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The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to former president of Finland and peace mediator Martti Ahtisaari yesterday. I think this is great as he demonstrated how quiet diplomacy can solve conflicts around the world. This news combined with the excitement around Hu Jia, however, got me down a little bit. I am sure Hu Jia will be given other awards in the near future.
Although Hu Jia didn’t received the Nobel Peace Prize, the authorities did not slow down in disrupting his prison life and his wife Zeng Jinyan. According to Zeng’s tweets from yesterday, the police surveillance has tightened up around her (perhaps temporary). Earlier today, she tweeted about Hu Jia being relocated from Tianjin to Beijing City Prison. It is unclear whether the rumors surrounding the Nobel Peace Prize brought on this change. One thing for sure is that this move has shortened the distance for Zeng to visit him but also brought him under the noses of the highest power.
Meanwhile, the reactions to the Nobel Peace Prize announcement within China were mixed. Some were disappointed while others looked at the prize as another medium utilized by Western countries to slam China. The colored lenses are here to stay for now but hopefully not for long.
In the first few days of the Beijing Olympics, there were media reports that Zeng Jinyan, the wife of imprisoned human rights activist Hu Jia has disappeared. Before anything could be confirmed, it was known that the police have pressured her in the last few weeks of July to leave Beijing “voluntarily” during the Games. AI later confirmed that the police had taken Zeng and her baby to a hotel room for 16 days during the Olympics, guarded, monitored and kept her incommunicado. On her blog (the original blog post is in Simplified Chinese, Global Voices Advocacy posted an English translation), she said she was taken to Dalian (288 miles by air from Beijing) on August 8th and she was brought home on August 23rd.
Before the temporary disappearance, she visited Hu Jia in prison on August 7th and found out the prison officials confiscated the letters he wrote to the family. Zeng has not received a letter from him in August. Before then, he wrote letters every week. The prison officials told Zeng that Hu Jia has been talking to others in prison about prisoners’ dignity and human rights. They want the family to tell him to stop spreading his views. Zeng doesn’t know when she will get to visit Hu Jia again.
In her latest blog post, Zeng said she received a letter from Hu Jia on September 5th and he explained he couldn’t write letters to her and their baby until now. He continued to do manual labor in prison. She then described how he was denied his right to talk to his family by phone. According to prison policies, he should be allowed to call his family twice a month. She inquired about it and she was told the prison’s phone system was being worked on. But every time she called the prison directly, a person picked up the phone. Upon answering she is Hu Jia’s family, she was told the person in charge was away in meetings.
Furthermore, the police asked Zeng to persuade Hu Jia to stop causing trouble in prison. Otherwise, the prison might not allow her to visit. Prison policies stated it is required to send an official notice to inform the prisoner’s family about the date of visit each month. Zeng has not received such a notice so far. She has been calling the police to ask when she can visit. In the past, the police would tell her approximately when she can see Hu Jia. But recently, the police told her they didn’t receive any information from prison.
At the end of the blog post, she wrote the following wishes:
- She hopes the prison would follow the rules by issuing formal notices of prison visits and settling on a regular time of visit.
- She hopes the prison would no longer confiscate Hu Jia’s letters to the family without reasons, stop requiring him to do manual labor (he has liver disease), and stop making work, rest and meals arrangements that would negatively affect Hu Jia’s health.
- The law does not ban lawyers and non-registered family members from visiting Hu Jia. His mother-in-law (Zeng’s mother) whose name is not on his list of registered family members, has not been allowed to see him. According to the law, she should be able to see him. Zeng thought the prison’s explanation of “non-registered person cannot visit” was improper.
Related news:
- USA Today: Chinese rights activist Zeng Jinyan disappears
- ABC News: Attention on Olympics, Dissident Goes Missing in China
- Associated Press: Detained Chinese activist returns to Beijing
In recent weeks, the protests in Tibet has led to a show down between pro-Tibet and pro-China people when the Olympic torch relay stops in London, Paris and San Francisco were disrupted. Away from the torch relay, similar protests took place in Seattle last week during the Seeds of Compassion gathering where the Dalai Lama was the main speaker, and most significantly at Duke University. In the eyes of a human rights activist, I embrace the fact that the two sides have their opportunity to voice their opinions in public. This kind of public exercise of freedom of expression is not likely to be seen in China.
