Arrested Chinese Blogger "Confesses" On State TV, Praises Censorship

Koreantoast writes "As part of a broader, chilling Chinese crackdown on Internet dissent, Chinese blogger Charles Xue appeared on Chinese state television in handcuffs on Sunday, denouncing his blog and praising government censorship. He 'confessed' to becoming drunk on the accumulated power of his Weibo blog, which peaked at 12 million followers, and confessed to recklessly spreading unverified rumors and slander, disrupting social harmony and becoming a vent of negative emotion on mainstream society. He also praised new government legislation cracking down on Internet freedom, stating how dangerous the Internet would be if left uncontrolled by the government. Xue was arrested on prostitution solicitation charges though his television confession did not discuss that. His arrest was also suspiciously around the same time as a broader government sweep that picked up other Chinese Internet activists."

Comments

Drudge and other U.S. bloggers are next

[DNAgent]

This is exactly the outcome that Diane Feinstein and others of her ilk would visit upon the U.S., given her way.

Re:Drudge and other U.S. bloggers are next

[Anonymous Coward]

Drudge is a "blogger" now? News to me. Unhinged, shit-flinging monkey perhaps, kind of like you appear to be.

You just described bloggers. 99.9% of them are worthless drivel.

And you just assumed that an elected politician would know the difference between a blog and a "news" website. Rights are Rights. You either have them, or you don't. That is why ours are so black and white, to avoid generalized fucktard opinions like this that can become law.

Re:Drudge and other U.S. bloggers are next

[PRMan]

Yeah, can the "I always vote Democrat" idiots in California finally vote her out please? I'm sick of being represented by her. But since they elected Jerry Brown to bankrupt California for a third time, probably not.

Re:Drudge and other U.S. bloggers are next

[icebike]

Impossible? Really?

Machetes work very well too.

The second amendment granted the PEOPLE the right to arms, not the government, and it was precisely to control the government that they were given these rights. It was fully expected that the PEOPLE would have the same arms as any soldier, which in this the modern era every citizen should be expected to have a fully automatic military long arm and a side arm.

See Switzerland. Vastly higher gun possession rate, gun death rate less than half of the US rate.

Re:Drudge and other U.S. bloggers are next

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting AC because the gun debate gets old after a while, but there is one point missing.

Guns are a wanted part of US culture, from the Wild West to the rednecks, to the gangbangers, and are part of every strata of US society.

Guess what will happen with a gun ban? Yep, the exact same thing that is happening because drugs are banned, and how alcohol was banned. Prohibition doesn't work. One has to change attitudes first (like drunk driving), then laws will change and be heeded.

A gun ban will get guns in more demand. Instead of top quality brands, people will be churning them out in basements. If ammo gets scarce, someone will make it from some chemical, somewhere.

Of course, with alcohol banned in the past, we got the mob. With drugs, we got the cartels. With guns, we will get gangs... and they will be the armed ones, and likely better armed than most police forces.

Do we want heavily gangsters be the only source of armaments? The police won't be able to stamp them out, and every disaffected 15 year old kid will find the gangsters cool, spawning a "cowboy" archetype similar to the bootlegger or someone who outfoxes the law? Do we want the ultimate of cool to be killing someone to take their handguns or ammo stash (like is done with drug stashes)?

I normally don't like stepping into the gun control argument, but lets be real, prohibition will not work. Instead, attitudes must change and make guns either viewed as tools (like the rest of the world), or even unstylish. Then, gun control might work. However, do we want to trade these shootings for constant shootings where gangs out-gun the police at every encounter? The existing drug cartels will be damn happy to start with metal shops and making firearms as well as getting gunpowder for ammo. If they know they are the only armed party in a town, they only gain more power.

Re:Drudge and other U.S. bloggers are next

[icebike]

Blah blah blah the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Right of the People
Shall Not Be Infringed.

Re:Drudge and other U.S. bloggers are next

[denmarkw00t]

I struggled a lot with whether to mod you up or reply in hopes of my karma boosting your post up some - someone please mod this up! Unfortunately, you can't count on many a /. reader going to your link, and all you did was dump it - but it is of value:

As Bier put it, "The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports defines a ‘violent crime’ as one of four specific offenses: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault." By contrast, "the British definition includes all ‘crimes against the person,’ including simple assaults, all robberies, and all ‘sexual offenses,’ as opposed to the FBI, which only counts aggravated assaults and ‘forcible rapes.’ "

While the rate is still higher when comparing similar categories (around ~700 some odd in the UK vs 340-ish in the US), even this comparison is riddled with holes. In summation, getting an "apples to apples" comparison of the crime rates in both countries is damn near impossible, and the idea that the UK's crime rate is orders of magnitude higher is simply wrong.

