April 2005 Archives

China's Henan province seems still in denial about its AIDS problem
BY HANNAH BEECH | SHANGHAI

China may finally be coming clean about its burgeoning AIDS problem, but health officials in the ravaged province of Henan are still behaving as if the epidemic were a dirty secret. Last month, more than 100 armed police stormed the NGO-run Orchid Orphan School in the city of Shangqiu, a boarding school for AIDS orphans (some of whom are HIV-positive), and whisked the students away on a truck. Two volunteers were detained for "causing social disorder." The local health bureau says the school was closed because it never applied for an operating license. But school founder Li Dan says he applied repeatedly. He suspects the school was shuttered because it was getting publicity. "The minds of the local Henan officials are very closed," says Wan Yanhai, a Beijing AIDS activist. "Their first impulse is to suppress information."

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The OpenNet Initiative tested China's Internet filtering of web content, blog postings, and e-mail correspondences. Our testing found efforts to prevent access to a wide range of sensitive materials, from pornography to religious material to political dissent. Unlike the filtering systems in many other countries, China’s filtering regime appears to be carried out at various control points and also to be changing over time. China operates the most extensive, technologically sophisticated, and broad-reaching system of Internet filtering in the world. China’s intricate technical filtering regime is buttressed by an equally complex series of laws and regulations that control the access to and publication of material online. However, ONI found that most major American media sites, such as CNN, MSNBC, and ABC, are generally available in China (though the BBC remains blocked). Moreover, most sites we tested in our global list’s human rights and anonymizer categories are accessible as well. Click for the full report

from OpenNet Initiative

By Mark Ward
Technology Correspondent, BBC News website

In less than 10 years China has gone from a net newcomer to the country with the world's second-largest online population.
The first international internet data from China started travelling across the net in 1994, yet now the country has more than 100m net users

That puts its second only to the US with its 185m web users. But China looks set to pass that within a few years - especially when you consider that China's net users represent barely 8% of its population.

If Chinese net use grows to the levels seen in many Western nations, it could end up with 750m people regularly going online.

But currently the experience of the average Chinese net user differs greatly from that of many in the West.

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By PU ZHIQIANG

EVER since June 4, 1989, when the world's cameras embarrassed the Chinese government by recording the slaughter of unarmed protesters in Beijing, spring has been a sensitive period in Chinese politics. Public demonstrations of all kinds have been repressed as if they were vicious cancers. It is indeed news, then, that people have been protesting in the streets of Chinese cities about Japan's wartime past, its textbooks' reluctance to face history squarely, and its proposed accession to the United Nations Security Council.

Of course, the fundamental nature of these protests is different from that of the demonstrations of 1989, because they so far have had the tacit approval of the authorities. The protesters have incurred essentially zero risk, and suspense over the outcome has also been near zero. But even when protests are government-sanctioned, they still offer the Chinese people a rare chance to let off some steam.

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By JOSEPH KAHN (for the New York Times)

BEIJING, April 26 - A top Chinese state-run newspaper said in a staff editorial this week that the wave of popular protests against Japan were part of an "evil plot" with "ulterior motives," suggesting that at least some elements of the Chinese leadership now wish to portray the demonstrations as a conspiracy to undermine the Communist Party.

The editorial, published in The Liberation Daily of Shanghai on Monday, used the most strident language to date in an escalating campaign against the anti-Japan protests, which officials had previously done relatively little to stop - and some say had even encouraged - for three weeks to mid-April.

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