“If the environmental protection bureau chief dares to swim in [Ruian's] river for 20 minutes, I will pay [him] 200,000 yuan [HK$246,000],” Jin wrote on Sina Weibo.

In three photos Jin posted, a river in small-town Ruian is seen entirely blocked by floating rubbish. Jin blamed a rubber overshoe factory for dumping industrial waste into the river.

This river was where villagers used to wash vegetables and clothes in his childhood, Jin told Chinanews.com.

Asked for comment, Ruian’s environmental protection bureau chief, Bao Zhenmin, acknowledged the river was polluted, the report said. But he said the rubbish is from people, and not factories.

“Overpopulation of this region is the main reason behind the pollution…[The population] has largely exceeded the local environment’s capacity,” Bao told Chinanews.com.

Jin’s push in Zhejiang comes as activist web users accused factories in Shandong province of intentionally dumping waste into rivers, according to Li Jing at the South China Morning Post:

It all started with a microblog post exposing factories in Shandong that injected toxic waste water underground, and evolved into an online campaign to uncover pollution scandals as people returning home from cities for the holiday encountered unbearable levels of water contamination.

Deng Fei , a social activist who helped initiate the campaign, said some journalists and lawyers had mobilised to investigate clues offered by microbloggers, adding that several members of the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference had expressed interest in looking into the problems.

The first post, published on Tuesday on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo, said some chemical plants in Weifang – which were preparing for initial public offerings – had been secretly discharging untreated waste water deep underground, using high-pressure injection wells to avoid supervision.

It has been reposted by about 50,000 microbloggers.

Tea Leaf Nation’s Liz Carter writes that the issue has become the number-one trending topic on Sina Weibo:

News broke on social media that not only were companies polluting the water, but were intentionally pumping wastewater into the ground through high-pressure pipes in order to avoid complying with regulations. The polluted water has caused cancer in many nearby residents, according to reports, and affected the development of local children. A company in Weifang, Shandong was implicated when a journalist travelled there to cover the story.

In a post deleted by censors on Sina Weibo, a lawyer named Gan Yuanchun described how officials from Weifang, Shandong sent some of their subordinates to Beijing to prevent media from breaking the news. China Central Television (CCTV)’s coverage of the story was shelved. and the journalist who traveled to Weifang is still being held there involuntarily. Gan Yuanchun wrote in a follow-up post, “Weifang: You think that by harmonizing [censoring] CCTV, you can cover up the truth about #UndergroundWaterPollution? And you’re still trying to help this kind of soulless company complete its IPO? You must be dreaming!!”

The state-run Global Times reported that the online outcry in Weifang prompted a response from local authorities, who offered rewards to any whistle-blower whose tips proved accurate, and Ernest Kao and the South China Morning Post reports that an editorial in the Beijing News last week urged officials to tackle the water pollution issue:

Beijing’s official mouthpiece called for a “declaration of war” in the new Lunar Year on “unscrupulous enterprises” engaged in the illegal and often secretive discharge of untreated waste into waterways. It urged the public and netizens to help.

…

The editorial said local governments were only compounding the problem by upholding lax environmental regulations and shielding “superstar” companies, deemed too important, from punishment.

“The reason why groundwater pollution has long been ignored is that the vast majority of contamination cases occur in rural counties, where farmers lack the right to speak out,” it said.

The editorial said the fundamental problem lay in governance – or lack of it – and encouraged the public to “take action to investigate and expose any of those unscrupulous companies”. It also called on “the relevant parties” to encourage supervision and ensure citizen activist channels are unimpeded”.

See also recent CDT coverage of water pollution in China, including an accident at a chemical plant which caused the contamination of a river in northern Shanxi province.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: industrial pollution, Internet activism, microblogs, online public opinion, Shandong, sina weibo, water pollution
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

With real name registration, the devolution of responsibility extends beyond the website operators and reaches individual users. When each Weibo post becomes tied to an identified person, then each individual user will be more likely to practice self-censorship with respect to their own posts.

