May 14, 2012

Melissa Chan of Walnut is the first accredited foreign correspondent to be barred from China in 14 years. She is not sure what prompted her expulsion.

After filing 400 stories from China, reporter Melissa Chan never thought she'd wind up in the headlines herself.

Chan returned to Southern California last week as the first accredited foreign correspondent to be expelled from China in 14 years, an act that sparked a flurry of news reports and expressions of solidarity from fellow journalists.

Chan, who was the sole Al Jazeera English correspondent in China, said she knew she was on shaky ground for most of this year.

She had been working on month-by-month credentials since January, when the government refused a routine visa-renewal request. Ordinarily, journalists are granted year-long credentials, but Chan is believed to be the first foreign correspondent to be given temporary papers.

Interviewed in her hometown of Walnut, Chan, 31, says she's not exactly sure what prompted her expulsion after five years of reporting in China.

In March, she wrote about a distraught mother seeking a daughter who had been forcibly sterilized and put in an illegal "black jail" for violating China's one-child policy.

"A lot of journalists have done black jail stories," she said, but hers "was probably the first" to get coverage on TV. "It's also the first time that we got a government official to respond to a question about the existence of black jails." The official denied the black jails existed, "but it was on the record, Chan said, "so that was useful for human rights groups. And that could be one reason why there's the perception that I'm a go-getter."

Interference from China's security apparatus is a fact of life for China correspondents. Chan recalled a nine-day trip in China's far west to cover a Muslim Turkic ethnic minority community, only to lose every translator she had set up because her phones were tapped and police had intimidated them prior to her arrival.

Frequently, she wrote of her dealings with authorities on Twitter.

There is a "strong possibility" that those dispatches played a role in her expulsion, she said. And after three months of short-term visas, "maybe they were angry that they put me on a tight leash and that didn't stop me," she said.

The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China said the Chinese government was angered about a documentary that aired in November about the use of prisoners in forced-labor camps. Chan was not involved in that production.

"My understanding is that the Chinese government chose the temporary visas in this case to allow time for discussions with Al Jazeera" about Chan, said Peter Ford, vice president of the correspondents' club, "and when those discussions did not bear fruit, they refused to renew her visa."

Al Jazeera English declined to comment about the expulsion and instead issued a statement. "We hope China appreciates the integrity of our news coverage and our journalism.... Al Jazeera Media Network will continue to work with the Chinese authorities in order to reopen our Beijing bureau." Al Jazeera's Arabic-language component still maintains correspondents in China.

The last time China kicked out correspondents was in 1998, when a Japanese correspondent and a German reporter were expelled in separate cases in which they were accused of obtaining secret documents.

At a media conference Tuesday in Beijing, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said that Chan had violated "relevant laws," but would not say which ones. Chan, who was known to always carry a copy of her Chinese press rights, believes that she broke no laws.

Chan, who is fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese, immigrated with her family to the U.S. from Hong Kong when she was 3. A U.S. citizen, she graduated from Yale University and earned a master's degree in comparative politics at the London School of Economics. Chan worked for Al Jazeera since 2007 and misses China, which she considers home. She said it was the longest period of time she had ever lived outside of Walnut. Her parents are relieved she's back.

In the wake of her expulsion, Chan has been variously praised and criticized. Some see her as a human rights activist who has exposed illegal jails and land confiscations. Others consider her an agitator.

But Chan said she doesn't consider herself the most hard-hitting reporter in China. She admires the many journalists who covered last year's pro-democracy protests in China, and those who sneaked across the border when Tibetans set themselves ablaze in resistance -- both stories she did not pursue. For all of April, she was stuck in Hong Kong, unable to report on the breaking story of blind dissident Chen Guangcheng.

For now, Chan is looking forward to a year of clean air, Whole Foods and Starbucks chai tea lattes when she attends Stanford University in the fall. She was recently accepted for a Knight Fellowship there, where she will be exploring ways for journalists to safeguard their computers from hackers.

Before her fellowship begins in September however, she'll return to Al Jazeera headquarters in Qatar and be assigned another reporting post.

"I have to face the reality, which is I'm not going back to China any time in the near future, not the way that this has played out," she said. "And I'm sure I'll be back in China someday. It's just a question of when."

Times staff writers Barbara Demick and David Pierson in Beijing contributed to this report

>> Original Report

May 10, 2012

China seeks to limit Central Tibetan contacts with troubled eastern regions.

Some of the security checkpoints in Tibet.

Chinese authorities are setting up police surveillance stations and other checkpoints across Tibet to monitor the activities of ordinary citizens and travelers approaching the capital city, Lhasa, in the latest move to tighten security in the region, according to Tibetan sources.

The security measures come following protests in Tibetan-populated areas against Chinese rule and calling for the return of Tibet's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, including a wave of self-immolations highlighting the plight of Tibetans.

Religious pilgrims going to Lhasa and others who are found without proper identification are stopped on the road and sent back to their places of origin, a Tibetan from the eastern region of Kham told RFA this week, saying he had just recently arrived in Lhasa.

"Pilgrims are required to carry personal identification and Chinese ration cards. Those found without them are turned back," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"I saw over 50 checkpoints during my journey," the man said, adding that new checkpoints have been established to the east of Lhasa in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) counties of Pome, Pashoe, and Nyingtri.

"Before reaching Lhasa, travelers and pilgrims are again thoroughly checked at Rito town in Maldro Gongkar county," he said. "They are asked about the reasons for their trip and about where they will be staying."

Demands for information

Even after this strict scrutiny, travelers are not allowed to stay in Lhasa for more than a month, and must register with Lhasa police on their arrival and when they depart, he said.

"They are asked to provide the address of their place of residence in Lhasa and about the people providing them accommodation, including information about those people's jobs."

"They also have to report to the police each week," he said.

Pilgrims from the eastern regions of Kham and Amdo, the scene of repeated self-immolations and other protests by Tibetans challenging Chinese rule, face particularly heavy restrictions, he said.

Meanwhile, Lhasa Tibetan Radio reported on May 5 that about 50 roadside police booths have been set up in Chamdo county in the TAR's Chamdo prefecture, with plans under way to set up other surveillance stations in 10 other counties in the prefecture.

The booths in Chamdo county are already fully staffed and functioning, the state-controlled radio service said.

