In Great Hall of The People, “Complete Victory.” In the Countryside, a More Complicated Story

In late 2020, China declared victory over poverty, marking the end of a five-year campaign to raise rural incomes above $600 per year. In the essay “The Countryside Through A Daughter In-Law’s Eyes,” though, Huang Deng wrote movingly about the harsh realities of life outside of China’s urban areas. The poverty alleviation campaign was intended to address some of those issues, yet significant questions remain about who, exactly, accrued the benefits. Nevertheless, in a triumphant speech given in the Great Hall of the People this week, Xi Jinping reiterated that the campaign was a complete victory. Bloomberg News provided a breakdown of Xi’s speech and an accompanying People’s Daily article that lauded him, personally, for the campaign’s successes:

Xi said in a speech Thursday that some 10 million people have been lifted out of poverty annually during his eight years in power, at a cost of almost 1.6 trillion yuan ($248 billion). The event at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, including an awards ceremony for key participants in the campaign, was televised live to the nation of 1.4 billion people by state media.

The ceremony highlighted Xi’s personal role in the fight, honoring a town in the northwest whose officials he worked with earlier in his career and mentioning his visits to impoverished areas. “I insisted on looking at real poverty, understanding the real efforts to reduce poverty, helping those are in real poverty and achieving real poverty alleviation,” Xi said in a speech that lasted more than an hour.

[…] The People’s Daily ran a three-page, 22,000-character article Wednesday summarizing the poverty-alleviation orders Xi has issued since taking power. His efforts “achieved great success and made a great contribution to global progress,” the party’s official mouthpiece said. [Source]

That's a narrative framework that:
a) Crushes Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin, *and* Deng Xiaoping together
b) Puts them in Mao's shadow.
c) Raises up the post-2012 period
d) Starts down path of presenting post-2012 as culmination/solution to *millennia* of Chinese history.

— Carl Minzner (@CarlMinzner) February 25, 2021

(2/x) Recognize how unusual the format is. Page 2 – single article, entire page of text (no photos). Sure, you sometimes see that for full page releases of Party documents, or reprints of high level speeches. But not usually for single articles.

— Carl Minzner (@CarlMinzner) February 23, 2021

(4/x) The language isn't cold reporting. It's emotive. Xi is depicted *personally* as the caring, moving leader who is moved by the people's pain and takes action.

— Carl Minzner (@CarlMinzner) February 23, 2021

(8/x) Ha! Gets even better. Today's @PDChina has an article in *exactly* the same vein as yesterday. But, get this – today, it starts on page one, and occupies ALL of page 2 *and* 3.

Number of uses of Xi Jinping's name? 139 (!!!)

— Carl Minzner (@CarlMinzner) February 24, 2021

At The Washington Post, Lily Kuo wrote about the political significance of Xi’s declaration, and some netizens’ skepticism about the numbers:

Over the last eight years since Xi became head of the ruling Communist Party, the government has spent as much as 1.6 trillion yuan ($248 billion) on poverty alleviation — as local officials went door to door to identify impoverished households, delivering assistance from loans to farm animals. Experts say the policy is key to Xi’s legacy as he works to cement his position as the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, China’s paramount leader and founding father of the Chinese Communist Party.

“Xi Jinping claimed victory in the war against the coronavirus and now he is claiming victory in the war against poverty. This gives Xi the ability the claim victories in two major challenges facing China. This is crucial if you are trying to position yourself as a leader akin to Mao,” said Carl Minzner, a professor at Fordham Law School and author of “End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival Is Undermining Its Rise.”

[…] “Can someone tell me what the official standard is for eliminating poverty? Why can I still see people on the street begging?” one asked on the microblog Weibo. Another joked, “China has eliminated absolute poverty. That’s right. Everyone is just relatively poor.” [Source]

 

#China's government says nearly 100 million people have been lifted out of #poverty in the last 8 years.

How have the lives of people in rural areas changed?
Part 2 of our interview with @mmchitwood – who spent years living in a rural village in Yunnan @Geetagurumurthy pic.twitter.com/ujxN8ckNCV

— Danai Howard 丹娜 (@DanaiHoward) February 25, 2021

Chinese media outlets have showered the campaign in praise. Global Times, a state run tabloid, called the campaign a “world miracle” and wrote that it would be the launching point for China’s nation building after the “Two Centenaries”—the hundredth anniversaries of the Party’s founding, on July 1 this year, the People’s Republic of China’s, on October 1, 2049. Some find the story too good to be true. At China Media Project, David Bandurski examined the state-propagated myth of a rural Hunan chili farmer, arguing that the campaign was not simply a social or economic endeavor but also an illuminating example of how media and propaganda outlets work in tandem to “launch satellites” packed with “positive energy”:

By this point, Dong’s story had come full circle. A national movement coordinated from the top had generated demand across the country for exemplary cases. These had trickled back up to the top as local leaders signaled their compliance, offering up lists of local award candidates, like ritual offerings of “positive energy.” Repackaged at the national level, stories like that of Dong Heqin were delivered through outlets like The Paper, Xinhua and the People’s Daily.

[…] There is a slang term in Chinese today that speaks to this basic skepticism, directing suspicion at those boasts that are so enlarged that their seams begin to tear, revealing the stuffing inside. That term is “launching a satellite,” or fangweixing (放卫星), and its history stretches back to the calamitous political actions of the 1950s, when tens of millions starved in the wake of such lies.

