What drives high-profile disappearances in China

Details

Written by northsouth

Category: Asia

Published: 19 November 2021

Hits: 1150

BEIJING — The disappearance of tennis star Peng Shuai in China following her accusation of sexual assault against a former top Communist Party official has shined a spotlight on similar cases involving political dissidents, entertainers, business leaders and others who have run afoul of the authorities.

A look at those cases and the background on such actions.

WHAT HAPPENED TO PENG SHUAI?

Despite an outcry in the tennis world and global media, Chinese officials have not directly addressed the accusation posted online by Grand Slam doubles champion Peng more than two weeks ago. Peng said she was sexually assaulted by Zhang Gaoli, a former vice premier and member of the party’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee.

Peng, 35, is a former No. 1-ranked player in women’s doubles who won titles at Wimbledon in 2013 and the French Open in 2014. She also participated in three Olympics, making her disappearance all the more prominent with Beijing set to host the Winter Games starting February 4.

Peng wrote in a lengthy social media post on Nov. 2 that Zhang had forced her to have sex three years ago, despite her repeated refusals. The post was quickly deleted from her verified account on Weibo, a leading Chinese social media platform, but screenshots of the explosive accusation quickly spread across China’s internet.

WHY DO PEOPLE DISAPPEAR IN CHINA?

China says it is a nation “ruled by law,” but the Communist Party ultimately holds sway and there are large gray areas of enforcement. Control over the press and social media allows authorities to keep word of disappearances quiet and to stonewall critics, although such news often gradually surfaces through underground and foreign sources.

Among Chinese celebrities in the entertainment world, tangling with the authorities can be a career killer. For business leaders, it can mean a loss of status, market access and possible incarceration. With political dissidents, it often means disappearance into the vast security state, without access to family or legal recourse.

Even before taking power in 1949, the Communist Party underwent numerous rounds of vicious internecine struggles during which those on the losing side were disposed of without due process. The 1966-76 Cultural Revolution saw politicians, educators and musicians locked up for years without charge, often in solitary confinement.

Today, the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection handles most major charges against ranking officials, who may drop out of sight for months before a terse statement is issued saying they are under investigation for “severe violations of rules and regulations.” Heavy sentences are later announced, with little or no details given about the charges or the evidence brought against them.

WHAT FAMOUS PEOPLE HAVE GONE MISSING?

Notable people who have dropped from sight under circumstances that remain unclear include business leader Jack Ma and famous actress Fan Bingbing.

Ma, China’s most prominent entrepreneur and the founder of Alibaba Group, the world’s biggest e-commerce company, stopped appearing in public after he criticized regulators as being too conservative in an October 2020 speech.

Days later, the government ordered Ma’s Ant Group, a financial service that grew out of Alibaba’s online payments business, to suspend a planned stock market debut in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Rumors on social media questioned whether Ma had been detained. Friends of Ma reportedly said he wasn’t detained but decided to stay quiet following criticism of his comments. Ma reappeared two months later in a January 2020 video released by Alibaba but made no mention of his disappearance.

Fan disappeared for three months before news emerged that tax authorities had ordered her and companies she represented to pay taxes and penalties totaling $130 million.

People can drop off the map if they are linked to disputes with the politically well-connected involving business and reputation.

Businesswoman Duan Weihong disappeared in 2017 and her husband, Desmond Shum, said he didn’t hear from her for four years until he was preparing to publish a book about corruption among Chinese elites. Shum told Time magazine his wife begged him in a phone call not to publish his book, “Red Roulette.”

Duan, also known as Whitney Duan, was cited by The New York Times in a 2012 series of articles about the family wealth of then-Premier Wen Jiabao, China’s No. 2 leader. It remains unclear what exactly prompted her disappearance.

A real estate mogul, Ren Zhiqiang, disappeared from public view in March 2020 after criticizing President Xi Jinping’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Ren was sentenced later that year to 18 years in prison on corruption charges.

WHAT OTHER KINDS OF PEOPLE DISAPPEAR?

In a rare case that appeared in the open, Swedish citizen Gui Minhai disappeared in 2015, when he was believed to have been abducted by Chinese agents from his seaside home in Thailand.

He and four others who worked for the same Hong Kong company that published books critical of the Communist Party all went missing at about the same time and turned up months later in police custody in mainland China.

A court in eastern China later sentenced him to 10 years in prison for “illegally providing intelligence overseas.”

