Month: November 2022

Rights activists and democracy campaigners outside China have come out in strong support of the “white paper” protest movement last weekend that was sparked by a fire in a locked-down apartment building in Xinjiang’s regional capital, Urumqi. The Nov. 24 fire left 10 dead and sparked protests across China over the weekend after video of the blaze went viral, with many people expressing condolences for the victims and calling for an end to ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy of strict lockdowns, compulsory COVID-19 testing and mass…

Beijing accelerated its nuclear weapons program last year and has nearly doubled its supply of warheads since 2020 to past 400, a size that U.S. military planners did not expect to see until about 2030, a new report from the Department of Defense says. The 2022 China Military Power Report, the latest edition of an annual report mandated by the U.S. Congress, says Pentagon planners in 2020 estimated China’s stockpile of warheads was in the “low-200s” and might double by the end of the decade.  But a rapid expansion of…

Chinese human rights lawyers have been scrambling to assist the friends and families of people arrested during a wave of anti-lockdown protests over the weekend, many of whom have little experience being treated as dissidents by Chinese authorities. “So many people have been calling,” attorney Wang Shengsheng told RFA on Tuesday. “Our phones were blowing up because people had lost contact with their friends, and we found that people had been taken away in many different places, including Shanghai, Beijing, Ningbo, Kunming, Yunnan and Guizhou.” The rush of calls came…