[…] These days, the CCP no longer talks in its official discourse about “sending up satellites” of economic or other policy glory. But the phrase remains as a popular reference to absurd and boastful acts of propaganda. And last week, a post on China’s WeChat platform applied the phrase to Dong Heqin’s story. The headline: “Officialdom Launches a Satellite: It is Captured Alive by Netizens!” (官方放卫星，被网友活捉). [Source]

But as this report from Baojing county shows, not everyone in China's rural hinterlands has benefitted from a renewed anti-poverty drive, which has raised questions about how precarity is measured and how funds are allocated to those in need. pic.twitter.com/P6BfIH5Um8

— Sean Gleeson (@seanjgleeson) February 26, 2021

Hyperbolic coverage aside, significant policy steps need to be taken in order to consolidate the real gains the campaign has brought to rural citizens. Towards that end, the Chinese government has created a new National Rural Revitalization Bureau that will lead the next stage of rural development policies. The Bureau’s creation was preceded by an annual policy paper that encouraged financial institutions to invest heavily in the countryside. In an opinion piece published in Foreign Policy, Martin Chorzempa and Tianlei Huang argued that investment should focus on high schools in order to raise rural education levels:

Among migrant workers and the underdeveloped rural communities that depend on the wages they send home, a quiet crisis is taking place—with potentially dramatic consequences for China’s future growth. Despite what the GDP number suggests about the country’s successful handling of the pandemic, China’s longer-term economic risks have only grown—and are a direct result of the crisis in rural China. As Stanford University researchers Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell document in their meticulously researched book, Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise, hundreds of millions of rural Chinese face a dangerous lack of human capital and suffer from pervasive health problems, including widespread iron-deficiency anemia, uncorrected myopia, and parasitic intestinal worms. Exacerbated by the pandemic, China’s rural crisis remains largely invisible to outside observers, and even to many Chinese.

[…] China’s leadership knows this is a problem and has taken the human capital issue seriously in the last decade and a half by pouring money and resources into education. But it hasn’t been enough to correct for decades of insufficient attention. A little-known fact about China: Only since 2005 have the first nine years of school been free and mandatory, and even today completing high school after those nine years comes at a steep cost for families. Public high school, which is not yet mandatory, often costs many times the average rural family’s income. Eliminating tuition for poor families would likely lead to better educational outcomes by removing a key barrier, allowing more children to continue school and develop critical skills. [Source]

Hukou system, land-use reform, poor education and low high school attainment rates, rising wages and closing factories mean rural residents may be living their best lives now, but the future is uncertain. New Rural Vitalization campaign must address these 3/

— Matthew Chitwood (@mmchitwood) February 25, 2021

In order to solve the glaring education gap between rural and urban areas, the state is attempting to entice e-commerce workers to head to the countryside. At The South China Morning Post, Yujie Xue reported on the plan to get “talent” into the countryside:

This plan is Beijing’s solution to the challenges that China is facing, as it seeks to cultivate a large domestic market to counter challenges outside the country. Following decades of brain drain and declining investment, the countryside has become a weak spot in China’s economic development: While the expansive region is home to 44 per cent of the country’s population, rural income per capita last year was only 39 per cent that of urban areas.

[…] While it remains to be seen how many skilled workers will answer Beijing’s call, some in China’s technology sector already see a role for themselves in helping China’s countryside cope with its ageing population and labour exodus.

[…] Other Chinese companies have also tried to bring technologies to the countryside. Alibaba Group Holding, the owner of the South China Morning Post, has been promoting so-called Taobao villages since 2009 to help rural residents sell their products online. Pinduoduo, a fast-growing online shopping platform, has been offering week-long training programmes in finance, business operations and online marketing to rural merchants. JD.com, another e-commerce giant, has created rural service centres that use drones and other technologies to expand its logistic capabilities. [Source]

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/02/in-great-hall-of-the-people-complete-victory-in-the-countryside-a-more-complicated-story/

Photo: China, Ping’an, by Cyprien Hauser

China, Ping’an, by Cyprien Hauser (CC BY-ND 2.0)

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/02/photo-china-pingan-by-cyprien-hauser/

Photo: Chinese Lantern Festival, by Andrew Milligan sumo

Chinese Lantern Festival, by Andrew Milligan sumo (CC BY 2.0)

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/02/photo-chinese-lantern-festival-by-andrew-milligan-sumo/

Police Arrest Seven, Engage in “Online Pursuit” to Crackdown on Online Speech

The arrest of a popular Weibo blogger marked the denouement of months of high-altitude clashes between People’s Liberation Army troops and Indian soldiers in the Himalayas. In mid-February, the two sides agreed to synchronized disengagement, whereby troops retreated from positions held on the disputed border. Shortly after, a Chinese spokesperson disclosed for the first time that four Chinese troops had been killed in a bloody June brawl that left 20 Indian soldiers dead. Some did not believe the officially released casualty numbers. Qiu Ziming, a former investigative journalist who blogged under the handle La Bi Xiaoqiu, compared the clashes to a video game and suggested that more had died in the fighting. The following day, Qiu was arrested by local police for “[maliciously distorting] the truth,” and charged with picking quarrels and provoking trouble. At CNN, Nectar Gan reported on Qiu’s arrest and the new criminal law that means the blogger could face jail time for his post:

In 2018, China passed a law that bans people from “insulting or slandering heroes and martyrs.” Originally a civil matter, the law will be made a criminal offense in an amendment to the country’s criminal law, which comes into effect next month. Under that amendment, people who “insult, slander or use other means to infringe the reputation and honor of heroes and martyrs and damage the public interest of society” can be jailed for up to three years.