Even without real name registration for user generated content websites, true anonymity on China’s internet does not exist for most users. When registering for home or business internet access, real name registration is already required. Seventy percent of mobile phone users also register with their real names according to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the new rules suggest that the anonymous prepaid mobile phone cards will be phased out. Internet cafés are also required to record the real identity of each user. As a result, unless someone posting on Weibo is being very careful, the government already has the means to identify the author of an unwanted post. The six people arrested in connection with spreading rumors of a coup attempt in the spring of 2012 discovered this fact the hard way.

To achieve self-censorship, however, the users must first understand that they can and will be held accountable for the content they post. As a result, it would not be surprising to see implementation of real name registration accompanied by publicity campaigns and a number of high profile prosecutions for posting illegal content.

[...] This new rules were issued by the standing committee of the National People’s Congress, which has a higher position in the official government structure than both the municipality of Beijing and the General Administration of Press and Publication. As a result, the issuance of these rules suggests not only that China’s leadership at the highest levels support the rules, but that those same top leaders are paying attention to the issue of anonyms Weibo posts. With such high level focus, China’s internet users should expect a much greater effort to fully implementation real name registration this time.

Despite the official claims that the new rules will better protect online privacy, Adam Minter at Bloomberg sees Chinese netizens chafe at the real-name registration:

Other, more literary-minded microbloggers have taken to pointing out that many of China’s revolutionary heroes used pseudonyms. Thus, Xi’an Dragon, the online handle of a Sina Weibo microblogger in Xi’an, invokes the seminal 20th Century Chinese writer Lu Xun, a favorite of modern China’s founding father, Chairman Mao:

“If Lu Xun and Mao Zedong were still alive, I’d ask their opinion of real name registration. After all, Lu Xun had many pen names and Mao Zedong also published many articles under many names in many newspapers. Internet real-name registration will become the darkest political scandal in human history: the Real- Name Registration Scandal.”

However, by far the most common criticism of the real-name requirement is that China’s civil servants are asking for ever- greater degrees of transparency from China’s Internet users without requiring it of themselves. Indeed, in the last two years, Chinese governments at various levels have required “real name” registration for kitchen knives, railway tickets and HIV testing, among other things. Meanwhile, a long-promised and very popular proposed civil service reform that would require personal financial disclosures keeps getting punted into the future. For the online opposition to China’s new Internet law, the two issues are directly connected, and it’s not difficult to find microblogs and blogs making the connection. A New Year’s Eve tweet from another pseudonymous microblogger — this time in Zhengzhou — is harshly representative:

“A population of 1.4 billion needs to file a real name registration to buy a kitchen knife. Airlines and railways transported 2,000,000,000 passengers who revealed their real names. But 10,000,000 working civil servants cannot disclose their personal property? It’s not impossible, but they just don’t want to do it. If it’s legitimate income why can’t they accept public supervision?”

See more on real-name registration via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet activism, Internet censorship, Internet regulation, privacy, real name registration
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The rules had been heralded by a series of editorials in state media, including one from People’s Daily Online which framed the issue of internet regulation in terms of rule of law. From David Bandurski’s translation at China Media Project:

The internet is public space, and public order and good customs require the common efforts of web users, demanding that each web users “purify themselves” (自我净化), recognizing from the bottom of their hearts that the internet is not a utopia where they can do as they please, that it is not a “Garden of Peaches of Immortality” [i.e., a paradise] existing outside the law. But on this massive platform comprising 538 million web users and more than a billion mobile users, it is impossible byrelying on self-discipline alone to achieve regulation and order (规范有序) and to eliminate every single person with ulterior motives (别有用心者) or every doer of mischief (恶作剧者).

