chi@vlsi.uwaterloo.ca (Bo Chi) (02/13/90)
| +---------I __L__ ___- i \ ------I +----+----+ | ___\_\_ | \./ | | -----+- | | | | | __ \/ | --+-- |--- | |---| | I----+----I | I__J/\ | __|__ | | | |---| | | | _____ \ | /| \ | | | L__-| | I I---------J / J \/ | | V | _/ * C h i n a N e w s D i g e s t * (News General) -- Feb. 13 (I), 1990 Table of Contents # of Lines News Brief ............................................................ 36 1. Thousands In Mongolia Demand Communists Give Up Sole Power .......... 46 2. China Punishes Two Hundreds More Pro-democracy Peopel ............... 72 3. Recent Situation about Dai Qing ..................................... 67 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- News Brief ----------------------------------------------------------------- (1) Source: BEIJING (AP) February 09, 1990 From: "Jian Ding" <IZZYQ00@OAC.UCLA.EDU> ---------------------------------------- A moderately strong earthquake hit coastal China north of Shanghai early today, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries, the official Xinhua News Agency said. ....... (2) Source: BEIJING (AP) February 09, 1990 From: "Jian Ding" <IZZYQ00@OAC.UCLA.EDU> ---------------------------------------- China and the Soviet Union today began a second round of talks aimed at reducing forces along their 4,300-mile border, patrolled by hundreds of thousands of troops on each side. ..... The Soviet Union is believed to have some 600,000 troops along the Chinese border. China, armed with less sophisti- cated equipment, has an estimated 1 million troops on the fron- tier. ........ The two Communist powers fought a brief border war in 1969 and there have been sporadic clashes since then around disputed areas of the frontier. ... (3) BY: HARTMAN, CARL; AssociatedPress Writer Source: WASHINGTON (AP) February 09, 1990 From: "Jian Ding" <IZZYQ00@OAC.UCLA.EDU> ----------------------------------------- The federal Export-Import Bank is making a $10.4 million grant to help China build a subway in Shanghai, the bank announced Friday. ... A $30 million World Bank loan to China announced on Thurs- day was for relief of an earthquake that occurred in October and so was not part of the package. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Thousands In Mongolia Demand Communists Give Up Sole Power ----------------------------------------------------------------- From: (Yagui Wei) yawei@ucs.indiana.edu Source: (AP) NEWS 2/11/90 BEIJING - Mongolians stirred up by the Soviet Communists Party's decision to relinquish its monopoly on power demanded Mongolia's Communists do the same in a rally Sunday. The rally drew thousands of people, a source said. About 4,000 to 5,000 Mongolians attended the 3-hour demons- tration in front of the Lenin Museum in Mongolia's capital, Ulan Bator, a source said. The foreign source was contacted by telephone from Beijing. It was the fifth demonstration called by the Mongolian Demo- cratic Union, founded in December by artists and intellectuals. The rally was called late Wednesday or Thursday, the source said, after the Soviet Communist Party voted to relinquish its decades-old hold on political power. Mongolia, ruled by Communists since 1921 and long a client of the Soviet Union, has cautiously followed the So- viet lead in embracing ''perestroika,'' or reform, but apparently not quickly enough for some of its citizens. Some speakers Sunday called for the resignation of President Jambyn Batmonh and the Politburo and criticized Premier Dumaagiyn Sodnom for the nation's ''stagnant'' economy. But the speakers stressed they weren't against the party, just opposed to its monopoly, the source said. Indeed, two banners showed the union working with the party to combat bureaucratism. One depicted the union on one side of a saw and the party on the other side, cutting down a tree representing the bureaucracy, he said. Unlike previous rallies, which were dominated by union offi- cials, speakers Sunday included a taxi driver, a factory worker, an elderly woman, a coal miner and a herdsman from the country- side, the source said. Many said they were members of the union, which claims a total membership of 60,000. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 2. China Punishes Two Hundreds More Pro-democracy Peopel ----------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Jian Ding" <IZZYQ00@OAC.UCLA.EDU> Source: BEIJING (UPI) February 10, 1990 China staged more than 200 criminal trials directly linked to last spring's pro-democracy movement, while trials for unspecified crimes rose sharply, a state-run newspaper reported Saturday. The figures were believed the first reported compilation of trials involving the thousands of people arrested after the government violently suppressed last spring's demonstrations and launched a nationwide crackdown on dissent. The report in the Beijing Daily, an official newspa- per, said the figures were announced at a conference on the nation's municipal courts. The newspaper said Chinese courts in 1989 tried "more than 200" cases of offenses stemming from the "counterrevolu- tionary rebellion," the government's label for the