Re:Drudge and other U.S. bloggers are next

[chihowa]

Is her ilk "Democrats" or is it "autocratic authoritarians"? There are plenty of the latter in both parties. Blindly bashing the other party, whatever your tribal affiliation, doesn't clean them out of your party.

Re:Drudge and other U.S. bloggers are next

[alexgieg]

A gun ban (like every other civilized country) would have made the massacre of children at Sandy Hook impossible.

Like a drug ban makes consuming drugs impossible and the prohibition caused everyone to stop drinking?

Here in Brazil we have a near total ban on guns. It's almost impossible to get a license to own a gun, and even more impossible to get the right to carry it around. Miraculously though, almost all criminals have guns, several of which military grade. Guess who are the only people who don't? A hint: starts with "law abiding" and ends with "citizens".

Here's what would stop any massacre in any school: an unknown number of armed teachers. Child-massacring wannabees chose schools because they know those are not only defenseless, but mandated by law to be defenseless. Break that assumption and the issue solves itself.

Re:Drudge and other U.S. bloggers are next

[jcr]

The whole point of 2nd amendment is to let citizens

NO.

The constitution does not create our rights. The second amendment acknowledges the existing right to self-defense, and prohibits the government from infringing it.

-jcr

Re:Drudge and other U.S. bloggers are next

[jcr]

The second amendment granted the PEOPLE the right

No it didn't, and the idea that the constitution created our rights is a very dangerous misconception. Our rights are intrinsic to our human nature, and what the constitution does is delegate certain powers to the government.

-jcr

Re:Drudge and other U.S. bloggers are next

[BlueBlade]

But that's my very point - they are not unalienable. They are made up. Human rights have no basis in reality, there's no fundamental law of nature that grant humans those rights. They are only an ideology and, as soon as someone with different views gathers the most power, they'll cease to exist. In the future, it's possible that technology will enable someone with a different ideology to seize power, and those "unalienable" rights would go away, perhaps never to return until humanity becomes extinct.

If rights effectively go away once you don't own the biggest guns anymore, then by definition they aren't unalienable : they are created by mankind. This is why you have to be willing to kill to defend your ideologies, otherwise people can use violence to enforce their way of life over you.

Tent camp!

[s.petry]

The leaders of the so called free world promptly laid their coats over their laps after reading that little tidbit. I'm sure they were also wondering "How long till we can do that here?"

Just to be fair, I'm sure Merkel and Hillary had to cover their laps as well for similar "problems".

Bradley Manning

[Jherek Carnelian]

And yet when Bradley Manning makes an eerily similar statement plenty of people are willing to take it as proof positive that he was a bad guy.

Re:Bradley Manning

[s.petry]

Wrong! The first rule you learn in the US Army is that you are to uphold the Constitution and defend the citizens. You also learn that you are not to obey orders that are unlawful and therefor illegal.

Wear the Uniform and learn the job before you spout off bullshit propaganda. I proudly served my country defending it's citizens, consider myself to be pro-USA, and would have done exactly the same thing as Manning under the same circumstances.

i wonder what they threatened him with

[ClassicASP]

i gotta think people in china are intelligent enough to know this is a forced confession. and china's govt has to know their population is intelligent enough to know this. they're just basically making example of this guy as a message to its population to say "we can make you do whatever we want". i bet they threated to lobotomize the guy or something like that.

Re:i wonder what they threatened him with

[ShanghaiBill]

they're just basically making example of this guy as a message to its population to say "we can make you do whatever we want".

As they say in China: Kill the chicken to scare the monkey.

Translation ...

[gstoddart]

They threatened me and my family, and the only way I can escape prison or a firing squad is to publicly denounce this.

I do not believe this is anything other than agreeing to repeat the party line under duress.

So, in other words:

[kheldan]

..he was black-bag arrested, subjected to torture, beaten, starved, thrown in an oubliette for a time, threatened with death, had his friends and family threatened with all the above, and likely drugged, until he finally broke and was willing to say anything they wanted him to say, no matter the cost to him or his reputation, and no matter how humiliating. Next he'll probably "commit suicide", leaving behind a note explaining how he couldn't live with the guilt and shame for having spoken such lies about the glorious and just Communist government of China.

Yeah, sure. Sounds like just another normal day in mainland China.