“Chen Guangcheng is an activist from Shandong who lost his sight as a child; but he is a bright light that shines in the darkness. Without any professional training, he taught himself law to help himself and other disabled people and disadvantaged groups in rural areas. Outside China, he is best known for filing a lawsuit on behalf of women who suffered under China’s forced-abortion and sterilisation campaign. He has also fought for more equitable taxation of villagers and disabled people. He’s suffered a series of house arrests, detentions and trials and is currently confined to his home, along with his wife and daughter. Constantly under surveillance by agents and hired villagers, he’s prevented from communicating with the outside world. But in February 2011 he smuggled out of the village a homemade video that described his situation. After this, he and his wife were reportedly beaten and their computer, video camera, audio recorder and TV aerial, as well as legal documents relating to his case, were confiscated. The windows of the family house were covered with metal sheets. His bravery, persistence and thirst for justice are great inspirations. I would like to take this opportunity to express my respect for him and to send him my best. It would be an honour for me to meet him one day.”

Chen was also nomimated by Pulitzer Prize-winner Nicholas Kristof, who described him as “amazingly brave” and “indomitable”. The magazine announced that it “will be inviting all nominators and nominees to a giant dinner party”, which neither Chen nor Ai appears likely to be able to attend.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Chen Guangcheng, forced abortion, forced sterilization, house arrest, Shandong, soft power
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推若审查，我即停推。 RT @wenyunchao: @aiww 商人在商言商，道这东东，能像谷歌那样最好，不能也不能强求。

— 艾未未Ai Weiwei (@aiww) January 27, 2012

The new policy has been widely read as a concession to allow Twitter to enter China, in a similar vein to Google’s aborted censorship of search results on Google.cn. The speculation has been fuelled by co-founder Jack Dorsey’s recent visit to Shanghai, though that trip may have had more to do with Dorsey’s e-payment company, Square. Speaking to The Associated Press, Google’s chief legal officer played down the focus on China:

“I think what they (Twitter officials) are wrestling with is what all of us wrestle with — and everyone wants to focus on China, but it is actually a global issue — which is laws in these different countries vary,” Drummond said.

“Americans tend to think copyright is a real bad problem, so we have to regulate that on the Internet. In France and Germany, they care about Nazis’ issues and so forth,” he added. “In China, there are other issues that we call censorship. And so how you respect all the laws or follow all the laws to the extent you think they should be followed while still allowing people to get the content elsewhere …?”

“It’s a tough problem that a company faces once they branch out beyond one set of offices in California into that big bad world out there,” said Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices Online, an international network of bloggers and citizen journalists. “We’ll have to see how it plays out — how it is and isn’t used.”

It remains to be seen, for example, how high Twitter will set the bar for “what we believe to be a valid and applicable legal request” for blocking, and where the policy will apply: while the change is intended to allow expansion into countries with “different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression”, the company added that “some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there.” Takedown requests are to be catalogued online at chillingeffects.org/twitter, alongside the current list of copyright infringement notices. See more on Twitter’s claimed commitment to transparency at Ars Technica.

Ai would be sorely missed by many Chinese Twitterers. A recent post on the Sinophone twittersphere by Yaxue Cao at Seeing Red in China described his presence there:

You can’t write about Twitter Chinese without talking about Ai Weiwei. Needless to say, he was among the first people I followed. But within 24 hours I unfollowed him, because when I came back on Twitter the next day, OMG, all I saw was @aiww, nothing but @aiww, screen after screen. I figured that I will hear news about him and interesting things he said anyway from retweets ….

Soon enough, I re-followed him, this time feeling the need for a figure like him: he brings to Twitter Chinese warmth, a sense of confidence (although not certainty), street smartness, and he makes you feel a tad stronger, even though he is under surveillance of 9 cameras and multiple police cars permanently parked outside his gate.

See more on Cao’s post via CDT.

