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 ›

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It's good news for those of you who stand accused of one of the nearly 70 offenses that are punishable by death in China. Under legislation enacted on Tuesday, as of January 1, all death sentences handed out by provincial courts must be reviewed and ratified by China's Supreme People's Court. This reverses a 1983 law which gave such powers to the provincial courts in an effort to crack down on rising crime and corruption that occurred early under the reforms implemented under Deng Xiaoping. However, such liberal use of the death penalty in the world's most populous country and in a poor legal environment led predictably to large numbers of death sentences, many of them carried out on innocent people. Last year, a woman in Hunan reappeared 16 years after her accused killer had been executed for her murder. more ›

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. more ›