BEIJING — China’s national pole-dancing team, five women and two men, jet to Switzerland this week for the sport’s world championship. Back home, people fret about house prices, watch TV dating shows and love online shopping. They shoot “Gangnam Style” music video covers, too.
Read more
China’s political elite are expected to oust disgraced figure Bo Xilai and jostle for leadership roles in their last formal meeting which opened on Thursday ahead of next week’s landmark power handover. The Communist Party’s Central Committee convened behind closed doors, state media said, with 500 senior members to debate (read more…)
Read more
The owner of an Internet cafe in southwest China was given an eight-year prison term for criticizing the ruling Communist Party in online messages and for seeking to establish an opposition party, his wife said Thursday.
Read more
The Observatory has been informed by Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) of the ongoing arbitrary detention since September 30 of Ms. Mao Hengfeng, a Shanghai activist who has been active in defending the right to housing and opposing forced evictions as well as in promoting women’s reproductive rights.
Read more
China adopted a law on Friday to protect for the first time the rights of the mentally ill after years of accusations that psychiatric hospitals are used to lock up people against their will and silence dissidents.
Read more
The provincial authorities arrested Chen Yudao in 2008 over the murder of a neighbor. Without evidence, witnesses or motivation they kept him one year in prison, three years ago at the trial the judges did not sentence him.
Read more
Beijing (dpa) – Two years after her jailed husband won the Nobel Peace Prize, Liu Xia remains in limbo, almost completely cut off from the outside world yet subject to no legal process.
Read more
When the human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng escaped extra-legal house arrest and beatings and found his way to the U.S. Embassy last month, he became an instant hero on the Chinese Internet. How had he escaped? How could a single blind man tear such a hole in the government’s pervasive (read more…)
Read more
The Chinese Internet calls him “China’s blind spiderman.” The web buzz about the blind human-rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng, who somehow escaped house arrest in Shandong province and fled to the U.S. embassy in Beijing, was sky-high last week as news of his escape got out. How, people ask, did he (read more…)
Read more
The “deal” for Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng to leave China for legal study in the United States is not without pitfalls, but other outcomes could be worse. Even if Chinese authorities honor the promises apparently made to U.S. officials to let him travel, they have conceded little on human rights.
Read more
Diane and guests explore political intrigue in China, in light of ongoing internal power struggles and the recent escape of a dissident. We take a look at new complications in U.S. –China relations ahead of high-level talks in Beijing.
Read more
Fang Lizhi, a distinguished professor of astrophysics, luminary in the struggle for human rights in contemporary China, and frequent contributor to The New York Review, died suddenly on the morning of April 6. At age seventy-six he had not yet retired, and was preparing to leave home to teach a (read more…)
Read more