March 2011 Archives

By Edward Wong | The New York Times
March 30, 2011

A human rights advocate in Sichuan has been formally arrested and charged with inciting subversion against the state, according to a statement on Wednesday by China Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group that tracks violations by the Chinese government. The advocate, Chen Wei, was charged on Monday, and his family was notified on Tuesday.

Mr. Chen is the third person in recent days to be charged with inciting subversion in an extraordinary harsh crackdown on progressives in China that has been unfolding since late February. The other two, Ran Yunfei and Ding Mao, are also from Sichuan and are known, like Mr. Chen, to be promoters of the rule of law and democracy-oriented reforms.

Parts of Sichuan Province, a rugged, populous area in western China, are known to be havens for liberal thinkers, and the region has a long literary and philosophical tradition. The authorities there are now at the forefront of pressing charges against people advocating political reform.

On Friday, a court in Sichuan sentenced Liu Xianbin, a veteran democracy activist, to 10 years in prison for slandering the Communist Party in his writings; Mr. Liu was detained in June, before the current clampdown.

The recent wave of disappearances and detentions began when a Chinese-language Web site hosted in the United States posted a call in late February for frustrated Chinese to take to the streets in a so-called Jasmine Revolution to protest corruption and unjust rule. The Chinese government, fearing the kinds of protests that have swept through the Arab world, has apparently ordered that any signs of dissent be nipped in the bud.

China Human Rights Defenders estimates that at least 23 people have been detained for criminal investigation. ChinaGeeks.org, an English-language Web site based in Beijing, compiled a list this week of about 50 Chinese who have been recently detained, arrested or made to disappear; the list is based on various reports and is incomplete.

One person on the list is Yang Hengjun, an Australian spy novelist and pro-democracy blogger who vanished on Sunday after reportedly making a call from the airport in the southern city of Guangzhou. Mr. Yang had said three men were following him. The Australian government said Tuesday that it was concerned about Mr. Yang's whereabouts, and one friend in Australia said Mr. Yang, a former employee of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, had indicated over the phone to his sister that he had been taken away by security officers.

On Wednesday, the mystery over Mr. Yang deepened when at least three friends of his said on their microblogs that he had called them that morning to say he was in a hospital. One friend, Li Huizhi, wrote that Mr. Yang had said everything was a "misunderstanding." Another friend, Wu Jiaxiang, told Reuters that Mr. Yang coughed a few times. "It's impossible for me to say whether Yang was really in the hospital," he said.

The cryptic calls have fueled theories among many of Mr. Yang's supporters that he was being held by the state at a secret site.

>> Original Report

By Matthew Robertson | The Epoch Times
March 25, 2011

Chinese dissident Liu Xianbin was paraded into court on Friday and after two hours sentenced to ten years in prison. Liu had been convicted with the vague but perilous charge of "inciting subversion of state power," through essays he had written advocating democracy.

The judge in the Suining court in Sichuan Province repeatedly interrupted Liu as he attempted to make a statement, his wife told various Western media outlets in China. But he managed to cry out "I'm not guilty."

Observers see the harsh sentence as part of an overall attempt, ramped up in recent years, to extinguish the growing cohort of human rights lawyers, democracy activists, and other voices calling for civil society in China.

"It's actually very simple. It's the same thing they've been doing over the last several years. They want to smash this group of people," said Guo Guoting, a Chinese civil rights lawyer who now lives in Canada, in a telephone interview.

"The Party-state is deepening in its lawlessness, really," said Kelley Currie, a Senior Fellow with the DC-based Project 2049 Institute, a thinktank. "It's part of a broader trend where you're seeing them completely intolerant of dissent, anything that overtly challenges the system or talks about the illegitimacy of the CCP leadership," she said.

Joshua Rosenzweig of Duihua Foundation, a group focused on civil rights in China, wrote something along the same lines in the Wall Street Journal on March 24: "Compared to earlier suppression campaigns, this one is more terrifying because of its blatant lawlessness."

Liu's case is slightly different in that the law was ostensibly used. But there are immense problems in even the legal trappings with which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has attempted to gild the punishment, Guo says.

"Even going according to the CCP's standards, it's a judgment that entirely perverts the law," Guo wrote in an email. He pointed out that the language in article 105 of the Chinese penal code, which deals with subversion of state power, implies the use of violence. "But Liu Xianbin never did anything remotely violent," he wrote.

The particular charge has been used by the authorities for years, and has been subject to lengthy dissection by human rights groups.

In 1998 Liu was part founder of the China Democracy Party's Sichuan chapter. The group did not last long, however, and in 1999 Liu was sent to prison for 13 years. The charge was, like this time, "subversion of state power."

Other democracy groups founded in more recent years have faced the same harsh dismantling. Guo Quan, another democracy activist who founded the China New Democracy Party, is in his third year of a 10-year sentence handed down in 2009.

After Liu was released on Nov. 6, 2008, he went back to his democracy activism. Essays he penned for overseas dissident publications aroused the CCP's ire, and he was detained on June 27, 2010.

