Latest news with #Chen
American Military News
2 hours ago
- Politics
- American Military News
Veteran Chinese dissident faces ongoing police harassment despite prison release
This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission. 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 resume work. Chen has faced repeated persecution for his criticism of the Chinese Communist Party and commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen protests, including demands that the government investigate the crackdown and compensate victims. In 2021, he was sentenced to four years in jail on of child molestation which he denied and said were intended to smear his reputation. Most recently, on the eve of the 36th anniversary of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square protests crackdown, the National Security Bureau and local police subjected Chen to a five-hour interrogation, where he was forced to sit on the 'tiger bench,' Chen's friend and colleague Guan told Radio Free Asia on Wednesday. 'Tiger bench' is a form of torture used to restrain and immobilize detainees during questioning. Chen, like many others RFA interviewed for this story, asked to be identified only by a single name for fear of reprisals. 'The police accused him of 'picking quarrels and provoking trouble,'' said Guan, referring to a criminal charge frequently used by Chinese authorities to carry out arbitrary detentions against rights activists and dissidents. The charges were based on Chen's social media activity, including reposts of tweets by Ming Chu-cheng, an honorary professor of politics at National Taiwan University, and prominent dissidents Pastor Wang Yi, the pastor of a banned Protestant church in Chengdu, and citizen journalist Cai Chu, said Guan. Despite the lack of a subpoena, the police summoned Chen for questioning, confiscating his mobile phone and Wi-Fi equipment for three days, before returning them on June 3 night after repeated protests, Guan said. Chen's livelihood has also been impacted, his friends said. Upon release from prison, Chen found that his nursery business, which he had operated for many years, was emptied of all assets, causing him to lose his source of income, said Yang, another friend of the activist. The courts have also listed him as a 'dishonest debtor,' preventing him from accessing his bank accounts or resuming work, Yang said. 'He now has difficulty even renting a house and can only survive on donations from friends and through loans,' said Fang Liang, another friend of Chen's. During Chen's most recent imprisonment, his 91-year-old mother was also forcibly and violently removed from her Chengdu rental home by community workers, during which she suffered a head injury that required over a month of hospitalization, Guan said. During the forced eviction, many of the family's assets of value disappeared, including $30,000 of pension money that his mother had set aside for her granddaughter's education abroad, $5,800 in cash, and about 40,000 yuan (or US$5,560) in Chinese currency, Guan said. When Chen attempted to file a police report after discovering his empty home upon release, authorities refused to issue a receipt or open an investigation, said Yang. 'They don't allow you to have any evidence to sue them,' said Yang. 'The government said it's not their responsibility, and the police said to contact the community — they just pushed the matter back and forth.' Despite the ongoing harassment, Chen's friends say he is preparing to file a civil lawsuit to recover his mother's lost property and challenge the police's abuse of power. Shandong-based legal scholar Lu described Chen's ongoing troubles as a consequence of a typical 'secondary punishment' model that is designed to maintain control over dissidents through non-judicial means. 'Administrative review is inactive, the police deliberately do not issue receipts, and elderly mothers are forced to become homeless,' Lue said 'This is not law enforcement, but political coercion.'
Hindustan Times
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Our world on autoplay: K Narayanan writes on 20 years of YouTube
All stories begin somewhere. Finding out where isn't always easy, and this is especially true of YouTube. The facts are straightforward. The video-sharing platform, now believed to be the second-most-visited site in the world (after Google), was incorporated in 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. One could say the story began three years earlier, when eBay took over PayPal, causing a culture clash that led 38 of the original 50 PayPal employees to quit. Among these were PayPal co-founders Elon Musk and Peter Thiel; future venture capitalists David O Sacks and Roelof Botha; and the three future founders of YouTube. One could also go further back, to 1995 and the launch of one of the earliest dating platforms on the internet. The use of computers in matchmaking is older than the internet, going all the way back to a 1959 Stanford project that used an IBM 650 to connect 49 men with an equal number of women. But for Gary Kremen, the founder of Match, it wasn't as easy. He wanted to use data to help people connect. He wanted to be able to feed in hobbies, professions, height, weight; anything that could influence affinity. But there was a problem. In 1995, the internet was overwhelmingly male. Without significant female participation, Kremen knew Match was doomed to failure. The story of may seem tangential to the story of YouTube, but when Chen, Hurley and Karim started their company, they visualised it as an online dating platform where men and women would post videos about themselves that prospective partners could watch. They even had a slogan: Tune In, Hook Up. Ten years after the launch of Match, the internet had changed a great deal. But it was still male-dominated, and online dating was viewed with suspicion. The new company just couldn't get women to post videos of themselves. Chen, Karim and Hurley even posted on Craigslist, offering women $20 to post videos of themselves on the platform. There were still no takers. So they performed arguably the most effective pivot in internet history, and opened up the platform to any sort of video. *** The pivot was informed