UN General Assembly holds 2023 debate, WRIC demonstration expresses demands

Posted on 2023-09-27 by wrchina

WRIC 22-09-2023

The 2023 high-level general debate of the United Nations General Assembly lasted from September 19 to 23 and ended on September 26. Heads of state, heads of government and ministers gathered for a high-level general debate on the theme “Rebuilding trust and revitalizing unity: stepping up action to implement the 2030 Agenda and its sustainable development goals to promote peace and prosperity for all , progress and sustainability.” During the meeting on the 22nd, a group of women’s rights in China organization members from the New York NGO organization, together with various countries and groups, expressed their demands in front of the United Nations Headquarters in New York. On the China issue, those who follow the movement to express their demands mainly include Uyghurs who protest against the CCP’s genocide and Falun Gong practitioners who protest against the CCP’s inhumane suppression.

Older Li Qing, Yang Shisong, Zhang Yan, Xiao Li Qing, Li Chengsong and other people held up various banners and slogans, including the “Iron Girl” with a chain around her neck and the UN UNESCO Special Envoy for Girls’ Education. China’s First Lady Peng Liyuan, Chen Siming, who opposes the Chinese Communist Party’s transnational law enforcement, supports Taiwan’s entry into the United Nations, and supports Taiwan’s stranded people, etc.

Yiwu Liao: We waited for news of her death

Posted on 2023-09-06 by wrchina

From Yiwu Liao 09-06-2023

Zhang Zhan, who is on hunger strike in prison, is critically ill again, and almost all international human rights organizations have repeatedly called for her immediate release. Three days ago, Amnesty International Germany wrote to me again: “Mr. Yiwu, last year at the Frankfurt Book Fair, we did two activities for Zhang Zhan together, which were broadcast live on German TV and had a wide impact. But this year, there is news that her life is in danger. …… Zhang Zhan is the last important character in your famous book “Wuhan”, we can do something more for her. …… ”

I wrote back and said yes. Yes, thanks to the sustained efforts of many human rights workers, and thanks to the spread of the book Wuhan, Zhang Zhan is an indelible “historical symbol” of the “Wuhan Virus Hijacking” -In May and July next year, the English version of “Wuhan” will be released in the UK and the US.

I am going to post the end of Wuhan:

——————————————————————

At noon on November 14^th, 2021, the human rights worker Wang Jianhong emailed the “Written application for medical parole release for Zhang Zhan” submitted to the Shanghai Prison Administration by Zhang Zhan’s family.

Respected leaders:

I am Zhang Zhan’s elder brother, Zhang Ju. Zhang Zhan is currently being held in the Fifth Prison District of the Shanghai Women’s Prison; her prison number is 27997. In August 2021, in the reception room of the women’s prison we talked by phone with a doctor and Zhang Zhan, who had been sent to a hospital. From this we learned that Zhang Zhan’s body was extremely weak and that she weighed less than 40 kilograms [88 pounds]. Zhang Zhan is 177 cm tall [5 foot 8] and her normal weight had been 60-65 kg [132-143 pounds]. From when Zhang Zhan was detained in the Pudong Detention Center to when she was transferred to the Women’s Prison, her body had deteriorated due to various reasons. I asked the doctor if Zhang Zhan might die? The doctor plainly stated it was very likely.

On October 29^th, 2021, my mother was notified by the prison to go to the prison for a video meeting with Zhang Zhan. The Zhang Zhan my mother saw was weaker than what we had heard on the phone in August. Zhang Zhan’s weight now is probably less than 40 kilograms. She needed support from others to walk, and her neck was unable to support her head. Her face and forehead were all skin and bone, appearing bloodless, as if her life was hanging by a thread. In Zhang Zhan’s current physical condition, she cannot walk on her own. With the support of others or crutches, she can barely walk a distance of 20-30 meters [65-100 feet]. When my mother heard this terrible news, she was so heartbroken she fell to her knees before the prison staff, pleading with them to give Zhang Zhan humane care.

