AFP, July 12, 2009 -

BEIJING (AFP) — A fresh aftershock jolted China’s southwest Monday, three days after an earthquake in the same area killed one person, injured hundreds and directly affected two million people, state media said.

The US Geological Survey said the magnitude 4.9 quake struck a minute after midnight (1601 GMT) and was centred 95 kilometres (60 miles) east northeast of the tourist city of Dali in Yao’an county, a mountainous area of remote Yunnan province.

The quake was recorded at a shallow depth of 10 kilometres, it said.

Official news agency Xinhua said there were no immediate reports of deaths or injuries from the aftershock, which lasted about 10 seconds.

More than to 250,000 people in several counties in Yunnan were displaced after a 5.7-magnitude quake struck Yao’an on Thursday evening……. (more from AFP)

Reporters Without Borders, 11 July 2009 -

Reporters Without Borders regrets that the release of Urumqi-based cyber-dissident Tao Haidong on 8 July on completing a seven-year jail sentence has been overshadowed by the custodial sentences passed on two other cyber-dissidents and human rights activists, Zhang Qi and Zhang Peng, for criticising the government online.

Zhang Qi, an independent blogger based in the southwestern city of Chongqing, was sentenced on 7 July to four years in prison and two years without civic rights for “inciting subversion of state authorities” in his blog. Zhang Peng, a blogger based in Shenyang, the capital of northeastern Liaoning province, was sentenced without a trial on 27 June to 18 months in a reeducation camp on the same charge for referring to the 1989 pro-democracy movement.

“Tao Haidong was only freed because he had completed his sentence, while two other cyber-dissidents, Zhang Qi and Zhang Peng, have been convicted because of their opinions,” Reporters Without Borders said.

“The repression never lets up, regardless of the reassuring comments by the Chinese leaders,” the press freedom organisation added. “We firmly condemn these sentences, which yet again highlight the severity with which the regime punishes those who express views at variance with those of the ruling Communist Party.”…… (more details from Reporters Without Borders)

Reporters Without Borders, 10 July 2009 -

Several Uyghur students currently in Paris told Reporters Without Borders today they have been unable to contact their relatives in Xinjiang since 5 July, either through the Internet or by telephone.

At the same time, the China Digital Times website had published a list of 118 keyword combinations such as “Xinjiang blood”, “Han and Uyghur cannot live under the same sky”, “Uyghur and Han, demonstration” and “conflict, Han and Uyghur” that produce no result in search engines because they have been blocked by the Chinese authorities. See http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/0….

For more information on the censorship of independent news and information about Xinjiang, see the Reporters Without Borders press release of 7 July……. (more details from Reporters Without Borders)

By Aislinn Simpson, The Telegraph, UK, 10 Jul 2009-

Major General Gerry Berragan, 51, was reportedly pickpocketed as he travelled by train and immediately notified the Ministry of Defence in London of the theft.

The BlackBerry phone and personal organiser is capable of storing and sending thousands of emails and could have revealed military secrets.

The security breach was considered so serious that the new Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth is said to have been informed and ordered an investigation.

Married father-of-two Maj Gen Berragan, who is Director General of Army Recruiting and Training and has served in Iraq, Northern Ireland and Kosovo, is understood to be the highest ranking officer ever to have been involved in such a security breach.

The loss is the latest to afflict the MoD since it was revealed that 700 of the department’s laptops were lost in the past five years.

“Maj Gen Berragan will have had access and briefing papers on a myriad of secret defence subjects,” a security source told the Sun newspaper.

But despite concerns about China overtaking Russia in spying on the West and its military secrets, a senior MoD source told the Sun the BlackBerry theft was not thought to be suspicious.

“We do not think Maj General Berragan was targeted by Chinese agents. He was in civilian clothes and we think it was opportunistic pickpocketing,” the source was quoted as saying.

The MoD said in a statement that no sensitive information had been compromised. “We are fully investigating this incident,” the spokesman added.

