May 19, 2024

You are here: Home / Archives for grass roots

Chinese Journalist Detained in Beijing, One Day After Human Rights Talk With U.S.

August 2, 2013 by

The journalist, Chen Min, 51, widely known by his pen name, Xiao Shu, was called to a meeting with security officials in Beijing at around noon Friday. As he was questioned, he kept a friend informed by text message.

In his last message at 1:50 p.m., Mr. Chen said the officers wanted him to leave Beijing and were threatening him, the friend, Wang Gongquan, said. After that, frantic calls and messages to Mr. Chen went unanswered, Mr. Wang said.

Mr. Chen had helped organize a petition calling for the release of Xu Zhiyong, a legal scholar who inspired a grass-roots anticorruption campaign calling for public officials to declare their assets. Mr. Xu, already under house arrest for more than three months, was detained on July 16 for seeking to “gather people and disrupt social order in a public space.”

The detention of Mr. Chen came as an Obama administration official spoke at the American Embassy here Friday about the results of three days of meetings at the annual U.S.-China Human Rights Dialogue, which is now in its 18th round.

Uzra Zeya, assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, said at a news conference that she had “specifically called into question the pattern of arrests and extralegal detentions of public interest lawyers, Internet activists, journalists, religious leaders and others who challenge official policies and actions in China.”

The case of Mr. Xu, 40, was among those Ms. Zeya named as having been raised with the Chinese.

Mr. Xu has worked as a law lecturer, and was previously a member of a local legislative body, the People’s Congress, in Beijing’s Haidian district. In recent years, the college where he is employed, the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, has barred him from teaching.

Mr. Xu’s recent call for party officials to declare their assets seemed to be in line with the campaign by the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, to eliminate corruption.

His main offense appears not to have been the cause he pursued, but rather his effort to mobilize a “New Citizens Movement,” which by some estimates had attracted several thousand people. Human Rights Watch estimates 16 people associated with the movement have been detained.

Two other activists who are serving prison terms whose cases were raised with the Chinese were Gao Zhisheng, who defended practitioners of Falun Gong, a religious group banned in China, and Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Ms. Zeya said.

The Americans raised the cases of more detained human rights activists, she indicated, than the eight identified by name at the news conference.

The United States government was deeply concerned, Ms. Zeya said, that the Chinese authorities had tried to silence activists by targeting their family members and associates. In that category, she mentioned the families of Liu Xiaobo and Chen Guangcheng, a legal activist who is now in the United States.

The detention of Mr. Chen, the journalist, came after he sent an e-mail Friday saying that he was prepared to endure arrest for the sake of Mr. Xu, the detained rights advocate.

“I have no other choice,” Mr. Chen wrote in the e-mail, which he forwarded to a reporter. “First, in the name of brotherhood, I must act for Xu Zhiyong, my friend of many years. Second, my bottom line is the advancement of civil society. If the authorities violate this bottom line and I go along, that would amount to the bankruptcy of the ethical framework that I have stood by for many years.”

Mr. Chen had worked as an editor and commentator at Southern Weekend, a weekly newspaper with a reputation for combative journalism that offended some officials. He was forced aside in 2011.

He has attracted a wide following among educated Chinese readers with impassioned and sometimes acidic criticisms of censorship and other political restrictions.

Mr. Xi has indicated that proposed economic reforms would not be accompanied by any significant political relaxation. He has instead repeatedly stressed his loyalty to party traditions and political orthodoxy.

On Thursday, Chinese state-run news media featured a commentary from the official Xinhua news agency that warned that if China embraced democratic ideas promoted by liberal intellectuals, it would succumb to turmoil worse than that in the Soviet Union after the collapse of Communism.

These unnamed liberal intellectuals were “creating apocalyptic visions of China’s imminent collapse and vilifying the present socialist system,” the commentary said, accusing the liberals of “blatantly inciting the public to serve as cannon fodder for triggering social turmoil in China.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/world/asia/chinese-journalist-is-detained-in-beijing.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Under Pressure, China Measures Its Impact in Myanmar

May 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment

China’s ambition of transporting energy through the Indian Ocean and across the mountains of Myanmar seems close to fulfillment. Natural gas is scheduled to start flowing in July from wells deep in the Bay of Bengal through a 500-mile pipeline. Oil will run in a parallel pipe at the end of the year.

But for China, the cost of the pipelines has been far greater than the several billion dollars that the China National Petroleum Corporation, China’s energy giant, has spent on construction. With its projects challenged more than ever by activists energized by Myanmar’s democratic opening, China has been trying to repair its tarnished reputation among residents here, and in the country at large.

Farmers and fishermen in this remote coastal region — who made little headway while objecting to lost lands and diminished catches under Myanmar’s repressive military junta — are winning some concessions. In central Myanmar, monks have joined with ancestral landholders to stop a Chinese-led conglomerate from leveling a fabled mountain embedded with copper.

And last week, in a new ominous sign for the Chinese, guerrillas of the Shan State Army attacked a compound belonging to the Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise, a partner with the Chinese oil company, not far from the pipeline and close to China’s border.

In response to the broad opposition, Beijing has ordered secretive state-owned Chinese companies to do something they have rarely done before: publicly embrace Western-style corporate social responsibility practices and act humbly toward the people who live near their vaunted projects.

The grass-roots protests against Chinese projects disturb Beijing because they come amid a scramble for influence in Myanmar between China and the United States.

Official visits give a glimpse of the diplomatic jockeying. President Thein Sein of Myanmar, who heads the quasi-civilian government, will visit the White House on Monday in what will be the first encounter in Washington between an American president and a leader of the country formerly known as Burma, since 1966.

