May 28:
Former Republic of China (ROC-Taiwan) Premier Su Tseng-chang has captured 50.47 percent of the vote in a five-way contest to win the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairmanship. Su won 55,894 votes followed by former Tainan Magistrate Su Huan-chih (23,281 votes), and former Vice Premier Wu Rong-I (16,315 votes). Voter turnout was 68.62 percent of the 163,808 DPP members eligible to vote in Taiwan. Despite two previous failed attempts to seek the DPP’s presidential nomination, Su’s victory improves his chances of becoming the party’s choice in the 2016 election, Taiwan’s China Post reports. President Ma Ying-jeou, chairman of the ruling Kuomintang, congratulated Su.
[Editor’s Note: Su, 65, is a lawyer. He served as ROC premier from January 2006 to May 2007 and DPP party chairman in 2005, but resigned after the DPP’s losses in local elections. Su also served as Pingtung magistrate (1989-1993), Taipei magistrate (1997-2004), and as presidential secretary-general (2004-2005) to former President Chen Shui-bian.]
May 29:
After a factory owner beat a worker to death for demanding his 1070 RMB back-salary, hundreds in Rui’an, Zhejiang rioted for six hours overturning cars and attacking the municipal government building. Yang Zhi, a 20-year-old worker from Hunan died from head injuries after the scuffle on May 12. Yang’s supporters – mostly from Hunan – rioted after police did not arrest his employer, Japan’s Kyodo reports. A crowd of 500 to 600 migrant workers rushed the government office building, turning over an iron fence, and attacking over a dozen cars with stones and bricks, the official Xinhua news agency reports. After the incident more than 100 special and riot police were sent to maintain order in Rui’an.
June 1:
Google will now notify users when a search term is likely to be blocked by China’s censors. The company announced that its engineers took “a long, hard look at our systems and have not found any problems. However, after digging into user reports, we’ve noticed that interruptions are closely correlated with searches for a particular subset of terms.” The company analyzed 350,000 popular search terms to find words that were “disruptive queries.” Now when users search one of those terms a yellow box appears stating that searching for the term “may temporarily break your connection to Google. This interruption is outside Google’s control.” In January 2010 a clash over censorship led Google to move its servers to Hong Kong. Since then, as users grew weary of blocked websites and connection timeouts, Google’s market share in China has shrunk from 35.6 to about 17 percent, The New York Times reports.
June 2:
Li Changchun, a member of the Standing Committee of the CPC Central Committee’s Political Bureau, has called for “deeper theoretical research of Marxism in order to push forward the development of the Party's own ideological theory,” the official China Daily reports. Li made the remarks at a meeting on the theoretical research and construction of Marxism, a project he said the CPC Central Committee launched eight years ago “to make Marxism reflect the situation in China and encourage people to adhere to and develop socialism with Chinese characteristics” and “to create an innovative mechanism for the country’s theoretical work.”
June 3:
Relations between China and Russia are at an all-time high, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said just before President Vladimir Putin’s state visit to China. Since 2001 China and Russia have settled border issues, agreed on the use and protection of cross-border water resources, conducted joint border inspections, and supported each other’s efforts to safeguard sovereignty, state unity, and territorial integrity, the official China Daily reports. During his trip Putin will advance a China-Russia “comprehensive strategic partnership” including a joint communiqué and other agreements. “Russia and China have common core interests. They hold similar stances on the ongoing profound changes in the world and similar approaches to new challenges,” Lavrov said. Specifically, he mentioned Sino-Russian cooperation in the Middle East, North Africa, the Korean nuclear issue, and Central Asia.
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