Update: the Associated Press has spoken via Skype to a close friend of Chen, Zeng Jinyan, who claims that Chinese officials forced the activist to choose between going into exile alone or staying in China with his family. More details as we get them.
Chinese dissident activist Chen Guangcheng has left the US Embassy in Beijing, been treated at a hospital in the city and reunited with his wife, reports said today.
In the first confirmation that the blind legal activist had been housed under US diplomatic protection following his escape from house arrest last week, US ambassador Gary Locke called the Washington Post to say he was with Chen en route to Chaoyang Hospital in east Beijing. Chen is also said to have spoken to US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who is due to arrive in Beijing today for bilateral talks, with whom he “shared a mutual admiration”.
State news agency Xinhua said that 40-year-old Chen, a prolific human rights activist known for his campaign against forced abortions in China’s Shandong province, left the embassy “of his own volition” after staying there for six days.
China’s foreign ministry spokesman Liu Weimin has demanded an apology from the United States, accusing the country of taking a Chinese citizen “via abnormal means” into its embassy and of having “interfered in the domestic affairs of China”.
US officials told Reuters that “this was an extraordinary case involving exceptional circumstances, and we do not anticipate that it will be repeated.” They added that Chen plans to remain in China to continue his work, and that the Chinese government had given them assurances of his safety.
Today’s developments come after several days of sensitive negotiations designed to resolve the activist’s fate ahead of Clinton’s arrival in Beijing. US president Barack Obama signalled his support for Chen yesterday, noting that China would “be stronger” if it were to improve its human rights record. Clinton said that a “constructive relationship includes talking very frankly about those areas where we do not agree, including human rights”.
Chen spent four years in prison on charges of disturbing public order before being placed under house arrest in the village of Dongshigu in September 2010. He fled to the Chinese capital last week and a video was released online in which he claimed he and his family had been tortured by officials.
Whether or not Chen is indeed “a free man”, as one of his lawyers Li Jingsong was quoted as saying today, remains to be seen. “I am highly sceptical in terms of promises about the rule of law,” Beijing-based writer and documentary film-maker Charlie Custer told Index, noting that the government has “virtually a zero per cent track record” of treating Chen according to Chinese law.
He added: “I highly doubt Chen will be allowed to be entirely free; I suspect he’ll be sent back to where he was before. He won’t be allowed to operate as a regular Chinese citizen would and should be.”
“He should have been a free man 18 months ago when he should’ve been released from prison,” said Joshua Rosenzweig, a human rights researcher based in Hong Kong, adding that the Chinese government had a long time to protect the activist.
“They only gave these assurances because of the actions of Chen to escape and because this became a high-profile diplomatic incident,” he said.
The safety of several of Chen’s supporters, such as activist He Peirong (@pearlher) also remains uncertain. He, a Nanjing-based activist and one of Chen’s most prolific supporters, is thought to still be detained after police took her from her home on 27 April for having helped Chen escape house arrest. Chen’s nephew, Chen Kegui, is understood to be in hiding.
“If China was serious about assuring Chen’s safety then they’d release them [his supporters],” Beijing-based writer and documentary film-maker Charlie Custer told Index. “The fact that they’ve not done that speaks volumes as to China’s intentions of how they’ll treat Chen.
“All He Peirong did was drive him to Beijing, why is she being held by police?” Custer added.
Meanwhile, security was tight at the hospital where Chen was being treated. Tom Lasseter, Beijing bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, tweeted from the scene:
Today’s developments need to be monitored closely to ensure the guarantees promised to Chen are not a one-off, Rosenzweig added. If China does not fulfill its promises, he said, “there is not much in the way of progress.”
“Serious questions need to be asked about nature of political system that places a high priority on maintaining stability above all else, and how that kind of a system makes it possible for local agents to carry out egregious infringements on individual rights for such a long time without intervention,” he said.