A member of the military junta that China backed for decades, Mr. Thein Sein met President Obama in November during what was the first visit by a sitting American president to Myanmar. Mr. Thein Sein has visited China twice in the past six months. The leader of the opposition, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was at the White House earlier this year and is expected in Beijing soon.

“It is in China’s self interest to think about the impact of their investments,” said Thant Myint-U, a Myanmar historian and author of “Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia.” “In the long term, it is difficult to see a Myanmar where China is not important. But there is a chance that China will no longer be the dominant actor in Myanmar, and that is worrying for some people in China.”

That concern has prompted Chinese officials, worried about losing Myanmar to the Americans, to push back. When a veteran Chinese diplomat, Wang Yingfan, was appointed several months ago as special envoy to Myanmar, he immediately flew there and spoke about the social obligations of Chinese state-run corporations.

And Gao Mingbo, the head of the political section at the Chinese Embassy in Yangon, said: “The companies must retain the support of the local communities. That has been the consistent message of the embassy: to be open, to be engaged.”

He created the embassy’s Facebook page; although Facebook is blocked in China, it is a tool that Chinese officials in Yangon, Myanmar’s commercial capital and main city, are using to reach citizens.

“If you don’t walk the walk and just talk the talk, you won’t win the hearts and minds of the local people,” Mr. Gao said.

Whether China’s outreach efforts will quell anti-China protests is an open question.

Wai Moe contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/world/asia/under-pressure-china-measures-its-impact-in-myanmar.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Group Pushing Deficit Cuts Has Deep Business Ties

January 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Mr. McCrery did not mention his day job: a lobbyist with Capitol Counsel L.L.C. His clients have included the Alliance for Savings and Investment, a group of large companies pushing to maintain low tax rates on dividend income, and the Win America Campaign, a coalition of multinational corporations that lobbied for a one-time “repatriation holiday” allowing them to move offshore profits back home without paying taxes.

In Washington’s running battles over taxes and spending, Mr. McCrery and his colleagues at Fix the Debt have lent a public-spirited, elder-statesman sheen to the cause of deficit reduction. Leading up to the fiscal negotiations, they set up grass-roots chapters around the country, met with President Obama and his aides, and hosted private breakfasts for lawmakers on Capitol Hill. In recent days, Fix the Debt has redoubled its efforts, starting a new national advertising campaign and calling on Mr. Obama and Congress to revise the tax code and reduce long-term spending on entitlement programs.

But in the weeks ahead, many of the campaign’s members will be juggling their private interests with their public goals: they are also lobbyists, board members or executives for corporations that have worked aggressively to shape the contours of federal spending and taxes, including many of the tax breaks that would be at the heart of any broad overhaul. While Fix the Debt criticized the recent fiscal deal between Mr. Obama and lawmakers, saying it did not do enough to cut spending or close tax loopholes, companies and industries linked to the organization emerged with significant victories on taxes and other policies.

“Some of these folks who are trying to be part of the solution have also been part of the problem,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning advocacy group, and a former economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “They’ve often fought hard against the kind of balance that we need on the revenue side. Many of the people we’re talking about are associated with policies that would make it a lot harder to fix the debt.”

Sam Nunn, a former Democratic senator from Georgia who is a member of Fix the Debt’s steering committee, received more than $300,000 in compensation in 2011 as a board member of General Electric. The company is among the most aggressive in the country at minimizing its tax obligations. Mr. McCrery, the Louisiana Republican, is also among G.E.’s lobbyists, according to the most recent federal disclosures, monitoring federal budget negotiations for the company.

Other board members and steering committee members have deep ties to the financial industry, including private equity, whose executives have aggressively fought efforts to alter a tax provision, known as the carried interest exception, that significantly reduces their personal income taxes.

Erskine B. Bowles, a co-founder of Fix the Debt, was paid $345,000 in stock and cash in 2011 as a board member at Morgan Stanley, while Judd Gregg, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire and a co-chairman of Fix the Debt, is a paid adviser to Goldman Sachs. Both companies have engaged in lobbying on international tax rules.

Mr. Gregg also sits on the boards of Honeywell and IntercontinentalExchange, a company that has warned investors that a tax on financial transactions would lower trading volume and curtail its profits. The two companies paid Mr. Gregg almost $750,000 in cash and stock in 2011.

In all, close to half of the members of Fix the Debt’s board and steering committee have ties to companies that have engaged in lobbying on taxes and spending, often to preserve tax breaks and other special treatment.

Fix the Debt does not endorse specific tax proposals. Instead, it advocates broad principles for debt reduction, including “comprehensive and pro-growth tax reform, which broadens the base, lowers rates, raises revenues and reduces the deficit.” A spokesman, Jon Romano, said that the executives involved with the campaign were committed to tax reform, even if it closed loopholes that benefited their companies.

“All the people involved in this campaign have said from the beginning that everything has to be on the table,” Mr. Romano said. “Our C.E.O.’s, our state chapters, our small-business leaders — they are all willing to give something up for the sake of the country.”

Those involved with the campaign say they have tried to separate their advocacy for Fix the Debt and their private work for clients. Vic Fazio, a former Democratic congressman from California who is on the campaign’s steering committee, is a lobbyist at Akin Gump, a Washington firm whose clients include KKR, a leading private equity shop, and the Private Equity Growth Capital Council, an industry trade group.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/us/politics/behind-debt-campaign-ties-to-corporate-interests.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,