The Chinese government has refused author Liao Yiwu an exit visa to attend the PEN World Voices Festival in New York. Authors at the event, led by Salman Rushdie, issued a protest on Friday (22 April) and called on the Chinese authority to overturn their ban. Liao is best known for his poem Massacre about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown for which he spent four years in jail. The festival has vowed to set up an empty chair to represent Liao.
With Ai Weiwei still missing in action, and dozens of other government undesirables, such as activists and rights lawyers also disappearing, it’s no wonder that the director of the Songzhuang Documentary Film Festival got cold feet.
Zhu Rikun told Chinese rag, The Global Times, that they had canceled the event, which was scheduled for early next month, because: “The overall situation was tense, and we had received a lot of pressure. We worried that the films to be shown would meet some problems in this environment and decided to cancel it.”
He did not elaborate on the referred to pressures.
UNCUT got in touch with an independent filmmaker who was planning on attending the festival. He asked us not to use his name.
“Although I had a feeling that it would be cancelled, I was still surprised when they actually did it,” he said, expressing disappointment.
I think it’s down to ideology. They don’t like people with diverging viewpoints coming together and watching these kinds of films. And neither do they want to let those people who have diverging viewpoints express their ideas.
The Global Times went on to cite an organizer for the festival as saying none of the films that were due to be shown were sensitive and most of them had already been shown at a festival in southern China in March this year.
This would have been the eighth incarnation of the festival which was started in 2003. It is held in the outskirts of Beijing in an artists’ district, a popular haunt for “sensitive” events.
The China Gay and Lesbian Film Festival is hoping to show a season of films in June. It remains to be seen if they will feel confident enough to go ahead.
A leading human rights lawyer who has been critical of the Chinese government returned home yesterday (19 April). Jiang Tianyong, disappeared on 19 February whilst visiting his brother in a Beijing suburb. Meanwhile, Liu Xiaoyuan, another rights lawyer who had disappeared last week, was also released. Liu suggested that his association with Ai Weiwei led to his detention.
Change.org, a website which runs an online petition calling for the release of Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, has been hit by DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. The website had managed to collect over 90,000 signatures for their petition. Ben Rattray, the founder of the website, stated that the attacks originated from a Chinese internet address. A spokesman for the ministry of information in Beijing said it was not aware of the issue.