13.

The technology is spreading fear among escapees in China, Hanna Song, director of international cooperation at the South Korea-based Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, told the same hearing.

“China’s increasing use of emerging technology is being used as a tool of repression that affects the most vulnerable groups including North Korean refugees,” she said. “Many North Koreans spoke about how the advanced surveillance capabilities, such as facial recognition and biometric systems, are used to monitor and track the movements of those in China.”

There are no statistics on North Korean refugees caught or arrested as a result of facial recognition technology in China. Experts have explained that it is not easy to identify North Koreans because there are many foreigners who are not registered in China’s surveillance system.

But sources told RFA that facial recognition likely has a role in the arrests of such refugees in China.

“Most of the North Korean escapees being arrested now [in China] can be attributed to facial recognition cameras,” Chun Ki-won, a reverend with the Durihana Mission, an organization that carries out rescue operations for escapees, told RFA.

Kim Sung-eun of the Caleb Mission, another group that assists escapees in China, said personnel from his organization were arrested with a group of escapees because of facial recognition technology.

“Some of our people got caught too, before COVID-19,” said Kim. “There is a facial recognition machine in front of the train station. They passed it and sat on the train and they were caught right away.”

All the escapees were forcibly repatriated to North Korea, he said.

Several officials of South Korea-based organizations told RFA that they believe facial recognition technology is having a great impact on escaped North Koreans. 

“Cameras installed throughout China and artificial intelligence facial recognition technology have made it difficult for North Korean refugees to move, and awareness of fleeing North Koreans [in China] is growing,” said Ko Yonghwan, a former North Korean diplomat who is currently a non-resident senior researcher at Korean Institute for Military Affairs.

Because the technology is so advanced, China would even be able to surveil escapees at North Korea’s request, said Choo Jaewoo, a professor at the department of Chinese language and literature at Seoul’s Kyung Hee University.

“If North Korea requests tracking of a specific person and China accepts it, the risk of being caught by facial recognition technology could be much greater,” said Choo.

Higher costs

The surveillance software has increased the risk facing brokers, prompting them to raise their prices.

Before facial recognition technology was so prevalent, it cost about US$2,000 per refugee to get through China with the help of a broker, but now it costs $10,000 to $15,000, said Kim from the Caleb Mission.

“It wasn’t easy before, but the reality is that using the train station or bus stop has become more difficult,” said Ji Chul-ho, head of the Emergency Rescue team at Now Action & Unity for Human rights, a South Korean organization that helps North Korean escapees.

“It is a reality that it is difficult to use most [public transportation] these days,” he said. “As a result, the cost of rescue is higher than in the past, as it is necessary to move using the broker’s vehicle and to more carefully arrange [escape] plans.”

Prior to the advent of facial recognition technology, escapees could at least see police coming and try to avoid them, or hide when they hear sirens, Ji said.

“Now we are exposed to more invisible and unaware fears,” he said. “It is a serious problem.”

Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

Rights activist Ji Xiaolong has stood trial in a Shanghai court on public order charges after he wrote to a Chinese leader criticizing the grueling COVID-19 lockdown of spring 2022, Radio Free Asia has learned.

The latest in a long line of COVID-19 dissidents to face the wrath of the government, Ji stood trial at the Pudong New District People’s Court on June 21 for “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” a charge frequently used to target peaceful critics of the ruling Communist Party.

According to his father, Ji Xinghua, the prosecution based its case on posts he made to Twitter that were “insulting” to China’s leaders.

“The prosecution said he tweeted something that insulted the country’s leaders,” Ji’s father said. “His lawyers said the authorities didn’t comply with regulations in their investigation and in their collection of evidence.”

“I don’t think that what he did caused any kind of public disorder, and I don’t think it adds up to picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” he said.

Ji’s detention came after he wrote to then Shanghai ruling Chinese Communist Party secretary Li Qiang, calling on him to resign for “blindly following orders from the central government” when implementing weeks of grueling lockdown in the city earlier this year.

Li has since risen to the position of Chinese premier.

Calls to quit

Netherlands-based dissident Lin Shengliang said that Ji’s targeting of Li Qiang was likely the biggest factor behind his arrest and trial.

“They won’t talk about the [real reason], which was that he questioned Li Qiang’s COVID-19 containment measures in Shanghai at that time,” Lin said. “They are even less likely to mention that now.”

He said the key was that Ji had called in his petition for Li to step down.

In the petition, Ji also wrote that he was fine with being jailed for opposing government policies in an era of widespread internet censorship and surveillance of ordinary people.