[…] On Friday morning, a popular blogger with 2.5 million followers on China’s Twitter-like Weibo raised questions over the official death toll, suggesting the real figure might be higher than four. “This is why India dares to publicize the number and names of their casualties, because from India’s point of view, they won with a smaller cost,” he wrote.

By the evening, police in the eastern city of Nanjing had detained the blogger, identified by his surname Qiu, for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” — an offense commonly used by the Chinese government to target dissent and criticism.

Writing on its official Weibo account Saturday, the Nanjing police claimed that Qiu had “distorted the truth” and “caused extremely abominable impact on society,” adding that he had confessed to his “unlawful act.” [Source]

This was not Qiu Ziming’s first run-in with the law. In 2010, while working as an investigative reporter for the newspaper Economic Observer, Qiu was branded a wanted criminal by police cronies of a local paper manufacturer that Qiu had investigated. From a 2010 report by Madeline Earp of The Committee to Protect Journalists:

[…] On July 23, police in southeastern Zhejiang province issued an arrest warrant for a reporter for the Beijing-based Economic Observer on charges of damaging the reputation of paper manufacturer Zhejiang Kan Specialty Material Company in a series of stories alleging insider trading. The company denied any wrongdoing, according to news reports. The journalist, Qiu Ziming, went into hiding but stood behind his reporting in posts to his Sina micro-blog.

The paper was quick to comment. “We are deeply shocked that our reporter Qiu Ziming has been listed as a wanted criminal due to engaging in standard news reporting,” a statement on its English- and Chinese-language websites said. “We’re committed to using all legal means to defend the legitimate right of the media and journalists to conduct interviews and engage in reporting.”

By July 29, police had revoked the warrant and apologized, according to local news reports. The website of the General Administration of Press and Publication, the state agency responsible for regulating Chinese print media, posted an article by its own news outlet, China Press and Publishing Journal, that supported reporters’ rights: “News organizations have the right to know, interview, cover, criticize and monitor events regarding national and public interest. Journalistic activities by news organizations and their reporters are protected by law,” according to a translation by the English-language edition of the Communist Party organ People’s Daily. [Source]

Qiu was not the only person arrested in this year’s online campaign against “slander.” Six other internet users were detained in what Global Times described as “efforts to protect heroes and martyrs’ reputation and crackdown on any humiliation or insult on the internet,” under a law passed in 2018. Most strikingly, police in Chongqing announced that they were engaged in “online pursuit” of a 19-year old outside of China. At The Guardian, Helen Davidson reported on the “online pursuit” and the use of the internet to harass critics overseas:

The men were detained under a 2018 law which makes it illegal to defame “heroes and martyrs” in China. An amendment set to take effect this month brings potential penalties of three years in jail. Another man who police said had lived overseas since July 2019, was “pursued online” over comments he made about the soldiers, “on suspicion of causing trouble on the internet”.

[…] “Heroes and martyrs are not allowed to be desecrated. Cyberspace is not outside the law,” it said.

[…] Yaqui Wang, China researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the pursuit of the 19-year-old was a tactic by authorities “to show that they would not tolerate any speech questioning the official narrative of the border conflict, no matter where the critic is physically located”.

“Authorities used to harass overseas-based critics or their China-based families without resorting to formal prosecution mechanism or leaving a paper trail,” Wang told the Guardian. “Now they don’t feel they need to be discreet about it, or maybe they even want to be conspicuous about it.” [Source]

Formally prosecuting overseas critics will have a chilling effect within the diaspora community, but at the same time, it attracts bad international press, hardens critics and drives them underground (unlike inside the country, anonymity is possible for overseas critics.)

— Yaqiu Wang 王亚秋 (@Yaqiu) February 22, 2021

for 网上追逃 the info is shared within the police system, through the database 全国在逃人员信息系统

for 网上通缉 the info is shared with the public pic.twitter.com/71IMCIu7Rf

— Chenchen Zhang (@chenchenzh) February 22, 2021

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/02/police-arrest-seven-engage-in-online-pursuit-to-crackdown-on-online-speech/

Photo: Morning haze in Chengde, by Keith Ewing

Morning haze in Chengde, by Keith Ewing (CC BY-NC 2.0)

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/02/photo-morning-haze-in-chengde-by-keith-ewing/

Canadian Parliament Votes to Recognize Uyghur Persecution as Genocide

Canada’s House of Commons voted 266-0 on Monday to recognize China’s treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang as genocide, making it the second country in the world after the United States to make the designation. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet abstained from the vote, however, reflecting the government hesitancy to further elevate tensions in the strained China-Canada relationship. A last-minute amendment to the motion also saw MPs overwhelmingly vote in favor of calling on the International Olympic Committee to move the 2022 Winter Olympics out of China “if the Chinese government continues this genocide.” At Canada-based Global News, Emerald Bensadoun reported on the vote:

The Liberal cabinet’s abstention came on the heels of an already-strained relationship between Canada and China, intensified by the December 2018 arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at the behest of the U.S. government and the arbitrary detentions of Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig in what has been widely viewed as retaliation.