- The Telegraph (UK)

By Tim Culpan, The Bloomberg, July 9, 2009 -

July 9 (Bloomberg) – Facebook Inc.’s social-networking Web site was inaccessible in China as the government blocks information after violent clashes in one of its regions.

As of 1:36 p.m. Beijing time, there were at least 36 reports of Facebook.com being unavailable from China, according to Herdict.org, a project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which tracks Web outages. Local access to the YouTube.com video site of Google Inc. was also broken, and connections to Amazon.com Inc.’s online store were irregular.

China’s government, which maintains tight control over the Internet, media and information flow, severed access to e-mails and the Web this week in the western city of Urumqi in Xinjiang province amid ethnic clashes that left more than 150 people dead and 1,000 injured. Authorities blocked Google’s search engine last month amid criticism it spread pornography.

“The government wants to show it’s doing as much as it can to prevent links to information from overseas as well as from inside China,” Duncan Clark, chairman of BDA China, a Beijing- based technology consultancy, said by phone. “It won’t work.”

Facebook.com couldn’t be accessed from Beijing or Shanghai as of 11 a.m. local time, while connections were possible from Seattle and Brisbane, Australia, according to WebSitePulse.com. Yahoo! Inc.’s Yahoo.com Internet portal and Microsoft Corp.’s Hotmail.com e-mail service were reachable from all four locations, according to WebSitePulse.com.

“It does appear to be running slowly” in China, said Larry Yu, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook. “We’re looking into the matter, what the reason is for the service running slowly.”

‘Prisoner of State’

Amazon.com, the world’s largest online store, sells “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang,” the banned memoirs of the former chief of the Chinese Communist Party, who was under 16 years of house arrest until his death in 2005. He secretly taped his account of the infighting among party officials before they ordered the military to crush pro-democracy demonstrations on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. Clicking on the book’s Web page from China blocks the whole site for at least 15 minutes, and it can be re-accessed once the Internet browser’s history is cleared.

This may mark the first time the government has totally suppressed access to Amazon.com, broadening previous restrictions on Web pages for individual books, Clark said. …… (More from Bloomberg)

July 09, 2009-

On July 9, 2009, Beichuan County People’s Court in Sichuan Province sentenced He Hongchun (何洪春), a family member of a victim of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, to three years in prison with a five-year suspension. He was convicted of organizing to disrupt social order. Dozens of parents of victims from Beichuan who were present at the hearing were outraged by the sentence and protested that the trial was unfair. He Hongchun, 47, was released after the sentence was announced.

He Hongchun is the great uncle of Zhang Yiyang, who attended Beichuan County Qushan Kindergarten, and was one of more than 500 children killed during the earthquake when two elementary school buildings in the town of Qushan, Beichuan County, collapsed. She was three years old.

In the earthquake aftermath, when parents of victims in Beichuan found out that their insurance company – China Life Insurance Company, Beichuan branch – was giving them insurance payments that were substantially lower than those it gave to families of victims elsewhere (4,000 or 8,000 yuan versus more than 10,000 yuan in Mianzhu and 60,000 yuan in Dujiangyan), they asked He Hongchun and seven other parents to represent them in a lawsuit against the insurance company. Both the Beichuan County Court and the Mianyang People’s Intermediate Court refused to take the case, citing a directive from the Sichuan Provincial High Court that instructed all courts not to accept cases arising from earthquake-related insurance payment disputes.

In September 2008, the parents went to the insurance company three times to negotiate and protest. During the second and third visits, some parents disrupted the work of the insurance company and damaged several tables and chairs. He Hongchun’s brother-in-law, Mr. Zhang, told Human Rights in China (HRIC) that He was never an organizer of these visits or a participant in the disturbance. Rather, during the second visit by the parents, He, along with Beichuan’s county chief, tried to calm the parents down. On the third visit, He came to the insurance company at its request to try to mediate.

