Day: March 26, 2024

A long-running land dispute in Cambodia’s capital of Phnom Penh took another twist Tuesday when authorities posted a big sign saying that evicted residents have agreed to move to another location – even though most residents said that wasn’t true.

The dispute began nearly five years ago when former Prime Minister Hun Sen gave residential land near Tamok Lake to developers who plan to build a high-rise building. 

Ever since, authorities have been trying to evict about 200 families from their homes in the Samrong Tbong community in the capital’s Prek Pnov district.

Land disputes are common in Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries. Government officials routinely seize land for lucrative real estate ventures, leaving displaced local residents with little or no recourse.

About three weeks ago, about 50 residents began a protest on the land – some of them in waist-deep muddy water around the construction site – to demand that President Hun Manet’s government grant them the right to keep their land.

On Tuesday, district authorities put up a metal sign nearly two meters, or 6 feet, wide, saying: “This location has been settled according to [government] policy.”

But representatives of the community say the sign does not reflect the will of the majority.

Samrong Tbong community representative Sea Davy told Radio Free Asia that 27 families accepted land swaps with the authorities, while 70 others refused the deal, wanting to remain on their land and build houses. 

She asked the government to grant residents, who do not want land in a different area, the right to build on their own land.

The land dispute has left some of the people impoverished and with high debt, while some children have dropped out of school to help their parents earn a living. 

RFA was unable to reach Phnom Penh Gov. Khuong Sreng or district Gov. Them Sam An for comment.

Residents say they will continue to protest until a solution is found.

Translated by Yun Samean for RFA Khmer. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

China’s Ministry of State Security has warned the country’s social media influencers, particularly military enthusiasts and former state employees with access to confidential information, that they are at risk of breaching national security laws in their bid to attract fans.

“With the rise of self-media, a casual video or comment can attract a lot of attention online, and anyone can become an online celebrity,” the ministry said in a post on Tuesday to its official WeChat account.

“Knowledge-sharing and outdoor check-in accounts are very popular … but they need to improve their awareness of national security,” the post warned.

The growth of amateur military enthusiasts has come amid a rise in popularity for nationalistic commentators who like to brag about China’s military might online, particularly with regard to a potential invasion of democratic Taiwan.

“Military fan” content has proliferated behind the Great Firewall of internet censorship in recent years, as it is often produced by “little pink” creators of nationalistic content, which drives large amounts of traffic on Chinese social media.

Some like to report on the latest high-tech weaponry and equipment being deployed by the People’s Liberation Army, analyze the strengths of its command regions and theaters, or engage in military plane-spotting, including aircraft identifying marks, according to state media reports.

Meanwhile, on YouTube, short videos have also appeared in large numbers on channels like China Defense and Military Tube and CCTV’s China Military, using official state media footage and sometimes an AI voice-over and subtitles in English that appear aimed at an overseas audience.

But official warnings are growing that some influencers appear to be going too far, amid a nationwide crackdown on the flow of information under ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.

The latest Ministry of State Security post follows a warning from the Ministry in December that any military fans reporting details of construction projects, technical specifications or the deployment of new military equipment could be prosecuted, with prison sentences of 3-7 years for the most serious offenders.

In January, a People’s Liberation Army-affiliated media organization Jun Zhengping Studio complained publicly after a blogger shared tips on how to sneak into a restricted military zone on the Xiaohongshu social media platform.

The post was illustrated with a photo of a young woman scaling a chain-link fence at a restricted facility near the central city of Wuhan, close to a big red sign that reads “No Entry. Restricted Military Area.”

The Ministry’s post on Tuesday said former civil servants, defense officials and scientific researchers have used their insider knowledge to drive traffic to their accounts, taking advantage of public curiosity about secret matters, even before the statute of limitations on that knowledge has expired.

“Anyone striving to become an internet celebrity must always pay attention to their words and deeds, and never leak national secrets or endanger national security,” the account warned, according to state broadcaster CCTV.

It singled out “outdoor enthusiasts” who like to check in at restricted areas “as a gimmick to attract attention,” and who take photos around military restricted zones regardless of warning notices.

“Illegal actions like breaking into military restricted areas in order to attract fans seriously disrupts the orderly management of important military areas, and may even provide an opportunity for overseas spies and intelligence agencies to spy on and analyze our military deployment, endangering national security,” the report said, citing the ministry.

“Areas under military management and classified sensitive areas are not tourist attractions,” it said, calling on social media platforms to weed out content of this kind.

Under Chinese law, the country’s citizens are obliged to protect military facilities, the post warned.

