A Party member and chief engineer for a State-owned enterprise in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, died in suspicious circumstances Tuesday while being held for investigation by the city’s commission for discipline inspection.

The People’s Procuratorate of Wenzhou said the man, Yu Qiyi, “suffered an accident” Monday night and died in hospital at 3:15 am on Tuesday. However, Yu’s family slammed claims his death was accidental, insisting photos circulated online [see Shanghaiist] show he had bruises and appeared to have been bitten.

[…] On Monday night, staff from Yu Qiyi’s company rang his family to inform them he had been hospitalized and his life hung in the balance. Family and friends rushed to the hospital, only to learn Yu junior had died and had bruising over much of his upper-body.

[…] The hospital listed the cause of Yu’s death as drowning, noting he was unconscious when admitted for treatment, his father said.

Another disputed shuanggui death occurred in September, when the family of a retired official from Hunan rejected official claims that he had committed suicide. Photos of his apparently bruised body led to speculation that he had been beaten and murdered: “Inspectors,” one netizen commented, “you guys are as fierce as Japanese bandits!”

The Dui Hua Foundation noted in 2011 that shuanggui—whose name refers to the “dual designation” of the time and place of an investigation—enjoys some popular support, fed by anger at official corruption and other abuses of power. “Sadly,” it added, “acceptance of shuanggui seems to have seeped into international human rights circles and resulted in a dearth of relevant research and advocacy.” But The Guardian’s Jonathan Kaiman reported that state media coverage of Yu’s death might signal positive, if limited, change:

Critics say shuanggui detainees, bereft of legal protection, are particularly vulnerable to human rights abuses. According to Flora Sapio, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong who has written a book on the subject, Xinhua’s sympathetic coverage could represent a high-level decision to begin addressing the rights of detainees while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged.

“What they’re trying to do is get people in the system to treat criminal suspects in a different way,” she said. “At the same time you, as the party state, want to be the only voice with the power to talk on matters of justice.”

The vast majority of shuanggui detainees stand no chance of rescuing their careers and many kill themselves in detention. Most cases are eventually transferred to the judiciary, where they usually end in death sentences or long imprisonments. Bo Xilai, the disgraced Chongqing party chief, spent 10 months under such detention before his case was sent to the courts in January. He has yet to be formally tried.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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The title refers to an incident in prison when he broke the rules by singing; as punishment, he was ordered to sing 100 songs. When his voice gave out, he was tortured with electric shocks from a baton inserted into his anus.

“I felt like a duck whose feathers were being stripped,” he writes.

[…] Even now, he experiences a recurring nightmare. “I am flying and I see people on the ground with guns and knives running after me,” he said. “But I am a bird without legs, and when I can’t fly anymore, I fall to the ground. The people come nearer and nearer, and as soon as they are about to attack, I wake up filled with terror.”

[…] He sees his mission as a storyteller of human suffering, not as a reformer striving for change in what he calls the “foul pigsty” that is China. “I have no interest in what China will become,” he said. “My suggestion would be that China crumbles into dozens of little countries so that it would no longer be the terrible menace it is now.”

See more on the book and Liao’s incarceration via CDT.

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“He was limping and reported having heart problems and high blood pressure,” a friend, Jamyang Tsultrim, told Radio Free Asia. “His vision was also weak.”

A former monk, Jigme Gyatso was initially given a 15-year sentence for “leading a counterrevolutionary organization” after he and a group of friends secretly advocated Tibetan independence. The crimes he was accused of by a Chinese court in 1996 included his role in distributing pro-independence leaflets and hanging a banned Tibetan flag at the Ganden monastery near Lhasa, capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region.

[…] The authorities, in fact, added three years to Jigme Gyatso’s sentence after he joined other inmates in shouting out the name of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader, as a delegation from the European Union toured their prison in 2004. According to Amnesty International, prison guards later retaliated by severely beating Jigme Gyatso and killing nine inmates.

Jigme Gyatso should not be confused with the monk and filmmaker of the same name who has been missing since last September.