Without wings, the bird of freedom cannot fly high. Without rule of law, a free internet cannot go far. Today’s society reveres rule of law, and just as our actual society needs rule of law, so does our virtual society need rule of law. Cleaning up the online world demands the self-discipline of web users, but even more it demands the interventionist discipline (他律) of rule of law. Only by putting the “binds” of rule of law on the internet, by stipulating the lines of conduct and adding supervision according to the law (厘定行为边界，依法加以监管), only by making violators of the law bear the burden of illegality [as opposed to victims of crimes], only then can we possibly restrain irresponsible rumors, restrain the leakage of personal information, and make the internet clean again.

Following the Standing Committee’s decision, state media have emphasised provisions to protect privacy, and denied that the rules are aimed at suppressing netizens’ celebrated exposure of official wrongdoing. From Gui Tao and Huang Xin at Xinhua:

Online muckraking is not necessarily incompatible with a requirement to provide genuine identification. Many whistleblowers prefer to use their real names, as they feel this will give their claims more weight.

Other reports state that the identity policy will clamp down on the freedom of speech in Chinese cyberspace. But the accusers should know that freedom without limits or responsibility is chaotic and dangerous. No one should enjoy the freedom to spread malicious rumors or libel, even online. The rule should only be feared by slanderers who wish to take advantage of online anonymity.

For law-abiding netizens, the rules passed on Friday will only better safeguard their lawful rights and privacy. The rules, which stress the protection of Internet users’ privacy, stipulate that citizens have the rights to demand service providers to delete online information that discloses their identities or infringes upon their own rights.

[…] Instead of depriving netizens’ freedom and entitlement, the rules protect the legal rights of every Internet user. The rules will ultimately help to create a better online environment in China.

Global Times aimed for a similarly reassuring tone:

Overall, the Chinese Internet is free and responsible, but also has moments of chaos and illegal activity. Infringements upon people’s rights and privacy can easily be found on the Internet. The new legislation, in this regard, is likely to become a turning point in terms of online regulation. Most of its 12 articles respond to the high expectations of the public for changes to the Chinese Internet.

Of course, there are concerns. Despite its chaotic nature, the Internet has been playing a role as a supervisor of the government from the bottom up. As a truly effective and tough supervision mechanism has yet to be formed within the system, supervision from the Internet is important to make up for it. This is a huge contribution the Internet has made to China’s construction of democracy, and no one wants to see it weakened.

In reality, there is no crackdown on the public’s supervision via the Internet, because this wouldn’t help China’s progress.

But meanwhile, we cannot simply cover up all the problems of the Internet just because it dares to criticize. There is urgent need for the Internet to have order, and this cannot be achieved through moral self-discipline only, but requires assistance from the law.

Xinhua’s Gui and Huang also played down the significance of the new real-name rules, arguing that many such requirements already exist. But according to The New York Times’ Keith Bradsher, they are now likely to become both more widespread and more strictly enforced.

Any entity providing Internet access, including over fixed-line or mobile phones, “should when signing agreements with users or confirming provision of services, demand that users provide true information about their identities,” the committee ordered.

[…] The regulations issued Friday build on a series of similar administrative guidelines and municipal rules issued over the past year. China’s mostly private Internet service providers have been slow to comply with them, fearing the reactions of their customers. The committee’s decision has much greater legal force, and puts far more pressure on Chinese Internet providers to comply more quickly and more comprehensively, Internet specialists said.

[…] The requirement for real names appeared to be aimed particularly at cellphone companies and other providers of mobile Internet access. At the news conference, an official from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Zhao Zhiguo, said that nearly all fixed-line services now had real-name registration, but that only about 70 percent of mobile phones were registered under real names.

Whether or not the new rules stem the flow of online exposés, argued NPR’s Frank Langfitt, “it’s also clear that muckrakers can only aim so high.”

LANGFITT: […] Luo Changping is deputy editor of Caijing, one of China’s more aggressive and independent magazines. Earlier this month, he posted on his Chinese Twitter account allegations about a high-ranking official in Beijing. Luo said the official had fabricated his masters’ degree and helped defraud Chinese banks. So far, Luo says, the charges have gone nowhere. […] Many domestic media are not allowed to report on this case, he said, and frankly, Luo was hesitant to discuss it.

