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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."
How is it that some people get cool nicknames, like "the Stainless Steel Mouse" and "Iceman" and "Dozer." The best I could ever manage was Lunchbox...
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
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....
Never formally charged! That's outrageous! When will those Chicoms desist from such tyrannical and autocratic practices and embrace democracy, a proper Bill of Rights and the rule of law like we have here in the good ol' US of A.
"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
So Qincheng is the Chinese word for Guantanamo, then? Good to know.
Money for nothing, pix for free
...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.
from the article:
"Liu was bailed out on Friday afternoon, the centre said, saying the move amounted to freeing her because political detainees are rarely, if ever, released on bail."
While China does not typically release political detainees, they are only releasing her on bail. They could still pick her up for the same thing some time later, or decide to officially charge her. It is also important to note that they convicted one of the 4 involved. This situation is far from being over.
You have just inferred that the Guantanamo Bay prisoners are terrorists. How do you know this? Has a judge told you so? Perhaps it was a politician who told you so? Wouldn't being imprisoned by a politician make one a political prisoner?
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?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
When I hear about things like this it reminds of just how unusual and fragile freedom is in the world. It also makes me fearful because so few people in America are dedicated to the preservation of freedom. Instead they're either disinterested in what goes on or dedicated to furthering some ill-concieved and short sighted political agenda that they usually don't even understand. The rights and freedoms this country was founded upon are far more important to our collective future than red-herring issues like abortion. The abortion debate iself is little more than a battle-front in the cultural wars between the loony left and the religious right. As long as there are unwanted children being conceived abortion will exist regardless of whether it is legal or not. Arguing about something that cannot be stopped is futile and even counterproductive. Its like arguing about how people should wipe their asses. Its impossible to force anyone to follow whatever conclusions are reached, so why argue about it? Laws against abortion will work about as well as laws against Marijuana or Alcohol. Marijuana can be easily grown, alcohol can be easily fermented and distilled, and an abortion is only a coat-hanger away. The laws regarding all are in reality little more than proclamations of what the government would prefer you do. People get all worked up over abortion because it is a stand-in for all the other issues that don't get argued about directly. Ideological points that have been disproven or discredited but which the left or right doesn't want to let go of. It doesn't suprise me that so many people have forsaken the political process. If the choice is between a closet communist and a someone who is either a theocrat or owned by a bunch of fat-cats, there isn't really any way to make a good choice. So people don't vote and in doing so forfeit the very power that MUST be held by the people for democracy to truly exist. Every time a person disinvolves themselves from the political process they're letting the fate of this country be determined by idiots and ideologues. People who are either stupid or crazy or both.
If things keep going like this then America is doomed to die from collapse from within. Unfortunately for all our "friends" in other places who would like to see that happen, America's collapse will likely pull them in with it, or at least place them upon the very precipice of collapse just like the collapse of Rome sent all of Western Europe into the dark ages, only this time on a global scale.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
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 ...
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.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve 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:
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.
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
the only two I ever got were billygoat and pencildick.
This space available.
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.
it has been clear in all education on "rules of war" in the Swedish army for the last 20 years at least that there are "combatants" and "illegal combatants" or "bandits". And I have served in the army, so I know.
I, too, served in the Swedish army, and you are both right and wrong...
There exists a distinction between combatants and "bandits". But bandits (or illegal combatants) are criminals, and treated as such.
They are not stuck in a legal limbo, that is what Ashcroft invented.
Simply put, they are either combatants and criminals, there are rules for dealing with both.
Ashcroft just doesn't feel like following the rules, so he makes up an exception...
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."