June 19:
College students in Nanjing protesting the issuance of below standard diplomas have clashed with police leaving thirty injured, one hundred in Nanjing Public Security Bureau custody, and two police vehicles smashed. In claims reported by the BBC, the Hong Kong based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said that after learning they would receive technological proficiency certificates rather than the official college diplomas they were promised, over one thousand students from the Nanjing Institute of Industrial Technology held a three-kilometer-long protest “parade” from their campus to the city center. Each student had paid the 50,000 Reminbi ($7,317) tuition and attended the school for three years. The parade drew tens of thousands of onlookers and when police tried to stop the protesters the clash occurred. The day after the demonstration several hundred police secured the area.
[Editor’s Note: Two similar incidents occurred in December 2005 and June 2006. In Liaoning, 3,000 students at the East Soft Information Institute attacked campus facilities and teachers after they were told that the word “online” would distinguish their diplomas from those normally issued by it’s parent, Northeast University. In Henan, students paid Shengda University $2,500 a year after being promised their diplomas would bear the name of its parent, Zhengzhou University, a national-level institution, and not mention Shengda. When the diplomas noted both schools students erupted, ransacking classrooms and administrative offices, shattering car windows, and scuffling with the police.]
June 21:
Authorities in Gansu province have begun removing satellite dishes in Tibetan-regions in an effort to block access to foreign broadcasts, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports. RFA and Voice of America (VOA) Tibetan-language broadcasts appear to be the targets of the campaign. Beginning in April, broadcasting departments in Gansu dispatched staff to Tibetan areas to install cable lines for government-approved programs and to pull down the satellite dishes Tibetans use to listen to RFA and VOA broadcasts. One document obtained by RFA from Gannan prefecture in Gansu cited State Council document 129 and described an "unprecedented efforts to collect satellite dishes." Anyone failing to comply would be "dealt with in accordance with law," the memo said. Authorities have also built hundreds of jamming towers in Tibetan region to disrupt the transmissions.
June 23:
The Interior Ministry has intercepted over 1 billion rubles [$32 million] worth of smuggled Chinese goods intended for sale at Moscow's Cherkizovskiy market and other Russian markets, state-controlled Russian Channel One TV reports. According to Russian police the goods were smuggled from China through customs checkpoints in Khabarovsk and Maritime territories. The ministry's economic security department said that several suspects have been detained.
[Editor’s Note: At a meeting in Vladivostok in November 2007 Russian and Chinese customs officials agreed to improve information exchange on goods crossing the border to strengthen cooperation against smuggling. That agreement aimed to prevent the trafficking of goods and drugs across the Russian-Chinese border in both directions. This seize could be considered part of that bilateral effort. At the time Russia’s Far East customs department reported that about 90 percent of all contraband-related crimes in the Russian Far East were smuggled from China, Russia’s Vladivostok News reports.]
June 25:
China's defense ministry has opened a center for peacekeeping training in suburban Beijing. The 16,000-square-meter facility, which will have conference center, twenty classrooms, and “training facilities for peacekeeping skills”, will cost 200 million yuan ($29 million), the official People’s Daily reports. It will host international exchanges and offers courses to train United Nations peacekeepers from around the world in shooting, driving, building UN peacekeeping camps, and de-mining. Since 1990, the China has dispatched over 12,000 peacekeepers on eighteen UN missions. Currently, 1,949 Chinese peacekeepers are on missions in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, although they do not perform in combat roles.
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