TAIPEI: A Taiwanese rights activist and outspoken critic of his government’s attempts to seek closer ties with Beijing criticised Chinese authorities after he was denied entry to Hong Kong yesterday.
Chen Wei-ting, a key figure in an unprecedented student-led protest occupation of Taiwan’s parliament earlier this year, had planned to attend a mass rally tomorrow in Hong Kong in support of greater democracy there.
But he said he was immediately taken away and questioned by officials upon arrival at Hong Kong airport yesterday afternoon.
“They told me I could not enter Hong Kong due to ‘political factors’,” Chen saud, adding that he was questioned for about an hour before being sent back to Taiwan.
Chen said he had also planned to visit some friends organising an unofficial pro-democracy referendum in Hong Kong, reciprocating their support for the three-week-long Taiwanese protests against a proposed services trade pact with China.
“They don’t want me to enter Hong Kong because they feared the merging of democracy movements with Taiwan,” said Chen, who flew to Hong Kong on a travel document issued specially for Taiwanese by the Chinese authorities.
Beijing to boost police gun training
BEIJING: China will boost gun training for police in Beijing, a senior security official said, as it braces for what it calls an upsurge in militant violence around the country.
The Vice-Minister of Public Security and head of Beijing’s Public Security Bureau, Fu Zhenghua, urged officers to increase security in the city as he visited police stations and SWAT checkpoints along Beijing’s main thoroughfare, Chang’an Avenue, on Saturday.
Police must be ready to “deal a deadly blow to enemies at the critical time”, the official Xinhua news agency cited Fu as saying in a report yesterday. Chinese police do not always carry firearms, but top leaders have warned that security threats are mounting.
Police in Beijing have already stepped up armed patrols after five people were killed and 40 hurt when a car ploughed into a crowd and burst into flames near Tiananmen Square last October. The dead included three people in the car identified by authorities as Islamists from the western region of Xinjiang.
Agencies