But the protest at Duke turned sour quickly after Chinese student Grace Wang (Wang Qianyuan) attempted to promote a dialogue between the two sides. The pro-China students accused her of promoting Tibet’s independence which she is definitely not doing. Since the protest, Wang received threatening phone calls and emails (see reporting in Duke’s independent daily newspaper The Chronicle and the blog section of national publication US News). Her parents’ home in China was vandalized. There was also a fake apology letter from someone who pretended to write as her father. As Wang’s personal safety got compromised by Web 2.0 through internet posting of her personal information, the firestorm continues through comments on the two articles of The Chronicle (over 500 submissions for the one published on April 14th and another 300+ of them directed to the April 16th piece) and the additional verbal abuse towards Wang on an online forum in China.
Wang is not the only one being called a traitor these days. Chang Ping, an editor of the Southern Metropolis Weekly in China questioned the reporting of the protests in Lhasa by both western and Chinese media in an essay, titled “Where does the truth about Lhasa come from?” (check out the translated version and the original Chinese version). He pointed out that while many Chinese internet users questioned the objectivity of western media reports on Tibet, they do not question their own media in China. He further raised the danger of state-controlled media:
If the netizens genuinely care about news values, they should not only be exposing the fake reports by the western media and they should also be challenging the control by the Chinese government over news sources and the Chinese media. There is no doubt that the harm from the latter is even worse than the former. When individual media outlets make fake reports about real events, it is easy to correct because just a few meticulous Chinese netizens can do the job. When media control is exercised by the state authorities, the whole world is helpless.
Chang’s essay snowballed into another online debate in China and more name calling ensued. While Wang called for an open dialogue over Tibet and Chang was calling for press freedom, they were both called a traitor. Is it unpatriotic to criticize your country? I see it as the other way around. Only those who care less about the actions of their leaders turn a blind eye and go about business as usual, or the other reason might be that they know the consequences of speaking up are too much to take the risk. Those who raise their voices over the shortcomings of their country are just as patriotic as those who defend their country at all times.
As Beijing based BBC journalist Paul Danahar explained the fallout of reporting on Tibet, he posted the famous quote of the 16th century satirist Pietro Aretino:
I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies.
The AI UK Economic Relations team and The Observer newspaper in conjunction with AIUSA Business and Human Rights program have organized a webcast titled, “The Struggle for Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace” to be held today at 10:30AM PST / 1:30PM ET. The event will use the internet to link activists from around the world to discuss the struggle against internet repression and to celebrate the irrepressible desire of people towards freedom of expression. Speakers and contributors include internet gurus, cyber dissidents as well as net activists, writers and journalists, such as the following from the US:
- Morton Sklar – Attorney representing a Chinese cyber-dissident in a lawsuit against Yahoo!
- Jimmy Wales – wikipedia.org
- Ethan Zuckerman – Global Voices
- Cory Doctorow – boingboing.net
The webcast will take place online. Shortly after the live webcast, the audio portion will become an episode of the Irrepressible.info podcast.
Related news and links:
- BBC News: Censorship ‘changes face of net’
- AIUK (video): Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices Online talks about the human cost of internet repression (once the page opens, click the QuickTime link on the left and wait a long while for the video to load)
- AIUK (audio): Trailer to the webcast by BBC journalist Clark Boyd who will chair the event
- AIUK: Amnesty warns that Internet ‘could change beyond all recognition’ unless ‘virus of Internet repression’ is tackled
- VOA: Amnesty International Warns Censorship Will Damage Internet
- Telegraph (UK): China’s internet censorship spreads
Blogging live during the webcast: I am trying for the first time to blog during an event. I logged onto the webcast 5 minutes before the scheduled time (after thought: my computer clock is 5 minutes behind so I was actually one minute late – note to self :). The slides took a while to load and the Windows Media video and audio portion took a long while to connect. Now I am in but the event has already started. No way to tell who is talking but it sounded like it is Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia.
