October 18:
In a rare mainland visit, Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, leader of the Catholic Church diocese in Hong Kong, has met with church leaders of the officially sanctioned Catholic Church in Shanghai. For Zen, an outspoken critic of Beijing, this visit was his first since he was promoted to cardinal in 2006. His last trip came in 2004 as a bishop. He met with Shanghai bishop Jin Luxian and his deputy, Xing Wenzhi, of the official church but said it was a tightly controlled session and that he was unable to discuss sensitive topics between Beijing and the Vatican. Zen was also not permitted to meet with any underground bishops. More than 60 million mainland Chinese belong to independent churches loyal to the Vatican, three times more then belong to the official church. The Standard quoted Zen as saying: “This terrifying system has built a wall between people's hearts. It has installed a padlock on people's mouths. Lord! When can we Chinese people open our hearts and speak and behave like proper human beings?”
October 21:
The Municipal Intermediate People's Court in Huzhou, Zhejiang has re-sentenced four town-level cadres to up to 16 years in prison and confiscated their property for embezzling donations for Sichuan earthquake victims. The embezzlement took place after a fundraiser for victims of the magnitude-8 earthquake on May 12, 2008, which left nearly 88,000 people dead. Sun Shuirong, head of the military department in Zhili, Zhejiang, was in charge of the fundraising from May 15-17 Sun and Chen were sentenced to 16 years in prison each for embezzling 200,000 yuan from quake relief funds. Chen's deputy, Shen Meiying, who accepted 110,000 yuan got 13 1/2 years, and town financial head Wei Zhugeng was sentenced to 12 1/2 years for embezzling 110,000 yuan. The first verdict was announced in April, but the four defendants claimed their confession had been coerced through tortured and petitioned for a retrial, reports the Shanghai Daily.
October 22:
Earlier this month, police in Shantou, Guangdong made their largest single illegal firearms bust in a decade, confiscating more than 113,000 guns bound for local mafia and well-off clients. The Shenzhen Daily reports that the second platoon of the Guangdong maritime police raided the illegal weapons operation after they discovered two cargo trucks containing a large weapons cache. The seized weapons were black-market copies of military arms in terms of size, weight, appearance and structure, a spokesman said. A Guangdong police officer said that Shantou, Shanwei and surrounding areas were notorious for manufacturing illegal guns and printing counterfeit banknotes. He said that for at least a decade, Jiazi, Guandong had specialized in manufacturing guns and supplying them to local criminal gangs for 5,000 yuan to 60,000 yuan each. “In areas like these even police officers can't get in,” he said in comments carried by the South China Morning Post.
[Editor’s Note: In September 2006, Xinhua reported that mainland police had seized more than 100,000 guns, more than two million bullets and nearly a million knives in a crackdown on violent crime across the country in the first nine months of the year. More than 4,000 people suspected of making, trading or selling firearms or explosives were arrested, and police closed down 360 underground weapons makers and dealers.]
October 23:
Qinghai province’s new education policy requiring that all subjects (except Tibetan and English language classes) be taught in Mandarin Chinese has sparked protests among Tibetan youth. What began with thousands of Tibetan students from six schools rallying outside their local government headquarters has expanded. Street protests made up of thousands of Tibetan teenagers chanting: “We want equality of nationality; we want equality of culture,” have spread from Rebkong county (Tongren) in Malho Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (Huangnan), about 200 km south of Xining, Qinghai, to Chabcha county and the Golog Tibetan autonomous prefecture. A teacher at the Golog Tibetan Middle School in Dawu told the South China Morning Post that: “Because more than 90 percent of our students are Tibetan, the reform will definitely cause a serious linguistic barrier. That's why many students and their parents strongly oppose it.”
[Editor’s Note: Last month, Qiang Wei, Communist Party secretary of Qinghai, vowed to make “bilingual education” a province-wide project. “In today's world, ethnic Chinese who have no command of Chinese would not find any opportunities in our country, just as people who want to go abroad should learn foreign languages.” Qiang told local cadres that local resentment should not hinder their effort to “promote bilingual education as a political mission.”]