‘Berlin Twitter Wall’ Blocked in China

A virtual wall created for Twitter users to express their thoughts and hopes on the 20 year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has been blocked in China.

The “Berlin Twitter Wall,” as it’s called, is an initiative of KulturProjekte Berli, a not-for-profit organization that promotes networking and mediation of art and culture.

Launched on Oct. 20, according to the press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the virtual wall was blocked by Chinese authorities after almost 2,000 Chinese Internet users left Twitter messages there. The wall currently has just over 4,000 tweets posted on it, mostly in Chinese.

“Chinese Internet users must not be prevented from accessing the Berlin Twitter Wall,” said Reporters Without Borders in a statement released Tuesday morning.  “Initiatives like these are important platforms for the promotion of freedom of speech as well as for critical voices and protest.”

RSF added that many foreign news outlets and social-networking sites remain inaccessible to Chinese users.

Twitter account holders can post comments that appear automatically on the berlintwitterwall.com site by using the hashtag #fotw (fall of the wall).

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Filed under: China , Berlin Twitter Wall

Comptroller Candidate Liu’s Shady Aides and Associates

By Joshua Philipp for The Epoch Times

READ ABOUT JOHN LIU AND HIS ASSOCIATES HERE

NEW YORK—If birds of a feather flock together, it’s worth asking who John Liu, Democratic candidate for New York City comptroller, is flocking with.

John Liu’s former chief of staff, John Choe, is an active, outspoken supporter of the North Korean communist regime.

Ellen Young, John Liu’s district administrator until 2006, is widely accused by residents in her district of swindling people out of tens thousands of dollars. Young is a former State Assembly Member.

Liu also has strong ties to the Fukien American Association, known to be connected to the criminal underworld and the Chinese Communist Party.

John Choe on ‘U.S. Imperialism’

“Korea is at the front lines of the liberation struggles against imperialism,” John Choe said in a May 2006 speech. He was speaking at a conference called “Preparing for the Rebirth of the Global Struggle for Socialism” hosted by the Workers World Party, a self-described “orthodox Marxist” political group. The audio of his speech is available at workers.org.

John Choe, as John Liu’s chief of staff for several years, was an influential member of Liu’s City Council administration.

“We still have friends, activists who are being arrested on a daily basis [in South Korea],” Choe said in his 2006 speech to the Workers World Party (MP3 sound file available), “for expressing their free will and their thought and for struggling against the U.S. and U.S. imperialism.”

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Filed under: China, Commentary, Current Affairs , Ellen Young, John Choe, John Liu, Joshua Philipp, New York City Comptroller

Chinese Netizen Journalists Face Restrictions

by Genevieve Long for The Foreign Policy Association

In a country like China that is already so restrictive of press freedoms, it’s surprising that the grip of control could be tightened any further. Yet, according to a new press release from the non-governmental organization Freedom House, that’s exactly what is happening.

Freedom House says it is “dismayed by new Chinese Internet restrictions,” which include stricter rules about video sharing websites. The measure follows closely on the heels of a gruesome video that was circulated last week which contained graphic footage of alleged persecution of Tibetans. The video, which was widely circulated, could have been linked to Chinese authorities blocking YouTube.

Of particular concern to Freedom House is a section of the new restrictions which reads:
“The regulations specifically mention videos from “netizen reporters,” who have played a critical role in informing Chinese citizens about police brutality, the melamine scandal, and the lethal consequences of corruption surrounding the Sichuan earthquake.”

Netizen is defined by the dictionary as a blending of the two words citizen and net. So a netizen reporter, under China’s repressive laws governing the dissemination of information and control of information, could be a crucial link between the public and information. Even in the face of the facts that a netizen reporter has no media affiliation or fact-checker or editor, they would still be potentially doing what has been referred to in new media jargon as “acts of journalism”.

The gathering and dissemination of information under the current circumstances in China, even without editorial content or control, could be critical information nonetheless.
Mark Twain once said, “Get your facts first, and then you can distort ‘em as much as you please.” The Chinese people deserve the opportunity to at least have access to the facts, and can then decide what to do with them.

In addition to being a contributing editor for The Epoch Times, Genevieve Long writes the Media and Foreign Policy blog  for the Foreign Policy Association, where this piece was first published.

Filed under: China, Commentary , China, Chinese journalist, Foreign Policy Association, netizen journalist

An Appeal for Others in China that Led to Persecution

By Genevieve Long for The Epoch Times

Ten years ago on April 24, when Jinying Gao took a train to Beijing from her hometown in Liaoning Province, China was a different country.

Gao, who has practiced Falun Gong since 1994, set out on a mission of faith with little more than the shirt on her back for the six hour journey to her country’s capital. With her husband, also a practitioner, beside her, they arrived in Beijing in the middle of the night. Thousands of other Falun Gong practitioners were at the train station, waiting for dawn to arrive.

The travelers, whose numbers would eventually swell to 10,000, had come from all corners of China to appeal to the central regime about a case of 45 imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners in the city of Tianjin. The imprisoned practitioners were beaten and arrested by police on April 24, 1999, after days of appealing over a youth magazine’s slanderous article against Falun Gong.

“In China, the media blocked the news of [of the arrests],” recalls Gao who is now 64 years old and escaped to the U.S. close to 17 months ago.

Falun Gong is the most popular qigong practice in China. By 1999 it was estimated that between 70 and 100 million Chinese people were practicing it. But in the China of ten years ago, as today, to be popular with the public is to be suspect by the communist party.

Three years earlier, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and then-head, Jiang Zemin, began to view Falun Gong’s popularity as a threat. The Beijing Youth Daily had listed the practice’s main book, “Zhuan Falun” as a bestseller in 1996. Not long after, the regime issued a nationwide notice forbidding the distribution of all Falun Gong publications.

