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

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 ›

I don't like the website Utopia (Editor's note: an ultra-leftist website), but I hope they can continue to make their voice heard. I don't like what Liu (Xiaobo) stands for, but I wish he did not have to sit in prison, and that he would have his place in Chinese society like other "dissidents" do. Nevertheless, the tolerance level in Chinese politics is never as high as we wish it to be. Do what you must but be mindful of the measure. Once you break past a certain threshold, the constructiveness of the diversity you're trying to create will turn into destructiveness, and the backlash will happen. This is the real China. 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 ›

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 ›

The practice, along with capital punishment, are merely two of the most visible examples of how China's justice system stands apart from other countries. Though there have been talks of labor camps getting shut down, no official move has yet been made, with recent news also suggesting that labor camps have now at least developed an ironic sense of humor. more ›

Online donations are still pouring in from all corners of China and around the world as supporters of the dissident-artist Ai Weiwei chip in to help him out with the RMB15 million fine for tax evasion that he's been given 15 days to cough up. It's a spontaneous, collective middle finger that they've thrusted at the powers that be for the injustice they see in the 81-day detention that Ai was put through last year as authorities scrambled to prevent the Jasmine Revolution from spreading to China. more ›

James Fallows talks with China analyst Damien Ma about the recent elevated security within China since calls for a "Jasmine revolution" surfaced earlier this year. Ma observes that China has shifted from being more externally aggressive to internally aggressive in 2011, a shift that may be a reaction to the Arab Spring, but is also likely due largely in part to nervousness surrounding the coming political transition next year. 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 ›

It's unfortunate that this sort of news has seemingly become routine this year: "A Tibetan writer and magazine editor, Tashi Rabten, has been sentenced to four years in prison for what Chinese authorities call separatist activities in a Tibetan region of western China, according to a report by the International Campaign for Tibet, an advocacy group based outside of China. Tashi Rabten was the editor of Eastern Snow Mountain, a banned literary magazine. He had been held since April 2010 in detention in an unknown location. He was among a group of young Tibetans at Northwest Nationalities University in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province, who had written about a widespread Tibetan uprising in 2008. Three other Tibetans who worked with Tashi Rabten on the magazine received prison sentences of three to four years in December 2010." [New York Times] 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 ›

Just days after Ai Weiwei's release from prison, prominent activist Hu Jia and the four individuals who'd been taken away on account of their relationships to the artist Ai Weiwei have been released. Hu was released after completing a three and half year sentence for state subversion. His wife, Zeng Jinyan confirmed that he arrived home at 2:40am today through her Twitter account. more ›

Zeng Jinyan (曾金燕), wife of jailed AIDS activist Hu Jia (胡佳), has reemerged after a one-day disappearance that took the local AIDS activist community by surprise. 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 ›

On behalf of the outlawed benevolent spiritual group/black renegade cult Falun Gong, the Human Rights Law Foundation has filed a U.S. federal lawsuit against Cisco Systems, claiming they corroborated with the Chinese government in monitoring the activities of dissident groups. more ›

The Sino-American human rights talk that happened in Beijing (which one side considered really concerning and unsatisfying while the other side felt was frank, open and constructive) seems to have had a good result for at least one dissident: human rights lawyer Teng Biao was released Friday afternoon. more ›

"I have to always to ask myself, 'How long can I last?' if I'm in extreme conditions such as jail." more ›

This weekend we got the disturbing news that a new gay bar on the Bund was raided and dozens of its patrons were detained harshly and now more bad news, we're afraid. It has hit the web that China's most outspoken artist and activist Ai Weiwei has also been detained by police, now for over 24 hrs. more ›

For someone so controversial that he's constantly placed under "house arrest" and censored from Chinese Artist of the Year posts, Aiweiwei sure is able to get the word out about himself. In a country that drags bloggers into detainment over suspicions of "incitement to subvert state power", "disappears" some prominent activists and has thugs throw rocks at foreign journalists trying to reach other prominent activists, Ai Weiwei has still somehow managed to give a particularly candid interview to Time Out: Hong Kong. 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 ›

Surprise! The rest of the world doesn't like China's human rights record. Human Rights Watch has released a critical report entitled "Promises Unfulfilled," concluding that the Chinese government had "violated many of the key goals of the National Human Rights Action Plan" it created for itself in April 2009 by "tightening restrictions on rights of free expression, association and assembly." HRW is urging the U.S. State Department to pressure China about it, but... well... good luck. Nobody in China believed the promises would be fulfilled anyway and, as one ex-dissident tells the Washington Post, "Americans don't really care about human rights in China." more ›

@laowu1989 tweets: "June 4 exiles, do you dare to declare your personal assets and income? How were the astronomical donations spent? How much of those have you given to the families of those who died, and to those who spent time in jail? We still have a debt to settle! If I dare to offend the CCP, you bet I will offend you too!" more ›

Journalist-turned-digital-media-man Thomas Crampton speaks to Ai Weiwei, one of the most outspoken critics of the Chinese government in the art world, about social media and the impact that it's having on contemporary China. Ai Weiwei is the son of Chinese poet Ai Qing (艾青) who was denounced during the Cultural Revolution and sent to a Xinjiang labour camp. He is known most recently for the investigation of the Sichuan earthquake student casualities.
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Over a year after he first disappeared outside his own home, human rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Gao Zhisheng has resurfaced near his hometown. Gao told the New York Times that he was no longer in police custody, but couldn't give any details abut where he was the past 13 months. He also suggested that he had no plans to return to his work as a human rights defender, saying "right now, I just need to calm down and lead a quiet life." Goodness gracious. 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 ›

"China brooks no interference in its internal judicial affairs... China has no dissidents." 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 ›

• You could just call it good business, or you could call it a complete disregard for humanity - China's $7 billion resource deal with the African nation of Guinea (currently under a regime without legitimacy) has basically screwed Guineans out of their lifeline out of poverty. [The Independent]
• Want an explanation of what the Obama-Hu collaboration for clean energy and climate change really means? So do we. So here's one. [Green Leap Forward]
• Want to see a Chinese interview of President Obama? Here's the one Southern Weekly did. [Southern Weekly]