Dechen Pemba of High Peaks Pure Earth contributed to this post.

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The source said Wang’s food and accommodation were better than expected. “Wang lives in a single-room which has everything one could expect to find, including a television to watch and newspapers and magazines to read,” the source said.

However, he has no computer and no access to the internet.

He is being held in Qincheng Prison, which is administered by the Ministry of Public Security and was built to hold officials above vice-ministerial level.

[…] The source said some supporters from Chongqing or Wang’s hometown in Liaoning province had taken dishes of dumplings to the prison and dedicated them to Wang on the eve of Lunar New Year last month. “It was a heartfelt gesture even though he [Wang] failed to receive the gifts,” the source said.

Confiscated dumplings aside, Wang’s reported circumstances are rather softer than those he is said to have presided over as police chief. The municipality’s new administration has promised to “banish” his and Bo’s influence. Supporters of Bo, who is still awaiting trial, gathered in Chongqing on Thursday to protest the exorcism. From Patrick Boehler at South China Morning Post:

“The people of Chongqing do not welcome an organised crime lawyer,” one banner read, according to photos that spread on Sina Weibo and forums. “Fight organised crime, eliminate the evil.” Many of the comments on Weibo reflected some nostalgia for Bo’s rule, which ended last year and became China’s most spectacular political scandal in decades. “I only trust Bo Xilai,” one person commented on the photos. “Justice will prevail.”

The red banners they were holding were directed against lawyer Li Zhuang, who is leading appeals against what he says were politically motivated convictions during Bo’s tenure. He himself has been sentenced to two and half years in prison for fabricating evidence in 2010. The small protest shows that Bo, son of revolutionary hero Bo Yibo, still has at least some support in his former Central Chinese power base.

Li himself has memorably described Bo and Wang’s rule as “like a crazy mouse on a rollercoaster going to a slippery slide“.

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“In fact, they’ve never stopped monitoring us for one day after Chen Guangcheng left,” the brother, Chen Guangfu, who lives in Dongshigu village, in Shandong Province, said Wednesday. “There’s still surveillance in the village. The guards, they’re still here, just a bit more hidden.”

He said he was followed recently. “The situation is still quite tense here,” he said. He also reported new pressure on his son, Chen Kegui, who was sentenced to three years and three months in prison in November for assaulting and injuring a government official who broke into the family’s home in April during a frantic search for the escaped Mr. Chen. The brief trial was riddled with irregularities that thwarted the defense, said lawyers supporting the family.

When Chen Guangfu and other family members visited on Feb. 28, Chen Kegui told them he was beaten and threatened by guards before the trial, and that he has since been warned by prison officials not to try any appeals of his sentence, said the father.

[…] Prison guards kept close watch on the visit, and Chen Kegui appeared reluctant to recount details of what he has been through, Chen Guangcheng said. “It’s clear that there are other things he’s holding back from saying,” he added.

See more on Chen Kegui’s case via CDT.

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On January 12, 2013, two family members of the imprisoned rights defense lawyer Gao Zhisheng (高智晟) were permitted to visit Gao at Shaya Prison in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, according to Gao’s wife Geng He (耿和). This was the first family visit since March 24, 2012, and the only confirmation since that date that Gao is still alive. Gao’s younger brother and Geng He’s father were allowed to see Gao and speak with him by phone through a glass window.

[…] Before being allowed to see Gao, his younger brother was subjected to a body search and told that, during the visit, he was not allowed to discuss Gao’s case, Gao’s prison situation, or Geng He and their two children, who are in the United States, or to accept press interviews after the visit.

Gao’s mind seemed clear and he spoke normally. His younger brother was not able to find out when Gao is scheduled to be released, or whether he received the letters from his wife and children.

When Gao’s brother asked when Gao is permitted to see his family next, he was told that the family has to “follow old ways.” Geng He said, “Last time, it took nine months for the authorities to allow the family to see Gao in prison. How long will it take next time?”

See more on Gao’s case at Human Rights in China and at CDT.