Jimmy finished. Someone else started talking about China. No idea who is talking. Okay, a person from The Observer came on the screen. Cool, The Observer gave birth to AI by printing our founder’s first appeal to the world. The speech is now concentrating on the Irrepressible.info campaign supported by The Observer. 68,500 signed up to that website. Talking about companies that are involved in internet censorship. Support Amnesty, woo hoo! Thanking those involved in putting together the webcast.
Clark Boyd will now take over. People are warned if they leave the room for the bathroom, they won’t be let back in. Good thing I am joining from home. Encouraged people to send questions from home. But how?
Introducing Martha Lane Fox of lastminute.com. The slide says it’s the keynote address. Remembering 10 years ago when Martha started lastminute.com. Story about how Australian and Korean students interacted through the internet. Internet companies disrupted our normal routines of shopping and looking for information in the past. 10 years on, it’s about the power of the individual from 3 levels, social (dating, networking, MySpace, Facebook), corporate (users versus corporations, read reviews about hotels before booking, find out about the truth), political (e-petitions, Amnesty campaign). 196 millions users on Skype. 24% people shop online last Christmas. Read news online. Customize how we want information delivered to us. Shopping online. YouTube videos. A person can do a lot online in a few hours. Be optimistic about the internet.
Introducing Ron Deibert of Open Net Initiative. Ron is participating virtually. There is only audio. The slide now says, “The state of the internet.” ONI has been testing since 2002 through local users and advanced network to tab into countries for the openness of the internet. In 2002, 3 to 4 countries engaged in internet content filtering. Last year, 25 countries are doing it. More numbers and names of countries that did more advanced filtering. Sophistication of filtering is also increasing. Porn or sensitive cultural info were past targets. Nowadays, blogs, streaming media, opposing views, independent human rights info are blocked. Commercial filtering products, such as Smart filter, are used in several countries. Few people pay attention to these smaller companies versus the attention to Google and Microsoft. Denial of service attacks were used during election. They are hard to trace the source. Those are just-in-time filtering, they are aggressive instead of passive. What needs to be done? Don’t take advantage of the internet for granted. States are actively intervening the internet. We need to protect the architecture of the internet. Build tools to protect it, like Psiphon. Hold governments and corporations accountable. Far too much secrecy. Emails are not magical. They pass through optical lines where authorities have plenty of opportunities to track the source of communication.
Talking about the human cost of internet censorship. Introducing Sami Ben Garbia, Tunisian cyber-dissident who was forced to leave his home country due to his internet activities. Why the internet is bad? Control of freedom of expression on the internet. Companies are helping with this control. Video sharing sites are blocked in many countries. Photo sharing sites have the same fate. Online maps, too. Blogging platforms, emails, SMS are blocked. Activists may not have enough technology to defend themselves but they have fear. They are powerless confronting powerful machines. Examples of experiences in Tunisia. People spent time in prison. People got into trouble for downloading a song. Journalists are harassed and imprisoned. Example of experiences in Syria. Blogging against corruption is a crime. In Egypt, bloggers are jailed. In Fiji, a businessman was labeled an anti-military blogger. In China, 50 cyber-dissidents are imprisoned. Conclusion, anti-personal land mines should be banned. Fight the companies which designed the softwares.
Introducing a blogger from Iran. He has been interrogated by the authorities. He was arrested and spent 23 day in solitary confinement, he was blind folded. After 2 weeks, he lost his mind. He was delusional. He started interrogating himself in his cell. He doesn’t know which blog posts he wrote caused him trouble. One interrogator told him that he was being made an example of the consequence of blogging. One year after release, his father was placed in jail for ten days although he had already left the country, seek asylum in the Netherlands. People are scared by how their families are affected. The internet is about the average users. It’s about the voice of ordinary people. The problem of finding reliable info online. Websites backed by government spreading certain info. Extremists spreading their views. It’s important to raise awareness for finding reliable information.
Introducing Josh Wolf, US cyber-dissident who was jailed refusing to turn over a video of an anti-G8 protest. His blog is a video blog. He filmed the protest in San Francisco. A police was injured during the protest. He was nowhere near the injured policeman. He was asked to turn over the video. He sited journalist privileges to defend himself. He was dragged to jail. Protect the press and also bloggers. He considers himself a journalist because he gathers info and distributes it. Freedom Media Coalition is a peer-to-peer support system. It will be launched in a month. Encourages people to blog from prison, get people from the outside to help them.
