While government land grabs in rural areas have sparked mass unrest and, rarely, organized resistance across China for decades, the Shandong program of “village mergers” was far more ambitious in scope, and had been packaged as a bid to improve the lives of farming communities in a total revamp of rural areas.
Xu had also penned a New Year’s message to China’s citizens in 2020, calling on them to think about whether they want to carry on with an authoritarian government or movement towards democratic constitutionalism, an idea that President Xi has said has no place in his vision for China
Wuhan Communist Party secretary Ma Guoqiang admitted last week that officials could have halted the epidemic if they had imposed travel restrictions sooner. Some five million people are believed to have fled the city before quarantine restrictions were imposed
Authorities across China are warning members of Christian churches not to try holding public gatherings to celebrate Christmas, church
China’s army of petitioners, who flood the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s official complaints departments daily, frequently report being held in unofficial “black jails,” beaten, or otherwise harassed, if they persist in a complaint beyond its initial rejection at the local level
Huang Xiaomin was handed the two year, six-month prison sentence by the Jinniu District People’s Court in Sichuan’s provincial capital, Chengdu, which found him guilty of “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” a charge commonly used to target peaceful critics of the government