CHANGPING: (Through translator) My phones certainly have been monitored, including my office phone, home phone and cell phone. I can feel that. Sometimes phones will be cut off, and you can hear echoes.

LANGFITT: Luo says without the rule of law and a truly open press, piecemeal exposes can only do so much. He’s not optimistic. […] If there are no systematic changes, he says, I think fighting corruption on a case-by-case basis doesn’t have much effect. It’s really just a power struggle between officials.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet activism, Internet regulation, National People's Congress, people's daily, privacy, real name, real name registration, rule of law, state media, Xinhua
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

From a pair of computer screens in a lime green bedroom in Upper Manhattan, a 27-year-old man from Wuhan, China, is working to bring about a popular uprising.

“Our group is expanding,” said the uptown blogger, who studied the classics and graduated from Columbia University. He asked to be called Gaius Gracchus, in honor of the ancient Roman reformer, but also uses the pseudonym Hua Ge, or “Flower Brother,” online.

Some activists question the value of such efforts, saying that the calls for widespread protests have accomplished little except to provoke the government into arresting dozens of activists since February.

“It’s an admirable attempt at free expression, but we have not seen any sudden change come of it,” said Pu Zhiqiang, a leading human rights lawyer and advocate of democratic reform in China. “Instead, we’ve mainly seen the Chinese Communist Party frighten itself over it. So it’s hard to see the significance of it in the short term.”

Despite his work, the revolution remains notional. No protesters have gathered in Chinese streets under the banner of the Jasmine movement since late February. Only the police heed the calls for protest each Sunday, blanketing areas in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities in an attempt to snuff out coordinated gatherings.

Mr. Wang, sitting under a photograph of Tiananmen Square in the party’s modest New York headquarters in Flushing, Queens, said there was a debate among dissidents about whether China was ready for an Internet-driven revolution coordinated by a new generation. “We are excited with the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ because we see that the young Chinese, they want to return to the streets,” he said.

While there is no clear evidence that such broad sentiment exists, Chinese authorities are clearly readying for the possibility.

Interest about the people behind the Jasmine Revolution reignited after the Associated Press tracked down the activists earlier this month and talked to them about their aims. From the AP:

The group is a network of 20 mostly highly educated, young Chinese with eight members inside China and 12 in more than half a dozen other countries.

Interviews with four members of the Initiators show similar evolutions: All are young people who grew to resent the government’s autocratic rule and China’s widespread inequality and injustice. The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt made change look possible.

“People born in the late ’80s and the ’90s have basically decided that in their generation one-party rule cannot possibly outlive them, cannot possibly even continue in their lifetimes. This is for certain,” the lean, soft-spoken 22-year-old who goes by the Internet alias “Forest Intelligence” said in an interview at a cafe in Seoul’s trendy Samcheong-dong district.

The group has no illusions that change, if it does come, will happen soon, but is willing to wait years to gather momentum.

“Some people say this movement is going to die and this movement is not going to be successful like that in Tunisia or Egypt. But in those countries, it took three or four years for the people to make preparations and finally, there was a peaceful transition,” Hua Ge said.

“It may take a period of time for the people to wake up, so the longer we continue our efforts the more people will know about the situation and join us.”

For more information, the “China Jasmine Revolution” blog can be found at http://molihuaxingdong.blogspot.com/

© cdtstaff for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet activism, jasmine revolution
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

While China has the world’s most sophisticated internet censorship system, it also has almost 400 million internet users – at least some of whom are challenging those restraints with increasing boldness. Controls mean that almost everyone self-censors to some degree. But some have used the variations and gaps in the system to stake out spaces where they can find or share viewpoints that are not officially sanctioned.

In fact, the internet is arguably more important than in other countries since the mainstream media is still more firmly controlled. The Chinese have even invented a word – “wangmin” or “netizen” – that captures this sense of the internet as a space for social and political discussion.