[…] Ahead of the vote on Monday, Conservative MPs Michael Chong and Garnett Genuis were joined by Uighur community members at a virtual teleconference in calling for the federal government’s support of the motion, saying unanimity would send a strong signal to China.

“We can no longer ignore this,” said Chong, the party’s shadow foreign affairs minister.

[…] Kalbinur Tursun, a woman who had survived a Uighur camp in Urumchi, China, called on the federal government to recognize what she described as “genocide” perpetrated by the Chinese government. [Source]

The designation has received strong public support and endorsements from influential voices in Canada, including from the Prime Minister’s own special advisor for Holocaust remembrance, who said prior to the vote that he felt confident that what was happening in Xinjiang met the test of genocide. The vote is also a win for rights groups internationally who have been urging Western governments to designate the label. When the U.S. State Department made the designation on the last day of the Trump administration, experts criticized the timing for seemingly politicizing the designation. But Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has stood by the label, and on Wednesday the State Department again reiterated its commitment to the designation.

.@StateDeptSpox Price: On genocide, we have been very clear that Secretary Blinken has determined that what has taken place in Xinjiang was genocide. We’ve also been very clear that it constitutes crimes against humanity. pic.twitter.com/ZQARDjGCvG

— Department of State (@StateDept) February 24, 2021

Lawmakers in the U.K. have also been making moves to force the government towards recognizing the treatment of Uyghurs as genocide. A formal legal opinion published in the U.K. earlier this month concluded that there was “a very credible case” that the Chinese government is carrying out genocide against the Uyghur people.

In parliament, ministers from the Labour Party alongside rebel Conservative MPs have tried to force a vote on a “genocide amendment” to a recent trade bill that would empower U.K. courts to decide whether a country was committing genocide. As in Canada, the U.K. government has been reluctant to use the term “genocide” to describe the atrocities in Xinjiang. In recent weeks, it has sought to hinder the amendment via parliamentary procedure, forcing the bill to go back and forth between the two houses of parliament as lawmakers continue to fight over the best way to handle the issue. The government has sought to bring attention to the issue in other ways. This week, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab urged China to give “urgent and unfettered” access to U.N. investigators in a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Still, while recognizing the treatment of Uyghurs as a crime against humanity, some voices have expressed doubt about the appropriateness of calling the atrocities in Xinjiang “genocide.” The Economist this month published an article headlined “‘Genocide’ is the wrong word for the horrors in Xinjiang”, arguing that “just as ‘homicide’ means killing a person and ‘suicide’ means killing yourself, ‘genocide’ means killing a people.” But Donald C. Clarke, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote a forceful rebuttal to The Economist’s argument:

The definition of the Genocide Convention deserves, it seems to me, at least some initial deference. It was the product of a lot of thought, and has been endorsed by the more than 150 governments that have signed and ratified the Convention. Article II(a) says that “killing members of a group” is genocide, and paragraphs (b) through (e) set forth the other crimes that the drafters and over 150 governments thought should also go under the same name.

[…] Words mean what people in the relevant language community use them to mean. “Genocide” is a word that was specifically created by a lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, and adopted by the international community to serve a particular purpose. (See Philippe Sands’s excellent book on the subject.) The Genocide Convention did not take an existing word and add its own gloss to it. It created and defined the word for the first time. To argue that genocide means or should mean something other than what was intended by those who created the word and introduced it into the language requires some pretty strong support. In offering only a naïve and fallacious theory of language in support of its own definition, the Economist does not provide it.

Finally, the confusing part: The Economist seems to be saying that we must embrace its narrow definition of genocide because of the consequences of using the Convention’s definition. The article states that to refuse to engage with China—for example, on issues such as climate change—is to endanger the economy and the planet. That’s a reasonable stance. But the article seems to think that applying the label of genocide means we can’t engage with China on these issues. To me, that doesn’t follow. If China is big and powerful and can affect our fate, we have to deal with it. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t call a spade a spade. Is the Economist really saying that mass killing would mean we shouldn’t engage with China on, say, global warming? Or that mass sterilization should be treated as significantly different? [Source]

In Canada, the genocide designation was followed by more calls for government sanctions on China. The Conservative Party’s shadow foreign minister Michael Chong called on the government to impose a “more effective ban on imports” from Xinjiang and targeted sanctions “to punish those overseeing the genocide.” Last month, Canada and the U.K. both announced they would ban imports from Xinjiang produced with forced labor. This week, the Washington Post’s Eva Dou, Jeanna Whalen, and Alicia Chen reported that recent bans on Xinjiang cotton have begun to have an effect on fashion industry supply chains:

What’s happening now in the fashion industry is rare in the history of global trade: a multibillion-dollar supply chain splintered almost overnight over a human rights issue.

Just a year ago, companies “were saying it’s impossible” to stop buying textiles with Xinjiang cotton, said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a Washington-based advocacy group. “You can’t leave. Or if you could leave, it would take three to five years to even execute such an exit.”

[…] Nate Herman, senior vice president of the American Apparel & Footwear Association, said U.S. brands were working to remove Xinjiang cotton from their supply chains but that the process is slowed by the pandemic.