In a recent interview with The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, Ai suggested that the government saw Twitter as a threat akin to Christianity as a potential source of independent community. The comparison arose with reference to the recent departure of writer Yu Jie.

“Internally, since they don’t have a way to discuss issues or communicate, it’s really a deadlock for them, and that keeps creating pressure. They had beaten him—Yu Jie—terribly, because he is related to Christianity, and that is what they hate the most or are scared of the most. They are scared of any form of unity. They wouldn’t be scared of me if I don’t get on Twitter, because on Twitter I can form a community. But, as individuals, they don’t care about you. So they crash down on people quite terribly, and subject people to abuse. I don’t think Yu Jie could stay any longer. In that kind of situation, you just have to say, ‘This is not possible,’” Ai said.

Ai and Osnos also discuss the artist’s iconic and widely coveted Sunflower Seeds, now on display in New York, and the “legal burlesque” of the tax evasion charges which followed his detention last year:

Before I left his house, I asked him he thinks he’ll win his tax case. “No,” he said flatly. “We’re only winning by revealing the truth. We can win in a sense of so many people beginning to understand. They will understand that you cannot win a case, but at least you can say, ‘I have to fight because it’s related to at least thirty thousand supporters.’”

Update: At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Eva Galperin asks “what does Twitter’s country-by-country takedown system mean for freedom of expression?”

… Right now, we can expect Twitter to comply with court orders from countries where they have offices and employees, a list that includes the United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan, and soon Germany.

… For now, the overall effect is less censorship rather than more censorship, since they used to take things down for all users. But people have voiced concerns that “if you build it, they will come,”–if you build a tool for state-by-state censorship, states will start to use it. We should remain vigilant against this outcome ….

So what should Twitter users do? Keep Twitter honest. First, pay attention to the notices that Twitter sends and to the archive being created on Chilling Effects. If Twitter starts honoring court orders from India to take down tweets that are offensive to the Hindu gods, or tweets that criticize the king in Thailand, we want to know immediately. Furthermore, transparency projects such as Chilling Effects allow activists to track censorship all over the world, which is the first step to putting pressure on countries to stand up for freedom of expression and put a stop to government censorship.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, censorship, Christianity, google.cn, Rebecca MacKinnon, Twitter, yu jie
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Read more about Ai Weiwei and other political dissidents in China via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, dissidents, documentaries
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In over forty years of writing about China, I have been subjected to many forms of pressure. But this has never happened to me. What had I said this time that attracted the attention of the official shredder? The article, titled “China: Richer but Repressed,” mentioned Ai Weiwei, the outspoken artist and designer of the Beijing Olympics’ Bird’s Nest stadium, who was detained last year for 81 days; Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, now serving eleven years; the blind civil rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng, long under house arrest and prohibited contact with all visitors; and Wang Yi, who published exposes of tainted milk and enforced abortions, and spent a year in detention. I included quotes from books by Harvard scholars. Surely everything I wrote is well known in China, especially to the tiny number of English-reading urban people who buy Newsweek.

Then I learned that a few months earlier, on August 28, 2011, Ai Weiwei had also published a piece in Newsweek that the Chinese censors cut out. In it he called Beijing a “nightmare,” a city of “desperation” in which those who don’t have money or connections “hold no hope.” As for the authorities’ methods of suppressing information about those who are detained or made to disappear, he wrote:

They see you or they don’t see you, it doesn’t make the slightest difference. There are thousands of spots like that. Only your family is crying out that you’re missing. But you can’t get answers from the street communities or officials, or even at the highest levels, the court or the police or the head of the nation. My wife has been writing these kinds of petitions every day, making phone calls to the police station every day. Where is my husband? Just tell me where my husband is. There is no paper, no information.