Around 130 similar booths--called "dogs' dens" by local Tibetans--are already in operation in Lhasa city, a second Lhasa-area source said, also speaking on condition he not be named.

Reported by Soepa Gyaltso and Lobsang Sherab for RFA's Tibetan service. Translations by Dorjee Damdul. Written in English by Richard Finney

>> Original Source

May 7, 2012

The last time this happened, the last time he was grabbed by the Chinese authorities, he was "disappeared" for 60 days. Beatings, shouts, shackles, blindfolds, no sunlight. He said he was banged on the head so severely -- typically with plastic bottles filled with water -- that his memory began to slip. He couldn't remember his Skype password or how the furniture was arranged in his bedroom back home.

So it scared his friends when Jiang Tianyong was detained last Thursday evening while trying to visit his friend Chen Guangcheng in a hospital in Beijing. Mr. Chen, the blind human rights advocate, had left the protection of the U.S. Embassy, and a major diplomatic wrangle over his future was taking place.

Mr. Jiang, a lawyer who has long supported Mr. Chen, had just been detained and was sitting in a police car when Eva Pils, an associate professor of law in Hong Kong, called his cellphone. Mr. Jiang told her about his situation -- "very tense, naturally," she said. Later, ominously, his phone went unanswered.

"He was held for nine hours and was severely beaten," Ms. Pils said in an interview Monday. "At one point he lost the hearing in one ear. He's now under house arrest. They promised he could see a doctor today. We'll see if that happens."

A former schoolteacher who became a trained and certified lawyer -- unlike Mr. Chen who has no formal legal training -- Mr. Jiang has had his legal license indefinitely suspended for his impertinence in confronting the government and defending, among others, Falun Gong members and a dissident Tibetan monk.

Mr. Jiang and Mr. Chen's involvement in a loose network of human rights advocates and unlicensed quasi-lawyers known in China as "barefoot lawyers" was described in an article in 2005 by Jerome A. Cohen, a New York University law professor who remains a trusted adviser to Mr. Chen.

Mr. Jiang was among several colleagues, accomplices and like-minded activists who were picked up in the days following Mr. Chen's daring and now-celebrated escape from house arrest last month. Beijing and Washington have apparently reached an agreement that will allow Mr. Chen and his family to travel to the United States so he can pursue legal studies.

"It was a huge boost to everybody's morale that Chen Guangcheng could escape" from house arrest, said Ms. Pils, who also serves as director of the Center for Rights and Justice at the Chinese University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Law. "We were very happy simply to know that he was safe."

When the revolutions of the Arab Spring were taking shape a year ago, a group of friends and lawyers gathered in Beijing to discuss the plight of Mr. Chen and his family, who were then under detention in their stone farmhouse in rural Shandong Province.

Their meeting was held on Feb. 16, 2011, and within days the authorities began a crackdown against the circle of activists. The Chinese authorities, apparently worried about a possible spillover effect of the unrest in the Middle East, began rounding up dissidents, writers and especially human rights lawyers, "disappearing" them for weeks or months at a time.

"It is clear that the crackdown has reached unprecedented levels -- the threshold that warrants detention by the police has been dramatically lowered," Nicholas Bequelin, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said at the time, quoted in a story in the South China Morning Post.

"Now we have entered the most serious wave of political repression."

When it became clear that Mr. Jiang was among those who had been disappeared after the Feb. 16 meeting, the State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley said on March 8 that the United States was "increasingly concerned by the apparent extralegal detention and enforced disappearance of some of China's most well-known laywers and activists."

In interviews with the Voice of America, the Morning Post and other media outlets, Mr. Jiang described his incarceration, which included the water-bottle beatings:

I spent the entire detention period in one room, except that they moved me twice. I did not know where I was because when they moved me they covered my head. Day in and day out, I was under a blinding white light in that room. I do not know how I spent the spring; I didn't see a single ray of sunshine.

They clearly told me, 'Don't expect to go through any legal procedures or go to a detention center, let alone have any illusions of going to court. Forget those dreams.' That's exactly what they said to me. They told me that they could keep me in this state for a month, six months, a year, or even longer.

Meanwhile, in the wake of Mr. Chen's dramatic escapade, Ms. Pils does not expect a rush of Chinese lawyers and dissidents to be suddenly seeking refuge in Western embassies and consulates, following the lead of Mr. Chen whose fame, after all, preceded him.

And for any dissident or activist to leave China for good, she said, was "a hugely difficult decision, even for those who have been badly tortured."

>> Original Source

By Wei Jingsheng | The New York Times

May 4, 2012

FEW people understand the predicament of Chen Guangcheng, the blind human rights activist who sought and then gave up American protection in Beijing, as well as I do. No matter what he has decided, whether to stay in China or to leave, he has made both the right choice and the wrong choice. I faced a similarly difficult situation.

In March 1979, I was arrested and spent more than 14 years in solitary confinement for promoting freedom and democracy, and denouncing Deng Xiaoping's attempts to create a new type of dictatorship in China.

In September 1993, one week before the International Olympic Committee voted on Beijing's (ultimately unsuccessful) bid for the 2000 Summer Olympics, the Chinese government released me, six months ahead of schedule. This also coincided with President Bill Clinton's efforts to persuade Congress to delink human rights and trade by making China's most-favored-nation trade status permanent. With Congress deadlocked on the issues, Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher set up a meeting with me in Beijing to seek my views.

When the Chinese government got wind of it, they immediately detained me. The illegal practice, which has recently been written into Chinese law, is called "residence under surveillance." An official, who claimed to represent President Jiang Zemin, came to negotiate with me. He had a simple request: I should not meet with the secretary of state, and if I agreed there was no need to make a public statement about my decision.

"We understand you very well and we never propose anything that you cannot accept," the official said. "As long as you agree to cancel your meeting with the Americans, we'll satisfy whatever requests you make."

Their offer, even though accompanied by veiled threats, sounded very attractive. "We will not arrest any of your people," the official promised, referring to other democratic activists. "Besides, we are going to release another batch of dissidents soon. We'll allow you to establish an independent workers' union as well as an organization to protect Chinese artists. We will not stop you from providing humanitarian assistance to your friends."

It was a tough choice. I leaned toward accepting the conditions, because many of my friends were suffering in jail and others were about to enter jail. In addition, workers and artists needed to organize themselves and protect their own interests. However, I was keenly aware that saying yes to the government would also mean that the impact of international pressure would be diluted. Without such pressure, the Chinese government would step up its repression and I would eventually lose my own freedom.