[…] Herman said he has heard of about a dozen shipments stopped by CBP since the ban last month. CBP declined to confirm the number but said it’s actively enforcing the measure and that detentions of shipments “are expected to grow.” [Source]

This week, newly analyzed data on the China’s birth rates by province have suggested a marked and unnatural decline in the Uyghur population in Xinjiang.

In case it wasn't obvious that Xinjiang is an extreme outlier, here's a histogram with every 2-year change for each province. Xinjiang's 49% drop from 2017 to 2019 is circled in red and unparalleled. pic.twitter.com/vJdckXUMks

— John Stone (@jnzst) February 24, 2021

The source of this data is China's official publication, China Statistical Yearbook https://t.co/M7xfBD62k8

The year in that URL can be changed to other years. I went through ten of these to get the data.

— John Stone (@jnzst) February 24, 2021

For a historical perspective on the genocide in Xinjiang, Sean R. Roberts, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University, published an article in Foreign Affairs titled “The Roots of Cultural Genocide in Xinjiang”:

The period of reform under Deng Xiaoping that gained steam following the death of Mao in 1976 held a good deal of promise for the Uyghurs. Beijing tentatively adopted a strategy of partial decolonization in Xinjiang. Deng’s close associate Hu Yaobang, the general secretary of the CCP from 1982 to 1987, spearheaded liberalizing reforms in the region as he did elsewhere in China. He called for many of the Han migrants in Xinjiang to return to their hometowns and advocated for unprecedented cultural, religious, and political reform. The government allowed previously shuttered mosques to reopen and new mosques to be built. Uyghur-language publishing and artistic expression exploded. And Hu even suggested making the region more autonomous within the Chinese system of governance, mandating that the leaders of the region come from the indigenous ethnic groups and be allowed to cultivate their own culture and language in local state institutions. This aspiration for greater inclusion of ethnic minorities fit well with Hu’s overall vision for democratization and liberalization.

But Hu’s hope for a more autonomous Uyghur region and for a more democratic China was never realized. Conservatives in the party purged Hu in 1987, blaming his more liberal policies for stoking student agitation throughout the country. The crackdown on the mass student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989—which sprang up partially in response to Hu’s ouster—signaled an end to the era of political reform. The event that truly sealed the fate of the Uyghur region, however, was the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. China inaccurately viewed campaigns for ethnic self-determination as the driving force behind the dissolution of the Soviet Union and acted to ensure that China did not suffer a similar fate.

Throughout the 1990s, the CCP deployed numerous so-called antiseparatism campaigns aimed at snuffing out signs of agitation. The state saw Muslim piety as akin to a call for self-determination and targeted religious individuals. It also arrested numerous secular artists and writers. These aggressive campaigns involved significant state violence—mass arrests, torture, and executions. Occasionally, they also sparked violent retaliation from Uyghurs. Despite that sporadic bloody conflict, there was no organized Uyghur militant movement in the region, no genuine threat of secession, and no reason to believe that Xinjiang merited such heavy-handed treatment. [Source]

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/02/canadian-parliament-votes-to-recognize-uyghur-persecution-as-genocide/

Translation: Weibo User Sentenced to Six Months Over Wuhan Poem

Last April, Weibo user “Marilyn Monroe” (@玛丽莲梦六) wrote a widely-shared post of vignettes from the Wuhan lockdown. The user reported that they were “asked to tea” soon after the post went viral, and later disappeared. Now they have been convicted of “picking quarrels and provoking troubles” and sentenced to six months in prison:

Zhang Wenfang, a Hebei based Weibo user, sentenced to 6 months in prison for a piece of content she posted on Weibo, which mentioned dozens of untold sad stories during the Covid lockdown in Wuhan City, and which authority claimed contained rumors. pic.twitter.com/2lQRV4fp8u

— 中国文字狱事件盘点 (@SpeechFreedomCN) February 22, 2021

Most of the stories in “Marilyn’s” post came from news reports out of Wuhan. The central government’s attempts to ensure the dominance of its triumphalist narrative on the epidemic have led to crackdowns on “unofficial“ accounts of the lockdown. But one Weibo commentator wrote that “Marilyn’s” arrest would not stop them: “My own historical memory: I’ve seen photographs, videos, or Weibo posts that correspond to each of her lines.” “Marilyn” wrote that her post was intended as a reminder of “those people and events that should not be forgotten.” CDT has translated her poem, adding links to coverage of every event that we could identify. Here is @玛丽莲梦六’s “The One On The Balcony Sounding A Gong and Crying Out For The Sick”:

The one on the balcony sounding a gong and crying out for the sick. 

The one following a hearse in the deep of night, calling out “Mama” in grief. 

The one truck driver stranded along the highway, wandering without a place to return. 

The one who died while sitting up, whose family cradled their head as they waited for the hearse. 

The one who starved to death in their home during quarantine. 

The pregnant woman who spent 200,000 yuan before being denied further treatment when she became unable to pay. 

The one who feared infecting their family and so dug a grave and quietly hanged themself. 

The one with no doctors to turn to, who feared infecting his wife and kids and so jumped from a bridge to end his life. 

The 90-year-old who waited at the hospital for five days and five nights to ensure their 60-year-old son a bed. 

