Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
"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
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.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
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.
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.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
- 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 ...
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
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.