“Peace” (@鸟人与鱼)

The death of 22-year-old Yuan Liya, who fell from the Jingwen shopping center on May 3, has been deemed a suicide by the Beijing police. In disbelief, hundreds protested last week calling for the surveillance footage of Yuan’s final moments to be released. But even that has not quieted doubts that Yuan took her own life. Prior to the release of the footage, a 28-year-old woman was arrested for spreading a rumor that Yuan was gang-raped by security guards, which spread on Weibo. The official site of Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau announced that it had been proved that the girl from Anhui had “committed suicide” and “the family offers no disagreement.”

In response to the official verdict, seasoned blogger @琢磨先生 started a “non-suicide vow” campaign on Weibo:

@琢磨先生: [Non-Suicide Vow] I am Mr. Zhuomo. I will never commit suicide. If I should die in any type of accident, it is homicide, and the police should investigate thoroughly. Please repost this and make your own vow, lest you are “suicided.”

【不会自杀承诺保证书】我是琢磨先生，我绝对不会自杀。将来如果我出任何意外，都是他杀，请警方务必彻查。转发本微博并做出你的承诺，以防“被自杀”。

[original post]

As of May 13 at 5:15 p.m. EST, this weibo has been reposted 33,103 times and received 11,653 comments. There is also a Non-Suicide Vow Weibo discussion page.

Through these vows, netizens are trying to prevent being “suicided”–having their murder written off as suicide by the authorities.

This is not the first time such pledges have appeared. Activist Li Wangyang was found hanging in his hospital room last year. 20 years in jail took a severe toll on Li’s health, but those close to him doubted the official ruling of his death as a suicide. After Li’s death, activists including the likes of Hu Jia and Wang Lihong declared that they would never commit suicide, no matter what situation they found themselves in.

CDT Chinese has collected a number of vows:

@鸟人与鱼: I am Birdman-and-fish (鸟人与鱼). I will never commit suicide. If I should die in any type of accident, it is homicide, and the police should investigate thoroughly. Please repost this and make your own vow, lest you are “suicided.” @琢磨先生

【不会自杀承诺保证书】我是鸟人与鱼，我绝对不会自杀。将来如果我出任何意外，都是他杀，请警方务必彻查。转发本微博并做出你的承诺，以防“被自杀”。@琢磨先生

@天使向莉: I am Xiangli. I promise that I will never commit suicide. I am outgoing and positive. My regular activities, such as buying soy sauce, taking cold showers, and doing sit-ups, would not cause my death. I have signed a power of attorney (POA) with Attorney Liang Xiaojun (@梁小军律师) and Attorney Chen Jiangang (@律师陈建刚). From the date of signing the POA, no one, including myself, my family, and other relevant and non-relevant persons, has the right to terminate the agreement.

我是向莉，我在此承诺，我绝不会自杀。本人性格开朗，积极向上，打酱油凉水澡仰卧起坐等常规项目均不至于致命。本人已签写委托函至@梁小军律师 @律师陈建刚 处，自函签订之日起，本人及家人及相关、无关人等，均无权更换、解聘律师。

@折腾画笔: #nonsuicidevow Though I occasionally feel depressed, I promise I will never cut off my future by committing suicide. I have no tangled romances, and no tendency towards world-weariness. I am striving to learn traditional arts from all across China. Hang gliding, parachuting, riding a hot air balloon, deep-sea diving, and traversing Siberia are all on my list. I also want to circumnavigate the globe. I absolutely love life.

#不自杀承诺# 本人虽偶有抑郁，但承诺绝不自断前程。无情感纠葛，无厌世倾向，现正积极努力在祖国各地学习传统文化遗产技艺。滑翔翼、降落伞、热气球、深海潜水、穿越西伯利亚等，均被排上行程。有生之年还想环行世界，绝对爱惜生命。

@周泽律师: I just reposted the following two blogs. @无敌破壊王 promises he will never commit suicide and says, “If I should die in any type of ‘accident,’ it is homicide, and the police should investigate thoroughly;” @天使向莉 promises she would “never commit suicide,” and has signed a POA. What do they mean? We need to seriously discuss this topic: If they really did do that [commit suicide], would these vows and POAs have effect?

【不自杀承诺】刚转发两条的微博中，@无敌破壊王 承诺不会自杀，表示“将来如果我出任何意外，都是他杀，请警方务必彻查”；@天使向莉 也承诺“绝不会自杀”，还向律师出具了委托书。这到底怎么回事呢？严肃探讨：如果他们真那个了，这承诺及委托有效吗？

@徐子林不加V: I am Xu Zilin. I will never commit suicide. If I die in some unexpected way some day, it is homicide. The police should launch a thorough investigation. Please don’t say I have committed suicide. To those who are like me, please publish your own “non-suicide vows” preemptively and declare them to the world, lest you are suicided.

我是徐子林，我绝不会自杀的。如果我有一天被各种方式给弄死了，都一定是他杀。请警方彻底追查到底，请不要说我被自杀。那些和我一样绝不自杀的人，请提前为自己写下“不自杀保证书”，并昭告天下，以防被自杀。

@白眼狮子大老爷: [Non-Suicide Vow] I am Master White-Eyed Lion (白眼狮子大老爷). I solemnly swear that I will never commit suicide. If one day I disappear, swallow poison, jump off a building, drown in the ocean, or do anything else unexpected,  it is homicide, and the police should investigate thoroughly. A big case like this must be resolved! I believe in you, gentlemen of peace.

【不自杀承诺保证书】我是白眼狮子大老爷，我郑重承诺，我绝对不会自杀。将来如果我失踪，服毒，跳楼，跳海或者是出现其他方式的意外，都是他杀，请警方务必彻查。大案必破！我相信你 平安君

The official Beijing police Weibo account is called “Peaceful Beijing” (@平安北京).

@法西斯集中营-毅: [Non-Suicide Vow] Though I am not afraid of death, I do not want to die. Though I may not always succeed in the pressures of life, eking out my insignificant existence is still a small matter. No matter how hard life may be, I will never commit suicide. If I should die in any type of accident, it is homicide, and the police should investigate thoroughly. Life is short and time flies. I will be a good child who loves life.

【不自杀承诺保证书】本人虽然不怕死，但绝对不想死，忍辱负重可能做不出来，但苟且偷生对小弟来说小事一桩。再苦再艰难都绝对不会自杀，在此之前，不管出现什么意外，均为他杀，请有关部门务必彻查。人生苦短，光阴飞逝，做个爱惜生命的好孩纸~

@Vegas-babe: #Anhuigirljumpsoffbuilding [Non-Suicide Vow] I, Xiao Yin, testify that I will never commit suicide! Not even if I am raped by 100 shameless men, have no car, no home, no lover, no money to feed myself, go through 100 break-ups, and develop gynecological complications from AIDS. If I should die suddenly, it’s homicide! The relevant departments must not blithely conclude my case. May 10, 2013 More: http://t.cn/zT8Uh4o

#安徽女孩坠楼#【不自杀声明】本人小茵在此声明，本人在有生之年绝不自杀！即使被100名抠脚大叔轮X没车没房没人爱没钱吃饭失恋100次得了艾滋妇科炎症，亦不会自杀或自主性堕楼等~倘若横死均为他杀！有关部门请勿随便定义~特此声明，2013年5月10日 详情:http://t.cn/zT8Uh4o

@杨佩昌: I suggest that all young and beautiful single women who love life should testify openly on Weibo: under no circumstance will I ever choose to take my own life.

建议热爱生活、年轻漂亮且未婚的女士在微博上发表公开声明：本人在任何情况下都不会选择自杀这条道路。-这年头防着点好，免得万一被自杀。

Via CDT Chinese. Translation by Junebug.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Hu Jia, li wangyang, Netizen Voices, suicide, Wang Lihong, weibo, Yuan Liya
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Liu Xia, wife of 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, has been held under house arrest in Beijing for over two years since her husband’s award was announced. Three weeks after a team from the Associated Press managed to gain access to her apartment, however, Liu has received another surprise visit from Chinese activists including Hu Jia, who posted the above video. The four pushed past a guard to reach her, but quickly agreed to leave at Liu’s request. From the AFP:

It was the first time in more than two years that friends have been able to see Liu, who has not been charged with any offence.

She appears emotionally shaken by the visit and is seen asking the visitors to leave, apparently out of fear of retribution from the authorities.

[…] The visit took place on Friday, Liu Xiaobo’s birthday.

[…] “The video is all about fear and anxiety,” Hu said. “She has already lost a lot of hope. The authorities are making her fearful. What she is afraid of is her family will come under pressure.

“Imagine people come to visit you after two years under illegal house arrest and all she feels is fear that the authorities will crack down further.”