The one who commented under a Weibo post begging for a hospital bed: “My family member just passed away, vacating a hospital bed. I hope this will help you.”

The one who first cursed those begging for help, saying they made him depressed, but who later had no choice but to call for help in the same way. 

The one who posted “hello” when learning to use Weibo in order to call for help. 

The one who covered their mouth with a scarf when being checked by the authorities, and cried in shame because they couldn’t buy a mask.

The one who used orange peels as a mask. 

The one who went alone to the Civil Affairs Bureau to report their orphan status after their entire family (father, mother, grandfather, and grandmother) died. 

The one who donated all the masks they received as pay in lieu of cash.  

The one who wrote, “I will meet death in peace,” “it is time to offer myself.”

The one who wrote “I can, I understand,” signed with a red fingerprint, and then died twice.

The one who built the Huoshenshan Hospital without stopping to sleep or rest but upon returning to his village was viewed as a Plague Demon. 

The leukemia patient who needed to go to Beijing for a bone marrow transplant but had no way out of the city, who wanted euthanasia for their pain. 

The one wearing burial clothes who, after unsuccessfully calling for a hospital bed, collapsed onto the floor. 

The one who couldn’t do hemodialysis because of the outbreak and, after fruitlessly pleading at the neighborhood gates for help, jumped to their death, whose corpse wasn’t removed for six hours. 

The one who was forced to write “You must wear a mask when you leave the house” 100 times by the local police. 

The one who was struck until they bled because they weren’t wearing a mask. 

The one yelling “I’m hungry! Oh, I’m so hungry I’ll die. My wife and child are starving at home and your bellies are surely full!”

The one who raised bees for a living who killed themself because he couldn’t transport their hive because of the outbreak. 

The one that left home to find work, who trekked for 13 days, walking over 700 kilometers, who slept under bridges and in caves, among grass and in burrows, to work in a mine. 

The one unable to get treatment and afraid of infecting their wife and kids  who wrote in their will that they wished for their body to be used in scientific research in hopes that nobody on earth would again suffer the torment of this virus, then left their cellphone and wallet behind, walked out the door, and died on the road back to their family home. 

The one who wrote, “After my death give my body to the state. But what about my wife?” 

The one who carried their mother on their back while searching everywhere for treatment, walking for three hours because cars were banned during the lockdown. 

The one who gave their child to the hospital with a note, “In giving birth I have spent all that I had saved, in my desperation I am stranded here.”

The one who climbed down from a ten-story window to leave the house to buy groceries. 

The child who watched over their grandfather’s body for five days, tucking his corpse under a quilt. 

The one who recovered from a severe case only to come home to find their entire family dead, who hung themself from the roof. 

The one who, at over 60 years old, was solely responsible for all the shopping, cooking, and cleaning for an entire police department of more than 60 officers and broke down crying in the hallway. 

The one who was homeless in Wuhan for over 20 days whose hair went half-white. 

The one who couldn’t afford to buy a cellphone for online classes and then swallowed a handful of their mother’s prescription psychotropic drugs. 

The one who, at 25 years old, resigned from CCTV and went to Wuhan at the most dangerous moment to report, who then faced the people who had come to arrest him and recited from memory, “When the youth are strong, the nation is strong. When the youth are weak, the nation is weak.”

The one who yelled “everything is fake” when the leaders came to inspect. 

The one who broke down crying after recovering the bodies of three children from the collapsed Quanzhou quarantine hotel. 

The one who wrote 60 entries of her lockdown diary, whose account was shut down multiple times, and who was ganged up on and cursed by a group of internet hoodlums. 

The seven- or eight-year-old child who followed along uncomprehendingly with the procession to retrieve their parent’s ashes. 

The one who tried to patiently persuade the government officials that while the virus must be prevented, people must also eat, who in the end just sighed. 

The one deeply beloved by patients who was admonished by the hospital for wearing a mask and who died after getting infected. 

The one who said, “If I had seen this day coming, I would have said it everywhere, criticism or no.” [Chinese]

CDT has previously translated other selections of poems involving the pandemic, including several by Wuhan nurse “Wei Shuiyin.”

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/02/translation-weibo-user-sentenced-to-six-months-over-wuhan-poem/

Photo: Sunset at Central, Hong Kong, by johnlsl

Sunset at Central, Hong Kong, by johnlsl (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/02/photo-sunset-at-central-hong-kong-by-johnlsl/

HK Announces Oath Requirement for Elected Officials, Paving Way for More Opposition Disqualifications

The Hong Kong government has introduced a bill that will grant it the power to disqualify elected officials for failing to pledge loyalty, as the authorities define it, to the HKSAR or for betraying their oath of office. The proposal paves the way for the removal of pro-democracy District Councillors, local representatives who were elected to office in landslide victories in the fall of 2019. The changes came one day after Xia Baolong, Beijing’s director of Hong Kong and Macau Affairs, declared in a strongly worded speech that Hong Kong must be ruled by “patriots,” echoing words from Xi Jinping earlier this month. Xia’s speech signalled that even more electoral reforms were to be expected, with media reports suggesting possible changes to the composition of the 1,200 person Chief Executive Election Committee.