“Any behavior that disrupts the orderly management of military restricted areas or threatens safety at military facilities will be severely punished by law,” the Ministry warned.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

A court in Vietnam on Tuesday sentenced a man to eight years in prison for managing a Facebook page that shared news and content that authorities said was against the state.

Nguyen Van Lam, 33, was the administrator of “The Diary of Patriots,” a page on Meta’s social media platform that authorities said defamed and smeared Vietnam’s senior leaders.

Lam was convicted in the Tien Giang People’s Court in southern Vietnam of “making, storing, disseminating, propagandizing anti-state information and materials” under Article 117 of Vietnam’s Penal Code, which is criticized by rights groups as being an intentionally vague law that allows Hanoi to stifle dissent.

According to the indictment, Lam, a native of Vinh Hoa commune, Vinh Loc district in Thanh Hoa province, regularly visited websites and social media pages to read posts and articles with bad content and therefore developed a “hostile and anti-state” attitude. 

He used the Facebook account “Nguyễn Lâm” to put up 19 posts with content distorting and defaming the system of one-party rule in Vietnam, it said..

There are multiple pages on Facebook with the same name, and Lam may have had connections to more than one of them, state media said. 

One of the “Diary of Patriots” pages had more than 800,000 followers.

The earliest page was created in 2011, at the beginning of widespread demonstrations against China’s claims and aggressiveness in the South China Sea. Though Vietnam upholds its own claims, it often stifles anti-China dissent.

Restricting freedom of speech 

The arrest was aimed at punishing those who had “created a forum for people to discuss and share multifaceted information in the spirit of freedom of speech,” said a member of that page who wished to remain anonymous for security reasons.

“I am against the punishments against those who exercise human rights and promote human rights values,” he told RFA Vietnamese in a text message, saying that he did not know Lam personally.

He called on Vietnamese authorities to adopt the world’s “civilized standards,” and said that the international community has a responsibility not to ignore Vietnam’s crackdowns on activists while supporting Hanoi’s bid to stay on the U.N. Human Rights Council.

State media reports did not include information about Lam’s arrest.

RFA attempted to find details about his arrest by contacting the Tien Giang provincial police department, but staff who answered the phone refused to respond to queries.

Lam did nothing criminal by managing pages on social media, said Phil Robertson, Deputy Asia Director for New York-based Human Rights Watch.

“He should be immediately and unconditionally released,” Robertson said. “Sadly, it looks like Vietnam’s leaders will not stop this crackdown until they have imprisoned every last activist in the country.”

In July 2023, Ho Chi Minh City police arrested Phan Tat Thanh, who was allegedly the former administrator of “The Diary of Patriots” page, charging him with “propaganda against the state” under Article 117.

RFA’s database shows that since January 2024, the Vietnamese government has arrested six activists on the same charges and sentenced one to six years in prison for the same accusation.

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

Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong’s resignation last week amid corruption allegations will have little impact on Vietnam’s direction, the country’s foreign minister said in Washington on Tuesday.

Speaking in English at the Brookings Institution, Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son said the “collective leadership” model used in Hanoi meant Thuong’s surprise ouster represented only a change of personnel.

“The resignation of the president, I think, will not affect our foreign policy as well as our own [domestic] policy of economic development,” Son said. “We have collective leadership. We have collective foreign policy. We have collective-decided economic-path development.”

Vietnam’s policies, Son said, were not decided by individual leaders but instead by the congresses of the Communist Party of Vietnam every five years. Accordingly, the fact that “one or two figures in the leadership has resigned does not change” much, he explained.

Thuong’s ouster should be “welcomed by the international community” and foreign investors, Son added, calling it a sign of the seriousness of Vietnam’s “Blazing Furnace” anti-graft campaign.

Thuong, who is 53, resigned as president on Wednesday over corruption in Quang Ngai province between 2010 and 2014, while he was serving as the provincial Communist Party secretary. Vice President Vo Thi Anh Xuan is now serving as acting president.

Thuong had only been in office for about a year, having replaced former President Nguyen Xuan Phuc in March 2023 after Phuc stepped down to take responsibility for COVID-19 scandals.

Analysts, though, have speculated his downfall may have been engineered by Public Security Minister To Lam, who could have ambitions to become president or even party secretary-general.

The party secretary-general – currently 79-year-old Nguyen Phu Trong, in power since 2011 and the spearhead of the anti-corruption efforts – is the most powerful figure in Vietnam, followed by the prime minister and the largely ceremonial office of president. 

Trong’s current term as secretary-general ends in 2026.

Deepening ties

At Brookings on Monday, Son also spoke about the “long journey” to friendship Vietnam and America had walked since the 1970s.

He praised the turnaround in relations, noting that trade between the two countries had grown 245 times to US$110 billion since bilateral ties were officially normalized in 1995 under the Clinton administration.

