The Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon - China Digital Space. “I'm a grass-mud horse.” Translating the Resistance Discourse of Chinese Netizens Xiao Qiang About the Project The Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon is an online glossary of terms created by Chinese netizens and frequently encountered in online political discussions. This project is part of our effort to contribute to a deeper understanding of the Internet’s cultural, social, and political impact by moving beyond anecdotal evidence and systematically documenting and interpreting political discourse created by Chinese netizens. Is the Internet acting as a “safety valve” to prolong the life of the Chinese authoritarian regime, or are new forms of networked communication enhancing opportunities for social change and helping to move China toward the “threshold” for political transformation?
Origins of the Grass-Mud Horse In early 2009, a creature called the grass-mud horse appeared in an online music video which became an immediate viral hit. Building the Lexicon How You Can Help About China Digital Times. China executes Tiananmen Square 'attackers' Tiananmen Square, Then and Now - In Focus. Twenty-three years ago today, the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) violently cleared Beijing's Tiananmen Square of protesters, ending a six-week demonstration that had called for democracy and widespread political reform.
The protests began in April of 1989, gaining support as initial government reactions included concessions. Martial law was declared on May 20, troops were mobilized, and from the night of June 3 through the early morning of June 4, the PLA pushed into Tiananmen Square, crushing some protesters and firing on many others. The exact number killed may never be known, but estimates range from several hundred to several thousand. Today, China's censors are blocking Internet access to the terms "six four," "23," "candle," and "never forget," broadening extensive efforts to silence talk about the 23rd anniversary of China's bloody June 4 crackdown. Use j/k keys or ←/→ to navigate Choose: In Tibet and Uyghur Regions, Internet Blackouts Are the Norm. Student-led protest in Chabcha county, Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Photo by Students for a Free Tibet via Flickr (CC BY 2.0) … as we approached Aba County, something changed.
I stopped getting messages on WeChat and QQ, China’s most popular mobile apps…When I tried to load e-mail, an error occurred: “Could not authenticate cellular data network: PDP authentication failure.” I still had a signal—the little 3G icon was there and everything. But the signal didn’t seem to contain any data. Stories of Internet censorship in China often focus on surveillance and social media filtering, practices that violate the rights to free expression and privacy of all users in mainland China. But those living in remote, embattled ethnic minority regions of the country face a far more bleak reality when it comes to using the Internet. This kind of “political punishment” began in Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures with 2008 political riots in Lhasa. Man Details Risks in Exposing China’s Forced Labor.
Scrawling in wobbly English on a sheet of onionskin paper, the writer said he was imprisoned at a labor camp in this northeastern Chinese town, where he said inmates toiled seven days a week, their 15-hour days haunted by sadistic guards. “Sir: If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization,” said the note, which was tucked between two ersatz tombstones and fell out when the woman, Julie Keith, opened the box in her living room last October. “Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.” The letter drew international news media coverage and widespread attention to China’s opaque system of “re-education through labor,” a collection of penal colonies where petty criminals, religious offenders and critics of the government can be given up to four-year sentences by the police without trial. If Mr. Last December, Ms. For Ms. China: Tibetan Immolations, Security Measures Escalate | Human Rights Watch | Rights & Liberties.
China sentences Uighur to life for reporting riots. Study Finds China Censorship Of Social Media Is Real, Pervasive. China's death row TV hit, Interviews Before Execution. Rebecca MacKinnon: Inside China’s censorship machine. In a new book, excerpted below, former CNN correspondent Rebecca MacKinnon explains how Beijing, and its loyal corporate minions, scrub ‘disharmonious’ material from the Chinese Web: In fall 2009, I sat in a large auditorium festooned with red banners and watched as Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, paraded onstage with executives from 19 other companies to receive the “China Internet Self-Discipline Award.” Officials from the quasi-governmental Internet Society of China praised them for fostering “harmonious and healthy Internet development.” In the Chinese regulatory context, “healthy” is a euphemism for “porn-free” and “crime-free.”