The next day, I learned over the phone that two of my friends had been released. The news helped me decide. I reluctantly agreed to the offer, taking comfort in the fact that my action had at least benefited some of my friends. As for international pressure, I chose to believe that the Americans would stick with their values and not abandon their Chinese friends.

Therefore, I declined Mr. Christopher's invitation with the flimsy excuse that I was indisposed and needed treatment at a place outside Beijing. To be fair, the Chinese government did release some dissidents, and no new arrests were made until 1995. Wang Dan, a leader of the 1989 student pro-democracy movement, was allowed to move freely following his release. But we had miscalculated the depth of American commitment. After Mr. Christopher left, President Clinton, in a reversal of his campaign promises, agreed to renew China's trade benefits and delink them from human rights policy. As Chinese-American trade relations warmed, the crackdown resumed and I was detained once again.

The next May, Mr. Wang and several dissident friends were also arrested and locked up with me in the name of "residence under surveillance." A friend in the police force warned me, "The two sides have reconciled their differences," referring to China and America. "You need to figure out how to handle the new situation."

In December 1995, after a hasty trial, I was sentenced to another 14 years in prison for "attempts to subvert the government."

Mr. Clinton did keep some of his promises. He managed to bring me to the United States, in 1997, and Mr. Wang, in 1998. He intended to show that the granting of trade benefits and the removal of post-Tiananmen sanctions did not mean the United States would be indifferent to the human rights issues in China.

From my experience, one can see how the Communist Party operates -- why it makes promises and what its so-called guarantees mean. It is obvious that Mr. Chen did not understand the emptiness of these promises, which explains why he initially accepted the government's pledges and left the United States Embassy in Beijing, where he had fled after escaping house arrest in his village, for treatment at a hospital. (On Friday, a tentative agreement that would allow Mr. Chen to travel to the United States as a student was announced.)

In my time, the Communist Party kept its promise for as long as one year because human rights were directly linked with trade. Now that such international pressure does not exist, the party no longer feels the need to keep its word. The Chinese leadership does not fear the United States government; it only fears the loss of its power.

Human rights have been overpowered by economic interests; the cause is as hopeless as that of the big United States trade deficit with China. With the loss of any viable economic means to pressure and penalize the Chinese Communist Party, one has to ask: On what basis does America believe that the Chinese government will keep the promises it makes?

May 01, 2012

When Ji Yeqing awakened, she was already in the recovery room.

Chinese authorities had dragged her out of her home and down four flights of stairs, she said, restraining and beating her husband as he tried to come to her aid.

They whisked her into a clinic, held her down on a bed and forced her to undergo an abortion.

Her offense? Becoming pregnant with a second child, in violation of China's one-child policy.

"After the abortion, I felt empty, as if something was scooped out of me," Ji told a congressional panel in September. "My husband and I had been so excited for our new baby. Now suddenly all that hope and joy and excitement disappeared. ... I was very depressed and despondent. For a long time, whenever I thought about my lost child, I would cry."

As she lay unconscious, she said, an IUD to prevent future pregnancies was inserted.

The issue of forced abortions -- and in some cases, forced sterilizations -- in China has seized the spotlight in recent days with news of escaped activist Chen Guangcheng.

Chen, a blind, self-taught lawyer, rose to fame in the late 1990s because of his advocacy for what he calls victims of abusive practices, such as forced abortions, by Chinese family planning officials. He investigated forced abortions and sterilizations in eastern China -- a practice China denies -- and helped organize a class-action lawsuit on behalf of victims, for which he served four years in prison.

A fellow activist, Hu Jia, said Chen has taken refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

"Chen may be safe for the moment, but the women for whom he risked everything are not," said Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, a California-based organization that describes itself as a "broad-based, international coalition that opposes forced abortion and sexual slavery in China."

"Forced abortion is not a choice," Littlejohn said. "It is official government rape."

On a January 2011 visit to the United States, Chinese President Hu Jintao reportedly denied that China was forcing women to submit to abortions. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Florida, who gave Hu a list of human rights concerns, said that Hu insisted a forced-abortion policy did not exist, according to media reports.

China's population is the largest on earth, with more than 1.34 billion people. Since its implementation in 1979, the one-child policy has prevented more than 400 million births in China, according to China's National Population and Family Planning Commission.

About 13 million abortions are performed nationwide each year, the commission has said -- about 35,000 a day. It is unknown how many of those are coerced.

But the one-child policy has been blamed for abuses. In some cases, advocates say, fetuses identified as female are aborted, or midwives strangle a female infant with the umbilical cord during delivery, identifying the baby as "stillborn," according to All Girls Allowed, a nonprofit group that aims to end female "gendercide," educate abandoned girls, rescue trafficked children and defend women's reproductive rights.

Other females are abandoned, left to die or raised as orphans.

Chinese traditionally prefer boys over girls because they are seen as better able to provide for the family and carry on the family bloodline. As a result, the practice of aborting female fetuses or abandoning infant girls continues, particularly in rural areas.

In November, according to state-run news agency Xinhua, Premier Wen Jiabao, in a speech to the National Working Conference on Women and Children, "urged banning illegal fetus gender identification and illegal abortion."

"The social status of the female population indicates the level of social progress (of a nation), while children are the future and hope of a nationality and a nation," Wen said.

Last summer, Xinhua reported that "millions of Chinese men of marrying age may be living as frustrated bachelors by 2020" because of the gender imbalance. In 2010, China's sex ratio at birth was 118 boys for every 100 girls, the news agency said.

China kicked off a national campaign "to significantly curb non-medical sex determinations and sex-selective abortions to balance the gender ratio," Xinhua said. Also during the campaign, "efforts will be made to raise awareness of gender equality, to severely punish those involved in cases of non-medical sex determinations and sex-selective abortions, and to strengthen monitoring."

Liu Qian, vice minister of the Ministry of Health, said that doctors violating the ban would be stripped of their licenses or penalized, and involved medical institutions would also be punished, according to Xinhua.

The one-child policy could contribute to China's high rate of female suicide, according to All Girls Allowed.

China is the only country in the world where the female suicide rate is higher than that of men -- some 500 women a day, the group said, citing statistics from the World Health Organization and the U.S. State Department.