On September 27, 2008, the Beichuan County Public Security Bureau detained He Hongchun for organizing parents to protest at the insurance company. According to He’s family members, on October 14, fifteen days before his formal arrest, He was paraded in handcuffs down the street in the town of Leigu, along with other criminal suspects. …… (more details from Human Rights in China)

Paolo Gallini, Religious Intelligence, 9th July 2009 -

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) expressed concern today over the continued persecution of Uighur Muslims and the Chinese government’s violent response to the Uighur protest in Urumqi in the Xinjiang autonomous region Sunday, that left more than 150 dead and thousands injured.
US Commission raises concern about Chinese religious persecution

Media reports from the scene said that Uighur protesters, with legitimate grievances, were forced to disperse by government security forces. When they failed to disperse, force was used that led to the deaths of more than 150 Uighurs. Reports also indicate that, amidst the violence, Han Chinese were killed by Uighur rioters.

In a swift statement, the Chinese government said its violent crackdown was in response to a protest by Uighur separatists who rioted, burning hundreds of shops and cars. More than 700 persons were detained.

“The heavy hand of Chinese government repression displayed at Tiananmen Square and last year against Tibetan protesters appears evident again. We call on the Chinese government to end its violent response to the protests and act with moderation and restraint in dealing with Uighur unrest in Xinjiang, and to allow peaceful demonstrations and greater religious freedoms,” said Leonard Leo, USCIRF chair……. (more details from Religious Intelligence)

Reporters Without Borders, 8 July 2009 -

Reporters Without Borders is very worried by yesterday’s arrest in Beijing of Ilham Tohti, editor of the Uyghur Online blog (www.uighurbiz.cn) and economics professor at Beijing’s Central Nationalities University, who had been relaying information about the rioting in Urumqi, the capital of the far-western province Xinjiang, since 26 June.

“The crackdown is not limited to Xinjiang,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The authorities have arrested an independent writer who was just posting reports on his blog. We think his arrest is a direct result of the role he played in informing the Uyghur community in China and abroad. We call for his release, which could help to stop the violence.”

This is the third time this year that Tohti’s blog has been blocked. The authorities pressured him to stop posting articles in March and June. On 12 March, for example, he posted this note: “I hope my readers will forgive me but I must remain silent for a while. I have to face a lot of threats and harassment. But whatever happens, I urge my friends to continue our struggle.”…… (more details from Reporters Without Borders)

Editorials, The Washington Post, July 7, 2009 -

FROM TWITTERERS in Tehran to bloggers in Burma, citizens living under authoritarian regimes depend upon free access to the Internet for information, coordination and the ability to make themselves heard. That’s why oppressive governments devote so much effort to online censorship: They, too, recognize the power of information to promote freedom. But some independent groups are pushing back against their control.

The indelible images and powerful stories that have emerged from Iran in recent weeks have been made possible by the efforts of a few volunteer experts running a makeshift system of patchwork servers. The Global Internet Freedom Consortium, a small, non-governmental organization, provides access to almost 1 million users daily and, according to recent statistics, to more than 90 percent of anti-censorship traffic from China and Iran. Its software allows users to evade online censors by connecting to a remote server that switches IP addresses nearly once a second to avoid being traced. But increased demand for the Internet amid recent turmoil has been overloading the consortium’s servers just when access is most needed. For the peaceful online revolution to continue, congressional support is necessary.

Before the Senate Appropriations Committee is a bill that could provide access to 100 million distinct users every day. Dedicating $50 million in the State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill to Internet freedom could allow millions who live in autocratic societies access to the Internet. Internet freedom has long been a stated congressional priority — the 2008 appropriations bill included a commitment to provide “anti-censorship tools and services for the advancement of information freedom in closed societies.” Now is the time for Congress to put its money behind its words.

For every dollar the United States spends to guarantee access, oppressive regimes must spend thousands to put up walls and barriers. Once enough there are enough holes in a firewall, it crumbles. The technology for this exists. What is needed is more capacity.

