China: 13-storey apartment building collapse in Shanghai, Kiled one worker

a toppled 13-storey apartment building that buried one worker in Shanghai June 27, 2009

Report from Reuters

China delays launch of internet filter Green Dam

Jonathan Watts and Tania Branigan in Beijing, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 30 June 2009 -

In a last-minute climbdown, the Chinese government announced today that it will delay the launch of censorship software that was supposed to have been sold in every computer from tomorrow.

The postponement comes after an unprecedented wave of online opposition, protests by foreign governments and calls by prominent bloggers for Chinese netizens to climb, attack and demonstrate against the “great firewall”.

Xinhua, the state news agency, reported the change of plan four hours before the software launch was due.

“China will delay the mandatory installation of the ‘Green Dam-Youth Escort’ filtering software on new computers,” it said in a terse statement attributed to the ministry of industry and information technology.

The authorities looked likely to miss their deadline for the rollout of the software that blocks pornographic, violent and politically sensitive content.

The Guardian struggled to find a single retailer who had Green Dam either installed or bundled with computers.

Adding to the mystery, Lenovo, Sony, Dell and Hewlett Packard refused to comment on whether their PCs are now being shipped with the software, as the government ordered them to do last month.

The government says the software is necessary to clear the Chinese web of “harmful content”. But critics say it is a misguided attempt to put the internet genie back in the bottle by a Communist party that now has to answer to about 300 million web users.

“Green Dam is a mini-great firewall placed inside every personal computer,” said Michael Anti, an influential blogger. “The real logic behind it is that China is a big kindergarten in which even adults are treated as children that need to be ‘protected’.”

Isaac Mao, a prominent internet commentator, believes the government has made a big mistake: “I think this is the tipping point between the people rising up and those in power trying to suppress them. The great firewall is overloaded and that is why the authorities are trying to move the focus of control to the desktop. But it has annoyed a lot of people. Not just liberals who want free speech but the young who see it as an intrusion into their personal lives.”

Although the plan has at least temporarily failed, it succeeded in mobilising people against the censors. Wen Yuchao, a journalist and blogger who goes by the online name North Wind, said more than 1,000 netizens have signed up to his campaign to “climb” the firewall by signing up to proxy servers that bypass the government’s controls. He said 15,000 people are joining TOR ‑ one of the most popular proxies ‑ every day, about double the normal rate. Freegate, a proxy that was developed by Falun Gong, has also reported a sharp rise in demand.

Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist and freedom of expression champion, called for an internet boycott tomorrow.

“Thousands of netizens have said they will join the boycott. People are starting to realise how important it is to tell the government what they want,” said Ai. “There is nothing the authorities can do [to stop us]. That is what is great about this. It is personal but widespread.”…… (more from The Guardian)

N. Korean heir made secret trip to China

By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing and Robin Harding in Tokyo, The Financial Times, UK, June 29 2009 -

The son and heir apparent to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il joined a delegation of senior military officials for a top-secret, week-long visit to China in mid-June in spite of Beijing’s claims no such trip occurred.

The visit was meant to shore up support for the inexperienced Kim Jong-woon, Mr Kim’s 26-year old son, and to reassure North Korea’s closest ally a smooth leadership transition is under way, military, intelligence and diplomatic sources have told the Financial Times.

The Swiss-educated Mr Kim has apparently been given the title “bright leader”, after a tradition by which his father is known as the “dear leader” and his grandfather Kim Il-sung – the late founder of the totalitarian Stalinist state – is referred to as the “great leader”.

The younger Mr Kim accompanied Jo Myong-rok, first vice-chairman of North Korea’s National Defence Commission, regarded as the country’s top governing body, and Jang Song-taek, a member of the Defence commission and Kim Jong-il’s brother-in-law.

Mr Jang, a powerful political figure, has been tasked with establishing Kim Jong-woon’s legitimacy, analysts say.

The North Korean military delegation arrived by air in Beijing on June 10 and met senior Chinese officials during a clandestine visit that took them to Guangzhou, Shanghai and Dalian.

They returned to Pyongyang on June 17.

The itinerary was close to that followed by Kim Jong-il on his last official visit to China in January 2006. The latest trip was conducted far more discreetly. The delegation was housed in military hotels.

This month, China’s foreign ministry denied any knowledge of such a visit.

- The Financial Times

China’s human rights law firms forced to shut down in sensitive year 2009

By Ariana Eunjung Cha, Washington Post, Via The Boston Globe, June 28, 2009-

BEIJING - In the five years since it was founded, the Yitong Law Firm has established itself as one of the country’s fiercest human rights advocates. It represented Hu Jia, the dissident who spoke out against the Tiananmen Square crackdown and on behalf of HIV/AIDS patients; Chen Guangcheng, the blind activist who exposed forced abortions; and hundreds of others its lawyers felt had been wrongly imprisoned.