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The book was a long time in the making and has come at huge personal cost. Faced with the threat of more prison if he had it published abroad, he decided to flee China in 2011, leaving his mother and others behind.

“They were watching my emails and they knew I was in touch with editors in Germany and Taiwan,” he said at the launch of For a Song and a Hundred Songs in Paris.

“They said I couldn’t publish the book, and if I did, they would put me in prison again, this time for at least 10 years … The German and Taiwan editors got worried about my safety and they pushed back the publication date.

“All in all, they pushed it back three times. The third time, I decided to escape.”

Liao discussed the book’s origins with Mariana Grépinet (article in French) at Paris Match:

This book almost never saw the light of day. Why is that?

I started writing it upon leaving prison. I’d formed the habit of scribbling poems in very small writing, because they only gave us pencil and paper for a couple of hours each month. The first time, it took a little over a year. I had over 300,000 characters! On April 4th, 1995, the police came and confiscated my manuscript. At that point, I wasn’t using a computer, I wrote it all by hand. So I had a choice: I could forget about it, or rewrite the whole thing. I spent two years rewriting it. That was a formidable memory exercise! And paradoxically, it helped a lot with the literary structure as well as my reports on the dregs of Chinese society: I was able to record everything down to the slightest details …. Then the police came back. I’d written even smaller so I could hide the pages more easily, but they stole it again anyway. The third time, I had a computer, a big one, and took the precaution of making extra copies. Of course, each version was different. Only the police could say which was best: they are my most loyal readers!

[…] You seem bitter ….

In China, the air, the blood, the milk, and even the values are polluted. If the west continues to import from China, it too will end up as one vast dustbin.

Fragments of Liao’s time in prison can be seen in Nineteen Days, his recollections of June 4ths from 1989 to 2009, translated by Wenguang Huang and published in The Paris Review:

June 4, 1993

I was transferred from the No. 2 Sichuan Provincial Prison in the suburbs of Chongqing. I will serve out the rest of my sentence at the No. 3 Prison in Dazu County, in northern Sichuan Province. Tonight, a dozen convicted counterrevolutionaries gathered spontaneously in the courtyard, squatting down and silently watching the sky like those fabled frogs stuck at the bottom of a deep well.

I was holding a flute in my hand. The crowd surrounded me, asking me to play a tune. I was still an amateur, though, and hadn’t yet mastered the instrument. I became really nervous in front of the crowd and played out a string of dissonant notes.

Li Bifeng, an inmate, patted me on my shoulder and said: “Old Liao, I’m glad that you will be released soon.” Another inmate, Pu Yong, who died soon after his release, interrupted us: “We will all be released soon. I bet you that on the fifth anniversary, the verdict will be overturned and all of us, no matter what type of sentences we are serving, will be released.”

In November, Li was sentenced to 12 years in prison for charges related to a property deal. According to Liao, the case was actually motivated by officials’ misplaced suspicions that Li had financed his escape to Germany.

See also Philip Gourevitch on Liao’s move to Germany at The New Yorker, and an interview with Ian Johnson at The New York Review of Books soon afterwards, via CDT.

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[…] The practice of hiring “body doubles” or “stand-ins” is well-documented by official Chinese media. In 2009, a hospital president who caused a deadly traffic accident hired an employee’s father to “confess” and serve as his stand-in. A company chairman is currently charged with allegedly arranging criminal substitutes for the executives of two other companies. In another case, after hitting and killing a motorcyclist, a man driving without a license hired a substitute for roughly $8,000. The owner of a demolition company that illegally demolished a home earlier this year hired a destitute man, who made his living scavenging in the rubble of razed homes, and promised him $31 for each day the “body double” spent in jail. In China, the practice is so common that there is even a term for it: ding zui. Ding means “substitute,” and zui means “crime”; in other words, “substitute criminal.”

The ability to hire so-called substitute criminals is just one way in which China’s extreme upper crust are able to live by their own set of rules. While Occupy Wall Street grabbed attention for its attacks on the “1 percent,” in China, a much smaller fraction of the country controls an even greater amount of wealth. The top one-tenth of 1 percent in China controls close to half of the country’s riches. The children and relatives of China’s rulers, many of whom grew up together, form a thicket of mutually beneficial relationships, with many able to enrich themselves financially and, if necessary, gain protection from criminal allegations.

