The man who dares not say the L Word

10 Nov 10 | Asia and Pacific, China

David CameronDavid Cameron has extolled the virtues of human rights and democracy during his trade mission to Beijing but why won’t he raise the case of imprisoned writer Liu Xiaobo? Dinah Goodman reports

David Cameron’s first stop on his first visit to Beijing as Prime Minister was Tesco. As he was surveying the shelves of soy sauce and egg noodles, human rights activists were baying at his heels, urging him to make a public statement on human rights. Western leaders always get asked to do this of course when they meet China’s top leaders, but Cameron is under particular pressure in the wake of China’s snippy (almost hysterical) reaction to the award of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned intellectual Liu Xiaobo (read about that here). Cameron is the first western leader to visit Beijing since Liu’s controversial win.

Chinese human rights activists were not cutting Cameron any slack either. Dissident artist Ai Weiwei told the Today programme that Cameron would be committing a crime if he did not push the human rights issue with President Hu Jintao during his two-day trade mission here.

In the end, while Cameron did not publicly utter the L (Liu) word, he did give a speech where he lauded the benefits of democracy, an independent judiciary, and a free media, to students at Beijing University today. “All the time the government is subject to the rule of law,” he said. “These are constraints on the government and at times they can be frustrating. But ultimately we believe they make our government better and our country stronger.”

The lecture was not broadcast to the public and the human rights element is unlikely to be reported domestically. A quick search on baidu.com a few hours after the speech revealed only one Chinese news outlet, Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV, had reported on Cameron’s more controversial comments.

His phrasing was very diplomatic, perhaps in part because the last time he was here in 2007 he was reportedly called “arrogant” by a Chinese official for his public statements on China’s human rights record. At Beijing University today he was careful to say that he was not suggesting that the UK had “moral superiority” over China and that the UK was “not perfect”.

China has already warned western governments that they risk its wrath if they attend the award ceremony for Liu. “The choice before some European countries and others is clear and simple: do they want to be part of the political game to challenge China’s judicial system or do they want to develop a true friendly relationship with the Chinese government and people?” vice-foreign minister Cui Tiankai said last week. While no government is expected to bow to this threat — several countries, including the UK and France, have already confirmed they are attending — it’s a different matter when you are in Beijing to smooth the course of deals worth billions of pounds.

China has always been prickly about any public criticism of its peculiar brand of human rights and the stick it wields is money. Indeed a recent studyshowed the existence of the “Dalai Lama effect” where countries who meet with Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader lose an average of 8.1 per cent in exports to China in the two years after the meeting. A sobering thought for a man on a “vitally important trade mission.”

Dinah Gardner is a regional editor for Index on Censorship

Yu Jie chooses to publish and be damned

06 Aug 10 | Asia and Pacific, China

“No one living in China is more daring than the maverick writer Yu Jie,” journalist and historian Jonathan Mirsky wrote more than five years ago. It’s even more apt today.The 36-year-old Chinese dissident and writer is about to risk his freedom by publishing an explosive new title outing China’s cuddly premier, Wen Jiabao, as an authoritarian hard-liner behind the scenes.

In China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao,  Yu claims that “Grandpa Wen” has purposefully cultivated his populist image but in reality he is just as keen on restricting civil liberties as the rest of the party.

Chinese politicians are a distinct breed. Predominantly male, they are stiff and robotic on camera, fond of official speak, and sport identikit greased-back hairstyles.

Although 67-year-old Wen still has the hairdo, he comes across as the Communist Party’s first human being, their poster boy. He cries on camera. He hugs children on camera. He smiles and laughs on camera. He even shakes hands with Aids victims on camera.

But to Yu, this is all an act. There is little information yet as to what evidence Yu has for his accusations: That Wen is insincere and is not simply a victim of Communist party machinations, for example.

For that we will have to wait for the book to be published, which is August 16, according to Yu’s Hong Kong publisher, New Century Press. Yu is a best seller but all his books are banned on the mainland. Instead he publishes in Hong Kong, which still enjoys relative freedom of press.

It’s amazing that Yu has stayed out of jail so long. Over the years he’s spoken out for everything from religious freedoms to democracy. He once proposed that Mao’s body be removed from the mausoleum on Tiananmen Square. Most recently he’s spoken up for the exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama.

This is not the first book he’s published about the Chinese leadership either. Last year he released Confrontation between Liu Xiaobo and [President] Hu Jintao (Chinese name: ??????????) which went virtually unnoticed by the western press. Liu Xiaobo is another dissident writer currently serving 11 years for his efforts to call for political reform.

On his twitter, Yu, whose username is Yujie89 (a reference to the Tiananmen Square massacre) says his Wen book is much more risky because he is singling out the premier. Yu is going ahead with the book even though on Monday he was detained for four hours by police and threatened with jail if he published.

“As a writer, I consider freedom of speech an essential part of my life,” he told The New York Times. “Without it I will be a walking corpse, with no meaning and no value.”

Breaking News: China renews Google’s internet licence

09 Jul 10 | Index Index, minipost, News and features

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.”