See more on Liu Xia and Liu Xiaobo via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: house arrest, Hu Jia, liu xia, Liu Xiaobo, Nobel Peace Prize
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WeChat is similar to the popular US-based mobile messaging serviceWhatsApp, but it does more. An amalgamation of social media tools akin to Twitter, Facebook and Skype, it comes in eight languages including English, Arabic and Russian.

[...] Hu Jia, a human rights activist jailed for three years on a charge of sedition, suspects that voicemail messages to his friends had been listened to by guobao officials (internal security bureau).

“I took a chance and assumed WeChat was relatively safe,” he said. “It’s a new product and not developed by China Mobile or China Unicom, [two of China's main telecoms companies], which have been monitoring my calls and text messages for over 10 years. But the guobao surprised me with their ability to repeat my words or voice messages verbatim, though I’m sure I only sent them to some friends through WeChat.”

[...] Adam Segal, a Council on Foreign Relations cyber-security expert, said that WeChat was not alone in offering potential security loopholes. “Information technology services and software are all fundamentally insecure,” he said. “WeChat shouldn’t be singled out in this instance. Many technologies have some type of vulnerability, and a directed adversary can figure out vulnerabilities to exploit and gather intelligence.”

At Tech in Asia, Charles Custer discussed the other side of the coin:

That WeChat, like all domestic social media, poses a security risk to dissidents should not come as a surprise. Nor is it particularly surprising that countries like Taiwan are concerned about the potential security implications of the service. But interestingly, Chinese authorities see the service as something of a threat as well. On Sunday evening, state-run broadcaster CCTV ran a feature piece about the dangers of WeChat, focusing primarily on how its anonymity and location-reporting features can give criminals an easy in. For example, the report told the story of Xu Xiaohong, a single woman who was ultimately ambushed and murdered when a man she met on WeChat attempted to rob her. He knew where she was, and when she was going to be there, because of WeChat.

[...] Of course, any chat tool can be used to perpetrate fraud, robbery, and other crimes, and many Chinese commenters have already pointed out that the CCTV seems to be unnecessarily blaming WeChat for the faults of its users. And it’s worth mentioning that the app does have a warning message reminding users not to trust strangers when they first engage its find-users-in-my-vicinity feature. Still, though, it’s clear the location reporting has made a lot of people nervous. Expectations of privacy in China can be lower than they are in some Western countries (if you’ll forgive the sweeping generalization), so it is interesting to see that WeChat’s location-reporting unnerves both China’s dissidents and its police. The concerns of those groups don’t seem to have had much effect on regular users, though, who are still signing up at an impressive clip.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Hu Jia, Internet privacy, Internet technology, social media, state security, tencent
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Breathless from disbelief at receiving unexpected visitors into her home and with a shaking voice, Liu Xia told The Associated Press in her first interview in more than two years, that her ongoing house arrest has been a painfully surreal experience. She said she has been confined to her duplex apartment in downtown Beijing with no Internet or outside phone line and only allowed weekly trips to buy groceries and visit her parents.

Once a month, she is taken to see her husband who is four years into an 11-year prison term for subversion for authoring and disseminating a sweeping call for democratic reform known as Charter ’08.

[…] “I felt I was a person emotionally prepared to respond to the consequences of Liu Xiaobo winning the prize. But after he won the prize, I really never imagined that after he won, I would not be able to leave my home. This is too absurd. I think Kafka could not have written anything more absurd and unbelievable than this.”

[…] “I can’t remember [when I last saw my husband],” she said. “I don’t keep track of the days anymore. That’s how it is.”

Watch the AP video of the interview:

See also photographs of an emotional Liu Xia taken by the AP.

On Tuesday, a group of 134 Nobel laureates wrote to Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, urging him to release Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia [.pdf]:

On December 25, 2009, your government sentenced Dr. Liu, a highly respected intellectual and democracy advocate, to 11 years in prison for “inciting subversion.” The charges were based on his political essays and co-authorship of “Charter 08,” which called for peaceful political reform in China based on the principles of human rights, freedom, and democracy. Shortly after the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Dr. Liu its Peace Prize, the government placed Liu Xia under house arrest, where she remains cut off from the outside world two years later without charge or the benefit of any legal process. In response to the continued detentions of Dr. Liu and Liu Xia, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, an independent and impartial body of experts, issued Opinions No. 15-16/2011, finding their detentions to be in violation of international law; however, despite this finding their cases remain unresolved.

Across all disciplines, the distinguishing feature which led to our recognition as Nobel Laureates is that we have embraced the power of our intellectual freedom and creative inspiration to do our part to advance the human condition. No government can restrict freedom of thought and association without having a negative effect on such important human innovation. Indeed, we Laureates are distressed that your government continues to block access to the main Nobel Prize web site (www.nobelprize.org).

Archbishop Desmond Tutu also launched a public petition calling for the couple’s release, which has now almost reached 200,000 signatures. Another letter came from within China on Tuesday, from a group of 40 activists including Hu Jia, legal scholar He Weifang and rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang:

Inside China and abroad, people are hoping to see signs for political reform as China ushers in new leadership. Systematic political changes are complex and many-faceted, requiring rational deliberation and orderly actions, and we would like to see various social forces working together to advance this process.

we propose the followings as initial steps for political and social change:

1.Initiate legal procedures immediately to reverse the wrong verdict against Dr. Liu Xiaobo, and set him free as soon as possible;

2.Immediately lift the restrictions imposed on Liu Xia, Liu Xiaobo’s wife, ending forced isolation, and allowing her to live her normal life;

3.Immediately free those who have been detained or sentenced for their political stand, expression, or religious beliefs;

4.Immediately cease surveillance of people who hold independent political positions or/and expressing independent opinions, and remove all forms of restrictions on their freedom of movement.

We believe that the existence of political prisoners does not help China to build its image of a responsible world power. Ending political imprisonment is an important benchmark for China to move toward a civilized political system.

China faces complex problems, and reform is a difficult endeavor that requires all the effort from all the people.

The BBC reports that signatures added since Tuesday have brought the total to almost 300.

Any hope that the new Party leadership might be receptive to these requests will be dampened by news that Norwegians, alone in Europe, will be ineligible for Beijing’s new 72-hour visa waiver scheme. Their exclusion appears to be an extension of the feud against Norway that began with the announcement of Liu’s award. According to The Financial Times, a travel administration official declined to confirm this suspicion, but said that “some countries were not eligible because their citizens or government were ‘of low-quality’ and ‘badly behaved’.”

The state-owned Global Times accused the 134 Nobel laureates of ignoring China’s progress and—despite the presence on the list of figures such as the Dalai Lama—of opposing “non-Western” ideologies.

In recent years, the choice of the Nobel Peace Prize winners, from US President Barack Obama in 2009 to this year’s pick of the European Union, has increasingly made the public scratch its head. Certainly, the decision to award the prize to dissident Liu Xiaobo infuriated Chinese society.

It seems that the Nobel Committee has missed the real focus of the world, and consequently has seen its influence dwindling.

Among these 134 members, we wonder how many of them have first-hand experience of China, let alone are aware of the changes that have taken place in terms of China’s political freedom in recent years.

By speaking with one voice, the 134 Nobel laureates have only demonstrated their firm opposition to non-Western ideologies. In their eyes, a few dissidents speak for all of China. A sense of moral superiority still persists among Western elites and their followers.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei also condemned the letter. From the BBC:

“China is a law-abiding country. Liu Xiaobo was lawfully sentenced to a fixed-term imprisonment by the judicial organ because he committed an offence against Chinese law,” he said.

“The Chinese government opposes outsiders handling matters in any way that would interfere in its judicial sovereignty and internal matters.”

On the other hand, he congratulated Mo Yan, who he said “loves his country and people”.

In fact, Mo Yan also expressed his hope for Liu Xiaobo’s release after being named the 2012 Literature Prize winner in October. His public support surprised critics who had accused him of being a government puppet. But Tom Hancock wrote at the AFP that Mo is unlikely to mention Liu again while in Sweden to receive his prize:

Mo Yan has long trodden a fine line between criticising China’s political establishment and cooperating with it, said Ma Xiangwu, a literature professor at the People’s University in Beijing.

“For a long time Mo has occupied a position within the system, but not totally within it,” he said. “His works are often very critical of society and politics — he’s too complex to be put in a box.”

In keeping with that, he said there was “absolutely no chance” Mo would refer to Liu in his Nobel lecture.

“He won’t mention sensitive issues during his speech. I think he will be quite moderate. I don’t think he will directly criticise the government… but I also don’t expect he will heap extravagant praise on China,” he added.

