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

"Political Satire"

[Raindance]

This seems pretty high-profile and has piqued my interest; anyone have a link (ideally translated) to the "Political Satire" that was good enough to land this young woman in prison for a year?

RD

Re:"Political Satire"

[z01d]

http://171.64.233.179/

sorry, my english is not good enough to translate her writing.

more info about the brave young girl (quote from that website):

Liu Di is a 22-year-old student at the Department of Psychology, Beijing Normal University.

On November 7, 2002, the police of PRC arrested Miss Liu. No detention warrant has been shown to Liu or her family, and nobody has informed Miss Liu's whereabout to her family and the university after more than one month.

Until now, the only message Liu's family received from the police is an oral notice that Liu was charged for "endangering the national security."

Miss Liu had written a few satirical political comments on the Internet, which might be the cause for her arrest. Her penname at the BBS was "stainless mouse."

Miss Liu's mother died when she was 16. She lived with her grandmother who is an octogenarian.

It is said Miss Liu is physically weak.

Our view: The arrest of Miss Liu is illegal.

Re:"Political Satire"

[fbg111]

I don't have a link, but here's a rough translation of the "Political Satire" she wrote:

"The Chinese government needs to become more open and transparent, crack down on corruption within its ranks, and institutionalize universal human rights protections for its citizens."

Funny stuff, huh.

Atleast, with China...

[jkrise]

It's only a few cases like this, and everyone knows they're in prison.

OTOH, what good is served when chaps like RMS, Linus, Bruce, ESR etc. are all out in the open, yet can't achieve anything useful with just dissidence? To top it, we have some famous chaps from SCO on this side of the law, spouting their "Intellectual Property" claims!

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

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mitnick was held without bail for over two years before sentencing: he has said that he set some kind of United States record by being held for four and a half years without a bail hearing, while also held in solitary confinement for eight months 'in order to prevent a possible nuclear strike being initiated by me from a prison payphone'."
Kevin_Mitnick

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

[Anonymous Coward]

"No eye witness has made a single complaint."

"We know where your family lives, and we are prepared to bomb them into dust" is a pretty good incentive not to criticize...

Other possibilities:
1: its an experience they want to forget as soon as possible, and not talk about;
2: the US media has been instructed not to make any negative reports about conditions and treatment of prisoners (with the words "official secret" and "life imprisonment" to clinch the deal);
3: Your choice of media is such that you don't see the full statements of those released

I suspect number 3.

hmmm...

[mOoZik]

She was never formally charged, but kept at Qincheng Prison for over a year."
Just like the Guantanamo Bay prisoners?

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, except that there aren't any mass graves at Qincheng.

Re:Translation

[lordholm]

Actually, the Guantanamo prisoners are held as illegal combatants, and according to the laws of war rules and laws are not applicable on illegal combatants; and besides, the war is not (formally) over in Afganistan yet.

It is not custom to release POWs before the war is over (and these weren't POWs). It really isn't much to ask for; to count as a legal combatant all you have to do is have a clear chain of command and some kind of uniform (a piece of cloth wrapped around the arm is enough).

The people held in Guantanamo are held RIGHTFULLY. I am of the opinion that people that do not respect the laws of war shouldn't be able to hide behind them. On the other hand, I don't believe that the Northern Alliance were that good at keeping to the rules either.

If you want people the U.S. hold prisoned wrongly, it would be better to think of all the illegal aliens in the U.S. who are held in prison as their home nations refuse to let them back. They are thus trapped within the system, and THIS is horrible; the Guantanamo situation is not.

Re:Both sides of the pond?

[release7]

And don't forget the fact that China has MFN (most favored nation) trade status despite the blatant disregard for human rights. Then compare this to our embargoes against Cuba, whose only crime is having a lot of anti-Castro supporters in Florida who would vote against Bush for lifting any sanctions on the island nation.

other points of view

[Grond]

As the article and summary both mention, the release comes a week before the Premiere's visit to the US. An article in Der Spiegel claims, however, that the release was primarily motivated by the visit of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

An AP version of the story mentions Schroeders visit (which the Reuters story linked to by the summary does not), but does not go as far as claiming as Der Spiegel does that "[the release] is a gift for Schroeder" (my translation). That particular quote is attributed to Frank Lu of the Information Center for Democracy and Human Rights, a Hong Kong-based watchdog group that is a primary source for both the AP and Spiegel articles.