The following month Party prosecutors compiled a list of his statements as evidence against him. He had written that "the rule of the Communist Party has always been characterized by high pressure and terror," and that the Chinese people live under "the terrorizing rule of the political police, living their lives mechanically like slaves."

This was "slander of the People's Democratic Dictatorship," the prosecutors said.

Guo, formerly a lawyer, regards the sentence as a strong signal by the authorities to Liu's peers. He used the well-worn Chinese phrase: "killing the chicken to scare the monkeys."

Many see in the authorities' increasingly fierce tactics a kind of desperation.

Since 2008 the Party went from the usual fears about its legitimacy to being "completely freaked out," Kelley Currie said in a telephone interview. "It's a low trust regime, their legitimacy is rooted in things that are extremely transient," she said.

>> Complete Report Here

By Radio FREE Asia
March 25, 2011

Netizens suspect China of Internet disruptions and interference

U.S.-based Internet giant Google is funding high-tech research into software that can detect when and where governments and Internet service providers are interfering with normal Web traffic.

Google on Monday accused the Chinese government of disrupting its e-mail services inside China, as netizens complained of inaccessible accounts and attempts to steal their passwords.

China hit out at the allegations on Tuesday, calling them "unacceptable."

Gmail account holders have been complaining to the California-based company of disruption for several weeks, coinciding with annual parliamentary sessions in Beijing and anonymous calls for protests inspired by recent uprisings in the Middle East, the company said.

But Google said they had detected no technical issues with Gmail.

Google said it suspects Chinese authorities of interfering with Gmail in a way "carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail."

Hard evidence

According to Wenke Lee, Professor in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a principal investigator on the Google-funded development project, the new software could provide hard evidence to settle such disputes in future.

His team, funded by a U.S. $1 million Google Focused Research Fund, will work on ways to enable Internet users to click a button and determine whether their service was being disrupted or censored.

"At the end of the project, the team hopes to provide a suite of Web-based, Internet-scale measurement tools that any user around the world could access for free," Georgia Tech said in a statement on its website.

"With the help of these tools, users could determine whether their ISPs are providing the kind of service customers are paying for, and whether the data they send and receive over their network connections is being tampered with by governments and/or ISPs," it said.

"If we have a community of Internet user-participants in that country, we will know instantly when a government or ISP starts to block traffic, tamper with search results, even alter web-based information in order to spread propaganda," Lee said.

Transparent policies

According to Georgia Tech researchers, some 60 nations including the United States censor some access to information on the Internet.

They say the new tools will cover Internet connections accessed via both computers and cell phones.

"Regardless of what policies an ISP or government takes on issues like censorship and net neutrality, we believe those policies should be transparent," said Nick Feamster, Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science.

He said the team wants to make a "transparency watchdog" system that uses monitoring agents to keep constant tabs on network performance and availability in strategic Internet locations around the world.

Beijing has denied allegations of tampering with Google services.

'Unacceptable accusation'

"This is an unacceptable accusation," foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a regular news briefing on Tuesday.

Beijing has explicitly forbidden any online content that "endangers state security," "divulges state secrets," or "subverts state power."

Any content that  jeopardizes "ethnic unity," interferes with government religious policies, propagates "heretical or superstitious ideas," or "disrupts social stability" is also banned, according to regulations governing China's Internet published last year.

China has also rolled out tough new regulations aimed at monitoring Internet usage in cybercafes across the country in the past year, with many businesses now requiring a swipe of smart ID cards before allowing people online.

China had a total of 457 million Internet users at the end of 2010.

Reported by Xin Yu for RFA's Mandarin service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

>> Original Source

By Clifford Coonan | The Irish Times
March 24, 2011

China is intensifying a crackdown on the Uighur ethnic minority in the restive province of Xinjiang in response to uprisings against governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer has said.

"What happened in Tunisia and Egypt has strong effects on Uighur people and the Chinese people because it gives the oppressed peoples hope for a better world," Ms Kadeer told Australia's federal parliament.

Middle-East-inspired protests have been used as a pretext by China's security forces for a widespread crackdown on anyone the government considers a threat to its rule, including lawyers and political activists. There have been curbs imposed on foreign reporters and increased restrictions on internet access.

Ms Kadeer, a 65-year-old US-based businesswoman, was in Australia at the invitation of two government members despite objections from China.

Beijing blames Ms Kadeer for inciting ethnic clashes in Xinjiang's capital Urumqi in 2009, leaving about 200 people dead, mostly Han Chinese. She denies the charge.

The recent overthrow of Middle Eastern governments "sent shock waves through the Chinese leadership that people's patience could run out - people will one day rise up and challenge the authority of the regime", she said.

China had responded to the protests with a security crackdown that made the western cities of Kashgar and Urumqi resemble war zones as soldiers searched homes and rounded up members of the Turkic-speaking Muslim minority, she said.

Ms Kadeer made her remarks as seven people allegedly involved in plotting terrorist activities were sentenced to death for robbery and murder in Xinjiang.

Uighurs account for nine million of Xinjiang's 20 million residents and many are angry about the influx of Han Chinese and restrictions on their religion.

The landlocked province of Xinjiang has China's second-highest oil and natural gas reserves.