Sure enough, Mo told a press conference in Stockholm on Thursday that “I have already issued my opinion about this matter”, and that his prize is for literature, not politics. Chinese media, meanwhile, have preferred to focus on whether Mo will wear a tuxedo or a Mao suit to next week’s ceremony, or one of the three other outfits he is said to have taken with him when he left on Wednesday.

See also ‘You Wait for Me with Dust‘, a poem from Liu Xiaobo to Liu Xia (via Tania Branigan), and more on Liu Xiaobo, Liu Xia, Mo Yan and the Nobel Prizes at CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Barack Obama, Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, european union, He Weifang, house arrest, Hu Jia, illegal detention, liu xia, Liu Xiaobo, mo yan, Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel Prize, norway, pu zhiqiang, Xi Jinping
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“This is a case that tramples on the rule of law. It is a declaration of war against fairness and justice in the world. I absolutely cannot accept this and am very, very angry,” said Chen Guangcheng in an interview from his home in New York where he has been studying English and law. “There is no doubt that this is a kind of retaliation against me.”

[…] Since Chen Kegui disappeared into police custody in May, Yinan authorities have not officially notified his family about the prosecution nor have they let family members see him or hire their own lawyers to defend him. Lawyers were instead appointed to him, and one of them told his father Chen Guangfu about the trial only on Friday morning.

[…] “I feel very disappointed,” the father said. “I had believed that once the new generation of leaders came to power there would be improvements in the rule of law, but now it looks like the situation is still the same.”

Activist Hu Jia, a close friend of Chen Guangcheng and one of the first people he met with after his escape, described Chen Guangfu’s predicament on Twitter as the trial was underway:

陈克贵的父亲陈光福自始至终没能直接和法院工作人员交涉上，他一进入法院大门就被沂南县的警察围住，警察们明确告知大哥只能做证人，在大哥拒绝作证人的情况下，他们不让大哥旁听。现在十余名警察围着陈光福，有些曾参与过陈光诚案。他在法庭的路对面等待庭审结束的消息。 #陈克贵

— Hu Jia 胡佳 (@hu_jia) November 30, 2012

Chen Kegui’s father, Chen Guangfu, has at no point been able to make direct representations to the courthouse staff: as soon as he set foot through the door, he was surrounded by Yinan county police who bluntly informed him that he could only be present [if he testified] as a witness, and that if he refused they would not let him attend the trial. Now ten or so policemen are surrounding him, some of whom previously took part in Chen Guangcheng’s case. He’s waiting across the road from the courthouse for word of the hearing’s result.

11月30日，光福大哥会是最难受的人。上午主持祭奠父亲，然后马不停蹄赶到法院，想要见到身处牢狱别离218天的儿子。但却只能见证儿子被枉法审判。

— Hu Jia 胡佳 (@hu_jia) November 30, 2012

Chen Guangfu may be the unhappiest person of all today. In the morning, he directed the memorial ceremony for his father; afterwards, he immediately dashed to the courthouse, hoping to see in person the son who’s been away in prison for 218 days. But in the end he could only witness his son’s twisted trial.

Chen explained to The Guardian that “I hoped they would tell me early so that I could prepare, but since they didn’t, there is nothing I can do. I have not heard from my son, and the lawyers appointed by government didn’t tell me anything.” Following the trial, The Guardian’s Tania Branigan reported reactions from the family’s preferred lawyers:

Chen Wuquan, who was hired by Chen Kegui’s family to defend him but rejected by the court, said: “I can’t accept the result. Chen Kegui is not guilty at all. His behaviour was legitimate self-defence, not the crime of intentional injury. From a legal perspective, the result is unacceptable.”

[…] Teng Biao, another lawyer rejected by the court, said holding the case at such short notice ensured that they had no time to reach Yinan to help the family with legal advice.

Teng added that the defendant’s relatives had not seen him since his detention, noting: “No one has a clue about his condition.”

Human rights organisations have given scathing assessments of the trial. From Amnesty International’s Roseann Rife and Human Rights Watch’s Sophie Richardson, respectively:

“Chen Kegui was today tried by the same court that in 2006 sentenced his uncle Chen Guangcheng to prison on trumped up charges. The family has since suffered a catalogue of abuse at the hands of local authorities which central authorities have failed to investigate despite promises to the contrary.

“The sentence is appalling. It is clear that Chen Kegui’s trial was not fair. We are concerned that sentencing him to imprisonment for something that many consider self defence is nothing more than retaliation for his uncle’s escape.”

“Prosecuting Chen Guangcheng’s nephew was a test of China’s respect for the rule of law, and both the nephew, Chen Kegui, and the rule of law lost [….] This case bore the same disturbing hallmarks as Chen Guangcheng’s persecution – incommunicado detention, denial of lawyers of his choice, and a politicized and closed trial.”

[…] “Chen Kegui’s case not only violated Chinese and international legal standards, it also suggests that the new leadership in Beijing can’t or won’t follow through on commitments to investigate local officials implicated in wrongdoing and egregious human rights abuses [….] And that in turn is a worrying indication of what lies ahead.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Amnesty International, Chen Guangcheng, chen kegui, Hu Jia, human rights watch, lawyers, Teng Biao, trials
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Li Yuanlong, who once worked as a reporter for the state-run Bijie Daily in the city of Bijie in Guizhou province, was taken to the airport along with his wife early Wednesday afternoon and “told to take a vacation” his son, Li Muzi, told China Real Time on Friday.

[…] The Bijie Public Security Bureau could not be reached for comment. A person answering the phone at the Bijie city government propaganda office said Mr. Li was traveling with his wife, citing messages posted to former journalist’s account on the web portal KDnet. “They are very happy now! That’s his own personal matter – why are you asking us?” the person said before hanging up.

[…] Li Fangping, a Beijing-based lawyer who has been keeping track of the situation, said that he had talked to Li Yuanlong when he was on his way to the airport. “I can confirm that he is travelling under control,” the lawyer, who is not related to Li Yuanlong, said.

“This is a way for (the local government) to maintain stability,” he added. “The public still wants more details, even though the local government has already dismissed the relevant people. Because Li Yuanlong is the main information provider, and because he was a reporter who has a lot of friends in the media, they authorities are afraid that people will continue to contact him in search of more clues or that Li might even leak out information about other instances of social injustice.”

Chin had previously explored why this story in particular resonated so deeply with the public. Also from China Real Time Report:

Stories of suffering children are always hard to stomach, but they tend to hit with particular impact in China, where the one-child policy and a strong belief in the family as the most basic unit of society have combined to imbue the young with an aura of unsurpassed importance. In this case, the impact of appears to have been amplified by similarities between what happened to the brothers and the Hans Christian Anderson short story “The Little Match Girl.”

The story, about a poor Danish girl who dies from exposure on New Year’s Eve after running away from her abusive father and trying to sell matches on the street, was once included in Chinese primary school text books as an example of the difficulties faced by the poor in capitalist countries.

[…] Cao Lin, a columnist for the state-run China Youth Daily, [wrote:] “At a time when we’re crowing about the rise of the nation and the creation of a moderately well-off society, to have five children die while seeking warmth in a trash bin is truly bizarre [….”]

Cao Lin was one of many in the state media to ask what had gone wrong, and who was to blame. Eight local officials were swiftly identified and fired. From Lin Xi at Global Times:

Eight local officials including two district chiefs in charge of civil affairs and education were dismissed or suspended from their duties by the Bijie municipal party committee on Monday because of the accident. Some people believe that these boys’ families and society should bear the primary responsibility for the accident instead of the officials. They think that it was the ignorance and indifference from the boys’ relatives and society which caused this tragedy.

However, the officials are not innocent because it is their duty to guarantee every citizen’s safety. The death of the five boys reflects management problems within government.

If the education system was better, these boys would have been taking lessons in warm classrooms instead of leaving school. If the assistance system was more active, they could have been found earlier and may have escaped death. Indeed, governments and officials have done nothing which directly caused this accident. However, it was the officials’ inaction which left the boys to die in the cold.

Many doubted, however that the sacking these eight officials had adequately addressed the root of the problem. From Rachel Wang at Tea Leaf Nation:

[…] As @bll2012 opined: “We are used to finding scapegoats when we encounter problems, then they give you a scapegoat! Then you shut up! You are so pathetic! Why not find the real cause: The failure of the social protection system.” Independent Chinese media Caixin (@财新网) also sounded a note of caution: “The tragedy in Guizhou did not only reflect management loopholes in Bijie alone, but also the defects of the mechanism protecting Chinese children’s rights. China is among the few countries that does not have a professional child welfare department. Administrative systems for child protection and rescue urgently need to be built.”

