Xiaorong Li
The Chinese Human Rights Defenders pointed out, in a press release on April 28, 2010, that "As the 2010 Shanghai World Expo opens on May 1, conspicuously absent from the festivities will be the residents of Shanghai who have lost their homes, businesses, and freedom to exercise their rights in the government’s drive to bring its ambitious plans for the Expo to fruition. Ahead of the arrival of an estimated 70 million visitors over the next six months, officials in Shanghai have detained, placed under surveillance, or threatened activists, dissidents, and petitioners across the city and in surrounding areas. Police in other cities have warned activists not to travel to Shanghai."
I wish that those few world leaders who plan to attend the opening ceremony of the Expo, including the EU President and French President, would be reading the CHRD press release! They may brush off the claims of human rights abuses associated with preparations for the Expo, insisting that the Shanghai World Expo is only a "trade show" and they ought to be there to promote trade and commerce. But the Chinese government has politicized the trade show. The CHRD press release cites one local activist as saying:
“The government is working to create an atmosphere of fear in the activist community in Shanghai and elsewhere,” said one activist who has been closely monitoring developments ahead of the Expo. “Many activists, dissidents, and petitioners are under some form of restriction of movement or surveillance. Some are refraining from speaking out for themselves or getting in touch with others for fear of serious retribution.”
According to CHRD, police have sought out high-profile local activists and made it clear that any efforts to expose abuses by the government will be met with swift and serious retaliation. For example, Feng Zhenghu (冯正虎), a veteran Shanghai activist who for years has sought to draw attention to the failures of the Shanghai judicial system, had planned to set up a “Shanghai Expo of Unjust Court Cases” during the Expo. Around midnight on April 19, Shanghai police raided his home, confiscated his computer equipment and took him away for a four-hour interrogation. Police threatened that if he spoke out during the Expo they would “make him disappear like Gao Zhisheng (高智晟).”
Other activists have been placed in detention to ensure that they will be out of sight for the duration of the Expo. CHRD has documented six cases of Shanghai petitioners-turned-activists who have been sent to Re-education through Labor (RTL) since January for reasons related to the World Expo, and a total of 10 dating back to the latter half of 2009.[1] For example, Tong Guojing (童国菁) was sent to 18 months of RTL on February 13. Tong, like most of those sent to RTL, started petitioning after his home was forcibly demolished, and became an activist as he learned about the plight of fellow petitioners.
A number of activists in the provinces surrounding Shanghai, such as Wen Kejian (温克坚) and Zou Wei (邹巍) in Zhejiang Province, and Zhang Lin (张林) in Anhui Province, have been warned by local police against traveling to Shanghai during the Expo. CHRD has received reports that activists in cities as far away as Guangzhou, Xi’an, and Beijing have been asked to “tea” or questioned by police in recent days, and warned not to travel to Shanghai or speak out during the World Expo.
Forced evictions carried out in preparation for the Expo have been a source of widespread anger among Shanghai citizens for years. According to official statistics, 18,000 households were relocated to clear the grounds for the Expo, but activists argue that, taking into account other development related to the Expo, many more residents were affected.[2] Shanghai officials estimated in 2009 that complaints over forced eviction and demolition accounted for “70 or 80 percent” of petitions originating from the city (for interviews with Shanghai residents affected by Expo-related forced evictions, please see CHRD’s report, Thrown Out: Human Rights Abuses in China’s Breakneck Real Estate Development).[3]
To prevent victims of forced evictions from drawing attention to their grievances during the Expo, police are detaining, harassing, and threatening petitioners. Many are being held under “soft detention” at home. For example, Huang Yuqin (黄玉芹), a resident of Minhang District, Shanghai, whose home was demolished on March 2, has been under “soft detention” since April 19. Security guards have followed her whenever she leaves her home, and have prevented her from leaving on at least one occasion. Huang also received a notice warning her not to gather with others or petition on or near the Expo grounds for duration of the Expo. Other Shanghai petitioners have received an identical notice in recent weeks, threatening “strict punishment” for any who disregard the instructions.[4]
Finally, some veteran Shanghai petitioners have been detained as a warning to others ahead of the event. For example, Shen Peilan (沈佩兰), who has been petitioning since the forced demolition of her home in 2003, was administratively detained for 15 days in the Minhang District Detention Center in late March and early April. Shen, who was beaten during her detention, has since been released, and has gone into hiding in Shanghai.
The international media and human rights organizations have, as of yesterday, turned their spotlight on the Shanghai Expo, exposing such abuses as forced eviction and demolition, interviewing disgruntled local residents, and revealing government ordinances restricting freedom of expression and the press. Un-intended perhaps by the Chinese government, the Shanghai Expo will also be an Expo to the world of Shanghai's human rights problems.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Googlegate: Raising the Bar of Business Code of Conduct 谷歌门事件：提升商业道德的水准
Xiaorong Li
In mid-January, Google threatened to pull its business out of China unless China lifts filters of its search engine (google.cn and google.com) results. What is this all about? Only Google can explain the intent or motives behind its decisions. Despite the motives, Google may have done some good by spotlighting and picking fight with cyber censorship and cyber infiltration. Google and other foreign (mostly US) Internet technology corporations should have protested, even at the cost to their own profit, a long time ago or should have never accepted culprit role in the government’s online censorship as pre-condition for entering the Chinese market in the first place.
If Google did the right thing this time, then, it implies that Google has not been doing the right thing to doing business in China under the condition of assisting censorship. And it also means that the other Internet companies are still doing the wrong thing by keeping doing business under such compromising conditions. If hackers breaking into human rights activists’ email (gmail, Yahoo, hotmail) accounts should prompt such reactions as Google’s, then, such reactions are overdue since hackering emails has been an ongoing reality for several years. Typically, the hackers would enter somebody’s email account and send emails to all on the user’s address list, spreading rumors or sending attachments containing viruses. Curiously, such hacking seems to target activists rather than random victims. I have received “important messages” frequently from so-called Google Administrators alerting me “due to irregular actions in your account, it will be soon closed” and so on, trying to get me to click a link or open an attachment. But the senders’ addresses, upon inspection, often end with “.tw” or “.ho”. These are clearly fake email addresses and such emails cannot come from Google. Others who are less careful might have been tricked. Many in the Chinese activist community, inside China or on exile, have been victims of routine email hacking so much so they rarely communicate anything “sensitive” via emails.
Surely it is never too late to correct one’s mistakes. We all need time to get over our learning curve – to come to the realization of having made a mistake.
Google made a fuss more like because it is alarmed by the sophisticated, large-scale cyber attacks on its site and the sites of more than 30 other Internet companies doing business in China, intended perhaps to steel intellectual property or install spyware. Whatever the triggers are, Google’s act raises important ethical questions about the moral standing of American companies doing their part in assisting the Chinese government’s Internet censorship. It is worth raising such issues and sounding the alarm, since the other Internet companies who have said nothing will apparently continue their collaboration with the authoritarian regime. The repercussions of the Google action, including a televised speech on Internet freedom by Hilary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, on January contributed to a wave of public discussions about corporate responsibilities in the era of globalization of Internet technology.
Aside from intentions and repercussions, many Americans may not know the fact that Google’s Chinese search engine in China, www.google.cn, accepted ethically compromising conditions set by Chinese authorities to censors so-called “sensitive” contents. Google.cn filters “sensitive” words, thus contributing to upholding the Chinese government’s Great Fire Wall to block Chinese users’ access to open information online. An easy test can be performed to demonstrate how much information is censored by Google.cn. A user on outside the Great Fire Wall can search for the same words such as “Tiananmen incident”, or “Falun Gong”, on both google.cn and google.com. One will see two very different pages of search results. In volume, the Google.com search produces 10-15 times more items of results than Google.cn does. In contents, predictably, the results out of Google.cn are one-sided, reflecting the government’s point of view. It is difficult for Chinese users to directly link to Google.com and gmail (which is hosted outside China) -- connecting from China is either very slow or not accessible. And like all websites outside the country, once opened in China, Google.com’s search results are subjected to censorship – politically sensitive contents would also be filtered and some pages are blocked.
Google wants to make clear that its mission is to promote open information and its motto is “Don’t be evil!” But this mission has been seriously compromised since Google entered China in 2006. Much like Google, other American internet companies, such as Yahoo, Microsoft, News Corp (MySpace), accepted the Chinese authorities’ policies of Internet censorship and practiced self-censorship under pressure.
