Tag Archives: Country: China

Washington Post: There’s surprisingly little data available on the subject. But a 2012 poll by WIN/Gallup International — an international polling firm that is not associated with the D.C.-based Gallup group — asked more than 50,000 people in 40 countries whether they considered themselves “religious,” “not religious” or “convinced atheist.”

Forum 18: China does not allow religious communities to run schools for children, even though regulations do not forbid the provision of religious education to minors. Nor is religious education provided in state schools. For students beyond school age, only state-approved religious groups affiliated with China’s five state-backed monopoly faiths are allowed to apply to set up institutions for the study of their faith or training of clergy, Forum 18 News Service notes. Restrictions are especially tight in Tibet and Xinjiang. The state limits the number of such institutions and their size. Establishing new colleges is cumbersome and long drawn out, even when successful. Their curricula must include “politics” and “patriotic” education, as defined by the state. The state also discourages religious activity on general university campuses. These restrictions reflect the authoritarian state’s desire to control religious groups, including by intervening in the training of their leaders and the level of education of their members.

Catholic Culture: During a visit to China, Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow has been urging government officials to approve the Russian Orthodox Church as a “recognized religion.”

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Family planning agents are investigating China’s most famous film director for reportedly having 7 children with 4 women. If guilty of breaking China’s laws, Zhang Yimou could face $27 million in fines.

NTD Television: Human Rights Without Frontiers, an international NGO based in Brussels, presented its latest report on freedom of religion and belief around the world at the European Parliament on Tuesday.

Religion Clause Blog: On April 19, the U.S. State Department submitted to Congress the 2012 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.

The Christian Institute: Fiona Bruce, MP for Congleton, said in the debate on Tuesday that if they are to condemn the gender abortion practices of China and India, they must “be ready to condemn and challenge any suggestion that gendercide is taking place in the UK”.

Christian Today: Now is not the time to visit Kashmir if you’re a Christian tourist. AsiaNews reports that local Christians—but especially foreigners—in the picturesque but contested Indian state are increasingly in danger of anti-conversion violence.

AP: Human rights groups are urging U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to raise the ill-treatment of dissidents and other rights concerns during a weekend visit to China expected to be dominated by talk of North Korea.

AP: Dozens of Chinese rights lawyers and citizens have flocked to an eastern city this week to protest an elementary school for preventing the 10-year-old daughter of an activist from returning to class.

CNSNews: Chinese civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng, testifying in front of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and a packed crowd Tuesday, held up a list of “corrupt officials” whom he said were responsible for “130,000 forced abortions” in China.

Washington Post: Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng appealed to Congress Tuesday to press the Obama administration to release what he said were high-level diplomatic agreements made with China when then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton negotiated his departure from China nearly …

Boston Globe: Speaking before a congressional panel Tuesday, Chen said his nephew has been threatened by Yinan County officials with life imprisonment if he appeals his three-year sentence for assault.

Peter Saunders at CMF Blog: In other words legalised abortion will lead to legalised euthanasia as a cost-saving and population-control measure. The Political blog ‘Turtle Bay and Beyond’ reported last week on an interview with CFAM’s Susan Yoshihara on the population crisis in China. ‘Demographic trends are poised to spoil Beijing’s plans for a Chinese century,’ said Yoshihara, co-editor (along with Douglas A. Sylvia) of the book, ‘Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics.’

Reuters: Two retired senior Chinese officials are engaged in a battle with one another to sway Beijing’s new leadership over the future of the one-child policy, exposing divisions that have impeded progress in a crucial area of reform.

LifeSiteNews: A mother of two has died after a forced sterilization, which took place against a doctor’s orders, Women’s Rights in China reports.

Gospel Herald: Tens of thousands of Chinese were to be baptized Catholics on Easter Sunday in mainland China, the country with a quarter of the world’s population, while just 50 years ago the Communists had ordered the complete purge of any religions and the indoctrination of atheism in its citizens.

LifeNews: After reading the article, I asked Dr. Brian Clowes, director of education and research at Human Life International, to investigate the number of worldwide abortions since 1973. The results were staggering! He estimates that there have been more than 1.72 billion abortions over the last 40 years, a trend that is not lessening but growing exponentially as more and more countries embrace and legalize contraception and abortion as methods of population control, which is always sold as “family planning” and “reproductive health.”

