around the blogosphere:  Chinese citizens are climbing the Great Firewall to read the Twitter posts of an adult film star... The Falun Gong may be banned in China, but followers are finding ways to spread the word that the CCP kills Falun Gong members and harvests their organs... A Renmin University graduate created a stir when he attended a presentation by Yunnan's Propaganda Bureau and threw 30RMB worth of fifty cent notes (wu mao) at the presenter (English translation here).

Prolific Twitterer and Chinese human rights lawyer Teng Biao continues to follow the story of three men who staged a hunger strike to protest their death sentences in a murder case. According to Teng, the situation is "growing desperate!" LRF has translated his latest tweets and posted them below.  To see Teng's earlier tweets about the case, as translated by LRF, click here.

#lpya Tweets from Teng Biao in Chronological Order (Oldest to Newest) Part II

江西乐平无辜公民被以故意杀人罪判死缓，多年申诉无果，方春平、黄志强和陈发根自2月23日早在景德镇监狱3绝食，现已100小时。采访电话：13155771226；13241918519；13910576638 #lpya #deathpenalty
Leping, Jiangxi Province-Innocent citizens were wrongfully sentenced to deferred death sentence for intentional homicide, Fang Chunping, Huang Zhijiang, and Cheng Fagen have been on a hunger strike since February 23rd, totaling 3 days! Interview phone numbers: 13155771226；13241918519；13910576638 #lpya #deathpenalty

死刑冤案： 3名公民正在景德镇监狱绝食 #lpya #sixing http://tengbiao.blog.sohu.com/144911410.html
Wrongful Death Sentence: 3 citizens in Jingdezhen prison are on a hunger strike #lpya #sixinghttp://tengbiao.blog.sohu.com/144911410.html

江西乐平无辜公民被以故意杀人罪判死缓，方春平、黄志强和程发根自2月23日早在景德镇监狱绝食，现已4天，生命危急！！！家长13155771226；监狱07982662967；13979865126 律师13241918519 #lpya
Leping, Jiangxi Province-Innocent citizens were wrongfully sentenced to deferred death sentence for intentional homicide, Fang Chunping, Huang Zhijiang, and Cheng Fagen have been on a hunger strike since February 23rd, totaling 4 days and the situation is growing desperate! Lawyer  13241918519 Prosecutor’s office 0791-8312947 Family  13155771226 Prison 07982662967#lpya

Chinese human rights lawyer Teng Biao has been closely following the case of three men in China who, Teng tweets, have been wrongly accussed of murder and sentenced to death. While the men started a hunger strike to protest their sentence, Teng took to Twitter to let the world know about their plight. 

Teng asked for help this morning translating his tweets into English and LRF wanted to help out.  See his tweets and our translation below:

#lpya Tweets from Teng Biao in Chronological Order (Oldest to Newest)

1. 景德镇监狱3名公民绝食仍在继续。江西乐平4名无辜公民被以故意杀人罪判死缓，多年申诉无果，方春平、黄志强和陈发根三人自23日早晨起开始绝食。要求还其清白。滕彪、许志永、李和平、张赞宁等多名学者律师长期关注此案。 #lpya

In Jingdezhen prison, 3 innocent men started a hunger strike yesterday morning to protest the death sentences they received from a murder case they have been appealing for years with no success. The case of Fang Chunping, Huang Zhijiang and Chen Fagen has been closely followed by Teng Biao, Xu Zhiyong, Li Heping, Zhang Zanning and other legal scholars for a long time.

2. 从1999年9月9日和2000年5月24日，江西乐平市连续发生了两次杀人、抢劫、强奸大案，乐平市公安局无法找到真凶，为了破案，对方春平等四人采取了残酷的刑讯逼供，生不如死，不得已违心承认。但被打出来的口供与其他物证之间没有任何关联。 #lpya

From September 9, 1999 to May 24, 2000, there were two consecutive incidences of rape, homicide and robbery in Leping city, Jiangxi Province.  When the Leping Public Security Bureau was unable to find a legitimate suspect, they decided to detain Fang Chunping and 3 others, all of whom are unrelated to the case, and cruelly tortured them for days to withdraw a false confession.

(Read more after the jump)

I'm in the process of pulling together a presentation on the special tension between security and openness faced by organizations like the Laogai Research Foundation, who serve the impossible-to-secure dissidents of the repressive Chinese Communist Party.  So I was particularly interested, in light of our Twitter campaign to Free Liu Xiaobo, and our own interest in how the growing community of Chinese dissidents on Twitter have managed to create a much-needed public forum, in the question posed yesterday by C. Custer - "Is it a trap?"