In its 2009 Human Rights Report, the State Department noted that "many observers believed that violence against women and girls, discrimination in education and employment, the traditional preference for male children, birth-limitation policies, and other societal factors contributed to the high female suicide rate. Women in rural areas, where the suicide rate for women was three to four times higher than for men, were especially vulnerable."

Sometimes the consequences are even more severe. In October 2011, a woman who was six months pregnant died during a forced abortion in eastern China, according to Women's Rights Without Frontiers.

Last month, a woman in the same region was forced to undergo an abortion while nine months pregnant, the organization reported. The baby was born alive, but then was drowned in a bucket, according to the organization. A photo of the infant's body floating in the bucket was circulated on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, sparking widespread outrage.

Chinese officials are prohibited under law from "infringing on the rights and interests of citizens when promoting compliance with population planning policies," according to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, created by Congress to monitor human rights and the rule of law in China. However, the commission in its most recent annual report noted "reports of official campaigns, as well as numerous individual cases in which officials used violent methods to coerce citizens to undergo sterilizations or abortions or pay heavy fines for having 'out-of-plan' children," meaning a family's second child.

In one example from October 2010, the commission said, a woman in southeastern China who was eight months pregnant with her second child was kidnapped and detained for 40 hours. She was forcibly injected with a substance that caused the fetus to abort. Her husband reportedly was not permitted to see her during this time, the commission said.

"Nothing in human history compares to the magnitude of China's 33-year assault on women and children," said Rep. Chris Smith, R-New Jersey and chairman of the commission, during the September hearing at which Ji Yeqing testified.

"Today in China, rather than being given maternal care, pregnant women without birth-allowed permits are hunted down and forcibly aborted. ... For over three decades, brothers and sisters have been illegal; a mother has absolutely no right to protect her unborn baby from state-sponsored violence."

"Out of plan" children whose parents do not pay fines may go without household registration, or hukou, which presents obstacles to social benefits including subsidized health care and public education, All Girls Allowed said, citing the commission's 2010 report.

A woman's family members, including her husband, parents, in-laws or siblings, may also be targeted for violations of the policy, according to Women's Rights Without Borders, which published a 2005 report compiled from Chen's notes into cases he was investigating before his arrest. The report alleges arrest, torture, beatings and fines of family members for the violations of relatives. It also documents a case where a woman suffered health problems after being forced to undergo a tubal ligation despite her high blood pressure.

Ji told lawmakers her first forced abortion was in 2003, after officials said she and her husband would be fined $31,000 for their second child and fired from their jobs. Her second came in 2006, despite the fact she and her husband at that time were willing to pay the fine and lose their jobs.

She continues to suffer consequences from the abortions. Her husband divorced her, she said, because she could not give him a son (the couple already had a daughter). After she remarried and moved to the United States in 2010, she said, she visited a clinic to have her IUD removed and undergo an exam. "The doctor told me that I had cervical erosion, likely due to the poor medical conditions of my forced abortions," she said.

Liu Ping told a similar story to Congress last year. She said after giving birth to her son, she was required to undergo five abortions between 1983 and 1990. During the last procedure, an IUD was inserted.

"When I learned of the procedure, I protested that I had a kidney disease and could not keep the IUD, but they completely ignored me," she said. "The doctor just gave the bill to my husband and told him to pay." Her husband was later arrested, she said, and she was given a "serious administrative warning" at her job and fined six months' pay.

Liu had to report to the factory clinic each month for an exam to make sure she had not removed the IUD on her own or become pregnant again, she said.

In 1997, she missed a monthly pregnancy check because she was caring for her terminally ill mother, she testified.

"Agents from the Family Planning Commission waited at my home to drag me to the exam," she said. "When they pushed me to the ground, I fell and hurt my neck vertebrae. My spirit completely collapsed after this one. I attempted suicide, but was stopped by my family from jumping."

Liu was able to move to the United States and she and her husband reconciled after a divorce.

"I feel happiness and joyful," she told lawmakers. "But I know in my homeland, China, there are millions of women who are suffering as I did. Each day thousands of young lives are being destroyed. I beg everyone to save them."

CNN's Jaime FlorCruz contributed to this report.

 >> Original Report

29 April 2012

The improbable late-night escape of the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng from house arrest in his rural village has thrilled anti-abortion campaigners and human rights groups, while humiliating the security forces who were charged with sealing off Mr. Chen and his family.

"Friends of Mr. Chen, along with people in the Chinese government, say he is now inside the American Embassy in Beijing," my colleague Andrew Jacobs rep;orts from the capital.

"His escape is nothing less than a miracle," said Zeng Jinyan, a human rights campaigner.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government, as it presumably negotiates with American officials over Mr. Chen's immediate future, seems to have issued a gag order on his flight from detention.

There has been no mention of Mr. Chen's situation by Xinhua, the official state news agency, nor by the state-run newspapers China Daily, People's Daily or Global Times.

Indeed, in a search of Xinhua's entire English-language archive, there is only one mention of Mr. Chen -- an account in 2007 of his being sentenced to four years and three months in jail for destroying public property. The story refers to Mr. Chen as a "mob organizer" who reportedly broke some office windows "to vent his anger at workers who were carrying out poverty-relief programs."

Online searches of Mr. Chen's name also are being blocked inside China, including on the popular Twitter-like service called Weibo. Variations on his initials and the name of his prefecture are also off-limits, along with the words "blind lawyer," "embassy," "U.S. embassy" and "consulate."

Banned searches turn up this message: "According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, these search results cannot be shown."

"Nearly all possible searches have been blocked, and even the Chinese word for 'blind person,' or mang'ren (盲人)," writes David Bandurski of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong.

Mr. Chen, 40, blinded in infancy by an untreated fever, has campaigned for years against the harsh enforcement of the state's one-child policy in eastern China, alleging that local officials have forced thousands of people to have abortions or undergo sterilization procedures.

The 15-minute video that he recorded about the harsh treatment of him and his family is now available here with English subtitles, and an English-language transcript is on The Shanghaiist site.

In the video, essentially an appeal to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao for justice, Mr. Chen describes the elaborate security system which -- until one night last week -- had so hermetically kept him a prisoner.

"The whole situation is just so over the top," he says. "I understand the number of officials and policemen who participate in my persecution adds up to some 100 people."

