Results tagged “freespeech”

Did hell freeze over? Because somebody was actually able to win a censorship case against the Chinese net police... in China! Hu Xingdou, an economics professor who discusses politically sensitive topics on his blog, unsurprisingly had it shut down for “hosting illegal content” by his ISP Beijing Xin Net. Surprisingly, he decided to fight back, suing them in April. Even more surprisingly, a judge in Beijing has now ruled that Beijing Xin Net was wrong to close his blog. The Daxing district court said the company had failed to prove that it had contacted Hu about the “illegal content” before shutting down his little part of the web, and therefore owed him the 1,370RMB fee he had paid for two years of services. Okay, so it's not exactly a victory for free speech, but it's at least a step towards not being shut down willy nilly anymore. Source: Ars Technica

Looks like it's not just the Yunnan government that's recognized the power of the internet. Today, Premier Wen Jia Bao went online to talk to netizens in a chat jointly hosted by Xinhua and the central government. According to Xinhua, Grandpa Wen began internetting with the country at 3pm and responded to questions about the financial crisis, unemployed migrant workers, Sino-U.S. Relations and - surprisingly - free speech.

AP: Job outlook in China 'grim'

The novel tells the story of a teenage boy who receives a special notebook. Whenever he writes the name of an enemy in the book, along with a description of how and when that person dies, the enemy dies exactly as described.

It seems that the TIME Magazine China Blog has been blocked by the Great Firewall of China (GFW), or "GFW-ed" to use the industry nomenclature. The blog normally covers a full-range of issues, including topics and analysis that local media wouldn't touch with a 10 meter 棍, and as a rule, TIME tends to "err on the side of free speech." However, evidently the blog took things a step too far for China's censors, when on June 4th, all three bloggers (Simon Elegant, Bill Powell, and Austin Ramzy) wrote about the world's largest public square.

With the sun out, the temperatures high, one can only think of one thing-- what's going on in the World of the -ist's?

We mentioned in this earlier post that Prof. Li Yinhe, the noted sexologist, had just written on her blog that she was being pressured to keep her mouth shut, i.e. not talk about spouse-swapping and not submit proposals to officials about legalizing gay marriage in China.

Google has been in the news recently after co-founder Sergey Brin said at the World Economic Forum in Davos said, speaking of Google's decision to comply with censorship regulations in China, that "on a business level, the decision to censor ... was a net negative."

Google, along with Yahoo and Microsoft, has taken a lot of heat lately for its complicity in suppressing free speech in China. What ever happened to "make money without doing evil"? But “things aren’t always as they appear”, as the saying goes. The smart folks at Internet Censorship Explorer have found a backdoor in Google.cn that allows users to get around the Great Firewall. Is it a feature or an oversight? We’ll let the conspiracy theorist in you sort that issue out.

• The BBC, long blocked by Chinese web censors, appears to be following in Google's footsteps regarding the internet in China. Shanghaiist finds foreign news organizations self censoring more disturbing than search engines. Who is next?
• Wu Xianghu, the deputy editor of the Taizhou Evening News, "died of liver and kidney failure after he was severely beaten by police enraged by reports in his newspaper about their work." He was 41. ESWN has photos of the attack. Taizhou is in Zhejiang province.
• Another way of looking at coal mine accident stats in China.

The British highbrow magazine Prospect has come out with its 2005 list of the 100 most influential "public intellectuals" in the world, which ranges across nations, disciplines and professions. The list includes five (ethnic) Chinese, all of mainland extraction, but not all of whom are living or working in mainland China.

Looks like leftist/author/poltician/TV personality/wearer-of-sunglasses Li Ao spoke at Fudan University today after all, despite reports that his plans had changed. The controversial 70-year-old, an advocate of both free speech and the unification of Taiwan and China, is making his first trip to the Mainland since his family fled to Taiwan in 1949. Hi speeches last week at Beijing University and Tsinghua University created quite a stir and some confusion. According to the New York Times, "Li chided China's leaders for suppressing free speech, ridiculed the university administration's fear of academic debate and advised students on how to fight for freedom against official repression" at Beijing University, prompting authorities to impose a blackout on coverage of the rest of Li's China visit. But at Tsinghua, Li said China was in its "halcyon days" and he "lauded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) several times, saying that while China was bullied by Western powers in its modern history." Li reportedly admitted that the government had "asked him to eliminate political content from his talk" at Fudan. Did he? Well, since Shanghaisit has never been too good at learning foreign languages, we don't know just yet. There appears to be video footage of the speech (in Chinese, of course) at the Phoenix TV website. (We're hoping ESWN will translate it soon -- he translates everything else.)

British PM Tony Blair came out of his visit to China a big winner after receiving China's backing for a United Nations Security Council resolution against terrorist incitement. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on London, Blair pushed for new laws that would make public or private statements that indirectly incited terrorism an offense punishable by law. The new UN resolution, which is still in the works, is of the same drift -- it gives countries a greater mandate to stop terrorist incitement within their own borders.

Despite the foreign media's interest in hailing Ice-T as Thursday's Pandora's Box of free speech, the Original Gangster and producer/DJ Afrika Islam seem more intent on putting on a memorably entertaining show. But if, before Ice takes the stage tomorrow night at Club Pegasus, local authorities ask him to sign a contract agreeing not to perform his more objectionable material -- really, what would that leave him with? -- you bet your ass Ice will be signing his Tracy Marrow on the dotted line. "We are not going to jail in China!" Ice-T told local weekly 8 Days. (For more of that interview -- including audio clips -- check out 8Days.sh Thursday morning.) And Thursday night roll up to Pegasus for what promises to be the dopest hip-hop ticket of the summer. Islam will be setting the stage with a set that runs the gamut from Proto-Old School to the Electro Funk. Miss it and you'll be forced to admit that ... you played yourself.