One plausible argument for entering the Chinese market even if it means obeying ethically compromising local regulations is this: Internet companies will get a significant market share of the world’s largest pool of potential users, 1.3 billion. This will not only enable American companies to make profit, but also enable Chinese users to benefit from information technology. While some politically sensitive information is blocked, this argument goes, the vast majority of the Chinese population only need “un-sensitive” information about products, services, or daily life necessities.
This argument did not foresee the reality that, after years’ trying, most foreign Internet companies that had entered China have not been able to claim significant shares of the Chinese market. Google has about a 30% share of the market, while its Chinese competitor Baidu take more than 60%. Chinese companies are good at imitating foreign products but also have less or no prohibitions in providing services – such as free music download -- at the expense of certain regulations on copyrights and so on. And these companies are good at meeting the socio-psychological needs of Chinese consumers. Google is the only one so far who has go public about this frustrations and is willing to cut its looses, which may turn out to be insignificant in comparison to Google’s global revenues. Google may have calculated that the benefit of losing its share of the Chinese market is not worth keeping at the cost to its intellectual property being hacked and its reputation.
Though Google’s announcement raised the ethical bar for doing business in an authoritarian police state, other US Internet companies have not come around the learning curve to do such a calculation. For example, do the revenues for Yahoo in China really trump Yahoo’s interest in maintaining a clean reputation or peace of its CEOs’ conscience? Yahoo’s reputation nosedived after it was exposed for having handed over email recordings to Chinese police, which resulted in the imprisonment of several internet writers and journalists. One of them, Shi Tao, a journalist, is serving a 10-year sentence for leaking “state secret” through his Yahoo email! Microsoft also suffered in its reputation after it was exposed for shutting down the blog of the Chinese journalist Zhao Jing, who had written and posted an article about the government’s censoring of a Beijing newspaper. Unfortunately, most foreign Internet companies are so infatuated with their vision of selling products and services to a significant fraction of the 1.3 billion consumers, such that they would write off the losses of their reputation and overlook the fact that significant market shares have gone to Chinese companies. Thus, as of today, every page on the MySpace China site included a link allowing users or monitors to “report inappropriate information” to authorities, and Apple’s iTunes forbids Chinese users to download applications that refer to the Dalai Lama.
It may be true that the majority of China’s 380 million ordinary Internet users may not search for such words as “Tiananmen”, “Falun Gong”, or “Dalai Lama.” But if anyone ever does, Google.cn and other foreign Internet (website, blog, email) providers doing business in China have helped the Chinese government to make the information unavailable to that person. And the Chinese government’s increasingly long list of “sensitive” words for Internet blocking suggests that more and more people might be searching for these words, which is the only plausible explanation of the expanding official list.
Though victimhood does not relieve one of implication in Internet censorship, it is only fair to point out that Google and other companies, Chinese or foreign, are victims of China’s cyber policing regime, or at lease willing victims in the case of the foreign companies.
The cyber attack on Google website has been coordinated between technical and non-technological tactics. In June 2009, government-controlled media accused Google of spreading unhealthy pornographic contents. Chinese cyber activists conducted analysis of search words entered in Google.cn search engine, they found repeated searches from locations in Beijing of pornographic words. The frequency of such searches was later used by official media in its accusations against Google. Analysts believe that such deliberative acts are those of government-paid cyber thugs, known as the “50 cents party”. The objective of the members of the “50 cents party” is to harass and inform on online activists, monitor contents of websites, blogs, and Twitter, infiltrate activists’ interactive sites or chat groups, and hack websites\email accounts.
In addition to paying cyber thugs to petrol the Internet, the government also uses the following non-technological tactics:
1. The government adopted administrative regulations to control online magazines, scan mobile phone text messages, require internet/blog address registers to use real names, and so on. Various government agencies have issued many directives to control particular types of internet media, organizations, and usage, including online magazines, website registrations, interactive forums and bulletin board services (BBS), blogs, and video websites.
2. They deployed the “110 cyber police” on webpages. Cyber police petrol often appears as images of policemen or links for readers to click. They facilitate reporting of “illegal or unhealthy” contents on webpages.
3. They implemented a point system to punish internet media for infractions. Companies that accumulated points may have their registration licenses suspended or pay hefty fines. Through a complex system of administrative incentives and punishments, the government coerces companies into practicing self-censorship – to filter sensitive contents, block or delete articles, or close down websites and blogs on their own sites.
4. The government organized a "vigilant informants network", known at the "50 cents party" with paid cyber petrol men to collect information on netizens, infiltrate and subortage websites or online interactive sites frequented by dissidents/activists.
5. The government continues to use the criminal law to persecute internet users for expressing their views online.
6. In one extreme case, government shut down the Internet and cell phone networks for the entire Xinjiang Autonomous Region after the riot last July. As of last month, only a couple of official websites was made accessible.
Will Google’s pullout be a loss to Chinese users? Will it have any huge impact on online activists? If it is, this would offset any cost-benefit calculation that may have figured into Google’s decision to threat to pull out. Since the Chinese government has not budged, nor will it budge, to lift censorship. Lately, the government has indicated that hackers outside the government must be responsible for such hackings at Google’s sites.
Chinese online activists and even Chinese IT company professionals are delighted by Google’s announcement. One website portal owner was the first to lay flowers in front of Google’s Beijing headquarter. A card attached to a bunch of flowers reads, “Google [acted like] a real man”. (Photos) The Chinese internet companies too are victims of the government’s censorship.
If Google pulls out of China, general users will lose Google.cn as a search engine, but they can’t find certain information there anyway and they can instead find government-sanitized information on Chinese website portals like Baidu. Such Chinese competitors will have an even bigger share of the market. However, Chinese consumers have a taste for forbidden fruits – banned books, movies, or unavailable (pirated) brand-name designer handbags or CDs, often become hot items. Upon learning about the alternative, “forbidden” Google products – their superior quality and efficiency, consumers may have stronger desires than before to get their hands on them, which is what gives teeth to Google’s threat, otherwise largely symbolic move.
Those netizens who are un-satiable for information and online activists who have a penchant for alternative (un-censored) information, however, are unlikely to have less access to information and to Google tools, such as Google Document, Google Translation, Gmail Groups, etc., since most of them are already gaining access to the open Internet via proxy servers – which allow them to bypass the Chinese government blocking devises: the Great Fire Wall.
If the Chinese government’s Internet censorship is mostly furbished by American companies, a small fraction of the Chinese population – the online activists – have also benefited from technology. But the credit does not necessarily go to companies that have compromised principles to enter China. Rather, those Chinese who have the will to undermine official censorship have made creative use of Internet tools. The hope for a future of free expression and open information in China lies in these younger and creative Netizens. They are very vocal in denouncing cyber censorship and demanding Internet freedom. They have become very creative in using the new online media to mobilize and “climb over” the Great Fire Wall. Though Twitter is blocked in China, however, after China closed down the popular Chinese social networking site Fanfou last September, many users switched to Twitter and found their way to access the site by proxy or alternative links. Today, Twitter has become one of the most effective tools for networking and mobilization of Chinese activists. Another example of this is the protest in Panyu, Guangdong province, against the construction of a waste processing station last November, which was entirely organized and reported on Twitter. In another example, in January, when the government began implementing a new regulation to scan text message and suspend users’ accounts if “illegal, unhealthy” contents are discovered, many Chinese users repeated texted censored words in order to overwhelm the censors. Finally, when authorities censored the words “Charter 08” on Chinese websites, activists used words with different characters but the same spelling “county chief with swollen glands” to evade the blocking.
One of the most useful tools for bypassing the Great Fire Wall (GFW) is proxy server. Users inside the Wall can connect to such a server, which is based outside the Wall, which enables them to visit the open Internet, including all the officially blocked websites. The best known proxy servers are called Freegate and Gardengate, developed and maintained by Falun Gong networks in the US, which are providing the most-needed Internet technology tools to Chinese netizens walled in by perhaps the most sophisticated, high-tech engineered, state censorship in the world.
It’s hard to know how many Chinese netizens are served by such technologies – how many are using available tools to access the open Internet, to engage digital disobedience and online activism, but the number must have grown to such an extent that the Chinese government has invested billions of dollars to strengthen its blockage with the Golden Shield Project while shutting down many websites, blogs, and social networking sites.
What we have seen is this pattern: the more draconic measures the government takes to censor the Internet, the more innovative the netizens become and the more of them manage to find their way to access online tools to undermine censorship. In this game between the super-fat cat and millions of mice, there may have not been a clear winner for now, but the price of controlling millions of mice is growing increasingly high. Google’s act of protest has the effect of raising that price.