Therefore, according to the lawyer Li Fangping, Li Yuanlong was detained to prevent the damage from spreading any further. At The Daily Beast, Duncan Hewitt linked his treatment to the cases of Zhai Xiaobing (@stariver) and Ren Jianyu, and suggested—as did Charles Custer at ChinaGeeks—that while local government may be directly responsible, the political climate in which such actions are tolerated and encouraged is one of Beijing’s making:

Li’s detention echoes what is now a common pattern in China, in which sensitive individuals are removed from circulation at sensitive times, and held either under effective house arrest at home, or in what are known as “black [i.e. unofficial] jails.” During the run-up to the recent Communist Party Congress, rights groups say over a hundred people faced such treatment—including the well-known human-rights activist Hu Jia, who was only released from a three-year jail sentence last year.

In some cases the hard line taken against dissidents may be the choice of local authorities rather than necessarily being decreed from the center, says Professor Kerry Brown, executive director of the China Studies Center at the University of Sydney, but he adds that it is nevertheless a sign of the prevailing mood in Chinese political circles:

“The golden rule seems to be that no one gets bad marks for picking on dissidents and others labeled trouble makers,” he says, “while for those who are lenient, on the other hand, the risks if things go wrong are still high.

Furthermore, a Central Propaganda Department directive previously published by CDT suggested that Beijing, while allowing some coverage, had chosen to grant local government considerable control:

[… Y]ou may report moderately on the incident according to Xinhua wire copy and authoritative information released by the local government. Do not put this news on the front page, do not lure readers to the story, do not link to the story, to do not comment on it, and do not dispatch journalists to the scene.

Li, the primary remaining conduit of information on the case, had long been a thorn in the side of local authorities. In 2006, he was sentenced to two years in prison for allegedly inciting subversion in a series of articles posted to overseas Chinese websites. From the Committee to Protect Journalists’ report on his trial in May 2006:

“Like many committed reporters in China, Li Yuanlong began posting his articles online after facing censorship at his newspaper,” CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper said. “He is guilty of nothing more than expressing his criticism of official actions and should never have been brought to trial. We call for his immediate and unconditional release.”

Li reported for Bijie Ribao on rural poverty and unemployment in his native Guizhou province and had frequently been censored in recent years because of complaints by local officials embarrassed by his reports, according to the New York-based advocacy group Human Rights in China and CPJ sources.

[…] Li pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, and his lawyer rejected the notion that his criticism threatened state authority.

“He only criticized wrongdoings of some Communist Party officials or local governments,” the lawyer told Reuters. “The Communist Party and state power is not the same concept.”

At EastSouthWestNorth, Roland Soong translated one of Li’s essays, On Becoming an American Citizen in Spirit, originally posted to exile site Boxun under the pen name Ye Lang (Night Wolf). In it, Li pecked at the raw nerve of China’s ‘crucifixion’ by foreign imperialists, defending former Peking University professor Jiao Guobiao‘s suggestion that it would have been better for the U.S. to “liberate” China from Communist rule at the end of the Korean War:

[…] If America really sent its soldiers to drive for Beijing, then this is more than ‘interfering internal politics of other countries’ and it is really the invasion by the ‘world police.’ I have been pondering why interfering in the internal politics of other countries and being the world police man have become terms of denigration that are natural and indisputable in “our” vocabulary. If your internal politics is a totalitarian regime covered up by dark curtains, then why should not the police in charge of maintaining world peace come and show you? As a common example, I am beating my wife and kids at home and someone else (such as the police) comes to stop me. I yell: “I’m beating my wife and my kids. What is this to outsiders? Why are you entitled to mind my family business?” Is that acceptable? As another example, a Chinese person falls into the river, or his house catches fire. There is an American on the side, but the patriots won’t let the Chinese person accept the help of the American. Instead, the Chinese person must wait for other Chinese to save him. The Chinese person will have to “sacrifice himself for the greater good.” Is this not the modernized version under the cover of patriotism of the old saying “It is a minor matter to starve to death; it is a major matter to lose your chastity”?

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: central propaganda department, china youth daily, Committee to Protect Journalists, Global Times, Guizhou, Hu Jia, illegal detentions, jiao guobiao, journalists, Korean War, Li Fangping, Li Yuanlong, local government, local officials, Ministry of Truth, poverty, poverty alleviation, subversion, vacation-style treatment
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Zhai Xiaobing with Ai Weiwei.

Even beyond China’s Great Firewall, Twitter is not always a safe haven for the country’s more outspoken critics. Just before the 18th Party Congress began, Zhai Xiaobing, a fund manager in Beijing, was arrested for a tweet deemed to “spread false terrorist information” (涉嫌散布虚假恐怖信息):

#剧透推 #慎入 死神来了6即将上映。大会堂突然倒塌，正在开会的2000多人只有7人幸免，事后却又一一离奇死亡。是上帝的游戏，还是死神的怒火，神秘数字18怎样开启地狱之门？11月8日全球院线震撼登场！

— 星河舰队 (@Stariver) November 5, 2012

#SpoilerTweet #Enter-at-your-own-peril “Final Destination 6” has arrived. In which the Great Hall of the People collapses all of a sudden. All 2,000+ people meeting there died except for 7 of them. But afterwards, the seven die one after another in bizarre ways. Is it a game of God, or the wrath of Death? How will 18, the mysterious number, unlock the gate of Hell? Premieres globally on November the 8th to bring you an earthshaking experience! (translated by Yaxue Cao)

Zhai has not been released since his November 7 detention. An online petition [zh] for his release, signed by prominent Chinese activists such as Ai Weiwei and Hu Jia, has collected 419 signatures as of this posting. “We hope the the Beijing police shows a sense of humor and do not create a big incident out of a small issue,” writes petition author Bei Feng (Wen Yunchao). “In particular, do not ruin the image of the new leadership soon after the 18th Party Congress.” Zhai’s is not the first Twitter-related arrest in China.

Zhai, whose Twitter handle is @Stariver, studied ancient (pre-Qin) literature at Peking University, and formerly worked in the media. His acerbic tweets make no excuses for the violence and corruption in China, while images of armed police in Lhasa streets and protests in Hong Kong against patriotic education mingle with cat and food photos. Yaxue Cao of Seeing Red in China writes, “In Twitter’s Chinese community, @Stariver is known for his cool and biting comments about current events in China that cut the froth and burst false ‘hopes.’ He is also known for the depth of his knowledge in classics.”

CDT Chinese has collected some of Zhai’s more urgent tweets, translated here by Mengyu Dong:

如果不是为了生物多样性的考虑，我相信上帝不会造出“中国人民的老朋友”这种畜牲。

— 星河舰队 (@Stariver) October 16, 2012

Stariver: If not in consideration of biodiversity, I believe God wouldn’t have created those beasts, the “old friends of the Chinese people.”

各级网警和小秘书团结协作，众志成城，投身救灾抢险工作，将受灾死亡人数牢牢控制在37人，用青春热血谱写了一曲忠诚的赞歌。 — 星河舰队 (@Stariver) July 25, 2012

Stariver: All levels of Internet policemen and little secretaries coordinated together, used their united will as strength and devoted to disaster relief work. They kept the number of victims to 37, and composed a faithful song of praise with their youth and ardor.

Noticing that the death toll was reported at 37 for multiple incidents across China this summer, netizens call this the “Law of 37” (死亡37定律). Zhai wrote this tweet soon after the Beijing flood.

人民日报的任务是把中国打扮成白富美，全球都不如它牛逼；环球时报的任务是把中国打扮成迫害狂，全球都是针对中国的阴谋陷害；新闻联播的任务是把中国打扮成班干部，德智体美劳全面发展，还能一帮一一对红。 — 星河舰队 (@Stariver) July 26, 2012

Stariver: The task of the People’s Daily is to dress up China as “white, rich, and beautiful,” the f**king best in the world; the task of the Global Times is to dress up China as a paranoid, as if the whole world is scheming against it; the task of Xinwen Lianbo is to dress up China as a class leader who is moral, intelligent, physically fit, tasteful and socially responsible, and can pair up with partners and help each other to develop.

文革暴力，是匪帮组织暴力对于底层民众的裹挟，是极端程序邪恶和实质邪恶对普遍人性黑暗面的强力激发，对此不了解，就是历史愚昧；民间暴力，是对匪帮利益勒索和国家机器暴力镇压的反抗，是在程序正义无可诉求之下的最后防线，对此的否定，就是现实无耻。 — 星河舰队 (@Stariver) July 28, 2012

Stariver: The violence of the Cultural Revolution was the coercion of the lowest in society by organized gangs, the brutal excitation of humanity’s dark side by essential and programmatic evil. Whoever does not understand this is ignorant of history. The violence among the people is revolt against extortion by gangs and the brutal oppression of the state apparatus, the final line of defense in a system where it is impossible to appeal for justice. Whoever denies this is truly shameless.

