Blind activist and self-taught lawyer Chen Guangcheng gives his first in-depth television interview to Anderson Cooper." more ›

After leaving Beijing's Capital Airport Saturday evening with his wife and two children, blind dissident and self-taught lawyer Chen Guangcheng has touched down at Newark-Liberty International Airport and headed straight for New York University. more ›

And finally -- yet another chapter of the Chen Guangcheng saga comes to a close. The blind activist and self-taught lawyer left Beijing's Capital Airport yesterday at about 7pm with his wife and two children on a 13-hour flight to Newark. more ›

Shanghaiist's collective eyebrows were raised today by the appearance of what's essentially an evangelism guidebook written by Rev. Bob Fu, founder of ChinaAid, on the Foreign Policy magazine. In the article entitled Jesus loves China, too, the activist who was recently propelled into the media limelight through his advocacy for blind dissident Chen Guangcheng makes scant mention of religious freedom, the stated mission of ChinaAid. Instead, he lays bare his masterplan and agenda -- to "save my homeland, one soul at a time" -- so as to eventually turn China over to Jesus Christ. more ›

Chen Guangcheng, the blind dissident who made a miraculous escape from house arrest in Linyi late April before making his way to Beijing to hide out at the US Embassy, has told Verna Yu of the South China Morning Post, that he believed God was the one that made his escape possible. more ›

Blind human rights activist Chen Guangcheng has managed to escape from house arrest while his guards were not watching, and appeared immediately afterwards on Youtube, delivering a message to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, with the following three demands: more ›

Land rights lawyer Ni Yulan (倪玉兰), who has now been permanently disabled due to police torture, has been sentenced to jail by a court in Beijing along with her husband Dong Jiqin (董继勤). more ›

Astrophysicist and activist Fang Lizhi (方励之), one of the figureheads of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests, passed away Friday in Tucson, Arizona at the age of 76, after 22 years of life in exile. more ›

Prince Claus Award laureate Tsering Woeser writes in Foreign Policy about the silence of the Han Chinese people and the double standards of Chinese human rights activists on Tibetan self-immolations. She asks, how many Tibetans have to burn themselves before the Chinese care?: more ›

Pro-democracy activist Qin Yongmin, who was freed from prison in November 2010 after serving a 12-year term for subversion, was recently taken in by state security over his plans to launch a "peaceful transition" website. His story as told to Radio Free Asia: more ›

Seeing Red in China has translated a most fascinating account written by Ge Xun (葛洵), a Chinese man who migrated to the United States in 1986. He was back in Beijing recently to take care of funeral arrangements for his mother who had just died at the age of 83. After he was done with family matters, Ge planned to pay a visit to famed "Tiananmen Mother" Ding Zilin (丁子霖), a retired professor whose son was killed in the June 4 crackdown in 1989, and who now leads a group of women like herself to press the government to uncover the truth. more ›

'Tis the season for exceptionally harsh prison sentences. China seems to have made a habit of convicting its political activists at Christmas time, and this year is no exception. In the last week, two Chinese democracy advocates, Chen Wei and Chen Xi, have been sentenced to prison terms of 9 and 10 years, respectively. And today, a couple goes on trial for campaigning against forced evictions. more ›

more ›

Dozens of Tibetan activists attempted to enter the Chinese embassy in New Delhi on Sunday but were stopped and taken away by Indian police. more ›

It's that time of the year again -- Norway's Nobel Committee has met to decide who should be the winner of its peace prize this year. Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland says the choice has "not been particularly difficult" this time round while pundits are placing their bets on representatives of the Arab Spring revolution which swept across the Middle East earlier this year. Among the top contenders are Google executive Wael Ghonim from Egypt, and Tunisian blogger Lina Ben Mhenni. Jagland also took the opportunity to defend the decision to award last year's prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, even though that immediately led to frozen Sino-Norwegian ties and possibly made life more difficult for Liu:

"The reactions (from China) were as expected. They were not more extreme than what we expected," he said. more ›