(Adapted from a talk on Jan. 22, 2010 at a forum sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy and Center for International Media Assistance)
In mid-January, Google threatened to pull its business out of China unless China lifts filters of its search engine (google.cn and google.com) results. What is this all about? Only Google can explain the intent or motives behind its decisions. Despite the motives, Google may have done some good by spotlighting and picking fight with cyber censorship and cyber infiltration. Google and other foreign (mostly US) Internet technology corporations should have protested, even at the cost to their own profit, a long time ago or should have never accepted culprit role in the government’s online censorship as pre-condition for entering the Chinese market in the first place.
If Google did the right thing this time, then, it implies that Google has not been doing the right thing to doing business in China under the condition of assisting censorship. And it also means that the other Internet companies are still doing the wrong thing by keeping doing business under such compromising conditions. If hackers breaking into human rights activists’ email (gmail, Yahoo, hotmail) accounts should prompt such reactions as Google’s, then, such reactions are overdue since hackering emails has been an ongoing reality for several years. Typically, the hackers would enter somebody’s email account and send emails to all on the user’s address list, spreading rumors or sending attachments containing viruses. Curiously, such hacking seems to target activists rather than random victims. I have received “important messages” frequently from so-called Google Administrators alerting me “due to irregular actions in your account, it will be soon closed” and so on, trying to get me to click a link or open an attachment. But the senders’ addresses, upon inspection, often end with “.tw” or “.ho”. These are clearly fake email addresses and such emails cannot come from Google. Others who are less careful might have been tricked. Many in the Chinese activist community, inside China or on exile, have been victims of routine email hacking so much so they rarely communicate anything “sensitive” via emails.
Surely it is never too late to correct one’s mistakes. We all need time to get over our learning curve – to come to the realization of having made a mistake.
Google made a fuss more like because it is alarmed by the sophisticated, large-scale cyber attacks on its site and the sites of more than 30 other Internet companies doing business in China, intended perhaps to steel intellectual property or install spyware. Whatever the triggers are, Google’s act raises important ethical questions about the moral standing of American companies doing their part in assisting the Chinese government’s Internet censorship. It is worth raising such issues and sounding the alarm, since the other Internet companies who have said nothing will apparently continue their collaboration with the authoritarian regime. The repercussions of the Google action, including a televised speech on Internet freedom by Hilary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, on January contributed to a wave of public discussions about corporate responsibilities in the era of globalization of Internet technology.
Aside from intentions and repercussions, many Americans may not know the fact that Google’s Chinese search engine in China, www.google.cn, accepted ethically compromising conditions set by Chinese authorities to censors so-called “sensitive” contents. Google.cn filters “sensitive” words, thus contributing to upholding the Chinese government’s Great Fire Wall to block Chinese users’ access to open information online. An easy test can be performed to demonstrate how much information is censored by Google.cn. A user on outside the Great Fire Wall can search for the same words such as “Tiananmen incident”, or “Falun Gong”, on both google.cn and google.com. One will see two very different pages of search results. In volume, the Google.com search produces 10-15 times more items of results than Google.cn does. In contents, predictably, the results out of Google.cn are one-sided, reflecting the government’s point of view. It is difficult for Chinese users to directly link to Google.com and gmail (which is hosted outside China) -- connecting from China is either very slow or not accessible. And like all websites outside the country, once opened in China, Google.com’s search results are subjected to censorship – politically sensitive contents would also be filtered and some pages are blocked.
Google wants to make clear that its mission is to promote open information and its motto is “Don’t be evil!” But this mission has been seriously compromised since Google entered China in 2006. Much like Google, other American internet companies, such as Yahoo, Microsoft, News Corp (MySpace), accepted the Chinese authorities’ policies of Internet censorship and practiced self-censorship under pressure.
One plausible argument for entering the Chinese market even if it means obeying ethically compromising local regulations is this: Internet companies will get a significant market share of the world’s largest pool of potential users, 1.3 billion. This will not only enable American companies to make profit, but also enable Chinese users to benefit from information technology. While some politically sensitive information is blocked, this argument goes, the vast majority of the Chinese population only need “un-sensitive” information about products, services, or daily life necessities.
This argument did not foresee the reality that, after years’ trying, most foreign Internet companies that had entered China have not been able to claim significant shares of the Chinese market. Google has about a 30% share of the market, while its Chinese competitor Baidu take more than 60%. Chinese companies are good at imitating foreign products but also have less or no prohibitions in providing services – such as free music download -- at the expense of certain regulations on copyrights and so on. And these companies are good at meeting the socio-psychological needs of Chinese consumers. Google is the only one so far who has go public about this frustrations and is willing to cut its looses, which may turn out to be insignificant in comparison to Google’s global revenues. Google may have calculated that the benefit of losing its share of the Chinese market is not worth keeping at the cost to its intellectual property being hacked and its reputation.
Though Google’s announcement raised the ethical bar for doing business in an authoritarian police state, other US Internet companies have not come around the learning curve to do such a calculation. For example, do the revenues for Yahoo in China really trump Yahoo’s interest in maintaining a clean reputation or peace of its CEOs’ conscience? Yahoo’s reputation nosedived after it was exposed for having handed over email recordings to Chinese police, which resulted in the imprisonment of several internet writers and journalists. One of them, Shi Tao, a journalist, is serving a 10-year sentence for leaking “state secret” through his Yahoo email! Microsoft also suffered in its reputation after it was exposed for shutting down the blog of the Chinese journalist Zhao Jing, who had written and posted an article about the government’s censoring of a Beijing newspaper. Unfortunately, most foreign Internet companies are so infatuated with their vision of selling products and services to a significant fraction of the 1.3 billion consumers, such that they would write off the losses of their reputation and overlook the fact that significant market shares have gone to Chinese companies. Thus, as of today, every page on the MySpace China site included a link allowing users or monitors to “report inappropriate information” to authorities, and Apple’s iTunes forbids Chinese users to download applications that refer to the Dalai Lama.
It may be true that the majority of China’s 380 million ordinary Internet users may not search for such words as “Tiananmen”, “Falun Gong”, or “Dalai Lama.” But if anyone ever does, Google.cn and other foreign Internet (website, blog, email) providers doing business in China have helped the Chinese government to make the information unavailable to that person. And the Chinese government’s increasingly long list of “sensitive” words for Internet blocking suggests that more and more people might be searching for these words, which is the only plausible explanation of the expanding official list.
Though victimhood does not relieve one of implication in Internet censorship, it is only fair to point out that Google and other companies, Chinese or foreign, are victims of China’s cyber policing regime, or at lease willing victims in the case of the foreign companies.
The cyber attack on Google website has been coordinated between technical and non-technological tactics. In June 2009, government-controlled media accused Google of spreading unhealthy pornographic contents. Chinese cyber activists conducted analysis of search words entered in Google.cn search engine, they found repeated searches from locations in Beijing of pornographic words. The frequency of such searches was later used by official media in its accusations against Google. Analysts believe that such deliberative acts are those of government-paid cyber thugs, known as the “50 cents party”. The objective of the members of the “50 cents party” is to harass and inform on online activists, monitor contents of websites, blogs, and Twitter, infiltrate activists’ interactive sites or chat groups, and hack websites\email accounts.
In addition to paying cyber thugs to petrol the Internet, the government also uses the following non-technological tactics:
1. The government adopted administrative regulations to control online magazines, scan mobile phone text messages, require internet/blog address registers to use real names, and so on. Various government agencies have issued many directives to control particular types of internet media, organizations, and usage, including online magazines, website registrations, interactive forums and bulletin board services (BBS), blogs, and video websites.
2. They deployed the “110 cyber police” on webpages. Cyber police petrol often appears as images of policemen or links for readers to click. They facilitate reporting of “illegal or unhealthy” contents on webpages.
3. They implemented a point system to punish internet media for infractions. Companies that accumulated points may have their registration licenses suspended or pay hefty fines. Through a complex system of administrative incentives and punishments, the government coerces companies into practicing self-censorship – to filter sensitive contents, block or delete articles, or close down websites and blogs on their own sites.
4. The government organized a "vigilant informants network", known at the "50 cents party" with paid cyber petrol men to collect information on netizens, infiltrate and subortage websites or online interactive sites frequented by dissidents/activists.
5. The government continues to use the criminal law to persecute internet users for expressing their views online.
6. In one extreme case, government shut down the Internet and cell phone networks for the entire Xinjiang Autonomous Region after the riot last July. As of last month, only a couple of official websites was made accessible.
