Guo Rui

Liu Wen was hauled into a police station after he alerted his colleagues more than a month ago to a disease outbreak at a seafood market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. He has no regrets. Liu, a doctor at the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital in Hannan district, sent the warning through a WeChat messaging group on December 30, he told Chinese news service Caixin. He said he sent the warning because the hospital was close to the seafood market. The next day, hospital management called him in and asked him where he got the information. And two days after that, he was questioned by police, according to the report. His treatment is similar to that meted out to Li Wenliang, a Wuhan doctor who also c

Before its closure, exotic animals – from snakes to civets – were available at a wet market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.  That market is ground zero of a new virus killing people with pneumonia-like symptoms and it is infecting growing numbers of others around the world. According to official reports, as of 11pm Wednesday, the previously unknown coronavirus had killed 17 people and infected more than 500 others. Most of the infections and all of the deaths were in Hubei province where Wuhan is located. 375 of the infections were in the city itself.  Many worked or lived near Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, which experts believe is the source of the outbreak, with the virus jumping

In the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, a hiring plan has been submitted aiming to win the hearts and minds of young people in Hong Kong. But a new survey suggests that's a tough mission.  Gordon Lam, a Hong Kong member of the Guangdong Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, submitted a proposal to the advisory body calling on the provincial government to set up an employment support agency for Hong Kong students. He also said a government liaison body should “provide them with financial subsidies and referral information” so the students can “help service the development of the Greater Bay Area.”  The Greater Bay Area plan is a grand vision by Beijing to turn nine Pearl

A founding pastor of China’s Early Rain Covenant Church has been sentenced to nine years in jail by a Chinese court for inciting subversion of state power and other crimes. Wang Yi was detained in December 2018 along with other senior figures in the prominent underground Christian church during overnight raids across various districts of Chengdu, the southwestern city where the church was founded. On Monday, the Chengdu Intermediate People’s Court released its judgment, which said the pastor was also convicted of illegal business operations. In addition to the jail term, Wang would be stripped of his political rights for three years. Personal assets valuing $7,000 would also be confiscated.

Beijing has issued a new set of “patriotic education” guidelines, vowing to ramp up efforts to unite the country’s 1.4 billion population amid continuing social unrest in Hong Kong. Compared to the previous guidelines, published in 1994, the new framework goes a step further in emphasizing the role of the party in the country.  The new document explicitly defines patriotism as not just love of the country but also of the ruling Chinese Communist Party and its official political ideology. “The fates of the country and the party and socialism are inseparable,” the guidelines said, echoing previous remarks by President Xi Jinping. The guidelines, jointly issued by the Communist Party’s Central

When You Weijie’s husband was killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, the only official acknowledgment she received was a small cash payment from her work unit. Her husband, Yang Minghu, was an office worker. He was sympathetic to the pro-democracy protesters and went to check on their safety on June 4. He was caught in gunfire on a Beijing street as the military advanced to the square to enforce martial law. He was 42. You received 800 yuan ($115) as compensation for her loss of her husband, but she returned it. “I couldn’t use the money. I felt that this is a person’s life, this is the price of a human’s life,” she said. Now 65, what she wants is an open investigation into what hap

Li Rui, a former aide to Chairman Mao, took notes. In his diaries, he documented the inner workings of the ruling Communist Party, including everything from what he witnessed during the Cultural Revolution to Mao’s swear words. The diaries are being held by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, but a lawsuit filed in China is now seeking to prevent them from seeing the light of day. Li, who died at the age of 101 in February, was a personal secretary to Mao Zedong and later a critic of the Chinese leadership, a rarity among China’s political elite. Li started keeping a diary in 1935, when he was an 18-year-old Communist activist, and only stopped in the spring of 2018, when he was h

At the end of 1978, the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s top decision-making body, the Central Committee, met to end more than a decade of ideological turmoil and open the door to then-radical experiments such as private ownership. The push was driven by late leader Deng Xiaoping and was the start of a new pragmatic period in Chinese politics. In the intervening years, the party has continued to loosen state control in many economic and social activities, legalizing private ownership, allowing market competition and opening up to foreign investment and trade. But the red line set by Deng remains in place: there can be no challenge to the party’s rule. As China confronts new challenges such

Nine former Chinese government prosecutors have been jailed for their role in the mysterious torture and death of Hong Kong businessman Stephen Lau Hei-wing in custody last year. Lau, 60, owned the Kimberley Hotel in Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui district. News of his possible death in custody in mainland China was revealed during a court hearing in Hong Kong in June 2017. The Tianjin No 1 Intermediate People’s Court on Tuesday sentenced Xu Xuezhe, the lead interrogator, to 15 years in jail. Zhou Qingjun, another defendant got 11 years for intentional assault. Six others received sentences between 15 months and three years for extorting confession by torture. The ninth defendant, head of the inv