Prolonged detention and starvation have caused irreversible damage to Zhang Zhan’s internal organs and secretory system. According to the relevant provisions of the “Notice of the Supreme People’s Court, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Justice, and the National Health and Family Planning Commission on Issuing the ‘Provisions for Temporary Serving of a Sentence Outside Prison’”, Zhang Zhan’s current physical condition and illness have already met relevant conditions for “treatment on medical parole”. Regardless of the relevant laws and regulations or humanitarian principles, we hereby apply for permission to allow Zhang Zhan to seek medical parole. We are well aware that the Zhang Zhan case has a certain degree of sensitivity. From the perspective of our family, we are willing to cooperate with the relevant requirements of the police, prisons and other relevant departments.

Zhang Ju

November 6, 2021

Over two months ago, I sent the closing paragraphs of my book God Is Dead to several Westerners, including the former chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy, Carl Gershman. Carl was deeply moved and forwarded an article from the Washington Post to me. Five days previously on November 7, the Post’s editorial board had published, “Opinion: She told the truth about Wuhan. Now she is near death in a Chinese prison,” which concluded: “Ms. Zhang should be saluted for her intrepid attempts to record the chaos and cataclysm of Wuhan in those early weeks. She was a sentinel of a looming disaster. Her journalism was not a crime. She must not spend another moment behind bars. She must not be allowed to die.”

But my thoughts linger on the words of Zhang Zhan’s brother on Twitter: “My sister may not live much longer. In the coming cold winter, if she’s unable to persevere, I hope the world will remember her as she was.”

Apart from a very few appeals and notations, what else can I do? Beckett’s immortal play “Waiting for Godot” has evolved into “Waiting for the God of Death” in this case. There are millions of Chinese netizens following Zhang Zhan. Every one of them knows that Godot or the God of Death will eventually appear, they just don’t know where and when: it might be in a prison cell, or it might be like Liu Xiaobo, who, in name only, was “paroled for medical treatment” in accordance with the law, but still died in captivity.

We are awaiting news of her death. We are helpless. In the Bible, the record of the miracle of “resurrection,” fictitious or not, like Godot, causes human beings dominated by the World Wide Web to lose patience each passing day. I have been in exile for ten years, far enough away from the time and space of the Communist Party of China, yet I am still wrapped up in the shadow of the Wuhan virus, which is even more limitless than the Chernobyl nuclear leak. In a letter to Hans Balmes, the German language editor of this book, I wrote: “The fictional and non-fictional characters in this book all disappear one by one. Zhang Zhan, the last, is not missing, but waiting to die… …”

As regards Wuhan, Zhang Zhan produced 122 self-media videos and Kcriss only 4. The common denominator with this “intruder” was trying to understand more about the P4 lab. The longest video recorded by Zhang Zhan, 21 minutes and 46 seconds, was made on April 27, 2020. She personally uploaded to YouTube “A Visit to the Mysterious Wuhan Virus Research Institute: Is the Source of the Virus Related to It”. Seventeen days later, the Shanghai police crossed provincial boundaries to arrest her on charges of “picking quarrels and inciting trouble.”

I’ve recorded and compiled Zhang Zhan’s intermittent, breathless commentary in the film:

I finally got to sleep sometime after three o’clock last night but was woken up by an alarm clock at eight o’clock.

This P4, I have been here three times this year. The path before me is newly made. Over the wall beside it is the P4. There’s a high-voltage electric wire fence atop the wall. Troops have assumed control, and no one can enter. I’ll still walk around it and give it a try. As is know the world over, the most dangerous virus research is undertaken within these two circular and square buildings…

The surroundings here are very nice, as the P4’s backed by green hills with a small, lush stream in front of it and black birds fly overhead. I don’t know what kind of bird that is. If there weren’t this high-voltage fence and the workplace behind the wall… Last time here I climbed the hills but came across a gorge I couldn’t get past. The dense woods also blocked my view. There is a cemetery in the hills that evokes our sad memories of the dead.