Simpleton

[GCP]

You can't think of a better way to govern that many people than an authoritarian regime with no elections that proclaims itself to be the "People's Government" and has imprisoned and murdered tens of millions of people for disagreeing?

Not a very deep thinker are you? The US and EU combined are about half the population of China. Do you mean to say that if our populations were simply to double, our best option would be to abandon democracy, rule of law, elections, free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc., and demonstrate that anyone who disagreed would end up dead? That's really the best you can come up with?

You sound like a product of Chinese (re)education.

Of course, you could argue that we can do it because we don't have to have one government controlling all of those people. We have several governments, each covering only a portion of those people, each subject to independent replacement every election day.

Of course China doesn't have to do it all with one government either. The Tibetans, Uighurs, Taiwanese, Hong Kongese...would love to take some of the "burden" off those poor overworked murderers in Beijing. But Beijing is just like you. They can't think of a better way for them to keep governing than by doing what they're doing, either.

Re:Simpleton

[BiggerIsBetter]

In Europe, many relatively small groups of people people were more exposed to different ideas and cultures. China was relatively introspective on a large scale, both due to politics and culture (is there a difference?). I think that has more to do with the decline than any other reasons.

I won't claim to be a historian, but Mongolia isn't what it used to be, Japan is still a small group of islands, and Hong Kong aside, Europe is still in Europe. Despite pockets of defeat, China did ok dealing with the other reasons.

Re:Outrageous!

[grendel_x86]

Adding to this, unfortunatly, we have been pushed down onto the list of violators of human rights by the UN.

We have about 175 or so 'enemy combatents' detained in this manner, some US citizens w/ no political affiliations at all that are being detained like this.

Id like to say this is going to end soon, but i think this will become the 'norm' unless we can get a good switch of power (not just bush), if they dont get labeled enemy combatants themselves. (Nothing stops Bush from labeling Dean, and Clark enemy Combatants other than it being a bad PR move).

China vs,. US

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone explain to me how

• the US
• is never right about anything it does,
• Europe calls it a "crime against humanity" when the US executes 71 people in 2002
• groups like our faithful slashdot posters and Amnesty International constantly bitch and whine about how evil the US is, and
• basically ALL the problems of the world are America's fault

and,

• China (in recent times)
• builds the great firewall of China,
• suppresses free speech,
• executes 1,000+ people in 2002 (over 14x the US total)
• conquers countries and actually FORMALLY integrates them into China,
• moves people in forced migrations, and
• commits various other human right abuses,

and the our "right-thinking left-wing friends" never say shit about it?

I realize anti-Americanism is popular, but ...

Re:China vs,. US

[Anonymous Coward]

They both suck. America's just taking it on the chin now because in addition to a prison system that resembles China's far more than it does any European democracy's (far more imprisoned in absolute and relative numbers mostly for non-violent drug offences, execution of juveniles, as well as the more newsworthy detentions with no charges filed both stateside and in Gitmo) but America is now a far worse threat to international peace and stability than China.

You don't have to look at China...

[Anonymous Coward]

or even Guantanamo Bay... last week in Miami there were hundreds of people locked up for protesting at the anti-FTAA demonstrations, many still there struggling for bail money.

When people came to protest at the jail, the police simply proceeded to arrest the protestors again to get them out of the way.

If you want an example of a "police state" just look at the USA right now, you don't need to look as far as China.

more arrests and jail info at
http://www.ftaaimc.org/ and http://www.stopftaa.org

Re:Translation

[TubeSteak]

Cuba, my good friends, is not US soil and neither is the military base they've 'leased' from the Cuban gov't. This article sums it up nicely

So far, federal judges have ruled that because the base, leased from Cuba, is on foreign territory, aliens held there have no access to U.S. courts to challenge their detentions. The Bush administration maintains that the detainees - most of them captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan - are "unlawful combatants," do not deserve POW status under the Geneva Conventions and can be held indefinitely.

