Mar 07 2006
Update on China Internet Censorship
Recent NYT article nicely titled, The Wild Web of China: Sex and Drugs, Not Reform (c)
“By some estimates, there are more than 30,000 people patrolling the Web in China, helping to form one of the world’s far-reaching Internet filtering systems.”
One can buy date rape drug online.
Peddling everything, even “a Web site called the Patriotic Hacker asserts that an instructor ‘led and initiated attacks on Japanese Web sites more than 10 times.’ It says he even managed to shut down the official Web site for the Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to Japan’s World War II military heroes. ”
Thu Apr 27, 2006 6:06 AM ET
BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese Internet writer has been charged with attempting to “subvert state power” for backing a movement by exiled dissidents to hold free elections for a new democratic government, his lawyer said on Thursday.
Yang Tianshui, 45, faces up to 15 years in prison for posting essays on the Internet supporting the “Velvet Action of China”, Attorney Li Jianqiang said by telephone.
Named after the “Velvet Revolution” that peacefully overthrew communism in the former Czechoslovakia, the movement held an online ballot for government leaders last year. But it attracted scant interest, with just over 500 people casting a vote.
The trial of Yang, who has been in custody since last December, is due to be in Nanjing, capital of the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu, in May.
If convicted, Yang, a member of the China chapter of International PEN, would be the second writer to be jailed this year.
At least five writers were jailed for up to 10 years last year as part of a government crackdown on free speech, according to the China chapter of International PEN, an association founded in Britain in 1921 to defend freedom of speech.