官场小说的流行源于受众对中国政治“宫廷模式”神秘感的追求，对政治黑帮斗争之“阴谋艺术”和官商经济权力寻租的崇拜。它唯一想要证明的，就是官场规则的合理性。

— 星河舰队 (@Stariver) June 19, 2012

Stariver: The popularity of novels about official circles originates from reader’s pursuit of the mystique of China’s “court” politics, the worship of the “art of conspiracy” in struggles among political gangs, as well as the worship of rent-seeking among politician and businessmen. The only thing it intends to prove is the rationality of officialdom’s rules.

RT @stariver要是有人一边端着碗吃屎，一边埋怨桌子没擦干净，你一定认为他是个傻逼。要是一个人一边无视当局的暴力，一边对民间行为表现出理中客的洁癖，他就是个吃屎还埋怨桌子不干净的傻逼。

— 那谁谁 (@na_sheishei) July 9, 2012

Stariver: If someone eats from a bowl of crap he is clutching, yet at the same time complains that the table is not clean, you’ll definitely figure him for a loon. If someone ignores the atrocity of state power, yet shows pathological concern for the cleanliness of the people’s conduct, then he is the loon who eats crap and complains about the dirtiness of the table.

Stariver: 9.18子曰：“吾未见好德如好色者也。”～孔丘局长说：我就没见过在小姐面前还能坚持原则的。#论语今译#   Stariver: (9.18) Confucius said: “I have not seen one who loves virtue as much as he loves beauty.” ~ Bureau Director Confucius said: I have not seen someone who can uphold his principles in the presence of a hooker. #ModernAnalects#

重庆打黑成果表明，在任何地方以任何方式惩治任何党员干部，都可以得到人民群众的拥护。 — 星河舰队 (@Stariver) March 19, 2012

Stariver: The outcome of the “beat black” in Chongqing shows that people support any punishment of any cadre, regardless of when, where, or how. –Chinese re-tweet robot

牛 RT @stariver: 烈士求民主，今世壮心犹可励；英杰为自由，后生远志必行之。 — Jian Alan Huang (@hnjhj) April 8, 2012

Stariver: The martyr pursues democracy; those ambitious among us today will still find him encouraging. The hero seeks liberty; those idealists of tomorrow must pursue it.

每次倒烟灰的时候，我都觉得是在倒自己的骨灰。

— 星河舰队 (@Stariver) December 24, 2011

Stariver: Every time I throw away cigarette ashes, it feels like I’m dumping the ashes of my own bones.

First tweet translated by Yaxue Cao. Excerpts from petition translated by Oiwan Lam of Global Voices.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, Ai Weiwei, beat black, Bei Feng, censorship, Chongqing, Confucius, Cultural Revolution, Global Times, Hu Jia, Internet censorship, Peking University, people's daily, Twitter, Wen Yunchao, Xinwen Lianbo
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While [Sina] Weibo can on occasion help incite real change, even on the streets, the sheer number of injustices that flash almost daily across Chinese Web users’ respective feeds means that citizens, armed with social media alone, simply do not have the power to combat even a small portion of them. As a result, some measure of ennui and resignation has begun to set in. In late October, online personality Zuoye Ben (@作业本), a pseudonymous Weibo user known for original and often critical views, gave voice to a growing feeling of fatigue among social media users. In a post commemorating three years of using the Weibo service, Zuoye Ben concluded that “Weibo has not changed China, it has just changed you and me: I have gradually got used to being cold and indifferent, just like you have slowly got tired of Weibo.” These words have been re-posted over [30,000] times and have garnered over [10,000] comments.

[…] Taken alone, Weibo is inadequate as a tool for delivering social justice because the service is not an open forum for comment — the Chinese government maintains firm control over how wide this window of free discussion is allowed to open. When debate grows too ferocious, authorities have the power to choke it off, banning keyword terms and strategically disabling functions to tamp down discussion. […]

As a result the service finds itself in a position similar to that of the country’s legal system. In theory, Weibo is a platform for citizens to give feedback and raise complaints, but ultimately the Party has the final say on whether anyone can open their mouth or not. When authorities do on occasion respond to pressure online, they do so unilaterally after the fact; web users never gain the satisfying sense they have engaged in a true dialogue with their government, or have enjoyed the benefit of due process.

Underlining the point, TLN notes elsewhere that during the 18th Party Congress that concluded this week, Zuoyeben’s posting was limited to pictures of food.

Online communications can be not only ineffective but actively harmful. In July, police warned that various criminals had exploited location data optionally broadcast by Tencent’s popular Weixin messaging service, known in English as WeChat and increasingly seen as a key rival to Sina Weibo. In other cases, security forces are the ones turning service against user. At the South China Morning Post, John Kennedy discussed activist Hu Jia’s suspicions about Weixin’s use as a surveillance tool:

Citing things he was told after being sentenced to prison for “inciting subversion of state power” in 2008 as well as numerous experiences resembling the ones above, Hu has come to the conclusion that:

The Guobao [Domestic Security Department] have become more efficient in their jobs by eliminating the need for cooperation from China Mobile or Tencent in many surveillance tasks. What they have now is direct backdoor access to China Mobile and Tencent systems. The Guobao are now able, in real-time, to both eavesdrop on or block your SMSs or WeChat from their technical investigation department offices.

[…] One QQ.com department head based in Beijing who was willing to speak off the record would only say:

As far as I understand, there is no full backdoor surveillance access given to the PSB. When QQ [was still Tencent's flagship product], there was a department set up in Tencent’s office in Shenzhen tasked with dealing with PSB inquiries and providing assistance with cases. With regard to surveillance of dissidents, if the PSB provided an administrative order Tencent would provide the requested information…Each separate case required [that the PSB provide] a new order.

See more on corporate cooperation in online controls via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, Hu Jia, legal system, QQ, sina weibo, social media, surveillance, tencent, weibo
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Hu Jia is an old friend of Chen and among the first people he met after fleeing to Beijing. A champion of democracy and political freedom, Hu, 39, was arrested and sentenced to three and a half years in prison on subversion charges before the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

[…] “I’ve always told the authorities, we’re playing the game of cat and mouse — but I am the cat,” he added.

Inspired by the likes of Hu and Chen, analysts see a trend of more people in the younger generation — armed with legal knowledge and Internet skills — joining the ranks of human rights activists at a time when mass discontent over problems like a widening income gap and rampant official corruption simmer beneath the surface.

Former English teacher He Peirong — known by her online name Pearl — was so touched by Chen’s story that she became involved in the plan to rescue him from his village to Beijing. Police in her hometown of Nanjing detained her for a week after Chen’s escape in April, but she says she feels no regrets.

“As we become more educated and better off, I think our political conscience will become stronger, as more people wake up to stand up for their rights,” she said, adding that police had warned her not to go to Beijing during the Party Congress.

The article also describes the current situation of Chen’s mother, brother and nephew, Chen Kegui, following the younger Chen’s arrest. See more on Chen Guangcheng via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, Chen Guangcheng, chen kegui, Dongshigu, Hu Jia, human rights activists, leadership transition, Shandong
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A story Monday by the Xinhua news wire reported that a senior security official had recently been “inspecting a security ‘moat’ project created in areas encircling Beijing for the congress’ smooth holding.” There was apparently no water involved, just a lot of police.

The story quoted Zhou Yongkang, a standing committee member who oversees domestic security, as urging authorities in Beijing and surrounding regions to form a “solid defense . . . thus creating a safe, orderly, auspicious and peaceful environment for the successful holding of the 18th National Congress.”

Amnesty International released a statement last week that gave an idea of what that might mean: More than 100 activists have been rounded up so far.

“The police have placed dozens of activists under house arrest, forcibly removed individuals from Beijing and have closed down the offices of community groups in attempts to suppress peaceful dissent,” the group said. “Scores of activists are believed to be held in ‘black jails’ across the country. . . . Hotels, hostels, basements of buildings and farm centers have all been reportedly used as black jails.”

A major thrust of the campaign has been to block petitioners from reaching the capital. The Telegraph’s Tom Phillips visited Lü Number 3 Team Village on the outskirts of Beijing:

Lu is home to around 700 permanent residents, many of whom supplement their incomes by renting shoddily built shacks to aggrieved men and women bound for Beijing to seek assistance from the central government.

“I don’t care who the tenants are, as long as they pay,” said the owner of one of dozens of cramped guesthouses, who rents rooms for 10 yuan (£1) a night or 200 yuan (£20) a month.