pro- democracy protests that swept the nation until the crackdown last June. The report gave few details and listed only the number of cases tried, omitting how many suspects were tried in each case. Chinese criminal courts often hold trials for multiple suspects and, under Chinese law, virtually all suspects tried are con- victed. Courts also handled 3,459 cases on "crimes of severely disrupting social order," a 47 percent increase over 1988, it said. The report did not elaborate, but at least some of those cases are also believed linked to the student-led unrest last spring. The Chinese government has kept secret virtually all tallies of arrests and trials stemming from the dragnet that followed the crackdown. Western diplomats believe between 10,000 and 30,000 people were arrested. The government initially publicized the arrests last summer, but senior leader Deng Xiaoping is known to have subsequently ordered that only a few high-profile arrests be made public. Human rights groups have reported thousands of people still held, many in apparent violation of even the flimsy due process guarantees under Chinese law. Detainees released from jails have told Western reporters they were held incommunicado for months. The government, concerned about its tarnished image overseas and hoping to win the restoration of foreign economic coopera- tion, has been acutely sensitive to the persistent Western reports on detainees and trials. The official Xinhua news agency last month carried an unusual denial by an unidentified "senior judge" of a Washington Post report that at least 800 people had been convicted and sentenced to prison in secret trials for offenses linked to last year's protests. Several independent Western reports, however, have quoted informed Chinese sources as confirming that such trials have been held. Many of the college students who led the democracy move- ment and the leading intellectuals who supported it remain confined at the Qincheng Prison in Beijing's northern suburbs. Authorities routinely refuse to answer any inquiries about the detainees or the prison. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Recent Situation about Dai Qing ----------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Jian Ding" <IZZYQ00@OAC.UCLA.EDU> BY: FU, CHARLENE L. ; Associated Press Writer Source: BEIJING (AP) February 09, 1990 A prominent Chinese journalist who was arrested eight months ago for supporting pro-democracy students recently was allowed a visit from her family, her daughter said Friday. Dai Qing's husband and daughter visited her for the first time at Qincheng prison on the outskirts of Beijing late last month, just before the Lunar New Year, the most important holiday in China. Wang Xiaojia, the daughter, denied a news report in Hong Kong that her mother had been released from prison and put under house arrest. Authorities told the family the investigation of Dai's case was completed recently but she would continue to be held under "guardianship," Wang said, and the family had no idea when she might be freed. Dai worked for the Guangming Daily, a newspaper for intel- lectuals. She was one of China's most prominent journalists, well-known for critical, frank reports on political, environmen- tal and feminist issues. She joined other journalists last spring in calling for guarantees of greater press freedom. On May 14, fearing a crackdown, she pleaded with student demonstrators to leave Tiananmen Square. Immediately after soldiers drove the protesters from the square June 3-4, killing hundreds and perhaps thousands of unarmed civilians, Dai publicly resigned from the Communist Party. Security forces took the journalist from her home July 13. Wang said her mother seemed well and appeared to be holding up emotionally. She said Dai did not appear to have been beaten and was not handcuffed or restrained during the hour in a visitors' room. Wang, 21, said it was the first time she and her father were allowed to visit Dai. "We brought her some food chocolates and packaged meat," she said. "Mostly, we just talked about family matters." Wen Wei Po, a nespaper in Hong Kong that supports Beijing, said last week Chinese authorities recently had allowed many imprisoned pro-democracy activists to have visits from their relatives. The visits coincided with the Lunar New Year and were granted to "intellectuals and academics," the paper reported. It said Wang Dan, one of the democracy movement's top stu- dent leaders, and Liu Xiaobo, a teacher who was a hunger striker, were among those visited. The decision was made in tandem with the lifting of mar- tial law in Beijing in mid-January. It said both moves were to indicate that China's political situation is "daily becoming more stable." -------------------------------------------------------------------------- +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | China News Digest Subscription (Xinmeng Liao): xliao@ccm.umanitoba.ca | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | China News Digest Executive Editor: (Bo Chi) chi@vlsi.uwaterloo.edu | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Tue Feb 13 09:08:32 EST 1990