by one of the most significant sports events of the Aughts: the 2004 Superbowl halftime show, featuring Kid Rock, P Diddy, Nelly and, most famously, Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. Towards the end of the performance, Timberlake ripped off a portion of Jackson's top, exposing her breast. The resulting scandal nearly destroyed Jackson's career. Despite being broadcast live on TV, clips of the incident were next to impossible to find online a year later, giving Chen and the others the idea of a broad-based video-hosting platform. Karim was the first to post on YouTube, that now-tiresomely-famous 19-second video of him standing in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. The video, still on the platform, now has over 360 million views — a significant number, but one that pales, for instance, in comparison to Baby Shark (2016), which has over 15 billion. And there were other videos: brutal clips from the war raging in Iraq, videos of war crimes committed by American soldiers at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Disturbingly, for the corporate world, movies, music videos and TV show episodes began to show up in their entirety. Corporate lawyers rubbed their hands in glee and, by the end of 2006, the platform was facing a deluge of copyright-violation suits. *** In November 2006, Google executive Jeff Huber emailed Peter Chane, the Google Video product manager, saying YouTube was 'cranking interesting features a lot faster than we are, but don't likely have a backend that will scale or plan to make money'. Chane responded that Google Video had plans to catch up, and that YouTube was angling to be acquired by Yahoo. The thread went on, until Google co-founder Larry Page stepped in with a single sentence: 'I think we should look into acquiring them.' A year later, the acquisition was complete. YouTube had been looking for a buyer. There had been informal conversations with companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Google moved faster. Their biggest concern were the copyright-violation suits, and the promise of more to come, but Google was confident they could work this out. The price they paid was a jaw-dropping $1.65 billion in stock — an unheard-of sum for a company with no revenue model yet. Pundits muttered about risk, but two decades on, the YouTube acquisition has paid off many times over. And when it came to the legal hassles, they did figure it out. 2007 saw the launch of Content ID, an automated system that checks posts for copyright violations. It also saw the launch of the YouTube Partner Program, in which content creators could monetise their videos by allowing the insertion of ads, building on synergies with Google's own AdSense system. Today, this programme is the cornerstone of the 'creator economy' and has helped make YouTube one of the most successful monetisation systems on the internet. *** Just four years after they bought it, in 2010, Google announced that YouTube had registered a profit. It was doing a lot more than that. It had started to spawn its own superstars: PewDiePie (the Swede Felix Kjellberg, who started out making gaming videos and has since built a side hustle in online feuds), Pomplamoose (the husband-wife musical duo of Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte), Michelle Phan (the future beauty influencer), Jenna Marbles (a comedian and the first woman to hit a billion views). In 2012, Korean popstar Psy's Gangnam Style became the first video to hit a billion views, and K-pop began to travel the world. The video was so popular that it broke YouTube's view counter, which at the time maxed out at 2.147 billion views. The next few years saw a range of new product launches: YouTube Kids, for children's content; YouTube Gaming, to compete with Twitch; YouTube Red, which would become YouTube Premium, offering ad-free content. When Covid-19 struck, it had a major impact on YouTube, driving massive surges in viewership, content creation and revenue. Amid rolling lockdowns around the world, people turned to the platform for entertainment, education, new, fitness videos and recipe videos, leading to record-setting usage across the platform. Ad revenue nearly doubled, rising from over $15 billion in 2019 to $28.8 billion in 2021. *** There are competitors, of course. TikTok and Instagram Reels focus on short videos and encourage endless scrolling more directly. Twitch targets gamers effectively. Streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime are competing for the viewer's time and attention. But YouTube rolls on, regardless. It hasn't all been smooth sailing. Small creators have felt unfairly penalised by the algorithm, which tends to promote videos with 10,000 or more views. There was Elsagate, in which bizarre and brutal cartoon videos gamed the YouTube Kids algorithm to garner millions of views, at least some of them from children on devices set to autoplay. The platform has also been accused of being a hotbed of political misinformation and disinformation. As for the future, like everything tech these days, it seems likely that AI will be involved. (Maybe the next product will generate videos based on text prompts.) There is also the anti-trust litigation facing Google, and a divestiture of YouTube is a possibility here. Google Search and Google Ads could be split up, which could disrupt the creator economy at the heart of the video platform. At the moment, it remains the platform that binds the world. Whether it's a security guard on the night shift watching a movie, a traveller on a train watching a talk show, a pensioner watching a devotional song, a child watching a cartoon or a student at a virtual lecture, this is where most of the world hits play. (K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and occasionally technology)
Hindustan Times
11 hours ago
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
US student visas: Applicants' online activity to be reviewed
