May 2005 Archives
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BEIJING
The most important person in the world right now may be Hu Jintao, and we're beginning to get a better sense of what kind of a leader he is: disappointing.
More than anyone else, President Hu will determine whether China can continue to surge and whether its rise will be stable and peaceful. Ever since he vaulted into the top ranks of the Communist Party in 1992, there have been vigorous debates about whether he is a closet reformer or a closet hard-liner, but now that he has been the Communist leader for two and a half years, we can form a tentative conclusion: the second camp seems to have been right.
Mr. Hu appears to be an intuitive authoritarian who believes in augmenting the tools of repression, not easing them. Most distressing, Mr. Hu has tugged China backward politically. He has presided over a steady crackdown on dissent, the news media, religion, Internet commentary and think tanks. China now imprisons far more journalists than any other country.
By PAT CHOATE
CHINA is the global epicenter of pirating and counterfeiting. By its government's own estimate, China's domestic trade in bogus goods accounts for $19 billion to $24 billion annually. That is undoubtedly a significant understatement, and it doesn't even include the stolen technologies and phony brands China exports to the rest of the world. Since welcoming China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, the United States has had a historic opportunity to stop the Chinese piracy trade. So far, the Bush administration has failed to seize it.
I opposed bringing China into the trade organization, and I don't like the idea of subordinating America's sovereignty to undemocratic international institutions like the W.T.O. But those decisions are behind us, and the worst thing we can do now is to fail to use the limited tools that the W.T.O. provides for protecting our economic interests.
By JIM YARDLEY
ZIBO, China - For a Chinese government that regularly promises its citizens a society governed by the rule of law, the case of a neatly dressed man named Li is a reminder of what still remains outside the law.
Here in a bleak stretch of eastern China, Mr. Li, 40, spent two years in a prison called Shandong No. 2 Labor Re-education Camp. Mr. Li, who spoke on condition that only his surname be used, and other followers of the banned spiritual group Falun Gong have been jailed here despite never having a lawyer or a trial - rights granted under China's criminal law.
China has been accused by two US-based human rights groups of conducting a "crushing campaign of religious repression" against Muslim Uighurs.
It is being done in the name of anti-separatism and counter-terrorism, says a joint report by Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in China.
It is said to be taking place in the western Xinjiang region, where more than half the population is Uighur.
China has denied that it suppresses Islam in Xinjiang.
It says it only wants to stop the forces of separatism, terrorism and religious extremism in the region, which Uighur separatists call East Turkestan.
By Joe McDonald
BEIJING -- A Chinese journalist who worked for a financial newspaper was sentenced Saturday to 10 years in prison on charges of giving state secrets to foreigners.
Shi Tao's family said the sentence was the minimum possible under his March conviction "illegally providing state secrets to foreigners." They said the maximum was life in prison.
Falun Gong, Dalai Lama Among Blocked Topics
By Jonathan Krim, Washington Post Staff Writer
The Chinese government is succeeding in broadly censoring what its citizens can read on the Internet, surprising many experts and denting U.S. government hopes that online access would be a quick catalyst for democratic political reform.
Internet users in the world's most populous country are routinely blocked from sites featuring information on subjects such as Taiwanese independence, the Falun Gong movement, the Dalai Lama and the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, according to a study to be released today by a consortium of researchers from Harvard University, the University of Toronto and Cambridge University in England.
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