REFERENCES
Reference articles
2010: How an undercover reporter exposed suicides and extreme working conditions at China’s Foxconn factories
From 2009 onwards, Chinese media started reporting on a string of suicides at the Taiwanese-owned iPhone maker Foxconn’s factory in Shenzhen. In 2010 alone, 14 young workers had committed suicide by jumping to their deaths from Foxconn buildings. All of the workers were in their late teens or early twenties. In early 2010, Southern Weekly…
2018: Exposing faulty construction of a major metro line in Hong Kong
In early summer 2018, Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily published a series of reports, of which three are translated below, exposing faulty construction along the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) line linking ShaTin to Central. The investigation demonstrated that structural walls and platforms at three MTR stations had construction defects that could lead to potential collapse.…
2019: Connecting the dots of China’s largest bribery scandal
In October 2019, Xing Yun, the Deputy Director of the National People’s Congress of the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia, was charged with bribery and sentenced to death with reprieve. With an estimated 449 million CNY (62 million USD) that Xing had illegally appropriated across his two-decade-long career in Inner Mongolia, it became at the…
2024: A mother’s pursuit of justice for her son beaten to death by police
In 2018, police officers took unconscious Sun Renze to the hospital in Yining City, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and claimed he had choked on water while in custody. Sun died 43 days later. An autopsy, carried out after repeated requests from his mother, revealed multiple organ failure likely caused by external injuries as a result…
The Chinese legacy on the right to information
Contrary to the People’s Republic of China’s official discourse, based on cultural relativism that states that human rights are a “Western” concept unfit to apply to a Chinese context, the right to information and the struggle for its fulfilment have been present throughout the history of the country and still plays a key role in…
The right to information at the heart of modern China’s intellectual discourse
The universal principles of human rights, including the right to information, have been claimed by progressive Chinese scholars and intellectuals since the 19th century. Despite many setbacks in contemporary China, the struggle for the right to information has continued to be a core intellectual cause. The endorsement of the right to information and freedom of…