Every time I come, I come upon different sights and things, and each time I get a little deeper than previous time. We will only be able to trace the truth about the source of the virus through perseverance and patience. Here is the closest we can get to the rear entrance. Before there was any evidence, there was speculation over how the virus moved from bats to humans, over how it passed across the tables of voracious diners, folk rumors, conspiracy theories, and so on, the root causes of which were fear of the regime and the system. Nobody has the power to stop this. Just like today, as we look for the truth from the outside, we can only trust our instincts to find our way.

Okay, I’ll go down this pile of rubble. The weeds are thick but there should be no snakes. The oncoming shot is of a big red building under construction. There are four tall chimneys in the distance. The building behind the chimneys is the P4. Every time I come, I can hear the roar of boilers and machines.

The P4 before me is surrounded by iron fences and iron and steel panels. I hope to show the audience more perspectives and more details. But no matter from where you look at it, there are surveillance cameras, even other places inside the walls are separate from the P4…

A restricted area within a restricted area…

The Scientist Who Foresaw China’s Stagnation

Posted on 2023-09-06 by wrchina

Reprinted from The New York Times 8-29-2023

ILLUSTRATION BY SAM WHITNEY/THE NEW YORK TIMES; IMAGE BY THEERAKIT/GETTY IMAGES

Incongruously, Yi Fuxian, one of the world’s experts on China’s demographic plight, specializes in pre-eclampsia — a complication of pregnancy — and works in Wisconsin. His day job is as a senior scientist in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In his native China, though, he’s far better known for his off-hours specialty, which is warning the Chinese people about the serious consequences of their baby bust.

I interviewed Yi last week after seeing a spate of news stories and analyses about the slowdown of the Chinese economy. “It’s no surprise,” he told me. He said China’s long-term demographic problems don’t fully explain its current financial difficulties, but they do tend to make those short-term problems worse.

In the second quarter, China’s economic output was just 0.8 percent higher than in the first quarter, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. “Exports tumbled, a real estate slump deepened, and some debt-ridden local governments had to cut spending after running low on money,” The Times’s Keith Bradsher wrote.

On Aug. 21, Li Yuan reported in The Times that she spoke to more than a dozen business owners and consumers and their mood was dark. “They worry that it’s the beginning of something they don’t dare to imagine and fear that the government doesn’t have solutions,” she wrote. “The bad news just keeps coming.”

It’s long been assumed that it was only a matter of time before China had the world’s biggest economy, surpassing that of the United States. That may well still happen. But right now, China is growing more slowly than the United States. There’s at least a chance that China’s economy will never surpass the U.S. economy in size, going by market exchange rates.

This chart requires some explanation: According to the International Monetary Fund, China’s economy surpassed the U.S. economy in 2017 if output is measured on the basis of purchasing power parity, which takes into account that things cost less in China. The U.S. economy was still 40 percent bigger than China’s as of last year when comparing gross domestic products using actual exchange rates rather than ones that equalize purchasing power, according to the I.M.F.’s data.

China has exhausted the easy gains from moving workers from farms to factories. Its attempt to sustain growth through real estate investment has led to overbuilding and overindebtedness. It is also becoming geopolitically isolated. This month, for example, President Biden signed an executive order banning high-tech investments in China that could enhance China’s military capabilities.

Adam Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, described China as suffering from a case of economic long Covid. In an article in the September-October issue of Foreign Affairs, he wrote:

Like a patient suffering from that chronic condition, China’s body economic has not regained its vitality and remains sluggish even now that the acute phase — three years of exceedingly strict and costly “zero Covid” lockdown measures — has ended. The condition is systemic, and the only reliable cure — credibly assuring ordinary Chinese people and companies that there are limits on the government’s intrusion into economic life — cannot be delivered.

In another article in the same issue, Ian Johnson also blamed the autocratic leadership of Xi Jinping, China’s president. Johnson, who has contributed to The Times and other publications and is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that China’s economic problems “are part of a broader process of political ossification and ideological hardening.” The Chinese call the sense of national stasis neijuan, which he translated as “life twisting inward without real progress.”

Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, is more positive on China’s outlook but wrote in a recent LinkedIn post that the country needs a “beautiful deleveraging” to deal with overindebtedness. To spread out the burden, he wrote, there should be a combination of defaults and restructurings, which are deflationary, with money printing, which is inflationary but makes debt more affordable.

An open question is whether Xi is willing to do what’s needed. As Bloomberg’s Rebecca Choong Wilkins and Colum Murphy reported on Aug. 20, Cai Fang, an adviser to the central bank, recently urged direct stimulus to consumers. But the authors noted that “Xi in the past has warned against the trap of ‘welfarism,’ which senior officials say can lead to ‘laziness.’”

Back to Yi. He follows the crisis news, but he’s focused more on the long term, in which demographics play a bigger part.

One of seven children, Yi was born in Hunan, a mountainous province in southern China, according to a profile in the University of Wisconsin alumni magazine. He studied clinical medicine before earning a doctorate in pharmacology. He moved to the United States in 1999. He and his wife have three children, more than they would have been allowed under China’s ill-considered and since repealed one-child policy.

Yi’s book, “Big Country With an Empty Nest,” was banned by the Chinese government when it appeared in 2007 because it expressed skepticism about the one-child policy. By 2013, Chinese authorities had begun to come around to his views. A new edition was picked as one of the 10 best books of the month by Xinhua, the official news agency. In 2016 he was invited to speak at the prestigious Boao Forum for Asia.

Just before the forum, he told The Times that he thought China’s economy would never get bigger than that of the United States. That, he said, angered officials in the National Health and Family Planning Commission. Although he completed his speech at the Boao Forum and gave 30 lectures at Chinese universities in the following two months, he said he has been on shaky ground ever since. He said he hasn’t attempted to return to China since 2017, fearing that if authorities let him in, they might not let him back out.

As parlous as China’s situation appears in the official statistics, Yi said things are actually worse. In 2019, he argued that China’s population had started declining in 2018, with a fertility rate of 1.1, whereas official projections were that the country’s fertility rate would stabilize at 1.8 and that the population would not begin to decline until 2031. The People’s Daily Online, the website of the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, ranked Yi’s conclusion third in its “Top Ten Rumors in 2019.”

This year the authorities acknowledged that China’s population had begun to decline, although they said 2022 was the first year of decrease. They also acknowledged that the fertility rate had fallen to 1.0, far below the replacement level of 2.1. Yi argues that China’s population is 1.28 billion, instead of the 1.41 billion the China’s leaders are trying to make up for a shrinking work force by improving education, but that can backfire, Yi argued, pointing to Japan’s experience. “As Japan’s enrollment rate for tertiary education has soared — more than doubling since 1992 — the number of young people willing to work in manufacturing has declined,” he wrote in another Project Syndicate commentary.

government claims.

“China’s decline will be gradual,” Yi wrote in yet another commentary. “It will remain the world’s second- or third-largest economy for decades to come. But the huge gap between its waning demographic and economic strength and its expanding political ambitions may make it highly vulnerable to strategic misjudgments. Memories of past glory or fear of lost status could lead it down the same dangerous path that Russia has taken in Ukraine.”

A Clarion Call Against the Reincarnated Dictator Cantorial Tyranny

Posted on 2023-09-06 by wrchina

By Jing Zhang 08-26-2023

(The source and link：https://www.yibao.net/2023/08/26/a-clarion-call-a…tatorial-tyranny)

Editor’s note: The author is a longtime Chinese human-rights advocate IW living in the US., and founder and executive director in particular of Women’s Rights in China.

Not long ago, there was a call for papers, with substantial prizes available, circulating on the Internet. Many figures in the pro-democracy movement with substantial online followings are serving as judges. The themes in the solicitation of papers are on the one hand “Let Us Discuss Autocracy: A Call to Action,” and on the other a “National Nonviolent Non-Cooperation Action Plan.”