But the village’s once-crowded guesthouses stand largely empty this week after police and security forces moved in to weed out potential troublemakers ahead of the highly sensitive leadership transition.

The state media has dubbed the crackdown the “zero petitions” policy. A report in the Global Times newspaper last month claimed”petitioning cases” in Beijing had fallen 12% since August, after 10,000 detentions.

Activists already in Beijing have faced house arrest or strong pressure to leave the city. From Gillian Wong at The Associated Press:

The crackdown has extended to lawyers such as Xu Zhiyong. He said Beijing authorities have held him under informal house arrest since mid-October, stationing four or five guards outside his apartment in Beijing around the clock.

[…] Even dissidents’ relatives have come under pressure. Beijing activist Hu Jia said he was warned by police to leave town, and that even his parents told him that police had told them to escort him to his hometown.

“My parents said to me: ‘Hu Jia, you don’t know what kind of danger you are in, but we know,’” he recounted in a phone interview from his parents’ home in eastern Anhui province. “They said: ‘Beijing is a cruel battlefield. If you stay here, you will be the first to be sacrificed. Don’t do this.’”

Also pressured to leave Beijing was writer Wang Lixiong, whose Tibetan wife Woeser had already left for Lhasa. Wang wrote in a New York Times op-ed, translated by Perry Link:

The Communist Party has, for the sake of its own meeting, asked that my wife leave me and that I leave my elderly mother, who is too old to live without someone to care for her. Incidentally, she joined the Communist Party in 1947 (two years before the founding of the People’s Republic, and a time when joining was still dangerous) and did so in order to oppose the reigning Nationalist government, which she saw as “lacking humanity.”

Now, I want to ask her, “What do you think of the humanity of the Communist Party today?” but cannot bring myself to inflict on her the pain that the question would bring.

I have replied to State Security that a party conclave is no reason to disperse a family. They, in turn, threatened that if I refused to leave, things would become “uncomfortable” for me. They did not say how. I have decided to wait at home and see. What does a party that vows before the entire world that it follows the rule of law have in mind for my discomfort?

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, activists, Amnesty International, CCP, dissidents, Global Times, house arrest, Hu Jia, perry link, petitioners, security crackdown, stability preservation, Wang Lixiong, Woeser, Xu Zhiyong, Zhou Yongkang
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Li Zhonghe, 65, a retired construction worker, told Reuters he would have to keep his 40 to 50 pigeons in their coops when the congress starts.

“There are currently some extra restrictions, so we are not supposed to let the pigeons out to fly,” Li said, adding he did not know the reason why. “It’s this way every time there is a congress. I’m accustomed to it by now.”

Unlikely as it seems, pigeons, often raised as a hobby in China, have been used as a tool of subversion before. In the late 1990s, dissidents released pigeons carrying slogans written on ribbons tied to the birds’ feet in southern China.

The Beijing Carrier Pigeon Association said in an online notice two annual autumn races, originally scheduled during the congress, would be postponed until December. It did not say why.

The Wall Street Journal has published a series of photos showing the heightened security in Beijing, and The New York Times’ Andrew Jacobs has more on the government’s full-court press:

As this sprawling city of 20 million people steels itself for the 18th Party Congress, all sorts of potentially buoyant objects — balloons, homing pigeons, Ping-Pong balls and remote-control toy airplanes — are finding their way onto lists of suspicious items that could potentially carry protest messages and mar the meticulously choreographed political spectacle.

And this is just a tiny portion of the government’s rules and restrictions, circulated on the Internet but never officially acknowledged, that seem likely to make daily life especially challenging during the weeklong congress, which one provincial police department likened to a “state of war.”

In recent days, kitchen knives have been removed from store shelves, Internet access has mysteriously slowed to the speed of molasses, and international news channels like CNN and the BBC have disappeared from television sets in upscale health clubs.

As Jacobs reports, “hundreds, if not thousands” of dissidents have either been placed under house arrest or asked to leave Beijing. The Guardian’s Jonathan Kaiman caught up with prominent activist Hu Jia, who said he has been under tight surveillance for the past six weeks:

On 20 October, state security officers escorted Hu to a train station in Beijing and bundled him off to his hometown in Anhui province. Hu said the police threatened his parents with violence if he returned to Beijing before the end of the meeting.

“This has been way worse than the 17th party congress,” Hu said, referring to a similar event in 2007, while he was formally under house arrest. “At that time I was allowed to go out and buy things to eat. This time there’s just no way.”

Meanwhile, although state media published several cherry-picked comments from Sina Weibo users on Friday, David Bandurski of The China Media Project details the difficulty of finding microblog posts mentioning the congress:

Searches for “18th Congress” using both numerals and Chinese characters are blocked on Chinese social media sites. Apparently, it is possible to make posts using the terms, but it is not possible to see what others have posted unless you are following them. The goal, it seems, is to restrict conversation about the meeting while not outright banning the terms.

Searches for the terms yield a message that reads: “We’re sorry, results related to ’18th Congress’ cannot be found.”

See additional coverage of China’s upcoming 18th Party Congress, via CDT.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, activists, Beijing, dissidents, Hu Jia, microblogs, netizens, security
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“I hope he can achieve his freedom as soon as possible,” Mr. Mo, 57, told reporters during a news conference held a day after he won the 2012 prize for literature. He spoke not far from his family’s home in rural Shandong Province, the setting for many of his epic novels.

Even if Mr. Mo’s remarks were spare and decidedly nonconfrontational — he went on to suggest he was not an admirer of Mr. Liu’s pro-democracy essays — they are nonetheless likely to infuriate China’s leadership, which has been exulting in the Swedish Academy’s decision to give China its first Nobel in literature.

[…] Ran Yunfei, a sharp-tongued writer persecuted for his pro-democracy views, said he was heartened by Mr. Mo’s comments but doubted that he would become a crusader for human rights and free expression. “He has become very skilled at walking on a tightrope,” Mr. Ran wrote in a microblog post. “Now that he has become a household name with the government’s backing, it’s only going to become harder for him to be a real critic of the government.”

Other critics have also softened their tone. Activist Hu Jia said to Reuters that “what has happened in the last 24 hours has changed him. A Nobel prize, whether for peace or for literature, bestows on one a sense of wrong and right.” Outspoken artist Ai Weiwei, who had previously called Mo’s award an “insult to humanity and to literature“, told China Real Time Report that “I want to welcome Mo Yan back into the arms of the people. If this sort of courage is the result, I hope more Chinese writers will be given Nobel prizes.”

Also at China Real Time, Human Rights Watch’s Nicholas Bequelin commented on Mo’s politics and his support for Liu Xiaobo:

“Mo Yan certainly has a mind of his own. He’s not a government puppet. His novels make very clear that he’s not a cheerleader for the state of Chinese society today,” said Nicholas Bequelin, senior Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. The novelist’s willingness to talk about Mr. Liu, he added, “will make it a little more difficult for China to conceal that they’re holding a Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison.”

Avant-garde writer Bei Cun wrote on Sina Weibo (via South China Morning Post’s John Kennedy):

Journalists and friends have messaged me asking for my view, as I’ve expressed both congratulations as well as opposition to the hand-copying [of Mao's speech]. What we must remember is that this is a literature award, and is limited to that profession. As I said several days ago, a writer’s political position will not inevitably affect his or her professional ability, otherwise someone such as Heidegger would be difficult to understand. Writers aren’t saints, maintaining a spiritual contradiction is allowed. I can only hope Mo Yan uses his influence to encourage people to act on conscience.

Jeffrey Brown discussed Mo’s political tightrope-walking with University of Virginia’s Charles Laughlin and China Digital Times Editor in Chief Xiao Qiang on PBS NewsHour:

For more views on the politics of Mo and his award, see David Wertime’s post at Tea Leaf Nation and Yaxue Cao’s at Seeing Red in China.

Even before the press conference, Mo’s English translator Howard Goldblatt had discussed with Reuters how the author might make use of his new prominence:

“I think Mo Yan could actually, in a very nuanced way, make a difference and get some of this stuff happening,” Goldblatt said by telephone from Boulder, Colorado, referring to improving freedom of speech and conditions for writers.

“To be honest with you, I doubt that he will. I think he’s just a novelist who doesn’t want to be involved in those things.”

[…] “You know, he respects and likes the dissidents,” said Goldblatt.

“He just doesn’t want to become one of them in exile.”

While thanking his supporters and detractors alike, Mo himself has taken on his critics directly. From Reuters:

“I believe that the people who have criticized me have not read my books,” he said. “If they had read my books they would understand that my writings at that time took on a great deal of risk and were under pressure.

“Many of the people who have criticized me online are Communist Party members themselves. They also work within the system. And some have benefited tremendously within the system,” he added.