Its success rate isn’t stellar – it has won at most 60 percent of its cases. But in a country where rule of law is still a work in progress and calling for democracy is often treated as a crime against the state, Yitong and other human rights firms have spoken out for people who otherwise would have been silenced.

Those days may be over.

Since the beginning of 2009 – a sensitive year filled with anniversaries of uprisings – the Chinese government has been forcing human rights law firms such as Yitong to shut down.

Formally, there is no crackdown; no police are swooping in to seize files or send attorneys en masse to labor camps. Instead, Beijing is simply using its administrative procedures for licensing lawyers and law firms, declining to renew the annual registrations, which expired May 31, of those it deems troublemakers. Human rights groups say dozens of China’s best defense attorneys have effectively been disbarred.

“It’s a collective strike,’’ said Cheung Yiuleung, a leader of the China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group, an advocacy organization based in Hong Kong. “Compared with individual warnings, the annual check of licenses is more effective. . . . It has had a frightening effect on all lawyers on the mainland.’’

A few prominent lawyers have met with even harsher treatment. One has gone missing: Gao Zhisheng – who defended religious minorities such as members of Falun Gong and underground Christians, was a nominee for last year’s Nobel Peace Prize and whose family fled China and sought asylum in the United States in March – was taken by security agents from his home in Shaanxi Province Feb. 4 and has not been heard from since.

Several lawyers say they have been beaten en route to meetings with clients in human rights cases. Others have been detained, questioned, and put under house arrest for days or weeks.

In late May, 17 human rights attorneys whose licenses have been suspended signed an open letter saying authorities are engaging in the “full-scale repression of rights’’ of defense lawyers “to an unprecedented degree.’’

With high unemployment from factory closings because of the global economic crisis, China’s leaders have expressed concern that the sporadic outbreaks of social unrest in recent months might spread, and they have sought to keep those who might stir up dissent, such as human rights lawyers, under tight rein.

Their concerns are compounded by this year’s significant dates: the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising that led to the Dalai Lama’s flight to India; the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre; and the first anniversary of protests over the shoddy construction that caused many deaths in last year’s Sichuan Province earthquake.

Attorneys whose licenses have not been renewed as of this month include Li Xiongbing, who represented victims of contaminated infant formula against the manufacturer Sanlu; Li Chunfu, who has been working on two cases involving wrongful death while in custody.

- The Boston Globe

China’s ’second channel’ Diplomacy in Canada

By Matthew Little, Epoch Times Staff,  Jun 25, 2009 -

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi made an official visit to Canada this week, prompting some to proclaim a breakthrough in Canada-China relations. China-business lobbyists will say the Conservative Government has now seen the light. But there are others who fear the government is stepping down from a stance toward China that was not only principled, but also made sense.

Early on, Prime Minister Stephen Harper had chilly relations with the communist regime. He publicly criticized its notorious human rights record, angering the China-business lobby. But he also earned respect as one of the few world leaders to speak up for China’s downtrodden.

That was then. Today it is hard to tell what Mr. Harper’s position is. The Prime Minister’s Office seemed reluctant this week to put “human rights” and “China” together in the same sentence when asked whether Harper and Yang had discussed that issue in their meeting. Instead, his spokesperson, Demitri Soudas, would only say the two had talked about all issues of concern to both countries.

It could be said that Yang’s arrival in Canada was paved by former Chinese ambassador to Canada Mei Ping. Beginning last fall, Mr. Mei worked behind the scenes to influence the Conservative government’s China stance, a fact he boasted about in a reception at the Chinese consulate in Toronto last Wednesday night.

Ming Pao, a pro-Beijing Chinese-language newspaper that covered the event, reported that the communist regime turned to Mei because of his extensive ties here.

A ‘Secondary Channel’

The paper quoted Mei as saying he visited Canada in September and October of last year on a mission to use a “secondary channel” of diplomacy to change the government’s stance.

His efforts took him on a cross-Canada tour with stops in eight cities where he met with business leaders, think-tanks, opposition leaders, and media.

Chen Yonglin was a student at the Foreign Affairs University in China in the 1980s when Mei was the Chancellor there and said he is familiar with Mei’s “secondary channel.” It’s a concept Mei discussed at that time too.

Also called Track II diplomacy, under normal circumstances it would involve non-official figures engaging in dialogue for confidence building or conflict resolution. But in reference to China’s efforts in Canada, Chen noted its broader implication. “It means to influence the Canadian Government through the Chinese community in Canada.”

Chen said Beijing previously exercised this “second channel” through overseas front organizations to dissolve the trade sanctions Western countries imposed on China after the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre.

