Hujia&jinyan’s spirit

Amnesty International has posted on Youtube a video of the police harassing Jinyan Zeng taken from a selection of clips of Prisoners in Freedom City.

Article by By Orville Schell Newsweek MagazineChina’s Agony of Defeat

It’s impossible to understand what the Games mean to the Chinese without understanding their history of humiliation.

The Olympics are an irresistible stage for athletes-but also for those who wish to act out their grievances before the world. The Beijing Games, which kick off on Aug. 8, are hardly an exception. While Chinese leaders furiously insist they’re not, and should not be, “political,” these Olympics promise to become one of the most charged in history. Rarely has a more varied array of contentious issues crystallized around a single sporting event.[continues...]

From a number of sources, unfortunately all in chinese (google translate isn’t fantastic) as well as jinyan’s blog, a few activists who are asking for the release of Hu Jia are wanted by the police and are currently in hiding. The chinese link is “here” so you may read it using whatever translation tool you prefer.

Background reading From China HRW by Phelim Kine;

English version of Phelim Kine’s op-ed “China’s Olympisch gebrek aan mensenrechten,” published in the Dutch magazine Idee (July 2008).

The Olympic torch relay passed through Lhasa on June 21 with precious little hint of respect for the “fundamental ethical values” enshrined in the Olympic Charter. Instead of cheering sports fans, the streets were filled with thousands of police in riot gear surveilling the hand-picked crowds and the foreign journalists flown in specially to cover the event.

These controls are just the latest evidence of how the March 14-15 violence in the Tibetan capital has prompted the most systematic and prolonged crackdown on human rights in China since the June 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. The government broke up peaceful demonstrators criticizing Chinese rule in Tibet, after which violent protests erupted, which in turn gave the government a rationale to invoke when it kicked the foreign media out of the region and launched an intensive security operation involving hundreds of thousands of armed police and military.[continues...]

BEIJING (AFP) - A leading US congressman said Tuesday China was carrying out a tragic crackdown to smother dissent during the Olympics, triggering a warning by Beijing to butt out or risk harming Sino-US ties.
“Tragically, the Olympics has triggered a massive crackdown designed to silence and put beyond reach all those whose views differ from the official ‘harmonious’ government line,” U.S. Representative Christopher Smith told journalists.

“On Sunday night, three human rights lawyers with whom we had scheduled to have dinner, were threatened, then taken away or placed under house arrest by the police. Our meeting never occurred.”

The detained rights lawyers, veteran activists Teng Biao, Li Heping and Li Baiguang, had not violated any law, he said.[continues...]

Far Eastern Economic Review May 2008

by Jerome A. Cohen and Eva Pil

On april 3, 2008, the Beijing Number One Intermediate People’s Court convicted Hu Jia, a 34-year-old Chinese commentator and activist, of the crime of “inciting subversion of state power” through publication of five articles and two interviews. It sentenced him to three and a half years in prison and subsequent deprivation of his political rights, including that of free expression, for another year. Although Mr. Hu’s case has remained virtually unknown to the Chinese people, by the time of sentencing it had become famous worldwide. When on April 17 foreign journalists asked Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu about it, she gave the standard mofa response to inquiries about political prosecutions: “The case was handled in accordance with Chinese law. China is a country under the rule of law, it abides by the law. No person is above the law and no one has a right to interfere with it.” rule of law, people inside as well as outside the country have reason to be afraid, so flawed was it in both process and substance. [Continues in pdf format]

From the Dui Hua Foundation

The prominent Chinese rights activist Hu Jia (胡佳) was sentenced yesterday to 3-1/2 years imprisonment by the Beijing Number One Intermediate People’s Court. According to the Xinhua News Agency’s official report on the conviction, “Hu published articles on overseas-run websites, made comments in interviews with foreign media, and repeatedly instigated other people to subvert the state’s political power and socialist system.”

Hu’s case can be examined from a number of angles-for example, whether China’s laws against “incitement” contravene the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or whether punishing Hu is part of a larger effort to silence dissent in advance of the Beijing Olympics. Here, though, we explore briefly two aspects of the way Hu Jia’s case was handled and try to place his case in a bit more context.

What’s the Rush?

It took only 98 days from the time Hu Jia was detained for the court to render its verdict. This is an unusually short amount of time to investigate and try a political case in China. Although time limits for each stage in the legal process are spelled out in China’s criminal procedure law, numerous provisions allowing for extensions make those deadlines highly elastic.[continues...]

Story on hacking into Freedom city

For China’s Astro Boy generation, a house arrested blogger like Zeng Jinyan could be most clearly viewed as one node in a network system needing to be re-established as quickly as possible. This seems to be at least partly the case in ‘Hack into Freedom City’, a manual being P2Ped around the blogsphere which explains one procedure used to hack through the surveillance system state security agents have set up surrounding Zeng’s home in building #76 in the BOBO Freedom City housing complex in eastern Beijing’s Tongzhou district.[continues...]

From TIME China Blog

Human Rights watch in New York have issued a call for Beijing to release activist Hu Jia, whose case we have followed closely. “The case of Hu Jia, who will as of February 27 have been detained for two months, has become emblematic of Beijing’s broad attempt to suppress dissent ahead of the Olympic Games,” the organization wrote.
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Reporters without Borders have published their China 2008 Annual Report. 

An icy blast blew on press freedom in China ahead of the 17th Communist Party Congress in Beijing in October. Journalists were forced to put out official propaganda, while cyber-censors stalked the Net. Despite the introduction of more favourable rules in January, nearly 180 foreign press correspondents were arrested or harassed in 2007.

Reporters Without Borders representatives met for the first time Chinese officials in Beijing at the start of the year, including the deputy information minister. The authorities said they were ready to reconsider the cases of journalists and Internet-users currently in prison, including Zhao Yan, who worked for the New York Times and was sentenced to three years in prison on the basis of false accusations. But they did not keep their promises. Zhao Yan was released in September having served his full sentence. And all the other promises came to nothing. At the end of the year, the authorities refused to grant visas to five representatives of Reporters Without Borders who wanted to travel to Beijing.

The assurance given by a Chinese official in 2001 that, “We will guarantee total press freedom”, when Beijing was lobbying for the 2008 Olympics, was never kept. It was a year of disillusionment in 2007. Many observers had expected more tolerance to be shown to the press along with greater freedom of expression, as the authorities had pledged. But the government and in particular the political police and the propaganda department did everything possible to prevent the liberal press, Internet-users and dissidents from expressing themselves. Foreign correspondents experienced great difficulties in working despite new rules giving them greater freedom of movement until October 2008. [continues...]