Posts Tagged ‘china’
July 2nd, 2009
China’s controversial plan to install Green Dam internet filtering software on all computers will go ahead despite previous postponements, a government official told state media today saying it was only “a matter of time” until the software was installed. Meanwhile
the Telepragh has reported that Green Dam has already been downloaded three million times since the end of March and has been installed on 518,000 computers. Read more
here
June 24th, 2009
One of China’s most prominent political activists has been formally arrested for inciting subversion. Liu Xiaobo is accused of spreading rumours and defaming the government, according to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency. Mr Liu’s arrest comes six months after he was taken into custody. Read more
here
June 23rd, 2009
China has confirmed it will continue with plans to force every computer in the country to run controversial filtering program Green Dam. The move follows news that Google have agreed to filter search results in China to screen out pornographic or explicit material. In a Twitter posting, prominent blogger Ai Weiwei appealed for an Internet boycott on the softwares launch in July, the same day of the anniversary to mark founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Read more
here
June 22nd, 2009
An official complaint was lodged by US representatives with the Chinese government over plans to introduce mandatory Green Dam web censorship software. Read more
here
June 19th, 2009
American computer makers say the Chinese government has not backed down from a requirement that Internet censorship software be preinstalled on all computers sold in China after July 1, despite reports this week that the rule had been relaxed. Read more
here
June 18th, 2009
Chinese police appear to have detained a blogger who posted images of the aftermath of a riot online, prompting concerns of a crackdown on citizen journalists. The images he had posted online have since been deleted or blocked. Read more
here
June 17th, 2009
The Chinese government appears to have backed down in the face of public opposition to its plans for mandatory installation of Green Dam Youth Escort on all new computers. The software restricting access to pornography and politically sensitive websites was due to be compulsorily incorporated in the hard drives of all new machines sold after 1 July, but state-run media has announced that it will instead be an optional package.
Read more
here
June 10th, 2009
China has defended the use of new screening software that has to be installed on all computers saying its purpose is to filter out pornographic and violent material. Read more
here
June 8th, 2009
China plans to enforce that all personal computers sold in the country as of 1 July have “Green Dam-Youth Escort” software designed to censor and block certain websites. Read more
here
June 4th, 2009
Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft is varying search results of the term “sex” dependent on the country. The UK, US and all European countries produce long lists of results but Arabian countries, China, India and several others produce no results leading to accusations of censorship. Read more
here
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Tags: Tags: Arab region, Bing, censorship, china, india, Internet censorship, Microsoft, search engine, sex, UK, US,
June 4th, 2009
Chinese police have cordened off Tiananmen Square, to prevent people marking the 20th anniversary of the massacre and banned foreign press. Earlier today US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged China to launch an official inquiry. Read more
here
June 2nd, 2009
Poet Liu Hongbin fled China after taking part in the Tiananmen Square protests. Here, he describes his experience of returning to China as a persona non grata in 1997
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June 1st, 2009
China’s biggest news portal, Sina, has shut down artist-turned-activist Ai Weiwei’s blog without explanation after he refused to self-censor his posts ahead of 4 June, the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen protests. Read more
here
May 27th, 2009
The online version of one of China’s most radical magazines, Yanhuang Chunqiu (China Through the Ages) has been closed by the censors who patrol the Great Firewall of China, days before the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Read more
here
May 26th, 2009
A Chinese professor has won his case against an Internet company that closed his website in March after he posted what was deemed to be illegal material. This is the first-ever case to be won by a victim of Internet censorship in a Chinese court. Read more
here
May 20th, 2009
Liu Zhihua, the last-known prisoner jailed on the charge of hooliganism after protesting against the crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement has been released from jail in China in advance of the 20th anniversary of the protests.Read more
here
May 18th, 2009
China’s Lou Ye and Iran’s Bahman Ghobadi are both at Cannes Film Festival with movies made undercover after they were barred from working by the authorities at home. ” Read more
here and
here
May 14th, 2009
Two US journalists arrested in North Korea near its border with China in March are set to face trial on June 4. Read more
here
April 15th, 2009
Twenty years ago this week, Chinese students began their occupation of Tiananmen Square, a protest that ended in a massacre. In an exclusive extract from the next issue of Index on Censorship, Wang Dan, a leading figure in the 1989 movement, talks to writer Xinran about the fallout and the legacy
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March 25th, 2009
Google said that its YouTube video-sharing website had been blocked in China.