Moving on to corporate complicity. Introducing Morton Sklar, president of the World Association for Human Rights USA. He helped Yu Ling, the wife of a Chinese dissident to file a lawsuit against Yahoo!. In China, Yahoo! provided user info to the authorities. Cisco provided router technology to monitor internet use. Google put out a censored search engine. 4 individuals are known to have been imprisoned because Yahoo! provided their user info. Chinese court documents cited Yahoo! many times. Yahoo responded by saying they do what they are expected to do, they followed the orders, it was done by a Chinese affiliates. They must be held accountable. They must question the info request. They must not allow themselves to be complicit. Teresa Harris will now share a few words on behalf of Yu Ling. The first time she was able to see her husband after he was in jail, once about half hour every month, he was weak, he had no expression, he was coughing a lot, his hair turned white. Yahoo betrayed her husband. 9 pages out of 14 Chinese court documents contain her husband’s email address. Her husband was simply expressing himself on the internet. Yahoo didn’t even say sorry. Morton is back. He thinks the chances of the lawsuit is good. Companies’ argument for being in China is better than no internet access at all. Companies should ask themselves whether it is worth doing business and complicit to torture and repression of information. Ordinary people need to be more aware of what’s happening. People who own shares of those companies should put pressure on the companies. Yahoo is having a shareholder meeting on June 12th. People should vote for the resolution calling for an end to internet censorship.
Introducing Yan Sham-Shackleton of glutter.org. She worked for an ISP in Hong Kong and China. She blogs as an ordinary person. She was a producer in charge of writing the news for the internet. It was right after 1997. She put out a piece about the Chinese authorities she and her friend put together. They were called into a room by her boss one day and were told that they could no longer put up sensitive info about politics. June 4th came around. Tiananmen Square crackdown discussions were blocked from chat rooms. She helped the block but she eventually quit her job. The technology is really easy to use, it was first used to block swear words but more words were added. She started her blog to talk about democracy. It was her 30th birthday and wished for a democratic China. She was traveling in China and checked her blog. She ran into some people who worked for the authorities. She went home and she could not get into her blog. She contacted Typepad which hosted the blog and learned there was a regional block. She organized an online mini protest. She encourages getting the word out about your experience.
I have to get ready for work. I’ve only asked for a half day off so I must stop blogging now.
It’s been almost a week since the Beijing Olympics new media regulations became effective on January 1st. Are there any significant changes for foreign journalists working in China? There was a mix of good and bad news in this first week. Bao Tong, the former aid of the Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, was approved by the government on January 1st to be interviewed by Reuters. Bao was jailed following the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and he has been outspoken about the Chinese government since being kept under house arrest after he was released from prison in 1996. Refer to my earlier post for his latest essay published by Radio Free Asia.
On the other hand, human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng was released from detention since he received a three-year suspended prison sentence on December 22nd but his whereabouts is unknown. RFA interviewed his family members and friends and the speculation is that the Chinese government kicked Gao out of Beijing a few days before the New Year so he would not be accessible to foreign journalists.
Two days ago, Wang Guoqing, vice-minister of the State Council Information Office told China Daily about the need to change government officials’ attitude from “managing” to “serving the media.” He cautioned that the change in attitude might not take place immediately outside of the major cities because many officials are used to the “Regulations on the Supervision of Foreign Journalists and Resident Foreign News Organs” enforced since 1990. He encouraged government officials from the local level to interact with the media more openly, like holding press conferences.
It seems to me there is a lot of talk but not enough action. Part of the new media regulations include the freedom to interview individuals or organizations with only their prior consent which has been contradicted by the Bao Tong’s interview since it was pre-approved. Reuters also requested to interview Shanghai lawyer Zheng Enchong but the request was denied because Zheng was stripped his political rights which means he is not allowed to talk to the media. And taking Gao Zhisheng out of Beijing is the new low of press freedom.
I am anxious to see whether any foreign journalists will be allowed to check out locations of recent social unrest because that’s where the real action is from the aftermath of China’s economic boom and years of human rights neglect.
