On August 8, 2013, Guo Feixiong (real name Yang Maodong) was arrested and then indicted on charges of “gathering a crowd to disrupt order in a public place.” The heavy sentence came as a shock to everyone following the case. More shockingly, the court added a charge right in the courtroom in order, apparently, to deliver a heavier sentence.
Covid Keeps Workers in Factories, Distorting China Spending
Bloomberg 2/10/2021
(Bloomberg)
For the first time in her life, Zhang Sufang won’t be going home for the Lunar New Year. Instead the 37-year-old production supervisor is exchanging gifts with her parents and 16-year-old son by post as fears of reigniting the pandemic in China disrupt the nation’s biggest holiday.
“When I received boxes from home, I burst into tears,” said Zhang, who works at Fujian Strait Textile Technology Co., a yarn-maker in eastern China.
China may have got its control of Covid down to a handful of new cases per day, but quarantines and travel curbs to keep it that way have forced millions of factory workers to give up the idea of a traditional family gathering. That will distort what is traditionally an annual catalyst for spending, a setback for a government trying to boost the role of consumption in the economy.
As the world struggled with the COVID-19 pandemic during the holiday season and Americans focused on Donald Trump’s frantic efforts to overturn the election he lost, China ended the year in a typical manner. As usual, the Chinese authorities embarked on their annual Christmas tradition of locking up dissidents and critics when the world was too distracted to pay attention.
Soon after Thanksgiving, Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow and Ivan Lam, young icons of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests of 2014, were all sentenced to prison for taking part in an illegal assembly in 2019. Three days after Christmas, a Shanghai court sentenced citizen journalist Zhang Zhan to four years in prison for critical reporting on the government’s handling of COVID-19 in Wuhan early in the outbreak.