It is not unusual to find video posted online depicting police or military officials committing serious human rights violations but a recent video shows that the police don’t have it all their own way.
A woman who ran a red light and refused to stop for a police officer found her attempts to get away recorded by the camera in the police officer’s helmet as he clung to the bonnet of the speeding car.
The Southern Weekly, a Chinese newspaper, which irked the authorities recently by taking on the state censors is again pushing boundaries, this time it has released a list of the five best stories of 2012 that had been suppressed – it is a list that was of course soon censored.
Ezine Shanghai List published photos that were posted on Weibo by Weekly staff that gave a synopsis of each story.
Shanghai List’s Tom Bannister provides this report.
Although the controversial newspaper has resumed publishing, and free-speech protests have fizzled out, the Southern Weekly continues to relish prodding and poking Beijing’s hardliners.
At the newspaper’s annual meeting Friday, an occasion where there was no doubt rather a few pressing issues to discuss, staff awarded prizes to the five best stories that had been censored last year. A journalist at the newspaper posted photos of the synopsis of each of the winning stories on Weibo. This was then forwarded by thousands of other users before the posts were, rather appropriately, deleted by censors.
The top five stories that won the awards were:
1) A feature story about the ‘rational’ youngsters who refused to get involved in the anti-Japanese protests in September.
2) An article about the 79 victims killed as a result of heavy rain in Beijing in the summer.
In Mark Twains’ classic book “Tom Sawyer” set in the mid 1800s the main character, a young boy, convinces his friends to not only do an arduous chore for him but to actually pay him for the privilege – move forward a century or so and few leaps in technology and the same scam still works.
A Verizon computer programmer who decided he would rather watch online cat videos, shop on ebay and catch up social media but wanted to keep his salary and benefits simply subcontracted his work out to a Chinese Consulting firm.
The result – he kept earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, the programming was excellent and always on deadline earning him top job appraisal rankings and lots of sensitive information was handed over to well no one is entirely sure.
For all the online security features that can be installed in a network, firewalls, passwords, encryption etc none of it is of any use when it comes to someone willingly let others into the system. In this case there was no suggestion it was motivated by anything other than laziness but the results could have been catastrophic.
It is a timely reminder not to on to “auto pilot” when it comes to online security and assume the systems will take care of themselves. The human dimension is a major factor in information spillage. Unlike the movies where huge sums of money are offered or gorgeous temptresses and suave hunks seduce the information from employees the more prosaic reality is that the risks seem to be greater from a few acrobatic cats and a bargains from an online auction. Continue reading »
The Beijing authorities public reaction to the city’s lethal pollution is not unlike the captain of the Titanic making an announcement saying “there is no need to panic we are just stopping to take on a little ice.”
“A truth suppressed is a falsehood spread”. And this sums up the coverage of the record pollution levels in China’s capital.
But although the authorities have forced the media to play down the issue netizens are getting the word out. The authorities position is ludicrous. It is possible to reasonably successfully lie about or suppress the facts over, say, protests or unrest in other parts of the country but it is bit hard to hide the fact every breath is like having your head down the chimney from a steam locomotive.
People do tend to notice when they have trouble breathing despite the hearty reassurances of the people in power it is nothing to worry about. It is hardly surprising that people are tending to believe the empirical evidence rather than the official nonsense. Again censorship actions such as these are more likely to trigger the social upheaval the Chinese leaders so fear rather than prevent them. Continue reading »
Eric Schmidt concluded his controversial four day visit to North Korea with former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson with an exhortation to the pariah state to open up internet access. It is a call that is so inane and inappropriate it can only increase speculation as to why he went there at all.
The trip which Governor Richardson had apparently initiated in order to try and secure the release of a US tour guide imprisoned there had drawn criticism from the State Department which did not support his outreach to a rogue state. The reason for Mr Schmidt’s presence was somewhat unclear.
But if it really was to spread the good word about the internet he would have done better to stay home and sent an email. Unless he is in possession of hitherto unseen supernatural abilities he would have had more luck nailing jello to a ceiling than convincing the world’s most repressive state to open the doors to the online world.
The United Nations reports that ten percent of North Korean children are so stunted by malnutrition that they have permanent physical and mental impairment. The country relies on foreign aid and grudging support of its neighbors to survive day to day.
What would average North Koreans do if they had internet access? Perhaps google “food” and “shelter” to see what it looks like. The internet can be a useful tool for democratic reform but not if you are going to die from a treatable disease while waiting for a search engine to finish bring up its results.
There are priorities for North Korea and concentrating on feeding, housing, educating and keeping them healthy is probably slightly ahead of disarmament and abandonment of a nuclear weapons program which itself is much, much higher up the list than internet access at this stage.
The whole rational for undertaking this visit is bewildering. Unless there was some secret mission they were on, the governor and the google CEO seem to have done little more than provide photo opportunities and reflected glory for the leaders of the most repressive, isolated anti-free speech ant-democratic country in the world.
China’s new leadership is under attack from both ends of the political spectrum for its recent crack down on media and online information access in addition to indications it has no intention to move towards democratic reforms.
