A new report from the Korean Institute for National Unification (KINU) provides eyewitness testimony that the Kim regime publicly executed violators of Pyongyang’s draconian COVID-19 quarantine measures.
Reports of shoot-to-kill orders for anyone attempting to cross the North Korean border during the pandemic were previously covered by NKNews in October 2020, but new testimony in the KINU report grants further credence to these dark realities.
Public executions have long been a feature of the Kim regime’s policies – ranging from public executions of Christians for being caught with a Bible to the purging of Pyongyang’s elites to tamp down on any semblance of revolutionary spirit. A 2019 report from the Transitional Justice Working Group put a finer point on the matter – of the 600 defectors interviewed, they documented “323 reports of sites of state-sanctioned killings”. According to the same report, 83 percent of North Koreans surveyed said they witnessed a public execution.
The 15-year-old Beijing LGBT Center, one of the pioneers of the “different sexual orientation movement” in China, announced this week that it had terminated its operations without explanation.
Analysts said the closure of the well-known rights center was seen as inevitable and a reflection of the increasingly repressive political environment in China under Xi Jinping.
[…] In 2019, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan passed the Special Act on Same-Sex Marriage, becoming the first country in Asia to allow same-sex marriage, but the regulations stipulated that married same-sex couples could adopt only children biologically related to one of the partners […] Taiwan is now leading Asia in same-sex marriage legislation.
The evidence suggests LGBTQ+ activists in China have had a particularly tough time since President Xi Jinping took office in 2013. The effects of targeting have spiralled in the past few years, reflected in the abrupt closure of the Shanghai Pride in 2020, and the 2021 shutdown of LGBT Rights Advocacy China – an organisation that held law-based campaigns.
This was only one incident, and hopefully it won’t be repeated elsewhere.
Such incidents happen often in Afghanistan, and mostly against women. The central government bans girls from education, just to name another example.
There is another article by CBS quoting representatives of the central government:
Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban regime’s chief spokesperson, confirmed the arrests to CBS News on Monday, saying “a group of women who were involved in modeling to promote clothes were detained, advised in front of their family members […]
The person said that after several hours of searching [for a woman detained by the Taliban], the family found the woman at a local police station late Tuesday evening, where Taliban officials demanded money, along with her passport and other documentation, as a penalty and “to guarantee that she will not violate the dress code in the future.”
The family member said the authorities told the family they would “take her biometrics and photos, and if she violates the dress code in the future, she will be imprisoned for a longer period.”
Recent arrests of women in Kabul Afghanistan for ‘bad hijab’, confirmed by the Taliban, regrettably signified further restrictions on women’s freedom of expression and undermines other rights,” [United Nations special envoy for Afghanistan] Bennett said in a social media post.
Gangs are running profitable businesses inside the correctional facilities, and even have the keys to their own units. Recent rioting showed the extent of their power, posing a difficult challenge for the government of Daniel Noboa.
Regarding the ‘1984 social credit system’ there are a lot of good resources which tell a story far diffrrent from yours. One recent example is tbe documentary ‘Total Trust’ by Chinese film maker Zhang Jialing. The film’s introduction says:
Total Trust is an eye-opening and deeply disturbing story of surveillance technology, abuse of power and (self-)censorship that confronts us with what can happen when our privacy is ignored. Through the haunting stories of people in China who have been monitored, intimidated and even tortured, the film tells of the dangers of technology in the hands of unbridled power.
Watch the film. There are many reviews about it (and other sources about surveillance in China). It’s really easy to find on the web.
I think this law has similar intentions.
Addition: <a href="">@megopie</a> it would be great if you could post a source of what you say. Thanks in advance.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose real power derives from his position as the head of the ruling Communist Party, has placed more emphasis on quality over quantity. He has demanded absolute loyalty from party members, launched an ideology drive to shore up their faith, and unleashed a crackdown on internal dissent. Members are bound by more stringent rules – and millions of cadres have been investigated for violating them in the past nine years since Xi took control of the party.
The official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) likely was at 49.5 in December from last month’s 49.4, according to the median forecast of 24 economists in a poll conducted Dec 22-28. The 50-point mark separates growth from contraction.
I don’t know how whataboutism helps China or anyone else, but there are several countries with high degrees of inequality. You should also provide a source for your data. Gini coefficient for US
To provide context to the article: There is a proven dynamic relationship between trade openness, foreign direct investment, and industrial economic growth within economies, and this is true also for China. There is strong evidence for this (for example, see here).
A significant portion of China’s GDP depends on foreign direct investments, and the Gini coefficient, a metric for economic inequity, is 0.45 in China (for comparison, in most European countries it is between 0.3 and 0.35). It is commonly said that any Gini above 0.4 bears a high risk for social unrest.
This is a sign how powerful Navalny still is in Putin’s imagination even from his prison cell. Everything seems done for Putin’s victory in the upcoming election in March, all opposition eliminated, but he still fears the ‘dissident’ so much to locate him at the edge of the Arctic Circle.
I don’t want to disturb the thread here about religion, islam, and the like, but the point here is that a young girl was forced into a marriage at the age of 15, then raped and beaten by her ‘husband’, and then hanged by an autocratic regime because she obviously found no other way out of the horror. The Iranian regime is in charge of that, the people responsible are to be held accountable, rather than any religion, ideology, or the like.
It has been reported that more than one million ethnic minorities have been killed, arrested and forced into detention camps/prisons, what is referred to in Beijing as “re-education camps”, like the one witnessed during the Cultural Revolution. In reality, minority people are subjected to humiliation, torture and political indoctrination in these so-called camps to make them “de-radicalised”. China claims this to be an effective way of “tacking extremism”, whereby, once de-radicalised, these people would acquire skills to be employable and contribute to the economy. The mass internment system has affected not only those subjected to the state crackdown but also the family members of those incarcerated, especially children.