He was already under residential surveillance at his home, and police had prevented him from going back to his hometown in Jiangsu’s Shazhou county to visit his elderly parents, he wrote.

Ji, who has already served a three-and-a-half year jail term for writing political graffiti in a Shanghai public toilet, was a vocal critic of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy of stringent lockdowns, mass isolation and quarantine facilities and wave upon wave of testing that ended following nationwide protests in November 2022.

During the weeks-long lockdown, residents of Shanghai repeatedly complained of shortages of food and essential supplies and lack of access to life-saving medical treatment for those sick with something other than COVID-19, and Ji had posted a number of video clips and posts from lockdown.

During Ji’s initial interview, police confronted him with various comments he had made to overseas media organizations including Radio Free Asia, the Epoch Times and New Tang Dynasty TV, as well as the petition he started, some video clips he reposted and some social media posts he made.

‘Bad idea’

Ji’s father said he supports his son’s view of the zero-COVID policy.

“Of course it was a bad idea to put the city in lockdown … which brought a lot of inconvenience to ordinary people,” he said. “They weren’t able to control [the pandemic] through lockdowns, so it’s good that they stopped doing that.”

Ji’s trial comes after authorities in the central city of Wuhan tried and sentenced citizen journalist Fang Bin, who disappeared for three years after filming from hospitals and funeral homes early in the COVID-19 pandemic from the city of Wuhan, in secret.

News only emerged in April 2023 that Fang, who fell silent after a Feb. 1, 2020, livestream from Wuhan healthcare facilities, had been sentenced in secret to three years in prison.

Fang, along with jailed Shanghai dissident Zhang Zhan, detained YouTuber Chen Qiushi and exiled journalist Kcriss Li, was among a number of high-profile bloggers who tried to report on the emerging and little-understood viral outbreak from Wuhan. His report also described the pandemic as a “man-made” disaster, calling on people to resist government “tyranny.”

On June 2, 2023, Zhang Zhan was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which described her as a hero who “should be honored by the world for their courage.”

“Instead of meeting those requests [for China to abide by international human rights law] with transparency and debate, Chinese authorities used their massive police power to censor and jail,” the Commission said in a statement.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Banned by the State Department from traveling to the United States until he became India’s prime minister in 2014, Narendra Modi was on Thursday ushered into the White House for the second time in as many years amid praise from U.S. President Joe Biden.

Standing next to Modi – who was denied U.S. visas over his role as governor in Gujarat’s 2002 anti-Muslim riots – Biden said the pair were “trusted partners” who share the “core principles” of democracy.

“Welcome, Mr. Prime Minister. Welcome back to the White House,” Biden said. The meeting, he added, was happening at an “inflection point” in world history that was forcing their countries together.

For his part, Modi glossed over any bygones – and travel bans.

He had only seen the White House’s exterior when he traveled to the country “as a common man” some 30 years ago. But not this time: “This grand welcome ceremony at the White House today,” the premier said, “is an honor and pride for the 1.4 billion people of India.”

“Thank you, Mr. President, for your friendship,” he added.

The specter of China

During the morning ceremony, neither Biden nor Modi betrayed the reasons for the embrace of their two countries. 

But there were clues.

One was in the abundance of announcements that followed, headlined by a US$2.7-billion factory to be built in India by U.S. microchip maker Micron, which was last month banned from selling in China amid the ongoing chip war between the United States and Beijing.

There were deals, too, for America’s General Electric to build fighter jet engines for India’s military, as well as for the sale of Stryker armored vehicles and lightweight long-range howitzers, which India’s military currently positions along its disputed Himalayas border with China.

China’s specter was also present during an afternoon press conference at the White House, with Biden asked his views of Modi’s crackdown on religious and media freedoms in the context of his recent public comments that Chinese President Xi Jinping is a “dictator.” 

“We’re straightforward with each other and we respect each other,” Biden said of Modi, without answering the reporter’s question.

“One of the fundamental reasons that I believe the U.S.-China relationship is not in the space it is in with the U.S.-Indian relationship,” he said, “is that there’s an overwhelming respect for each other.”

‘A pretty amazing transition’

The personal bonhomie between Biden and Modi marks a dramatic shift in relations between the countries, with New Delhi long skeptical of American foreign policy aims and one of the primarily architects of the stridently neutral Cold War-era Non-Alignment Movement.

A socialist republic according to the preamble of its 1950 Constitution, India nonetheless long hewed closer to the Soviet Union. In fact, the historical ties between Moscow and New Delhi – and India’s reliance on Russian-made weaponry – were widely seen as key to Modi’s recent reluctance to isolate Russia amid its invasion on Ukraine.

