11 Oct 10 | Uncategorized
One of China‘s best-known dissidents Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday night. Liu is currently serving an 11 year prison sentence for “inciting subversion of state power” after the former litarture professor circulated Charter 08, a petition calling for greater freedom in China. He has been in and out of prison since he took part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests but on the mainland the Chinese language media have ignored the prize. Instead Xinhua, China’s official news agency, released an English-language statement later recycled by China Daily and the Global Times, detailing the Foreign Ministry’s angry response.
Those who have talked about the prize have come under sharp state scrutiny. The nobel laureate’s wife, Liu Xia, was placed under house arrest on Friday.
Last night she tweeted:
Brothers, I am back; I’ve been under house arrest since the 8th; I don’t know when I’ll be able to see everyone; my mobile phone has been ruined; I have no way of making or receiving calls. I saw Xiaobo; the prison told him on the 9th the news that he’s been awarded the prize. Later matters we’ll talk about in time. Please help me [re]tweet. Thank you.
Popular netizen Secretary Zhang was celebrating on Friday. Now he finds himself under house arrest with shifts of guards watching his home. Zhang is behind an invitation only internet forum for liberal leaning people, 1984bbs.com, which today put up a notice today warning users to backup their files as the website stops operating tomorrow due to official pressure. On his Twitter page, Secretary Zhang thanks those who have supported his forum, including artist Ai Weiwei, and records his day under surveillance.
Other intellectuals have also been harassed but this hasn’t deterred internet users from talking about the event by using abbreviations and circumlocutions for “Liu Xiaobo.” They know using the full name would trip internet filters, drawing the attention of the censors who patrol microblog and blog sites deleting suspect posts.
08 Oct 10 | News and features
Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2010, Liu Xiaobo is treated as a subversive criminal in China, currently serving an 11-year sentence for incitement to subvert state power. Lauren Davis reports
(more…)
08 Oct 10 | Index Index, minipost
Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo has been awarded the 2010 Nobel peace prize. He was praised by the Nobel committee for his “non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights”. Currently serving an 11-year prison sentence on charges of subversion, Liu was co-author of Charter 08, calling for democratic reforms in China. It was feared last month that pressure from the Chinese government might affect the committee’s decision, and as the award was announced, BBC news and CNN broadcasts were blocked in China.
08 Oct 10 | Uncategorized
Last month, Xie Chaoping, author of The Great Migration, was detained for 30 days on the trumped up charge of operating an illegal business. The Great Migration is about the repairing of the Sanmen dam in Weinan, Shaanxi Province and the residents who were forced to move off their land. “Xie thinks he’s being persecuted because he’s disclosed embezzlement, local government wrongdoing, migrants’ suffering and land disputes,” reported the Guardian. After his release on 17 September, Xie was interviewed by various Chinese media such as the famous Southern Group magazines, where he discussed the events that led to his imprisonment and talked about the distress he felt behind bars. On the thirtieth day of his detention, when he was summoned to court, he scrawled a note just in case he was sentenced, whereupon he would hand the note to someone. It read:
“One day, history will pass judgment on the person who concocted this arrest warrant. Using the constitution, corrupt officials and their servants have created a literary inquisition. These people will definitely be nailed to history’s hall of shame. Long live true democratic rule of law.”
It turned out that he didn’t need the note, because he was released later that day.
In a similar case, a schoolteacher under the alias Yuan Ping was detained in late September and released after only a few days by the authorities in the manufacturing city of Dongguan, Guangdong province. He wrote about the sex industry there, which is underpinned by the migrant workers community, at a time when police are trying to eradicate the culture altogether.
The search engine Baidu’s Baike, which has the best gloss on recent events, describes the subject of the novel as “mainly describing a normal worker who arrives in Dongguan and tries to make a career, whilst criticising social realities”. The gist of the story is one person’s first-hand look at Dongguan’s sex industry. Local authorities objected to the depiction of their city and attempted to nail Yuan on pornography and obscenity charges, but in fact they had no legitimacy for arresting him – and it’s purported that they didn’t even read the book.
It’s a strange situation. The police are directly involved in local efforts to censor books, but the legal grounds for such censorship are unclear. What they didn’t anticipate, however, was that by detaining these authors, the authorities stirred up more interest in their books than was previously possible.