Family Research Council: The magnitude of these figures is staggering. By comparison, at present there are 315 million people living in the United States. Rabinovitch does not really tell where the data came from within the Chinese government, but these are pretty specific numbers that make sense. In short, we are talking about a maximum of 336 million Chinese who would be under the age of 42 – the peak working years.

LifeNews: In another tragic case, a 42-year-old mother took her life last week inside a local Family Planning Office after two botched forced sterilizations.

LifeNews: The graphic photograph of a of an aborted 7-month boy is widely circulating among Chinese people on the Internet following a horrifying forced abortion that took place on Friday. The forced abortion took place in Chuzhou City, Anhui Province as a woman named Lü, a 33-year-old Chinese woman whose husband reported the case and released the photograph, was victimized.

LifeNews: A new study has found that women with a history of induced abortion were more likely to experience metabolic syndrome compared to women who had never had abortions, increasing their risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes and stroke.

LifeSiteNews: Cao Ruyi, a Chinese woman who was spared a forced abortion last June when she was five months pregnant, is thankful her baby boy is alive and well – but the couple still faces the grim prospect of persecution from the totalitarian state apparatus.

Telegraph: More than half a billion birth control procedures, including at least 336 million abortions, have been performed in the name of the one-child policy, China’s Health ministry revealed yesterday.

AP: China pledged Wednesday to allow charities, industry associations and other nonprofit groups to play a greater role in society in an acknowledgement of the growing importance of independent organizations that the authoritarian government traditionally has treated with suspicion.

Phayul.com: Around 200 Tibetans from all over Switzerland took part in a special solidarity prayer vigil in front of the United Nations office in Geneva yesterday.

Kristen Hatten at LifeNews: The horror of such a place is difficult for us to imagine, but it is a reality, every day, for over one billion people. How? How could such a nightmarish Orwellian state exist in 2012, when every day we pride ourselves on moving forward and becoming more and more enlightened? The answer is simple: Communism.

World Net Daily: China’s crackdown on its thriving house-church movement is surging just months after it was reported attacks on Christians had subsided, according to a report from the human rights group China Aid.

Pat Buchanan at Townhall: What is it that gives a party its legitimacy, its right to rule? What holds a nation together when its cradle faith, its founding ideology, has been abandoned by both elites and the people? That is China’s coming crisis.

Telegraph: A Chinese wealth survey has found that Asia has more billionaires than any other continent, apparently surpassing North America for the first time.

Religion Clause Blog: According to yesterday’s London Daily Telegraph, in China, Christian “house church” activist Cao Nan has filed a lawsuit against the police in the city of Shenzhen to challenge the police decision to detain him for 12 days for meeting with other Christians to preach and sing hymns in Shenzhen’s Lizhi Park.

NBC: A 13-month-old child was fatally crushed by a car containing Chinese officials after they went to collect a fine from the parents for breaching the country’s one-child policy, according to Chinese state media.

Today, scientist may have turned urine into a different kind of gold, stem cell gold. Researchers in China have created neural stem cells from the cells found in urine. From Wired . . .

AP: Chinese courts convicted eight Tibetans over accusations they incited others to self-immolate in the first such prosecutions to become publicly known . . .

Washington Post: The Tibetans of China had a difficult 2012, and so far 2013 is not looking much better. Tibetan self-immolations, in protest against Beijing’s increasingly harsh rule over the Himalayan region, are continuing apace. Since the new Communist Party leadership took power, Chinese authorities appear to have tightened their grip on Tibet, sending in security forces to cordon off areas of unrest and even confiscating thousands of satellite dishes.

LifeNews: Despite some reports claiming China may relax or even do away with its brutal one-child policy, that results in forced abortions, coercive sterilizations and other human rights abuses, Chinese officials are renewing its commitment to it.

Reuters: “If this goes on, there will be no taxpayers, no workers and no caregivers for the elderly,” said Gu Baochang, a demography professor at Renmin University.

AP: The family of an imprisoned Chinese rights lawyer was allowed to visit him for the first time in nearly 10 months, providing a confirmation that he was still alive, a human rights group reported.

AP: The workers demanded the scrapping of the ridiculously strict requirements stipulating that workers only have two minutes to go to the toilet and workers will be fined 50 yuan ($8) if they are late once and fired if they are late twice,” said the security guard, surnamed Feng.

