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. (more…)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 hereJuly 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)
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.’
(more…)
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.
(more…)
