21 Nov 2010 | News
Wangyi09’s twitter feed stops abruptly at 7:45AM on October 28. According to human rights groups, the Chinese rights activist, whose real name is Cheng Jianping, was detained later that day for a satirical tweet she had posted on October 17 which mocked anti-Japanese protesters by urging them to destroy the Japanese pavilion at the Shanghai Expo. Her husband-to-be, Hua Chunhui, also a rights activist, said the day she was grabbed by police was to have been their wedding day.
Hua had posted the original tweet which read: “”Anti-Japanese demonstrations, smashing Japanese products, that was all done years ago by Guo Quan [an activist and expert on the Nanjing Massacre]. It’s no new trick. If you really wanted to kick it up a notch, you’d immediately fly to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion.” Cheng re-tweeted it, adding the comment: “Angry youth! Charge!”
According to Radio Free Asia (RFA), who spoke to Chen Lei, a deputy chief of police in Xinxiang town, Henan province, Cheng was sentenced to a year of re-education through labour (RTL) on 15 November for “disturbing social order.” Cheng’s age is unclear. Some reports cite her as 46, others as in her twenties. The BBC reports that she is now being held in Shibali River women’s labour camp in Zhengzhou city in Henan.
Two days later, Amnesty came out with a statement calling for her release. “Sentencing someone to a year in a labour camp, without trial, for simply repeating another person’s clearly satirical observation on Twitter demonstrates the level of China’s repression of online expression,” said Sam Zarifi, the organization’s Asia-Pacific director.
Amnesty adds that the police may have been watching Cheng because she had been working as an online activist for several years, including showing support for imprisoned dissident and this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo. Cheng’s twitter account shows her as following the Dalai Lama’s and Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s twitter feeds among others.
21 Nov 2010 | Asia and Pacific, China
Wangyi09’s twitter feed stops abruptly at 7:45AM on October 28. According to human rights groups, the Chinese rights activist, whose real name is Cheng Jianping, was detained later that day for a satirical tweet she had posted on October 17 which mocked anti-Japanese protesters by urging them to destroy the Japanese pavilion at the Shanghai Expo. Her husband-to-be, Hua Chunhui, also a rights activist, said the day she was grabbed by police was to have been their wedding day. (more…)
26 Apr 2010 | Uncategorized
I’ve written a short blog explaining the potential effects of the UK’s Digital Economy Act to American readers of Dissent magazine.
If you think this only affects Internet users in Britain, think again. As with so much illiberal legislation, once mandated in one country, it begins to creep abroad. As Ian Brown, of the Oxford Internet Institute writes in the latest edition of the Index on Censorship magazine: “The European Commission has been secretly negotiating a new anti-counterfeiting treaty with the US, Japan and other developed nations that would mandate a three strikes policy.”
Read the rest here
19 Apr 2010 | Index Index, minipost, Uncategorized
According to Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun the Chinese Central Propaganda Department has issued guidelines on reporting of the Qinghai earthquake disaster. All internal news items circulated within mainland China are to be approved by state officials before publishing, and can only focus on positive aspects of the relief effort.
Western media has already been more critical, focussing on aspects such as the unrecognised efforts of the 200 Tibetan monks who were banned from accessing certain areas of the city, instead concentrating on helping the rural population whose houses suffered the most damage. Other aspects that have hampered the rescue operation include delays in the arrival of aid packages and the altitude sickness experienced by many workers not native to the area. In a similar twist to the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, people have again been questioning why only government buildings have remained standing, whilst schools and homes have suffered the most destruction. Chinese news channels have been banned from reporting on these aspects of the disaster.
