China censors ‘Beijing’ on Weibo, torture in Izium, and Russia is jailing its elites
Today, we start in China, where the censors are working overtime. Following last week’s protest on a Beijing bridge by a man later shown being bundled into a police car after hanging banners describing Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “traitorous dictator,” the government has been busy removing evidence of the protest from the internet. “We want food, not PCR tests,” read a banner. “Elections, not leaders.” The extraordinary protest, just days before the ongoing 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party began, has inspired copycat protests against Xi Jinping around the world. The Chinese authorities, already wary of any dissent marring what is widely expected to be a celebration of Xi Jinping’s reign en route to him being handed a third term as president, have clamped down on keywords that might lead people to the protest on the bridge. Restricted terms include “Sitong Bridge” and “brave man.” And extends, reports Bloomberg, to words such as “bridge” and “courage.” On Weibo, arguably China’s largest social media platform, even the word “Beijing'' was enough to trigger restrictions and monitoring.
As Iranian kamikaze drones fell on Kyiv this week, Russia stopped pretending that it was going after military installations. The drones are being aimed at residential areas, killing civilians and destroying vital infrastructure. According to Volodymyr Zelensky, a third of Ukraine’s power stations have been destroyed over the past week.
Meanwhile, Russian-appointed officials in the occupied city of Mariupol have removed a monument to Holodomor, a man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s. “We are not removing a monument, we are removing a symbol of political disinformation,” says a young woman in this video, a simple marble block dedicated to “victims of famine and political terror” visible in the background. As a historian friend recently put it, “the war in Ukraine is really a war about history and the legacy of the Soviet Union, whether the whole Soviet experiment was a good or bad thing.”
Electric shocks, waterboarding, rape — these are just a few among many findings of torture inflicted by Russian troops on Ukrainian detainees in Izium, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch. In Izium, a town in Kharkiv retaken by Ukrainian forces in September, Human Rights Watch researchers shed light on the horrors perpetrated during the months of Russian occupation. Survivors identified at least seven locations in Izium, including two schools, where they said Russian soldiers had detained and abused them. One woman who was held and repeatedly raped carved her name into the wall of the room in which she was held. She also carved words and phrases into the wall: “electricity, undressed or raped,” “murdered,” “very painful,” and “help.” She considered trying to kill herself in detention. Others did, with two men reported to have hung themselves a few days after their release from detention.