It is also a space for enjoyment.

“The internet community is diverse, lively, and contentious, full of fun and dynamism,” said Guobin Yang, author of The Power of the Internet: Citizen Activism in China. “This aspect of Chinese internet culture is not well understood by the general public in the west.

“[The internet culture is] capturing more and more things, good or bad, political or non-political, and then weaving them into all sorts of new creatures – new languages, new relationships, new images … despite and perhaps because of political control.”

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: freedom of expression, Internet activism, Internet culture
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Lin, 50, was sobbing outside a government office last summer when she met self-taught legal expert Fan Yanqiong. Fan took down the details of the case from Lin and then posted them online. Two others, You Jingyou and Wu Huaying, spoke to the mother and posted their video interview online.

On Friday, the three were in court awaiting a verdict on charges of making false accusations, which carries a sentence of up to three years in jail.

It is the latest example of Chinese Internet users being targeted for their budding grass-roots activism — ordinary people spreading the word about grievances from every corner of the country with postings on Twitter, microblogs and other Web sites.

“Netizens are using the Internet to talk about injustice,” said Liu Xiaoyuan, You’s lawyer. “But local officials just use their public power to suppress them.”

Dozens of bloggers showed up outside Mawei Distrist People’s Court on Friday in Fuzhou city where the verdict was to be announced, tweeting constantly and posting photos from the scene online. They reportedly were met by more than 100 uniformed and plainclothes police. The case was indefinitely postponed.

Chinese netizens have tweeted and posted pictures from outside the courthouse. All Tweets are here:

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bloggers, Internet activism, Twitter
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

These appear to be dark days for the Internet in China.

Four months into a crusade against Internet pornography, the government is closing thousands of sites—some pornographic, some not—and tightening rules on who can register Web addresses inside China.

A backlash against Beijing’s moves to block access to the Internet has spurred attempts by many users to ‘scale’ the so-called Great Firewall of censorship.
Foreign sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, blocked by censors in the run-up to the 60th anniversary of Communist Party rule on Oct. 1, remain inaccessible to most Chinese users. Several prominent critics of the state who used the Internet to spread their message have been detained or imprisoned.

Yet this list of casualties obscures a larger truth: The censors are losing.

… That the Internet threatens, fundamentally, the party’s information monopoly is one of the few facts that China’s liberal activists and its government enforcers agree on. In an essay published in December in a government magazine, Minister of Public Security Meng Jianzhu warned that the Internet “has become an important means for anti-China forces to engage in infiltration and sabotage, and to enlarge their power of destruction, which brings new challenges to the public security agencies to maintain national security and social stability.” He pointed to the use of the Internet to spread word of unrest before the government has a chance to control it.

Please click here to read the full text.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet activism, Internet censorship, Internet control, Xiao Qiang
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

A Twitter-style service offered by a government-linked news site in China was hacked and has since gone offline, according to screenshots posted on the Web.

A microblog service launched Tuesday by the Web site of the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of China’s ruling Communist Party, added to the growing number of Twitter-style services offered in China but became inaccessible by Wednesday. Screenshots posted in Chinese online forums showed the service before it went offline bombarding visitors with a set of pop-up messages apparently added by a hacker.

Some were satirical notes about the state-run newspaper or the “Great Firewall of China,” an informal name for the set of Internet controls China uses to block Web sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Images are from flickr.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blogs, hacking, Internet activism, people's daily
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Chinese web users have launched a postcard campaign to support dissidents in prisons and to protest against their detention, one of the organizers told Reuters.

Chinese Internet activists launched their first postcard campaign last month, in a little-known case of a man detained in Fujian province in southern China.

They are now expanding the campaign to support better-known activists, including legal aid lawyer Xu Zhiyong and earthquake victim advocate Tan Zuoren.

“It depends on the prison or detention house whether they can receive the postcards,” wrote Wen Yunchao, the blogger who initiated the idea.