And he names names: He specifically identifies about a dozen of the plainclothes guards who keep visitors away, often violently, from Dongshigu village. Christian activists, political supporters, foreign journalists, fellow Chinese lawyers and two U.S. diplomats have been physically driven off by the guards.

"The man who guarded the village entrance and attacked Christian Bale -- I understand his name is Zhang Shenghe, an official with our township. He is the so-called 'Military Coat' (or 'PandaMan') in netizens' descriptions."

Mr. Bale, the British actor, was roughed up last year when he tried to visit Mr. Chen with a CNN crew. A burly man in a green, army-style parka led the assault, shown in this video report.

The provocative and Internet-savvy Chinese novelist Murong Xuecun also has written a moving account of his attempt to visit Mr. Chen in October.

As Mr. Murong and three friends approached Lingyi, the largest city near Mr. Chen's village, they saw a video screen flashing the slogan, "A Civilized People Create a Civilized City."

In his account of being shoved to the ground and turned away by the Dongshigu guards, Mr. Murong writes, "All I wanted to know was what it takes to visit a person, and I'd gotten my answer: as impossible as walking to the sky."

He refers to "Believe in the Future," a bleak and wistful poem from 1968 by Shi Zhi, the pen name of Guo Lusheng, who has been called "China's Dante." The poem, circulated in copies written out by hand, became a touchstone for millions of educated urban students sent to work on farms during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s.

Mr. Murong writes:

"Almost everyone in our generation has read 'Believe in the Future':

When cobwebs clog my stove
When its dying smoke sighs over poverty
I will stubbornly dig out the disappointing ash
And write on snowflakes: 'Believe in the Future.'

This poem was written in 1968 during an abnormal time. That year, the historian Jian Bozan and his wife committed suicide. Tian Han, the lyricist of our national anthem, died in prison. That year, ordinary citizens silently endured a life of injustice.

But the real heroes were the ones who held onto hope, who still believed in the future, who still had faith that the world would turn back to normal."

>> Original Report

 

 

28 April 2012

Blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng is under "US protection" in Beijing following a dramatic escape from house arrest, a US-based rights group says.

The group, ChinaAid, also says high-level talks are under way between US and Chinese officials over his fate.

Earlier, fellow activist Hu Jia said Mr Chen was in the US embassy. Neither country has commented on the claims.

Mr Chen's escape could overshadow a visit to Beijing next week by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

She has repeatedly called for the dissident's release.

A statement from the Texas-based ChinaAid group said it had "learned from a source close to the Chen Guangcheng situation that Chen is under US protection" in Beijing.

The group is led by Bob Fu, an American-based human rights campaigner and friend of Mr Chen.

On Friday, Hu Jia - another friend of Mr Chen and himself a prominent activist and dissident - told the BBC he had met Mr Chen in the US embassy in Beijiing in the last 72 hours, after his escape from house arrest in the eastern province of Shandong. He said Mr Chen had scaled a high wall before being driven hundreds of kilometres to Beijing.

On Saturday, Mr Hu's wife Zeng Jinyan said on twitter that he had been taken away for questioning by local police.

Demands

Mr Chen escaped on Sunday, activists say, and has since released a video addressed to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.

Chen Guangcheng uses the video posted on YouTube to confirm he was under house arrest

There are reports that his brother and nephew, and others who helped him escape, have now been detained by police.

The rights group Human Rights in China quoted a source who knew about Mr Chen, and said his nephew Chen Kegui was taken away from his home by more than 30 police officers.

UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said she was concerned for the well-being of Mr Chen and his family, who live in Dongshigu town, Shandong province.

"I'm disturbed to hear reports that other family members, including his brother Chen Guangfu and nephew Chen Kegui, have now been detained," she said in a statement.

Chen Guangcheng

Chen Guangcheng, 40, was placed under house arrest after being released from a four-year jail sentence in 2010. Reports suggest authorities only realised he had escaped on Thursday.

In his video addressed to Prime Minister Wen, delivered from a darkened room, Mr Chen said outwitting his guards had not been easy.

In the appeal, posted online by Boxun, a Chinese dissident news website based in the United States, he asks that:

Prime Minister Wen investigate and prosecute local officials Mr Chen says beat up his family members

The safety of his family be ensured

Corruption in general in China be dealt with and punished according to the law

The Chinese authorities have come under international criticism for their treatment of him. At one point his daughter was barred from school. Many sympathisers who have tried to visit his home say they have been beaten up.

A self-schooled legal activist, Mr Chen is known for revealing rights abuses under China's one-child policy and has accused officials in Shandong province of forcing 7,000 women into abortions or sterilisations.

He Peirong, another China-based activist who had also campaigned for Chen Guangcheng, has also been detained at her home in Nanjing, according to other activists.

The Chen affair comes at an unwelcome time for China's leaders, who have been embroiled in a lurid political scandal involving disgraced former party boss Bo Xilai.

>> Original Source

April 21, 2012

Intimidating and courting Chinese journalists, Bo Xilai, an ambitious Communist Party official, fueled his political career by ably shaping his public image and seizing the spotlight in a way no peer had as he governed a Chinese city. But with his purge from the party's top ranks this month, Mr. Bo has suddenly found himself the target of the same media apparatus that he once so carefully manipulated, and that now vilifies him in the name of the party's leaders.

As it announced the purge, the party unleashed the full arsenal of its propaganda machine against Mr. Bo, pressing news organizations across the nation into an extraordinary campaign urging support for the party's decision to oust Mr. Bo, editors and media executives say. It has arguably been the greatest mobilization to support a decision by the party since the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

The campaign began on April 10, when the state news agency, Xinhua, announced that Mr. Bo had been suspended from the powerful Politburo and that his wife, Gu Kailai, was under investigation in the murder of a British businessman in November. Interviews with editors and media executives offer a glimpse of how the secretive party propaganda machinery has worked at a time of intense political tension. This week, the campaign is entering a more subtle phase as some news organizations veer away, at the behest of top propaganda officials, from running editorials emphasizing party loyalty and start to parse the significance of Mr. Bo's case.

For example, editors at Global Times, a popular newspaper that has Chinese and English editions, have been ordered to run commentaries or editorials that separate criticism of Mr. Bo from the welfare-oriented economic policies he championed in Chongqing, perhaps because party leaders want to take credit for similar policies in the future. The English edition is also supposed to criticize Western news coverage that has emphasized splits within the party, one person with knowledge of the order said.

