Human rights in China

On May 16, 2009, Xia Junfeng was selling deep-fried skewers out of his illegal street cart in the northeastern city of Shenyang when two officers confiscated his gas cylinder and took the hawker back to their office. What happened next is disputed: Xia said he was beaten by the two, who were members of a para-police force tasked with keeping order in cities, also known as chengguan. But the police said they found no evidence of such abuse. There were no witnesses or surveillance footage to confirm what happened in the room. What is clear is that at some point Xia, then 32 years old, got his hands on a small knife and stabbed the two officers and a driver who entered the room later. The two o

Women’s rights advocates have applauded a proposal to China’s top advisory body to expand access to assisted reproductive technology. This includes technologies such as in vitro fertilization and egg freezing – medical practices that are difficult to access for unmarried women in China. Under the country’s existing laws, unmarried women and couples who do not “comply with the population and birth-planning regulations” are banned from using those services at Chinese hospitals and agencies. Peng Jing, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body, submitted the proposal to the advisory body, which if adopted would give unmarried women the right to use ass

Three Chinese activists who helped publish censored articles about the coronavirus outbreak have been detained by police in China.  The trio – Cai Wei, Chen Mei and Cai’s girlfriend (a woman identified as Tang) – were contributors to a crowd-sourced project known as Terminus2049, hosted on the popular software collaboration site GitHub. Started in 2018 and named after a remote planet in Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novels, the project has been collecting articles that had been removed from mainstream media outlets and social media in China. Terminus2049 is hosted on Microsoft-owned GitHub, one of the world’s largest depositories for code that has remained largely uncensored in China. Widel

Hong Kong immigration authorities denied entry to the head of Human Rights Watch at the city’s international airport on Sunday, according to the group. Kenneth Roth, the group’s executive director, said in a report on its website that immigration officials told him he could not enter Hong Kong when he landed at the airport from New York, without explaining why. The American citizen planned to visit the city and launch the New York-based organization’s “World Report 2020,” with a lead essay on the Chinese government’s “assault” on the international human rights system. “I had hoped to spotlight Beijing’s deepening assault on international efforts to uphold human rights,” Roth said. “The refus

For four months this year, a Chinese makeup artist and influencer known as Yuya was repeatedly beaten by her then-boyfriend. Yuya, whose real name is He Yuhong, said in social media posts that she chose to stay silent until after the fifth and last beating in August, when he challenged her to take him to court, “Feel free to sue me, because you’ll lose.” This week, she revealed her story to the world. Yuya, 28, who also goes by Yuyamika and has more than a million online followers in China, posted security camera footage on Monday that she says showed her desperate attempt to escape a violent assault. The video has provoked outrage and sparked national debate on domestic violence.  Now, her

A famed Chinese beauty blogger has ignited national debate about intimate partner violence after she posted a video purportedly showing herself being victimized.  “I am breaking the silence. I hope no woman will have to live with what I went through,” Yuya, who has about one million followers on China’s Twitter-like platform Weibo, wrote in a post on Monday.  Nov. 25 is the Day for the Elimination of Voilence against Women. A 28-year-old online celebrity elaborated a video to reveal violence of her ex-boyfriend, combining solid evidence and testimony of other women. This strong individual action already gets 120 million hits. pic.twitter.com/gqxd27MCvv — FreeChineseFeminists (@FeministChina)

Wang Shuping, a doctor who helped expose a tainted blood scandal in rural China in the 1990s, passed away in Salt Lake City at the age of 59 last month. Family and friends have paid tribute to the whistleblower, who had to leave China in 2001 after being forced to close her lab in the central Chinese province of Henan, the epicenter of the blood selling crisis.   Wang’s life has been immortalized in a play, The King of Hell’s Palace, which had its world premiere at the Hampstead Theatre in London in September, just a week before her death. Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, a Chinese-American playwright, spoke to Inkstone about her creative process and her plans to make the play accessible to a Chinese-

Wang Shuping, a doctor who helped expose a tainted blood scandal in China in the 1990s, has passed away in Salt Lake City at the age of 59. Fellow whistleblower Gao Yaojie, who lives in exile in New York, wrote this essay in her memory. The Chinese “blood plasma economy” spread AIDS like wildfire. Over one million people have been its victims in one way or another. Before the government admitted to the existence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, among the four million workers in the medical field in all of China, only four came forward to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In order of their engaging in the fight, they are Sun Yongde of Hebei province, Wang Shuping of Henan province, myself and Gui Xien of

A Chinese student association at a Canadian university has lost its club status over concerns about its alleged links to the Chinese government. Objections to the Chinese Students and Scholars Association’s (CSSA) official status at McMaster University, near Canada’s largest city Toronto, stemmed from a protest campaign it had spearheaded in February in response to a talk given on campus by Rukiye Turdush, a Uygur activist. More than 1 million Uygurs and other ethnic minority groups are believed to be detained in mass internment camps in China’s northwest and subject to political indoctrination. Beijing describes the facilities as vocational training centers. The association issued an open l

The Chinese billionaire featured in the Netflix documentary American Factory has defended his country’s labor practices by criticizing unions, saying they hurt efficiency.  In China, American Factory prompted a wave of soul-searching about the human costs of the country’s economic success and the rise of super-rich entrepreneurs such as Cao Dewang, who owns factories at home and abroad.   The film, backed by Barack and Michelle Obama, documents what happens at two factories owned by Cao – one in Dayton, Ohio and the other in Fujian, southeastern China. Cao is a main character of the documentary, in which he comes across as a pragmatic Chinese businessman bringing jobs to America’s Rust Belt.