Three men were handed jail sentences for up to a decade in a secret trial last year for "inciting subversion of state power" through their criticisms of former president Jiang Zemin. The details of the trial have only now emerged through a Hong Kong-based rights organisation, writes Will Clem of the South China Morning Post: 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 ›

Pan Shiyi, a real-estate developer who called for cheaper iPads for the public, was ridiculed with requests for cheaper housing from netizens, including viral mockups made of a new currency in his namesake. Now, he's busted out his savvy PR chops, by issuing a personal version of his own currency. Well played sir, well played. more ›

@aiww: If you don't speak for Wang Lihong, nor for Ran Yunfei, not only you're the sort that doesn't speak up for fairness and justice, you have no love for yourself. more ›

How appropriate that Ai Weiwei should choose to end his social media silence by joining the hottest new thing to be blocked on the Chinese internet: Google Plus. He posted his first message yesterday, saying "来了，问候" ("Greetings, I'm here") and has since been added/friended/fanned/whatever-ed by over 7000 people. more ›

Last year in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, a 25-year-old woman was found dead. Her mother suspected that she was mass raped by a gang that had connections with the local police, but officials said she had died from "ectopic pregnancy." Three bloggers spread information online that they felt proved that there had been a criminal act. They were thrown in jail for slander. more ›

Three bloggers from Fujian who spread information online relating to the alleged rape and murder of Yan Xiaoling were found guilty of slander on Friday. AP reported that self-taught legal expert Fan Yanqiong received a two year sentence, whilst two others, You Jingyou and Wu Huaying, will each spend one year in prison. more ›

AP reported today that Beijing Film Academy professor Cui Weiping was due to fly to Philadelphia, but was told by her bosses on Sunday to cancel the trip. The official line was that she had classes to teach and her planned conference panel at the Association for Asian Studies in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was not related to her academic discipline. more ›

A little bit of light was shed on the saga involving human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng this week, but his whereabouts remain shrouded in mystery. Speaking with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, Foreign Ministry spokesman Yang Jiechi denied that Gao had been tortured, but claimed he had been sentenced to prison for subversion. However, Yang did not clarify whether he was referring to a new sentence or citing the suspended sentence handed down to Gao in 2006 for having written an open letter to President Hu Jintao claiming Falun Gong adherents had been mistreated. more ›

On Monday, outspoken Chinese poet Liao Yiwu had barely boarded his flight from Chengdu to Cologne when he was ordered to get off. Liao was planning to attend a literary festival in the German city, but was instead detained and questioned for three hours and then sent home, where he remains under house arrest. The writer himself claims this is the thirteenth time he has been stopped from leaving China. more ›

Yesterday, the news spread that Tan Zuoren, Ai Weiwei's right hand man in conducting a citizen’s investigation into the deaths of students in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, has been sentenced to five years in prison. more ›

• We're experiencing a pretty terrible natural disaster too, by the way. Some 100,000 homes have been either flattened or damaged by extreme blizzards in Xinjiang. Four people have been killed and half a million are snowed under. [The Associated Press]
• It's a good thing that text messaging services have resumed in that region, we suppose. We're hoping it helps those in need keep in touch with each other through this difficult time. [BBC]
• Peter Beaumont notices that some claim that there is even less freedom now than before 1989, and wonders why China is so terrified of dissent. [Guardian]

Yesterday's protest against a plan to build a garbage burning plant in the city of Panyu has sparked a lot of interest all over the internet. A fair amount of people showed up, and it seems like Sina has given a pretty optimistic writeup of the town hall event that sparked the protest. Mostly, though, this whole affair has piqued our interest in how the internet has integrated itself into the protests. more ›

As a testament to the increasingly daring nature of Chinese citizens, people have come out in mass to voice their vehement dislike of a recent government policy. Considering China's harsh treatment of large scale public protests and the potential ramifications participating could have on individuals, we figure only the most egregious of political moves could bring together so many people in harmonious dissent. So what happened? more ›

On the Washington Post is an amazing amalgamation of audio clips and transcripts of former CCP Premier Zhao Ziyang about the tragedy-that-must-not-be-named. Zhao, who fell out of favor partially because of his comments against Deng Xiaoping, was largely ignored for the last 16 years of his life and almost erased from history. When he died four years ago, the party reacted by forming an "Emergency Response Leadership Small Group" and declaring "a period of extreme sensitivity. more ›

If you were jam packed into Glamour Bar with 600 other people earlier this morning, watching President Barack Obama being sworn in, you might have been a little too dizzy with euphoria (and possibly heatstroke) to notice particular segments of his 18-minute inauguration address -- specifically, ones that likely caused the head honchos in Beijing to collectively cringe. more ›

Yesterday we heard that authorities in Sichuan were offering hush money to parents who lost children in the May earthquake. The story has been circulating widely, and more details about the government’s attempts to placate parents have come to the fore. Not only are officials apparently going door to door offering pay outs of around 60,000 RMB, they’re sweetening the deal by adding more incentives to keep up the harmonious front. The list includes pensions, free life insurance and relaxing the one child policy to allow parents of children disabled by collapsing schools to have another baby. more ›

With the upcoming Olympics and the subsequent global attention, the government obviously wants the nation to look its best, which in China sometimes translates to quashing dissent. Two European-based human rights groups working together as the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders recently published a report declaring that the government has stepped up attempts to quiet dissidents, citing four people arrested for Olympic Games protests, including Hu Jia, who was sentenced to three and a half years in jail for criticizing the government’s human rights violations. More from the AFP article:

In a foreword to the report, writer Wei Jingsheng wrote: "In particular, last year the Chinese Government's repression has rapidly upgraded, in an effort to make sure there is no dissident voices from the people during the 2008 Olympics." more ›

A group of Shanghai residents who had applied to the government for the right to hold an anti-maglev protest were rejected by the government. Despite this, small numbers of them intended to go on another "walk" in order to publicly air their grievances. This time, they were stopped by some other residents. According to this AP article, this is what happened:

Residents in armbands used a megaphone to warn people not to "linger here too long," to avoid problems with the police, who had rejected their petition to hold a protest march against the magnetic levitation, or maglev, train.

From Boxun.com (you need a proxy) we discovered that there was a maglev-related protest on January 6th. It first started around 11am, around the Xinzhuang/Minhang area, and was dispersed, only to form again sometime around 3pm, this time in the busy Xujiahui CBD. It managed to, in some form, last until 11pm. Protesters carried signs saying "out for a walk" (散步), while other chanted slogans about protecting their homes. The proposed maglev was to link the city's two airports as well as Shanghai to Hangzhou. However, recent protests brought public attention to the health effects of the maglev, leading, according to some, to the recent government decision to reroute the maglev so as to minimize the noise, radiation, and collateral damage. These proposed changes are part of the reason why the price estimates of the maglev have increased from 200 million per km to about 500 million per kilometer. more ›