To answer your "Why the downvotes?" question, two possibilities occur to me:

1) They may be folk concerned with the justice of the situation invested enough in this issue that they're reacting to your question with something like "Are you living under a rock?".

2) There may be folk invested enough in the mainland Chinese government's position that they take issue simply with the existence of these statements, and rather than engage with the substance of them, simply try to make them go away.

Whether either of these are a fair reaction is a different discussion.