Chen was the consul for political affairs in the Chinese consulate in Sydney before he defected in 2005. He revealed that one of his duties there was to monitor Chinese political dissidents and rights activists in Australia.

He also revealed how the regime used front organizations, including Chinese community groups, Chinese student groups, and Chinese media, to further Beijing’s interests abroad.

In his reported speech, Mei had also highlighted that the opinion of Chinese Canadians during the last election had altered Canada’s China stance, something Mei was in the country to witness.

The Epoch Times was following odd occurrences in the Chinese community during the election, many of which take on new significance in light of this information.

Among those odd occurrences was a poll published by the Ming Pao Chinese newspaper which claimed the single largest concern of Chinese Canadians was China-Canada relations. The poll came with the suggestion that political strategists could use the findings to lure Chinese voters.

These findings ran counter to most national election polls, which at the time found the economy was the overriding concern for the vast majority of Canadians.

Also odd were the townhall debates organized by Chinese community groups whose members were vocal supporters of the Chinese Communist Party and its foreign policy objective……. (More details from The Epochtimes )

China: 100 Million Ex-Servicemen Called to Protest at Tiananmen Square on ‘sensitive days’

Epoch Times Staff , Jun 26, 2009  -

Ex-servicemen and their families—numbering 100 million—have been asked to expose the widespread phenomenon of corruption in both the government and the military in China.

A recent posting at Tiexue Forum (a Chinese military affairs Web site) revealed that 200 veterans from the Fourth Headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) were called upon to launch a protest at Mao Zedong Memorial Hall on Tiananmen Square.

The posting indicated that there are 60 million veterans including their families and 40 million retired military staff including their families in China. The vast majority of these 100 million people are living in poverty. A few million of them are better off, but are also oppressed.

Military veterans encounter discrimination

One of the veterans from the Fourth Headquarters of the PLA was quoted as saying that it is the ones who retired early who became the most vulnerable. Their benefits are inferior to the Armed Police lieutenants. In general, they have encountered discrimination in housing and property rights. They are provided with low quality housing in remote areas where the medical services are poor.

“The 200 of us have risked our lives while serving the People’s Republic. We have now become the victims of stringent control under the bureaucratic bourgeoisie scum of the Central Military Commission, and we live in hardship. Most of those who left the army were laid-off. Worst of all, tens of millions of soldiers and militia who returned to the rural areas are struggling in the most devastating situations and are facing extreme hardships.”

The posting also criticizes the wide spread of brothels in China. “Many villages where these veterans live have become places of prostitution. Younger generations are either forced to become prostitutes or are exploited by the slave factories. Many of them even engage in the gangsters’ activities.”

Active duty soldiers don’t share equal opportunities. The PLA officially withdrew from public business activities and conducted prostitution secretly with the military budget. Innocent female soldiers are exploited as stationed prostitutes. The Armed Police forces openly engage in night club activities and smuggle drugs.

Veterans are urged to protest on ‘sensitive days’

For the proposed protest, all participants were invited to go to Tiananmen Square to attend Mao’s memorial service in uniform with their military medals, white flowers, and black armbands. “During the long wait, it’s a perfect time to tell the public of the corruption. All comrades are invited to Beijing. We should do it every day.”

It was also proposed that everyone particularly make an effort to go to Tiananmen Square on  “sensitive days,” such as  July 1, the birthday of the CCP; August 1, PLA Day; and September 9, Mao Zedong Memorial Day.

Among the hundreds of thousands of protests which took place all over China in 2009, this was the first time that ex-servicemen and their families were called to Tiananmen Square. In particular, it draws attention to the upcoming sensitive days for the CCP.

- The Epochtimes

China: 5 TV Station Staff Suspended for Failing to Censor Politically Sensitive Information

Epoch Times Staff,  Jun 25, 2009  -

Five staff members from Guangzhou Cable TV (GCTV) have been suspended for a “political mistake.” They apparently failed on several occasions to censor scenes related to the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the Falun Gong spiritual practice.

Programs from Hong Kong relayed to Guangdong Province normally have between 5-15 seconds delay for monitoring purposes. When Hong Kong TV broadcasts sensitive political information, local stations need to censor it immediately and replace it with other footage.

A Radio Free Asia report on Asia TV (ATV), broadcast a trailer announcing a “Special Series: The 20th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre” at 7:00 p.m. on May 22, which included the iconic scene of the student blocking the tank. The GCTV failed to censor the scenes at once, and an estimated one million TV viewers in Guangzhou City viewed it. On June 4, when ATV broadcast a special program on religion, including content relating to Falun Gong, GCTV again failed to censor it in time.