- The Washington Post

by John Lee, Foreign Policy, via npr.org, NPR.org, July 7, 2009-

After scolding the West for interfering in the internal affairs of Iran, Beijing’s public relations department will now be on the defensive following riots in Urumqi, the capital of the westernmost region of Xinjiang. Chinese state media has admitted that 140 people have been killed and almost 1,000 arrested. Hundreds had taken to the streets to protest the local government’s handling of a clash between Han Chinese and Uighur factory workers in far southern China in late June, in which two Uighurs died. The police responded to the rallies with force, claiming that the unrest was the work of extremist forces abroad and that a heavy reaction was necessary to bring the situation under control.

Given the region’s population of 20 million — barely 1.5 percent of the country’s people — many are wondering: Why has Beijing taken such a hard line in Xinjiang? The reason is summed up in one of the ruling party’s favorite mantras: “stability of state.” Unrest of even a small magnitude, the Chinese authorities believe, can spell big consequences if it spirals out of control.

Instability of the sort in Xinjiang today is hardly new for China. Behind Shanghai’s glamour and the magnificence of Beijing, there are large swaths of disunity and disorder. Taiwan, which mainland China still claims as its own, remains recalcitrant and effectively autonomous. Residents of Hong Kong want guarantees that Beijing will not dismantle the rights they enjoyed under British colonial rule. And traditional Tibetans, who fear a complete political and religious takeover by the ethnically Han majority, want cultural and administrative autonomy — even if most have abandoned hopes of achieving outright secession. Many of the 10 million Uighurs in Xinjiang want the same. The current violence is just the latest manifestation of their simmering anger.

There is widespread disorder even in provinces that pose no challenge to Beijing’s right to rule. In 2005, for example, there were 87,000 officially recorded instances of unrest (defined as those involving 15 or more people) — up from just a few thousand incidents a decade ago. Most protests are overwhelmingly spontaneous rather than political; they arise out of frustration among the 1 billion or so “have-nots” who deal with illegal taxes, land grabs, corrupt officials, and so on. To deal with the strife, Beijing has built up a People’s Armed Police of some 800,000 and written several Ph.D.-length manuals to counsel officials on how to manage protests. Those documents detail options to deal with protest leaders: namely the tactical use of permissiveness and repression, and compromise and coercion, on a case-by-case basis. The tactics are designed to take the fuel out of the fire. Sometimes leaders of protests are taken away; other times they are paid off; still other times they are given what they want.

Much of this is done quietly, which is perhaps why the current riots stand out. When it comes to what Beijing sees as separatist behavior, subtlety is no longer an option. Although their populations are relatively small, Xinjiang and Tibet together constitute one third of the Chinese land mass, and Beijing will not tolerate losing control over these territories. To be sure, the protesters in Urumqi and their supporters cannot spark an uprising throughout China. The protests will eventually be quelled, and their leaders will no doubt be dealt with brutally. But as the history of the Chinese Communist Party tells us, when the regime’s moral and political legitimacy is threatened, the leadership almost always chooses to take a hard, uncompromising line.

President Hu Jintao, who incidentally earned early brownie points within the party by leading a crackdown of political dissidents in Tibet in 1989, understands better than anyone that authoritarian regimes appear weak at their own peril. Losing face, he believes, will only embolden the “enemies of the state.” The Communist Party’s Leading Group on Foreign Affairs, which is chaired by Hu, has often spoken warily about the democratic “viruses” behind the “color revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia, and perhaps eventually Iran — the same kind that could conceivably take root in places such as Xinjiang and Tibet. This is why Chinese authorities are deeply suspicious of any group with loyalties that might transcend the state and regime or at least cannot be easily controlled by the state, such as the Falun Gong, Catholics, or independent trade unions.

It’s important to remember that, at home, the government’s hard line is not wholly unpopular. Most Chinese do not support the separatist agendas of Tibet, Xinjiang, or Taiwan. They would rather see a strong and unified China restored to historic glory. No wonder then that the Chinese state media has been quite upfront about reporting on the current unrest in Urumqi.

Chinese leaders learned much about control in their extensive studies of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their conclusion is clear: It was Mikhail Gorbachev’s ill-fated attempts to be reasonable that brought down that empire. The current generation of Chinese leaders is determined not to make the same mistake. And that means no compromise in Xianjiang.

- npr.org