“But pressure could be felt when huge amounts of postcards are flooding in.”

Read also on CDT: “Guo Baofeng, Your Mother is Calling You Home for Dinner!” (With Slideshow)

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Guo Baofeng, Internet activism, Ran Yunfei, Tan Zuoren, Wen Yunchao, Xu Zhiyong
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Celebrations that Beijing has bowed to global pressure and scrapped an order to use filtering software in all personal computers have turned out to be premature. On July 1, a Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) spokesman said that while Beijing had, on June 30, postponed the installation of the China-made Net-screening device, “the government will definitely carry on the directive on Green Dam.” While Green Dam allegedly targets only pornography, foreign and Chinese experts alike think its real purpose is to censor “subversive” material and to prevent the country’s 300 million Netizens from fomenting dissent on China’s growing information superhighways (CNN.com, June 30; InformationWeek.com, July 2). Also indicative of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) determination to combat Net-based anti-government activities are plans to convict leading dissident Liu Xiaobo on charges of “inciting subversion to the state and the socialist system.” Dr. Liu is an internationally known writer who was a key organizer of the Net-empowered Charter 08 Movement, which the CCP deems one of the most potent challenges to its authority since the mid-2000s. Beijing leaders also appear to have been taken aback by the so-called “Twitter Revolution” in Iran, where liberal activists have used the Internet and allied vehicles to broadcast their opposition to the controversial presidential polls held last month.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Green Dam, Internet activism, Internet control
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

I was a student at Beijing University at the time. My generation and the generation before us had grown up with censorship; there were severe punishments for voicing dissent. My parents were sent to a labour camp during the Cultural Revolution for being intellectuals. When I was 14 years old, I decided that I wanted to become a writer. My mother, who was a professor of Chinese literature, forbade it because writing was one of the most dangerous professions.

The history of modern China has been punctuated by bursts of rebellion followed by bloody crackdown. Throughout the history of the Chinese Communist Party not only has it been dangerous for the protesters, but also the protests have never produced any real impact.

The internet has changed this. The web gave the Chinese people a platform to express their opinions and to have their cases heard, and it is making a difference. The attention given to the case of a young woman working in a public bathhouse in a remote area of China is a good illustration of this.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989 protests, Deng Yujiao, Internet activism, online public opinion
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

So far this week we’ve seen the temporary blocking of Google.com and related services hosted outside of China including GMail. As if that wasn’t bad enough for one week, we’re now told that sexual health websites are a no-go for ordinary Internet users.

Meanwhile, the increased discussion of censorship all over the Chinese Internet is prompting China’s netizens to educate themselves about the various technical methods to “jump over” the “great firewall.” There are no hard and fast statistics on how many people in China are now using proxy servers, Tor, Psiphon, Freegate/Dynaweb, or OpenDNS as compared to a month ago. But based on the frequent mentions of these tools I’ve been seeing every day on blogs, in Twitter, and on other social networking sites, it seems that the latest Net Nanny follies have helped raise awareness of circumvention tools to a whole new level. If you plug the term 翻墙 (which means “scale the wall” – the most common Chinese euphemism for censorship circumvention) into Google’s search insights and restrict it to searches coming from China, you see a big spike in early June and a bigger spkie in the past few days (click to enlarge):

Searches for Tor (a nonprofit tool for anonymizing and circumvention) are also substantially up this month, and Chinese-language searches originating in China for Freegate (a tool developed and operated by a FLG-affiliated organization) spiked dramatically over the weekend.(...)
Read the rest of Rebecca MacKinnon: China’s Censorship Blowback (313 words)

---

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Fang Binxing, Great Firewall, Internet activism, Internet censorship
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/06/rebecca-mackinnon-chinas-censorship-blowback/feed/ 0 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/06/civic-minded-chinese-find-a-voice-online/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/06/civic-minded-chinese-find-a-voice-online/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:53:30 +0000 Liu Yong http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=40892 Read more]]>

From New York Times:

The case of Ms. Deng is only the most recent and prominent of several cases in which the Internet has cracked open a channel for citizens to voice mass displeasure with official conduct, demonstrating its potential as a catalyst for social change.