China has also snatched some foreigners.

Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were detained in China in December 2018, shortly after Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, on a U.S. extradition request. China delayed announcing their detentions for days, then denied that the arrests were linked. The two were released in September after Meng was allowed to return to China.

Even a scientist, gene-editing researcher He Jiankui, disappeared from public view for almost a year after announcing his controversial research at a conference in Hong Kong. He was eventually convicted of practicing medicine without a license in December 2019.

Accompanying the news of Peng’s disappearance, the wife of the former president of Interpol, who was taken into custody on a trip back to China in September 2018, told The Associated Press that she and her lawyers have been unable to contact him since that date.

State media reported that Meng Hongwei admitted taking bribes, but Grace Meng said her husband was the victim of a political vendetta.

Ex-Interpol Chief’s wife slams ‘monster’ China

Details

Written by northsouth

Category: Asia

Published: 18 November 2021

Hits: 1027

By JOHN LEICESTERan

LYON, France — In China, she enjoyed the privileges that flowed from being married to a senior member of the governing elite. Her husband was a top police official in the security apparatus that keeps the Communist Party in power, so trusted that China sent him to France to take up a prestigious role at Interpol.

But Meng Hongwei, the former Interpol president, has now vanished into China’s sprawling penal system, purged in a stunning fall from grace. And his wife is alone with their twin boys in France, a political refugee under round-the-clock French police protection following what she suspects was an attempt by Chinese agents to kidnap and deliver them to an uncertain fate.

From being an insider, Grace Meng has become an outsider looking in — and says she is horrified by what she sees.

So much so that she is now shedding her anonymity, potentially putting herself and her family at additional risk, to speak out against China’s authoritarian government that her husband — a vice minister of public security — served before disappearing in 2018. He was later tried and imprisoned.

“The monster” is how Meng now speaks of the government he worked for. “Because they eat their children.”

In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Meng chose for the first time to show her face, agreeing to be filmed and photographed without the dark lighting and from-the-back camera angles that she previously insisted on, so she could speak openly and in unprecedented detail about her husband, herself and the cataclysm that tore them apart.

“I have the responsibility to show my face, to tell the world what happened,” she told The Associate Press in an interview. “During the past three years, I learned — just like we know how to live with the COVID — I know how to live with the monster, the authority.”

Among the global critics of China — many of them now mobilizing against the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing — Meng brings the unique perspective of a former insider who has walked through the looking glass and emerged with her views transformed. So profound is the change that she has largely stopped using her Chinese name, Gao Ge. She says she now feels more herself as Grace, her chosen name, with her husband’s surname, Meng.

“I have died and been reborn,” she says.

About Meng, his whereabouts and health as an imprisoned soon-to-be 68-year-old, she is entirely in the dark. Their last communication was two text messages he sent on Sept. 25, 2018, on a work trip to Beijing. The first said, “wait for my call.” That was followed four minutes later by an emoji of a kitchen knife, apparently signaling danger. She thinks he likely sent them from his office at the Ministry of Public Security.

Since then, she says she has had no contact with him and that multiple letters sent by her lawyers to Chinese authorities have gone unanswered. She is not even sure he is alive.

“This has already saddened me beyond the point where I can be saddened further,” she said. “Of course, it’s equally cruel to my children.”

“I don’t want the children to have no father,” she added, starting to cry. “Whenever the children hear someone knocking on the door, they always go to look. I know that they’re hoping that the person coming inside will be their father. But each time, when they realize that it isn’t, they silently lower their heads. They are extremely brave.”

Official word about Meng’s fate came out in dribs and drabs. A statement in October 2018, just moments after Grace Meng had first met reporters in Lyon, France, to sound the alarm about his disappearance, announced that he was being investigated for unspecified legal violations. That signaled that he was the latest high-ranking Chinese official to fall victim to a party purge.

Interpol announced that Meng had resigned as president, effective immediately. That still infuriates his wife, who says the Lyon-based police body “was of no help at all.” She argues that by not taking a firmer stand, the global organization that works on shared law enforcement issues has only encouraged authoritarian behavior from Beijing.

“Can someone who has been forcibly disappeared write a resignation letter of their own free will?” she asked. “Can a police organization turn a blind eye to a typical criminal offense like this?”

In 2019, China announced that Meng had been stripped of his Communist Party membership. It said he abused his power to satisfy his family’s “extravagant lifestyle” and allowed his wife to use his authority for personal benefit. In January 2020, a court announced he’d been sentenced to 13 years and six months in prison on charges of accepting more than $2 million in bribes. The court said he confessed guilt and expressed regret.