Will Google’s pullout be a loss to Chinese users? Will it have any huge impact on online activists? If it is, this would offset any cost-benefit calculation that may have figured into Google’s decision to threat to pull out. Since the Chinese government has not budged, nor will it budge, to lift censorship. Lately, the government has indicated that hackers outside the government must be responsible for such hackings at Google’s sites.
Chinese online activists and even Chinese IT company professionals are delighted by Google’s announcement. One website portal owner was the first to lay flowers in front of Google’s Beijing headquarter. A card attached to a bunch of flowers reads, “Google [acted like] a real man”. (Photos) The Chinese internet companies too are victims of the government’s censorship.
If Google pulls out of China, general users will lose Google.cn as a search engine, but they can’t find certain information there anyway and they can instead find government-sanitized information on Chinese website portals like Baidu. Such Chinese competitors will have an even bigger share of the market. However, Chinese consumers have a taste for forbidden fruits – banned books, movies, or unavailable (pirated) brand-name designer handbags or CDs, often become hot items. Upon learning about the alternative, “forbidden” Google products – their superior quality and efficiency, consumers may have stronger desires than before to get their hands on them, which is what gives teeth to Google’s threat, otherwise largely symbolic move.
Those netizens who are un-satiable for information and online activists who have a penchant for alternative (un-censored) information, however, are unlikely to have less access to information and to Google tools, such as Google Document, Google Translation, Gmail Groups, etc., since most of them are already gaining access to the open Internet via proxy servers – which allow them to bypass the Chinese government blocking devises: the Great Fire Wall.
If the Chinese government’s Internet censorship is mostly furbished by American companies, a small fraction of the Chinese population – the online activists – have also benefited from technology. But the credit does not necessarily go to companies that have compromised principles to enter China. Rather, those Chinese who have the will to undermine official censorship have made creative use of Internet tools. The hope for a future of free expression and open information in China lies in these younger and creative Netizens. They are very vocal in denouncing cyber censorship and demanding Internet freedom. They have become very creative in using the new online media to mobilize and “climb over” the Great Fire Wall. Though Twitter is blocked in China, however, after China closed down the popular Chinese social networking site Fanfou last September, many users switched to Twitter and found their way to access the site by proxy or alternative links. Today, Twitter has become one of the most effective tools for networking and mobilization of Chinese activists. Another example of this is the protest in Panyu, Guangdong province, against the construction of a waste processing station last November, which was entirely organized and reported on Twitter. In another example, in January, when the government began implementing a new regulation to scan text message and suspend users’ accounts if “illegal, unhealthy” contents are discovered, many Chinese users repeated texted censored words in order to overwhelm the censors. Finally, when authorities censored the words “Charter 08” on Chinese websites, activists used words with different characters but the same spelling “county chief with swollen glands” to evade the blocking.
One of the most useful tools for bypassing the Great Fire Wall (GFW) is proxy server. Users inside the Wall can connect to such a server, which is based outside the Wall, which enables them to visit the open Internet, including all the officially blocked websites. The best known proxy servers are called Freegate and Gardengate, developed and maintained by Falun Gong networks in the US, which are providing the most-needed Internet technology tools to Chinese netizens walled in by perhaps the most sophisticated, high-tech engineered, state censorship in the world.
It’s hard to know how many Chinese netizens are served by such technologies – how many are using available tools to access the open Internet, to engage digital disobedience and online activism, but the number must have grown to such an extent that the Chinese government has invested billions of dollars to strengthen its blockage with the Golden Shield Project while shutting down many websites, blogs, and social networking sites.
What we have seen is this pattern: the more draconic measures the government takes to censor the Internet, the more innovative the netizens become and the more of them manage to find their way to access online tools to undermine censorship. In this game between the super-fat cat and millions of mice, there may have not been a clear winner for now, but the price of controlling millions of mice is growing increasingly high. Google’s act of protest has the effect of raising that price.
(Adapted from a talk on Jan. 22, 2010 at a forum sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy and Center for International Media Assistance)
Friday, February 26, 2010
“Aspirations for Rule of Law Spur Growth of Civil Society” 对法制的追求刺激公民社会的成长
Xiaorong Li
Obviously the growth of a civil society and the development of the rule of law are mutually supportive and mutually beneficial. Professor Cohen has made huge imprints in leading the way to develop the latter, but also indirectly and directly to develop the former. Let me use my 5 minutes to say something about one part of this point, that is, how developing the rule of law helps the growth of civil society.
When I say civil society, I refer to a public space sandwiched between the private realm where for-profit interests dominate and the space where the State dominates. A sizable and lively public space is a fact of life in China today. Yes, you’re right, this civil society still has to fight hard for its life and for every inch of the space for independent action, against powerful forces from both sides that try to invade it and obliterate it. No matter how fragile and precarious, the fact that such a Chinese civil society is alive and kicking is monumental and it is, to a large extent, a gift from those who worked tirelessly to help the development of rule of law in the past many years, and the person who has been at the forefront of that hardworking troupe is the person we’re honoring here today.
There are many ways in which the emergence of a legal system and the promise of rule of law have boosted civil society. Three come to mind:
First, the promise of rule of law gave people hope, inspires them, and the law supplied the ammunition. The Chinese law has been the double-sword which the party-state uses to put people in their place but it is also used by the people to hold the government accountable and seek justice.
Second, many young lawyers, products of the newly minted law schools in China’s universities, take the government’s promise of rule of law and what they learnt in law textbooks literarily, but as they meet the reality of rule by the CCP political and legal committees, they become the front-row challengers of the system, and leaders in the civil rights movement.
Thirdly, members of the Chinese civil society have used the law to some extent effectively to extract positive changes, not without paying the prices, of course.
Take for example what is known as the “rights-defense movement”. Several things about this phenomenon deserve our attention:
1st, it has commanded a broad participation from many social classes/groups, not limited to the educated elite.
2nd, participants have made good use of the internet as their tools for communication & mobilization – to bypass draconic rules controlling organizing, and they have NOT been crushed by the Great Fire Wall and the heavy deployment of cyber-police;
3rd, while NGO organizing has become the primary target of the government’s war against civil society, many forms of informal organizing have been invented and they are carrying on the bulk of citizen actions;
And finally, this movement remains largely non-violent, participants appeal to the law & the Constitution, despite the fact that there have been an increasing number of violent mass incidents in clashes between protesters and the police.
These features are worth noticing because they may offer explanations as to why some small positive changes have been extracted by civil society activism from the authoritarian police state. We need only look back at the past half year to find several mini-steps forward, not mentioning earlier landmark decisions like the abolition of the Custody & Repatriation detention system. These recent steps include:
- the uncharacteristically light sentence for the young woman Deng Yujiao who accidentally killed an official in self-defense last summer;
- the backing out by government from its order to mandatorily install filtering software Green Dam Youth Escort on new computers last July;
- the quiet acknowledgement of “black jails” in the official media in recent weeks,
- and the lift of ban by the Shanghai government two weeks ago on activist Feng Zhenghu's return from Japan after his 92-days protest at the Tokyo airport.
In short, three decades of foreign legal aid and rule of law programs have helped nurture aspirations and provide tools for activists in the Chinese civil society to fight for justice. Jerry and many of you who are here today played an important role in making this possible. I second what Jerry said in his South China Morning Post article 3 days ago that such programs and the international pressure have helped pave the way for an easier transition once the fundamental changes take place. However, we must face up to the troubling reality that none of these efforts has stopped the Chinese government from engaging in extra-legal persecution of Gao Zhisheng, and mis-use of the law to persecute Liu Xiaobo and many others good citizens including Chen Guangcheng, Hu Jia, Huang Qi, Tan Zuoren (the list can go on), to punish them for having spoken up for or taken actions to protect the rights and interest of disadvantaged groups of fellow Chinese citizens.
As a testimony to Jerry’s integrity and contributions, I end my remark by reminding us that, over the years, Jerry has actually befriended some of those whose names I just mentioned, spoken up on their behalf, and, in some cases, acted as legal adviser to their lawyers. Thank you, Jerry!
(Remarks made at the Conference: “Half a Century of Asian Law: A Celebration of Prof. Jerome Cohen”, George Washington University School of Law, Feb. 19, 2010)
Obviously the growth of a civil society and the development of the rule of law are mutually supportive and mutually beneficial. Professor Cohen has made huge imprints in leading the way to develop the latter, but also indirectly and directly to develop the former. Let me use my 5 minutes to say something about one part of this point, that is, how developing the rule of law helps the growth of civil society.
