Zhao Dongmin was arrested on 19 August last year after organizing more than 380 workers from about 20 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to form a labour rights group tasked with overseeing and monitoring SOE restructuring, and reporting corruption and abuses of power. The Shaanxi Union Rights Defence Representative Congress was formally banned by the municipal government of Xi’an on 27 July, after which Zhao wrote an open letter protesting the action to the State Council, the municipal, provincial and central committees of the Chinese Communist Party. He was arrested 18 days later. Since his arrest, Zhao’s case has been taken up by an increasingly vocal group of supporters, many of whom share his leftist political views. Zhao was the head of the Shaanxi Mao Zedong Thought Study … [read more]

Liu Xiaobo is a neo-liberal gadfly. His unreserved admiration for the political, economic and social system of the United States of America has been aptly expressed in his “Charter 08”. Is it because he has been sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy? In the 1980s Liu said in an Interview that only 300 years of occupation by a western colonial power could improve the situation in China: “Three hundred years of colonial rule. See what Hong Kong is like today, after one hundred years of colonial rule. China is so big, so of course it would require three hundred years of colonial rule to bring it up to the standard of Hong Kong; I guess three hundred years might even be not enough.” (Interview in Jiefang Yuekan, December 1988) As an unswerving supporter of the … [read more]