“Harmonious” implies prevention of activity that would provoke social or political disharmony. China’s censorship system is complex and multilayered. These blocks can be circumvented by people who know how to use anti-censorship software tools. Apple’s iPad and the Human Costs for Workers in China. Free Speech | Ai Weiwei | Chinese security. Please support our site by enabling javascript to view ads. BEIJING, China — China has released two of its best-known critics in the past week, but managed to silence both of them. And they’re not alone. In the months since failed calls for revolution in Beijing triggered a massive security response, scores of critics of the regime have been muzzled and gagged through various means.
In every case, it appears authorities have made it clear the risk of speaking out is greater than the burden of keeping quiet. Artist Ai Weiwei was released on bail Wednesday, while activist and blogger Hu Jia completed his three-and-a-half-year prison term and reunited with his family early Sunday morning. So how does the government effectively force its fiercest critics into silence? “The goal was to make it clear to people that there are new rules, there’s a new sheriff in town.” ~Joshua Rosenzweig, Dui Hua Foundation “They told me to be a good citizen and don't clash with the system. China-based corporate web behind troubled Africa resource deals. For centuries, wave after wave of colonists and foreign investors have swept through Africa, looking for profits from the continent’s abundant reserves of oil and prized minerals. Many instead left records of corruption and broken promises of shared wealth with Africans.
It is against this backdrop that an eager conglomerate has recently been drawing attention and generating headlines throughout Africa. China-Sonangol is part of a global network of companies extracting oil in Angola, buying gold in Zimbabwe, building luxury condominiums in Singapore and developing property in Manhattan. Its executives have met with African heads of state and challenged the global oil and mining giants who’ve been operating on the continent. And China Sonangol ventures have attracted strategic curiosity — some of its deals are the subjects of U.S.
China Sonangol has shown itself to be innovative and well-connected. New business model CIF’s first major foray into Africa was in 2005. The Angola connection. Urges Microsoft and Cisco to Reconsider China. This week saw two disappointing decisions by two major American companies, Microsoft and Cisco, that appear to be choosing to become little tech helpers to China's repressive regime rather than choosing to be a force for good.
For Cisco, it's more of the same. For Microsoft, it's a disappointing turn. China’s Internet censorship is perhaps the most pervasive and its filtering system most sophisticated. The Chinese government requires all companies operating there, whether Western or Chinese, to engage in an opaque self-censorship practice limiting access to any content that could potentially undermine state control, including but not at all limited to political content, information about minority groups, and a vast array of proxies and circumvention tools. Google’s 2006 entry into the country ended four years later when, following a series of cyberattacks originating from China, the search giant decided to stop self-censoring results, effectively ending their business there.
Microsoft. Action: Report: Cisco Joins China In Developing Massive Surveillance Network : The Two-Way. Chinese laborers adjust a surveillance camera at Tiananmen Square in 2007 in Beijing, China. Guang Niu/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Guang Niu/Getty Images Chinese laborers adjust a surveillance camera at Tiananmen Square in 2007 in Beijing, China. In a piece today, the Wall Street Journal reports that Cisco Systems Inc. will help China build a massive surveillance network in the city of Chongqing. But the bigger question that the piece is concerned with is whether that equipment will be used by the Chinese government to crackdown on dissent and what responsibility does a Western company bear when it does business with a government like China?
The Journal did not talk to Cisco, but it did get a hold of Hewlett-Packard, which expects to make a bid on the project dubbed Peaceful Chongqing: Jena McGregor, at the Washington Post, thinks about the issue and says that, indeed, questioning the motive of every potential client does not a sale make. India’s anti-bribe campaign inspires Chinese netizens. The anti-corruption movement in India, which has acquired fever pitch in recent months, is proving contagious, and is influencing people in China, which too faces just as serious a problem with corruption.