“In disastrous times, the people suffer; in prosperous times, they also suffer.” It is this quote from Zhang Yanghao, an official during the Yuan Dynasty, that led the call for essays, “Let Us Discuss Autocracy.” This sentence reveals the consistent survival mode of the Chinese people under the centralized and authoritarian system that has coursed through the country for more than 2,000 years. Even in 21st-century Chinese society, we can infer the continued existence of this vivid tragedy.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Chinese had tired of the tyranny of the imperial power, and social elites were criticizing it in both speech and writing, and were advocating universal values. But a dark tyranny quietly and freakishly overthrew the brief democracy instead [the Republic of China having been quickly overthrown by the dictator Yuan Shikai almost immediately, followed by years of civil war and KMT dictatorship]. 1949 was the first year of the CCP’s Marxist violence. Since then, it has abused the Chinese people without relent. From 1951 onwards the people have suffered the anti-counterfeiting campaign, the three- and five-antis campaigns, land reform, the people’s communes, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, coercive family planning, the Tiananmen Square massacre, the female workers who were told to “be a good cat” and accept their firing to revitalize the economy, and 500 million farmers leaving their homes and going to the city to toil, along with the associated separation of 80 million village children from their parents, followed by the tragedy of having to return every Spring Festival on a trail of blood and tears. Penned in by the tyrannical fence of “In disastrous times, the people suffer; in prosperous times, they also suffer,” the people’s tragedies repeat themselves again and again. The more than 70 years under CCP rule is basically the epitome of thousands of years of Chinese imperial history.

In aggregate the persecution the Chinese people have suffered from the policies and systems of the CCP regime is shocking. Millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of people have died unexpectedly. Among them are scholars, workers and farmers in the prime of life, as well as young people, even college, high-school and middle-school students. And this does not include the countless pregnant women deprived of their lives in the implementation of family planning, nor the 400 million innocent fetuses who were massacred.

“It’s him!” While a line, a confession, in the Japanese movie “Hunt” [a 1978 film, the first foreign movie released in China after the Cultural Revolution], this is also what family-planning cadres shouted to their accomplices who rounded up pregnant women who illegally gave birth in 2011. Ma Jihong, a peasant woman who was 6 months pregnant in Jiangjiazhuang, Lijin County, Shandong Province, hid in a cotton field to avoid the family-planning arrest team, but was finally dragged out of the cotton field by them and sent to the hospital for a forced abortion, resulting in two deaths. Zhang Ronghua was pregnant with her second child for nearly 10 months. In 2012, because she did not have a “birth permit,” mother and child also died on a delivery bed in the Maternal and Child Health Hospital in Tengzhou…In 1983 alone, China had nearly 50 million women who were subjected to forced family planning, of which 17,755,736 had IUD implantations, 16,398,378 had tubal ligations, and 14,371,843 had induced abortions. This does not include missing statistical data from remote areas, nor does it include public or private medical abortion data. (The above data are from Section 8-8-1 of the “China Health and Family Planning Statistical Yearbook,” published by the National Health and Family Planning Commission Statistical Information Center in 2013.) In addition, there were tens of millions of young and middle-aged men who could be and were arrested and sterilized at any time.

This national family-planning policy has harmed the Chinese people in ways without precedent in Chinese history, and indeed is also unprecedented in world history.

Isn’t childbirth, reproduction, the most normal, natural phenomenon for human beings? For thousands of years in China, regardless of whatever natural or man-made disasters might occur, even the worst emperors never cared whether a family had children or not. But today’s CCP controls the sky and the earth, including of course women’s wombs. In the past, pregnant women who were convicted of “excessive birth” were arrested so as to “pull out” the fetus in their stomachs. Today, women are instead called on to give birth to obtain prizes, and students who marry and attempt to procreate are given priority. And for those women who were previously regarded as “super-birth criminals,” who were tortured, sometimes to the extent of permanent disfigurement or even death via equipment, drugs, medical malpractice, etc., will the government apologize? Have the murderers been tried and the dead and injured compensated?

The national family-planning policy has been just one of a series of planned, organized and large-scale campaigns to persecute people of all ethnic groups in China over the 70 years since the founding of the People’s Republic.

