More than 200 people from Aotearoa New Zealand’s Chinese community gathered for a vigil at Auckland’s Aotea Square last night to mourn the lives lost under China’s stringent covid-19 lockdowns and to call for an end to the country’s “Zero Covid” policy.

The unprecedented display of defiance by a crowd mainly made up of Chinese Kiwis from the mainland came after a lockdown building fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang, last week that killed 10 people.

The Urumqi fire has sparked nationwide protests across China and among overseas Chinese, with vigils and protests building up in major cities including New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

More than 100 people at the event held up blank pieces of A4 paper as a symbol of defiance against China’s censorship of dissent, and chanted in Mandarin: “We don’t want leaders, we want votes — we don’t want dictatorship, we want citizens”.

“Without freedom, I’d rather die.

“Xi Jin Ping, step down, CCP step down.”

A similar vigil for the Urumqi fire victims was also held in Wellington last night.

Step up after seeing suffering
In an emotional speech, one of the organisers of the Auckland vigil said despite having no previous experience participating in social movements, she had decided to step up after seeing the recent tragedies of Chinese people suffering under the lockdowns.

“There were a series of suicides in Hohhot where I come from, I felt at that time that I can no longer say everything is fine — we can say that for New Zealand, but my family and friends are in China, so I can no longer be silent,” she said.

Members of the Uyghur Muslim community from Xinjiang — where the Urumqi fire happened — also attended, showing solidarity and protesting against human rights violations against Uyghurs.

The protesters also called for the release of protesters arrested in China.

The organiser paid tribute to a list of Chinese citizens who had stood up against authority during the pandemic, including jailed citizen journalist Zhang Zhan and the lone protester on Beijing’s Sitong Bridge who displayed banners calling for people to strike and for the removal of Xi Jinping.

Like her, many at the gathering were first-time protesters emboldened by the recent protests in China.

Another protester said he was also inspired by the man on Sitong Bridge.

‘He gave us courage’
“He gave us a lot of courage. He was a person at the bottom of society, who did what he knew was forbidden, he sacrificed himself to awaken the Chinese people’s desire for a democratic society,” he said.

“I feel like he’s planted a fire in all our hearts, he’s like the Prometheus of our times.”

An international student who had just graduated from high school said she wanted to contribute to ending China’s lockdowns.

“If the protests could work and make all the cities stop the lockdown, I was so happy to come to come here today, hear everyone share their stories and using the A4 paper to show our anger.”

Another said he hoped the protests in China and abroad instilled a sense of what it meant to be a responsible citizen for Chinese people.

“If people want to live with dignity in a fair society, there needs to be a civil society,” he said.

‘Softer’ solidarity
Meanwhile, some at the gathering chose a softer way of showing solidarity with the victims of the Urumqi fire.

Chrysanthemums were laid and candles were lit, and a school aged child accompanied by his parents played “Do you hear the people sing” on his flute.

One attendee told RNZ he was glad that the people who gathered could find something in common regardless of where they were on the political spectrum.

“Some people want to see a revolution in China, others just want something small like for their residential area to come out of lockdown earlier, so that people can freely buy groceries,” he said.

“But people can easily find a common denominator, and that’s hoping things will move forward a little bit, and let friends and family living in China be safer and freer.”

At least two major cities in China — Guangzhou and Chongqing — have eased covid-19 restrictions following a clash between protesters and police in Guangzhou this week.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Since coming to power in 2012, Chinese President Xi Jinping has launched an unprecedented crusade against press freedom.

Facing censorship, threats from police and sometimes jail, the last few independent reporters – those who do not work for state media serving Communist Party propaganda – are no longer able to sell their articles.

At least four citizen journalists who were investigating the real death toll from the covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan have disappeared.

More than six months after their arrests, there is still no trace of them.

France 24 Focus correspondents report.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

BACKGROUNDER: By Oiwan Lam

Former human rights lawyer and famous citizen journalist Chen Qiushi arrived in Wuhan city, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, on January 24, 2020, to report from inside the quarantined city.