Not in decades has such a widespread and finely tuned propaganda campaign been rolled out during the purge of an official. In the last two major purges, in 2006 and 1995, party leaders did not flood the media with nearly so much propaganda. And not since the bloodshed of 1989 have editorials insisting that officials and cadres reaffirm fealty to the party appeared with such frequency and vehemence.

Some analysts have said the purging of Mr. Bo presents the biggest challenge for the party since that period. The crisis was set off in February when Wang Lijun, a former police chief in Chongqing, fled to an American Consulate to present evidence of what he said was a murder plot involving Mr. Bo's family.

"We haven't seen this kind of direct meddling with the media across the board in a long, long time," said David Bandurski, editor of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong. "You can really sense the anxiety and the uneasiness. They're pushing so intently this message of unity and solidarity, and you know all is not well."

Mr. Bo, a Communist aristocrat and former journalism student who campaigned for a top post ahead of a leadership transition this year, was a polarizing figure who quickly built a fervent base of support after arriving in Chongqing in 2007, in part by his canny use of the news media. Some of Mr. Bo's most ardent supporters have been hard-line socialists and senior army officers, and one goal of the propaganda campaign, especially in the intense first week, appeared to be cowing or winning over Mr. Bo's remaining allies.

"They know that there will still be different views and interpretations throughout society," a senior executive at an official media organization said, "so you need to run a lot of articles and propaganda to unify people's thinking."

Starting April 11, unsigned editorials on the cases of Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang appeared, sometimes daily, in every major media outlet in China, from the People's Liberation Army Daily, the military's official organ, to Web portals where Chinese youth get their news. Most of the editorials originated in People's Daily, the official party mouthpiece. Friday was the first day the paper had no editorial on Mr. Bo.

The editorials have refrained from explicit character attacks on Mr. Bo or Ms. Gu and have not taken aim at Mr. Bo's policies in Chongqing. Instead, they have emphasized that he is being investigated for "serious disciplinary violations" and that the rule of law must prevail.

"This way they won't necessarily provoke much controversy," said Zhan Jiang, a journalism professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University. "This form of publicity is aimed at arousing as little negative reaction as possible."

Another editor said that when Mr. Bo was purged, editors at the party's main publications were told that People's Daily planned to publish a series of editorials on the decision over three days, and that major newspapers would have to reprint the editorials, highlights of which would be read on the television news. But later, on short notice, propaganda chiefs expanded the campaign and ordered other publications to run their own editorials as well.

"To me it indicates that a lot of people were still speaking up for Bo Xilai, so they had to go into overdrive," the editor said.

Guangming Daily, founded as the organ for the party's intellectuals, has run its own editorials, as have two other party newspapers, Liberation Daily and the People's Liberation Army Daily. One in the military newspaper on April 13 said all officers and soldiers "deeply understand the warning significance of the incident" and "firmly support the decisions and plans" of the party.

A commentary in Global Times on Thursday by its chief editorial writer, Shan Renping, was a more personal attack on Mr. Bo. It criticized his "smash the black" campaign against organized crime and the "red song" campaign that urged citizens to sing Maoist classics. "Do not overestimate one's individual influence," Mr. Shan wrote.

People's Daily has also been running editorials denouncing the spread of Internet rumors. Many Chinese get their news online, and the Internet has been rife with gossip related to Mr. Bo. Major microblog platforms, which have hundreds of millions of registered users, have had to devote more staffing to the task of self-censorship since the government intensified efforts to quash rumors.

But there are signs that bloggers posting messages in line with the party's anti-Bo narrative are allowed leeway. Li Zhuang, a lawyer persecuted by Mr. Bo, said Friday that before the purge, editorial handlers at microblog platforms where he posted would tell him to erase many of his posts criticizing Mr. Bo. Now, he said, such demands are rare.

At least one figure with a crucial stake in the political drama has appeared to take a route outside the state news media to send a message. Jiang Zemin, the former top leader and a onetime ally of Mr. Bo's father, met Tuesday with Howard Schultz, the chief executive of Starbucks, a Starbucks spokesman said. Political analysts here said an appearance at this time by Mr. Jiang, reported to be ailing at 85 and long absent from public life, signaled to other politicians that he still played a role in party decisions, including in the Bo crisis.

Bill Bishop, an analyst in Beijing who noted the meeting on his blog, said, "He's clearly not doing it because he's a coffee fan."

Edy Yin and Li Bibo contributed research.

>> Original Report

April 21, 2012

A US-based Chinese-language website that has reported extensively on the Bo Xilai scandal in China says it was crippled for several hours by a concerted hacking attack.

The Boxun website had to move to a new webhost after the denial-of-service attack on Friday, its manager said.

Boxun has reported for several weeks on the scandal surrounding Bo Xilai.

Mr Bo was removed from key political posts as his wife was investigated for the murder of a British businessman.

Boxun's original webhost, Name.com, told the Associated Press news agency that the hack was one of the biggest in the company's history.

It reportedly followed an emailed threat that it would be attacked if it did not disable the site.

It is not clear who launched the attacks, but the manager of Boxun.com, Watson Meng, was quoted as saying he believed they were ordered by China's security services.

A denial-of-service attack involves hackers paralysing a website by bombarding it with enquiries.

Stream of reports

Boxun.com, based in North Carolina, was set up 12 years ago by Mr Meng to campaign for human rights and democracy in China.

It has published a stream of reports and allegations about the fate of Bo Xilai, the politician at the centre of China's biggest political scandal in years.

Mr Bo was sacked as Communist Party boss of the south-western city of Chongqing, and suspended from other key political posts, amid an official investigation into corruption and allegations that his wife was involved in the murder of UK businessman Neil Heywood.

Mr Heywood was found dead in Chongqing in November 2011.

China routinely blocks web content that it deems inappropriate, but reports on Boxun are often repeated on micro-blogging sites in China by people who use software to circumvent internet restrictions.

The BBC's Martin Patience in Chongqing says that with more than half a billion internet users, China is finding it increasingly difficult to control the flow of information.

Chinese authorities have stressed that their investigation into Mr Bo and his family is purely a legal matter.

>> Original Report

April 16, 2012

Tibet's spiritual leader says China's 'totalitarian' policies sparked Tibetan self-immolations.

Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has blamed Beijing's "totalitarian" and "unrealistic" policies for the wave of self-immolations among Tibetans, saying the time has come for the Chinese authorities to take a serious approach to resolving the Tibetan problem.

He called on the Chinese leadership to adopt a "holistic view" in resolving the Tibetan crisis instead of a "self-centered" approach backed by power and wealth to suppress the Tibetans.

Thirty-three Tibetans have set themselves on fire since February 2009, challenging Beijing's rule in Tibetan-populated areas and calling for the return of the Dalai Lama to Tibet.

The burnings triggered protests by Tibetans questioning Chinese policies which they say are discriminatory and have robbed them of their rights.

The Dalai Lama, who is currently visiting Hawaii to speak about tolerance and peace, described as "very sad" the self-immolations by the mostly young Tibetans.

"I think this problem is not created by Buddhism, not created by Tibetan Buddhism culture [which is] very peaceful, very compassionate," the Dalai Lama said in an interview with Taiwanese broadcasting station Next TV.

"This problem started from totalitarian, blind sort of unrealistic policy. So, the people who create that policy must think seriously about this--that's my response," he said when asked about the self-immolations in the interview recorded before his Hawaii trip.

'Holistic view'

He asked Beijing not to take a "self-centered and short-sighted" approach but a "holistic view" in dealing with the Tibetan question.

He did not elaborate on the approach but said Chinese authorities should not use its immense power to "control the people."

This is "very short-sighted, very foolish thinking, totally lacking a holistic view."

The latest self-immolation occurred on March 30 when two monks set themselves on fire in Barkham (in Chinese, Ma'erkang) city in the Ngaba (Aba) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan.

The two subsequently died of serious burns, bringing to 25 the number of self-immolating Tibetans who have succumbed to their burns so far.

Contrary

Chinese authorities have labeled the self-immolators as terrorists, outcasts, criminals, and mentally ill people, and have blamed the Dalai Lama for encouraging the burnings which run contrary to Buddhist teachings.

The self-immolation protests have resulted in a Chinese security clampdown in the Tibetan-populated provinces of Sichuan, Qinghai and Ganzi, as well as in the Tibet Autonomous Region.

Aside from detaining hundreds of monks from monasteries, Chinese authorities have jailed scores of Tibetan writers, artists, singers, and educators for asserting Tibetan national identity and civil rights, exile sources said.

Reported by RFA's Tibetan service. Written in English by Parameswaran Ponnudurai.

>> Original Source

April 13, 2012

Ai Weiwei, China's most famous rebel artist, said Friday that he had filed a lawsuit with two courts against the Beijing tax authorities for violating his rights in bringing a tax case against him. Tax officials have said Mr. Ai's company, Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd., owes the equivalent of $2.4 million in back taxes and penalties. Mr. Ai says he does not owe that amount and has insisted that his wife, Lu Qing, is formally in charge of the company. Tax officials recently rejected an appeal filed by Mr. Ai. He said Friday that he was filing his lawsuit based on the fact that the tax authorities had not followed proper procedures in bringing their case against him. Mr. Ai said both courts promised to deliver an answer in one week.

>> Original Source 

April 11, 2012

The residents of a suburban village near China's capital accuse the local government of ties with a property developer.

Around 200 residents of a rural district on the outskirts of the Chinese capital marched to local government offices this week to protest against attacks from government-backed thugs on their property amid a long-running dispute over the use of local land for development, local sources said.

The villagers, from Shiliuzhuang village in the southern Beijing district of Fengtai, are accusing the government of murky links with a local property developer.

"This incident occurred because the residents of Shiliuzhuang village reported their local officials for illegal construction which was affecting their ability to go on with their lives," a Shiliuzhuang resident surnamed Xie said in a recent interview.

"They then started retaliatory attacks against us, and smashed up our vehicles," he said.

He said the village was now patrolled on a daily basis by unidentified men, whom the villagers believe are thugs hired by the government and property developer.

"They are a threat to our lives and our property," Xie said. "We reported it, but the police said it would be hard for them to do anything about it, and hard to investigate."

"We want the local government to sort this out for us."

The villagers on Tuesday left their damaged vehicles outside government offices in protest against the attacks.

Xie said the officials had initially refused to come out and talk to the protesting villagers, but that some journalists from Beijing newspapers had arrived at the scene.

"They only let us go in and tell them about our complaint after the media showed up," he said. "But their reply was pretty vague."

An official at the Shiliuzhuang village government offices confirmed the protest had taken place.

"Yes, I think so," the official said. "If there is something to announce, we will put it out via the proper channels."

Evictions

Xie said many of the villagers were complaining that they had been illegally evicted from their homes to make way for a property development, and been allocated temporary accommodation.

But their new homes came with no leasehold or ownership rights, rendering them vulnerable to further eviction, and were of very poor quality, Xie said.

A Shiliuzhuang resident surnamed Zhang said the villagers didn't oppose the decision to demolish their homes, but insisted that the process be carried out reasonably and legally.

"Right now, the villagers don't even feel secure, and the kids don't want to be alone in the evenings at home," he said. "I have to stay with them every day."

"They smashed our cars, our windows, and the villagers' camcorders," he said. "What are we supposed to do?"

In China, all land is ultimately owned by the state, but is allocated to communities under collective contract and through the household responsibility system that replaced state-run farms and communes under late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping.

Land acquisition for development, often resulting in lucrative property deals for local officials, sparks thousands of protests by local communities across China every month, many of which escalate into clashes with police.

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

>> Original Report

April 07, 2012

Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi, whose speeches helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, has died in the United States, aged 76.

April 6, 2012

Some Chinese leaders clearly hope that this year will mark another milestone in China's rise under authoritarian rule: the first time that a whole new slate of leaders is chosen largely by consensus among the political elite, not handpicked by a powerful strongman.

That selection will in all likelihood still take place when the 18th Communist Party Congress meets this fall. But with the dismissal and investigation last month of Bo Xilai, the party secretary of metropolitan Chongqing, the notions of stability and consensus in China's secretive political system have taken a big and possibly lasting hit.

Mr. Bo's spectacular fall from grace, hastened by his police chief's arrival at an American consulate in February with a sheaf of incriminating documents, is being dissected in varying ways even before it is complete: a titanic power struggle between Mr. Bo's neo-Maoist left and the more liberal and market-oriented right; infighting among ruling cliques; a seizing of the moment by Mr. Bo's many highly motivated political enemies.

