China Releases Cyber Dissident

Ridgelift writes "Reuters UK has the story on the release of three 'cyber dissidents' just one week before a trip by visit by Premier Wen Jiabao to the United States. One of the dissidents, 23-year-old Liu Di, aka the 'Stainless Steel Mouse,' had been detained since November 2002. She wrote political satire about the ruling Communist Party and posted messages in Internet chatrooms calling for the release of online dissidents. She was never formally charged, but kept at Qincheng Prison for over a year."

Comments

This would be good.....

[StingRay02]

...if not for the fact that it's probably just a PR move. It seems like every time the U.S. has something to do with China, human rights becomes the issue of the day. By releasing a couple of dissidents, China can say "Look, we respect human rights." It rings very hollow.

Both sides of the pond?

[mcrbids]

Before we get all high and mighty, and conclude that we in the United States are so much better, superior, or luckier, remember about the prisoners the US is holding RIGHT NOW in Guantanamo Bay.

These prisoners of the US Government were held for a year or more.

Let's clean up our own act before we get all high and mighty about the Chinese, heh?

What happened to fighting for freedom in the USA?

[Adolph_Hitler]

I notice people are willing to fight for freedom for the Iraqis, for the Chinese, for every country imagineable but in the USA we want a police state to protect ourselves from the terrorists? I'm confused, someone please explain this to me. We pass the patriot act, and make it possible to toss anyone in prison who even resembles a terrorist with no trial, nothing. I'd be worried about the USA.

Re:hmmm...

[Eloquence]

Anyone with half a brain will admit that China is more repressive on most domestic issues than the US. However, the fact that valid comparisons can be made in limited areas should be enough to give Americans the heebie-jeebies. Furthermore, you will hardly convince anyone by listing "factoids" without botherting to cite sources. Case in point: The total prison population in China, according to the World Prison Population List, is about 1.4 million. It is highly doubtful that 1 million of these are "dissidents". So this seems to be a fairly blatant case of numbers being exaggerated for political effect ("1 million" .. "300,000" - when you have nice, round numbers like these, you know you're dealing with public relations data). What's worse, the US is currently leading the international list, both in relative and absolute numbers, with more than 1.9 million people in prison, and that does not include detentions abroad. This in spite of the fact that the US has about 1/4th the population of China. The only country that has a larger percentage of the population in prison is Rwanda, where over 100,000 people are held on suspicion of participating in the 1994 genocide of over 800,000 people.

Why are so many Americans in prison, under third world medical conditions? The war on drugs, primarily, but also idiotic minimum sentencing laws. Where China executes people as a "deterrence", the US lock them up for decades for the same reason, while still retaining a provably flawed capital punishment system. And, by the way, according to Amnesty International:

Seven countries since 1990 are known to have executed prisoners who were under 18 years old at the time of the crime - Congo (Democratic Republic), Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, USA and Yemen. The country which carried out the greatest number of known executions of child offenders was the USA (17 since 1990).

There are many other very serious social issues in the US (insufficient health care, police brutality, religious fundamentalism, sexual hysteria ..), and just waving the finger at China and shouting "Woo, we're so great" is not going to cut it. The US needs to get serious about cleaning up at home before trying to impose itself as the world police elsewhere. Getting rid of your idiot president would be a good start.

Re:It's called compare and contrast (ie, not OT)

[jsebrech]

Actually, it's easy to find specific allegations of torture. It's also quite easy to find that the international and US courts have no control over guantanamo bay prisoners. And it's easy to find this from multiple sources. To me the very fact that the US government doesn't want courts to get involved signifies they're likely doing stuff that can not see the light of day. If there's nothing to hide, why are they hiding it?

Ofcourse, you could argue that these are all lies and hearsay, and that the US government would never ever use torture. But it is a fact that prisoners on guantanamo bay are held illegally (according to the geneva convention they should be pow's, but the US claims they aren't), and that they do not have due process rights (inalienable human right). If the US is breaking the law anyway in their detainment of these prisoners, would it be such a stretch to imagine them using torture as well?

There is such a thing as psychological torture by the way. If you're being held without accusation, without promise of release, ever (despite that the war in afghanistan is over, pow's haven't been returned or formally accused of a crime), and without even access to counsel or basically the outside world, would you feel ok? I'd feel downright miserable in such circumstances, even if they did not lay a hand on me. The geneva convention's definition of torture is "cruel and unusual treatment", which does not need to have a physical component involved.

I see no need for guantanamo bay. If the people there did something wrong, the regular US judicial system should be able to handle it. If they didn't do something wrong (and no, fighting for your country is not a crime), they should be freed. The very existance of guantanamo bay is a slap in the face of justice.