“I am working in China,” he said. “I am writing in a China under Communist Party leaders. But my works cannot be restricted by political parties.”

While Mo’s bold statement in front of the media was uncontainable, references to Liu Xiaobo elsewhere have faced tight controls. China Media Project highlighted a weibo post by deputy director of the School of Law at China University of Political Science and Law He Bing, which was swiftly deleted, despite not mentioning Liu by name:

As Mo Yan receives his [Nobel] prize, regardless of whether it is from the perspective of domestic or international politics, we should all consider changing the fortune of another Nobel Prize winner. Our country cannot remain idiotic to the very end. Full reconciliation is the prerequisite for a stable society.

Meanwhile, Liu remains in prison, while his wife Liu Xia is under house arrest in the legal black hole where she has spent the last two years. The Financial Times’ Jamil Anderlini, discussing her case as a weathervane for judicial reform in China, described the Catch 22 situation imposed on visitors. “Their attempts to impose arbitrary and impossible conditions on would-be visitors rather than just forbidding them from seeing her seemed to betray a desire to somehow legitimise her detention,” he wrote.

The BBC (via CDT) reported this week that her incarceration is designed to pressure Liu Xiaobo into agreeing to leave the country, and to control the flow of information to and from the jailed laureate. Reporters Without Borders, meanwhile, has published haunting video of Liu Xia smoking at her window—”one of the few freedoms she can still enjoy”.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, house arrest, Hu Jia, illegal detentions, literature, liu xia, Liu Xiaobo, mo yan, Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel Prize, Ran Yunfei, Reporters Without Borders, Xiao Qiang
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Nothing more vividly illustrates this injustice than the restrictions imposed on an accused’s right to effective counsel. These restrictions are not apparent from a reading of China’s ever-improving legislation. The 2007 Lawyers Law eliminated some of the obstacles confronting defence counsel under the 1996 Criminal Procedure Law, but police skirted that reform, saying they are not governed by the Lawyers Law. This year, many of those 2007 changes were incorporated into the Criminal Procedure Law itself, so that, starting on January 1, when the revised law takes effect, police can no longer rely on that feeble excuse.

Unfortunately, as Shakespeare might note today, legislative improvements keep the promise to the ear, but Communist Party- controlled legal institutions break it to the hope. If current events are any guide, the situation is unlikely to change under the revised Criminal Procedure Law. Recent cases remind us of the authorities’ continuing refusal to implement the right to counsel in good faith.

[…] These cases are legion and make a mockery of China’s claims to have established “a socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics”. Until the right to effective counsel is recognised in practice as the cornerstone of criminal justice, China’s “soft power” efforts are destined to fail.

Cohen’s fears that the new Criminal Procedure Law will not be faithfuly implemented are widely shared, as are his concerns at the enshrinement of “a murky, two-tier legal regime” in which political prosecutions are subject to far fewer restrictions than ordinary criminal cases. At The Wall Street Journal, Carl Minzner warns that the overall direction of China’s justice system is not merely ineffectual progress, but active regression. He suggests that despite, or even because of, its frequently professed commitment to rule of law, Beijing’s obsession with stability at all costs threatens to reverse the gains of the 1980s and 90s.

[…] Beijing worries that decades of official rule-of-law rhetoric are fueling surging numbers of petitions, protests and suits by citizens who seek to protect their legal rights. The idea of rule of law is even leading some officials to perceive law as superior to Party policy. Authorities also fear that China’s growing public interest lawyers might emerge as the core of Arab Spring-style protest movements.

This new line from the central government is an integral component of hardline “stability maintenance” political policies that have swept through the Chinese state in recent years. Central signals to local authorities are clear. Contain all disputes at the local level. Hold down the numbers of court cases. And, at all costs, prevent disgruntled petitioners from reaching Beijing.

Following the “reinstatement of his political rights” last month, activist Hu Jia writes that democracy is the only real way to maintain stability in China. From The Washington Post:

For 63 years, China has been engaged in a civil war, between its people and the party, over dignity and rights. In recent decades, the Tiananmen massacre, the suppression of Falun Gong and religious freedom, and violent “family planning” policies all have contributed to a human rights disaster. In a democratic system, this government would have been impeached hundreds of times. Consider just the one-child policy that has produced countless tragedies. Millions of infants have been killed. The daily abuses of power feed more disasters. China has institutionalized abuse of power, through the Political and Legal Affairs Committee, and individuals within the system, such as Bo Xilai and Wang Lijun, also take advantage of their positions.

Amid the global tide of democratization, China’s stagnation is equal to retrogression. The question of who succeeds Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao is not important now. Citizens are the most important force for political reform — and what matters is our courage and wisdom, what actions we take, and how many citizens wake up.

[…] Turning China into a democratic and lawful society in the next 10 years is the only peaceful option. Conciliation will never arrive without truth or confession. The sooner the Communist Party wakes up, the smaller the cost will be.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Arab Spring, Bo Xilai, Chen Guangcheng, criminal procedure law, criminal rights, democracy, Falun Gong, Hu Jia, Hu Jintao, Jerome cohen, leadership transition, legal reform, legal system, one-child policy, political blogs, rule of law, stability maintenance, Tiananmen, Wang Lijun, Wen Jiabao
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I often ask myself if I am afraid of being detained again. My inner voice says I am not. I love freedom, like anybody; maybe more than most people. But it is such a tragedy if you live your life in fear. That’s worse than actually losing your freedom.

[…] Reflect on Bo Xilai’s case, Chen Guangcheng’s and mine. We are three very different examples: you can be a high party member or a humble fighter for rights or a recognised artist. The situations are completely different but we all have one thing in common: none of us have been dealt with through fair play, open trials and open discussion. China has not established the rule of law and if there is a power above the law there is no social justice. Everybody can be subjected to harm.

I’m just a citizen: my life is equal in value to any other. But I’m thankful that when I lost my freedom so many people shared feelings and put such touching effort into helping me. It gives me hope: Stupidity can win for a moment, but it can never really succeed because the nature of humans is to seek freedom. They can delay that freedom but they can’t stop it.

Ai’s one year probation has now been lifted, according to Edward Wong at The New York Times:

“They told me they had lifted the probation because I had behaved well all year,” he said in a telephone interview as he was dining at a restaurant in Beijing’s Sanlitun neighborhood. “It really surprised me because I violated almost every rule they imposed.”

Before Mr. Ai was released from detention last year, the police said he had to refrain from talking to foreign journalists and could not use Twitter. But Mr. Ai regularly talks to journalists and uses Twitter daily.

Mr. Ai said the police did not give him back his passport. “You don’t need it,” Mr. Ai quoted one officer as saying. The officer then said that on Monday the police would return the passport and computer equipment they had seized.

Despite the promised return of his passport, Ai has been told that he still may not leave China as he may face charges of pornography, bigamy and illicit exchange of foreign currency, as Reuters’ Sui-Lee Wee explains. The pornography charges revolve around images, posted online “as a joke”, of Ai posing naked with a group of women. When the threat of prosecution first emerged late last year, supporters posted a barrage of nude photos online, while the original images sparked further controversy by tripping Facebook’s nudity alarms.

“We never even touched each other,” Ai said. “It’s nothing. Nobody will say that’s pornography. I asked them why this is pornography. They said under our policy, if there’s nudity, if people try to open a file many times, like over 1,000 times, that’s pornography. They have a law like that, which is ridiculous.”

Ai, who is married, also denies the charge of bigamy. He openly meets a girlfriend and has a three-year-old son from that relationship.

On the possible charge of “illicit exchange of foreign currency”, Ai said police told him that it concerned a project in 2008, when he invited 100 foreign architects to Inner Mongolia and arranged for a Swiss gallery to pay them in euros, while he got yuan currency in return.

Last July, Ai accepted a visiting lecturer post at the Berlin University of Arts, even knowing that once outside China, he might be unable to return. The continued bar on international travel will postpone this still further, but Ai may in any case now be less inclined to take the attendant risk. He told The Telegraph‘s Malcolm Moore recently that “’it has never been important to stay, until now …. When I went to New York in 1981, I vowed never to come back.’ But he has now become so emotionally involved, and has such faith in the twin powers of the internet and globalisation to change China, that he cannot bring himself to leave.”

