One of China's most popular news apps issued an abject apology Wednesday and pledged to increase its internal censorship staff to 10,000 after it and three other apps were temporarily banned by the government in a widening content crackdown.

Chinese media reports earlier this week said the four apps, led by news and content aggregator Jinri Toutiao, had been ordered removed from app stores for up to three weeks.

They are the latest victims in a tightening wave of censorship by the ruling Communist Party aimed at expunging anything deemed in conflict with "core socialist values".

Zhang Yiming, the founder and CEO of Toutiao, said in an apology issued Wednesday on one of its social media feeds that he was "consumed by guilt and remorse, and have not slept all night" over the ban.

Toutiao is owned by Beijing-based technology group Bytedance, which boasts more than 200 million users and is one of the world's largest internet startups with a valuation over $20 billion, according to Bloomberg News.

The ban was triggered by a service Toutiao offered through which users shared ribald jokes and videos, which Zhang said had now been permanently shut down.

"Over the years, authorities have given us lots of guidance and support but I did not truly understand or recognise this in my heart," Zhang said.

Saying the company had prioritised growth over social responsibility, Zhang pledged to reassess the company's vision and offer more "positive" fare in these "great times" brought by the Communist Party.

Zhang said the number of Toutiao staff charged with eliminating banned content would be raised to 10,000, up from 6,000, and that it would create a blacklist of banned users and deploy new censorship technologies.

China tightly monitors the internet for sensitive or unapproved content, and has wielded an increasingly heavy hand as President Xi Jinping has strengthened his own grip on the country with calls for a return to socialist purity under the dominance of the party.

It wasn't clear what specific content triggered the moves against the three apps, which also included apps by Tencent, NetEase and Phoenix News.

Toutiao was banned from downloads for three weeks, while the others received lesser shutdowns.

Wife of Chinese rights lawyer under house arrest
Beijing (AFP) April 11, 2018 - The wife of a detained Chinese human rights lawyer who had nearly completed a 100-kilometre (60-mile) march to highlight her husband's plight said she had been placed under house arrest on Wednesday.

"On April 11, 2018, trapped at home by forty or fifty people. A friend who came to visit was stopped and beaten. I can only climb out the window to shout," Li Wenzu wrote on her Twitter page on Wednesday afternoon.

The post included a video of Li sitting on a window ledge shouting and angrily gesturing to a crowd below.

In the video she described the plight of her husband Wang Quanzhang, an attorney who represented political activists and disappeared in a 2015 police sweep.

"He went to court for ordinary people. Now he's been arrested for a thousand days without [us] knowing if he is alive or dead. I went to find my husband," she said, referencing her march.

A close friend of Li's confirmed to AFP that she was "being controlled" by state security officers.

"She still can't leave her house," the friend said Wednesday evening, requesting anonymity.

Li's husband Wang has been charged with "subversion of state power" but authorities have blocked family-appointed lawyers from visiting him.

As well as representing activists he also acted for victims of land seizures.

His wife and a small group of supporters set off last Wednesday on a march from Beijing to the "No. 2 Detention Centre" in the northeastern city of Tianjin, where officials last said Wang was being held.

On Monday, shortly after reaching Tianjin, police officers detained at least two members of the group for several hours and forced Li and her friends to return to Beijing.

"They tried to make me give up on this march to Tianjin... I did not agree. I said that I have the freedom to go where I want," Li told AFP on Monday.

AFP was unable to reach Li on Wednesday, and state security officials do not have any publicly listed contact details.

- 'Legal limbo' -

China's ruling Communist party has repeatedly pledged to implement the "rule of law", but analysts say cases like Wang's highlight the stark limits of those promises.

"This sort of display of thuggery undermines the credibility of the Chinese criminal justice system," Amnesty International China researcher William Nee, said.

The country's courts are tightly controlled by the party, with forced confessions often used as evidence and guilty verdicts delivered in more than 99.9 percent of criminal cases.

Wang was one of more than 200 Chinese human rights lawyers and activists who were detained or questioned in the summer of 2015, the largest clampdown on the legal profession in recent history.

While the majority were released on bail, a handful -- including prominent lawyers Xie Yang and Li Heping -- were convicted of various crimes and sentenced to up to seven years in prison.

Wang's case is unusual because no trial date has even been announced. He is the last person in the so-called "709 crackdown" to remain in legal limbo.

Li has spent years trying in vain to obtain information on what has happened to her father. Instead of answers, she has been put under constant police surveillance.

Li told AFP their five-year-old son is afraid of the state security officers who have permanently moved into an apartment below their home.

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Hong Kong civic coalition warns UN on eroding freedoms
Hong Kong (AFP) April 10, 2018
More than 40 civil groups in Hong Kong appealed to the United Nations Tuesday demanding action to protect rapidly disappearing freedoms as Beijing increasingly tightens its grip on the freewheeling city. The coalition cited increasing self-censorship, declining press freedom and the disqualification of election candidates based on their political beliefs as key examples of Hong Kong's deteriorating conditions. "The situation of human rights has been eroding day by day," the coalition's spokesper ... read more