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January 14th, 2009
In an open letter posted on Chinese-language website Boxun.com, a group of more than 20 Chinese lawyers, writers, and intellectuals accuse state television CCTV of misleading its audience with propaganda and call for viewers to boycott its programmes.
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December 23rd, 2008
China’s greatest artist, Ai Weiwei, caused controversy in the summer when he announced he would stay away from the Olympic Games, despite being the creative mind behind Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium.
In an exclusive interview for Index on Censorship’s ‘Made in China issue’, he told Simon Kirby about challenging state censorship and the status quo.
Read here
December 10th, 2008
Author and dissident
Liu Xiabao was arrested on Monday in Beijing. Liu, who is on the board of Chinese PEN, was among 300 intellectuals who signed the
Charta 2008 declaration calling for democracy and widespread political reform in China.
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October 23rd, 2008
China sought to prevent the awarding of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to Chinese dissident Hu Jia on 23 October.
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August 19th, 2008
The Chinese authorities are yet to issue any permits for the designated ‘protest zones’ which were installed as a gesture of openness and freedom in conjunction with the Olympic Games. The state media organ, Xinhua, reported that 77 applications had been put forward by 149 individuals, with three were from international citizens. All of these were either withdrawn, suspended or rejected.
Read more
here
August 18th, 2008
Blogger Zhou ‘Zola’ Shugang, known in China as the ‘nailhouse blogger’, was placed under house arrest last week by Chinese authorities seeking to prevent him travelling to Beijing. Zola has frequently drawn attention to issues hushed up by the Chinese authorities.
Read ‘Notes on the Net’, Zola’s article on Internet activism for Index on Censorship’s ‘Made in China’ issue here (pdf)
August 14th, 2008
Journalist John Ray of ITV and
Guardian photographer Dan Chung have both reported being ‘manhandled’ by the Chinese police while covering a pro-Tibet protest in Beijing. Ray was also detained by police who claimed to have mistaken him for an activist, despite his having shown identification which proved otherwise. Seven activists present at the protest were also detained, including six Americans and a Japanese citizen of Tibetan descent.
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August 8th, 2008
As the Games begin in Beijing, Index publishes a roundup of arrests, detentions and surveillance since January –– a reminder that China has yet to meet its Olympic challenge of harmony and openness.
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August 4th, 2008
Continuing our series of articles from Index on Censorship’s ‘Made In China’ issue, Internet pioneer Isaac Mao explains why freedom of thought is what China needs most.
Read here (pdf)
July 31st, 2008
Liu Shaokun, a school employee, has been sentenced to a year of ‘re-education under labour’ after posting pictures of schools that collapsed in May’s Sichuan earthquake on the web. Chinese people were forbidden from taking pictures of the devastation, as they raised questions about planning and building.
Read more
here
July 29th, 2008
Continuing our series of articles from Index on Censorship’s ‘Made In China’ issue, Rebecca MacKinnon discusses how online pioneers are changing Chinese culture
Read article here (pdf)
July 14th, 2008
In the lead up to the Olympic Games in China, Indexoncensorship.org will be publishing articles from our journal. This week, an interview with Ai Weiwei, the artistic genius behind Beijing’s ‘bird’s nest’ stadium.
Read Ai Weiwei interview here (pdf)
July 8th, 2008
London Metropolitan University has expressed ‘regret’ at offence caused to China by its recent award of an honorary doctorate to Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama in May.
A
report on state-run
China Daily said that the university’s vice-chancellor, Brian Roper, had sent a letter to China’s embassy in London on 16 June to apologise for any upset felt by the Chinese people over the award.
A spokeswoman for London Metropolitan said the move came after the university’s media monitoring service had noticed negative comment about the decision on Chinese websites.
However, a representative of the Chinese embassy in London confirmed to
Index on Censorship that the letter of apology had come after the embassy had demanded it from the university.
Britain’s universities now hosts over 49,000 Chinese students.
May 7th, 2008
The estimated 30,000 journalists expected to converge on Beijing for the 2008 Olympiad need to prepare themselves well in advance before they blunder across one of the world’s least understood and most volatile domestic political stages, writes Rohan Jayasekera
The XXIX Olympiad in Beijing will be covered by an expected 20,000 accredited sports media workers — and another 10,000 unaccredited. That’s more than three journalists for every athlete. How will China react to this influx of independent opinion if the focus comes off sport and on to politics?