Bill Donohue at Newsmax: Hollywood was not given a pass because of the delicacy of the Constitution: there are First Amendment considerations in trimming the rights of the mentally ill, and there are Second Amendment rights involved in gun control. Hollywood was given a pass because it greases Obama.

LifeNews: It sounds like the best news we could possibly hear: Media reports claim that China is going to phase out its One Child Policy and allow parents to have two children. Within eight years, the government will allow parents to have as many children as they want.

The Guardian: A Chinese man who agitated for an investigation into the suspicious death of an activist has been detained at an unknown location, his lawyer said on Monday, describing him as possibly the first to be held under a controversial new law that allows secret detention.

The Guardian: Re-education through labour’ allows police to jail criminals without using courts and has targeted activists, claim critics.

One News Now: ChinaAid has released the secret Communist Party Central Committee document, which includes detailed instructions for a nationwide crackdown. Bob Fu tells OneNewsNow the purpose is to keep Christianity away from the brightest minds in China, who will eventually become professionals and government leaders.

Independent: Visit your parents. That’s an order. China’s national legislature amended its law on the elderly yesterday to require that adult children visit their aged parents “often” – or risk being sued by them.

AP: Bigamy is a criminal offense in China, while rules restrict most couples to just one child.

AP: This year’s Nobel literature winner Mo Yan, who has been criticized for his cozy relationship with China’s Communist Party, defended censorship Thursday as something as necessary as airport security checks.

Peter Zeughauser at the Wall Street Journal (via Google): The Shanghai Bar’s invitation confronts Big Law with a dilemma. Joining a Chinese bar is viewed by some Americans as condoning and helping to perpetrate a judicial system that is corrupt and badly in need of reform. Others regard joining the bar as an opportunity to advocate for reform from within the Chinese judicial system.

NCPA Policy Digest: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) have started to plan their own development bank, as well as a bailout fund to help many countries around the world. This is done in response to the growing dissatisfaction of Western banking institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), says The Diplomat.

LifeNews: The nephew of Chen Guangcheng has been sentenced to 39 months in prison for supposedly injuring a Chinese government agent who raided his house in the aftermath of Chen’s escape to the United States.

AP: The surge in self-immolations, along with an increase in large demonstrations, mark a new phase in the Tibetan protests.

WorldNetDaily: The leader of a Christian outreach in China says the recent power transition in the Communist government could mean good things for long-persecuted Christians there.

Steve Elwart at WorldNetDaily: The hope of several countries is that they can expand the ITU’s jurisdiction to the Internet, replacing the current governing system with one that is controlled by a U.N. bureaucracy. The member nations will also consider an “Internet tax” designed to collect money from more affluent nations and redistribute it to poorer nations to improve their Internet infrastructure. ITRs do not currently include regulation of the Internet within their jurisdiction, since they have not been revised since the beginning of the Internet communications era.

Washington Post: Google and many of its most popular subdomains, including Google e-mail, have been blocked by a “DNS poison” in China, according to Chinese Web monitoring site GreatFire.org, an extraordinary step in Web censorship even for the Chinese government.

Reuters: President Hu Jintao warned China’s incoming leaders on Thursday that corruption threatened the ruling Communist Party and the state, but said the party must stay in charge as it battles growing social unrest.

AP on MyWay: She’s among many people attempting to bring local complaints directly to the central government in an age-old Chinese tradition that has continued during the Communist Party era. But police never make that easy, and this week, as an all-important leadership transition begins, a dragnet is aimed at keeping anyone perceived as a threat or a troublemaker out of Beijing.

LifeNews: esterday I stumbled across the trailer for a documentary called It’s A Girl. The 3-minute preview stopped me in my tracks – particularly the part in which an Indian woman matter-of-factly describes how she strangled her newborn daughters. Eight of them.

Baptist Press: The recommendation — offered by a think tank under the State Council, China’s Cabinet — called for phasing in termination of the coercive population control program, according to the Associated Press. The foundation recommended:

Spiegel.de: The Chinese are seen as victors in the global financial crisis, and as both a hope and a threat to German industry. Beijing wants to be more than the world’s factory. But the country’s economic engine is showing signs of stalling and it is uncertain what direction it will take in the future . . . China is on a global buying spree, and it sees the current economic crisis in Europe and the United States as an historic opportunity to energetically press ahead with its offensive. The financial services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that China’s so-called red capitalists spent $23.9 billion on shares in foreign companies in the first half of 2012, or three times as much as in the same period last year.

