Journalists and aid workers have documented the plight of escapees from North Korea who have taken shelter in northeastern China. These vulnerable people are increasingly being sent back to the country they fled, where they are believed to face torture, ill-treatment, imprisonment and even...

Experiments in governance Many claims are made about the potential impact on China’s democratization of the election of village committees there. Cynics assert that these elections are nothing but show. Anne F. Thurston looks at the reality on the ground, including how village committees fit into...

The village committee, first introduced shortly after the communes began collapsing in the late 1970s, is only one of several organizations governing political life at the village level. The village assembly, the village representative assembly and the local branch of the Chinese Communist Party (...

Announcing the launch of a global campaign Acting on the orders of the Chinese leadership, martial law troops brutally ended the Tiananmen Square protests when they opened fire with tanks and machine guns on the unarmed people of Beijing on June 4, 1989, initiating a massacre which took lives of...

Tiananmen Mother Su Bingxian describes her meeting with Lois Snow in Beijing in April and what happened to her as a result.

Lois Wheeler Snow describes her experiences during her recent visit to Beijing and explains why she has become an ardent supporter of the Tiananmen Mothers’ campaign for justice.

Detained in a psychiatric hospital for championing worker rights

China ignores international law in its treatment of North Korean refugees Beijing’s attitudes towards human rights have impacts beyond China’s borders. James D. Seymour writes of one case in which disregard for its obligations to protect the rights of refugees’ results in their being sent to face...

UN Committee highlights gap between law and practice