Category: RFA

Hong Kong authorities are declining to provide details of six recent arrests under a national security law, fueling growing concerns about government transparency as it tightens controls on dissent. Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee said Tuesday that since the promulgation of the National Security Law in 2020, 332 individuals have been arrested. That was an increase of six arrests since Secretary for Security Chris Tang stated on June 1 that 326 people had been arrested under the law, with 165 convictions. When local media asked about the new arrests,…

Three months after his prison release, veteran dissident Chen Yunfei is in the cross-hairs of police over his social media posts and has faced multiple rounds of questioning and harassment amid ongoing surveillance, Radio Free Asia has learned. The Chengdu-based human rights activist and Chinese performance artist was released on March 24 after serving a four-year prison sentence in the southwestern province of Sichuan. But his friends say his freedom has been largely illusory, as police have repeatedly summoned him for interrogations and severely restricted his movements and ability to…

Chinese workers across industries are facing salary cuts and layoffs as mounting economic woes engulf China’s public and private sectors, sources tell Radio Free Asia. That’s forcing families to slash spending. It is also triggering deflationary concerns as businesses enter into desperate price wars. From Beijing’s central government offices to provincial agencies across China, as well as major state-owned enterprises like investment bank China International Capital Corp (CICC), employees have faced substantial pay reductions that have reduced household budgets and fundamentally altered consumer spending patterns. “I used to earn 6,000…

China’s nuclear arsenal is growing faster than any other country’s, by about 100 new warheads a year, a research group says. China could also potentially have as many intercontinental ballistic missiles as either Russia or the United States by the turn of the decade. Those findings are in the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) annual assessment of armaments, disarmament and international security, released Monday. SIPRI concludes that nearly all of the nine nuclear-armed states – the U.S., Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel – continued…