Is Twitter a trap?  Custer certainly makes a compelling argument that Twitter, as an immensely popular micro-blogging service, provides a lovely pool of material for "would-be prosecutors to compile evidence of thoughtcrime".  And he certainly doesn't overstate the danger involved in public dissent in China - Just last week activist Tan Zuoren was sentenced to 5 years in prison for reporting on the Sichuan earthquake and the Beijing Municipal High Court rejected the appeal of democracy activist Liu Xiaobo.  There is reason to be concerned about the safety of the Twitter community of Chinese dissidents, and to a certain extent the platform is the responsibility of its creator.  (Read more after the jump)

There was a great op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday arguing that China's Internet censorship amounts to protectionism. That China has been censorsing and even blocking Western media entirely seems unfair from a free trade standpoint (and even makes their attempts to infiltrate the global news media market seem a bit hypocritical). This WSJ editorial notes that when China joined the WTO China agreed to "give unlimited access and equal treatment to foreign-based or foreign owned business in ... online services." And there is even precedent: China recently lost an appeal to the WTO and is now being forced to allow foreign books, movies, and music to be distributed freely (although China has not yet complied with the ruling).

Perhaps China could, depending on interpretation, block media services that receive funding from foreign governments, like the BBC or NPR. But when it comes to for-profit sites such as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter, all of which have been totally blocked in China for months now, there is no good economic argument to allow for the blocked access. China has the largest population of Internet users in the world, and these companies are being denied access by the Chinese government to what should be one of their greatest opportunities. This drives home the point that the choice between economic and political freedom that China has tried to make is simply impossible in a global economy that is based more and more on information rather than physical goods. China's restrictions on speech, particularly online, is directly causing companies based outside of China to lose money (i.e. protectionism).  (Read more after the jump)

Six weeks ago, Chinese Twitter micro-bloggers made a quite a splash on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall through the online Berlin Twitterwall.  It was reported by October 29 that over 1,500 Tweets had been scrawled in Chinese across the site, most drawing apt parallels between the Berlin Wall and the "Great Firewall" of China.  The remarkable twist of this story was that these Chinese commenters "scaled" that very same cyber-wall to make their thousands of protests - Twitter has long been banned in China.  

Yet Chinese Twitter users are a growing presence on the popular micro-blogging platform, as we discovered firsthand.  During our ten-day campaign  protesting the continued imprisonment of Chinese writer and dissident Liu Xiaobo, of the 395 Tweets and Followers collected by our Twitter petition, 337 were in Chinese.  (Read more after the jump)

Due to the overwhelming response we received to our campaign (to date we have 473 follows, hundreds more retweets, and have made it onto 14 Twitter lists), and in protest of Liu's harsh eleven year prison sentence, we've decided to keep the Twitter campaign going! Click here to join the campaign, and watch the LRF website for updates as the campaign progresses!

395 Join the Twitter Campaign to Free Liu Xiaobo

To mark the one year anniversary of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo's detention, the Laogai Research Foundation ran a ten-day Twitter campaign to advocate for Mr. Liu's release. The campaign is now over, and we are pleased to report that 395 people, the majority of whom were Chinese, joined our campaign! We will now send letters demanding Mr. Liu's freedom to Chinese President Hu Jintao, the Chinese Embassy in DC, and the Supreme People's Procuratorate of China (the judicial organ responsible for Mr. Liu's case). We will also send a copy to President Obama. A copy of the letter can be seen below.

We would like to thank everyone who participated in this campaign. LRF founder Harry Wu was freed in 1995 due to international advocacy, and that is why we have reason to hope that continued international pressure will lead to Liu Xiaobo's release.

Over the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, China’s censorship authorities were working overtime, blocking access to Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, and other popular sites. Attempting to squelch information and opinion that would damage China’s Communist Party’s reputation, the CCP even “detained a number of political dissidents seen as threats to public order during the anniversary period,” the New York Times reported.

According to Reporter Without Borders, “The information blackout has been enforced so effectively for 20 years that most young Chinese are completely unaware of this major event.” “Twenty years later, it is still impossible for the Chinese media to refer freely to the ruthless suppression of China’s pro-democracy movement in June 1989.”