>> Original Report

By Sharon LaFraniere and David Barboza | The New York Times
March 22, 2011

If anyone wonders whether the Chinese government has tightened its grip on electronic communications since protests began engulfing the Arab world, Shakespeare may prove instructive.

A Beijing entrepreneur, discussing restaurant choices with his fiancée over their cellphones last week, quoted Queen Gertrude's response to Hamlet: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." The second time he said the word "protest," her phone cut off.

He spoke English, but another caller, repeating the same phrase on Monday in Chinese over a different phone, was also cut off in midsentence.

A host of evidence over the past several weeks shows that Chinese authorities are more determined than ever to police cellphone calls, electronic messages, e-mail and access to the Internet in order to smother any hint of antigovernment sentiment. In the cat-and-mouse game that characterizes electronic communications here, analysts suggest that the cat is getting bigger, especially since revolts began to ricochet through the Middle East and North Africa, and homegrown efforts to organize protests in China began to circulate on the Internet about a month ago.

"The hard-liners have won the field, and now we are seeing exactly how they want to run the place," said Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing analyst of China's leadership. "I think the gloves are coming off."

On Sunday, Google accused the Chinese government of disrupting its Gmail service in the country and making it appear as if technical problems at Google -- not government intervention -- were to blame.

Several popular virtual private-network services, or V.P.N.'s, designed to evade the government's computerized censors, have been crippled. This has prompted an outcry from users as young as ninth graders with school research projects and sent them on a frustrating search for replacements that can pierce the so-called Great Firewall, a menu of direct censorship and "opinion guidance" that restricts what Internet users can read or write online. V.P.N.'s are popular with China's huge expatriate community and Chinese entrepreneurs, researchers and scholars who expect to use the Internet freely.

In an apology to customers in China for interrupted service, WiTopia, a V.P.N. provider, cited "increased blocking attempts." No perpetrator was identified.

Beyond these problems, anecdotal evidence suggests that the government's computers, which intercept incoming data and compare it with an ever-changing list of banned keywords or Web sites, are shutting out more information. The motive is often obvious: For six months or more, the censors have prevented Google searches of the English word "freedom."

But other terms or Web sites are suddenly or sporadically blocked for reasons no ordinary user can fathom. One Beijing technology consultant, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution against his company, said that for several days last week he could not visit the Web site for the Hong Kong Stock Exchange without a proxy. LinkedIn, a networking platform, was blocked for a day during the height of government concerns over Internet-based calls for protests in Chinese cities a few weeks ago, he said.

Hu Yong, a media professor at Peking University, said government censors were constantly spotting and reacting to new perceived threats. "The technology is improving and the range of sensitive terms is expanding because the depth and breadth of things they must manage just keeps on growing," Mr. Hu said.

China's censorship machine has been operating ever more efficiently since mid-2008, and restrictions once viewed as temporary -- like bans on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter -- are now considered permanent. Government-friendly alternatives have sprung and developed a following.

Few analysts believe that the government will loosen controls any time soon, with events it considers politically sensitive swamping the calendar, including a turnover in the Communist Party's top leadership next year.

"It has been double the guard, and double the guard, and you never hear proclamations about things being relaxed," said Duncan Clark, chairman of BDA China, an investment and strategy consultancy based in Beijing, and a 17-year resident of China. "We have never seen this level of control in the time I have been here, and I have been here since the beginning of the Internet."

How far China will clamp down on electronic communications is unclear. "There's a lot more they can do, but they've been holding back," said Bill Bishop, a Internet expert based in Beijing. Some analysts suggest that officials are exploring just how much inconvenience the Chinese are willing to tolerate. While sentiment is hard to gauge, a certain segment of society rejects censorship.

For many users, an inoperable V.P.N. is an inconvenience, not a crisis. But Internet consultants said interfering with an e-mail service on which people depend every day is more serious. "How people respond is going to be more intense, more visceral," one consultant said.

>> Please Read Complete Report Here

By Radio FREE Asia
March 16, 2011

An open letter blames Chinese leaders for covering up blood-selling schemes.

Chinese authorities have pulled the plug on the website of an AIDS advocacy group after it published an open letter about the trade in blood plasma and its role in spreading the virus.

The website of the Beijing-based Aizhixing Research Foundation, at www.aizhi.net, had received several requests to remove the letter, written last December by a former senior official in China's health ministry.

The letter, penned by Chen Bingzhong, a former head of the China Health Education Research Institute, hits out at top officials for covering up the link between HIV transmission and blood transfusions in poverty stricken rural Henan province.

"It is not possible to visit this website," read a notice at the site's URL on Wednesday. "Apologies for the inconvenience!"

U.S.-based AIDS activist Wan Yanhai, who founded the group, said the site had been closed by the Beijing municipal news department.

"We got a letter from the Beijing news office," Wan said. "There were several asking us to remove that article, but we didn't answer them."

Wan said the group had received a call from the office informing them of the website closure on Monday.

Rights lawyer Li Xiongbin, who is in charge of domestic affairs for the group, declined to comment.

"You need to get in touch with Wan Yanhai to get the real reason for this problem," Li said. "I won't be able to give you an interview."

