Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
The PAGEs (see Tabs, above) attempt to make the information more meaningful by putting some structure to the information we have researched and assembled since 2006.
Image copyright ANIImage caption Millions of people across India have been stranded by the lockdown
The first train carrying migrant workers stranded by a nationwide lockdown in India has left the southern state of Telangana.
The 24-coach train, carrying 1,200 passengers, is travelling non-stop to eastern Jharkhand state.
Earlier this week, India said millions of people stranded by the lockdown can return to their home states.
The country has been in lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus since 24 March.
However, the movement of people will be only possible through state government facilitation, which means people cannot attempt to cross state borders on their own.
This train is a “one-off special train” to transport the workers on the request of the Telangana state government, Rakesh Ch, the chief public relations officer of South-Central Railways, told the BBC.
The train left Lingampally, a suburb of the southern city of Hyderabad, early on Friday and is expected to reach Hatia in Jharkhand on Saturday.
Mr Rakesh said that adequate social distancing precautions had been taken and food was being served to the passengers.
Image copyright ANIImage caption Railways officials said that adequate social distancing precautions had been taken and food was being served to the passengers.
He said each carriage was carrying 54 passengers instead of its 72-seat capacity.
“The middle berth is not being used in the sleeper coaches and only two people are sitting in the general coaches,” Mr Rakesh said.
Before the train pulled out of the station, all the passengers were screened for fever and other symptoms.
They had all been employed at a construction site at the Indian Institute of Technology, a top engineering school, in Hyderabad city.
The workers had earlier protested at the site against the non-payment of wages by their contractor.
Senior official M Hanumantha Rao said the contractor was asked to pay their salaries and arrangement made to send them back home.
The journey was organised at “very short notice”, senior police official S Chandra Shekar Reddy told BBC Telugu.
“We screened them at the labour camp itself and transported them to the railway station in buses,” he said.
India’s migrant workers are the backbone of the big city economy, constructing houses, cooking food, serving in eateries, delivering takeaways, cutting hair in salons, making automobiles, plumbing toilets and delivering newspapers, among other things.
Image copyright ANIImage caption Before the train pulled out of the station, all the passengers were screened for fever and other symptoms.
Most of the country’s estimated 100 million migrant workers live in squalid conditions.
When industries shut down overnight, many of them feared they would starve.
For days, they walked – sometimes hundreds of kilometres – to reach their villages because bus and train services were shut down overnight. Several died trying to make the journey.
Some state governments tried to facilitate buses, but these were quickly overrun. Thousands of others have been placed in quarantine centres and relief camps.
SCMP: “Guangzhou plans to empty its hard-labour camps by year’s end, state media reported yesterday, the latest locality to phase out the notorious punishment.
Rights advocates have long complained that the “re-education through labour“, or laojiao, system which lets police send suspects to work camps for up to four years without trial, is widely abused to silence dissidents, petitioners and other perceived troublemakers.
In March, newly installed Premier Li Keqiang promised nationwide reforms to the system this year, but concrete steps have yet to be announced. In the meantime, some cities or provinces have been moving away from the punishment.
“All [100 or so] detainees in Guangzhou labour camps will have completed their sentences and be released by the end of the year,” the China Daily reported, citing a senior judge in the city. Guangdong province stopped taking new re-education through labour cases in March, it said.
In February, Yunnan said it would no longer send people to labour camps for three types of political offences.
Four cities designated as testing grounds have replaced the system with an “illegal behaviour rectification through education” programme, domestic media said at the time.
The forced labour system was established under Mao Zedong in the 1950s as a way to contain “class enemies”. A 2009 UN report estimated that 190,000 mainlanders were locked up labour camps.
Calls to scrap the system grew last year after the media exposed the plight of Ren Jianyu , a former official who spent 15 months in a Chongqing labour camp for reposting criticisms of the government on his microblog.”
BBC: “A Chinese woman is suing a local authority who sent her to a labour camp for the loss of her personal freedom.
Tang Hui was sent to a re-education camp by Yongzhou’s local authority for “disturbing social order” last August, state-run news agency Xinhua reported.
She had been campaigning for harsher punishments for the seven men who raped and kidnapped her daughter, and forced her daughter to work as a prostitute.
Her case sparked a public outcry, and she was released after nine days.
Tang Hui is suing the Yongzhou authorities for 1,463.85 yuan ($236, £152) for her detention, Xinhua news agency reported.
She had taken her case to court after the Yongzhou re-education-through labour commission rejected her demand for compensation, Xinhua added.”
China seems determined to allow its citizens to petition central government and to stop local authorities from preventing this from happening.
Reuters: “China will compensate a woman who was held in a disused morgue as punishment for going to Beijing to petition against her husband’s jailing, state media said on Friday, in an unusual case of the government overturning an extra-judicial detention.
Chen Qingxia was held for three years in an abandoned bungalow once used to store bodies in northeast China’s Heilongjiang province after being abducted from Beijing by security officials, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
She had gone to the capital to seek redress for her husband, Song Lisheng, whom she said had been mistreated while serving an 18-month sentence at a re-education through labor camp, Xinhua added.
While China routinely dismisses Western criticism of its human rights record, the government does respond to some abuses, especially the more egregious ones reported by domestic media, in an effort to show that authorities are not above criticism
Chen’s plight came to public attention in December after media reported that people found posters she had put on a window of the building pleading for help, it said.
Four officials, including three police officers, had been fired in connection with the case, Xinhua added.
The government will pay medical bills and living expenses for her and her husband and step up efforts to find their young son, who became separated from Chen when she was abducted in Beijing, it said.
The amount of compensation has yet to be decided.
Chen’s case is the second reported in a week of the authorities taking action over illegally detained petitioners. A court in Beijing sentenced 10 people to up to two years in jail for illegally detaining petitioners from another city, state media said on Tuesday.
Petitioners often try to take local disputes ranging from land grabs to corruption to higher levels in Beijing, though only small numbers are ever able to get a resolution.
In many instances, they are rounded up by men hired by provincial authorities to prevent the central government from learning of problems in outlying regions, forced home or held in “black jails“, unlawful secret detention facilities.”
WSJ: “A Chinese province said it is suspending use of a harsh, gulag-like prison system commonly used around the country to stifle dissent, in the strongest signal yet that officials may be phasing out the widely criticized practice.
Workers in the Shayang Re-education Through Labor (Shayang Farm), a re-education through labor camp in Liaoning province. Photo part of the archives of the Laogai Museum, used with permission of the Laogai Research Foundation. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
State media on Wednesday reported authorities in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan said they would immediately suspend a practice known as re-education through labor, or laojiao in Chinese. The camps allow local authorities to detain those suspected of wrongdoing for up to four years without an open trial. Human-rights groups allege those detained in re-education-through-labor camps are subjected to physical abuse.”
Image copyright ANI
Image copyright ANI
Image copyright ANI
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 