When I say civil society, I refer to a public space sandwiched between the private realm where for-profit interests dominate and the space where the State dominates. A sizable and lively public space is a fact of life in China today. Yes, you’re right, this civil society still has to fight hard for its life and for every inch of the space for independent action, against powerful forces from both sides that try to invade it and obliterate it. No matter how fragile and precarious, the fact that such a Chinese civil society is alive and kicking is monumental and it is, to a large extent, a gift from those who worked tirelessly to help the development of rule of law in the past many years, and the person who has been at the forefront of that hardworking troupe is the person we’re honoring here today.
There are many ways in which the emergence of a legal system and the promise of rule of law have boosted civil society. Three come to mind:
First, the promise of rule of law gave people hope, inspires them, and the law supplied the ammunition. The Chinese law has been the double-sword which the party-state uses to put people in their place but it is also used by the people to hold the government accountable and seek justice.
Second, many young lawyers, products of the newly minted law schools in China’s universities, take the government’s promise of rule of law and what they learnt in law textbooks literarily, but as they meet the reality of rule by the CCP political and legal committees, they become the front-row challengers of the system, and leaders in the civil rights movement.
Thirdly, members of the Chinese civil society have used the law to some extent effectively to extract positive changes, not without paying the prices, of course.
Take for example what is known as the “rights-defense movement”. Several things about this phenomenon deserve our attention:
1st, it has commanded a broad participation from many social classes/groups, not limited to the educated elite.
2nd, participants have made good use of the internet as their tools for communication & mobilization – to bypass draconic rules controlling organizing, and they have NOT been crushed by the Great Fire Wall and the heavy deployment of cyber-police;
3rd, while NGO organizing has become the primary target of the government’s war against civil society, many forms of informal organizing have been invented and they are carrying on the bulk of citizen actions;
And finally, this movement remains largely non-violent, participants appeal to the law & the Constitution, despite the fact that there have been an increasing number of violent mass incidents in clashes between protesters and the police.
These features are worth noticing because they may offer explanations as to why some small positive changes have been extracted by civil society activism from the authoritarian police state. We need only look back at the past half year to find several mini-steps forward, not mentioning earlier landmark decisions like the abolition of the Custody & Repatriation detention system. These recent steps include:
- the uncharacteristically light sentence for the young woman Deng Yujiao who accidentally killed an official in self-defense last summer;
- the backing out by government from its order to mandatorily install filtering software Green Dam Youth Escort on new computers last July;
- the quiet acknowledgement of “black jails” in the official media in recent weeks,
- and the lift of ban by the Shanghai government two weeks ago on activist Feng Zhenghu's return from Japan after his 92-days protest at the Tokyo airport.
In short, three decades of foreign legal aid and rule of law programs have helped nurture aspirations and provide tools for activists in the Chinese civil society to fight for justice. Jerry and many of you who are here today played an important role in making this possible. I second what Jerry said in his South China Morning Post article 3 days ago that such programs and the international pressure have helped pave the way for an easier transition once the fundamental changes take place. However, we must face up to the troubling reality that none of these efforts has stopped the Chinese government from engaging in extra-legal persecution of Gao Zhisheng, and mis-use of the law to persecute Liu Xiaobo and many others good citizens including Chen Guangcheng, Hu Jia, Huang Qi, Tan Zuoren (the list can go on), to punish them for having spoken up for or taken actions to protect the rights and interest of disadvantaged groups of fellow Chinese citizens.
As a testimony to Jerry’s integrity and contributions, I end my remark by reminding us that, over the years, Jerry has actually befriended some of those whose names I just mentioned, spoken up on their behalf, and, in some cases, acted as legal adviser to their lawyers. Thank you, Jerry!
(Remarks made at the Conference: “Half a Century of Asian Law: A Celebration of Prof. Jerome Cohen”, George Washington University School of Law, Feb. 19, 2010)
Monday, December 21, 2009
Copenhagen: China's Predictable Act of Game Change
Xiaorong Li
The UN Summit on climate change ended in a non-binding agreement. China and the US, for different reasons, hail it as a victory. Toward the end of the negotiations, Politico reported that China's negotiators were pushing for "a short, noncommittal collective statement" rather than a full-fledged binding agreement. What came out of the summit is something that those monitor China’s human rights have predicted. China emerged as the central holdout, leading developing countries with high emission rates, which, they said, if they were mandated to lower, would slow down their economy and cost billions, which they wanted the industrialized countries to pay.
No one should be surprised to learn from Copenhagen that the last thing the Chinese government wants is a binding agreement, transparency of its actions in implementing it and any opportunity for international monitoring. Yet, China also wants to appear a key player in global efforts to combat climate change.
China also says it deserves being given “exception”. Now that sounds familiar! Chinese officials told the gathering of world leaders that China is still a developing country and should not be held responsible for its carbon emissions as a developed country should. But China has become a big industrial country and replaced the US in 2006 to become the largest greenhouse gases producer. Without firm commitment by China and the US to abide by an enforceable treaty, with measurable benchmarks, to cut down emission, there is little hope to slow down climate change.
Copenhagen accentuates the stark choices that the Chinese leaders must make sooner or later: Will China rise as a responsible, cooperative, and rule-binding world power, a force to do good in solving global problems? Or will China rise as a force to undermine international efforts, imposing its own political will, changing the rule of the game by swinging its sheer weight around on world stage?
While many have been charmed and seduced by China’s rapid rising power status, it is easy to turn blind eyes to the fact that the Chinese government rules above the law at home. It needs the law and uses it as its political tool. The Chinese leaders love rule by law, but they have kept rule of law at bay! The government has little transparency in its decision making. It is un-accountable to its people, even those who would be negatively affected by its decisions and policies. Such a power is naturally averse to any international monitoring and efforts at holding it accountable to binding rules constraining its exercise.
It is true that China has singed on to binding international rules. That is when there were enough pressure and incentives. In 1998, China signed and ratified the binding human rights treaty International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights (ICSECR), and also signed (but has not ratified) the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. At that time, China was eager to return to international stage with as a respectable power player. It still had to struggle to shed off bad reputations after it had bloodily butchered peaceful pro-democracy protesters on Tiananmen ten years back, in 1989.
The key to getting China to sign binding agreement on cutting emission, then, is making the government understand what is at stake for its own interest -- if climate change can’t be quickly contained. And monitoring is necessary if any quick effective emission cut is to be achieved.
Even if China had signed a binding international agreement in Copenhagen, it does not mean action. It is important to take seriously the lessons learnt from the way in which China evades its treaty obligations to international human rights law:
First, when ratifying an international treaty, China never fails to take reservations on key articles and opt not to accept optional protocols. Thus China took reservation on the article stipulating the right to form independent union in the ICSECR. It also took reservations on articles governing monitoring and refused to adopt the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture. These moves practically exempted China from inspection by the Committee against Torture and prevented Chinese citizens from reporting individual cases to the Committee.
Secondly, international monitoring of China’s implementation of its treaty obligations and holding it accountable has been very difficult, if not impossible. Twenty-one years after China signed and ratified the Convention against Torture, the Chinese law has not yet been fully revised to conform to the treaty’s requirements, perpetrators have rarely been held criminally responsible, victims are hardly ever compensated, and torture remains rampant in detention centers, jails, and in law enforcement. (These are documented in the UN Committee against Torture’s 2008 “Concluding Observation & Recommendations” issued after its review of China’s own report on the implementation of this treaty in the past five years: http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G08/457/10/PDF/G0845710.pdf?OpenElement)
Thirdly, even after a treaty is signed and ratified, China would resist very hard any monitoring efforts. China responded to the CAT “Observations” with a belligerent comment, denouncing its conclusions as “biased” and the sources it cited as “fabricated” by groups whose purpose was to “overthrow the Chinese government”. (See UN document CAT/C/CHN/CO/4/Add.1) At the UN Human Rights Council, where China lobbied hard and voluntarily pledged to promote human rights in order to get re-elected for a second term in 2009, it plays an aggressive role in trying to change the rules and practices that give the UN human rights monitoring mechanisms some teeth. E.g., China is trying to undo the UN practice of appointing independent experts to the Committee against Torture or to the positions of mandate holders of the Special Procedures monitoring different thematic issues of human rights or specific countries. China does not want the experts to do the job independently. If China has its way, the professors, lawyers, judges and NOG human rights advocates, who currently serve as volunteers in these posts will be replaced one day by diplomats and politicians from member states.
Taking these lessons seriously allows environmentalists and others who care about climate change to work more effectively toward their goals by, for instance, supporting efforts at democratic reform, rule of law changes, and improvement in protection of human rights in China.
