China Blocking Access to Google News Site

loconet writes "BBC and Reuters are reporting that China is blocking access to the Web site Google News according to media watchdog Reporters Without Borders. The organisation also accused Google of being complicit by filtering its Chinese-language site." From Reuters' version of the story: "The Paris-based group said the government had been blocking Google's English-language news Web site for about 10 days, after the company launched a Chinese-language version that removed politically sensitive reports."

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China also jailing journalists.

[glrotate]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/01/opinion/01kristo f.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

China's Donkey Droppings
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

For the last century, the title of "most important place in the world" has belonged to the United States, but that role seems likely to shift in this century to China.

So what are China's new leaders, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, really like? Are they visionaries who are presiding over the greatest explosion of wealth the world has ever known? Or are they ruthless thugs who persecute Christians, Falun Gong adherents, labor leaders and journalists in a desperate attempt to maintain their dictatorship?

There's some evidence for both propositions, and they are probably both true to some degree.

When Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen rose to the helm of the Communist Party two years ago, many Chinese hoped they would bring a new openness to a nation that is dynamic economically but stagnant intellectually. Instead, China has become more repressive.

The repression has now engulfed a member of The New York Times's family. Zhao Yan, a researcher for the Beijing bureau of The Times, has been detained by the authorities since September and is not allowed to communicate with his family or lawyers.

Mr. Zhao is accused of leaking state secrets, a very serious charge that could lead to a decade in prison. China's government may believe that he was behind the September scoop by The Times's Beijing bureau chief, Joseph Kahn, that China's former leader, Jiang Zemin, was about to retire from his last formal position.

While The Times's policy is, wisely, never to comment on the sources of articles, my own private digging indicates that Mr. Zhao was not the source for that scoop. He is innocent of everything except being a fine journalist who, before joining The Times, wrote important articles in the Chinese press about corruption.

(In fairness, sending journalists to prison for doing their job is not an exclusively Chinese phenomenon. Several American journalists - Jim Taricani of NBC, Judith Miller of this newspaper and Matthew Cooper of Time - may be sent to U.S. prisons in the next month or two for refusing to reveal their sources.)

Mr. Zhao's case is depressingly similar to that of another Chinese journalist, Jiang Weiping. He is serving a six-year sentence for "revealing state secrets," even though his real crime was exposing corruption.

"China has changed so much economically, but not politically," Jiang Weiping's wife, Li Yanling, told me. "It's a puzzle to me."

The authorities ordered Ms. Li to keep quiet about her husband's arrest, and detained her when she didn't. The couple's daughter, now 15, was traumatized at losing first her father and then her mother to the Chinese prison system. When Ms. Li was finally released, the daughter called her constantly from school to make sure that she had not been arrested again.

Mr. Zhao's arrest is just the latest in a broad crackdown in China. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 42 journalists are now in prison in China, more than in any other country.

"There was a period of openness, a period of hope, when the new leaders first came to power," said Jiao Guobiao, a journalism professor at Beijing University. "But now they've consolidated power, and everything has closed up again."

Mr. Jiao should know. He wrote an essay this year denouncing censorship, and it was immediately censored. Now the government has banned Mr. Jiao from teaching.

I've felt this cooling as well. I was planning to visit China this month, but the government has declined to give me a visa. It's the first time I've been refused, and the State Security Ministry may have worried that I would write a column about its unjust imprisonment of Mr. Zhao.

I love China, and I share its officials' distaste for those who harm it. That's why I'm angry that hard-liners in Beijing are presenting China to the world as repressive, fragile, tyra

Re:China also jailing journalists.

[Trailwalker]

For the last century, the title of "most important place in the world" has belonged to the United States, but that role seems likely to shift in this century to China

This makes the assumption that the status quo is unchanging. China is an amalgam that has been held together by force rather than by desire. Like the former Soviet Empire, Communist Yugoslavia, British India, et. al., the Chinese "nation" will disintegrate into smaller parts once a central government becomes unable to control the provinces by brute force. I doubt if a break-up would be amiable.

Chinese Citizens: What Your Government Is Hiding

[Nova Express]

Dear Citizens of China, Since your communist government is blocking access to Google, and assuming that you can read Slashdot, here are a few web pages that your government would probably prefer you not read:

• Here's a page which talks about Jasper becker's book Hungry Ghosts, which covers how farm collectivization during Mao's "Great Leap Forward" resulted in the death of some 30-60 million of your countrymen.
• Here's a page which discusses the genocide rsulting from China's invasion of Tibet, where "over 17 percent of the Tibetan people killed, and 6,000 monasteries ruined."
• Finally, here's a page discussing the practice of Falun Gong. Now I'm personally not a believer in Falun Gong, but since I live in a nation blessed with freedom of religion, and since your government would rather execute people rather than let them practice it, perhaps you should find out for yourself what it is they so desperately don't want you to hear.
• Finally, here's the profile of a true Chinese hero.

Freedom starts with you.

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