With that in mind, the detentions are being contested and its likely that the Supreme Court will give some type of opinion sooner or later, otherwise it sets a bad precedent. Think of it this way, if Gitmo isn't US soil and people there have no access to US courts... what about soldiers who want to bring cases against the gov't or anyone else for that matter? "Sorry son, you're in Cuba now, you don't get those kinds of freedoms."

Re:cop killers aren't political prisoners

[The Spanish Ninja]

I don't know anything really about Mumia, but Leonard Peltier is most certainly a cop-killer, and should have been executed years ago instead of stewing in jail soaking up my tax-money. Might as well free Charles Manson as any of them.

Something to think about

[tftp]

Slashdot is not the best place for political discussions. However, here is a fact. In USSR dissidents were also persecuted, jailed, etc. Time came, and they were victorious. However soon after that most of those dissidents are out of favor again (and "out of favor" is very mild expression - some were shot.)

Why is that? Well, reasons depend on the country, I guess. Lenin was one such dissident in 1900's, and see what he did when he got the power... examples are plentiful. Today ex-dissidents in Russia are accused of treason, of selling out, of helping to steal national wealth...

This is not unique to Russia in any way. Look at Georgia, for example. They got Gamsakhurdia - and he failed miserably. They replaced him with Shevardnadze - and guess what, he failed miserably. They replaced him with ${don't know yet} and he will fail, probably. Same happened in Poland, same happened in Yugoslavia, same happens everywhere. This is because being a dissident does not really mean that you think better than other people; it only means that you think differently.

The point is, not all dissidents are "freedom fighters", and not all countries need, or want, the freedom, and not all societies can take the cold shower of total, uncontrollable, unrestricted freedom (North Korea is one.) I don't know much about this guy, he may be great. I just want to show you the larger picture (which was painted without my involvement, BTW, I am only an observer here).

Of course it is bad to jail dissidents just because they are thinking differently and talking about something. If your political system can't prove its benefits in an open discussion, then probably the system does not deserve to exist.

There is a catch, however, and the catch is called "populism". Basically, unwashed masses are told fairy tales, promised infinite wealth in no time, as long as they vote in a certain way or behave in a certain way (such as siege of Presidential Palace demanding resignation of the President). If a society is well controlled and sufficiently dumb, then this works. It worked before many times. This is exactly the reason why democracy fails in many countries - because the people of the country must be smart and active to vote right. This is often not the case, and quite possibly China is afraid that sweet talk of dissidents promoting ${some_other_system} can cause severe disturbance, maybe even a civil war. This is something worth avoiding, maybe even by jailing one person. Basically, the question is this: "How many people you are willing to kill to save 1 million people?" Dostoevsky gave a lot of thought to this dilemma, see his "Demons" and "Crime and Punishment" for details. And of course "Ringworld Engineers" touches this subject too.

freedom

[jeisc]

It seems that freedom has become an object reduced to a marchandise that is exportable and marketed by politicians to suit their needs.

China also gave us Lao Tsu:
Quote
Why are people starving?
Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.
Therefore the people are starving.
Why are the people rebellious?
Because the rulers interfere too much.
Therefore they are rebellious.
Why do people think so little of death?
Because the rulers demand too much of life.
Therefore the people take life lightly.
Having to live on, one knows better than to value life too much.
Unquote
www.chebucto.ns.ca/Philosophy/Taic hi/lao.html

Education is not indoctrination, it should rather be the pursuit of truth regardless of the individuals of nation, color, or creed.

From the declaration of inependence
"WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness"
www.law.emory.edu/FEDERAL/independ/dec lar.html

Any human being held in captivity without respect for his basic rights is a loss and insult for all of humankind and more insulting is when the crime of an imprisoned individual was only pursuing and trying to expose the truth.
www.truthinjustice.org/imprisoned.htm

Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Article 9
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm