As more Chinese people going online, China’s censorship will struggle to keep pace, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said

PC World
Nov 4, 2010
By Michael Kan, IDG News

China’s strict controls on its Internet usage will eventually fail as more of the country’s people go online and express themselves, said Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

“Ultimately, the people will win over the government. The yearning is so strong,” he said on Wednesday during a talk hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Schmidt’s comments come several months after Google announced it would stop censoring its search results in China. But even as Google has attempted to provide unfiltered search results by redirecting users in China to the company’s Hong Kong search engine, the Chinese government continues to block certain searches.

China currently has 420 million Internet users, according to Chinese government statistics. But certain sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are blocked. At the same time, China heavily invests into policing the web, using a large organization of regulators that are estimated to number from 30,000 to 50,000, Schmidt said.    [FULL  STORY]

Taipei Times
Oct 29, 2010
AFP, BEIJING

The 17-year-old daughter of missing Chinese rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng (高智晟) has appealed for help from US President Barack Obama, saying Beijing had kidnapped him and that police beat her as a child.

Grace Geng (耿格), who now lives in the US with her mother and brother, urged Obama to ask Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) for information about Gao’s whereabouts when the pair meet next month at a G20 summit in Seoul.

The plight of human rights activists in China has come under the spotlight since the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this month to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), with the West pressing for the release of all political prisoners.

“President Obama, as the father of two girls yourself, please ask President Hu to tell this daughter where her father is,” Geng wrote in an opinion piece published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. “I know my father is just one man, but I also know that if the Chinese government is allowed to blatantly violate its own law with respect to my father, it is only a matter of time before the next father disappears.”    [FULL  STORY]

The China Post
October 14, 2010
By Christopher Bodeen, BEIJING, AP

A group of Communist Party elders in China has issued a bold call to end the country’s wide-ranging restrictions on free speech, just days after the government reacted angrily to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo.

In an open letter posted online, the retired officials state that although China’s 1982 constitution guarantees freedom of speech, the right is constrained by a host of laws and regulations that should be scrapped.

“This kind of false democracy of affirming in principle and denying in actuality is a scandal in the history of democracy,” said the letter, which was dated Monday and widely distributed by e-mail.

Wang Yongcheng, a retired professor at Shanghai’s Jiaotong University who signed the letter, said it had been inspired by the recent arrest of a journalist who wrote about corruption in the resettlement of farmers for a dam project.

“We want to spur action toward governing the country according to law,” Wang said in a telephone interview.    [FULL  STORY]

Reuters
By Walter Gibbs and Gwladys Fouche
Oct 12, 2010

OSLO (Reuters) – China broadened its retaliation against Norway on Tuesday for the selection of a Chinese dissident for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, cancelling a second cabinet-level meeting and a Norwegian cultural event in China.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told a news conference in Beijing the award to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo last week showed a lack of respect for China’s judicial system and damaged ties between the two countries.

In Oslo, the Nobel Committee said it would be “delighted” for Liu’s wife to accept the award at a ceremony on December 10 in Oslo if Liu, who is serving an 11-year prison sentence for “subverting” the Chinese state, were prohibited from traveling.

The U.S. embassy in Beijing urged China to lift any restrictions on Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, who has sent out messages she is under house arrest in Beijing, according to news reports and overseas human rights groups.

In actions against Norway’s government, which says it has no influence over the Nobel Committee, Beijing canceled a meeting scheduled for Wednesday between Norwegian fisheries minister Lisbeth Berg-Hansen and Sun Dawei, the vice minister of China’s food safety authority, Norwegian officials said.

On Monday, the Chinese canceled a meeting between Berg-Hansen and Chinese vice fisheries minister Niu Dum, also scheduled for Wednesday.

Expanding retaliation to cultural exchanges, Chinese authorities called off a Norwegian musical due to be performed next month in Beijing, the show’s composer said on Tuesday.

“The show is canceled, and we have been told (it’s) as a punishment for the Nobel Peace Prize,” Thomas Langhelle, the composer of the musical “Some Sunny Night,” told Reuters. “We are told that Norwegians now cannot perform in China.”

Ragnhild Imerslund, a spokeswoman for Norway’s Foreign Ministry, told Reuters: “Other meetings at the working level are proceeding as normal but meetings at the political level have all been canceled.*    [FULL  STORY]

guardian.co.uk

China’s best-known dissident, who is serving 11 years in prison, is probably unaware he has won prize

China’s best-known dissident today won the prestigious Nobel peace prize from the prison cell where he is serving 11 years for incitement to subvert state power.

The Norwegian Nobel committee praised Liu Xiaobo for his “long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China. The … committee has long believed that there is a close connection between human rights and peace.”

As the news was announced, transmission of both BBC news and CNN television channels was interrupted in China.    [FULL  STORY]

Associated Press
2010-10-09
By DAVID WIVELL

The world’s newest Nobel Peace Prize winner remained unreachable in a Chinese prison Saturday, while his wife’s mobile phone was cut off and the authoritarian government continued to censor reports about democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo’s honor.