Cover-up alleged

Activists and doctors have long blamed China's AIDS epidemic on the practice of blood-selling in poverty-stricken rural areas.

Chen's letter called for propaganda czar Li Changchun and vice-premier Li Keqiang to face disciplinary action for covering up the extent of the blood-selling problem.

Chen, 78, who is suffering from terminal liver disease, wrote that the two Lis should be held responsible for forbidding news coverage of the problem.

They should also be brought to account for harassing and suppressing AIDS experts Gao Yaojie and Wan Yanhai when they tried to speak out about the issue, he said in the letter, which was first sent to the ruling Communist Party of China's Commission for Discipline Inspection in June.

"This whole affair began around 17 years ago, so there are lot of things which I know quite a lot about, and I have accumulated a lot of documentation," Chen said in an interview with RFA in December.

"I think that this is an extremely serious issue. If, as a senior official, you cover up the extent of an epidemic, and don't report it, then you aren't competent for high office, and you should be held accountable. I think that this is what should happen."

Chen made the letter public at considerable risk to himself, and said he fully expects retaliatory measures against him from the government.

"I don't think the authorities will like it at all," he said. "But I don't care about any of that. I am already seriously ill."

'A continuing scandal'

Official accounts of China's HIV/AIDS epidemic typically focus on sex as the fastest-growing transmission route, singling out rising rates of infection among homosexual men.

But veteran activists Gao Yaojie and Wan Yanhai--now both exiled in the United States--say that infections through tainted blood transfusions at local hospitals and clinics are a continuing scandal in poorer regions of China.

Activists say police have repeatedly warned off members of the nongovernment Aizhixing AIDS advocacy group and civil rights lawyers over planned meetings with rural AIDS petitioners, many of whom were infected through this route and are trying to win redress.

Meanwhile, China has pledged to step up screening and public education for HIV/AIDS.

Measures will include free testing for HIV/AIDS and syphilis for expectant mothers, and intervention programs targeting drug addicts and people with sexually transmitted diseases.

Officials have also said that public awareness of HIV/AIDS needs boosting, especially among middle school and college students and among employers, who still routinely discriminate against those living with HIV.

According to the health ministry, sexual transmission has now overtaken drug use as the main cause of the spread of the virus in China's southwest, where AIDS has killed up to 11,609 people in the past two decades.

Government figures show that around 740,000 people are living with HIV/AIDS in China, although the true figure may be far higher.

Reported AIDS deaths in China rose by nearly 20,000 to 68,315 at the end of October, compared with figures released in October 2009.

Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

>> Original Report Here

By Edward Wong | The New York Times
March 11, 2011

Teng Biao is no stranger to the wrath of the Chinese authorities.

One of a handful of lawyers in China pressing for human rights and the rule of law, he has been repeatedly detained, beaten and threatened with death.

But this latest spell of detention -- he has been held by Beijing security officers for three weeks, with no word from him or his captors -- has struck a new chord of anxiety in his wife and friends.

"This time is really strange," said his wife, Wang Ling. "In the past, they held him only a few days, and we knew for what reason. But this time, I've been told nothing. No news, no calls, no result so far. I have no idea at all."

Mr. Teng is one of many prominent rights defenders and advocates who have disappeared and are being detained, some with no legal authority, in what critics say is one of the harshest crackdowns in many years. The detainees' relatives and supporters say previous periods of confinement did not last this long and in such total silence. The crackdown is part of a broader push to enforce social stability that has grown more intense in the past three weeks.

This is an especially uneasy time in China, with anonymous calls for a "Jasmine Revolution" similar to the uprisings in the Middle East popping up on some Chinese-language Web sites. That has coincided with the annual meetings of the National People's Congress and a consultative legislature in Beijing. Security officers have also clamped down on foreign journalists in the strictest such action in recent memory.

The United States took a strident tone with China this week, chastising it over the wave of detentions.

"The United States is increasingly concerned by the apparent extralegal detention and enforced disappearance of some of China's most well-known lawyers and activists, many of whom have been missing since mid-February," Philip J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman, said at a news conference on Tuesday. "We have expressed our concern to the Chinese government over the use of extralegal punishments against these and other human rights activists."

Chinese officials have avoided questions about the detentions and specific detainees. The overseas edition of People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, said in an editorial about China and the Middle East uprisings on Thursday: "A number of people with ulterior motives both inside and outside China are conspiring to divert the troubled waters toward China. They have used the Internet to fan the flames, hoping to whip up 'street politics' in China and thereby sow chaos in China."

China Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group, said Friday that 17 Chinese had been detained in connection with the calls for a so-called Jasmine Revolution (a term borrowed from the Tunisia uprising) and were being investigated for crimes. Among them is Ran Yunfei, a writer and blogger from Sichuan Province. Such investigations often result in criminal prosecution.

The group has also documented scores of other detentions and disappearances across China. Some people are missing, and some are under "soft detention" in their homes, an increasingly common form of confinement.

Zhang Jiannan, the founder of a popular Internet forum who was active on Twitter, was detained last week and put under criminal investigation, a friend of his said Friday. The forum, 1984bbs.com, was shuttered last fall. It was not clear why he was seized or of what crime he was suspected.

