China’s expanding surveillance, censorship, and suppression of dissent have forged an invisible prison of enforced silence, eroding freedoms under the pretext of socialist stability.
China: Pictures of the South-to-North Water Transfer Project
Journalist Sharron Lovell’s gallery of striking images portray the losing end of China’s massive water transfer scheme to alleviate some by taking from others.
Last Harvest
Imagine waking up one day to be told your home and way of life is to be upended for the construction of a massive state water project?
China’s remarkable coffee
Green Beanery, our coffee business and the social enterprise arm of Probe International, introduced coffee from China to our inventory last month. Supplied by the Xinzhai Coffee Co-op, this close-range look provides a fascinating snapshot of the growers behind our Yunnan Coffee selection – China’s first crop of farming entrepreneurs.
China puts rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang on trial as police scuffle with diplomats and protesters
As President Xi’s crackdown on dissent continues, China’s most prominent human rights lawyer awaits sentencing on the “vague charges” leveled against him. Meanwhile, many of the 200 human rights lawyers authorities rounded up in July, in a major nationwide sweep, remain behind bars. The Los Angeles Times reports.
China: Novelists against the state
Writers can help the world adjust to impossible facts and injured societies to heal but, for Chinese writers, censorship makes exploring “the fate of humanistic values in post-Mao society” problematic. How can authors be candid and avoid punishment?
China’s smog battle ongoing but skies are clearer for Beijing
The problem of smog is declining faster in Beijing than elsewhere in China, where air pollution remains at hazardous levels, reports Greenpeace. Chinese authorities, meanwhile, are making a “big deal” of going after small-time or individual polluters rather than industrial polluters. Why the smoke screen?
A year as a wife
A profile of Meng Qun, wife of prominent civil rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, detained in May 2014 for attending a Tiananmen protest discussion.
China releases two NGO activists ‘on bail’ ahead of president’s US trip
Guo Yushan and He Zhengjun, detained former members of the influential Beijing Transition Institute (now shuttered), have been released on bail by Chinese authorities. Some analysts see the move as a symbolic concession to US concerns over Beijing’s human rights record. What might their release mean going forward? Radio Free Asia reports.
China: CCP’s ‘profound dread’ behind crackdown on lawyers
The party’s attempts to project confidence do little to disguise its panic: It is beset by economic strife, antagonism between officials and the people, corruption, ecological disasters, unrest in Xinjiang and Tibet, and its own sense of ideological crisis.
In China’s crackdown on rights lawyers, big law says little
Chinese authorities are well aware how governments and bar organizations around the world feel about their fierce crackdown on human-rights lawyers. But the country’s commercial lawyers—including international firms active in China—have been relatively quiet. Why so? The American Lawyer reports.
Patricia Adams: China must free activists who championed environment and the rule of law
China must free Guo Yushan and He Zhengjun and restore confidence in their country.
Chinese authorities crack down on the country’s public interest groups and lawyers
On July 9, more than 100 lawyers in China issued an open letter on the Internet calling for an end to the shuttering of public interest groups and the detention and prosecution of individuals working for the public good.
Relaxing China’s one-child policy
“No government should regulate birth, period.” Probe International Fellow and correspondent, Dai Qing, discusses China’s population-control policies over the years in this opinion piece for The New York Times.
China: Scrap repressive foreign organizations law
The Chinese government should withdraw its draft law on foreign organizations, which represents “nothing more than a means to block the activities of groups Beijing doesn’t like,” Human Rights Watch said today in a submission to the National People’s Congress Standing Committee Legislative Affairs Commission.
Patricia Adams
Dai Qing
Fan Xiao
Lawrence Solomon
Mu Lan
Probe International
Lisa Peryman
Probe Media
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