Tag Archives: Country: China

The Age: Sydney’s Catholic Archbishop has questioned whether the gender imbalance caused by the selective abortion of female foetuses could hinder the rise to affluence of China and India.

Bloomberg: Chen Guangcheng, the Chinese dissident whose flight to the U.S. in April roiled U.S.-China relations, said iPhone-maker Apple Inc. (AAPL) should take a more outspoken role criticizing China for its one-child policy.

Telegraph: Thousands of protesters surrounded Hong Kong’s government headquarters on Monday over a plan to introduce a pro-China school curriculum that they describe as an attempt to brainwash students.

FoxNews (includes video): Fully two-thirds of the national debt is owed to the U.S. government, American investors and future retirees, through the Social Security Trust Fund and pension plans for civil service workers and military personnel. China, it turns out, holds less than 8 percent of the money our government has borrowed over the years.

George Weigel at EPPC: Despite some hiccups caused by the sorry state of the world economy, China is still The Future for many global analysts. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has even suggested that Americans have a lot to learn politically from the economic successes of Chinese authoritarianism. That China is the rising world power seems taken for granted in many elite foreign policy circles. I’m not buying. I didn’t buy “Japan is Number One” when that was the mantra two decades ago, because Japan had severe demographic problems-as in, very few children; its lack of the most basic form of people power in the most elementary form, I thought, would soon become evident in economic weakness (as it has). China also has serious demographic problems. Thanks to a brutally enforced one-child policy

C-FAM Friday Fax: Traditional Values Resolution Hijacked at Human Rights Council in Geneva

But the United States and some European countries objected that the rights of women and homosexual and transgender persons are frequently undermined by traditional values and religion, and that something should be said in the study about the conflict. The International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) joined the criticisms.

Yahoo Finance: a Chinese business magazine said a state bank has provided $1 billion in loans to help companies with listings abroad move them to domestic exchanges . . . The withdrawals follow accusations of improper accounting by some companies and a deadlock between Beijing and Washington over whether U.S. regulators can oversee their China-based auditors. Some Chinese companies say they are pulling out of U.S. markets because a low share price fails to reflect the strength of their business. Withdrawing also eliminates the cost of complying with American financial reporting rules.

Wall Street Journal (via Google): Parents want their kids to attend Christian summer courses. Will the Party authorities allow them? . . . Beijing is always uneasy about religion, and the vague legality allows it to regulate religious education on a whim, all the while telling the international community that parents are free to raise their children in their faith.

NY Times: “This trial is the outcome of a political struggle,” said Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent defense lawyer, referring to powerful enemies of Mr. Bo, a brash up-and-coming politician who alienated many party luminaries. “Any trial to which the central party pays this much attention had no chance of being fair.”

LifeSiteNews: Seven years ago, Tang Leqiong was approached by officials in her home, taken to a hospital, and forced to abort her eight-month-old unborn child. Why? Because her permit had expired. Tang was registered as a member of the farm population, entitling her to have a second child after giving birth to a girl in 1996.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Can a “human-centered approach” to issues include policies with the express purpose of eliminating people? This argument is cropping up, particularly in debates over climate change and now health care.

LifeNews: In the last several years, women who regret their abortions have been active at the UN telling delegates and bureaucrats how abortion hurt them. Now they are spearheading a coalition that submitted a formal complaint to the UN Commission on the Status of Women against China over its One Child Policy.

AP: The government says the move is motivated by health concerns, but others said Friday that it’s a risky campaign to secularize the Muslim minority that will likely backfire.

LifeNews: Dr Jackie Sheehan, senior fellow at the China Policy Institute and associate professor at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Nottingham in England appears to have the answer. In a new article she’s written in the South China Morning Post, Sheehan says “powerful financial and personal incentives” exist for local officials to ensure “forced abortions and sterilizations continue on mainland despite calls to reform family planning laws.

CNSNews: More Communist Party members in the Peoples Republic of China are attending church, according to the U.S. State Department’s latest report on International Religious Freedom.

