Renowned Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, who currently lives in Portugal with his Chinese wife and their child, sees China‘s reaction to the pandemic over the past three years as the “most stringent constraints on human behavior in Chinese history and in human history,” which are restricting human rights and personal autonomy, he told DW in an email interview.… Read More Ai Weiwei on China’s protests
Wilfred Chan Rose Tang was stunned when she saw videos last week of crowds in China chanting in Mandarin, “Give me liberty or give me death.” It was a phrase the Brooklyn resident had last heard more than three decades ago, when she was one of the student leaders at the pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.… Read More ‘Freedom in China is precious’: Tiananmen Square protest veteran salutes new generation
In 2020, the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, announced one of the harshest Covid lockdowns in the world, causing nearly 200 million migrant labourers to be stranded without wages, food and housing. Many undertook long journeys to return to their home villages, while others, caught in limbo with their families, were forced to wait, living… Read More The Great Abandonment: the extraordinary exodus of India’s migrant labourers
By Laura He Internet users in China will soon be held liable for liking posts deemed illegal or harmful, sparking fears that the world’s second largest economy plans to control social media like never before. China’s internet watchdog is stepping up its regulation of cyberspace as authorities intensify their crackdown on online dissent amid growing public anger against the country’s… Read More China to punish internet users for ‘liking’ posts in crackdown after zero-Covid protests
NB: The Chinese Communist Party considers protesting citizens to be ‘hostile forces’! The only hostile force in China today is your totalitarian tyranny comrades, and it looks like the Chinse people have had enough of it. And as some of their posters are asking: by foreign forces do you mean Marx and Engels? By the… Read More China protests: authorities call for crackdown on ‘hostile forces’
For the first time in decades, thousands of people have defied Chinese authorities to protest at universities and on the streets of major cities, demanding to be freed not only from incessant Covid tests and lockdowns, but strict censorship and the Communist Party’s tightening grip over all aspects of life. Across the country, “want freedom” has become a… Read More China’s young people cry for freedom
William Yang “The Communist Party, step down. Xi Jinping, step down!” Those were the slogans chanted by hundreds of protesters in China’s commercial capital, Shanghai, on Saturday evening and Sunday morning, as they gathered to demand the Chinese government end the strict pandemic control measures that have been imposed on several cities across the world’s second-largest economy. The protest… Read More Protests spread across China amid zero-COVID anger
CNN’s Beijing bureau Protests are erupting across China, including at universities and in Shanghai where hundreds chanted “Step down, Xi Jinping! Step down, Communist Party!”, in an unprecedented show of defiance against the country’s stringent and increasingly costly zero-Covid policy. A deadly fire at an apartment block in the country’s far western region of Xinjiang that… Read More Protests erupt across China in unprecedented challenge to Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy
Amrit Dhillon When Ram Yadav fled India’s strict countrywide lockdown imposed in March 2020, he was one of the lucky ones, managing to hitch rides from Delhi on trucks going in the direction of his village near Kanpur, 400km (250 miles) away. An estimated 10 million workers were forced to walk home, travelling on foot via fields, forests… Read More The migrant workers struggling in wake of India’s Covid response
PUBLIC GOODS • September 1, 2021 • Peter Rossman he multilateral trading system anchored by the WTO is not confined to cross-border trade in physical goods. It was also designed to protect corporate knowledge monopolies. Developing countries were told that strict adherence to the rules of ‘free trade’, codified and enforced by the WTO, would enhance their… Read More Multinational Corporations and COVID-19: Intellectual property rights vs. human rights
After the truth-shower 