Although the first case of the coronavirus emerged on December 8, Chinese media outlets only started covering the news on December 31, and the real scale of the outbreak came on January 20 when prominent Chinese pulmonologist Dr Zhong Nanshan admitted that the outbreak had entered the human-to-human transmission stage.

After Beijing announced Wuhan’s city-wide quarantine on January 23, the independent journalist circle was worried that no one would report on the situation in the sealed city.

READ MORE: Al Jazeera coronavirus updates

Chen built his reputation by covering the Hong Kong protests in August. Though he was harassed and silenced by Chinese authorities after his trip to Hong Kong, he continued speaking out using Twitter and YouTube.

Below is a summary of his reports from the center of the epidemic outbreak from January 24 to February 2.

January 24: Information should travel faster than the virus
After arriving in Wuhan around 10 pm, Chen urged citizens to contact him via WeChat and promised to report on the real situation in Wuhan. He anticipated that the national security police would go after him and made three public promises:

1. He would not spread rumors, would not create social panic and would not cover up the truth;
2. He would protect himself and would not reach out to patients who were in serious condition;
3. Until the outbreak is under control, he would not leave Wuhan even if he caught the virus.

He stressed that the spread of SARS (17 years ago) and the Wuhan coronavirus was due to a cover-up of the virus outbreak and the Chinese people should not repeat the same mistake; information should travel faster than the virus.

January 25: A visit to the Wuhan Central hospital
Chen’s WeChat account was suspended for one month after he published his January 24 video. According to WeChat’s notification, he was accused of spreading rumours and other illegal content.

At 2 a.m., Chen visited the Wuhan Central hospital where he found a relatively uncrowded emergency ward of 30 patients. Before noon, Chen was forced to check out from his hostel as local authorities handed out the order that hostel operators should not accept non-local residents.

Chen also visited a number of friends in Wuhan, one of them made a DIY face mask:

Today I visited a few friends in Wuhan. They took me to Jinyintan hospital. Just managed to talk to the doctor and could not enter the hospital. I was impressed by courage and optimism of the Wuhanese.

January 26: A dead body at Wuhan No 11 Hospital
Chen interviewed a nurse from Wuhan No 11 Hospital who said that the situation was far better than before the Lunar New year when the ward was flooded with thousands of patients. At that time, the government was not providing any assistance and medical workers were left without basic protective gear.

Instead of going through official channels, the hospital was forced to make public appeals through social media. The nurse also denounced some government efforts to “fact-check” social media saying: “They claimed that the video showing three dead bodies from the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital was fake. I told you, they were really corpses, though we could not verify if they died because of the coronavirus.”

Chen expressed his worries about human-to-human transmission inside the hospital as all the patients shared the same ward. He noted that the hygiene outside the hospital was also pretty bad — used masks, gloves, and vomit were everywhere.

January 27: Social panic and a divided city
Chen expressed frustration about the lack of citizen initiative to help each other out during the crisis: “Everyone is divided. They keep complaining and arguing about government policy but can’t even volunteer to help receive and distribute the resources sent from outside of Wuhan.”

Chen also mentioned how current affairs writer Wang Yajun was threatened by the Hubei authorities over his comments about the outbreak.

January 28: ‘Wuhan is like hell’
Chen helped deliver medical supplies and food to the Wuhan Union Hospital in the morning. He then visited the Huoshenshan hospital construction site, one of the two hospitals Beijing vowed to finish within 10 days.

At night, he interviewed a Wuhan citizen who criticized the local authorities for failing to alert local residents about the outbreak and their lack of public support for the quarantined city on the first day of the Lunar New Year.

The young man compared Wuhan to hell: people could not take public transportation to the hospitals and no one answered the emergency line. Even if the patients managed to go to the hospitals, they were only given anti-inflammatories.

The majority were not tested if they had been infected with the virus and were told to quarantine themselves back home.

Chen’s video went viral on Twitter and YouTube within two days.