Over the last eight months, Hong Kong has been rocked by dramatic changes to the city’s elected bodies, including the postponement of scheduled elections, the disqualification and mass resignation of pro-democracy lawmakers, and the arrest of every pro-democracy primary candidate for national security crimes. But as a formal change to Hong Kong’s electoral rules, the newly proposed amendments may be an even more formidable obstacle to pro-democracy candidates seeking future public office, likely further crushing Hong Kong’s opposition bloc and cementing Beijing’s political hold over the city.

The proposed changes were announced by Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Erick Tsang in a press conference on Tuesday. The Washington Post’s Shibani Mahtani and Theodora Yu reported on the broad strokes of the plan:

On Tuesday, Hong Kong’s government announced that anyone running for these local positions will need to be a “patriot” — meaning they must swear loyalty not to their constituents but to Beijing and the Communist Party — as China moves to quash the territory’s last avenue of democracy.

The changes, which are expected to be introduced to the legislature — where there is no viable opposition — next month and become law soon thereafter, will trigger the expulsion of several young pro-democracy councilors, even if they read the oath as instructed. Disqualified candidates will be barred from running in any elections for five years.

“You cannot say you love the country but you don’t respect” the Chinese Communist Party, said Erick Tsang, Hong Kong’s Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs. “It does not make sense.” [Source]

Due to the five year ban, disqualified individuals would in effect be barred them from at least two election cycles, as terms of office are four years long.

Tsang announced that sitting district councillors who were elected in the fall of 2019 would also be required to take the oath. That requirement opens the door for the government to disqualify current representatives based on any perceived “insincerity” in their oath-taking. Elected officials will be required to swear to “uphold the Basic Law and bear allegiance to the HKSAR.” The government produced a two-and-a-half page list defining the meaning of those terms, which it emphasized was non-exhaustive. Two pages of the list outlined “negative” acts that would disqualify an individual from office, including but not limited to:

• committing acts that endanger national security, including offenses under the Hong Kong National Security Law
• advocating or supporting Hong Kong independence, including implementing activities such as referenda for “self determination of sovereignty or jurisdiction,” or “devising constitution by all people”
• “soliciting” interference by foreign governments or organizations in the affairs of the HKSAR
• desecrating the national or regional flag, or insulting or disrespecting the national anthem
• committing acts that “undermine the order of the political structure led by the Chief Executive,” including “indiscriminately objecting” to the government’s motions, rendering the Government incapable of performing its duties, or forcing the Chief Executive to step down

English version- Two and a half pages to define what it mean to “uphold the Basic Law and bear allegiance to the HKSAR”. pic.twitter.com/3LtmBRVol9

— Alvin Lum (@alvinllum) February 23, 2021

The Guardian’s Helen Davidson reported that Tsang said candidates’ past behavior would be considered in decisions about their eligibility for office:

Past behaviour would be taken into account, raising the prospect that all participants in last year’s unofficial primaries held by the Democratic caucus, many of whom were arrested in January, would be affected. Tsang confirmed four district councillors disqualified from elections last year would be affected.

Tsang said there was no specific retrospective effect in the bill, “but whether or not we would judge acts committed in the past by a certain person, that would depend on the individual circumstances”.

“If you take the oath-taking seriously, then you don’t have to worry.” [Source]

Several of the conditions included on the “negative list” appear to target specific electoral strategies pursued by pro-democracy candidates in the past. Observers have noted that the conditions relating to holding a referendum, for example, seem aimed at quashing strategies like the unofficial primary held by pro-democracy candidates in July 2020, or unofficial referenda that have been held in more distant past. The provision against “indiscriminately objecting” to the government’s policies appears to target individuals involved in the laam-chau strategy proposed by University of Hong Kong law professor Benny Tai to create a deadlock in Legco that would ultimately force the resignation of the Chief Executive. In January of this year, national security police arrested Tai alongside every single pro-democracy candidate who ran in the 2020 primary, alleging that their participation in Tai’s plan constituted “subversion” under the National Security Law.

Tsang also confirmed that the amendments would lead to the immediate removal of four district councillors who had earlier been disqualified from running in the postponed 2020 Legislative Council elections. District councillors are allowed to concurrently serve in the Legislative Council, the city’s lawmaking body. South China Morning Post’s Tony Cheung and Lilian Cheng explained why the four were disqualified last July:

Last year, four district councillors – Shum, Fergus Leung Fong-wai, Tiffany Yuen Ka-wai and Cheng Tat-hung – were among a group of activists banned from running for the Legco elections, which were originally slated for last September but postponed by the city leader for a year because of the pandemic. Electoral officials had cited the political stance of the four in deciding they could not genuinely uphold the Basic Law.

[…] [Tsang] added: “Theoretically, the four district councillors would lose their qualification … For individual lawmakers, they would have lost their qualification to run in elections from the moment they were decided to have refused to take their oath, or failed to uphold [the Basic Law] and bear allegiance.” [Source]

Lester Shum just posted on what if he got disqualified, and the gov asked him to pay back his district councillor wages since August 2020.

The gov has not been giving him relevant expenses and subsidies for some time, thus he has been paying out of his own pocket, he said. pic.twitter.com/bFVqNmE3Hv

— Kris Cheng (@krislc) February 23, 2021

Occupying the lowest rung of elected office, district councillors perform fundamentally different roles from lawmakers in Hong Kong. Councillors’ jurisdictions are much smaller, and they typically manage quality of life issues such as garbage disposal or traffic matters. For The New York Times, Elaine Yu profiled one recently elected pro-democracy councillor who was elected as part of the pro-democracy landslide in November 2019:

Some days, Cathy Yau wanders down dark alleys looking for rats to poison. Other days, she helps food banks deliver meals to older people. Often her phone rings with calls from constituents: neighbors asking about their rights during a police stop-and-frisk, or how to best navigate the city’s welfare bureaucracy.

