Journalist Gheyrat Niyaz has been given a 15-year jail sentence by the Chinese authorities after he was found guilty of endangering Chinese national security. The Uighur journalist and blogger was given the sentence following accusations that he criticised Chinese government policy towards the Uighurs and gave evidence to Western press organisations during last year’s race related riots in Xinjiang province.
The Chinese authorities have ordered 122 websites to remove all traces of pornography or lewd content from their sites or face censorship and prosecution. The content prohibited includes pornographic fiction available for online reading or download. Chinese censorship has been steadily growing and recently hit the headlines over clashes with internet giant Google.
China confirms it has renewed Google’s internet licence. Making the announcement on Google’s company blog, chief legal officer David Drummond said:
We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP licence and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China.
Google’s relationship with China has been strained since it announced in March that it would no longer censor its search services in China. Instead it began to redirect Chinese users to Google’s unfiltered Hong Kong site. In a bid to have its licence renewed last month the company redesigned its google.cn landing page. Instead of automatically redirecting them to the Hong Kong site, it now offers them a link to google.hk instead. Google chief legal officer David Drummond defended the change in direction saying that “Without an ICP licence, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn—so Google would effectively go dark in China.”
Best-selling author Yu Jie has been taken into custody and threatened with imprisonment over his plans to publish a book critical of Premier Wen Jiabao. Jie says he was detained by security officers and told that he would face a substantial jail term if he went ahead with the book. He has long been critical of the Communist regime and his books are banned in mainland China.