When Phan Kim Khanh, a former member of President Barack Obama’s Young Southeast Asia Leaders Initiative, was serving a six-year sentence in Vietnam, he didn’t fathom that guards would force him to work six hours a day without compensation. Authorities in the communist one-party state arrested Khanh, now 30, in 2017 for running two independent online magazines in Vietnam. After the press freedom and anti-corruption campaigner was released on March 21, he told Radio Free Asia that prison guards told him and other inmates that they had to work without…
Day: March 27, 2023
Hong Kong Is Trying to Salvage Its Image. Who Is It Fooling?
Advertisement After the turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic and China’s imposition of the national security law (NSL), the Hong Kong government is anxious about the city’s attractiveness to foreign investment. They hosted a series of forums and summits to promote Hong Kong’s return to “business as usual.” They also organized numerous propaganda campaigns and roadshows to tell “a good Hong Kong story.” Their aim appears simple: to convince the global community that the city remains an attractive place for investment despite China’s economic downturn, especially after the zero COVID policy.…
For founder’s birthday, North Korean cities ordered to decorate streets with flowers
To celebrate the April 15 birthday of North Korea’s founder Kim Il Sung, authorities have ordered cities and towns to decorate the streets with flowers for the first time in three years, two sources in the country told Radio Free Asia. The holiday is a big deal in North Korea, where it is known as the “Day of the Sun.” Together with the “Day of the Shining Star,” the Feb. 16 birthday of his son, Kim Jong Il, the holiday perpetuates the personality cult surrounding the Kim family, which has…
Chinese coast guard ship chased out of Vietnam waters
A Chinese coast guard ship and a Vietnamese fisheries patrol boat apparently had a tense encounter during the weekend in the South China Sea, coming as close as 10 meters to each other, according to data from Marine Traffic, a ship-tracking website. The data, based on the ships’ automatic identification system (AIS) signals, shows that the China Coast Guard ship, CCG5205, and Vietnam’s Kiem Ngu 278 came “crazy close” to one another at around 7 a.m. on Sunday local time (midnight UTC), said a researcher based in California. As of…