In addition, according to the China Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, when GCTV relayed the news at 6:30 on June 5, it failed to censor the scenes of Hong Kong people commemorating the Tiananmen Square Massacre on the night of June 4. After an investigation by the Guangzhou Municipal Party Committee Propaganda Department, 2 editors and 3 assistant editors of the GCTV were suspended from their duties, while more employees, including executives of the TV station, may also be reprimanded.

GCTV belongs to Guangzhou TV. One of their previous hiccoughs was when former Chinese premier Zhu Rongji, delivered a governmental work report to the National People’s Congress in March 2001. The subtitles introduced him as a “former Falun Gong practitioner.” All editors and the TV executives involved were punished.

In previous years, many provincial TV station programs covering 10 provinces in China had clips inserted of Jiang Zemin’s crimes related to the persecution of Falun Gong, including the countless lawsuits filed against Jiang. Audiences in China said that the program also revealed Jiang’s cover up of the SARS epidemic. The regime’s mouthpiece Xinhua, criticized the inserted broadcast but dared not disclose the nature of the content to the mainland Chinese.

- Epoch Times

China Dissident Hu Jia Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize Again

Epoch Times Staff,  Jun 26, 2009  -

Chinese dissident Hu Jia, who was nominated for last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, has once again received a nomination for this year. The decision has aroused much attention around the world.

In December 2007, Hu Jia participated in many social and human rights movements.  He was detained by the Chinese regime on charges of “overthrowing state power”, and was sentenced to three years and six months in prison in March 2008.  According to a report from AFP on Oct 9, 2008, when Hu received his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in September 2008, the Chinese regime pleaded the prize committee not to consider awarding the prize to a “criminal.”

In 2008, the Nobel Foundation granted a nomination to another Chinese person, human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng.  However, when the prize was finally awarded to former Finland President Martti Ahtisaari, criticism arose that the Nobel Foundation failed to put enough emphasis on the Chinese regime’s suppression of Tibet and human activists.

According to The Nobel Foundation on June 22, the winner of the Nobel Prize Peace will be announced between October 5 to 12.  This year, 205 people and associations have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, setting a record.  Competitors for the Nobel Peace Prize include U.S. President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and Ingrid Betancourt, a former French hostage in Colombia.

- The Epochtimes

Expert: China’s Green Dam software is unsafe

by  Elinor Mills, Cnet News, June 25, 2009 -

The content-filtering software the Chinese government wants installed on all PCs sold in that country beginning next week was poorly developed and puts users at risk of having their computers compromised, a security expert who examined the code said on Thursday.

The Chinese government is requiring that all PCs include the Green Dam-Youth Escort software to block pornography, but it also blocks access to content related to violent computer games, illegal drugs and political speech, said Ben Feinstein, director of research at SecureWorks, a managed security service provider.

Critics are worried that the Chinese government could use Green Dam, a free download, to block all kinds of content and monitor online activities of users, as well as worried that the software could allow for a massive botnet to be created, either by cybercriminals or the Chinese government itself.

Feinstein and colleagues at SecureWorks’ Counter Threat Unit examined the Green Dam code earlier this month and found that it uses a variety of unsafe programming practices that have been banned at Microsoft and other U.S. companies, he said.

An example is the use of Strcpy, or string copy, a library function in the C programming language that copies memory from one buffer to another, according to Feinstein. If the copied string doesn’t fit in the destination buffer, it will overwrite memory and can be used in a buffer overflow attack.

“This software appears to be of low quality and to have not been developed with a secure methodology,” Feinstein said. “It likely suffers from a whole host of problems.”

The way Green Dam is designed to inspect all Internet traffic coming into and going out of a PC means more parts of the code are exposed to potential attack compared with programs that are more limited in scope and process less data, he said.

In addition, having the software on all PCs in China, as mandated, would create a huge install base and be an attractive target for attackers who could attack millions of computers by targeting just this one program, Feinstein said.

China historically has censored the Internet using filters on the network, blocking access to pages that deal with politically sensitive subjects like Tiananman Square, Falun Gong, and Tibet. Installing filtering software on the end-user computers will make it easier to block content than doing it in the network, according to Feinstein.

“You get efficiencies of scale if you push the filtering down to the end point rather than inspect huge Trans-Pacific pipes entering and leaving your country,” he said. Green Dam was published by Jinhui Computer Systems Engineering, which is run by a former officer of the Peoples’ Liberation Army, he added.

Researchers at the University of Michigan issued a report two weeks ago that found two major security vulnerabilities in Green Dam that could allow someone to remotely take over a computer running the software. The software was later updated and patched, according to an update to the report issued a week ago, however the researchers said they had discovered an additional security hole that remained unfixed.

Separately, a security researcher said he had released on a public Web site an exploit for a buffer overflow that remained unpatched in the Green Dam update.