Of course, as a Chinese citizen, Ai Weiwei risks another round of detention by saying such things. But what is the worst that can happen to a foreign writer who displeases the Party? In China, he can be threatened, even when walking in the street, or his phone can be tapped, deliberately audibly. He can be banned; this is very rare. (It has happened to Perry Link and to me.) Or, if he lives and writes abroad, as I do now, what he publishes in China can be expunged. There are two messages here: we don’t like your ideas, and nothing like this is going to be published in China if we can prevent it.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, censorship, freedom of expression, jonathan mirsky, Liu Xiaobo, media censorship
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“They have two months to review the case. If we are not satisfied with the results, we can bring the case to court,” said Pu Zhiqiang, a lawyer for Fake Cultural Development Ltd, a firm founded by Ai but registered to his wife ….

last week, Ai’s lawyers handed in a 9,000-word document requesting the review, pointing out inconsistencies with the case, including unregulated police involvement in Ai’s detention and violations of China’s tax code.

On Thursday, the Beijing tax bureau notified Ai that the review request had been accepted, Pu told AFP.

“We hope that the tax bureau will earnestly review the case,” he said.

Read more on Ai’s detention last year and its ongoing aftermath, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei detention 2011, pu zhiqiang, tax evasion
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The brother, Gao Zhiyi, told two news agencies that he had been informed that Gao Zhisheng was in a prison in Shaya County. The brother said he had received an official notice on Sunday telling him that Mr. Gao was now back in prison because a court had revoked his probation, and that he would have to serve three more years.

Mr. Gao, a Beijing lawyer known for taking politically delicate cases, was sentenced to three years of probation in 2006 for inciting subversion of the state. The official Xinhua news agency reported last month that his probation had been revoked.

But human rights advocates say Mr. Gao was never on probation because he had been missing for 20 months, presumably in police custody. Over the years, Mr. Gao has disappeared for lengthy periods and re-emerged to say he had been tortured by security forces.

Gao Zhisheng’s disappearance in April 2010, which the United Nations claims violated international law, marked the third time he had gone missing since the Chinese government shut down his law practice in 2005. The United Nations also expressed concern when the government revoked Gao’s probation last month.

Human rights observers have heavily condemned recently proposed changes to China’s criminal procedure law which would allow the government to secretly detain and torture critics such as Gao, Ai Weiwei, Liu Xiaobo and others. Zhou Xiaohui of The Epoch Times says that Gao’s continued detention offers an opportunity for the United States to walk the walk with regards to its intention to return to Asia and speak up about human rights abuses by China:

By supporting with concrete actions those whom the Chinese regime suppresses, America will strengthen itself by remaining true to itself.

At the same time, such a policy would provide real protection for U.S. national interests. It would give nations in East Asia a clear choice between the Chinese regime and the United States, between tyranny and freedom.

By helping China’s dissidents, the United States will help those who seek for China a future that is harmonious with the universal principles America is based on. America will be supporting those who are its true friends and in doing so win the friendship of the Chinese people.

As the new year approaches, the United States has an opportunity for a renewal of its approach to China. The individual who has most boldly criticized the Chinese regime’s violations of basic human rights is Gao Zhisheng. Let an American foreign policy based on the principles and true interests of the United States begin by rescuing Gao.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, dissidents, Gao Zhisheng, illegal detentions, lawyers, Liu Xiaobo, u.s.-china relations, United Nations, United States
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Post tags: 2011, Ai Weiwei, ccp 90 years, high-speed rail crash, jasmine revolution, U.S. relations, Wukan, year in review
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Leading the Chinese contingent at #10, China’s chief banker Zhou Xiaochuan was tied with his European and American counterparts, Jean-Claude Trichet and Ben Bernanke.

People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan, whose country owns a whopping $1.14 trillion in U.S. debt, has been forced to cope with the unpleasant fact that China’s entanglement with U.S. and European markets makes it dependent on the health of Western economies. To that end, he has pursued a course of letting the yuan gradually appreciate, in a bid to slowly build up domestic consumption and decrease China’s reliance on foreign markets.

