Word: falun
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...family, Li and lawyer Zhang Kai were detained by police. Li was chained to a chair and punched, while Zhang, also roughed up during their arrest, was locked in a cage. Their transgression? They were representing the family of Jiang Xiqing, a man who belonged to the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement. After a few hours of questioning, the Jiangjin district police released them around midnight. "We were scared, but the people [we represented] were even more scared," says Li. "So we went back the next...
...sensitive cases these lawyers have handled include illegal land seizures, representing victims of faulty products, like in last year's tainted-milk scandal, defending Tibetans accused of agitating for independence and, as in Li's case, defending followers of Falun Gong. "Lawyers no longer serve only as instruments of political control like how they were expected to perform from the 1950s to the 1970s," says Albert Ho, a Hong Kong solicitor and chairman of China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group. "With the opening and liberalization of China, it needs to build a system of law and a sound legal system...
...political dissent and information dissemination that many governments fear might foment unrest. Authoritarian governments frequently censor Internet access, restricting access to pro-democracy sites and sites for organizations documenting human rights violations. China, for instance, denies access to web pages describing the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 and Falun Gong, an outlawed religious group. According to Law School Professor Jonathan L. Zittrain, who conceived of the site, past efforts to monitor web restrictions have been centralized, making it difficult to identify and track the sites that have been blocked in real time. By having Internet users report problems as they...
...foreign dealings," says Law Yuk-Kai of Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post on Feb. 17 that Mugabe had the right to invest in Hong Kong real estate. "Hong Kong is a free port ... even Falun Gong practitioners can buy a property there," said the unnamed official. The connection between a marginalized religious sect and a tyrant in power for three decades may be tenuous, but, for Zimbabweans, half of whom face malnutrition, it must elicit the most cynical, if fleeting, of smiles...
...Outside of the economy, there are a handful of potentially tricky anniversaries for China in the coming year: the 20th anniversary of the crushed Tiananmen movement, the 50th of the failed Tibetan uprising and the 10th of the banning of the Falun Gong spiritual sect...