And it is not only crimes committed by the CCP against the Chinese people further in the past that remain unpunished. The most recent ones are unaddressed as well. After 2020, the anti-COVID policy of “dynamic” clearing, and closing and suddenly unblocking certain areas caused countless people to die needlessly, and in vain. The large-scale arrests for coercive nucleic-acid testing, the overcrowding in human warehouses of those who had tested positive, people choosing self-immolation in front of their doors, the wailing from hunger and pain…these things are unbearable to look back on. But the common people accepted their suffering, thinking that everything would be fine once the pandemic was over. As a result, Xi Jinping was able to personally carry out other campaigns during this time, eliminating Internet tycoons, those who promoted sales of celebrity-endorsed merchandise, and killing the education and training industry, and now doing the same to leading figures in the medical industry. But the CCP system that breeds all of this corruption throughout various industries remains intact.

While the CCP took turns imposing its intensive “fines” and other money-grabbing operations in many varied economic arenas, it dragged down the entire national economy, destroying the fruits of the people’s saving and hard work. Farmers who have been working in cities for many years are still the “low-end population,” and are driven back to their hometowns with empty pockets; at present, 40% of young people cannot find a job. The government has now straightforwardly announced that it will not disclose future employment data for young people. Even data on land sales, foreign-exchange reserves, bond transactions, academic information, and the Wuhan virus (Covid-19) death rate are now concealed. And data such as resumes of senior officials’ are now not made public. Collectively it is simply brazen, shameless.

Why do some people continue to place hope in the CCP despite the overwhelming evidence of its endless sea of heinous crimes? Here the recipe is lies + violence. For example, the party thinks that you should not have children, and uses its rhetoric to get you to believe it too. There are a hundred reasons why you must kill your children, and so you think it is your fault. When the party needs you to have more children, it will do everything possible to give you money, albeit in minuscule amounts, and the students who receive it to “give birth to the country” will hold onto it for dear life. Yes, for any human being in CCP China there is only one road to walk in life, and there is no resurrection after death. Given this, are there many people who aren’t afraid to do otherwise?

There are those who say that this is an inevitable stage in the history of Chinese civilization, but I say that this is the savage bullying of the jungle beast, darkness inflicted without remorse.

The Chinese people have been bullied for too long. They have endured more than 70 years and several generations of comprehensive rectification and brainwashing, and most of them choose to blot it out of their memories, or are willing to accept it. As long as things don’t happen to them personally, it is basically “refrain from caring about others.” As a result, Stockholm syndrome now sprouts in China. People who understand clearly nonetheless choose to close their eyes and protect themselves by not telling the truth, or simply to passively follow the prevailing political winds. While there is a small group of people who never give up and who pursue the truth, if they remain in China, they are likely to be frostbitten and die of cold on their way to keeping others warm; I for example cannot return to my hometown.

In fact, if one thinks about it more deeply, what is the difference between humans and animals? In addition to material desires, people also on some level have spiritual goals. Wang Weilin, who blocked that tank in 1989, is remembered by the world today. Peng Lifa on the Sitong Bridge in 2021 is also awe-inspiring. The reason is they spoke the truth, and did what was just and right. They bravely pierced the night sky like shooting stars. Although their deeds were short-lived, they will remain in the world forever. They knew the wisdom of “not for the sake of eternity, but for the sake of one moment’s righteousness.” They were not born on their knees, but were warriors who died standing up.

We all know that the democratic system has its flaws, but in a democratic society there are laws to abide by, and people can live with dignity and hope. In an autocratic system, only the rulers are respected. Even if there are laws, they will not be followed. Dignity and hope are important values in civilized society, and enabling people to have them serves the public interest. Daring to tell the truth is the first step in resisting violence. It is time for China to become a country ruled by law rather than by men. The call for essays on “Discussing Autocracy” sets up a platform for everyone to tell the truth together, to expose the darkness of communist dictatorship, and to reject the rotten debasement of the imperial autocracy. Your voice and views will be heard by the public and others will benefit from it.

In waging the crusade against dictatorship. you can listen, you can speak, you can write, you can do. It is the responsibility of all of us.

August 20, 2023