The UN Summit on climate change ended in a non-binding agreement. China and the US, for different reasons, hail it as a victory. Toward the end of the negotiations, Politico reported that China's negotiators were pushing for "a short, noncommittal collective statement" rather than a full-fledged binding agreement. What came out of the summit is something that those monitor China’s human rights have predicted. China emerged as the central holdout, leading developing countries with high emission rates, which, they said, if they were mandated to lower, would slow down their economy and cost billions, which they wanted the industrialized countries to pay.
No one should be surprised to learn from Copenhagen that the last thing the Chinese government wants is a binding agreement, transparency of its actions in implementing it and any opportunity for international monitoring. Yet, China also wants to appear a key player in global efforts to combat climate change.
China also says it deserves being given “exception”. Now that sounds familiar! Chinese officials told the gathering of world leaders that China is still a developing country and should not be held responsible for its carbon emissions as a developed country should. But China has become a big industrial country and replaced the US in 2006 to become the largest greenhouse gases producer. Without firm commitment by China and the US to abide by an enforceable treaty, with measurable benchmarks, to cut down emission, there is little hope to slow down climate change.
Copenhagen accentuates the stark choices that the Chinese leaders must make sooner or later: Will China rise as a responsible, cooperative, and rule-binding world power, a force to do good in solving global problems? Or will China rise as a force to undermine international efforts, imposing its own political will, changing the rule of the game by swinging its sheer weight around on world stage?
While many have been charmed and seduced by China’s rapid rising power status, it is easy to turn blind eyes to the fact that the Chinese government rules above the law at home. It needs the law and uses it as its political tool. The Chinese leaders love rule by law, but they have kept rule of law at bay! The government has little transparency in its decision making. It is un-accountable to its people, even those who would be negatively affected by its decisions and policies. Such a power is naturally averse to any international monitoring and efforts at holding it accountable to binding rules constraining its exercise.
It is true that China has singed on to binding international rules. That is when there were enough pressure and incentives. In 1998, China signed and ratified the binding human rights treaty International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights (ICSECR), and also signed (but has not ratified) the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. At that time, China was eager to return to international stage with as a respectable power player. It still had to struggle to shed off bad reputations after it had bloodily butchered peaceful pro-democracy protesters on Tiananmen ten years back, in 1989.
The key to getting China to sign binding agreement on cutting emission, then, is making the government understand what is at stake for its own interest -- if climate change can’t be quickly contained. And monitoring is necessary if any quick effective emission cut is to be achieved.
Even if China had signed a binding international agreement in Copenhagen, it does not mean action. It is important to take seriously the lessons learnt from the way in which China evades its treaty obligations to international human rights law:
First, when ratifying an international treaty, China never fails to take reservations on key articles and opt not to accept optional protocols. Thus China took reservation on the article stipulating the right to form independent union in the ICSECR. It also took reservations on articles governing monitoring and refused to adopt the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture. These moves practically exempted China from inspection by the Committee against Torture and prevented Chinese citizens from reporting individual cases to the Committee.
Secondly, international monitoring of China’s implementation of its treaty obligations and holding it accountable has been very difficult, if not impossible. Twenty-one years after China signed and ratified the Convention against Torture, the Chinese law has not yet been fully revised to conform to the treaty’s requirements, perpetrators have rarely been held criminally responsible, victims are hardly ever compensated, and torture remains rampant in detention centers, jails, and in law enforcement. (These are documented in the UN Committee against Torture’s 2008 “Concluding Observation & Recommendations” issued after its review of China’s own report on the implementation of this treaty in the past five years: http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G08/457/10/PDF/G0845710.pdf?OpenElement)
Thirdly, even after a treaty is signed and ratified, China would resist very hard any monitoring efforts. China responded to the CAT “Observations” with a belligerent comment, denouncing its conclusions as “biased” and the sources it cited as “fabricated” by groups whose purpose was to “overthrow the Chinese government”. (See UN document CAT/C/CHN/CO/4/Add.1) At the UN Human Rights Council, where China lobbied hard and voluntarily pledged to promote human rights in order to get re-elected for a second term in 2009, it plays an aggressive role in trying to change the rules and practices that give the UN human rights monitoring mechanisms some teeth. E.g., China is trying to undo the UN practice of appointing independent experts to the Committee against Torture or to the positions of mandate holders of the Special Procedures monitoring different thematic issues of human rights or specific countries. China does not want the experts to do the job independently. If China has its way, the professors, lawyers, judges and NOG human rights advocates, who currently serve as volunteers in these posts will be replaced one day by diplomats and politicians from member states.
Taking these lessons seriously allows environmentalists and others who care about climate change to work more effectively toward their goals by, for instance, supporting efforts at democratic reform, rule of law changes, and improvement in protection of human rights in China.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
China’s Indictment of Liu Xiaobo: What Does It Say about the Obama Administration’s Human Rights Policy?
Xiaorong Li
The news came last Friday that Liu Xiaobo, the best known Chinese dissident intellectual who lives in Beijing, was indicted on December 10, 2009, “International Human Rights Day,” by the Beijing Procuratorate. This move seems rather provocative or defiant, considering that the US President Obama had just returned from his China trip, where he has, no matter clearly or opaquely – a subject of debate, made statements advocating freedom of expression and information.
The Chinese leaders’ defiance to Mr. Obama and his call for more freedom of expression at the Shanghai “town hall” meeting with students carefully handpicked by the Chinese officials cannot be more accentuated by the fact that Mr. Liu is indicted for “drafting Charter 08 with others”, which the prosecution said was a “serious crime.” This means that writing and expressing views urging democratic reform and improving human rights is officially “a serious crime” in China and people go to jail for doing that, like Mr. Liu Xiaobo has for the past year.
Many may have wondered why the Chinese authorities chose at this time to indict Mr. Liu. But why wouldn't they? What would they have been worried about? One interesting question is whether the Obama Administration would learn something about the diminishing effectiveness of quiet private engagement on human rights with a big and increasingly more powerful country like China – if such a policy ever had any effectiveness at all before.
From talking to many people inside China, including Mr. Liu’s close friends, supporters, and his lawyers, I have heard it said repeatedly, often passionately, that the move against Liu Xiaobo and Charter 08, after having detained him and harassed other signatories for an whole year, is the outcome of the US President’s timid appeal in China. They told me that Obama’s appeals for human rights, which came in the form of praising freedom of expression on the internet and in a statement about agreeing to disagree about human rights during the joint press conference with the Chinese President Hu Jintao, were too weak and too vague. This seems to signal green light for the Chinese leaders to take strong actions on detained democrats and human rights activists, whose fate had been put on hold, as if awaiting for Obama’s visit.
It now looks like that US officials handed a short list of prisoners of conscience to the Chinese officials and President Obama may have personally conveyed the US government’s concerns about the individuals on the list to Hu Jintao. It was a private, quiet effort, to the Administration’s credit. But precisely because it was quiet and private, the Chinese leaders could easily pretend that they didn’t know anything and feel not pressure to respond. If this laudable effort ends there, out of the public view, it practically re-assured the Chinese leaders that the US would not protest loudly if they refuse to release these individuals or improve their conditions. The Chinese leaders seem to have concluded, quite logically, that the Obama administration, coming to Beijing to ask for help on several issues of importance to the US -- constraining Iran and N. Korea’s nuclear programs, slowing climate change, and re-balancing the economy -- would be too distracted by its own problems and unwilling to offend China by exerting any real pressure if the Chinese government went ahead convicting Liu Xiaobo and accusing drafting Charter 08 a crime.
For the Charter 08 writers and signatories, it might be better to be acknowledged than ignored by the Chinese government, but being officially labeled as having committed “a serious crime” sends a chill through the community. Charter 08, a public petition calling for democratic reform and protection of human rights, was initially signed by 303 Chinese on its release day on Dec. 9, 2008. In the past 12 months, more than 10,000 people have signed the petition, including about 8,000 residing on mainland China.
During those 12 months, other than the initial arrests, summons, interrogations, raids of homes and confiscation of personal property, the government has only published articles in official media to denounce “universal values” and “multi-party democracy,” but officials have rarely responded directly to Charter 08 by naming its name and have refrained from calling it a criminal act. Coming out finally to label drafting Charter 08 “a serious crime” clarifies speculations that, within top ranks of the leadership, officials were divided and some reformist inclined officials might be sympathetic to the drive or might have seen this as an opportunity to consolidate their power in the high-level power struggle.
Calling drafting Charter 08 a “crime” sends a stern warning to those who wrote, edited, or promoted this text, about one hundred of people, I was told, and to the thousands who signed the petition. For being implicated in this “criminal” act, they too could face imprisonment. The Chinese authorities clearly want to put them in their place: stop them from voicing their political views and threaten them with legal punishment for engaging in any political organizing!
