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China veteran rights activist jailed for 9 months
by Staff Writers
Beijing (AFP) Sept 9, 2011
China's suicide rate 'among highest in world'
Beijing (AFP) Sept 8, 2011 -
A person tries to kill themselves in China every two minutes, the government and state media said Thursday, giving the country one of the highest suicide rates in the world.
China's suicide rate is 22.23 people out of every 100,000, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention said on its website.
"Our nation has one of the highest rates of suicide in the world," the Beijing Youth Daily quoted Beijing Health Bureau spokesman Mao Yu as saying.
About 287,000 people kill themselves in the country of 1.3 billion every year, while about two million try to commit suicide annually.
China marks World Suicide Prevention Day on Saturday, according to the Beijing Youth Daily.
The disease control centre said suicide is the biggest killer among Chinese aged 15 to 34.
Extreme pressure to perform well at school and to find employment were the main reasons behind the high rate of suicide among China's youths, media said.
The suicide rate in rural areas is three times higher than in urban centres and accounts for 75 percent of China's suicide total, it said.
According to the Guangzhou Daily, the number of suicides in China has risen sharply during the reform and open period, when the nation's economy has boomed.
A person attempts to commit suicide in China every two minutes, the paper said.
In 2009, the British medical journal The Lancet identified Lithuania, Finland, Latvia, Hungary, China, Japan and Kazakhstan as all having exceptionally high rates of suicide, 20 per 100,000 people or higher.
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Chinese veteran rights activist and doctor Wang Lihong was sentenced Friday to nine months in jail for "creating a disturbance", as part of what campaigners say is a broad crackdown on dissent.
The 55-year-old, a veteran of China's 1989 pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square, plans to appeal the sentence in the next 10 days, her lawyer Han Yicun told AFP.
Wang was arrested in April, after online calls for Arab-style protests spooked authorities, prompting a widespread clampdown on dissent.
Rights groups say her detention was linked to her support for activists who used the Internet to call for Chinese citizens to join those planned protests, which never materialised.
She has been in detention for nearly six months already, and under Chinese law, only has a little more than three months left to complete her sentence, according to Han.
He said Wang -- who went on trial last month -- was in good sprits and appeared calm when the verdict was announced in a Beijing district court in the presence of her son, brother and sister.
The sentence is light compared to the five-year maximum penalty that could have stemmed from the charge -- one that has frequently been used over the past years to silence anti-government protesters.
Wang has a number of prominent supporters, including artist and activist Ai Weiwei. In early August, Ai -- recently released from detention himself -- posted a message on his widely followed microblog on her behalf.
"If you don't speak out for Wang Lihong, you are not just a person who will not stand up for fairness and justice, you do not have self-respect," he wrote.
At the time of her trial in August, dozens of police surrounded the courtroom to keep protesters and supporters in line.
A core of supporters chanted "Wang Lihong is innocent!" outside the courthouse, eyewitnesses told AFP at the time.
A delegation of Western diplomats hoping to observe the August trial were kept waiting in a reception area and denied access to the courtroom, and journalists were not allowed into the hearing either.
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Beijing bars NGO expert from EU-China rights event
Beijing (AFP) Sept 8, 2011 -
Beijing blocked a member of a leading non-governmental rights group from attending a two-day EU-China human rights seminar, despite protests from Brussels, the EU said Thursday.
China refused to issue a visa to a member of New York-based Human Rights in China (HRIC), who was invited to take part in the talks that ended Wednesday, the EU embassy in China said in a statement.
HRIC had been asked to attend the dialogue as a representative of the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights, an EU official told AFP.
"The EU made it clear to the Chinese side that it deeply regrets that one participant from a leading European NGO was not allowed to participate," the statement said.
China's foreign ministry spokesman said he was unaware of the visa refusal when questioned by reporters Thursday.
The European Union regularly organises meetings between China and EU groups on the issue of human rights, as well as a high-level dialogue that normally takes place twice a year, alternating between an EU country and China.
HRIC said it was told that the foreign ministry called the group an "anti-China" organisation, whose participation in the seminar was "totally unacceptable".
"We regret being excluded from this exchange," it said in a statement, "but our more fundamental concern is the success of the Chinese authorities in stigmatising any independent voices as 'anti-China'."
HRIC did not name the expert who was barred.
The seminar comes as dozens of writers, lawyers, government critics and activists have been jailed, placed under house arrest or harassed by police since calls for Arab-style protests began appearing online early this year.
Meanwhile, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo remains in jail in China for his calls for greater democracy and human rights in the country.
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