Sant traces the use of ding zui back to the Imperial era, when some officials reportedly defended it on the basis that that justice was still done as long as the “market value” of the punishment was paid.

China Law Prof Blog (via @chinahearsay) has excavated a 2004 story about an entire fake prison in Sichuan province, set up as cover for a factory making pirate cigarettes.

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China has pledged to abolish the practice of taking transplant human organs from condemned prisoners within three to five years, a senior health official said Thursday.

China is creating a national organ donation system to reduce its reliance on organ donations from death row inmates and encourage donations from the public, Huang Jiefu, vice minister of health, told a conference in east China’s city of Hangzhou.

[...]“The pledge to abolish organ donations from condemned prisoners represents the resolve of the government,” he said.

Health officials have said insufficient organ donations by the public mean that the majority of transplanted organs in China come from executed prisoners – but only with prior consent.

Statistics from the Ministry of Health show that about 1.5 million people in China need transplants, but only some 10,000 transplants are performed annually.

The Wall Street Journal provides some context and statistics surrounding the harvesting of prisoner’s organs in China, and mentions the viewpoint of some who are awaiting organ donations:

Due in part to traditional beliefs and distrust of the medical system, voluntary donations are rare in China, where the need for organs far exceeds the supply. An estimated 1.5 million people in China are in need of organ transplants annually, while only 10,000 receive them, according to government statistics.

An estimated 65% of China’s annual organ donations come from prisoners, according to human-rights advocacy organization Amnesty International.

[...]Some patients awaiting transplants say abolishing inmate donations will be akin to a death sentence for them, according to a report published in the medical journal Lancet in 2011. The report said the number of patients requiring transplants is rising due to the rise in chronic and noncommunicable diseases in the country.

PRI’s The World talks about the subject with their China correspondent Mary Kay Magistad. In the interview they discuss the details of the practice, and talk a bit more about the conflicting “traditional beliefs” mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article:

[...W]ithin the Chinese Confucian belief system you’re supposed to keep the body intact after a person dies. This is part of ancestral worship but also just part of how people feel about their bodies being a sacred part of themselves. You shouldn’t be even donating blood much less organs. It’s a real problem. There’s a huge shortage and the government is trying to figure out how to fill at least some of the gap.

The entire interview can be heard via PRI’s The World.

Also see the latest blogpost from Seeing Red in China, which offers a characteristically well-informed synopsis of the practice, its coverage in state media over the years, and the new policies that will effect it.

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I don’t disagree that the recent sentences are heavy. I’m less convinced, however, that the sentences themselves are clear evidence of a crackdown on dissent in China. This is because the length of the sentences in each of these cases can be attributed in large part to mandated penalty-intensification under Chinese law ….

Note that I’m not saying that there is no crackdown underway or that the punishments that were handed down are justified. I believe that China’s use of criminal sanctions against “inciting subversion” is a clear violation of international human rights law protecting free expression.

What I am saying is simply that Liu Xianbin, Chen Wei, and Chen Xi were given heavy punishments not simply because of any ongoing crackdown but more because of their persistent and long-standing political activism, for which each of them has spent a considerable amount of the past two decades behind bars. I think it gives us a better understanding of how the government cracks down on dissent to recognize that it’s precisely these kinds of veteran activists whom the authorities want “off the grid” and that the legal system is designed to enable them to do so.

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We are very disturbed by reports in China’s state-run media about a Beijing court’s decision to replace human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng’s extensive period of probation with a full three-year prison sentence. Just a few days before the five-year probation period expired, the Court decided that Gao must now serve his full suspended sentence for violating the probation rules, with no credit for the time he has already spent under the control of the authorities.

For the past 20 months, Gao has been subject to strict monitoring measures by the Public Security Bureau in what appears to be a form of house arrest in an unknown location. This case is illustrative of a trend of secret detention and disappearances of human rights defenders which the High Commissioner for Human Rights and other UN human rights bodies have already criticized on several occasions in recent years. The High Commissioner has raised the specific case of Gao, along with a number of others, with the Chinese authorities twice in the past seven months.

In relation to this case, one provision included under proposed amendments to China’s Criminal Law Procedure, which are currently being considered by the National People’s Congress, raises further concerns, as it would permit the legalization of secret detention. OHCHR is of the view that this will represent a major setback, running counter to a number of important efforts made over the past decade by the Government of China towards the ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

British Foreign Office Minister Jeremy Browne expressed similar concerns in a statement on Wednesday:

I am deeply concerned by reports that Chinese lawyer and human rights defender Gao Zhisheng, whose probation period was due to expire this week, has been returned to prison for three years. Gao has now been missing since March 2010. I am concerned by reports that Gao has suffered torture and mistreatment, and by the apparently extra-legal nature of his detention. I repeat calls previously made by the UK Government for the Chinese authorities to provide, as a matter of urgency, information regarding Gao’s wellbeing and location.

As in the case of Chen Guangcheng, whose family members have shared his house arrest since late 2010, Gao’s family has also been subjected to intense pressure by the authorities. Gao’s wife, Geng He, fled to the US with their children in 2009. At The Wall Street Journal, Paul Mooney describes their escape, based on a recent interview:

Ms. Geng’s story began in 2008, when a vegetable-seller slipped a note into her hand with the change. “We will protect you—don’t worry,” said the message, which she believes was from a member of the Falun Gong.

Matters reached a head when her daughter, Gege, now 17, was told to transfer to a new high school for her freshman year, a heavy emotional blow for the teenager. Seeing the effect of the government’s campaign against Mr. Gao on the family, Ms. Geng turned to the vegetable seller asking for help. This set in motion the escape.

Shortly after, the seller told her to proceed to the Beijing West Train Station one evening. She was to take her young son Tianyu, six years old at the time. Gege was to leave on her own. Ms. Geng had no opportunity to tell her husband she was leaving. “When we left our apartment, I didn’t look in any direction,” she recalls. “We just left with the clothes on our backs.”

Human Rights in China, meanwhile, reports the release of activist Wang Lihong following the completion of a nine-month prison sentence for “gathering a crowd to disturb social order”.

Wang Lihong (王荔蕻), a well-known rights defender from Beijing, was released in the early morning of December 20 from the Chaoyang District Detention Center in Beijing, where she completed a nine-month sentence for “picking quarrels and provoking troubles.” Wang’s son Qi Jianxiang (齐健翔) posted a public message on Twitter Tuesday asking that those planning to greet Wang outside the detention center not go there, saying that Wang is temporarily staying “another place to recuperate for a couple of days” (暂时在别处静养一两天).

She was detained on March 21, 2011, tried by the Chaoyang District People’s Court of Beijing on August 12, and convicted on September 9. The prosecution’s charge was based on Wang’s role in organizing a protest outside a courthouse in Fujian on April 16, 2010, where the “Three Netizens,” Fan Yanqiong (范燕琼), You Jingyou (游精佑), and Wu Huaying (吴华英), were tried after they helped expose a police cover-up of a rape and a murder. The government alleged that the protest resulted in disorder inside the courtroom and traffic confusion in the area.

HRIC also notes two other recent releases, those of Zheng Yichun and Bo Xiaomao, who served seven and twelve years respectively for “inciting subversion of state power”.

On his China Blues blog, Paul Mooney notes Wang’s release, and translates an essay on her activism and detention by Ai Xiaoming. The following excerpt is Wang’s defiant written response to official demands for a “letter of guarantee” during her three-month house arrest a year ago:

. . . [F]rom a legal point of view, making a citizen write a guarantee letter pledging to not do things that are not illegal in order to have freedom of movement is illegal and a mockery of the law.

I am a citizen of the People’s Republic of China. I have the right to live on the land of my own country and the right to freely move around.

