Updates to Our Database of Arrests under the Hong Kong National Security Law

on April 30, 2024

We updated our suite of graphics tracking the impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law. The law, which went into effect on June 30, 2020, and the allegation of “sedition,” have been used to arrest 292 individuals, charge 159, and convict 71 as of January 31, 2024.

Among arrests under the law in recent months, four individuals were arrested for signing up for paid subscriptions to Patreon accounts for Nathan Law and Ted Hui, Hong Kong politicians now living in the UK and Australia, respectively. Reasons cited for other recent arrests include posting on social media criticizing officials, as well as calling for protests and threatening the families of government officials, leading to charges of sedition.

In March, legislators passed a new security law in Hong Kong. Enacting a mandate in Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the territory’s constitution, the new legislation expands on the 2020 National Security Law to cover sedition (and increases the maximum sentence for this offense), collaboration with “external forces,” treason and insurrection, and other acts. We will be looking into how this new legislation will affect national security cases going forward.

You can see our full dataset and graphics here.

 

Lessons from Tiananmen for Today’s University Presidents

By James A. Millward on April 29, 2024

Thirty-five years ago, in April 1989, Chinese students from Beijing’s elite universities began their occupation of Tiananmen Square. Their issues were different from those of American students today. Chinese demonstrators voiced concerns about corruption, inflation, the effects of on-going market reforms, and lack of free press and participatory governance. Today’s students at Columbia, NYU, Harvard, Yale, University of Minnesota, University of Texas, Brown, USC, and other campuses are mounting an antiwar movement, calling on their institutions to divest from Israel in light of the unprecedented levels of civilian death in Gaza, and for the U.S. government to stop supplying Israel’s offensive war machine. Another big difference: as it turned out, Chinese students faced far more serious and long-lasting repercussions than seem likely for American students, even those violently arrested by police. At least so far.

A New Round of Restrictions Further Constrains Religious Practice in Xinjiang

By Martin Lavička on April 19, 2024

Authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region rang in 2024 by announcing an update to the region’s strictures on religious practice. Changes include new rules to ensure that sites of religious worship, like mosques, look adequately “Chinese,” and to mandate the cultivation of “patriotic” religious leaders.

Killing Wind #6

on April 18, 2024

A holographic portrait of Mao Zedong hangs on the wall of a house in Shuinan Village, Dao county. Mao’s embrace of radical policies and violence led to the Cultural Revolution in which at least 1.5 million were killed in collective killings pervasive across the Chinese countryside.

Killing Winds #4

on April 18, 2024

In this ancestral temple hall that doubled as a school in Gongba Town, “black elements” rounded up by a militia were kept and tortured before being marched to a nearby execution ground and killed.

Killing Winds #9

on April 18, 2024

In the collective killings across rural China during the Cultural Revolution which claimed at least 1.5 million lives, the tools of execution were often farming and household implements like cudgels, hoes, rakes, and shoulder poles.

Killing Winds #3

on April 18, 2024

Many rural Chinese were forced to live in cow pens during the Cultural Revolution, before they were taken away and killed. Today, many of the survivors eke out meager existences as rural laborers or farmers. Their families were denied education in the Mao era, which has affected younger generations down to today.

Killing Wind #7

on April 18, 2024

Children aged 6 to 10 sit under the Chinese Communist Party flag, learning math, in a single-room schoolhouse in Maple Wood Mountain, Dao County. Just behind the school is a pit with 31 corpses, including the three children of Zhou Qun. The children were tossed into the limestone pit alongside adults who had been clubbed on the head. Everyone died over the next seven days in the pit except for Zhou. “I think of how the children died in my arms. . .” she told us, breaking down.

Killing Wind #8

on April 18, 2024

Zhou Qun, formerly a primary school teacher, was the sole person to survive being clubbed on the head with a hoe and then being tossed into a limestone pit with 31 others. She climbed out of the pit after seven days. This dent in her skull is all that remains physically of the trauma, but nightmares of her children dying in her arms continue to haunt her 50 years on.