Any or all of those characterizations may be true. There is wide agreement among outsiders that Mr. Bo's downfall points to perhaps the most serious division in the party elite since the leadership upheavals during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

But to many, neither Mr. Bo nor the explanation of his collapse is so clear-cut. They see a collision between a Communist Party that prizes stability and secrecy in choosing its leaders, and a new kind of leader who set his own political agenda and thrived on public adulation.

In a Western system, Mr. Bo might be called a populist. In China, where lockstep unity is a foundation of the party's claim on power, he was a fearsome unknown.

"The concern was not that Bo would change the delicate balance of power, but that he would lead the party completely out of control," said Cheng Li, an expert on China's elite at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "It's more than a power struggle. It's a corresponding interest to maintain the legitimacy of the Communist Party -- to survive."

Wu Si, a liberal intellectual and editor based in Beijing, said in an interview: "What in actuality are the rules of transferring power at the highest levels now? It's not clear."

"But Bo Xilai seemed to be heading down a new road," Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Bo is mostly identified as the charismatic darling of China's new left, the intellectuals and policy wonks who argue that China should use state power to assure social equality and enforce a culture of moral purity and nationalism. Mr. Bo's policies in Chongqing, from the mass singing of Mao-era songs to his pitiless anticorruption campaign, were conceived with the help of leftist theorists at the government-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.

But Mr. Bo was also adaptable. As mayor of Dalian in the 1990s, he sought to remake the northeastern coastal megalopolis into a new Singapore. To waves of favorable publicity, his government rewarded citizens who reported rude taxi drivers and fined those who uttered unpleasantries like "nao you bing," or, roughly, "numbskull."

In Dalian, and in Chongqing, he could pursue liberal causes as easily as leftist ones. He proposed experimenting with direct elections in local townships, courted foreign investment, mounted aggressive tree-planting and pollution cleanup campaigns and built low-income housing.

Only Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who has cultivated an image as the caring grandfather figure of the national leadership, rivaled Mr. Bo's popularity. But while the modest Mr. Wen was always careful to show his loyalty to the party's central command, Mr. Bo often seemed to appeal to the disenfranchised masses who longed for someone to shake things up.

"Bo Xilai was differentiating himself from other leaders in a very conspicuous way," Susan Shirk, a scholar of the Chinese elite at the University of California at San Diego, said in a recent interview. "His style of politicking was antithetical and threatening to a political oligarchy that was trying to keep the competition among themselves hidden from the general public."

Mr. Bo's ambition and abrasive style made some enemies in the elite, notably Mr. Wen. His posting in 2007 to Chongqing, deep in China's interior, was seen by some as an effort to sideline him. Instead, it became the base for his campaign to join the Politburo's Standing Committee, the nine-member body at the peak of the Communist hierarchy whose membership will turn over this fall.

In a governing elite that makes big choices by consensus, experts say, Mr. Bo might well have vaulted onto the Standing Committee with the support of sympathizers, had Chongqing's police chief, Wang Lijun, not fled to the American Consulate in Chengdu, in nearby Sichuan Province.

Mr. Wang carried papers that he said implicated Mr. Bo's family in a criminal inquiry of the death of a British businessman, Neil Heywood, an acquaintance of the Bo family. Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang are now said to be confined in Beijing while party officials investigate those and other claims.

To incumbent leaders who worried about Mr. Bo's destabilizing impact, "the Wang Lijun case was just a godsend," said Huang Jing, an expert on elite politics and director of the Center on Asia and Globalization at the National University of Singapore.

"It opened up a big hole, and the Bo Xilai camp, I believe, simply collapsed."

Shorn of their standard-bearer, China's leftists seem in at least temporary retreat. Censors this week shut down several Web sites supporting Mr. Bo for one month, including the well-known Utopia, which caters to the far left. Simultaneously, a weekly legal affairs magazine published an interview in which one of Utopia's founders claimed it had been "hijacked" by extremists who promoted Mr. Bo's experiments in Chongqing.

More broadly, China's leadership has moved swiftly to paper over any sign of discord. Communist Party journals have showcased exhortations to promote stability and ignore malicious rumors -- a clear reaction to false reports of an impending coup that spread online last week.

The newspaper The People's Liberation Army Daily minced no words. "Historical experience shows that whenever the party and country faces major issues, and whenever reform and development reach a crucial juncture, struggle in the ideological arena becomes even more intense and complex," it said. "We must pay close attention to the impact of the Internet, mobile phones and other new media on the thinking of officers and troops."

Enforced by the leadership, China's rigid status quo is returning in full force. Which is not precisely what China's reformers were hoping for.

"On first look, I think it's a good thing," said Mr. Wu, the liberal intellectual, of the impact of Mr. Bo's ouster on party politics. "But on second look, I think, not necessarily."

Sharon LaFraniere and Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting. Li Bibo contributed research.

>> Original Source

April 05, 2012

The Anonymous hacking group claims to have defaced almost 500 websites in China.

Targets hit in the mass defacement included government sites, its official agencies, trade groups and many others.

A message put on the hacked sites said the attack was carried out to protest against the Chinese government's strict control of its citizens.

It urged Chinese people to join Anonymous and stage their own protests against the regime.

Attack pattern

The announcement about the defacements was made via an Anonymous China account that was established in March. A list of the 485 sites affected was put on the Pastebin website. Separate Pastebin messages posted email addresses and other personal details stolen when sites were penetrated.

Sites defaced had the same message posted to them that chided the nation's government for its repressive policies.

It read: "Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall."

China has one of the most comprehensive web surveillance systems in the world, known as the Great Firewall of China, that reinforces its broader social controls. The system polices where Chinese people can go online and tries to restrict what they can talk about.

On defaced pages, the Anonymous attackers also posted links to advice that could help people avoid official scrutiny of what they do and say online. Much of the advice was in English so it is unclear how much help it would be.

There has been no official confirmation of the defacements. News wires reported that government officials had denied any had taken place.

However, many of the sites listed are now offline and a few others displayed a hacked page for a long time rather than their own homepage.

The Anonymous hackers reportedly successfully attacked some sites a second time once the original defacement was cleaned up.

>> Original Source