Among those who have "been disappeared" into an extralegal vacuum, as liberal Chinese describe it, are six lawyers who often take on rights cases. They are Tang Jitian, Jiang Tianyong and Mr. Teng from Beijing; Liu Shihui and Tang Jinglin from Guangzhou; and Li Tiantian from Shanghai. Mr. Tang was taken away on Feb. 16, and Mr. Jiang and Mr. Teng both vanished on Feb. 19. Gu Chuan, an activist writer in Beijing, also disappeared during that period. That round of detentions took place after a group of lawyers and rights advocates met in Beijing on Feb. 16 to discuss the case of Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer under strict house arrest in rural Shandong Province.

The detainees have probably been kept so long because the calls for a Jasmine Revolution began percolating on the Internet that same week, and then the meetings of the National People's Congress and consultative legislature opened on March 5.

Relatives and supporters say they hope the detainees will be released after the legislative sessions end Monday, but scholars say that the use of extralegal detention has been widening, in conjunction with a rollback of legal rights, and that the long disappearances could be a new status quo. The targets are often the tiny fraction of China's 170,000 lawyers who push for legal reform and enforcement of the Constitution.

"What's disturbing with some of these lawyers or ex-lawyers, the government seems to be increasingly treating them lawlessly," said Jerome A. Cohen, a professor at New York University who studies China's legal system.

"I think it's all part of the accelerating trend," he added. "It started with the 17th Party Congress in fall of 2007. You had a new party line, one that was much tighter. They're looking for a comprehensive method of social management. There's a new formula."

Eva Pils, an associate professor of law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said that the long silences were unusual and that "there's a very great concern about the treatment during their period of enforced disappearance."

Perhaps the most serious recent case is that of Gao Zhisheng, a rights lawyer who spoke of being pummeled with electric batons and burned with cigarettes during one round of detention in 2007. He has since been subjected to further enforced disappearances, the latest beginning in April 2010.

Mr. Teng, the Beijing lawyer, wrote an essay in December about being beaten during a brief detention that month. At one point, he said, a plainclothes officer said to a policeman: "Why waste words on this sort of person? Let's beat him to death and dig a hole to bury him in and be done with it."

>> Original Source

By Damian Grammaticas | BBC World News
March 09, 2011

The United States government has called on China to stop what it calls the "extralegal" abductions and detentions of lawyers and human rights activists.

The US state department called on Beijing to uphold its internationally recognised human rights obligations.

Since the middle of February human rights groups say more than a dozen high-profile figures have disappeared.

They include Teng Biao, a law professor known for challenging abuses of power by the Communist Party and the state.

Teng Biao was summoned to a police station on 19 February.

Officers raided his home, took away computers and documents but issued no notice of his detention as required by law.

Anger and fear

Speaking in Washington, state department spokesman P J Crowley said the US government was "increasingly concerned by the apparent extralegal detention and enforced disappearance of some of China's most well-known lawyers and activists".

The lawyers include Tang Jitian, taken away from his home by police on 16 February, and Jiang Tianyong, seized at his brother's house three days later.

The campaign group Human Rights in China says it is "a concerted, large-scale crackdown with a severity rarely seen in recent years".

The US state department called on China's government to uphold its internationally recognised human rights obligations, including freedoms of expression, association and assembly.

Human rights groups say the disappearances may be linked to official anger at a video that surfaced last month filmed by the blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng, in which he showed how he is being held under illegal house arrest.

Other rights groups say China's authorities may be using the pretext of clamping down on any possible contagion from the revolutions in the Arab world to round-up many activists.

The organisation Chinese Human Rights Defenders says police have cast a wide net taking in internet bloggers who have posted or relayed messages about the calls for a Middle East-style popular revolution in China.

It is thought five of those detained for posting messages face criminal charges of state subversion that carry lengthy sentences.

>> Original Source

By Sharon LaFraniere | The New York Times
March 03, 2011

Apparently unnerved by an anonymous Internet campaign urging Chinese citizens to emulate the protests that have rocked the Middle East, Chinese authorities this week have begun a forceful and carefully focused clampdown on activities by foreigners that the government deems threatening to political stability.

Public security officials have summoned dozens of foreign journalists in Beijing and Shanghai to be dressed down on videotape, warning them that they had broken reporting regulations by visiting locations that had been selected as protest sites in Internet postings. Journalists were bluntly warned that they faced the loss of their visas, revocation of their credentials and expulsion if they did not abide by new limits on their ability to interview and photograph Chinese citizens, the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China said in a statement.

In Shanghai, the authorities objected to the location of an annual St. Patrick's Day parade set for March 12 that had been expected to draw more than 2,000 people, prompting Irish organizations to abruptly cancel the event on Monday. The parade was to have taken place on a major street close to a cinema where the Internet postings had urged people to gather every Sunday to show their displeasure with the Chinese government.

