It seems like those hoping to protest over perceived wrongs by the government can't even trust "journalists" to help them out these days. Amongst their various tactics to quell unrest, Chinese police are now posing as reporters in order to catch would-be dissidents before they can even get organized, according to the Telegraph: more ›

Sohu, that bastion of hard-hitting news on the Chinese internet, serves up a video of pretty female reporters at the NPC [h/t CDT]: more ›

Huang Qingnan (黃慶南), the activist from the Shenzhen Dagongzhe Migrant Worker Centre who was brutally hacked on his back, waist and leg is finally well enough to give an interview. Erm, well, not really. From this video, it appears he was splashed with acid too? We can't quite tell. Urgh. Anyhow, the muscles on his left calf have all been destroyed, which means he will have to learn how to keep his balance with his remaining muscles. The Dagongzhe centre was forced to close for a while after the attack, but now they've sprung back into action with fund-raising activities which you will see in the second half of the clip. Let's see how the mafia react to that. more ›

What would you do if you paid a shitload of money to study at some college, thinking it would legit and all, only to be told that your diploma would not be recognised after all? We don't know about you, but we would definitely riot. Well, that's what some civilian students at the Hefei PLA Artillery Academy did a few days back. And it turned out to be a very bloody incident. Iron doors were... more ›

More than a dozen prominent Singapore celebrities have come out in support of a new parliamentary petition to repeal Section 377A in the city-state's Penal Code which outlaws “acts of gross indecency” between men by appearing in a Youtube video uploaded recently. more ›

It was about a month ago that Shanghaiist reported on one of the housing protesters, Liu Xinjuan, who was sent to a mental asylum after trying to get her case heard in Beijing. Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports (in Chinese) that she was released after a spell of 15 days in the asylum. According to Liu, there were a couple of times when the authorities were poised to let her go, only to realize that since another government conference was coming up, they would have to keep her locked up to make sure she didn't make a scene. These are the Kafkaesque words of her captors: "本来想放你出去，但现在还有一个会要开，你出去他们还得抓你." ("I was planning on letting you go, but now there's another conference, so if we let you go we'd just have to catch you again.") That article has stories of other people, not just housing or tenants' rights activists, who have been threatened with a stay in the loony bin as well. more ›

Shanghaiist recently caught wind of events happening down in Guangzhou relating to the recall of a Taishi village chief Chen Jinsheng. Chen was elected with 60 percent of the vote, but villagers in this suburb of Guangzhou felt that Chen was incompetent, citing huge budget deficits, and that he needed to be recalled. Hence they attempted to get the 20 percent of eligible voters needed for an effective recall petition, and, despite some conflicts with the authorities about who could be counted and why, they managed to get more than that amount. The situation escalated when the government seized the financial documents of the village, which contained whatever written information there was about village chief Chen's activities. Anything related to corruption or the budget deficit would be found there. The government took this by force while some villagers tried to resist, which lead to villagers getting arrested and subsequent hunger strikes. more ›