January 29: Infected nurse broke down
Chen visited the Wuhan No 5 hospital and there were about 100 people. A nurse broke down and screamed out in the hospital car park as she was infected at the hospital but could not get a bed in any hospital. Rumors spread online saying that the hospital had a number of medical workers infected but doctors were ordered not to talk to media.

January 30: Identified cases were not confirmed
Chen said his name and face were blocked on WeChat, and any distribution of his video could result in a WeChat ban. He said that taxi drivers had been aware of the virus outbreak since mid-December.

According to sources from a Wuhan taxi driver chat room, there were 20,000 taxis in Wuhan and only 6000 were in operation during the quarantine. Residents had to contact district administrators to arrange a taxi.

Chen said that the day before he had followed a patient to Tongji Hospital where patients were having treatment but there were not enough beds. According to Chen, his friend asked for a test but there were not enough coronavirus testers to check on his infection.

January 31: Four confirmed infected in one single family
Chen attempted to visit a family which had four confirmed infected patients. Two were hospitalized and the 84-year-old mother passed away in the morning. The son was confirmed infected on January 23 but there were no beds available.

Chen eventually could not pay the visit to this family as the residential district was locked down with guards standing in front of the gate.

February 1 & 2: Citizen reporter Fang Bin arrested
Chen posted several videos from other citizen sources on Twitter and YouTube.

The first one showed large crowds outside of a pharmacy attempting to buy a Chinese medicine called “shuanghuanglian.” On January 31, The Chinese Academy of Sciences released a report in the People’s Daily News claiming that the medicine could repress viral replication.

While the medical experts admitted that there wasn’t any clinical evidence about the effectiveness of the medicine, panicked shoppers bought up all the medicine from the market.

The second one showed national security officers disguised as disease control officers visiting Wuhan citizen reporter Fang Bin late at night claiming that they suspected he was infected.

On January 31, Fang Bin uploaded a video taken from Wuhan No.5 hospital which showed how corpses from the hospital were sent to a funeral house and he believed that was the real reason for his arrest.

Fang was released the following day and talked about the incident via Chen’s YouTube channel. The police had accused him of creating social panic.

Both Fang and Chen were trying to dig into the stories about the death toll of the Wuhan coronavirus. Chen visited the Hanhou Funeral Home on January 29 and found out that within a period of 1.5 hours four vehicles had entered the funeral home, a designated cremation center for bodies infected with the coronavirus.

On January 31, Fang Bin found out that a vehicle parked at the entrance of the No 5 Hospital was loaded with 8 bodies.

During Fang’s arrest, law enforcement officers claimed that they needed to quarantine Fang as he had been in contact with the infected. On February 2, a new administrative regulation was released stating that the disease control officers were authorised to take away any individual who was in contact with the infected.

Chen pointed out that the new regulation could be used as an excuse to arrest citizen reporters, including himself. He urged others to speak out for themselves.

Republished from Global Voices under a Creative Commons licence.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

OPINION: Moale James

What should we expect for the future of media freedom in the Pacific? And how do we sift through the “bullshit” as emerging journalists? These were two of the many questions raised at the pre-conference keynote for the Melanesian Media Freedom Forum at Griffith University, Brisbane.

Attending on the night where various media professionals, many with extensive careers in the Pacific. A few notable attendees included SBS correspondent Stefan Armbruster, retired foreign correspondent Sean Dorney, radio journalist Pauline Nare and academic Dr Tess Newton Cain.

Key note speaker, Professor David Robie focused the night’s conversation on the lack of media freedom in West Papua with the main issue being the lack of international media attention and its effect on opportunities to make positive humanitarian changes.

READ MORE: WEST PAPUA: PMC director blasts politicians, media over ‘shameful silence’ on rights violations

To date, 528,000 West Papuans have lost their lives to a slow-motion genocide.

Dr Robie and audience members expressed their disgust and concern at the silence and inaction from international governments and the lack of media reporting on these events.