Western diplomats in China said other events that had been planned by foreigners, or with their help, had also been abruptly canceled. "We've noticed that a somewhat larger number of our cultural and educational programs around China are being postponed or canceled, but we haven't been notified by Chinese authorities of any specific reason," said one diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Separately, Beijing officials announced Wednesday that they intended to monitor the movements of millions of residents by means of information transmitted by their cellphones. One official was quoted on a government Web site as saying that the new program would provide "real-time information about a user's activity."

The project aims to monitor all Beijing residents who use cellphones -- about 20 million people -- to detect unusually large gatherings. One official said the primary use would be to detect and ease traffic and subway congestion. But Chinese media reports said government officials could use the data to detect and prevent protests.

The government's actions this week are the latest in a long and steady process of restricting speech and assembly freedoms that appears to have gained speed after antigovernment protests flared in Tibet in March 2008 and in the western region of Xinjiang in 2009.

The limitations also follow two weeks of unusually harsh treatment of political activists, possibly also inspired by fear that the upheaval in the Middle East could spread to China.

Four prominent lawyers involved in rights issues have disappeared after being seized by the police, at least 100 activists have been detained and an unusually large number of activists have been charged with crimes, including some that could draw life sentences with a conviction, said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher in Hong Kong with Human Rights Watch.

Criminal charges were not a hallmark of the last major crackdown on activists, in December, when the imprisoned democracy advocate Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Bequelin said.

"That is an escalation," he said. "You have one case or a couple of cases, well, that happens. But now, we have quite a few."

Victor Shih, a China specialist and political science professor at Northwestern University, said Chinese authorities were systematically carrying out lessons they had learned from the collapse of authoritarian governments in Eastern Europe.

"Once there's a sizable demonstration, it becomes costlier to control, so why let it happen in the first place?" he said in an interview in Beijing on Thursday. "Because they have a lot of resources, they are able to pour a lot of money into making sure that, at least in Beijing, nothing happens."

No protests of any note have taken place in China since calls for Middle East-style demonstrations were first published on an American Web site two months ago. But last Friday, public security officials, without mentioning the possibility of weekend protests, summoned some foreign correspondents in Beijing, reminding them to abide by unspecified reporting rules.

Some who tried Sunday to look into vague, Internet-based calls for protests paid a price. In Beijing, plainclothes officers dragged reporters and photographers into alleys or shops and erased images from their cameras. Three journalists were injured, including a Bloomberg News videographer who was kicked and beaten, according to the correspondents' association.

This week, public security officials warned reporters from The New York Times, The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and numerous other foreign news organizations that they had violated regulations by appearing at possible protest sites and that further infractions would not be tolerated.

>> Please Read Complete Report Here

By Radio FREE Asia
March 01, 2011

Activists demand a revision of the official verdict on the failed Chinese democracy movement.

The relatives of victims of the 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square have called on China's parliament to overturn the official verdict on the movement, amid growing calls for protests similar to those that have swept through the Middle East.

"The massacre of June 4, 1989 happened nearly 22 years ago," the victims' group Tiananmen Mothers wrote in a open letter to China's National People's Congress (NPC).

"In those long years, the National People's Congress, as the highest political power in the land, has never discussed or debated the killings that happened on the Square in 1989, nor has the verdict delivered by Deng Xiaoping at the time ever been changed," it said.

The letter was published online and signed by 128 people, including Tiananmen Mothers founder member Ding Zilin, a retired Beijing university professor whose 17-year-old son was killed in the crackdown.

"Every year, we have sent a joint open letter to the annual parliamentary meetings so as to make clear what we are calling for to the delegates," Ding said on Tuesday. "Of course, we have never once received any kind of response."

Ding said the relatives of the victims had decided nonetheless to keep writing the letters.

"Even though the authorities take no notice of us, and the delegates to the parliamentary meetings are indifferent to us, at the very least we can say that we are not indifferent," she said.

"We continue to uphold the principles of rational and peaceful measures to continue to support our ... demands."

Call for commission

The letter called on the NPC to set up a special inquiry commission for independent investigation into the events of June 3 and 4, 1989, and to report the results to parliament, including a list of those who died and their number.

It also asked that the authorities assess the case of each victim's family separately for compensation, and for compensation to be paid to them.

Finally, it called on the NPC to set up its own prosecution process to call to account those who were responsible for the killings.

"This year the international community is being swept by demands for democracy," said fellow signatory Zhang Xianling, in an apparent reference to a wave of popular uprisings sweeping the Middle East.

"Our country puts on a show of democracy and respect for human rights to the outside world, but here in China these problems remain unresolved."

She said all the relatives of victims were under tight police surveillance ahead of the parliamentary session, which begins on March 5, with an annual session of a nationwide consultative body opening on March 3 in Beijing.

"Right now there are four officers on duty, watching me, 24 hours a day," Zhang said.

The Tiananmen Mothers were not alone in addressing complaints ahead of the annual parliament.

Beijing-based political activist He Depu, who was released earlier this year from an eight-year jail term for subversion, also wrote to the NPC complaining about conditions in Chinese prisons.

"Prison food isn't really enough to satisfy the needs of the body," He said. "It is much easier to get sick, and then you don't get reliable medical treatment."

"The death rate is very high," he added.