AP: China criticized Mitt Romney on Tuesday, saying the U.S. presidential candidate’s statement that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel could worsen an already tense Mideast situation, or even re-ignite a war between Palestinians and Israelis.

AP: China said Tuesday that a U.S. report describing repression of religion in China and elsewhere is a political tool based on groundless accusations that displays Washington’s arrogance and ignorance.

Washington Times: “The curriculum only paints a rosy picture about the Communist Party… This is just an attempt to introduce the mainland agenda in Hong Kong schools,” she said.

AP: “In contemporary China, only socialism with Chinese characteristics can develop China, benefit people and revitalize the nation,” Xi said.

GroundReport.com: The Police in China have continued to intensify its persecution on the Christian community with the recent detention of Sunday School children and their teacher during a raid in China’s remote Xinjiang province.

LifeNews: A Chinese woman has become the victim of a forced sterilization after she and her husband petitioned to receive the funds a court awarded in a lawsuit they filed.

NY Times: Pan Chunyan was grabbed from her grocery store when she was almost eight months pregnant with her third child. Men working for a local official locked her up with two other women, and four days later brought her to a hospital and forced her to put her thumbprint on a document saying she had agreed to an abortion. A nurse injected her with a drug.

LifeSiteNews: Alozj Peterle, the Slovenian MEP responsible for the passage of an EU resolution condemning a much-publicized case of forced abortion in China, gave an interview today with Vatican Radio, saying that public funding should not be allocated to coercive “family planning” measures in China.

AP: The exchanges have become a regular fixture in China-US relations along with recurring economic and policy dialogues. But they haven’t produced any significant narrowing of differences on human rights . . .

AP: Yonhap News Agency says China arrested the activists while they were discussing ways to help North Korean defectors in China. Yonhap cited no sources.

Alex Newman at The New American: The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is under heavy fire after an investigation by the Population Research Institute (PRI) showed yet again that the UN is working with the communist dictatorship ruling mainland China to enforce its barbaric “one-child” policy — complete with forced abortions, involuntary sterilization, kidnapping of “illegal” children, and other brutal tactics.

AP: The government body that controls the Catholic church in China says it is investigating the selection of a bishop who cut his ties to the group as soon as he was ordained, in an embarrassment to Beijing that could deepen its rift with the Vatican.

AP: The family of a woman forced to undergo an abortion because she ran afoul of China’s one-child policy has accepted a cash settlement . . .

Catholic Culture: The Vatican announced the excommunication of a Chinese bishop who was ordained without the approval of the Holy See, while Chinese authorities have taken into custody another bishop who proclaimed his loyalty to Rome and renounced the government-backed Patriotic Association.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: A Resolution at the EU Parliament last week raised alarm bells regarding the recent controversy in China surrounding the forced abortion that Feng Jianmei was forced to undergo.

Computer World: Collapse of Great Firewall of China is inevitable, Google Chairman predicts

BBC: New allegations of forced late-term abortion have emerged in China’s Fujian province, a lawyer has told the BBC.

AP: A newly ordained Chinese bishop has been placed in isolation after announcing he’s quitting his government posts in a challenge to Beijing’s control over the Catholic clergy . . .

AP: The Vatican has urged China to engage in good-faith dialogue with the Roman Catholic church, urging the communist government to avoid damaging gestures . . .

LifeSiteNews: Hu Xia was seven months pregnant with her second child when officials in Shangche township, located in Hubei province, told her she must pay a fine or undergo an abortion.

Daniel Pipes at National Review: The Russian and Chinese actions point to these alliances shaping the foreign policies of outside powers, too. Whereas the European Union and the U.S. government are increasingly sympathetic to Islamism, in part as a way to tame their own Muslim populations, Moscow and Beijing have a history of open conflict with their Muslim populations and therefore adopt policies more hostile to Islamism in the Middle East.