- Cnet News

Microsoft’s Search Engine Filters Out Sensitive Results for Chinese Searches

Owen Fletcher, IDG News Service, Via PCWorld, Thursday, June 25, 2009 -

Microsoft’s Bing search engine filters out some sensitive results from searches made in simplified Chinese, the script used to write the language in China, searches revealed Thursday.

The filtering appeared to occur for searches done both in and outside of China. A search for “Tiananmen” returned images of tanks rolling into Beijing’s central square in 1989 to crush pro-democracy protests if the search was written in English or in traditional Chinese characters, which are used in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

But those images did not appear for the same search done in simplified Chinese. Stately photos of the Tiananmen gate leading to Beijing’s old imperial city instead filled the page.

Search results appeared to be missing for other politically charged words in simplified Chinese as well. Searching for “Falun Dafa,” a name for the Falun Gong spiritual movement banned as a cult in China, turned up the movement’s Web page if performed in English or traditional Chinese, but not when done in simplified Chinese.

Like Google’s local search engine, Bing also appeared to filter out some sensitive results in any language when used from an IP (Internet Protocol) address in China. The Falun Gong Web site could not be found using traditional characters in China.

China has stepped up efforts to control content on foreign Web sites in recent weeks. Bing, Twitter, Flickr and other sites were blocked for the June 4 anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown in an apparent attempt to prevent public commemoration or other disturbances.

China appeared to block Google’s English search engine and other Google sites for over an hour Wednesday night, following state media criticism of the company last week for serving pornographic search results.

The Internet is heavily patrolled in China by police and by domain owners who fear punishment if they allow discussion of sensitive issues to appear on their Web sites. YouTube and some foreign news sites are blocked in China, and others including Wikipedia have been blocked before.

Microsoft did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

- PCWorld

55 US Assembly Members Urge Obama to Denounce China’s Persecution of Falun Gong

By Stephanie Lam, Epoch Times Staff, Jun 24, 2009 -

As the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) persecution of Falun Gong nears the 10-year mark, two New York state politicians have taken action. New York State Assembly Members Phil Boyle and Vanessa Gibson each wrote a letter to President Obama on June 18 urging him to denounce the persecution and demand that the CCP put an end to it.

Boyle and Gibson described Falun Gong as a tranquil and peaceful practice guided by the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, numbering 70-100 million practitioners before the CCP started its persecution on July 20, 1999. Over 3,000 Falun Gong practitioners are known to have been persecuted to death in the past decade.

Boyle wrote that Falun Gong practitioners experience “Torture, malnutrition, exhaustion, neglect in detention, and even organ harvesting in hospitals,” and that the actual number of people who died from the persecution might be over 10,000.

The two assembly members are especially concerned because the CCP has extended the persecution of Falun Gong into the United States. He reported that “Pro-communist mobs have berated, threatened, and physically attacked Falun Gong practitioners in New York City. New York City police officers have had to arrest several members of an anti-Falun Gong mob for attacks against practitioners, with charges ranging from assault to resisting arrest.”

Boyle and Gibson praised President Obama for his efforts in protecting human rights internationally, and asked that he continue this by supporting Falun Gong. Within five days’ time, Boyle’s letter was co-signed by 53 other members of the New York State Assembly.

- The Epochtimes

Google censors itself to avoid China censorship

Asianews.it, 06/23/2009 -

Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Google suspended its “Suggest” search-prompt functionality in China after being criticised by the government for providing links to pornography. In doing this Chinese authorities are further accentuating their hold over the internet, just a few days before every computer built or sold on the mainland is supposed to have a software filter.

Google Suggest is a function that automatically prompts Web users with completed words as they type in the search box, using algorithms and other data to predict the query they are most likely to want to see, according to the company’s Web site.

Marissa Mayer, vice president for Google’s search unit, said in Taipei yesterday that Friday the company temporarily disabled the ‘Suggest’ functionality because of Chinese government’s complaints about inappropriate sites.

Google controls 27.8 per cent of China’s paid-search market last year.

For many experts the decision is linked to the requirement which comes into effect on 1 July that all computers built or sold in the country to have ‘Green Dam’ software, which stops access to certain sites or contents.

Ostensibly this is to deny access to vulgar or pornographic sites, but many experts see it as a tool to prevent people from accessing politically sensitive sites like those that mention the Falun Gong, a movement that is persecuted in mainland China.

Internet firms and the United States government have expressed concern over the issue and urged Beijing to discuss the matter before the new rule comes into effect because it might limit freedom of expression in the name of the fight against pornography.

Outspoken Beijing artist Ai Weiwei, who helped design the landmark Olympic Bird’s Nest stadium but who has now become a vocal critic of the government, called on web users to boycott the Internet on the day of Green Dam’s debut.