“Mutual trust” and “understanding,” he said, is now at a high, marked by last year’s upgrading of relations to a “comprehensive strategic partnership” during U.S. President Joe Biden trip to Hanoi.

That was no small feat, he said.

Normalization of ties still took some two decades after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Son recalled, with Hanoi and Washington again ending up on opposite sides during the 1980s Cambodian Civil War following Hanoi’s 1979 invasion and occupation of Cambodia.

Backed by the Soviet Union, the last Vietnamese troops did not withdraw from Cambodia until September 1989, prior to the 1991 U.N.-run elections there that came with the end of the Cold War.

“After the [Vietnam] War, when Vietnam helped the Cambodian people cope with the genocidal regime of Pol Pot and [Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister] Ieng Sary … again, the international community and our American friends here still did not understand why,” Son said.

“From the war, and then misunderstanding of each other for quite some time, we entered normalization 30 years after that,” he said.

During his trip to Washington this week, Son also met with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. A readout from the State Department said Son and Blinken discussed, among other things, Hanoi’s human rights record.

Son alluded to those discussions on Tuesday. 

“Although we still have differences, we now have goodwill [and] frank and candid dialogue,” he said. “After so many ups and downs, the relationship between our two countries is now a model in international relations, especially for countries currently at war.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Police in China are stepping up spot searches of people’s phones for apps enabling them to bypass the Great Firewall of government internet censorship, residents told Radio Free Asia in recent interviews.

A resident of the southwestern province of Sichuan who gave only the surname Huang for fear of reprisals said he had recently been stopped on the subway in the provincial capital, Chengdu.

“This happened to me in Chengdu,” Huang said. “A police officer stopped me on the subway and wanted to check my phone, but I didn’t allow him to.”

“I told him he had no law enforcement powers and he let it go,” he said.

Chinese authorities have stepped up spot checking operations on the streets and on public transport in the years since the “white paper” protest movement of 2022, which the government blamed on infiltration by “foreign forces,” and have been forcing people to download an “anti-fraud” app that monitors their phone usage, according to recent interviews.

Huang said he has also seen police checking people’s phones on the streets of Shanghai and Beijing.

A resident of the northeastern province of Jilin who gave only the surname Zhang for fear of reprisals said police have been stepping up similar checks where he lives.

“You have to be very clandestine to get around the Great Firewall,” Zhang said. “Circumvention tools and viewing overseas websites are not allowed.”

“Generally speaking, nobody dares to post photos that have come from outside the Great Firewall to WeChat,” he said. “If you do, your account will be blocked.”

He said anyone who gets hauled in to “drink tea” with the feared state security police will have their phone checked as a matter of routine, meaning that people need to delete such software or reset to factory settings to avoid discovery.

He said that while some uncensored content occasionally gets through, there isn’t as much as before the current crackdown.

According to Huang, the current crackdown was sparked by the “white paper” protests, after which the authorities have targeted university students to crack down on people going “over the wall” to get content that hasn’t been censored by the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

‘You have to be especially careful’

A mobile phone repair specialist in the southern province of Guangdong who declined to be named for fear of reprisals said the police-approved “anti-fraud” app can also detect the presence of circumvention tools on any phone where it has been installed.

“As long as your phone has the anti-fraud app installed, they will know what you are doing,” she said.

“You have to be especially careful now if you want to get around the Wall.”

A screenshot provided by a resident of the central province of Hubei showed an SMS alert from the provincial police department warning them that circumvention software had been detected on their phone, in violation of the Online Security Law.

The user was ordered to cease and desist or report to the local police station, on pain of further “enforcement measures,” according to the text message.

According to the X citizen journalist account “Mr Li is not your teacher,” a student at the School of Electronic Information and Computer Engineering at Sichuan’s Institute of Industrial Technology was recently disciplined for “ignoring online security regulations” and using software to bypass the Great Firewall on many occasions between Feb. 29 and March 11, according to a photo of the school’s disciplinary announcement.

They had accessed content on overseas websites and reposted it to two WeChat groups, which “violates the school’s student regulations,” the notice said.

The student was given a warning under the college’s disciplinary code, it said.

Last month, China’s state security police started combing through the account’s follower list and putting pressure on people living in China to unfollow it, the journalist reported.

China’s Cyberspace Administration has also been stepping up its campaign to remove unapproved content from Chinese social media platforms, reporting that it revoked the licenses of more than 10,000 websites in 2023, and hauled in more than 10,000 “for interviews.”

The websites were being targeted for “spreading false information, incitement of confrontation and other harmful content,” state news agency Xinhua reported on Jan. 31.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.