Security tightened

Ordinary Chinese who have been pursuing complaints against official wrongdoing, often for many years, said security was now very tight in Beijing ahead of the NPC and in the wake of a series of calls for Middle-East-style "Jasmine" protests against government corruption.

"We are now all being kept under surveillance at home," said a Beijing-based petitioner surnamed Wang. "We have to ask permission to go anywhere and, when we do, the police follow us."

"We're not allowed to go to Tiananmen Square or the Wangfujing [shopping district]."

She said petitioners were also being prevented from communicating with each other.

"Our phone calls are all being recorded," Wang said.

Chinese activists reported further detentions and house arrests this week triggered by calls for "Jasmine" protests at the weekend inspired by recent protests in Egypt and Tunisia.

Chinese authorities responded to calls for more pro-democracy protests for the second Sunday in a row with a strong security presence in major cities.

Reacting to anonymous online appeals for citizens to protest and press the ruling Communist Party for greater openness, hundreds of uniformed and plainclothes policemen turned out in areas designated as protest sites in Beijing and Shanghai.

Many of the student leaders of the 1989 protests fled overseas, while dozens of others were handed heavy jail terms for their part in the movement.

Officials have characterized the demonstrations as "political turmoil," charging participants with "counterrevolutionary activity," and have ignored calls from a vocal minority of activists for a public reckoning with the crackdown.

No one has yet compiled reliable figures of the number who died, but the number may be in the hundreds, or possibly thousands.

Reported by Xin Yu for RFA's Mandarin service and by Grace Kei Lai-see for the Cantonese service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

>> Original Source

By Andrew Jacobs and Jonathan Ansfield | The New York Times
March 01, 2011

The call to action shot across mobile phones and Internet chat sites, urging people to converge on 13 Chinese cities to demand an end to corruption, inflation and the strictures of authoritarian rule. "The Chinese people do not have the patience to wait any longer," said one message.

The anonymous organizers got a sizable turnout -- but in China, most of those who poured into squares and shopping centers were police officers and plainclothes security agents.

Two months of upheaval in the Mideast have cast doubt on the staying power of all authoritarian governments. But in China calls for change are so far being met with political controls wielded by authorities who, even during a period of rising prosperity and national pride, have not taken their staying power for granted.

The nearly instantaneous deployment of the police to prevent even notional gatherings in big cities the past two weeks is just one example of what Chinese officials call "stability maintenance." This refers to a raft of policies and practices refined after "color revolutions" abroad and, at home, tens of thousands of demonstrations by workers and peasants, ethnic unrest, and the spread of mobile communications and broadband networking.

Chinese officials charged with ensuring security, lavishly financed and permitted to operate above the law, have remained perpetually on edge, employing state-of-the-art surveillance, technologically sophisticated censorship, new crime-fighting tools, as well as proactive efforts to resolve labor and land disputes, all to prevent any organized or sustained resistance to single-party rule.

"It is a comprehensive call to arms for the entire bureaucracy to promote social stability," said Murray Scot Tanner, a China security analyst at C.N.A., a private research group in Alexandria, Va.

Since the first widespread calls for Middle East-style demonstrations in China were published two weeks ago on an American Web site that is blocked in China, the police have reacted with brutal efficiency. They have placed more than 100 dissidents and human rights campaigners under house arrest and threatened others who forwarded messages about the protests, and have detained six prominent lawyers and activists on suspicion of inciting subversion. Censors have also intensified the filters on microblogs, already among the tightest in the world.

At an unpublicized meeting in February, the Politburo outlined heightened controls to prevent the type of revolts that toppled governments in Egypt and Tunisia, said one ranking journalist who declined to be named.

"The crackdown has been the most severe we've seen in years," said Wang Songlian, a researcher at Chinese Human Rights Defenders.

Despite persistent calls for political reform among the country's small and embattled group of human rights advocates, most analysts agreed that China faced a smaller risk of street unrest than did Egypt, Libya and Bahrain. Unlike those countries, where oligarchic rule and high unemployment have fed discontent, China's leaders have largely tamed widespread antipathy through policies that have led to robust economic growth and through selective repression that most Chinese have come to tolerate.

Over the past five years, stability maintenance, known as "weiwen" in Chinese, has become a multiagency juggernaut that relies on a sophisticated menu of Internet censorship, the harassment of blacklisted troublemakers and an industrial complex of paid informants and contractors. The vast bureaucracy extends from the Politiburo Standing Committee's chief law enforcer, Zhou Yongkang, to neighborhood "safety patrol" volunteers on the lookout for Falun Gong members and low-level clashes that can mushroom into large-scale disturbances.

The party has matched this tight fist with a buildup of mediation techniques and manpower within party organizations and a system of rewards and punishments for bureaucrats who fulfill -- or fail to meet -- social harmony goals.

The problem, critics say, is that the high-level pressures to achieve stability often force local officials to clamp down on the symptoms of social discontent rather than address the underlying inequities. That feeds a spiral of new abuses and controls. Just as troubling, legal scholars and judges say, is a party drive to prioritize defusing conflict over adjudication by law.

Yu Jianrong, a leading sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has been blogging and traveling the country to warn local officials that the fixation on weiwen fuels government mistrust. "It is tantamount to drinking poison to quench one's thirst," he recently wrote in Caixin weekly.

