Social Stability - 84. page

Zhang Pancheng, a former security guard at Peking University, went missing because he posted a video on the Internet last November criticizing China’s human rights situation and Xi Jinping for giving out generous foreign aid to 3rd world countries. Zhang’s friends and lawyers have recently confirmed that the authorities arrested Zhang for allegedly “Picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” According to Zhang’s mother, Zhang Pancheng has been held in the Xicheng District Detention Center in Beijing for more than four months. The family member received a notice of the arrest. An attorney that the Zhang’s family hired had gone the detention center to visit him. The lawyer told Zhang’s family that Zhang refused to admit he made a mistake, refused to write a letter of guarantee, and refused to sign the lawyer’s power of attorney.

In the video Zhang made, Zhang said: “I am a simple, ordinary Chinese, but I also have my dreams, my ideals, my self-esteem, and my rights as a person. In China under today’s totalitarian rule, no one has personal safety. A private entrepreneur could die any time and anyone could disappear for no reason. He (Xi Jinping) could give away $60 billion in foreign aid but did he go through any approval process? . . . One million innocent Muslim compatriots are being held. What crimes have they committed? Please release them and send them home immediately.”

Source: Radio Free Asia, April 10, 2019
https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/renquanfazhi/nu-04102019102548.html

Radio Free Asia reported that China’s provincial prisons have been undergoing renovation and expansion projects in recent years. Some online media have collected information from public government online information and found that over the past six years, the size of prisons everywhere has been expanding. Since 2013, 200 prisons have expanded to varying degrees. Overseas Uyghur organizations said that many Uyghurs have been transferred from Xinjiang to the mainland for custody, so the authorities needed to expand many detention facilities.

According to “Haifeng Express,” a Twitter account, since 2018, 34 prison expansion projects have been launched. They include Shaoyang Prison Phase II Expansion Project in Hunan province, Xingyi Prison Expansion Project in Guizhou, Luoyang Prison Reconstruction and Expansion Project in Henan, and the Prison Reconstruction and Expansion Project in Harbin. Radio Free Asia reported that their online research results showed that many prisons that were being renovated were not included on the list. This indicates that the actual number of prison reconstruction projects is far more than the reported number.

Di Lishati, the spokesperson for the World Uyghur Congress in Germany, disclosed to RFA on Tuesday March 26 that a large number of illegally detained Uyghurs have been transferred out of the Xinjiang region. Because the Chinese government has illegally detained a large number of Uyghurs, including the Turkic people, in reeducation concentration camps, the prisons are overcrowded. Since the Chinese government is under strong pressure from the international community about the illegal detention of Uyghurs, they planned to transfer the detained Turkic people gradually to the inland provinces of China. After these Turkic people were transferred to the provinces of mainland China, they continued to be oppressed and subjected to brainwashing education.

According to earlier reports from RFA, on New Year’s Day, a group of Kazakh young people from Nalati Town, Yili Xinyuan County were transferred to Nanchang, Jiangxi province, where a military company employed them under the China Aerospace Group. They were asked to learn Chinese after work and were even asked to join the party. Uyghurs in southern Xinjiang were transferred to Heilongjiang Province to serve as cheap laborers.

Source: Radio Free Asia, March 26, 2019
https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/renquanfazhi/ql1-03262019093632.html

Epoch Times reported on a recent disclosure that the cafeteria at the Seventh Middle School in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, served moldy and rotten food to the students, causing many students to feel sick. Some even had severe bleeding when they had a bowel movement. The school denied the allegation. The Police blocked any parents who went to the school to appeal and kept them from entering the school. On the day prior to the joint investigation team press conference the school was to hold, a photo showed that 30 buses carrying police were sitting on Phoenix North Street outside of the school. Another video showed that on the day of the press conference, the school only let those who pretended to be the parents into the conference while the real parents were blocked from entering the conference. During the conference, the school officials announced that the photos of the moldy and rotten food posted on the social media were fabricated. Three parents who were accused of “spreading rumors” were arrested. Meanwhile the board members of the middle school fired the principal of the school. The official website of Chengdu Municipal posted a number of photos on the school’s Weibo account showing the students “happily returned back to school and resumed their normal classes.” People posted comments below the picture saying the school officials staged the photos and they should feel ashamed.