January 2008 rules introduced for the Games theoretically allow foreign journalists to report freely on Chinese ‘politics, economy, society, and culture’ until next October.
This promised liberalisation came to a sharp halt following the outbreak of violent protests in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa on 10 March. Beijing responded with a news blackout, expelling foreign reporters from Beijing, Tibet and its neighbouring provinces of Gansu, Qinghai, and Sichuan.
The Foreign Correspondents Club of China has recorded more than 230 abuses of the new rules. Until March things were getting better, BBC World News Editor Jon Williams told a conclave of Chinese and Western journalists and media rights activists in Paris in April. ‘Now they’re as difficult as they’ve been for a long time.’
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April 15th, 2008
Would an Olympic boycott really inspire China to improve its human rights record and its dealings with Tibet? Or would it make things worse, asks Nick Young
Tibet’s Himalayan neighbours in Bhutan and Nepal are beginning to build political institutions better fitted to the 21st century, and there is no doubt that Beijing should renegotiate its relationship with Lhasa in keeping with this zeitgeist.
But would an Olympics boycott advance this process or, indeed, advance human rights in China generally? Almost certainly not. Humiliating the government of China is, in this instance if not always, a less astute tactic than campaigners suppose, and is likely to prove counterproductive.
China expected the Olympics to signal the end of a long era of humiliation that began 170 years ago with the Opium Wars. By 2000 it seemed that China had at last emerged from the shadows of western bullying, Japanese invasion, civil war, internecine political struggle and failed development. The political elite saw hosting the Olympics as a celebration of this renaissance. They will take efforts to spoil the Games as a sign that, rather than being ready to accommodate China’s peaceful rise, the west is determined to slap China back down the development ladder.
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April 10th, 2008
The increasingly farcical Olympic torch relay made its way to California yesterday. Lucie Morilllon of Reporters Without Borders was there
After the London and Paris demonstrations that disrupted the Olympics torch relay and angered Chinese officials, the world’s eyes were on San Francisco — the next city scheduled to welcome, 9 April, the symbol of the most controversial Games since Moscow 1980. A large proportion of the city’s population is Asian. The day before, exactly four months before the opening ceremony in Beijing, thousands of people attended a pro-Tibet rally and vigil with speeches by Desmond Tutu and actor Richard Gere. Other demonstrations had taken place before that event, including one involving activists who climbed the Golden Gate Bridge to display ‘Free Tibet’ flags. Protesters were warming up for the next day, as were the San Francisco police, the city’s officials, and the Beijing Olympic Committee. The route had already been shortened from eight to six miles, and was announced at the last minute in a clear attempt to prevent demonstrators from making plans well in advance. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom had made sure that he would have some flexibility in addressing the issue. He said that the route could be changed at any time, depending upon how the situation evolved.
The torch relay was originally scheduled to start off at 1pm from McCovey Cove, follow the waterfront to Fisherman’s Wharf, and head back to Justin Herman Plaza. I decided to go out to keep track of the demonstrations at about 10.30am. My hotel was a couple of blocks from the Embarcadero. As soon as I left, I bumped into a group of pro-Tibet demonstrators, all carrying flags and posters. I followed them down the avenue. On our way, we encountered groups of pro-Chinese government protestors carrying huge Chinese and Bejing 2008 flags. The Chinese authorities had obviously decided to play the PR game and send their own people to counter the visibility of their opponents. The closer we got to the Justin Herman Plaza, where the closing ceremony was supposed to take place, the more the various groups of protesters began to intermingle and confront each other, sometimes resorting to verbal provocation and insults. A group of Olympic supporters came across some Tibetan monks and started yelling at them. At this stage I was worried that even a single gesture could turn the situation violent. But the Tibetan monks went on, while their followers made peace signs. The pro-Chinese protesters were playing drums to drown out the loud heckling on one side and cheers on the other.
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March 17th, 2008
The Chinese authorities limited access to video site YouTube over the weekend, after clips of clashes between police and protesters in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, were uploaded.
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February 8th, 2008
On 8 February Yu Huafeng, former head of Guangzhou-based newspaper
Nanfang Dushi Bao, was released after four years in jail. Convicted in May 2004 on charges of corruption, he was released following pressure and campaigns led by both international organisations and those based within China. In 2005 by more than 2,300 Chinese journalists signed a petition for his release.
Read more here