During a study session last month for provincial and ministerial leaders, President Hu Jintao called for a mix of increased Internet controls and investment in local government services to reduce "inharmonious factors to the minimum."

Under a new five-year development plan, which is expected to be passed at the annual legislative sessions that begin this week in Beijing, officials pledge new "social management" mechanisms to pacify unrest.

Still, studies suggest such outbreaks have yet to subside.

Shanghai's Jiaotong University, in its annual report on crisis management released this year, tallied 72 "major incidents" of social unrest in 2010, compared with 60 in 2009. Crises hit the media faster too: about 33 percent were reported the day they occurred, 67 percent on the Internet.

Combating social instability is also increasingly costly.

China budgeted an estimated $77 billion for public security alone last year, according to a Tsinghua University study that was based on official police budgets, putting the costs of internal security almost on par with national defense spending. Some experts say the true number may be even higher.

Liaoning Province in northeastern China devoted 15 percent of its revenues to weiwen last year, according to media reports. Lianjiang, in southern Guangdong Province, acknowledged spending as much on stability maintenance in 2009 as it did in the previous five years combined.

"There's such a nervousness of letting things get out of control that even students complaining about the price of food in the school canteen will be reported as social instability," said David Kelly, a visiting scholar at Peking University who studies the stability maintenance system.

The strategy took root in the late 1990s as China grappled with mass layoffs caused by the privatization of state-owned enterprises, and accelerated in 2004 when a new brand of legal activism emerged in China and the color revolutions swept aside authoritarian rulers in the former Soviet republics.

But what began as a governing strategy morphed into an entrenched bureaucracy as China reacted to a series of pivotal challenges, including the 2008 Olympics, ethning rioting in Tibet and Xinjiang, and Charter '08, a petition calling for Western-style democratic liberties that proliferated online and led to the jailing of Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who helped draft it.

While Mr. Hu has directed the push, the country's security and propaganda authorities have seized on such events "to get as much money and power as possible," said an editor at a party publication who spoke off the record because he feared repercussions.

In the past few years, thousands of stability maintenance offices have opened, and more than 300,000 government functionaries have been enlisted in "community service management," according to Xinhua, the state news service. Local officials have cycled through Beijing for instruction in tactics to disrupt the Internet and disperse crowds with talks rather than force, and for training in "channeling public opinion."

In an article last year in The Southern Daily newspaper, officials in Lianjiang boasted how the city had installed surveillance cameras at major intersections, hired several thousand neighborhood informants and established the "Flying Tigers," a patrol of 340 young men recruited to assist the police in handling unrest.

A "peace prize" of up to $22 was awarded to local leaders who successfully stamped out trouble in their jurisdictions. As a result, officials said, there were no "mass incidents" in the first eight months of 2010, and the number of people filing complaints in Beijing dropped 25 percent.

"The facts demonstrate that stability can be bought," Xu Shun, the Lianjiang party secretary, told the newspaper.

Propaganda officials have come to consider the Internet the front line of defense against instability.

Central propaganda authorities determined in 2009 that local officials had two hours or less on average to contain news of "sudden incidents" from escalating on the Internet, though it remained a tough chore.

Under one government initiative, software engineers have been developing an automated system that can track trending topics and better pinpoint potentially disruptive news, according to industry experts.

"For example, at what point will a debate peak and drift more toward antigovernment sentiment?" one executive said. "They need to find the right time to step in and control it, but not appear too restrictive."

Under the mandates of weiwen, judges and legal scholars say the judicial system has largely abandoned two decades of reform and returned to the Mao-era practice of mediation that many lawyers describe as coercive.

Judicial promotions are increasingly tied to the ability to settle or dismiss cases and prevent litigants from appealing court decisions or filing petitions -- an age-old form of redress in which the aggrieved file complaints with the authorities.

Carl Minzner, an expert in Chinese law at Washington University in St. Louis, said many courts will coerce plaintiffs into settling lawsuits regardless of the facts or will simply obstruct them from filing lawsuits in the first place. To illustrate this shift, he cited a "model judge" of 2010, Chen Yanping, who was lionized by the Supreme People's Court for using mediation to resolve 3,100 cases without a single appeal or petition.

The flow of money dedicated to stability has also spawned shady businesses like "black jails," the extralegal holding pens for the petitioners who flood Beijing to file complaints against the authorities in their hometowns. The Chinese media have exposed how private security companies in the capital, some with connections to the police, have rounded up petitioners in Beijing on behalf of some 70 local governments.

Like the excesses of weiwen, the disproportionate crackdown on China's phantom Jasmine Revolution could also fuel new discontent. Last week the authorities in Beijing told some members of unauthorized churches not to gather on Sunday, and in cryptic conversations, they sought to dissuade foreign reporters from covering the rallies. Instead, they showed up in droves.

"Limiting people's freedom and trying to restrict the flow of information isn't dealing with the underlying problems China faces," said Pu Zhiqiang, a human rights lawyer who said he has been trailed for a week by plainclothes security agents. "I think this strategy is only going to create more enemies of the government."

>> Original Source