Tang Renjian, China’s former Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, was sentenced to death with reprieve for bribery at a court in Jilin province on Sunday, according to state-run news agency Xinhua.

Tang took bribes, including cash and property worth over 268 million yuan ($37.6 million), in various positions held from 2007 to 2024, Xinhua said.

The Changchun Intermediate People’s Court suspended his death sentence for two years, noting he had confessed to his crimes, it added.

China’s Communist Party expelled Tang in November 2024, six months after he was placed under investigation by the anti-graft watchdog and removed from his post.

President Xi Jinping started a campaign of purges of China’s domestic security apparatus in 2020, seeking to ensure police, prosecutors and judges are “absolutely loyal, absolutely pure and absolutely reliable”.

Tang was governor of the western province of Gansu from 2017 to 2020 before being named minister of agriculture and rural affairs, according to official biographies.

In January, Xi said corruption is the biggest threat to China’s Communist Party and remains on the rise.

WASHINGTON: Vacationing in India, engineer Amrutha Tamanam rushed to return to the United States after Donald Trump abruptly announced a $100,000 fee for the visa she holds.

As she scrambled to get back to the country she’s called home for a decade, racially motivated far-right trolls launched coordinated efforts to disrupt flight bookings from India, calling their campaign “clog the toilet.”

The White House would later clarify that the new H-1B fee was a one-time payment not applicable to current holders. But leading US companies had already advised their employees abroad to swiftly return to avoid the fee or risk being stranded overseas.

Tamanam, an Austin-based software engineer, began searching for a flight from the city of Vijayawada, as users on the far-right message board 4chan moved to overwhelm reservation systems, in a bid to block Indian visa holders from booking tickets.

One 4chan thread encouraged users to find India-US flights, “initiate the checkout process”, but “don’t check out,” thereby clogging the system and preventing the visa holders from reaching the United States before the announcement took effect.

The campaign may have had a direct impact on Tamanam, who encountered repeated crashes on airline websites. The checkout page, which typically allows users a window of a few minutes, timed out much faster.

After multiple attempts, she eventually managed to rebook a one-way ticket to Dallas on Qatar Airways, spending around $2,000 — more than double the cost of her original round-trip fare.

“It was hard for me to book a ticket, and I paid a huge fare for the panic travel,” Tamanam told AFP.

‘Keep them in India’

The 4chan thread — which also circulated among far-right Trump supporters on Telegram and other fringe forums — read: “Indians are just waking up after the H1B news. Want to keep them in India? Clog the flight reservation system!”

Responding posts, many riddled with racist slurs, advised users to hold seats for popular India-US routes on airline websites and booking platforms — without completing the purchase.

The stated goal was to block availability on high-demand flights, making it harder to find available seats and inflating prices.

Illustrating the scale of the operation, one 4chan user posted a screenshot of their browser and claimed: “I got 100 seats locked.”

“Currently clogging the last available seat on this Delhi to Newark flight,” another wrote.

Several 4chan users also posted about holding up seats on Air India and slowing the airline’s website. However, an Air India spokesperson told AFP the site experienced no disruptions, with systems operating normally.

‘Shared antipathy’

Though it was difficult to measure the campaign’s overall effectiveness, the trolling was an attempt to “cause panic among H-1B visa holders,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told AFP.

“The real scary thing about 4chan is its ability to radicalise people into extremist beliefs,” Beirich said, adding that several US mass shooters had published manifestos to the site.

H-1B visas allow companies to sponsor foreign workers with specialised skills — such as scientists and computer programmers — to work in the United States, initially for three years but extendable to six.

The United States awards 85,000 H-1B visas per year on a lottery system, with India accounting for around three-quarters of the recipients.

In an age of information warfare, the troll operation illustrates how bad actors can launch disruptive attacks “with the stroke of a keyboard,” said Brian Levin, founder of the Centre for the Study of Hate and Extremism.

“As nationalistic politics takes hold across the world, an informal international association of opponents will use an array of aggressive tools, including the internet,” Levin told AFP.

“What I think is so relevant is how rapidly it spread, how diverse the nations represented were, and how shared antipathy across international borders can be mobilised online.”

• Modi’s government split Ladakh off from IIOJK in 2019.
• Around half of Ladakhis are Muslim, 40% are Buddhist.
• “We have been used like slaves”, says apex body leader.
  

LEH: India’s remote high-altitude desert region of Ladakh has been in turmoil since four people were killed in violent protests demanding greater political autonomy for the Himalayan territory.

Growing resentment with New Delhi’s direct rule over the territory, and fears of losing livelihoods, boiled over on Wednesday as crowds took to the streets in the main city, Leh, torching a police vehicle and the offices of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Initially, police said five people had died, but later revised the toll to four.

The sparsely populated region, home to some 300,000 people, borders both China and Pakistan and is a strategic enclave for India. Around half of Ladakh’s residents are Muslim, and about 40% are Buddhist.

AFP looks at some of the issues.

Why are people protesting?

Modi’s government split Ladakh off from Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) in 2019, imposing direct rule on both after cancelling the region’s partial autonomy.

Since then, resentment has been growing in Ladakh over Delhi’s rule, with concerns about losing traditional livelihoods, land rights, and cultural identity.

Residents say the end of semi-autonomy stripped them of protections over land, jobs, and resources.

Decisions on development are made in Delhi and implemented by officials sent from outside, leaving the local elected council sidelined.

“All the protections we had within IIOJK were all gone,” lawyer Mustafa Haji told AFP.

Who is leading the demonstrations?

The Apex Body Leh, led by veteran leader Chering Dorjay, has become the main voice of the protesters.

“We have been used like slaves,” Dorjay, 77, said, vowing to continue the struggle in the days to come.

Wednesday’s demonstrations were also organised in solidarity with prominent activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on hunger strike for two weeks.

New Delhi blamed the unrest on “provocative speeches” by Wangchuk who was detained by police on Friday.

What are the core demands?

The protesters are demanding protection of land rights and to stop outsiders from buying property in Ladakh.

They also want constitutional autonomy under the “Sixth Schedule” of India’s constitution, which would allow a local legislature to make laws on land use and jobs.

Constitutional protections sought by Ladakhis may seem far off, but sustained negotiations with New Delhi have yielded some “small victories”, Dorjay said.

The government has already reserved 85% of jobs for locals and frozen the acquisition of domicile status for Indians from outside Ladakh until 2036.

But Dorjay says, “there is a long way to go.”

Why is land a sensitive issue?

The government has announced large-scale solar projects and industrial plans in Ladakh that require thousands of acres of land.

Locals fear this will endanger grazing grounds critical for pashmina goat herding, already under pressure from climate change and military buffer zones established with China.

“The danger to this centuries-old livelihood undermining lives of thousands of pashmina goat herders is another issue now,” Dorjay said.

Tensions soared after deadly clashes with Chinese forces in 2020, and new buffer zones have further reduced land available to herders.

“A situation where you don’t have any protection for your land and identity is not a happy one,” lawyer Haji said.