- Asianews.it

Christian Attorney Zheng Enchong Interrogated and Tortured by China Police

ChinaAid, June 23, 2009 -

SHANGHAI – On June 17 Christian human rights attorney, Zheng Enchong, was interrogated and tortured for nine hours by Public Security Bureau (PSB) officers because of his work defending Chinese citizens whose land has been confiscated by the government. During his detention, he was beaten, stripped and cigarettes were held to his lips and eyelids. Zheng Enchong has filed a written protest and plans to file a complaint to the central government.

According to ChinaAid sources, Zheng Enchong was summoned by four officers from Zhabei District Branch of Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau on June 17. During his detention, officers took turns slapping him five or six times in the face, and hitting him three times in the back of his head. Police also held lit cigarettes to his lips and eyelids. Later, the officers pulled him from the seat and took off all his clothing, except his underwear. Police threw his personal belongings, including: money, keys, pen, and a Bible and some cookies to the floor. Then the PSB officers proceeded to search his body.

Authorities compiled a written record of the interrogation without interrogating Zheng at all, and, then, wanted him to sign it. Instead, he wrote down a statement on the record describing his violent treatment by the PSB. He denounced authorities for using the same method on him as they use on Falun Gong practitioners.

Attorney Zheng has been summoned by officials nearly 20 times, and his house searched twice in the past two and a half months. In 2003,  he filed a major legal case exposing how government officials conspired with Zhou Zhengyi, “the richest man in Shanghai,” to illegally confiscate homes for demolition. Since that time, Zheng Enchong has been continually harassed and persecuted by Chinese officials. He was sentenced to three years in prison for “illegally providing secrets to overseas entities.” The charge related to two faxes regarding workers’ protests that Zheng was accused of sending to Human Rights in China, a non-profit organization. Zheng has also been beaten by authorities four times, so badly that he now has difficulty walking.

“As an internationally well-known Christian human rights lawyer, Attorney Zheng has always defended the poor and vulnerable,” said Bob Fu, president of ChinaAid and a friend of Mr. Zheng and his family. “The repeated harassment and torture against such a conscientious rights defender demonstrates the Shanghai authorities’ total disregard to citizens’ basic human rights. We encourage the international community to continue to press the Chinese authorities to stop these hideous acts and to hold the abusers accountable”.

ChinaAid calls on the international community to contact the Chinese Ambassador urge that the violence against Zheng Enchong end, and that government respect and uphold human rights according to the Chinese Constitution and international agreements:

Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong
3505 International Place, NW, Washington, D.C. 20008
Tel: (202) 495-2000
Fax: (202) 588-9760

- ChinaAid

Brother Searches for Arrestted Human Rights Lawyer Gao Zhisheng in Beijing

By Yi Fan and Ai Qing, Epoch Times Staff,  Jun 23, 2009 -

The whereabouts of Chinese human rights attorney, Gao Zhisheng, remain unknown several months after his arrest by police in February. His wife, Geng He, has revealed that Gao’s eldest brother has recently set out to look for him in Beijing.

Geng He now resides in the United States with her children after escaping from China shortly after her husband’s latest arrest. During this time, Geng said that she has kept in close contact with Gao’s eldest brother. On the morning of June 15, Geng received a call from this brother, who said that the Beijing public security refused to take on his case and search for Gao.

Geng said that Gao’s brother had attempted to go to the public security bureau but was denied entrance. She also said that he went to report his case to the local police substation where Gao was once detained but was ignored by the substation staff.

According to Geng, the substation forbade Gao’s brother from temporarily staying at Gao’s Beijing home, giving the reason that Gao had never authorized anyone to stay there.

Geng said that, Gao’s brother, who is a farmer going to Beijing for the first time, “is furious that he has no place to stay.” Worrying for his safety, she appealed to the international society to pay attention to the situation and safety of both Gao and his brother.

Having not spoken with her husband since his arrest, Geng, said that being able to talk on the phone with her husband would bring light into the lives of her and her children.

“The children say every day that they want to talk to their dad,” said Geng.

Gao Zhisheng was named one of China’s top 10 lawyers by the Chinese regime in 2001, however he was disbarred by communist authorities in 2005 after calling for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong in a series of open letters to the Chinese leadership.

Since then Gao has reported attempts on his life and has been arrested several times. Earlier this year, his family published a letter from Gao that detailed barbaric torture he suffered during a two month period at the hands of his jailers.

Recently, U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan wrote a letter to inquire about Gao’s disappearance. In response to his letter, Chinese ambassador Zhou Wenzhong replied that Gao is currently serving probation. However, multiple overseas organizations have recognized the Chinese regimes’ treatment of Gao as an act of abduction.