Following his victory in ArtReview’s parade of “the dancers who’ve spent the past 12 months gyrating around contemporary art’s greasy pole of power”, Ai Weiwei reached a more modest #18 in the Foreign Policy list, “for standing up to the Chinese Communist Party — even after it threw him in jail”:

Throwing Ai in jail put a famous face on a worrying trend: Since this spring, the number of human rights activists, lawyers, artists, and other dissidents vanishing into government custody without explanation has quietly but sharply spiked in China. Now Ai has taken up their cause, railing against this state of affairs — in open violation of the terms of his release. “[T]here are many hidden spots where they put people without identity,” he wrote in a searing Newsweek essay. “With no name, just a number.… Only your family is crying out that you’re missing.”

Accompanying his entry is a set of photos taken in Ai’s studio during a visit by Foreign Policy contributing editor Christina Larson earlier this year. Ai is also currently ranked at #12 in TIME’s Person of the Year poll, a comfortable ten places and 5,607 votes ahead of Kim Kardashian.

Immediately behind the artist at #19 in the Foreign Policy list are Yu Keping and He Weifang, nominated for their contrasting approaches to political change in China:

One surprising advocate from inside the system is Yu Keping, a bureaucrat and head of the government-advising China Center for Comparative Politics and Economics, whom the New York Times has described as a “mild-mannered policy wonk” and a proponent of slow but steady change. His straightforwardly titled essay, “Democracy Is a Good Thing,” insists that China can transition into a democracy that works for the Chinese. In a China Daily op-ed this summer titled “Reform Must Be Incremental,” Yu wrote that though the go-slow approach has been on balance good for China, “The country still lacks a mechanism to counter the selfish behavior of the bureaucracy, corruption is still rampant and public service rendered by the government is far from enough.”

He Weifang, meanwhile, is an outspoken critic of the Chinese legal system who was sent to internal exile in Xinjiang for signing the Charter 08 manifesto against the government in 2008 and then was told last year that he couldn’t leave the country. For He, a Peking University law professor and longtime writer on judicial abuses who says he sees China growing more repressive over time, reform cannot come fast enough. And if the Communist Party doesn’t adapt, he has warned, “then that process of transformation will not occur peacefully, and if the extreme violence comes, then there will be no Communist Party. It is a case of adapt or die.” So will it be Yu’s way or He’s?

Aside from the Chinese nationals, the list included “Tiger Mother” Amy Chua, a second-generation Chinese-American, who came in at #35. Economist Arvind Subramanian, known for arguing that China’s rise is both further advanced and greater in scale than most suspect, was #97.

Among the questions submitted to nominees was simply “America or China?” China fared poorly, with only six unqualified picks (from Nouriel Roubini, Sherry Rehman, Andrew Sullivan, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Pervez Hoodbhoy) to America’s thirty. 29 respondents declined to choose one or the other, opting for “both” or “neither”, or giving some other indirect answer. Among these, Human Rights Watch’s Kenneth Roth (#69) replied that:

China’s model of repressive development is enormously attractive to authoritarian regimes around the world. The United States (and other friends of human rights) must do a better job of making the case for accountable government as the best way to improve the lot of the most needy, impoverished segments of society.

Oxford Economist Paul Collier (#56) picked China with the disclaimer “rocky not rocket,” while controversial environmental researcher Bjorn Lomborg (#76) answered “America for what the future should be, China for what the future will be.”

Read more on Zhou Xiaochuan, Ai Weiwei, Yu Keping, He Weifang, Amy Chua and Arvind Subramanian via CDT.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Amy Chua, Charter 08, China's rise, He Weifang, United States, Yu Keping, zhou xiaochuan
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… “I think the tax would not be the problem because we have followed the instructions and paid the bond [the first required payment] and they seemed quite satisfied. For them that was winning a victory.

“That’s why I feel it’s not dangerous for her. If there was anything they were going to do it would come to me directly ….”

The artist added: “I’m worried, but nothing can help because when my arrest and release happened, it never had an explanation. When you know your worry will not help then you have to give it up. This is not something where you can find a solution.

