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.
more ›

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]

• China's class ceiling [LA Times] "China is the only ancient civilization in human history to have reemerged as a major force in the world. And Chinese are rightly proud of this. So why rock the boat? It is better to be ruled by boring technocrats like Hu who will keep things nice and steady. This is not the story one might hear from unemployed workers in the rust belts of northeastern China, or from rioting farmers in Guangdong province who have been pushed off the land by greedy developers working in tandem with corrupt party officials. Nor is this view necessarily shared by the brave lawyers willing to take on some of those corrupt officials, or intellectual dissidents who still get arrested for arguing that Chinese should be entitled to basic democratic rights. But it is the common line taken by people who benefit most from the current wave of fun, fashion and prosperity — the new urban elite, some of whom are pampered children of Communist Party bosses."
• What If China Had a Second Political Party Tomorrow? [The New Yorker] "On the prospects for multi-party democracy: If you had a second party alternative in China now, I think it would be an anti-foreign party. What else could you see as a platform to challenge the Communist Party, but to oppose the foreigners who are “buying up Chinese resources”?… There has to be a period of generally unfolding democracy. Not bang, all at once. And I think that will happen. I think it’s happening much too slowly."
• Editorial Dispute Threatens Caijing, a Chinese Magazine [NYTimes] "The owners of the magazine have recently come under pressure from some within the government to tone down or drastically alter Caijing’s aggressive journalism, people at the magazine say. Caijing’s managers have told staff members that they have been fighting to maintain the magazine’s editorial integrity. Caijing’s managers have been seeking to create a more independent publication by changing the magazine’s shareholding structure, seeking outside investors and pressing the owners to allow some employees to own a stake in the magazine. They also want a larger share of the magazine’s profits to be invested in new operations, including an English-language Web site."

• Readings on 1999's "May 8th Tragedy" [The China Beat] The China Beat compiles readings on 1999's "May 8th Tragedy," when NATO missiles were fired into the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three PRC nationals and sparking protests all around the world from angry Chinese citizens. Included are two news accounts from the time - one by the BBC and one by CNN, a Salon.com piece by a Beida foreign student and two later analysis of the situation.
• China eyes regular Olympic show [Financial Times] "Less than a year after China hosted the Olympics, Beijing is planning to put its stunningly choreographed opening ceremony back on as a regular evening show at the “Bird’s Nest”, the main stadium built for the games... Zhang Hengli, vice-president of the National Stadium Company that now runs the Bird’s Nest, said: “We want to put on a regular evening show like the opening ceremony. But that will take longer to realise [than other performances in the works for the stadium] because it requires a huge amount of money. We need to find an investor and deal with potential issues of intellectual property of the International Olympic Committee.”"
• Communists Can’t Outspend Capitalists as China Jobless Increase [Bloomberg] "Demand for work is so high that 5,000 students jostled at a Shanghai employment fair in March for 400 jobs available in the funeral industry. One woman with a management degree applied for a position as a mortician’s assistant to “make up the faces of the dead,” state media reported. The attraction: It paid 4,000 yuan ($585) a month, equal to what she might have earned in an office job two years ago."

• Beijing professor's remarks spark angry protests [AFP] "About 30 protesters tried to force their way into China's elite Peking University on Friday to confront a law professor who said 99 percent of the people petitioning the government with grievances are mentally ill and could be institutionalized."
• Chinese Online Games Market Grew 63% In 2008 [Gamasutra] "New data from analyst group Pearl Research shows that China's online games market grew 63 percent in 2008 to a total $2.8 billion. In its new Games Market in China report, Pearl Research forecasts that the Chinese online market will be worth more than $5.5 billion by 2012."
• The Pavilion Wars [The Atlantic] "The upcoming World's Fair should offer the chance to build a showpiece U.S. pavilion. But thanks to behind-the-scenes maneuverings and State Department incompetence, we may end up with a Chinese-funded pavilion—or no pavilion at all."

• Chavez says world 'center of gravity' now Beijing [AP] "The world's center of gravity has moved to Beijing, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told his Chinese counterpart Wednesday during a visit focused on boosting Chinese oil purchases. The frequent U.S. critic also praised China's response to the global financial meltdown that has sent prices of his South American nation's key export, oil, down sharply."
• Auto Makers Flock to Web to Woo Chinese Buyers [WSJ] "Global auto makers think the Internet is the way into the hearts of a new generation of Chinese car enthusiasts. Both foreign and domestic auto makers here are pouring ad money into online ventures, even as their overall spending remains flat. Market-tracking firm iResearch expects outlays for online auto marketing to reach 1.75 billion yuan, or roughly $256 million, this year, up from 1.38 billion yuan in 2008."
• Professor beaten ahead of Tiananmen anniversary [ABC] "The approaching 20th anniversary of China's Tiananmen Square crackdown has brought tensions to a head, with a 75-year-old, retired professor brutally beaten for trying to honour the memory of a Chinese leader who supported the students in 1989."

• A shuttlecock fight of epic proportion [theage.com.au] "Emerging superpower China annoyed neighbouring Malaysia this week as an unprecedented Chinese domination of badminton's showpiece event — the All-England Championships — led to heated claims of match-fixing."
• Rumor: Focus Media Executives In China May All Resign [Digital Marketing Inner Circle] "In what is some hot gossip circulating in the digital marketing industry in Beijing is that former Focus Media CEO Tan Zhi will collectively resign with the other Focus Media executives once the executive adjustment plan post the merger of some of its businesses with Sina.com."
• Chinese Officials Prohibit Blizzard's Lich King Expansion [Life from Wired.com] "Chinese World of Warcraft fans will have to wait even longer to enjoy the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, as the Chinese government has twice rejected applications for its release."

It seems like those hoping to protest over perceived wrongs by the government can't even trust "journalists" to help them out these days. Amongst their various tactics to quell unrest, Chinese police are now posing as reporters in order to catch would-be dissidents before they can even get organized, according to the Telegraph: more ›