In recent days, Chinese netizens have launched three anti-bribery whistleblowers’ website, inspired by an Indian website – ipaidabribe.com – where users can anonymously post details of bribes that they either paid or refused to pay. Chinese netizens have launched three anti-bribery whistleblowers’ website, inspired by an Indian website ipaidabribe.com. Screen grab from ipaidabribe.com The Chinese-language websites – ibribery.com and woxinghuile.info (which in Chinese means ‘I paid a bribe’) and 522phone.com – have proved enormously popular: they’ve drawn over 5 million hits and a blizzard of posts in just days, forcing their servers to crash. The websites’ administrators urge visitors to “expose bribery” but not resort to slanders and lies against honest people. 四维罗子 - Siweiluozi's Blog: Liu Xiaoyuan on the Investigation of Alleged "Tax Evasion" by Ai Weiwei. At a time when so many other outspoken lawyers in China have been silenced, he is one of a handful who continue to speak out publicly about sensitive cases.
When, as frequently happens, one of his blog posts is taken down by censors at Sina, he posts the notification he receives. (Sometimes, even those messages get censored.) Liu is also one of the few Chinese rights lawyers still actively posting to Twitter. That might be because, for over a month, he's been on a kind of "probation" over at Sina Weibo, where every post needs to be examined first before it can be put online. Lately, Liu has been especially vocal about the case of his friend, the artist Ai Weiwei, who disappeared into police custody on 3 April. Late last week, in a terse notice, the Xinhua News Service issued the first confirmation that Ai had been placed under "residential surveillance" (jianshi juzhu) while police investigated alleged tax evasion by his company, Beijing Fake Cultural Development. 1.
Siweiluozi's Blog: "I've Only Begun to Scratch the Surface": Liu Shihui Reveals Details of 108-Day Detention | Rights & Liberties. Besieged Monks 'Tortured' Chinese officials increase the pressure on Tibetan monks in a political 're-education' campaign. Watch a video of the increased security presence in Ngaba county Chinese authorities in southwestern Sichuan province have detained and tortured Tibetan monks amid a siege of a major monastery there, according to exile sources. Tensions have been running high at the besieged monastery of Kirti in Sichuan's Ngaba prefecture, which is home to some 2,500 Tibetan monks who say they are now running out of food. The siege of the monastery was sparked by the death of a monk last month in a self-immolation protest against Beijing's rule. A number of detentions, beatings, and attacks on unarmed local people with trained police dogs have been reported since. Exile sources now say that Chinese authorities are increasing the pressure with a concerted political "re-education" campaign inside the monastery, and the detention and torture of Kirti monks.
Monks tied to trees Nomads pressured The U.S. Chinese riots enter third day | World news. Rioters burned police and fire vehicles in a third day of unrest in southern China's manufacturing heartlands, witnesses have reported. Hong Kong broadcasters reported that armed police fired teargas as they sought to disperse the crowd and detained at least a dozen demonstrators. The clashes, which began on Friday after a fracas between security officers and a pregnant street vendor in Xintang, Guangdong province, highlight Chinese authorities' struggle to control social frustrations. It is thought that most protesters were migrant workers like the vendor. Last week hundreds of migrant workers clashed with police in Chaozhou, also in Guangdong, following a dispute over unpaid wages.
In Lichuan, Hubei, as many as 2,000 protesters attacked government headquarters last Thursday after a local politician who had complained about official corruption died in police custody. Unrest is thought to have become increasingly frequent, although data is hard to come by. Three Detained in Kardze. More Tibetans are held following the fourth week of anti-China protests. Three people, including two nuns, have been detained in separate incidents following protests against Chinese rule in a Tibetan region of Southwestern Sichuan province on Tuesday, according to sources with contacts in the area. “Two nuns staged a protest in Kardze (in Chinese, Ganzi) county seat during the early hours of June 28,” said a reporter from Delhi, India, who spoke with people in the region.
“The two nuns are Kunga Choezom, 22, and Deckyi Lhamo, 18, of the Gyemadra Nunnery in Kardze county,” he said. “They held up slogans in the town calling for the return of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, independence for Tibet, and freedom to practice religion.” The reporter said that a third Tibetan had been detained for protesting on the same day. “Another Tibetan named Karma Yeshi was also detained when he protested in Kardze town,” he said. “His details are not available.” Tight security “They threw leaflets in the air.