With a death toll as high as this, it becomes clear that the lack of journalistic reporting on this issue is a deliberate decision. This is not a number that can simply be ignored.

Dr Robie likened the media situation in West Papua to the cases of imprisoned female investigative journalists in Iran. The deliberate action of imprisoning critical journalists who are exposing human rights abuses is a mirrored pattern in the Pacific.

However, although there are international journalists being imprisoned there is an exciting emergence of “citizen journalism” a term that describes the creation, collection and distribution of news and information by the public on the internet and social media.

West Papuans are using the resources that they have on the ground and in their hands to capture the human rights abuses they are experiencing and actively sharing these online, forcing open the eyes of the world onto the slow genocide occurring in West Papua.

The “citizen journalism” coming out of West Papua has created global pressure on the Indonesian Government, which initiated a blackout across West Papua on August 21, 2019  in response to the growing unrest. Black spots are still active today in Jayapura and Maokwari.

Coming to the end of the key note presentation, Dr Robie unfurled the West Papuan flag  from behind the podium. In an act of solidarity, he asked all attendants to stand with him and make the promise that they would endeavour to be honest, passionate and critical journalists when it came to writing about the atrocities in West Papua.

If mainstream media are deliberately choosing not to report on the events in West Papua, then independent journalists must make the conscious decision to do so instead.

As the lecture came to an end it became clear that conversations around West Papua did not simply end with the slideshow. Conversations and deliberate actions of those present following this event are sure to be the catalyst for change for media freedom in not only West Papua but across the Pacific.

Papua Merdeka from Sorong to Samarai.

Moale James is a student at the University of Queensland undertaking her Bachelor in Journalism. Moale also proudly identifies as a mixed-race Papua New Guinean-Australian.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Pacific Media Watch Newsdesk

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has called on the Thai authorities to shed all possible light on the disappearance of Truong Duy Nhat, a famous Vietnamese blogger who went missing in Bangkok last month, one day after going to the local office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to apply for refugee status.

RSF is concerned that Vietnamese agents may have kidnapped Truong Duy Nhat on January 26 , who is from the city of Danang, in central Vietnam. The Thai police say they are not holding him.

More than ten days have gone by since anyone heard from him, RSF reports.

Other Vietnamese bloggers who have applied for refugee status in Bangkok say they think he was abducted while in a shopping mall in suburban Bangkok, according to Radio Free Asia, one of the media outlets for which Nhat works.

“We urge the Thai authorities to make every effort to shed light on Truong Duy Nhat’s extremely disturbing disappearance,” said Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk.

“If the Thai authorities prove not to have been involved, this would mean that Vietnamese agents are no longer bothered by international law and violate a partner country’s sovereignty in order to pursue their critics. This sends an absolutely terrifying message to the community of Vietnamese bloggers who have sought refuge in Bangkok.”

-Partners-

Network of sources
Nhat’s disappearance is all the more disturbing because he is widely respected as a blogger, even within certain circles of the ruling Communist Party in Hanoi.

Bui Thanh Hieu, a blogger who has found asylum in Germany, wrote on Facebook that he suspected that Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc may have ordered Nhat’s abduction.

“I think the prime minister wants Nhat arrested at all costs because he is in possession of compromising information about the prime minister’s clan in Quang Nam province,” Hieu wrote.

Quang Nam province adjoins Danang, Nhat’s home town, where the blogger has many sources to help him with his investigative reporting.

Place of refuge
Nhat used to work for state media outlets, including Danang police newspapers, until 2010, when he launched his own blog, Mot Goc Nhin Khac (Another Viewpoint), in order to be able to report and write with complete freedom.

He was arrested in 2013 and sentenced to two years in prison for “abusing democratic freedoms” in his blog posts. RSF included him in its list of 100 “information heroes” in 2014.

In the course of the Vietnamese government’s two-year-old crackdown on citizen-journalists, many of them have found refuge in Bangkok.

Vietnam is ranked 175th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2018 World Press Freedom Index, the lowest ranking in Southeast Asia. Thailand is ranked 140th.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz