From Global Voices:
Charter 08 has been around for just over a year, reportedly gathered more than 10,000 signatures, and Liu Xiaobo, one of its founders, was sentenced to eleven years in prison on Christmas Day last week.
While most of the original 303 signatories to Charter 08 were prominent liberal mainland Chinese public intellectuals, the larger group of people who tend to fall in that category have for several years often been criticized for a tendency to remain silent on China’s numerous social issues.
More recently, well-known Beijing Film Academy professor Cui Weiping has been getting some of that on Twitter, which she took up in late 2009. Following several tweets from her followers, though not her stated motivation, she decided this week to phone up friends and colleagues and tweet their responses to the news of Liu’s heavy sentence.
