Hundreds of migrant workers angry over mistreatment of a fellow worker surrounded a police station in eastern China and smashed cars and motorbikes, a Hong Kong-based human rights organization said yesterday.
The riot, which began on Thursday in Kanmen in coastal Zhejiang Province, lasted three days, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said.
Three hundred military police arrived in the town on Sunday and 30 migrant workers have been detained, the group said. No injuries were reported.
A woman who answered the telephone at Kanmen’s public security bureau said she saw the demonstration but denied that the workers broke into the police station or burned vehicles. The woman, who did not give her name, as is common with officials in China, said they only gathered on the streets, shouting their protests.
“Break into our PSB? If they did, we would beat them to death,” she said.
The violence comes just weeks after a crowd of 30,000 people in southwest China set fire to a police station, angry over what many believed was a cover-up of the death of a teenage girl by local authorities.
Such incidents are an embarrassment to officials, especially in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, which begin on Aug. 8.
The Hong Kong-based rights group said the unrest in Kanmen was centered around a migrant worker who was beaten by a security guard while trying to get a temporary residence permit.
When the worker went with a group of other workers to complain to police about the man who beat him, he was detained, triggering the protest in which hundreds of workers converged outside the police station, burning police cars and motorcycles and later throwing stones, the group said.
The report did not give any other details about the incident, including why the worker was beaten.
A notice posted on the Web site of Yuhuan County, which oversees Kanmen, said “the July 10 incident is being investigated” but did not describe what the incident was.
A Chinese freighter that allegedly snapped an undersea cable linking Taiwan proper to Penghu County is suspected of being owned by a Chinese state-run company and had docked at the ports of Kaohsiung and Keelung for three months using different names. On Tuesday last week, the Togo-flagged freighter Hong Tai 58 (宏泰58號) and its Chinese crew were detained after the Taipei-Penghu No. 3 submarine cable was severed. When the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) first attempted to detain the ship on grounds of possible sabotage, its crew said the ship’s name was Hong Tai 168, although the Automatic Identification System (AIS)
An Akizuki-class destroyer last month made the first-ever solo transit of a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ship through the Taiwan Strait, Japanese government officials with knowledge of the matter said yesterday. The JS Akizuki carried out a north-to-south transit through the Taiwan Strait on Feb. 5 as it sailed to the South China Sea to participate in a joint exercise with US, Australian and Philippine forces that day. The Japanese destroyer JS Sazanami in September last year made the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s first-ever transit through the Taiwan Strait, but it was joined by vessels from New Zealand and Australia,
CHANGE OF MIND: The Chinese crew at first showed a willingness to cooperate, but later regretted that when the ship arrived at the port and refused to enter Togolese Republic-registered Chinese freighter Hong Tai (宏泰號) and its crew have been detained on suspicion of deliberately damaging a submarine cable connecting Taiwan proper and Penghu County, the Coast Guard Administration said in a statement yesterday. The case would be subject to a “national security-level investigation” by the Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office, it added. The administration said that it had been monitoring the ship since 7:10pm on Saturday when it appeared to be loitering in waters about 6 nautical miles (11km) northwest of Tainan’s Chiang Chun Fishing Port, adding that the ship’s location was about 0.5 nautical miles north of the No.
SECURITY: The purpose for giving Hong Kong and Macau residents more lenient paths to permanent residency no longer applies due to China’s policies, a source said The government is considering removing an optional path to citizenship for residents from Hong Kong and Macau, and lengthening the terms for permanent residence eligibility, a source said yesterday. In a bid to prevent the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from infiltrating Taiwan through immigration from Hong Kong and Macau, the government could amend immigration laws for residents of the territories who currently receive preferential treatment, an official familiar with the matter speaking on condition of anonymity said. The move was part of “national security-related legislative reform,” they added. Under the amendments, arrivals from the Chinese territories would have to reside in Taiwan for
RSS