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A Taiwanese man detained by Chinese security forces for nearly two months, who was released several days ago, said that Chinese police put him under intense psychological pressure and forced him to plead guilty to crimes he did not commit.

“From the very start it was an abduction” Chung Ting-pang said in a press conference on Aug. 13.

At a recent U.S. congressional hearing on China’s human rights record, a representative of Falun Gong—a spiritual practice currently persecuted by the Chinese regime—showed a petition signed by 700 Chinese villagers demanding the release of an arrested practitioner. An inside source told The Epoch Times that these villagers have been harassed and threatened by Chinese authorities ever since the document was revealed.

Renowned Chinese human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng was conferred the “Ten Best Human Rights Defense Lawyers Award” by the Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Association (CHRLA) on July 24. As Gao remains imprisoned in China, his wife Geng He accepted the award on Gao’s behalf at Capitol Hill.

A recently organized mass training for police chiefs around the country appears to be part of an overall effort to take important security functions from the control of a Communist Party security committee that has been under the control of rivals to the current leadership.

The top Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official who oversees the restive Xinjiang region vowed recently to use an “iron fist” to crack down on potential unrest three years after ethnic violence rocked the area. Rights groups have slammed Chinese authorities for human rights abuses and disappearances.

Ethnic riots involving the Uyghur minority and the Han Chinese majority left around 200 dead in 2009 and prompted the CCP to institute heavy security in the northwestern region.

A high-level Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official has said the Party is in jeopardy because of widespread corruption, in a series of internal briefings given to high-level cadres in three provinces in China, according to a Hong Kong magazine.

A Taiwanese engineer who took a quick three-day trip across the strait to southern China now faces the possibility of an extended prison term and torture. His alleged crime: wanting to break through the rigid censorship that controls China’s TV broadcasts.

Zhong Dingbang was snatched at the Ganzhou airport in Jiangxi Province on June 18 as he prepared to board his plane to fly home.

Amid strong protests from the Chinese public both in and outside China, on Thursday, June 14, Chinese officials announced through Hong Kong media that they will be conducting an investigation into the death of Chinese democracy activist and dissident Li Wangyang.

Li was jailed for more than two decades following his attempt to establish an independent labor union in his hometown of Shaoyang City, Hunan province during the 1989 democracy movement.

Chinese state media revealed recently, in a typically opaque manner, that the Party Secretary of the Shandong Political and Legislative Affairs Committee (PLAC) had been replaced. Shandong security officials are responsible for the treatment of Chen Guangcheng, who escaped from his heavily guarded home in Linyi county in that province in April.

No announcement was made of the leadership change, but on May 29 the name of 58-year-old Bai Jimin did not appear among a list of PLAC officials in a state-media report. The meaning was clear.

Although martial law had been declared and troops were in the streets at the beginning of June, 1989, Beijing residents still hoped to protect the students at Tiananmen Square from having their democracy movement stamped out. One man remembers the moment those hopes were shattered and a hero whose first thought was to save the students.

Wang Jue is a Chinese scholar who now lives in Vancouver, Canada. At a local coffee shop, he recalled what he saw on the night of June 3, 1989.