I am a person with conscience and I cannot guarantee that I will remain silent in the face of suffering. I cannot guarantee that, when I face the stories of Qian Yunhui, Tang Fuzhen, Li Shulian . . . I will pretend not to see. . . .

If I remain silent when confronted with suffering and wickedness, then I will be the next person beaten down by evil. You as law enforcers, the restriction you place on my freedom is illegal and has seriously affected my life. I hope that law enforcement and related departments and personnel will quickly correct their illegal actions and give me back my freedom.

See also CDT coverage of Wang’s trial, which her lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan claimed was distorted by a number of procedural irregularities.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, Gao Zhisheng, house arrest, illegal detentions, prisoners, subversion, UN, UNHCHR, United Kingdom, Wang Lihong
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“Admiration” for China? “The right to find their salvation in their own way?” Liao Yiwu was astonished when told about the former chancellor’s statements. He asked whether Schmidt really uttered those precise words, then shook his head.

On Thursday of last week, Liao had just arrived in Munich after a book tour in the United States, in order to accept the Geschwister Scholl literary prize for his prison memoir on Nov. 14. He found his way, exhausted and shivering in the cold, to a restaurant in Munich’s English Garden for this interview, but when he heard Schmidt’s words quoted, he was suddenly wide awake.

Anyone who talks that way is afraid of jeopardizing trade with China, he said, but such people bring “bad thoughts into the world.” If trade is more important than human rights and dignity, “then the end of the world has arrived.” And no one should deceive themselves about the Communist Party, he said. “It has a golden body and two faces. It shows the Chinese people its fierce face, and the West its pleasant one ….”

At the restaurant in Munich, Liao orders a fish stew, but leaves half of it uneaten. “It’s the potatoes,” says the friend sitting next to him. “There were always potatoes in prison. Now he can’t force them down.”

Read more about Liao Yiwu, his writings and his move to Germany, via CDT.

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“I don’t think it ever occurred to the US or the Army that there would be GIs that would choose to go somewhere other than their own country,” Mr Hawkins says, more than six decades after he fought Communist Korean and Chinese soldiers in the frozen mud along the 38th Parallel.

When the war ended in 1953, tens of thousands of Korean and Chinese prisoners of war chose life in the US over their own homelands.

But America, in the grip of anti-communist fervour, was shocked when 20 of its own young soldiers defected to China.

David Hawkins was just 17 years old when he was wounded in battle and captured. Held prisoner for more than three years, when the war ended he decided not to return home.

“My reasoning was, they really have embraced this socialism so let me see what it is like – let me check it out,” he says.

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As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.

Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for “illegally petitioning” the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.

“Prison bosses make more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,” Liu told the Guardian. “There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off ….”

According to figures from the China Internet Centre, nearly £1.2bn of make- believe currencies were traded in China in 2008 and the number of gamers who play to earn and trade credits are on the rise.

A 2007 New York Times article described the gold farming phenomenon in greater depth, including the campaigns of extermination frequently waged on gold farmers by other players. These can have serious real-world consequences for the farmers: in-game death costs time and treasure, leading to missed quotas and firing or, in the case of prisoners like Liu, physical punishment.

It isn’t that WoW players don’t frequently kill other players for fun and kill points. They do. But there is usually more to it when the kill in question is a gold farmer. In part because gold farmers’ hunting patterns are so repetitive, they are easy to spot, making them ready targets for pent-up anti-R.M.T. hostility, expressed in everything from private sarcastic messages to gratuitous ambushes that can stop a farmer’s harvesting in its tracks. In homemade World of Warcraft video clips that circulate on YouTube or GameTrailers, with titles like “Chinese Gold Farmers Must Die” and “Chinese Farmer Extermination,” players document their farmer-killing expeditions through that same Timbermaw-ridden patch of WoW in which Min does his farming — a place so popular with farmers that Western players sometimes call it China Town. Nick Yee, an M.M.O. scholar based at Stanford, has noted the unsettling parallels (the recurrence of words like “vermin,” “rats” and “extermination”) between contemporary anti-gold-farmer rhetoric and 19th-century U.S. literature on immigrant Chinese laundry workers.