Fay Sonier at National Post: Alan Borovoy argues that the personhood of the pre-born child is irrelevant to the abortion discussion because, in his opinion, there is no rational way to decide when personhood begins. As such, he implies, Canada cannot establish any legislation that would regulate abortion. This stands in direct opposition to the reality in countless countries across the globe. Even China, the land of the One-Child Policy, and the horrific forced abortions that have resulted from it, has laws against sex-selection. Personhood can be known, and even if it couldn’t, we would still need to grapple with the critical matter at hand in every abortion, which is to ask at what point the pre-born child has value.

FoodConsumer.org: Women who have had an induced abortion may have to face a drastically increased risk of developing breast cancer, according to A.R. Jiang of Jiangsu Province Institute of Cancer Research in Nanjing, Jiangsu, China and colleagues who reported in Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention, which associates induced abortion with elevated risk of breast cancer.

Profit.NDTV.com: Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s family members today rejected an American newspaper’s claim that they had amassed assets worth $2.7 billion and threatened to take legal action against the daily which, however, stood by its report.

AP: China blocked access to The New York Times website Friday after the paper published a lengthy article claiming the family of Premier Wen Jiabao has amassed assets worth $2.7 billion through a web of investments

AP: Human Rights First gave its 2012 Human Rights Award to Chen Guangcheng at its annual gala on Wednesday

Boston Globe: People in China are increasingly worried about corruption, inequality and food safety, according to a survey released Tuesday that also found that about half of Chinese like American ideas about democracy . . . The Communist Party has said repeatedly that pervasive corruption threatens its hold on power.

Weekly Standard: In the spin room following the debate, I asked top Obama officials, as well as Planned Parenthood chief Cecille Richards, if Obama’s position on abortion is as extreme as what Ryan claimed. The Obama campaign denied the president favored abortion without restriction, but top Obama officials Jim Messina, Stephanie Cutter, and David Axelrod could not name a single restriction the president supports.

LIfeNews: As a result, the United States is currently one of only nine nations that allow abortion after 14 weeks of gestation.[ii] Even among this group, however, the United States is one of the most permissive in its treatment of abortion, placing it in the company of China, North Korea, and Canada, the only countries in the world that permit abortion for any reason after fetal viability.[iii]

Turtle Bay and Beyond: The international youth organization World Youth Alliance has released a report containing allegations that the European Union finances forced abortions, including in China, through its development aid programs.

Wall Street Journal (via Google): Chinese and South Korean central-bank officials criticized the U.S. Federal Reserve’s latest easing efforts and advocated reducing Asia’s dependence on the U.S. dollar. The comments Thursday, at a joint seminar in Beijing by the two central banks, are the clearest indication yet of a rising backlash in Asia against U.S. monetary policy, suggesting it could speed up the search for alternatives to the dollar as the main global currency.

BBC video report here. “Figures from the latest census show China’s birth-rate has fallen way below the level necessary to keep the population stable. The policy is unpopular, and it is leading to serious imbalances.”

AP: A car carrying the U.S. ambassador to China was mildly damaged after becoming the target of boisterous anti-Japan demonstrators who were expressing outrage over a territorial dispute and marking the 81st anniversary of Japan’s invasion of China.

The Telegraph: A senior advisor to the Chinese government has called for an attack on the Japanese bond market to precipitate a funding crisis and bring the country to its knees, unless Tokyo reverses its decision to nationalise the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea.

Free Beacon: China’s most powerful military leader, in an unusual public statement, last week ordered military forces to prepare for combat, as Chinese warships deployed to waters near disputed islands and anti-Japan protests throughout the country turned violent.

LifeNews: On September 13, All Girls Allowed (AGA) sent out a press release with the bold title, “Chinese Government Bans Forced Abortion.” We wish we could agree with our colleagues at AGA. Unfortunately, this time, we cannot.

BioEdge: China, a nation notorious for stifling fertility with its draconian one-child policy, is now worried about an epidemic of infertility. The head of Guangdong’s family planning commission, Luo Wenzhi, is appealing for sperm donors. “Donating your sperm is healthy,” he told a Chinese newspaper. “It won’t hurt you nor kill you.”