The Epoch Times article also reported that a video that the parents uploaded showed that the police blocked a parent from leaving home to take her sick child to the hospital. Another parent said she was not allowed to go to the hospital of her choice and could only go to the hospital that the school had designated. Some parents contacted nearby private schools hoping to transfer their children there, but they were told no. They suspected that the authorities had already exerted pressure on those private schools.

Source: Epoch Times, March 17, 2019
http://www.epochtimes.com/gb/19/3/17/n11120040.htm

The Hong Kong based newspaper Ming Pao published an article by Bruce Lui, a senior lecturer in the Department of Journalism at the Hong Kong Baptist University. The Chinese government’s “stability maintenance” expenditure last year was 1.37 trillion yuan (US$200 billion). It is expected that the actual cost of “stability maintenance” this year will exceed 1.4 trillion yuan.

China’s official defense budget for 2019 is 1.19 trillion yuan (US$180 billion). Lui said that the phenomenon of the stability maintenance expenditure continuously surpassing military spending shows whether the Beijing authorities purpose “is mainly to prevent people or to prevent foreign enemies.” Although most of the outsiders think that these maintenance funds are mostly used in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Sichuan, as a matter of fact, according to past years from the China Statistical Yearbook, the top seven provinces in year 2017 in terms of “stability maintenance” spending were Guangdong, Jiangsu, Xinjiang, Shandong, Zhejiang, Sichuan and Beijing, .

Guangdong spent around 121.4 billion yuan (US$18.05 billion), about 11 percent of the national total, more than twice that of Xinjiang province.

Lui’s article said that, after Chinese President Xi Jinping took office, Guangdong has always topped the stability maintenance spending, with an average annual growth rate of 13 percent. In recent years, it has increased at a rate of about 20 percent to 30 percent, much faster than the spending in Xinjiang.

He believes that Guangdong’s huge stability maintenance costs relate to Hong Kong. For years Hong Kong’s stability maintenance fund has come out of Guangdong. Intelligence, national security, military and research personnel from Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and even Zhuhai have been traveling to Hong Kong to collect all forms of intelligence and have launched operations. This has resulted in a constant increase in spending.

These personnel have exaggerated the situation in Hong Kong and the problem of Hong Kong independence so that they are able to obtain more manpower, material, and financial resources. “For those who can initiate a special project regarding Hong Kong independence, funds will be put in place.”

Lui pointed out, “Hong Kong people are deeply integrated into the Greater Bay Area. This area is not only an economic area, but also an important area for stability maintenance. Technology will keep you under surveillance without any trace.” “When Hong Kong’s people see the news of the Xinjiang Re-education Camp next time, can you think of some sort of “re-education camps” that are more expensive, invisible but more technologically advanced running around you?”

Source: Central News Agency, March 13, 2019
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/acn/201903130272.aspx

Well-known Chinese news site Sohu reported that a recent Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) study released a Chinese Antibiotic Pollution Map. The map revealed dangerous facts about the results of the industrialization of livestock farming. According to the study, tens of thousands of tons of antibiotics have entered the human population as well as the water and soil ecosystem in China. The pollution has covered the entire regular food chain including chicken, duck, pork, beef, and fish. From normal adults to new born babies, researchers discovered a wide range of antibiotics in their bodies, even if the individual was not taking any medicine at the time. This has resulted in widespread drug resistance issues across China. Illegal use of antibiotics across the industries of biotechnology, feed products, medicine manufacturing, and farming have developed the full cycle to deliver a large amount of antibiotics through the human digest system and the natural environment, such as rivers and even seas. Doctors have fewer and fewer options when treating diseases.

Source: Sohu, February 16, 2019
https://www.sohu.com/a/295162096_658124?sec=wd

The Central News Agency reported that, in the past two months, the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission has closed more than 490,000 illegal accounts and thousands of websites. According to the article, as of February 25, a total of 44.37 million internet messages were cleared, more than 490,000 illegal accounts were closed, and 1,462 registered websites were removed.

Source: Central News Agency, February 27, 2019
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/acn/201902270380.aspx