Once again, the Chinese leaders behaved like calculating maximizers of benefits. Since they see no costly consequences for locking up its most vocal critic, and on the contrary, feeling confident they have had other big world powers tied around their fingers, they no longer need to make concessions by making a soft landing on Mr. Liu’s case. There is no obstacle in their path: They revert to do what the nature of their power has always seduced them to do – silencing dissent, stamping out any civil society mobilization for political change. Being calculating, rational, does not make an authoritarian one-party regime less authoritarian.
Let’s face it, it would not be entirely fair to call Obama’s China trip the worst or least successful in comparison to previous US Presidents’ China visits on account of the lack of any deal on prisoners’ releases this time. China is almost a different country today and the US-China relations are in a very different place as compared to the days of the Clinton’s and the Bushes’ presidencies. But quiet private diplomacy, an old strategy that didn’t quite work under these former presidents, is less likely to work now as China sees little bargain in such deals and no real pressure for compliance.
Obama could still have done better at making clear, strong, and eloquent statements on human rights and democracy on his China trip. The outcome might not have been different, given the weakened position of the US vs. China. But even if that were the case, the President would have at least stood the ground of US values and made the American people proud. And more importantly, to many Chinese democrats and human rights advocates, he would not have let them down.
December 14, 2009
The news came last Friday that Liu Xiaobo, the best known Chinese dissident intellectual who lives in Beijing, was indicted on December 10, 2009, “International Human Rights Day,” by the Beijing Procuratorate. This move seems rather provocative or defiant, considering that the US President Obama had just returned from his China trip, where he has, no matter clearly or opaquely – a subject of debate, made statements advocating freedom of expression and information.
The Chinese leaders’ defiance to Mr. Obama and his call for more freedom of expression at the Shanghai “town hall” meeting with students carefully handpicked by the Chinese officials cannot be more accentuated by the fact that Mr. Liu is indicted for “drafting Charter 08 with others”, which the prosecution said was a “serious crime.” This means that writing and expressing views urging democratic reform and improving human rights is officially “a serious crime” in China and people go to jail for doing that, like Mr. Liu Xiaobo has for the past year.
Many may have wondered why the Chinese authorities chose at this time to indict Mr. Liu. But why wouldn't they? What would they have been worried about? One interesting question is whether the Obama Administration would learn something about the diminishing effectiveness of quiet private engagement on human rights with a big and increasingly more powerful country like China – if such a policy ever had any effectiveness at all before.
From talking to many people inside China, including Mr. Liu’s close friends, supporters, and his lawyers, I have heard it said repeatedly, often passionately, that the move against Liu Xiaobo and Charter 08, after having detained him and harassed other signatories for an whole year, is the outcome of the US President’s timid appeal in China. They told me that Obama’s appeals for human rights, which came in the form of praising freedom of expression on the internet and in a statement about agreeing to disagree about human rights during the joint press conference with the Chinese President Hu Jintao, were too weak and too vague. This seems to signal green light for the Chinese leaders to take strong actions on detained democrats and human rights activists, whose fate had been put on hold, as if awaiting for Obama’s visit.
It now looks like that US officials handed a short list of prisoners of conscience to the Chinese officials and President Obama may have personally conveyed the US government’s concerns about the individuals on the list to Hu Jintao. It was a private, quiet effort, to the Administration’s credit. But precisely because it was quiet and private, the Chinese leaders could easily pretend that they didn’t know anything and feel not pressure to respond. If this laudable effort ends there, out of the public view, it practically re-assured the Chinese leaders that the US would not protest loudly if they refuse to release these individuals or improve their conditions. The Chinese leaders seem to have concluded, quite logically, that the Obama administration, coming to Beijing to ask for help on several issues of importance to the US -- constraining Iran and N. Korea’s nuclear programs, slowing climate change, and re-balancing the economy -- would be too distracted by its own problems and unwilling to offend China by exerting any real pressure if the Chinese government went ahead convicting Liu Xiaobo and accusing drafting Charter 08 a crime.
For the Charter 08 writers and signatories, it might be better to be acknowledged than ignored by the Chinese government, but being officially labeled as having committed “a serious crime” sends a chill through the community. Charter 08, a public petition calling for democratic reform and protection of human rights, was initially signed by 303 Chinese on its release day on Dec. 9, 2008. In the past 12 months, more than 10,000 people have signed the petition, including about 8,000 residing on mainland China.
During those 12 months, other than the initial arrests, summons, interrogations, raids of homes and confiscation of personal property, the government has only published articles in official media to denounce “universal values” and “multi-party democracy,” but officials have rarely responded directly to Charter 08 by naming its name and have refrained from calling it a criminal act. Coming out finally to label drafting Charter 08 “a serious crime” clarifies speculations that, within top ranks of the leadership, officials were divided and some reformist inclined officials might be sympathetic to the drive or might have seen this as an opportunity to consolidate their power in the high-level power struggle.
Calling drafting Charter 08 a “crime” sends a stern warning to those who wrote, edited, or promoted this text, about one hundred of people, I was told, and to the thousands who signed the petition. For being implicated in this “criminal” act, they too could face imprisonment. The Chinese authorities clearly want to put them in their place: stop them from voicing their political views and threaten them with legal punishment for engaging in any political organizing!
Once again, the Chinese leaders behaved like calculating maximizers of benefits. Since they see no costly consequences for locking up its most vocal critic, and on the contrary, feeling confident they have had other big world powers tied around their fingers, they no longer need to make concessions by making a soft landing on Mr. Liu’s case. There is no obstacle in their path: They revert to do what the nature of their power has always seduced them to do – silencing dissent, stamping out any civil society mobilization for political change. Being calculating, rational, does not make an authoritarian one-party regime less authoritarian.
Let’s face it, it would not be entirely fair to call Obama’s China trip the worst or least successful in comparison to previous US Presidents’ China visits on account of the lack of any deal on prisoners’ releases this time. China is almost a different country today and the US-China relations are in a very different place as compared to the days of the Clinton’s and the Bushes’ presidencies. But quiet private diplomacy, an old strategy that didn’t quite work under these former presidents, is less likely to work now as China sees little bargain in such deals and no real pressure for compliance.
Obama could still have done better at making clear, strong, and eloquent statements on human rights and democracy on his China trip. The outcome might not have been different, given the weakened position of the US vs. China. But even if that were the case, the President would have at least stood the ground of US values and made the American people proud. And more importantly, to many Chinese democrats and human rights advocates, he would not have let them down.
December 14, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Speaking of Human Rights
Here's the speech President Obama should give when he meets President Hu Jintao
By Xiaorong Li
November 17, 2009
While President Barack Obama is in Beijing this week, he has an opportunity to address two key issues, climate change and human rights concerns, simultaneously. Here's the kind of speech the president should give:
"President Hu Jintao, ladies & gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to be in Beijing.
My administration has put climate change at the top of our diplomatic agenda. This is especially true when it comes to our relationship with China. Our two large nations share the title of top consumers of energy and the biggest polluters on earth. None of us can escape the impact of climate change. The security and stability of our nations and our peoples - our prosperity, our health, our safety - are in jeopardy.
Yet, we cannot meet this challenge unless all the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, including China, act together. The U.S., as one of the developed nations that caused much of the damage to our environment over the last century, has a responsibility to lead. China, as a rapidly developing nation that will produce a large share of global carbon emissions in the decades ahead, must do its part.
I am proud to say that my administration is actively pursuing its agenda to promote clean energy and reduce carbon emissions. President Hu, I urge you to build on what your government has already done to combat pollution and promote alternative energy.
I also want to express my admiration for the independent environmental activists who have sprung up across China. In my country, activists have played a vital role in mobilizing public opinion, blowing the whistle on polluters and developing energy-saving measures. I salute them as part of the solution to environmental problems.
For this reason, I am concerned that they still cannot express their views freely. One of this country's most vocal environmentalists is behind bars. Wu Lihong, a farmer, should be released from prison where he is serving a three-year sentence in retaliation for exposing the illegal dumping of industrial waste in the famous Tai Lake. Another hero, Sun Xiaodi, is currently serving two years in a labor camp. He fought for recognition of the health problems caused by nuclear contamination among workers in a plant in Gansu Province.
In 2008, a plant producing harmful waste was constructed in the densely populated city Chengdu. Residents held a protest march. One organizer, Chen Daojun, is now serving three years in prison for 'inciting subversion of the state.'