Washington Times: A pro-democracy heckler interrupted a speech by Chinese President Hu Jintao at the swearing-in of Hong Kong’s new leader Sunday, and tens of thousands of residents marched to protest Chinese rule on the 15th anniversary of the Asian financial hub’s return to Beijing’s control.

The Epoch Times: The husband of a woman from China’s Shaanxi Province who was forced by officials to abort a seven-month fetus this month said he will sue the local authorities, according to his lawyer.

AP: . . . the business and financial news agency published a report Friday detailing the multimillion-dollar assets of relatives of the man set to become the country’s next president.

The Hindu: Ms. Feng’s case has reignited debate about whether China should persist with its controversial family planning policies. According to Yang Zhizhu, a professor at the China Youth University for Political Sciences who has challenged the legality of family planning penalties, an increasing number of scholars, activists and ordinary citizens — with growing awareness of their rights — are questioning the enforcement of family planning rules, particularly with declining fertility rates across most cities.

AFP on Yahoo: The husband of a Chinese woman whose forced abortion seven months into her pregnancy caused uproar has disappeared, a relative said Tuesday, adding her family is being harassed on a daily basis.

LifeNews: Last week a woman stepped forward to share about her traumatic forced abortion, inspired by the response to Feng Jianmei’s story. Zhang Wen Fang, 43, told Chai Ling of All Girls Allowed that she lost both her baby and her livelihood when officials forced her into a hospital for surgery four years ago.

BBC: A group of 100 parents in China who have lost an only child want to sue the government for better financial compensation as they grow older.

AP: The Chinese father of a forcibly aborted baby whose case prompted an international outcry has been beaten and forced into hiding . . .

The Economist: But no loophole could help Feng Jianmei. On June 14th the provincial government apologised to Ms Feng, and said family-planning officials in Shaanxi would be fired. But that deals with the symptoms not the cause. “I had no money to pay the fine,” says her husband. “But does that mean we should suffer the grief of losing a child?”

Findlaw: That’s what led to a three-day conference in Beijing from May 28 to 30. The United States-China Intellectual Property Adjudication Conference was held at Renmin University in Beijing and had over 1,200 attendees, including business leaders, government officials and jurists.

International Herald Tribune: Hu Xijin, the editor of Global Times, a populist pro-government newspaper, criticized the abortion on Sina Weibo, the Twitter-like microblogging service in China . . . But he also suggested the one-child policy was still necessary, saying that “world resources cannot afford to feed a China with billions of people.”

New Statesman: There are 300,000 officials whose job is to enforce the one child policy, backed up by a network of 92 million members who assist with enforcement and informing.

Washington Times: City officials in China have apologised to a woman who was forced to have an abortion and suspended three people responsible, state media reports.

ProLifeBlogs: “This is nothing less than a crime against humanity. Every innocent life deserves to be protected, and no woman deserves this type of barbaric, dehumanizing treatment,” said ADF Director of Global Activities Benjamin Bull. “ADF calls upon our leaders in Washington to thoroughly condemn China’s practice of forced abortion and demand that it stop immediately. This is one event, but it is undoubtedly only one example of many more such forced abortions that occur in China.”

CNSNews: Chinese human-rights activist Harry Wu said he was “very disappointed in Obama,” and he also said the U.S. State Department, by excluding chapters on religious freedom for the first time in its human rights reports on various countries this year was ignoring the problem of religious repression in Communist China.

The Alliance Defense Fund is calling on U.S. political leaders to condemn the atrocity of forced abortion in China in the wake of graphic media reports that the government recently forced a woman seven months pregnant to have her baby aborted.

AFP: Graphic images posted online showing the bloody corpse of a baby whose mother was allegedly forced to terminate her pregnancy at seven months have caused an uproar in China.

LifeNews: The officials asked for RMB 40,000 in fines from Feng Jianmei’s family and, when they did not receive the money, they forcibly aborted Feng at seven months, laying the body of her aborted baby next to her in the bed (seen in picture, right).