The expiration of Ai’s probation coincided with a hearing in his lawsuit against local tax authorities, whose case against him, he claims, was riddled with procedural irregularities. Ai was prevented from attending the hearing. His legal advisor Liu Xiaoyuan went missing, and was then forced to leave Beijing; potential supporters were placed under watch and, in Hu Jia’s case, reportedly beaten; posts about Ai including some memorable photos of him posing in a police uniform were removed from Sina Weibo; and in the courtroom itself, his lawyers were prevented from giving evidence, while all public seating was filled with paid attendees to keep supporters out. From NPR’s Louisa Lim:

On Wednesday, a Beijing court heard Ai’s challenge to tax authorities demanding almost $2.5 million in back taxes. Ai was ordered to stay home, so he missed the eight-hour-long hearing. He said the court did not allow his lawyers to read the existing evidence, submit new evidence or call witnesses. Ai noted the irony of a public hearing in which the defendant wasn’t allowed to attend and the public seats — all five of them — were occupied by people paid to be there.

“Those five seats they assigned to their own people,” he said. “After three hours, these five people, they completely have no interest in case. They ask can they leave, ‘We didn’t know it would last for so long.’ And the court tells them that no, you cannot leave, you have to stay here until the case finishes and we’ll pay extra money for it. So they just take a nap in the court.”

So far, there has been no verdict from the hearing.

Update: Ai gave CNN a pessimistic and disheartened interview on his legal battle:

“I feel very sad, very miserable, actually,” he said in an interview Friday with CNN at his studio in Beijing.

[…] He said more than forty police cars and hundreds of officers surrounded his home. “You just cannot go, if you try, you cannot make it,” he claimed the police told him. Public buses were also prevented from stopping in the area of the court,” he added.

“They use the tax case to crush me but they don’t want me to show up because…all facts can be revealed.” Ai likened the court proceedings to a “very bad play” and said he was feeling “very discouraged” and “powerless.”

“The outcome is very clear. The court works for the police; the tax bureau also works for the police; the police is becoming a superpower in China…And they decide everything because we have a policy: it’s called ‘maintain stability’…But what is stability? Is it stability of the nation? Or of the people? Or stability of the controller?”

In another interview for the BBC, Ai also expressed his disappointment at the extension of the ban on international travel:

“My feelings are very mixed,” he said. “They told me I cannot leave the nation. I asked them for how long and they said: ‘We cannot answer you’. It seems very disappointing.”

The artist said he would like to go to both the UK and the US later in the year for work, but did not know whether it would be possible.

“It comes as a surprise they will not let me travel, because you cannot give somebody freedom and say there are strings attached,” he said.

While the inability to travel abroad for his work is clearly a source of frustration, Reuters’ Mike Collett-White writes that the overall effects of the government’s restrictions on Ai’s career are somewhat mixed. On one hand, his absence increases his allure among Western collectors; on the other, political sensitivities appear to have dampened enthusiasm among the Chinese collectors who have driven up other artists’ prices.

There is little doubt Ai’s outspoken views and subsequent travails have placed him at the “high table” of contemporary art in the West, although many of his works are not overtly political and their conceptual nature limits their market value.

“In terms of his impact, it makes him an even more important artist,” said Anders Petterson, head of ArtTactic which analyses trends in the art market, commenting on the latest headlines.

[…] While significant, Ai’s commercial value pales in comparison to other Chinese contemporary artists, and prices for his works have not skyrocketed in the same way. Before this year, his auction record stood at $657,000 for “Chandelier” set in 2007.

By comparison, the contemporary Chinese auction high is held by Zhang Xiaogang, whose “Forever Lasting Love” sold for just over $10 million at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong in April 2011.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Bo Xilai, Chen Guangcheng, courts, detention, Hu Jia, legal system, Liu Xiaoyuan, pornography, tax evasion
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Feng Zhenghu may be best known for his three-month stay in Tokyo’s Narita Airport after Chinese officials refused to allow him to re-enter the country. His eventual return in February 2010 did not mark the end of his problems, however. His persistent work to help petitioners hold the authorities to their own laws has led to an extra-legal house arrest similar to Chen’s. From Tania Branigan at The Guardian:

Since February the 57-year-old scholar has been barred from leaving his home, except when escorted to the police station for 10 hour sessions – as he was on Saturday. At one stage, unable even to shop for food, he resorted to lowering a basket from his window for well-wishers to fill with groceries every few days [see video of this process at Shanghaiist].

“What they have done to me is a breach of the law. It has no legal basis. I am very angry,” said Feng, speaking to the Guardian by telephone.

[…] Police have never formally notified Feng that he is under house arrest. An officer at the local station referred queries to the Shanghai police media department, where calls rang unanswered.

“Maybe people think Chen Guangcheng’s case was unique and that this has been won. Feng Zhenghu and Chen’s cases are both extreme, but they are on a continuum of illegal punishment and detentions for activists that is very, very common in China,” said Wang Songlian of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.

In spite of his anger, Feng, like Pu Zhiqiang and Ai Weiwei, shows a remarkable lack of bitterness towards his guards. Feng’s neighbours include American journalist Lara Farrar, who describes his attitude at The Huffington Post, and explains how Chen’s escape increased the harshness of Feng’s own situation:

“If I escape, those guards, the local public security bureau chief, the district governor, all of them will lose their jobs,” he said. “I have been with them for two years, and I understand them. It is also hard for them, so I don’t want to try to run away. Summer is coming, and I worry for them. The sun and mosquitoes are coming, and they have to stay outside. It is a pretty hard life for them as it is for me.”

Since the blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng dramatically escaped from house arrest in a rural village in northern Shandong Province at the end of April, the layers of security surrounding my apartment complex have multiplied. The guards are still at the gate. But now there are more who hang around all day near the entryway to Feng’s building. There are new security cameras by the entrance. This week, new ultra bright lights were installed on the grounds.

[…] “They are very worried right now that in Shandong a blind person could escape such heavy security,” Feng said. “They afraid that I might run away too, and then they will lose their jobs. So their days are not easy right now.”

Meanwhile, journalists have taken advantage of their new freedom to visit Dongshigu. Speculating on the sudden disappearance of the village guards, Chen’s older brother Chen Guangfu told Reuters’ Sui-Lee Wee that “perhaps the ‘nation’ of Dongshigu has surrendered to Beijing or Beijing won the war against Dongshigu. The policies of the central government can finally be carried out here. In the past it was like ‘the mountains were high and the emperor is far away’, this was a place where the law could not reach.”

Nevertheless, the shadow over Dongshigu has not entirely lifted, as McClatchy’s Tom Lasseter found:

“Chen Guangcheng is a good man,” said the farmer, wearing navy cotton pants and a green camouflage shirt. Before he could get another word out, however, a man identified by locals as a village official rode by on a scooter, honked his horn and said, “Don’t talk.” Moments later, the official circled back and bellowed, “Bu zhidao! Bu zhidao!” – Chinese for “don’t know” – apparently the only response the farmer was supposed to give.

A second farmer had explained earlier that, “Chen Guangcheng had a very good reputation, the common people sympathized with him,” when the same official, in a grey-striped polo shirt, rushed over to command, “Go! Go!”

It was a far cry from the previous year and a half, when dozens of men enforced a brutish cordon around this village of less than 500 people in eastern China’s Shandong Province. But the scene of petty bureaucrats – the village representative was joined by others from county offices — harassing anyone who wanted to publicly discuss Chen seemed a fitting coda as his story fades from the headlines. It has been a remarkable example of how dissent is silenced in China.

The fragments of praise Lasseter was able to gather contrast with blogger Sima Pingbang’s account, published in the Global Times in May. The “grass-roots intellectual” accused Chen of wielding tyrannical control over the local water supply based, apparently quite loosely, on a case described in Lijia Zhang’s recent portrait of the activist at The Diplomat.

Others visiting the village had experiences similar to Lasseter’s, as photographer David Gray recounted in a photoessay at Reuters:

[…] [Guangfu] arrived on a bike, smiling and very happy to see us. We walked with him to the family home, just five minutes away, and discovered of course that it was at the exact spot where we had first asked someone after entering the village. [Guangfu] said he was certain that all the villagers had been told not to talk to any foreigners, because normally they would all be out of their homes watching them.

We entered the gate to the Chen family home and met Wang Jinxiang, the mother of [Guangfu] and Guangcheng. This sweet lady greeted us with open arms and we quickly started the interview. It didn’t take long for her to begin crying as she recounted the many sleepless nights over the past years.

[…] Finally, a goofy-looking man dressed exactly like an official would be (with long dress pants and a collared shirt, in the middle of a farming village) approached us and asked where we were from. We told him we were from Beijing and we were doing interviews – would he care to comment? There was “No need” he replied, “As you can see, all is fine here.”

See also Charles Custer’s reflections on Chen’s escape and the ensuing diplomatic standoff at ChinaGeeks.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, detention, Feng Zhenghu, house arrest, Hu Jia, illegal detentions, security guards, Shandong, Shanghai
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