“It seems there are two different logics co-existing in this world. They must have a strong reason but we will never have it and they will not communicate.”

Ai’s associate Liu Yanping later reported on Twitter [zh] that the questioning had been similar to that on earlier occasions, covering Lu Qing’s personal circumstances and Fake Cultural Development Ltd’s designs for construction in Ordos. However, Lu is now considered a suspect, rather than merely a witness, and has been instructed not to leave Beijing.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei detention 2011, drinking tea, Ordos, police conversation, tax evasion
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SPIEGEL: Did you underestimate the Chinese people?

Ai: I did. Shame on me. I, and not only me, always thought, in modern history Chinese people are like a dish of sand, never really close together. But today I think a dish of sand is a good metaphor because now we have the Internet. We don’t have to be physically united. You can be an individual and have your own set of values but join others in certain struggles. There is nothing more powerful than that. On the Internet, people do not know each other, they don’t have common leaders, sometimes not even a common political goal. But they come together on certain issues. I think that is a miracle. It never happened in the past. Without the Internet, I would not even be Ai Weiwei today. I would just be an artist somewhere doing my shows.

SPIEGEL: In China, it is quite unusual for people to show their support for critics of the government so openly. Why do you think they are doing so this time?

Ai: Whenever there is injustice, there is tension. But in China it is very hard to release your anger unless you burn yourself or you jump from a bridge. In a society where there is no freedom of the press, it is difficult for victims to be noticed. Just take the example from yesterday: I had given a telephone interview to CNN. Then, suddenly, CNN was shut down for a couple of minutes. It was the first time I experienced that my television went totally dead. I realized: Oh my God, its because of me, this is crazy! Which nation would do that? Maybe Cuba, North Korea, China. But what do they want, what are they so afraid of?

Earlier this week, amid the ongoing tax probe as well as a new investigation into potential pornography charges, Ai also answered questions from readers in an online chat with NBC.

Also today, The Guardian’s Tania Branigan writes that even Ai wonders how long he can continue to speak out:

The surveillance camera police have trained on the turquoise gate of Ai Weiwei’s studio in north Beijing captures a steady stream of visitors; journalists, well-wishers, the art crowd. Five months after his release from an 81-day detention, and in the wake of a fortnight of extraordinary expressions of public support, Ai is anticipating other arrivals. “Every day I think, ‘this will be the day I will be taken in again.’

…

A few years ago the celebrated Chinese artist was a well-established figure in the international and domestic art worlds; provocative, certainly, but respectable enough to co-design the Olympic Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing and be covered by Chinese state media. Then his outspoken views and activism triggered clashes with authority, culminating in this year’s detention – part of a broader crackdown on activists, lawyers and dissidents that saw dozens held and more harassed, threatened or placed under other restrictions. He has become, to many, the face of human rights in China: more a symbol than a person.

“The fact the government disappeared him, and then afterwards continued to go after him through various charges, sends a signal to other activists that even if you are well known it does not really protect you,” says Wang Songlian of the Chinese Human Rights Defenders Network. “On the other hand, the way he turned it around was very clever, and I think activists have been energised.”

Elsewhere, Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou visited an exhibition of Ai’s work at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and defended the artist’s right to freedom of expression, saying Ai’s case underscores a glaring difference between Taiwan and the mainland:

Defending his efforts to press China on improving human rights, Ma said he urged the Chinese government to release Ai and Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) in his statement on the 22nd anniversary of China’s Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4, urging China to respect human rights as a way to promote cross-strait relations.

“The distance between Taiwan and the Mainland depends on the two sides’ views on the protection of human rights. The more similarities we share on the issues of human rights, the closer that distance will become,” Ma said.

In a written statement this year marking the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Ma urged the Chinese authorities to release Liu, Ai and other Chinese dissidents, and called on China to “undertake political reforms and promote the development of freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law.”

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei detention 2011, Cross-Strait relations, democracy, dissidents, Internet protests, Ma Ying-jeou, protests, Taiwan
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