Police kept reporters away from the prison where Liu is serving an 11-year sentence for subversion, and his lawyer said that Liu’s wife _ who had been hoping to visit him Saturday and tell him the news of the award_ has “disappeared” and he is worried she may be in police custody.

Chinese authorities, who called Liu a criminal shortly after his award Friday and said his winning “desecrates the prize,” sank Saturday into official silence.

Only an editorial in the state-run Global Times newspaper spoke out Saturday, saying in English, “Obviously, the Nobel Peace Prize this year is meant to irritate China, but it will not succeed. On the contrary, the committee disgraced itself.”

The paper’s Chinese-language edition called the award “an arrogant showcase of Western ideology” and said it disrespected the Chinese people.

But one Chinese newspaper cartoonist, Kuang Biao, posted an image on his blog Friday of a Nobel prize medal behind bars.

In naming Liu, the Norwegian-based Nobel committee honored his more than two decades of advocacy for human rights and peaceful democratic change _ from the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989 to a manifesto for political reform that he co-authored in 2008 and which led to his latest jail term.

President Barack Obama, last year’s peace prize winner, called for Liu’s immediate release.

But there was still no word from the winner himself. The mobile phone of his wife, Liu Xia, was turned off Saturday as she was expected to be en route with police to the prison to meet her husband.

“She’s disappeared. We’re all worried about them,” Liu’s lawyer, Shang Baojun, told The Associated Press on Saturday.

He said even Liu Xia’s mother had been unable to reach her.    [FULL  STORY]

NTDTV

Mr. Chen, who is blind and a self-taught lawyer, began defending the rights of farmers and the disabled in 1998. He later represented women who were forced to have late-term abortions and sterilizations under the Chinese regime’s one-child policy.

Mr. Chen was arrested in 2006 after documenting late-term abortions in Linyi City, and charged with damaging public property and gathering people to block traffic. His supporters say the charges were fabricated.    [FULL  STORY]

Liao Meizhi one of many wrongly detained in psychiatric institutions for clashing with local bureaucrats, say researchers

guardian.co.uk
31 August 2010 19.42 BST

Yang Chunguang holds the ID card of his wife Liao Meizhi, who is being held in the Yanshi mental hospital, Qianjiang city, Hubei. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

They snatched Liao Meizhi on her birthday, dragging her off the street and into a dirty blue van as others held back her husband.

It was only two months later, when a stranger knocked on the door, that her family learned where she had been taken. The man said he had just been discharged from a nearby mental hospital – and that Liao was being held there against her will. Her husband insists she has no psychiatric problems.

More than six months after she was seized, her family says she remains incarcerated in the nondescript building with thick steel doors just outside her hometown of Qianjiang, in China’s central Hubei province.

Researchers believe she is among a growing number of people wrongly detained in psychiatric institutions after clashing with local officials. One activist has compiled a database of more than 500 such cases.    [FULL  STORY]

NTDTV
Sep 16, 2010 Last Updated: Sep 16, 2010

Recently, reports have been coming out of China about Falun Gong practitioners who have been tortured or beaten to death just days after being abducted by authorities. NTD news reporter spoke to Levi Browde, Executive Director of Falun Dafa Information Center, about these recent cases.

“15% of the total death cases that we’ve received and verified were cases where the person died within 2 months of being put into custody. Often it’s within days, occasionally within hours. So clearly the moment they are taken into custody they are being faced with very brutal conditions for that kind of thing to happen,” said Levi Browde.

These are practitioners of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong. In 1999 the Chinese communist regime launched a nationwide crackdown on Falun Gong. At that time Falun Gong practitioners in China were believed to number between 70 and 100 million. Reports of detention and torture quickly emerged from China. Today, more than 3,000 people have been confirmed dead as a result of the regime’s persecution.

Amnesty International said in their 2010 report that the Chinese authorities’ campaign against Falun Gong had “intensified”. Over the past month, confirmed cases have emerged of Falun Gong practitioners being killed just days after police took them into custody. The Falun Dafa Information Center, a non-profit organization that researches the persecution of Falun Gong in China, reported on the case of Zeng Huaguo, a businessman from Hunan Province.

Levi Browde continued, “A man, 57 years old, who was being harassed by the police in China because of his practice of Falun Gong. They had ransacked his home, taken all his Falun Gong books, and all the materials from his home. He had actually gone back to the police and asked to have them returned to him. He was taken into custody and days later he was dead.”

According to the report, Mr Zeng’s family was offered the equivalent of U.S. $38,000 to keep quiet about his death.    [FULL  STORY]

At her appeal on 21 July, Chinese activist Mao Hengfeng said that she has been severely beaten at the Anhui Provincial Women’s Re-education Through Labour (RTL) facility over the past three months. She remains at high risk of further torture and other ill-treatment.  HTML version of report —–   Adobe PDF version of report