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Filed under: China , Epoch Times, Falun Gong

Penalizing Criminals with the Hangman’s Noose

China’s penchant for the death penalty could be an isolating factor
By Genevieve Long

There’s something to be said for being a good student of history, especially when it comes to China. Just consider the past two years. In that time, China has demonstrated a particular, repetitive, and deadly problem: melamine.

Melamine is a common industrial chemical with applications as a coating on dinnerware, and as a fire retardant, among other thing. It was never intended for consumption by living beings, human or otherwise. Even though the World Health Organization declared a “safe” level of melamine for human consumption in Dec., 2008, the scientific jury is still out on the long-term effects of melamine when consumed by humans, at any level.

Enter China’s milk and pet-food manufacturing industries. In 2007, it was discovered that melamine was being added to animal feed and pet food to boost the apparent protein level. The result was thousands of dead American household pets, and a subsequent uproar in the U.S. public and government. It also ultimately led to the indictment of several parties involved it the scandal by the U.S. government, and stricter standards by the FDA.

Fast-forward to late 2008, and history repeats itself as thousands of Chinese babies get seriously ill from melamine-contaminated baby milk. Watered-down milk from farmers and producers trying to up product volume and profit margins found its way to unscrupulous manufacturers masking the lower protein level with melamine. It’s a practice that has been happening for years, according to what one whistle-blowing farmer, Jiang Weisuo, told NPR late last year.

Because information is tightly controlled by the communist party, it may not be possible to know how many infants were actually sickened and killed. The last count publicly revealed was almost 300,000 sickened. At least six infants died from kidney failure.

As China continues to grow at a rate so fast that it almost outpaces itself, its political system under the communist party languishes. The imbalance of an archaic political system that overuses extreme punishments like the death penalty is nearly tipping the scales of a balanced society.

Legal punishments following both melamine scandals fall into that category. The Chinese Communist Party sentenced the head of the Chinese Food and Drug Administration to the death penalty in 2007 for his role in contaminated pet food. Following the recent contaminated milk scandal, two men were sentenced to death and 19 others given heavy sentences for their roles.

These seem like unusually harsh punishments until statistics are taken into account. For example, Amnesty International puts China at the top of the list of countries that use the death penalty in law or practice. While there has been a decrease in the death penalty worldwide since 1988, China is a different story. In 2007, China killed more than 470 people using the death penalty.

As China’s economy becomes more and more intertwined with the rest of the world, when will its practices of legal jurisdiction and punishment fall into line with the norms of other industrialized nations? Arguably, it may not be possible with the current form of government in place, which discourages dissent and emphasizes psychological and spiritual obedience to the communist party.

The answer could be that the road for China to become a true superpower will inevitably involve an overhauled government system. Likely something closer to a democracy—representative of the people’s needs and wishes. If this kind of government already existed in China, instead of two more deaths in the wake of the most recent melamine scandal, the complaints of grieving parents who publicly appealed for answers would have been heard. But instead, the parents who bravely stepped forward were taken into police custody and refused to speak to the media when released. Serious, open, public debates are a hallmark of a healthy democracy.

China has far to go to become a superpower that exercises judicial restraint in sentencing, and does not fear the voices of its own citizens.

Filed under: China, Commentary, Current Affairs , China, death penalty, melamine

Brutal Torture and Disappearance of Renowned Attorney Demands a Clear International Response

Published in the Canada Free Press by Falun Dafa Information Center

NEW YORK – Chinese security forces’ severe torture and disappearance of leading human rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Gao Zhisheng highlights the life-threatening danger facing Falun Gong adherents and those who come to their defense in China and must prompt a strong international response, the Falun Dafa Information Center said Thursday.

“Gao Zhisheng has repeatedly risked his life to stand up against injustice. He has been abducted and tortured largely for defending Falun Gong adherents publicly, exposing the atrocities they have suffered and calling upon the regime’s leadership to end its campaign against this large group of ordinary Chinese seeking to practice their faith in peace,” says Falun Dafa Information Center spokesman Erping Zhang.

“His horrific treatment for doing so should be a wake-up call to the international community of the Chinese regime’s disregard for human rights and the rule of law. Gao’s case shows clearly that absent international pressure with teeth, China’s leaders cannot be depended upon to uphold the basic dignity and rights of their own people.”

Gao Zhisheng, a Chinese rights lawyer featured on the front page of the New York Times in 2005 and listed among the top three candidates for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize, relayed the brutal torture he suffered in police custody in 2007 in a statement released on his behalf on Monday and published by the China Aid Association and Human Rights in China. (statement)

Several days before the letter was made public, on Feb. 4, Gao was again abducted by Chinese authorities. His current whereabouts remain unknown and he is at severe risk of torture.

Torture Account

In the statement released Monday, Gao describes the treatment at the hands of Chinese security agents after he was abducted on September 21, 2007 for writing a letter to the U.S. Congress detailing abuses surrounding preparation for the Olympic games.

Gao describes in great detail being stripped naked, thrown to a concrete floor where several officials beat him and shocked him with electric batons all over his body, including on his genitals and in his mouth. On other occasions, Gao was pinned down while torturers pierced his genitals with sharp objects. During the abuse, his torturers repeatedly linked his treatment to that of Falun Gong, whose persecution he is known for publicly condemning:

“The 12 courses [of torture techniques] we’re going to give to you were practiced on the Falun Gong,” Gao recounts one torturer named Wang saying. “We can torture you to death without your body being found.”

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Filed under: China, Current Affairs , China, Falun Gong, Gao Zhisheng, human rights