His wife has long maintained that the accusations were trumped up and that her husband was purged because he’d been using his high-profile position to push for change.

“It’s a fake case. It’s an example of a political disagreement being turned into a criminal affair,” she said. “The extent of corruption in China today is extremely serious. It’s everywhere. But there are two different opinions about how to solve corruption. One is the method used now. The other is to move toward constitutional democracy, to solve the problem at its roots.”

Grace Meng also has political connections through her own family. Her mother served on an advisory body to the Chinese legislature. And the family has previous experience of political trauma. After the Communist takeover in 1949, Grace Meng’s grandfather was stripped of his business assets and later imprisoned in a labor camp, she said.

History, she says, is repeating itself.

“Of course, this is a great tragedy in our family, a source of great suffering,” she told the AP. “But I also know that very many families in China today are facing a similar fate to mine.”

Schools close as smog-laden India capital considers lockdown

Details

Written by northsouth

Category: Asia

Published: 17 November 2021

Hits: 1140

By SHEIKH SAALIQ and SHONAL GANGULY

NEW DELHI — Schools were closed indefinitely and some coal-based power plants shut down as the smog-shrouded Indian capital and neighboring states invoked harsh measures Wednesday amid considerations of a lockdown in New Delhi to combat worsening air pollution.

India’s top court is deliberating on the lockdown — a first of its kind in the country to stem pollution and not to control coronavirus infections.

It’s not clear how far it would go, but the New Delhi government has already shown its willingness to impose an emergency weekend lockdown, similar to the one implemented during the pandemic. It’s now waiting for the Supreme Court’s decision, which could come as early as Nov. 24.

The government is discussing whether it would keep the industries open, and some experts say a lockdown would achieve very little in controlling pollution but rather would cause disruptions in the economy and impact the livelihoods of millions of people.

“This is not the solution that we are looking for, because this is hugely disruptive. And we also have to keep in mind that the economy is already under pressure, poor people are at risk,” said Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director at the Center for Science and Environment, a research and advocacy organization in New Delhi.

Even then, soaring pollution levels in the capital prompted a federal environment ministry panel to issue strict guidelines on Tuesday night to stem the pollution and to show residents that the government was taking action to control an environmental crisis that has been plaguing the capital for years.

Besides the closure of schools, the Commission for Air Quality Management ordered a stop to construction activities until Nov. 21 and banned trucks carrying non-essential goods. The panel also directed the states to “encourage” work from home for half of the employees in all private offices.

Despite some improvement in New Delhi air over the past two days, readings of dangerous particles Wednesday were still as high as seven times the safe level, climbing above 300 micrograms per cubic meter in some parts of the city.

The World Health Organization designates the safe level for the tiny, poisonous particles at 25.

Forecasters warned air quality would worsen before the arrival of cold winds next week that will blow away the smog.

Earlier this month, air quality levels fell to the “severe” category in the capital and residents faced bouts of severe, multiday pollution. It prompted a stern warning last week from India’s Supreme Court, which ordered state and federal governments to take “imminent and emergency” measures to tackle what it called a crisis.

Among the many Indian cities gasping for breath, New Delhi tops the list every year. The crisis deepens particularly in the winter when the burning of crop residues in neighboring states coincides with cooler temperatures that trap deadly smoke. That smoke travels to New Delhi, leading to a surge in pollution in the city of more than 20 million people.

Emissions from industries with no pollution control technology, pollutants from firecrackers linked to festivals, and construction dust also sharply increase in winter months.

Several studies have estimated that more than a million Indians die every year because of air pollution-related diseases.

The capital has often experimented with limiting the number of cars on the road to lower vehicular emissions, using large anti-smog guns and halting construction activity. But the steps have had little effect.

Residents say the government isn’t doing enough.

Suresh Chand Jain, a New Delhi shop owner, said authorities should introduce stricter regulations aimed at limiting car use and controlling the burning of crop residues in neighboring states, emissions of which contribute hugely to the capital’s bad air quality.

“Shutting down the city will not end the pollution,” said Jain.

Experts say such emergency measures are not helpful in the long run.

“These are done only to ensure that you don’t worsen the situation, that you shave off the peak. But it is not a silver bullet that is going to just clean the air immediately,” said Roychowdhury.