The government’s reactions have raised questions about how much power officials have to control what they call “online mass incidents.” China’s estimated 300 million Internet users, experts say, are awakening to the idea that, even in authoritarian China, they sometimes can fight City Hall.

“It’s about raising the public awareness of democratic ideas — accountability, transparency, citizens’ rights to participate, that the government should serve the people,” said Xiao Qiang, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who tracks China’s Internet activity. “Netizens who are now sharing those more democratic values are using these cases, each time making inch-by-inch progress.”

For more English news about Deng Yujiao, please click here.

For more Chinese blogger’s comments on Deng Yujiao’s case, please click here.

---

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Deng Yujiao, Internet activism, Xiao Qiang
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/06/civic-minded-chinese-find-a-voice-online/feed/ 0 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/06/xiao-qiang-the-roar-of-dissent-online/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/06/xiao-qiang-the-roar-of-dissent-online/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:16:47 +0000 Xiao Qiang http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=39985 Read more]]> From the New York Times:

Today, reports abound of young Chinese saying they don’t know or don’t care about events in 1989. Yet all one has to do is go online to the vast number of Chinese forums and blogs to know that the spirit of Tiananmen is still alive.

With 300 million people — mostly young, urban and well-educated — online in the country, the Internet has provided Chinese citizens with an unprecedented capacity to express themselves, expose corrupt local officials and call for social justice, despite heavy government censorship.

From efforts to uncover child slave labor to protests that halted the construction of a dangerous chemical plant, netizens are demanding accountability, transparency, and political reform from their government.

Recently, artist and blogger Ai Weiwei drew international attention to the issue of bad school construction and the children killed in those schools during the Sichuan earthquake by his efforts to collect their names. He has received an outpouring of support from the online public, which is calling for systematic changes, including an end to official corruption and cover-ups.

Such “public events” are increasing day by day, and reflect a rising rights consciousness among the Chinese. In 1989, the voices of those gathered on Tiananmen Square were heard on TV screens by millions around the world. Today, millions of voices express themselves on the Internet, carrying on the demand for democratic reforms that the Tiananmen protesters called for.

---

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989 20 years, Ai Weiwei, Internet activism, Xiao Qiang
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/06/xiao-qiang-the-roar-of-dissent-online/feed/ 1 http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/05/podcast-can-the-internet-bring-democracy-to-china/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/05/podcast-can-the-internet-bring-democracy-to-china/#comments Mon, 18 May 2009 23:28:29 +0000 Xiao Qiang http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=38995 Read more]]> From the Council on Foreign Relations:

Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project and an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, says the Chinese Communist Party seems increasingly inclined to try to use the Internet as a tool to gauge public opinion on local issues. At the same time, he says, it seems bent on strongly policing online dialogue to keep a handle on public opinion.

Qiang says strong Internet voices are emerging in favor of democratic reforms in China. He notes that this strain of opinion can at time conflict with nationalistic voices in the country, such as those that emerged in response to last year’s pro-Tibet rallies, which have also been amplified by the Internet. But Qiang says nationalistic and reform-oriented voices also overlap. “The same people who are very nationalistic” on issues like Tibet can be “very vocal to support political reform,” he says. Qiang says the “jury is still out” on what China’s experience with the Internet says about the medium as a democratizing factor. He stresses, however, that the Internet has proved to be a liberal force for the Chinese society, and could, in the long run, lead to a less repressive government in the country.

Please click here to listen to the interview.

Image source: Daihua’s Art Space.

---

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CCP, Internet activism, Internet censorship, political reform, Tibet, Xiao Qiang
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

]]> http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/05/podcast-can-the-internet-bring-democracy-to-china/feed/ 0 40.7560539 -73.9869537