Your honor, you told the U.N. General Assembly in September that your government will take bold actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Such an ambitious plan calls out for the active participation of members of Chinese civil society. Free expression is a key to civil society participation. People who post their opinions on the Internet, like the writer Liu Xiaobo, should not be behind bars for voicing their political views.
It is also crucial to hold polluting businesses accountable through a fair and just judicial process. That is why I am concerned that Chinese lawyers have been stripped of licenses or, as in the case of the Beijing lawyer Gao Zhisheng, imprisoned, tortured and made to 'disappear.'
The United States is willing to engage China as an ally and partner in finding solutions. The American people are flexible and pragmatic, but they hold dear to their hearts respect for liberty and human dignity. They will not give these ideals up for expediency's sake.
I look forward to working with you to achieve our common purpose: a world that is safer, cleaner and healthier than the one we found; and a future that is worthy of the children in China, in the United States, and in the world. Thank you."
Xiaorong Li is a research scholar at the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy, University of Maryland, College Park, who does consultant work for Chinese NGOs.
Copyright © 2009, The Baltimore Sun
By Xiaorong Li
November 17, 2009
While President Barack Obama is in Beijing this week, he has an opportunity to address two key issues, climate change and human rights concerns, simultaneously. Here's the kind of speech the president should give:
"President Hu Jintao, ladies & gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to be in Beijing.
My administration has put climate change at the top of our diplomatic agenda. This is especially true when it comes to our relationship with China. Our two large nations share the title of top consumers of energy and the biggest polluters on earth. None of us can escape the impact of climate change. The security and stability of our nations and our peoples - our prosperity, our health, our safety - are in jeopardy.
Yet, we cannot meet this challenge unless all the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, including China, act together. The U.S., as one of the developed nations that caused much of the damage to our environment over the last century, has a responsibility to lead. China, as a rapidly developing nation that will produce a large share of global carbon emissions in the decades ahead, must do its part.
I am proud to say that my administration is actively pursuing its agenda to promote clean energy and reduce carbon emissions. President Hu, I urge you to build on what your government has already done to combat pollution and promote alternative energy.
I also want to express my admiration for the independent environmental activists who have sprung up across China. In my country, activists have played a vital role in mobilizing public opinion, blowing the whistle on polluters and developing energy-saving measures. I salute them as part of the solution to environmental problems.
For this reason, I am concerned that they still cannot express their views freely. One of this country's most vocal environmentalists is behind bars. Wu Lihong, a farmer, should be released from prison where he is serving a three-year sentence in retaliation for exposing the illegal dumping of industrial waste in the famous Tai Lake. Another hero, Sun Xiaodi, is currently serving two years in a labor camp. He fought for recognition of the health problems caused by nuclear contamination among workers in a plant in Gansu Province.
In 2008, a plant producing harmful waste was constructed in the densely populated city Chengdu. Residents held a protest march. One organizer, Chen Daojun, is now serving three years in prison for 'inciting subversion of the state.'
Your honor, you told the U.N. General Assembly in September that your government will take bold actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Such an ambitious plan calls out for the active participation of members of Chinese civil society. Free expression is a key to civil society participation. People who post their opinions on the Internet, like the writer Liu Xiaobo, should not be behind bars for voicing their political views.
It is also crucial to hold polluting businesses accountable through a fair and just judicial process. That is why I am concerned that Chinese lawyers have been stripped of licenses or, as in the case of the Beijing lawyer Gao Zhisheng, imprisoned, tortured and made to 'disappear.'
The United States is willing to engage China as an ally and partner in finding solutions. The American people are flexible and pragmatic, but they hold dear to their hearts respect for liberty and human dignity. They will not give these ideals up for expediency's sake.
I look forward to working with you to achieve our common purpose: a world that is safer, cleaner and healthier than the one we found; and a future that is worthy of the children in China, in the United States, and in the world. Thank you."
Xiaorong Li is a research scholar at the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy, University of Maryland, College Park, who does consultant work for Chinese NGOs.
Copyright © 2009, The Baltimore Sun
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Václav Havel Honors a Chinese Prisoner
New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009
Letter to the editor
In response to China's Charter 08 (January 15, 2009)
A link to China's Charter 08
To the Editors:
Readers may be interested to know that Liu Xiaobo, a Beijing-based dissident now being held by Chinese authorities, and the other signatories of Charter 08, have received the 2008 Homo Homini Award in Prague. The award, which was presented by former Czech president Václav Havel on March 11 on behalf of the Czech-based organization People in Need, is given each year to someone who has "made an important contribution to promoting human rights, democracy and non-violent resolution of political conflicts."
For over three months, Liu has been held in incommunicado detention without access to a lawyer, in violation of Chinese law, for his involvement in the creation of Charter 08. Inspired by the 1977 Czech and Slovak protest movement Charter 77, of which Václav Havel was a founding member, Charter 08 is a document signed by more than eight thousand Chinese citizens that calls for greater respect for individual rights and democratic reform in China ["China's Charter 08," NYR, January 15]. Since Liu's detention, his wife has been able to pay him only two visits, under severely restricted circumstances. His current whereabouts are unknown.
The award was accepted on Liu's behalf by Xu Youyu, a political philosopher and writer, Cui Weiping, a literary critic, and Mo Shaoping, a leading human rights lawyer. In presenting the award, Havel said:
I would like once more to point out our experience, one that our Chinese friends should adopt in one way or another, the experience that one may never reckon with success, one may never reckon with the situation changing tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or in ten years. Perhaps it will not. If that is what you are reckoning with, you will not get very far.
However, in our experience, not reckoning with that did pay in the end; we found that it was possible to change the situation after all, and those who were mocked as being Don Quixotes, whose efforts were never going to come to anything, may in the end and to general astonishment get their way. I think that is important. In a peculiar way, there is both despair and hope in this. On the one hand we do not know how things will end, and on the other, we know they may in fact end well.
...It is our experience—and this is perhaps more an appeal to our ranks—that international solidarity is very important and valuable. It helps, even if only as an encouragement to us, rather than as an argument convincing the powers that be. Having had firsthand experience with a totalitarian system and dictatorship ourselves, it is thus our duty to help those who are yet not able to enjoy freedom.[*]
Li Xiaorong
University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland
Notes
[*]The complete text of Havel's remarks and acceptance speeches by Xu and Cui.
Letter to the editor
In response to China's Charter 08 (January 15, 2009)
A link to China's Charter 08
To the Editors:
Readers may be interested to know that Liu Xiaobo, a Beijing-based dissident now being held by Chinese authorities, and the other signatories of Charter 08, have received the 2008 Homo Homini Award in Prague. The award, which was presented by former Czech president Václav Havel on March 11 on behalf of the Czech-based organization People in Need, is given each year to someone who has "made an important contribution to promoting human rights, democracy and non-violent resolution of political conflicts."
For over three months, Liu has been held in incommunicado detention without access to a lawyer, in violation of Chinese law, for his involvement in the creation of Charter 08. Inspired by the 1977 Czech and Slovak protest movement Charter 77, of which Václav Havel was a founding member, Charter 08 is a document signed by more than eight thousand Chinese citizens that calls for greater respect for individual rights and democratic reform in China ["China's Charter 08," NYR, January 15]. Since Liu's detention, his wife has been able to pay him only two visits, under severely restricted circumstances. His current whereabouts are unknown.
The award was accepted on Liu's behalf by Xu Youyu, a political philosopher and writer, Cui Weiping, a literary critic, and Mo Shaoping, a leading human rights lawyer. In presenting the award, Havel said:
I would like once more to point out our experience, one that our Chinese friends should adopt in one way or another, the experience that one may never reckon with success, one may never reckon with the situation changing tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or in ten years. Perhaps it will not. If that is what you are reckoning with, you will not get very far.
However, in our experience, not reckoning with that did pay in the end; we found that it was possible to change the situation after all, and those who were mocked as being Don Quixotes, whose efforts were never going to come to anything, may in the end and to general astonishment get their way. I think that is important. In a peculiar way, there is both despair and hope in this. On the one hand we do not know how things will end, and on the other, we know they may in fact end well.
...It is our experience—and this is perhaps more an appeal to our ranks—that international solidarity is very important and valuable. It helps, even if only as an encouragement to us, rather than as an argument convincing the powers that be. Having had firsthand experience with a totalitarian system and dictatorship ourselves, it is thus our duty to help those who are yet not able to enjoy freedom.[*]
Li Xiaorong
University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland
Notes
[*]The complete text of Havel's remarks and acceptance speeches by Xu and Cui.
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