But that has shifted as China – a historical rival of India, and one with which it shares a disputed 3,400-kilometer (2,100-mile) border – has supplanted Russia as the lead geopolitical challenger to the United States.

“On security ties, we’ve really seen a pretty amazing transition in the last couple of decades,” said Richard M. Rossow, chair in U.S.-India Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Rossow said in a call last week to preview Modi’s visit that India’s longtime policy of nonalignment has over recent years “kind of shifted to language of strategic autonomy” and put an end to its historical reluctance to work too closely with the United States.

“That really is not exactly true when we focus on the main strategic threat that we both look at and share in the Indo-Pacific region, which is China,” he said. “We’ve found it relatively easy to open up doors that may have been closed 10-15 years ago.”

But that has not meant any alliances with the United States, with Modi at times warming to American advances when appearing threatened by China’s growing military power while thumbing his nose at other times.

“Trying to define what this relationship is,” Rossow said of U.S.-Indian ties, “is like crossing the river by feeling pebbles with your feet.”

Autonomous India

From Washington’s perspective, though, a stronger but fiercely independent India can still aid U.S. foreign policy objectives.

“As is well known in D.C. policy circles, India will never be a treaty ally of the United States,” explained Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the director of its South Asia program. “However, U.S. strategists see India playing a central role in their larger framework of deterring China.”

Vaishnav told Radio Free Asia that even if they do not become official allies, “the United States and India view their futures as inextricably linked” on technology, defense and the broader economy, because India provides an alternative to China as a manufacturing base.

Amid U.S.-led efforts to “de-risk” supply chains away from a reliance on Chinese manufacturers, Vaishnav said, American officials are keen, in particular, to help India find “a foothold in the semiconductor market” and thereby establish a long-term alternative source market.

Rossow of CSIS said the same logic extended to India’s military and the need “to reduce reliance on Russia as a major military supplier.”

“We’re really trying to push the envelope … beyond what we’ve ever done for a country that’s not an ally” in terms of sharing military technology,” he said, with an explicit aim of “helping India to become more self-reliant in some areas of weapons production.”

Speaking on the condition of anonymity on Wednesday evening, a senior Biden administration official also alluded to China as a key factor driving India closer to the United States militarily than ever before.

“I think some of the challenges that they faced along their own borders have concentrated their attention and caused them to focus intensively on both greater preparation on the defense side, and also seeking closer partnerships internationally,” the official told reporters.

The multipolar world

Ultimately, with India’s main priority to maintain its autonomy, playing off other world powers to its advantage is the aim of its game.

It’s a foreign-policy shift that has been forged by Modi’s external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, a strategic realist who former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger singled out in an interview with The Economist as “the practicing political leader that is quite close to my views.” 

The author of the foreign-policy treatise “The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World,” Jaishankar’s view of the emerging world order is one defined by a multipolarity of four major powers – China, Russia, India and the United States, who can at best be “frenemies.”

New Delhi won’t be constrained by any commitments to – or against – its “frenemies,” the minister has made clear. In the meantime, though, why not take what you can get without entering into alliances? 

“We would like to have multiple choices. And obviously try to make the best of it,” he told The Economist. “Every country would like to do that. Some may be constrained by other obligations, some may not.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster

The effort to fight widespread government corruption in Laos – for years a declared goal of the country’s top leaders – got a boost from the United Nations this week.

At a training conducted by the U.N.’s Office on Drugs and Crime, Vientiane municipal workers learned how to recognize money laundering, audit the finances of state enterprises and inspect government concession projects.

Berlin-based Transparency International’s 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index ranked Laos 126 of 180 countries it evaluated in fighting corruption.

“Cooperation included officials from the state inspector general’s office and others from related outside sectors,” an official from the Office of Inspector General told Radio Free Asia. “This time we did the training in Vientiane. Later, we’ll have one for government officials in Savannakhet province.”

The government has promised in the past to address corrupt practices that have put off potential foreign investors from pumping money into much-needed infrastructure and development.

However, despite the enactment of an anti-corruption law that criminalizes the abuse of power, public sector fraud, embezzlement and bribery, Laos’ judiciary is weak and inefficient, and officials are rarely prosecuted.

One official who said he worked as an inspector in Vientiane for a decade told RFA last year that he and his colleagues review the finances of government offices and departments but not those of individual officials who are powerful members of the party and the government.

“Nobody would dare inspect them,” he said.

‘They do it in a group’

It could be very difficult to solve Laos’ corruption problem, even with stricter laws, a Laotian who asked to remain anonymous said to RFA this week. So far, no government officials have been sent to prison for corruption, he said.

