In late May, Hua Haifeng, Su Heng, and Li Zhao—three labour activists working for the New York-based advocacy group China Labor Watch (CLW)—were detained by the police in Ganzhou, Jiangxi province, while investigating labour conditions at factories making designer shoes for global brands. In particular, they were inspecting a supplier of Ivanka Trump’s fashion brand. […]

At the end of April, the ordeal of Li Heping, a prominent lawyer who was caught up in the ‘709 crackdown’ against the weiquan community that took place in July 2015, came to an end. After being detained for almost two years, Li, who is well known to the international community for his overt rights […]

In late April, Fan Yusu, a forty-four-year-old female migrant worker from Hubei province, was propelled to literary stardom when her essay entitled ‘I am Fan Yusu’ went viral. Fan’s writing recounted a life marked by patriarchy, domestic abuse, and raising children singlehandedly. She detailed her feelings of isolation, and the challenges she faced living as […]

At the end of April, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released its latest annual report on Chinese migrant workers. According to the NBS, in 2016 there were 281,710,000 migrants in China—1.5 percent more than the previous year. Chinese workers appeared to be increasingly reluctant to migrate far away from their hometowns. In 2016, 112,370,000 […]

On 17 April, Premier Li Keqiang told a meeting of top state-owned enterprise (SOE) executives at the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission in Beijing that the government was reconsidering a 2015 policy capping their pay, and promised more competitive rates tied to performance. According to a Xinhua report, executives’ pay and other rewards or […]

On 10 April, the Beijing State Security Bureau released a set of Measures on Rewards for Citizens Reporting Leads on Espionage Conduct. These regulations promised informants who reported on spies rewards ranging between 10,000 and 500,000 yuan, depending on the relevance and usefulness of the information provided. The new regulations were accompanied by the online […]

In April, Amnesty released a report on the death penalty in China entitled ‘China’s Deadly Secrets’. In spite of the near absolute secrecy over the Chinese death penalty system, Amnesty estimated that in 2016 China carried out more executions than all other countries combined. The Report also objected to the unverifiable claims by the Chinese […]

Over the weekend of 25 March, Feng Chongyi, a Chinese-born professor who has been teaching for over a decade at the University of Technology Sydney, was stopped at immigration checkpoints in Guangzhou while he was attempting to board a flight back to Australia. For a week, he was prevented from leaving China and remained in […]

On 22 March, a Chinese construction worker died from a fall at the Imperial Pacific Casino construction site in the American Pacific island of Saipan. Soon after, Federal  Bureau of Investigation agents raided the construction site and discovered hundreds of undocumented Chinese construction workers employed by a company named Suzhou Gold Mantis Construction and Decoration. […]

In March, the Chinese media reported that in December 2016 a court in Beijing handed a suspended death sentence to two migrant workers from a village in Sichuan province, while three others were given jail terms ranging from fifteen years to life imprisonment for the premeditated murder of a colleague in August 2014. They had […]