Spare the endless confinement, spoil the child, right? The AP reports that the 6-year-old daughter of Chen Guangcheng (陈光诚), the blind activist who exposed forced abortions taking place in Shandong several years ago, has not been allowed to break her house arrest to attend school. Chen and his wife and daughter have been under house arrest, known commonly as 'Soft Detention' (软禁), since Chen's release from prison last year. For Chen's daughter, the house arrest began on February 24th, shortly after a CNN crew attempted to visit Chen at his home in Linyi (临沂市), Shandong. Fellow activist He Peirong says the girl had her books and toys taken away, but was promised that a decision would be made by September 1st regarding whether or not she could attend school. Chen's son is faring somewhat better as a current fifth grade student living with his grandmother, who he reportedly moved in with at an early age. more ›

You may remember Shanghai human rights lawyer Li Tiantian (李天天), who was given a horrifyingly humiliating interrogation of her sex life shortly after being released from three months of "disappearance" for tweeting about the Arab Spring and the Jasmine protests. more ›

Prominent HIV/AIDS activist and Sakharov Prize winner Hu Jia (胡佳) may have been freed from a three-and-a-half-year jail sentence for state subversion, but he continues to remain technically under house arrest, with security guards following him wherever he goes. more ›

Chinese dissident and activist Hu Jia (胡佳), who was rumored to be in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize several years ago, will be released on June 26th according to a tweet posted by Hu's wife, Zeng Jinyan. Imprisoned since April of 2008, Hu was active in the Chinese democracy movement, and also worked with environmental and HIV/AIDS issues. Hu was also the director of the June Fourth Heritage & Culture Association. [via Twitter] more ›

Shanghai human rights lawyer Li Tiantian (李天天), one of many activists to have 'disappeared' during the crackdown on the Jasmine protests, was recently freed on May 24 after three months of detention. more ›

Reporters trying to visit Chen Guangcheng, the blind activist lawyer most famous for uncovering Shandong officials forcing women to get abortions, are attacked by plainclothes thugs. The reporters were trying to confirm allegations that Chen and his wife were beaten after the online release of a video detailing abuses they suffered under house arrest. more ›

Wan Yanhai (万延海), founder of the Beijing-based Aizhixing Institute and one of the most outspoken HIV/AIDS activists in China has arrived in Philadelphia with his wife and daughter after hiding out in Hong Kong and Guangzhou for two weeks. more ›

It's not easy being an activist in China, just ask Ray Mahoney. more ›

Christian Post via Compass Direct News, reports that Alimjan Yimit, an ethnic Uyghur pastor of a house church who was sentenced last year to 15 years prison for "leaking state secrets", has been allowed to see his family for the first time in over two years:

Authorities in Xinjiang Province recently moved Uyghur Christian Alimjan Yimit from a prison in Kashgar to a prison in the provincial capital Urumqi and allowed the first visit from family members since his arrest in January 2008, sources told Compass. more ›

• Meanwhile in China… Sweet Powerpoint-style Graphics of Government Growth Plans [GOOD] "As someone who works in design, and the visual communication of information (like our weekly Transparencies or our recent infographic challenge to explain the financial crisis), I find this wonderful. Sure, it’s like every bad trick in the powerpoint/clipart book has been ruthlessly piled upon these slides. But still, to see typically boring, impenetrable government plans presented in a visual manner that seems sincere in its attempt to communicate with anyone is fascinating."
• Chinese 'gold farmers' making a living playing computer games [The Guardian] "These virtual industries sound surreal, but they are fast entering the mainstream. According to a report by Richard Heeks at Manchester University, an estimated 400,000 Asian workers are now employed in gold farming in a trade worth up to £700m a year. With so many gamers now online, these industries are estimated to have a consumer base of five million to 10 million, and numbers are expected to grow with widening internet access."
• A Chinese Pirate Unmasks: Letter from China [The New Yorker] "In his Internet experiment, Wang has added a compelling twist on the nature of Chinese nationalism. He did not simply want to prove that patriots would predictably bristle at the criticism, but that Chinese readers of all stripes would listen to criticism more closely from an outsider, even if they did not agree with it."

People who made the news this week more ›

Cyber dissident Wang Dejia was arrested for "subverting state secrets" (what else?), which means penning too many articles critical of the government. Some of those critical essays pertained to the upcoming summer Olympics:

In recent months, Wang also gave an interview to the Epoch Times, a media group backed by the banned sect F@lun G0ng, in which he claimed the Olympics would exacerbate the sufferings of Chinese people and leave them "living like dogs and pigs." more ›