It is hardly surprising that those of a right wing persuasion would be critical of China for anything other than a full abandonment of its avowed left wing policies coupled with its one party rule and massive state apparatus but it is somewhat unusual to find those sentiments echoed by the far left.
Obviously in any political philosophy there are factions and the Trotskyist China Worker‘s organization has never been lining up to go on a camping holiday with China’s Maoists. However their criticisms of a regime like China highlights the fact that the enemies of repression, censorship and democracy come in many variations and some of them are not too far philosophically from the oppressors themselves.
It should be noted here that RFAunplugged is politically neutral for reasons of ethics, policy and frankly boredom so source material cited in any blog should never be taken as endorsement of a political agenda or belief system. Our interest is in giving everyone access to as much information as the feel they need to make informed decisions about their own lives.
But returning to the very good article from the China Worker online website it is hard to argue with their criticisms of media repression, online censorship and democratic oppression; nor are their warnings of violent social upheaval totally without merit, though all right thinking people hope that scenario never eventuates.
Much of their criticism is the changing nature of the China’s leadership and their links to mega wealth. Their prescient and often overlooked criticism of this by-product of prosperity is valid and timely as it is already entrenched and will be a further barrier to democratic change.
For in the words of G K Chesterton. “The poor sometimes object to being governed badly but the rich always object to being governed at all.”
The China Worker article is copied below. It will be heartening for lapsed lefties to know the old style left wing vernacular it still alive and well.
Ezine PC World says the changes could prove a threat to companies doing business in China: “some observers say this may not only be an effort to stop citizens from reading or viewing Western information, but also to spy on international corporations doing business in the country who encrypt their internal communications.
The Guardian reported recently that the Chinese government is blocking internet services that have been able to “burrow secretly through what is known as the ‘Great Firewall’ …”
“A number of companies providing virtual private network (VPN) services to users in China say the new system is able to ‘learn, discover and block’ the encrypted communications methods used by a number of different VPN systems,” the report said. Continue reading »
Chines based hackers penetrated the web group of the New York based Council on Foreign Relations last week and used their access to attack members and visitors to the website.
The sophisticated attack utilized a recently developed method known as “drive-by” cyber attacks which targets anyone visiting the compromised site.
The Washington Free Beacon a conservative online publication, reported “computer hackers traced to China carried out an advanced cyberespionage attack against one of America’s most elite foreign policy web groups – the website of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
According to private computer-security forensic specialists, the hacking incident involved a relatively new type of ploy called a “drive-by” website cyber attack that was detected around 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday.
In the internet age it is not wise to flaunt expensive personal items that cost more than your annual salary. Lanzhou mayor, Yuan Zhanting, found this out recently when he made the mistake of being photographed on a number of occasions and each time he was wearing a different expensive wrist watch.
Two university students who noticed the mayor’s taste for pricey timepieces wondered how he could afford them on an official’s salary.
He is now being investigated. It was either the height of arrogance or stupidity because earlier this year another official Xian bureau chief Yang Dacai was similarly caught with high end watches. At the time Yang said “over the past ten years or so I have indeed bought five watches. I purchased them at different times, using my legitimate income to buy them”.
However his superiors were not buying the “if you put a little away each day how soon it builds up” line of argument. He was later fired.
Zhanting may be joining Yang at the local employment office soon in another triumph for the “human flesh engine search” – a remarkably effective form of internet vigilantism where netizens trawl the web for evidence of wrong doing, particularly corruption and then post the findings.
One of the few lessons I remember from journalism school (many years ago) was always ignore the clothes and check out the watch, pen and shoes. These three items are often a good indication of a persons character and integrity. A low paid government official who is sporting a $10,000 Rolex, Gucci shoes and a Mont Blanc pen at the same time as claiming to be poor is probably not the most trustworthy of people.
Business suits can be rented or borrowed but not watches, pens or shoes.
Chen Pingfu, a former music teacher now street musician, incurred the wrath of Chinese authorities when he began posting about injustices he and those around him had suffered at the hands of officials.
He was charged with inciting subversion but as the case was being heard all charges were dropped. No reason has been given but Pingfu was hardly fermenting rebellion he was just trying to highlight poor treatment.
However such criticism on social media and the internet has drawn a swift and harsh reaction in the past. But in this case the authorities appear to have had second thoughts.
China is a governed by a repressive regime but that does not mean all those working for it share the extreme values. It is possible that people in senior positions saw the case for what it was and canned it. On the other hand 12,000 comments following just one story about Pingfu broadcast in Hong Kong may have been a deciding factor. In either case a vigorous social media campaign seems to do no harm which is encouraging to China’s netizens.
Ezine Shanghaiist posted this report and picture on the case.
Chen Pingfu, a laid-off teacher turned street musician from Lanzhou, Gansu Province, was always something of an unlikely dissident. But when Chen began posting online about the injustices he suffered and saw around him, he was accused of “inciting subversion of state power” – the same charge that earned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo eleven years in prison.
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The Mekong River is the longest river in Southeast Asia and supports the lives of 70 million people from Tibet to Vietnam. Our reporters undertook the journey to tell their stories. From these conversations, the team produced the "Mekong diaries," a series of videos on display on www.rfa.org.
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