Marta Cooper is an editorial researcher at Index. She tweets at @martaruco
In a speech at Washington DC’s Holocaust Memorial Museum this week, Barack Obama this week announced US measures against technology companies aiding the Syrian and Iranian regimes in tracking and monitoring of members of the opposition. Here’s the introduction from the Executive Order signed this week, worth quoting at length:
I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, hereby determine that the commission of serious human rights abuses against the people of Iran and Syria by their governments, facilitated by computer and network disruption, monitoring, and tracking by those governments, and abetted by entities in Iran and Syria that are complicit in their governments’ malign use of technology for those purposes, threaten the national security and foreign policy of the United States. The Governments of Iran and Syria are endeavoring to rapidly upgrade their technological ability to conduct such activities. Cognizant of the vital importance of providing technology that enables the Iranian and Syrian people to freely communicate with each other and the outside world, as well as the preservation, to the extent possible, of global telecommunications supply chains for essential products and services to enable the free flow of information, the measures in this order are designed primarily to address the need to prevent entities located in whole or in part in Iran and Syria from facilitating or committing serious human rights abuses.
It’s another indicator of the fact that the online element is now an essential part of any conflict. Since Hillary Clinton’s speech on the web in January 2010, the US has positioned itself as the defender of the free internet against the censorious, snooping impulses of Iran, China et al.
Our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the United States have welcomed the White House move as ultimately “a good thing”, though with caveats. EFF say:
First, here’s what the order does accomplish:
It sanctions individuals and entities in Iran and Syria that are “complicit in their government’s malign use of technology” for the purposes of network disruption, monitoring, or tracking of individuals.
It aims to prevent entities (including companies) from facilitating or committing serious human rights abuses in Syria.
It bars the contribution or receipt of funds to any individual or entity named on the list contained within the order.
Notably, the order makes mention of companies that have “sold, leased or otherwise provided, directly or indirectly, goods, services or technology to Iran or Syria likely to be used to facilitate computer or network disruption, monitoring, or tracking that could assist in or enable serious human rights abuses by or on behalf of [the two countries’ governments]” (emphasis ours). This is notable because, when it was discovered that their products had made it to Syria and were being used by the regime to monitor network communications, executives of U.S. company BlueCoat denied knowledge of their products being in Syria.
Now, for what the order does not accomplish:
The order is solely focused on Syria and Iran, leaving out—most notably—Bahrain, where a protester was killed this weekend by police forces as well as, of course, other countries that engage in technology-related human rights violations. Bahraini human rights groups have documented the use of Trovicor technologies in surveillance there, leading to—in some cases—torture.
The order does not loosen existing restrictions by the Department of Commerce, whichbar the export of “good” technologies—including web hosting, Google Earth, and Java—to Syrians. At the Stockholm Internet Forum for Global Development last week, Syrian activist Mohammad Al Abdallah raised the Commerce restrictions as a consistent frustration amongst Syrian activists on the ground. While Treasury restrictions on Iran have been revised time and again, Commerce restrictions go unchanged.
The internet can be a scary place. In my early days of using the web, I passed my angry pubescent days innocently trolling chat rooms powered by America Online, mostly to harass fans of shopping mall punk Avril Lavigne.
I spent my free time accosting what I assumed were fellow misguided teenagers, even though my own music library was filled with the questionable sounds of Linkin Park, Kittie, and Papa Roach. Whilst undoubtedly irritating, my joy in prank calling restaurants and angering people online was mostly a benign past time. Had I been a teenager in Arizona today, my antics could have landed me with a criminal record before I even reached high school. Arizona recently passed H.B 2549 countering cyber-bullying and stalking, which would make trolling a misdemeanour in the state. According to the bill:
“It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use a ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person.”
Well there go my teenage years, Arizona. The broad language used in the legislation has raised a few eyebrows, particularly because offensive behaviour is not limited to one-on-one conversations, but also “irritating” communications via public forums, including “websites, blogs, listserves, and other internet communications”. The new legislation, which now must be signed by Governor Janice K Brewer before officially going into effect, leaves the regulation of what can be considered to be irritating or offensive in the hands of the state.
Trolling can take many different forms, and it becomes difficult to determine when irritating behaviour should merely be ignored, or if it poses a threat in real life. The 2010 suicide of Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi after his roommate secretly filmed him and tweeted about his sexuality, sparked a heated debate about cyber bullying, and whether or not his roommate’s behaviour led to Clementi’s suicide. Elsewhere in the world, trolling is used as a way to harass activists and silence them. Other trolls hide behind the internet and create forums calling for the killing of public figures, and in some instances, internet harassment has been been linked to teen suicides. However, there is a pretty big divide between the kind of bullying that leads to someone’s death, and the irritating antics of a teenager in a chat room. As it is, Arizona’s new law does not really draw the line between the two.