- The Epochtimes

Boycott China Internet Censorship, Calls Designer of Beijing “Bird’s Nest” Stadium

Radio Free Asia, 2009-06-23 -

HONG KONG— The man who designed Beijing’s emblematic “Bird’s Nest” stadium, which formed the centerpiece of the 2008 Olympics, has called on Chinese netizens to boycott the Internet on July 1 in protest at official censorship.

Blogger, designer, and social commentator Ai Weiwei called for a widespread boycott of the Internet on July 1, when the government has ordered that all new Chinese computers must include filtering software, allegedly to protect the country’s youth against pornographic content.

Ai called on the 5,000 or more people who follow his blog to boycott the Internet from the early hours of July 1 to the early hours of July 2, in protest at Chinese government controls on the Internet, especially a compulsory filtering program known as Green Dam.

Some users reacted via social networking sites similar to Twitter.

“If Green Dam is launched smoothly nationwide on July 1, that will be the day that the Internet in China was raped. Yes, yes, yes!” tweeted one commenter in reponse to Ai’s idea.

Met with scorn

Chinese computer users and commentators have lashed out publicly at the Web filtering program that the government has ordered installed on all new personal computers in China on grounds that it aims to protect young people online.

The “Green Dam Youth Escort” is a Windows executable file, which claims to be able to prevent young people from gaining access to undesirable content such as pornography, as well as providing monitoring reports to supervisors about users’ activities online.

Chinese Web users have greeted the move with scorn.

“It is to awaken people’s ability to form their own opinions, their self-consciousness,” another user wrote of the boycott.

“Strike on July 1: Prove your own existence!” said another.

“Boycott the Internet. Be your own master. Don’t count personal gain or loss,” said another……. (Radio Free Asia)

Tens of thousands of Chinese fight the police in Shishou City, Central China

By Malcolm Moore, The Telegraph, UK, June 22nd, 2009 -

It was a dramatic weekend in the relatively small city of Shishou in Hubei province.

Tens of thousands of rioters torched a hotel and overturned police cars, accusing the authorities of trying to cover up the murder of a 24-year-old man as a suicide.

police cars overturned in Shishou City (from QQ)

The deceased, Tu Yuangao, was the chef of the Yong Long hotel. According to the cops, he committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the building and left a note.

However, witnesses said there was no blood on the scene and Tu’s body was already cold just after it hit the ground. His parents were surprised that he left a suicide note, since he was allegedly illiterate.

There are plenty of rumours flying around – that two other employees at the hotel had died in the same way, that the boss of the hotel is related to the mayor of Shishou, that the hotel was a centre for the local drug business and Yu was killed for threatening to expose what was going on. There’s also a rumour that three further bodies have been found at the hotel.

There are more details and photos here (EastWestNorthSouth).

It’s a strange story, and it gets stranger. A huge mob, of anywhere between a few thousand to 70,000 people, depending on which report you read, quickly gathered outside the building to protect the body. Tu’s parents refused to let his corpse be taken away, claiming that it held vital evidence of the crime, and instead placed it inside the hotel on ice.

The crowd beat back waves of policemen. On Saturday, someone lit a fire inside the hotel, possibly to destroy the body, but it was saved.

Tu’s cousin apparently then armed himself with two barrels of gasoline and threatened to blow himself up if the body was taken.

The police restored order yesterday, imposed a curfew and took the corpse to a funeral parlour. There is still a lot of anger, however, and the website of the local government has been defaced by hackers.

What’s extraordinary is the speed in which the riot blew up, and the venom directed against the local authorities. Whatever was behind Tu’s death, there’s clearly something rotten in Shishou.

After months of calm, there have recently been a spate of riots being reported in the Chinese media, or on the internet.

Is this because media restrictions have been lifted, allowing news of riots to spread, or has there been a genuine increase in social tension in the countryside?

It is impossible to tell. China no longer publishes the figures for how many riots take place each year, but most people put the figure at around 80,000 and the vast majority go totally unnoticed.

The fact that there have been a dozen riots reported in the last couple of months may not demonstrate anything out of the ordinary. There is no theme that connects the recent protests – some are about property, some are work disputes, some are because of corruption.

But then again, a huge number of migrant workers are still out of work. Their factories have not recovered from the economic crisis. In the countryside, the harvest is finished and people’s savings may be running low. Perhaps the tinderbox is drier than usual.

UPDATE:  Overnight between Sunday and Monday over a thousand students rioted at Nanjing Industrial Technical School, smashing windows, television sets, their teacher’s cars and an on-campus supermarket.

A policeman was attacked, but the crowd was eventually subdued by hundreds of anti-riot police, according to blogs written by participants.