Min’s English is not good enough to grasp in all its richness the hatred aimed his way. But he gets the idea. He feels a little embarrassed around regular players and sometimes says he thinks about how he might explain himself to those who believe he has no place among them, if only he could speak their language. “I have this idea in mind that regular players should understand that people do different things in the game,” he said. “They are playing. And we are making a living.”

Gold farming is frequently conflated with Chinese nationality (PDF), according to Lisa Nakamura of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign:

Constance Steinkuehler’s analysis of Lineage II, a Korean MMO uncovered some the ways in which the condemnation of virtual currency buying is far exceeded by a visceral hatred of gold sellers or farmers. This hatred is strongly articulated to race and ethnicity: since many, but not all, gold farmers are Chinese, and there is a decidedly anti-Asian flavor to many player protests against “Chinese gold farmers.” As Steinkuehler notes, hatred of gold farmers has given rise to polls querying players on North American servers “Is it OK to Hate Chinese Players?” (32% of players responded “yes,” and the majority, 39%, replied “I don’t hate China, just what they stand for in L2,” and 10% checked “I am CN and you should mind yourself, you racist pig”).(Steinkuehler 2006, p 200) Though she notes “calling someone ‘Chinese’ is a general insult that seems aimed more at one’s style of play than one’s real-world ethnicity,” the construction of Chinese identity in MMO’s as abject, undesirable, and socially contaminated racializes the culture of online games, a culture that scholars such as Castronova have claimed are unique (and valuable) because they are exempt from “real world” problems such as racism, classism, “looksism” and other types of social inequality.

Gold farmers face other dangers. Late last year, Global Voices Online covered the sentencing of a pair of gold-farm owners to six and three-year prison terms. The post includes translated comments from blogger Ruan Yifeng, who argued that the disproportionate harshness of the punishment was imposed for the sake of game developers Shanda:

It’s loathsome to see the state judiciary serve to protect the interests of a company in such a way, and to issue a judicial interpretation which benefits Capital and sends those who haven’t committed any crime to prison.

Now, with this judicial precedent, it’ll be far easier for Internet game companies to profit as anyone who dares use a mod can be sent straight to jail! Faced with such roaring profits, who will care about the rights of the little people? Dong Jie and Chen Zhu have had their lives destroyed, but who cares if, this way, we succeed in putting the fear in other thieves? In any event, nobody forced Dong and Chen to lose their heads and go start plucking the hairs off a tiger.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: forced labor, gaming, gold farming, online games, prisoners, racism
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“He arrived safely at his hometown in Yulgan [in Chinese, Henan] county on the same day at around 7:00 p.m.,” the relative said. “On the way, he passed through Tsekhog [in Chinese, Zeku] county, where he was well received by the locals with scarves and greetings.”

“His family, fans, and friends gave him a warm welcome on his arrival at his home county in Malho prefecture,” the man said ….

“So far, the local police have not imposed restrictions on the local Tibetans and Mongolians for welcoming the popular singer following his more than a year in detention,” the relative said.

High Peaks Pure Earth has posted the video of one of the singer’s tracks, “Waiting with Hope”, accompanied by translated lyrics:

In this song, Tashi Dhondup directly references Yeshe Norbu (The Dalai Lama), the Panchen Lama recognised by the Dalai Lama and Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok, the much-revered abbot of the Serthar Institute in Eastern Tibet who passed away in 2004.

Yeshe Norbu, the wish-fulfilling gem
Don’t live in exile, please come home
The faithful people of the Land of Snows
Are waiting near your golden throne

Panchen Lama, the limitless and illuminated one
Don’t be in the prison, please come out
The faithful people of the Land of Snows
Are waiting for you with folded hands

Jigme Phuntsok, the great learned one
Like a bright star, please rise again
The faithful people of the Land of Snows
Are waiting for you with khatas in their hands

More tracks are available, with subtitles, on Vimeo.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Online video, prisoners, Tibetan culture, Tibetan independence
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