The US State Department said on Wednesday it is restarting the suspended process for foreigners applying for student visas but all applicants will now be required to unlock their social media accounts for government review. The department said consular officers will be on the lookout for posts and messages that could be deemed hostile to the United States, its government, culture, institutions or founding principles. In a notice made public Wednesday, the department said it had rescinded its May suspension of student visa processing but said new applicants who refuse to set their social media accounts to 'public' and allow them to be reviewed may be rejected. It said a refusal to do so could be a sign they are trying to evade the requirement or hide their online activity. The Trump administration last month temporarily halted the scheduling of new visa interviews for foreign students hoping to study in the US while preparing to expand the screening of their activity on social media, officials said. Students around the world have been waiting anxiously for US consulates to reopen appointments for visa interviews, as the window left to book their travel and make housing arrangements narrows ahead of the start of the school year. On Wednesday afternoon, a 27-year-old PhD. a student in Toronto was able to secure an appointment for a visa interview next week. The student, a Chinese national, hopes to travel to the US for a research internship that would start in late July. 'I'm really relieved,' said the student, who spoke on condition of being identified only by his surname, Chen, because he was concerned about being targeted. 'I've been refreshing the website a couple of times every day.' Students from China, India, Mexico and the Philippines have posted on social media sites that they have been monitoring visa booking websites and closely watching press briefings of the State Department to get any indication of when appointment scheduling might resume. In reopening the visa process, the State Department also told consulates to prioritise students hoping to enroll at colleges where foreigners make up less than 15 per cent of the student body, a US official familiar with the matter said. Foreign students make up more than 15% of the total student body at almost 200 US universities, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal education data from 2023. Most are private universities, including all eight Ivy League schools. But that criteria also includes 26 public universities.
The Star
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Star
Edison Chen's management clarifies actor's heated exchange with flight attendant
Photo: Edison Chen/Instagram Actor Edison Chen (pic) has found himself in unwanted publicity after reports emerged that he was involved in an alleged dispute with a flight attendant during a recent commercial flight from Tokyo to New York. According to entertainment site Dimsum Daily, the incident reportedly stemmed from a disagreement over disembarkation procedures, with the 44-year-old star allegedly telling the crew member, 'Bring your complaint letter. I will get you fired.' Chen's management, however, has since clarified the matter, explaining that after the plane had landed, the Infernal Affairs actor was retrieving his luggage when a passenger behind him began moving forward. Chen reportedly said politely, 'Could I please finish collecting my belongings first?' According to his management, a flight attendant then intervened, saying that the other passenger could disembark first as he held the airline's Diamond status. Chen, who is said to hold the same status, was left confused, prompting the misunderstanding. His management added that Chen is currently in communication with the airline to resolve the matter.
Hindustan Times
a day ago
- Hindustan Times
Video: Chinese student walks home with bags on bamboo pole after crucial exam, impresses internet
A heartwarming video of a Chinese secondary schoolgirl walking home after completing her exam, carrying her belongings on a bamboo pole, has gone viral on Chinese social media—earning widespread admiration and support across the country. According to a report by the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the video was filmed outside Guanyang County No. 2 Senior High School in Guilin, Guangxi province, southern China, shortly after the girl, surnamed Liu, finished the Gaokao—China's highly competitive college entrance examination. (Also read: Chinese woman stabbed 22 times in violent ambush, breast implants deflect fatal blows) The footage shows Liu dressed in modest clothing, balancing two large, overstuffed bags on either end of a bamboo pole as she quietly makes her way home. Watch the clip here: Clarifying the viral moment, Liu said the bags were filled with quilts. 'I get cold easily, so I brought three thick quilts to school,' she explained. She added that her mother was indeed with her, although not in the frame: 'I was walking ahead with the pole carrying quilts and daily necessities, while my mum followed behind with a suitcase; that's why she wasn't caught on camera.' Her head teacher, surnamed Chen, described Liu as a diligent student from a rural background. 'She has a strong work ethic and always takes the initiative. Whatever she commits to doing, she sees it through. She's very capable,' he said. The video has struck a chord with viewers nationwide. A teahouse owner in Chengdu, Zhang, told SCMP he was moved by her perseverance and would be 'delighted to offer her a summer job' helping with cleaning or preparing tea. Luo, a retired professor from Wuhan University, expressed a desire to sponsor her future education. 'I see my younger self in her. Now that I have the means, I want to support her, but I haven't been able to reach her,' he said, adding that he had left comments across platforms in hopes of contacting her. Despite the generous offers, Liu has gracefully declined all financial help. 'With my father and brother working away from home, it's just my mum and me. She's getting older, so I don't want to go too far. I plan to find a summer job nearby.' She added, 'Some families may favour sons over daughters, but in my family, everything is fair – sometimes my parents even spoil me more, which makes my brother a little jealous. We may not have flowers, but being together is our bouquet.' According to SCMP, Liu plans to run a small stall selling liangfen (cold jelly noodles) over the summer. She hopes to study education and become a teacher one day.