Such is life for a Hong Kong district councilor.

“I do things that nobody’s directed you to do, but which no one else would do if I didn’t,” she said.

[…] Since taking up their posts a year ago, many district councilors have sought to redefine the office — with mixed results. They have boycotted meetings with senior officials, accused the city’s police chief of lying and extracted information about the surveillance infrastructure in their neighborhoods. In turn, government representatives have staged walkouts when the councilors tried to discuss political issues at meetings. [Source]

That the government appears intent on restraining even these relatively minor opposition figures underscores the extent of its determination to assert control over the city’s political scene.

Still, the announcement on Tuesday left many questions unanswered. A major unknown is exactly how the Hong Kong and Central People’s government plan on enacting these electoral changes. In years past, Beijing has insisted that changes to the electoral process had to go through a “five-step process” of approval that includes a two-thirds majority vote in favor in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. But as legal experts pointed out on Tuesday, so many pro-democracy lawmakers had either resigned or been disqualified from Legco that there were not enough remaining lawmakers to vote for electoral reforms.

#HongKong doesn't have enough lawmakers left to make its own decision on electoral reforms, says Basic Law Committee vice chairwoman Maria Tam. https://t.co/L4g6B0SjuU

— RTHK English News (@rthk_enews) February 23, 2021

South China Morning Post’s Jeffie Lam and Lilian Cheng reported on options for how Beijing could push through the oath-taking changes despite the shortage of legislators in Hong Kong:

[…] “We are now faced with an unprecedented situation. We only have 44 legislators … So if any election-related changes are to be made, my personal view is they can only be done by exercising power stated in the [Chinese] constitution,” Tam said, referring to an article that outlines the power of the National People’s Congress to decide on the systems instituted in China’s special administrative regions, which include Hong Kong.

However, only a simple majority in Legco would be needed to pass the local legislation following a Beijing resolution.

[Ip Kwok-him, a local deputy to the National People’s Congress,] estimated that Beijing’s resolution and accompanying details would be created through the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) much as the national security law was last June.

Concrete details of the Beijing-imposed legislation were announced on the same day the NPCSC passed it unanimously on June 30 and listed it under Annex III of Hong Kong’s Basic Law. [Source]

Any changes to the oath-taking requirement promulgated by Beijing could be expected to come bundled with even more electoral reforms. On Monday, Beijing’s top official in Hong Kong, Xia Baolong, gave his first public speech since taking office in 2020. The Wall Street Journal reported Xia’s announcement that Beijing would take charge of rewriting Hong Kong’s electoral laws when top leaders gather for their annual session on March 5:

At an annual legislative session in March, Chinese lawmakers are expected to vote on the proposed changes to the composition of a 1,200-member committee that picks Hong Kong’s chief executive, the people said.

The revisions would drastically reduce, or potentially eliminate, the 117 seats assigned to Hong Kong’s district councilors, a bloc now dominated by opposition groups, they said. These seats would be given to some of the more than 200 Hong Kong-resident members of China’s top political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the people said.

The plan is part of sweeping changes presaged by the chief of Beijing’s office on Hong Kong affairs, Xia Baolong, in a speech on Monday in which he said that Hong Kong’s executive, legislature and judiciary must comprise “true patriots.” In his first public speech after taking the office in early 2020, Mr. Xia called anyone who opposes the governments of China or Hong Kong “destroyers” who shouldn’t be able to exert influence in the future. [Source]

Almost eight months after the enactment of the National Security Law, the pace of democratic backsliding in Hong Kong has shown no sign of slowing down. The dramatic changes to the electoral system are just one of several major developments in the last week. Separately, a move to overhaul the embattled public broadcaster RTHK has exacerbated fears about the rapid decline of press freedom in the city. The broadcaster’s editor-in-chief, a veteran journalist, was replaced by a civil servant with no journalistic background after a government report found “serious inadequacies” including “poor management” and “lack of editorial accountability” at RTHK.

In judicial news, pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai was again denied bail last week, after the judge cited new accusations from police that Lai had committed additional national security crimes. Separately, Lai, alongside eight other veteran pro-democracy activists including Martin Lee, Margaret Ng, Albert Ho, and others, went on trial this week for illegal assembly in relation to a peaceful protest on August 18 2019. They face sentences of up to five years in prison.

In the midst of all of these developments, the U.K. officially rolled out its online application for BN(O) passport holders, allowing applicants to apply from their smartphones, circumventing the need to visit the consulate’s processing center. On Tuesday, it shared space at the top of the App Store with Hong Kong’s contact tracing app, perhaps sharing a common ethos with the latter’s name: LeaveHomeSafe.

UK Immigration App ranked 2nd on App Store in Hong Kong on the day of BN(O) visa online application roll-out. pic.twitter.com/OZELwmnfQQ

— Elgar Teo (@elgarteo) February 23, 2021

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/02/hk-announces-oath-requirement-for-elected-officials-paving-way-for-more-opposition-disqualifications/