The students were enraged after being told that they would only graduate with a technical degree (the equivalent of high-school diploma) rather than the associate degree (just underneath a normal bachelor’s degree) they were promised at enrollment.

- The Telegraph

China: Rape Victim Accused of Killing Official Loses Freedom Again

By Luo Ya, Epoch Times Staff, Jun 20, 2009 -

On June 16 the Badong County Court of Hubei Province issued a statement that declared Deng Yujia’s “freedom has been legally, fully restored.” Within 48 hours, that freedom had been taken away once again, although the Chinese people have been told she is free.

In a tape recording of a conversation of a blogger with Deng’s mother, the mother says Deng is now being held in a psychiatric hospital.

Deng, a waitress and pedicurist at a Badong resort, had been tried for killing a Communist Party official who was alleged to be raping her. Her act of resistance, subsequent arrest, and trial have captured the attention of people throughout China, with bloggers, former Communist Party officials, and even members of the state-run media writing in her defense. Approximately 500 supporters showed up outside her trial, even though the trial date had not been announced in advance.

The court’s decision, which claimed to give Deng her freedom, found her guilty but did not impose any punishment. The court claimed to give her leniency, in part because of her “bearing limited criminal liability,” meaning that she was mentally ill.

That assertion was never proven at trial as no witness or evidence was presented. Bloggers who have followed this case closely assert that Deng has no mental illness. Nonetheless, the claim that she is mentally ill is now the apparent pretext for detaining her.

Wu Gan, a blogger who goes by the pen name of Tufu, has supported Deng. On the 18th, Tufu got in touch with Deng’s mother, Zhang Shuhai, and told her how Internet bloggers had collected money to help her family financially and in particular wished to offer Deng a quiet place in Beijing where she might recover from her ordeal. Zhang thanked the supporters but refused to take any money.

Tufu uploaded his conversation with Zhang to his blog on June 18. Part of what Zhang says in the recording is: “She is—I am not sure where she is.

“I am back home now, but I don’t know where she is.

“The authorities demand to treat her illness. She is out to a hospital. I am not with her now.”

The conversation with Zhang does not make clear when exactly Deng was detained in the hospital……. (more details from The Epochtimes)

Technology Companies Should Resist China’s Censorship Attempts, HRW says

Human Rights Watch, June 19, 2009 -

(New York) - The computer industry should make it clear to the Chinese government that it will not cooperate in efforts to curtail access to information on the internet through government-mandated or provided filtering software such as the “Green Dam Youth Escort” program, Human Rights Watch said today.

Despite domestic and international criticism, the Chinese government has apparently not reversed its initial demand that companies pre-install Green Dam on all personal computers by July 1. This week, a Washington-based group representing leading information technology companies issued a brief statement urging the Chinese government to “reconsider implementing its new mandatory filtering software requirement,” but to date has received no response indicating the new requirement would be rescinded.

“The government’s order to install censorship software represents a grave threat to freedom of expression in China,” said Arvind Ganesan, Business and Human Rights Program director at Human Rights Watch. “The Green Dam technology highlights Beijing’s ongoing efforts to intensify its chokehold on Chinese citizens’ internet access and the need for computer software and hardware firms to resist complicity in those efforts.”

Green Dam is ostensibly designed to filter out pornography and other “unhealthy information” from the internet, but reportedly is also programmed to censor content ranging from political information to websites catering to the needs of China’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. Green Dam is not transparent and does not facilitate users choosing which sites or terms to block or allow. Numerous commercial parental-control software packages are already widely available in China, including products sold by Microsoft.

Human Rights Watch said that instead of providing the promised protections, the Green Dam software could instead pose a serious new threat to free expression if industry leaders do not actively oppose any new efforts by the Chinese government to reintroduce mandatory pre-installation of Green Dam or other filtering software in the future. In addition to the censorship threat, the software could further intrude on user privacy, undermine user choice, and have the potential to make multinational companies complicit in those efforts.

According to the Open Net Initiative and other research institutions, Green Dam has serious security vulnerabilities that leave users vulnerable to hacking and could ultimately allow the government to track users’ browsing habits and communications. While the Chinese government has recently announced that it would issue security patches to fix some flaws in the software, it is not a sufficient step to address all the problems that the software creates for human rights.

“The controversy over Green Dam is just the latest attempt to make computer, software and internet companies complicit in China’s attempts to censor the internet,” said Ganesan. “It is critical for the industry to draw a line and make it clear to the government that it won’t sacrifice ethical principles and international human rights standards for profit.”

In a letter to major computer makers, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo, Human Rights Watch expressed concern about the May 19 directive, “Notification Regarding Requirements for Pre-Installing Green Filtering Software on Computers,” and its human rights implications for companies in China and abroad. …… (more details from Human Rights Watch)