October 5:
Thousands of Hui Muslims in China's Gansu province have ransacked a nightclub near a mosque after widespread complaints about prostitution and loud music. The residents stormed the building at 10 pm on September 21 and ransacked it. The rioters smashed just about everything they could and about 10 people were injured in the clashes between the rioters and security guards. Up to 30 local Islamic leaders, some of them over 70 years old were arrested a week or so after the clash for instigating the riots, the Times of India reports.
October 8:
Ever since Seoul halted all inter-Korean trade on May 24, North Korea’s state-run companies have been seeking out South Korean firms in China to do business. The Chosan Ilbo reports that "North Korean companies are clandestinely trying to win orders from South Korean firms by sending people to China who have relatives or acquaintances there." In order to skirt sanctions, North Korean firms are offering to make half-finished products in the North and use Chinese firms as middlemen to send the products to South Korean firms in China for finishing and export to South Korea.
Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou has congratulated the jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo on winning the Nobel Peace Prize and called on China to improve its human rights record. Ma did not call for Liu's release from his 11-year prison sentence, the Associated Press reports.
October 11:
China plans to tighten control over Tibet’s Buddhist monasteries to reduce the influence of the exiled Dali Lama and other “internal and external separatist forces,” according to a notice from the State Administration of Religious Affairs. “The Management measure for Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and temples,” which the ministry began drafting after the 2008 Tibet riots, will be applied beginning November 1. “Monks at some monasteries,” the administration posted on its website, “are disrupting national unity and splitting the nation. The existence of these problems has seriously influenced the normal order of Tibetan Buddhism and given the Dalai clique an opportunity to engage in destructive separatist activities.” The stricter management of monasteries is officially designed to help "maintain the normal order of Tibetan Buddhism and build a socialist harmonious society," the notice said according to Germany’s Deutsche Presse-Agentur press agency.
[Editor’s Note: The notice followed the sentencing of two monks accused of leading anti-Chinese protests in 2008 in Lhasa, Tibet. The Lhasa Intermediate People's Court sentenced Jampel Wangchuk and Kunchok Nyima to life imprisonment and 20 years in prison, respectively. The two men were monks at Dreprung, one of the most sacred Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, and were in a group of about 350 monks who marched into Lhasa from the monastery on March 10, 2008. Police arrested the two monks and some 40 others in April 2008, but there was no confirmation of what happened to them until last week, the group said. Courts have already sentenced dozens of other monks and average Tibetans who joined the 2008 protests. After the 2008 protests, the government has tightened security, turned away journalists from Tibetan areas, limited tourists’ access and suspended communications in some places.]
October 12:
Interfax News Agency reports that in meeting to discuss the development of the gas industry through the year 2030, Russian Energy Minister Sergey Shmatko said Russia is “proceeding from the understanding that China will take in any volume of gas that we will be able to supply to it." China’s gas consumption has increased by 8.5 percent on an annual basis over the last nine years and the country will need 200 billion cubic meters of gas per year by 2015. At the end of September, Gazprom and China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) inked a document titled "Expanding the main conditions for delivering natural gas from Russia to China." It covers key commercial aspects of shipments of Russian gas to the Chinese market, including volumes and timeframe. The signing of an export contract is expected in mid-2011, and shipments are slated to begin end-2015. It is expected to be a 30-year contract for annual delivery of 30 billion cubic meters of gas per year, Russia’s Interfax News Agency reports.
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