Religion Clause Blog: Xinhua reports today that China’s State Council Information Office has published the National Human Rights Action Plan of China (2012-2015).

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Two groups that work to prevent human rights abuses in China, China Aid and All Girls Allowed, have reported that a woman who is five months pregnant from the Hunan Province is being held at a hospital in Changsha city for violating China’s one-child policy and faces an imminent forced abortion if she does not consent to a voluntary abortion or pay a fine. Cao Ruyi, 37, and her husband Li Fu have a six year old daughter.

LifeSiteNews (video embedded): Turner had to answer for his history of provocative statements, and made a few new ones, when members of the website WeAreChange.org caught up with him on camera late last month.

AP: China plans to stiffen restrictions on Internet service providers as it seeks even greater control over the opinions voiced on the country’s lively microblogs and other web forums.

AP: State media reported that staff at a religious school in heavily Muslim far western China set off explosives to fend off a police raid and that 12 children were burned.

Baptist Press: One day, I was out sharing the Gospel in some small Chinese villages when, suddenly, the police surrounded me. They grabbed me and threw me in the back of a van.

Guardian: Official forecasts often predict light pollution while US embassy tweets say conditions are bad, hazardous or even ‘crazy bad’

NY Times: The rally in Victoria Park, an annual event that commemorates the Tiananmen massacre in Beijing on June 4, 1989, drew 180,000 people this year, according to organizers. The police put the crowd at 85,000. China Daily, published by the Chinese government . . .

Washington Times: The yuan and the yen — the currencies of Asia’s two biggest economies — started direct trading Friday in Tokyo and Shanghai. …

Turtle Bay and Beyond: If you thought it was costly to have a child, consider how much one couple in China paid. For violating China’s one-child policy by having a second child, the parents were fined 1.3 million yuan ($204,114).

NC Register: As Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng prepared to give his first speech in the United States, a group of Chinese expatriates gathered in New York City May 29 to discuss abuses in their homeland’s one-child-per-family policy.

AP: Google has fired a new salvo in a censorship battle with Beijing by adding a feature that warns users in China who enter search keywords that might produce blocked results and suggests they try other terms.

Tim Ferguson at Forbes: That’s because Chen in rural Shandong province was fighting, among other things, application of China’s one-child policy that has included pressure or worse to end pregnancies. In the hubbub of Chen’s escape from Shandong and eventual flight to New York, Bob Fu, a Texas activist for Christian causes in China, was seen playing an active role. But in the secular world in which Chen is now ensconced, this part of his struggle now draws little conversation.

AP: Twenty-three years after China’s sweeping crackdown on the Tiananmen Square democracy demonstrations, fewer than a dozen people remain in prison, among them elderly and likely mentally ill prisoners, a rights group said Thursday.

Catholic Culture: The late Bishop Francis Li Yi of Shanxi cannot be buried with episcopal honors, Chinese officials have told local Catholics.

Chen Guangcheng at the NY Times: The fundamental question the Chinese government must face is lawlessness. China does not lack laws, but the rule of law. As a result, those who handled my case were able to openly flout the nation’s laws in many ways for many years.

Washington Times: Chen Guangfu, the eldest brother of Chen Guangcheng, fled his home in Shandong province and arrived in Beijing on Wednesday to seek legal help for his son, Chen Kegui, who is being held on an attempted murder charge. …

XINHUANET: With most Chinese provinces experiencing a serious gender imbalance, a government official in charge of family planning has pledged the country will work hard to ameliorate the problem.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: They were inspired by the reports of the Club of Rome, a think tank that unites Heads of States, UN bureaucrats, diplomats, scientists and business leaders who claim they “share a common concern for the future of humanity and the planet.”

AP reports.

Catholic.org (includes video): In China, one thousand five hundred abortions occur per hour. Let that number sink in for a minute. These are the results of an investigative report that has been presented by Accuracy in Media and Women’s Rights Without frontiers (WRWF) have been presented in the online publication, The Blaze. The details are gruesome and shocking.