“Laws are strict but enforcement is weak, and that’s not strong enough to solve the problem,” he said.

Over the last two or three years, some officials have been fired or moved to other positions – but that’s been the extent of the government crackdown, a former state employee told RFA. 

“There are many state employees who are corrupt,” he said. “Police, tax collectors, even employees of mineral companies. They do it in a group, with the involvement of high-ranking officials.”

A report last year from the country’s State Inspection Authority said the Lao government had lost US$767 million to corruption since 2016, with government development and investment projects – such as road and bridge construction – the leading source of the widespread graft.

At the time, nearly 3,700 members of the communist Lao People’s Revolutionary Party had been disciplined, with 2,019 expelled and 154 people charged, the report said.

Another report from the Asian Development Bank found that almost 70 percent of businesses that applied for registrations, licenses and permits in Laos paid bribes to government officials to get approval.

Translated by Sidney Khotpanya. Edited by Matt Reed.

A fishers’ group and others have slammed the Philippine president for saying he would coordinate with Beijing on its annual fishing ban in the disputed South China Sea, including in waters within Manila’s jurisdiction.

China has no standing to prohibit any activities in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ), critics said as they responded on Thursday to comments by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to reporters about planning ahead of the May-August Chinese ban to give fishermen an alternative source of income.

Beijing “has no right whatsoever to impose a fishing ban” in waters within the Philippines’ EEZ, said Antonio Carpio, a former Philippine Supreme Court justice and South China Sea expert.

That’s because in 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines when it threw out China’s expansive claims in the waterway, he said. This was particularly true of the West Philippine Sea, the waters of the South China Sea within Manila’s EEZ.

China has been unilaterally imposing a fishing moratorium from May to August every year, claiming this promotes sustainable fishing.

But the Philippines has in past years protested against this, saying the practice violates its sovereignty. Some areas covered by the fishing ban are in Philippine waters.

“We cannot recognize China’s fishing ban in any part of our EEZ because that will … recognize China’s nine-dash line, which is the basis for China’s fishing ban,” Carpio told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated news outlet, in a message on Thursday.

The nine-dash line is a boundary used by Beijing on its maps to demarcate its territorial claims in the sea.

“The Arbitral Award states that China’s nine-dash line cannot serve as a basis to claim waters or resources in the South China Sea,” Carpio said.

During his comments on Tuesday, Marcos made no reference to the validity of the ban or otherwise. 

“When there is a fishing ban, we coordinate with them so we do not get surprised that there’s suddenly a fishing ban. So we can have some time to plan,” Marcos said, according to transcripts released Thursday.

“When they say there is going to be a fishing ban in two months’ time, then let’s plan: What will the fishers do? Let us give them another livelihood or another source of income.”

Marcos said he had raised the issue of Filipino fishers’ rights during his meeting with President Xi Jinping when he visited China in January.

“I really prioritized the issue of fisheries when we met. I said, let us not talk about the territory because we will not be able to decide now,” Marcos said.

“Let us prioritize the fisheries because these people are not at fault, why punish them? So we are making some progress in that regard.”

‘China has no moral ascendancy’

The activist fisherfolk group Pamalakaya is completely unconvinced by this argument of the Marcos administration, which it believes “should … reject Beijing’s annual unilateral ban.”

“There should be no room for any compromise, not even a coordination in regards to fishing activities in our territorial waters,” Pamalakaya said in a statement on Thursday.

“No amount of alternative source of income could equate the fishing livelihood of Filipinos in the resource-rich West Philippine Sea, and its significant contribution to our local food security.”

Additionally, Pamalakaya trashed Beijing’s claim about sustainable fishing.

“We remind President Marcos Jr. that China has no moral ascendancy, not especially a legal right, to impose a fishing ban on the pretext of marine conservation,” the group said.

“Because it is the one destroying our marine biodiversity and ecosystem through massive reclamation, illegal poaching, and industrial fishing expeditions.”

Marine scientists meanwhile have expressed alarm over the destruction of coral reefs in the South China Sea that are critical for the environment and preventing a collapse in fish stocks, which sustain the livelihoods of tens of millions of people.

Some of the South China Sea reefs are “gone forever” due to the creation of military bases atop them, John McManus, a professor of marine biology at the University of Miami in Florida, told Radio Free Asia in October 2020.

The majority of such construction has been by China, which dredged up Fiery Cross Reef, Subi Reef, Mischief Reef, Woody Island, and some other islets between 2014 and 2017, to make way for artificial islands that now host its military.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news outlet.