Related news and links:
- China Digital Times: Bao Tong Allowed to Talk to Foreign Press
- RFA Mandarin service news brief (Simplified Chinese) on January 1st and 2nd covering the Reuters’ interview with Bao Tong
- China Digital Times: Gao Zhisheng Whereabouts Unknown
- RFA Mandarin service (Simplified Chinese): Gao Zhisheng might get expelled out of Beijing
- Gao Zhisheng’s blog (Simplified Chinese): Hu Jia’s post – Gao Zhisheng’s whole family got escorted out of Beijing (partial translation of the post shown in Global Voices)
- RFA Mandarin service (Simplified Chinese): Gao Zhisheng removed by police one week ago, whereabouts unknown
- China Daily: ‘Serve the media, not manage them’
- China Daily: Presenting the true picture of China (2-page interview with Wang Guoqing)
- BBC News: China wrestles with new media era
Global Voices, a media project of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School that tracks online conversations around the world is having its annual summit in Delhi, India this Saturday, December 16th. The sign-up for the event is already full but GV is going to have streaming audio and live chat online so anyone can participate from other locations. The GV folks have all the techie stuff figured out already (including a link to a page that converts Delhi time to your own) so you should check out all the details on their site.
Related links:
While I was surfing the Global Voices website a few days ago, I read about the Journalist’s Day in China celebrated on November 8th. The day was officially marked by the Communist Party in 2000. According to the post on Global Voices, the day’s history traced back to a reporter, Liu Yu-sheng of the newspaper, Jiang Sheng Daily. He was prosecuted by the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party that lost the civil war in China and fled to Taiwan) in 1932 and executed in 1933 under the charge of pro-communist stand. Later, it was discovered that Liu had written investigative report criticizing the local government. However, the post on China Media Project seems more fitting because the All-China Journalists Association was founded on November 8, 1937. Anyhow, the Communist Party observed the day giving out awards and all while media censorship continues.
There was some good news with cyber-dissident and pro-democracy activist, Jiang Lijun released from prison after serving four years. Others like Shi Tao and Li Zhi remained in prison. Media censorship is not new as evidenced in the life of China’s first journalism rebel Shao Piaoping. During Shao’s days, he was fighting the country with one man’s will “to die as a journalist.” In this day and age, I hope more people will join this fight so we won’t see any more journalists’ lives taken away.
Once I found out WordPress keeps stats on my blog, I got obsessed by it. It’s rather basic so I started using MapStats through Blog Flux but the site is really slow loading (or not loading at all). I am sticking with it for now because Blog Flux offers a wide range of services such as Pinger which automatically ping a long list of sites for you.
I wasn’t this blog-tech-savvy even just a few days ago because I didn’t know what ping and noob mean but luckily I live with a geek who explains all these terms to me. While I was reading other blogs, I kept seeing the Technorati logo so I visited the site to find out what it is and I immediately wanted to get my blog listed there. That led me to ping and I did it manually last night. The moment I woke up this morning, I wanted to know if my blog got listed on Technorati and luckily I got in.
That’s not all the exploring I did. I saw a few other logos/buttons on some blogs that allow readers to bookmark or add feed. Some blogs have a bunch of buttons to accommodate many services out there. Then I found AddThis which provides a one-button link to multiple bookmarking services or feed readers. It even offers buttons for Podcast or products. After copying the HTML codes from AddThis and then pasting and correcting them in my sidebar widgets, I got those buttons up. I tested them out (sort of, I am not subscribed to any of those services so I just checked out the links) and they are pretty nifty.
Couple days ago, I was looking up info on the blog, Glutter which led me to an article about it on Global Voices. I went back to Global Voices yesterday and found out it’s a multi-user blog with a global perspective. It’s not that everyone can blog on there but instead their blogger-editors capture the most interesting posts around the world and organize them by country/region. It’s really cool. Naturally I checked out the China section and found out about the Best of Blogs awards hosted by Deutsche Welle. There are some gutsy blogs out there for sure. The Best Weblog Chinese award went to The Colourful World – Shuweicao’s Blog whose owner had stomach cancer but she continues to write her food blog after her stomach got removed. Her blog is in Chinese (obviously) but there are enough pictures for the non-Chinese readers to start drooling.
There are certainly tons more out there in the blogging world to adventure but for now, I hope I can manage to keep blogging and pinging along.
