A victim of China’s oppressive authoritarian regime for most of his life, Liu Xianbin has repeatedly spoken out for human rights and democracy while sacrificing his own freedom. Liu and Chinese dissident writers Du Daobin and Zhou Yuanzhi are plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Cisco, Systems Inc., currently pending in Federal Court in Maryland. Over the past decade, Cisco has enabled the Chinese Ministry of Public Security to crack down on dissent through highly sophisticated internet surveillance technology, known as the “Golden Shield Project”. Were it not for Cisco’s help , the Chinese Communist Party may not have had the tools and technology to persecute, punish and torture Liu for his peaceful and non-violent internet activities. (Download pdf of translated articles from Cisco's Chinese website about PSB business deals here.)

Born in 1968 in Sichuan Province, Liu Xianbin was attending Renmin University in Beijing when the pro-democracy student movement swept China. He participated in the 1989 protests, including the blocking of military vehicles in Tiananmen Square. Having lost faith in Communist Party rule, Liu helped to organize an anti-communist group and began writing articles criticizing the repression and violent crackdown of the Tiananmen incident and pushing for the establishment of a democratic party. For these "crimes", he was arrested in 1991 and eventually sentenced to 2.5 years in prison on charges of "counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement," yet this was only the beginning of Liu’s activism.

Du Daobin is one of the earliest cyber dissident writers in China.  By the time of his detention in October 2003, he had published tens of articles on the internet at home and abroad. In June 2004 he was charged with “inciting to subvert state power” and sentenced to 3 years’ imprisonment. Instead of serving his prison sentence immediately, it was postponed while he spent 4 years under probation. In June of 2008, on the eve of the Summer Olympics to be held in China, the authorities accused Du of disobeying the rules of probation, as he had continued to write articles critical of the regime. Thus, after four years of probation, Mr. Du was sent to serve his 3-year prison term. While in prison, he was subjected to physical and psychological torture and was held under the most stringent control.  He was forced to sit on a low bench for two months, which led to cardiac prolapse. After this incident, due to malnutrition and potassium deficiency, he lost his ability to walk and for a long time he was dependent on a wheelchair. Although today he is free and able to walk, Du remains under close watch. Who is this man that China views as such a threat, and what is it about his writings that has the government so nervous?

Du Daobin was born in Wuhan, Hubei Province in 1964. Formerly an employee of the district government, Du was a firm believer of communism. He read the works of Marx, Lenin, and Mao Zedong and took up writing poetry. After the tragic events of the 1989 protests, Du sympathized with the students and strongly opposed the killing that occurred. Before officially becoming a Party member, he retracted his application. He began to write works in support of the democracy movement and since 1997 he has been exploring the ideas of liberalism and promoting China's path to democracy. Originally a supporter of the movement, as Du became more outspoken, he too became a victim of the government’s crackdown on freedom of speech. Starting in 2001, Du published articles on a number of Chinese websites, calling for fair treatment of city and rural dwellers, social security and fair wages for farmers, and for the abolishment of the discriminatory policies of usury towards farmers. He also published articles on foreign websites, severely criticizing Chinese Communist Party ideals and the one-party dictatorship system and policy.

It’s hard not to feel let down by the US-China Human Rights Dialogue which took place at the end of last week.  As many others have already pointed out, China doesn’t really take it seriously.  After all, they sent Chen Xu, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director General for International Organizations.  When you Google him, the Chen Xu in question doesn’t even come up on the first page of search results.  And as Sophie Richardson pointed out in her post for Foreign Policy, the “Chinese officials spend their visit just trying to run out the clock.” But as the previous eight years have taught us, a minor human rights dialogue is better than no dialogue at all.

The focus of the discussion was primarily around rule of law in China, undoubtedly a critical piece in the drive towards encouraging China to be a more responsible international stakeholder.  Ideally, these talks have set the scene for the continuation of the conversation in the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) taking place in China on May 24-25, but you can’t help but feel that the timing of the Human Rights Dialogue provides a convenient out for human rights to be sidelined during the S&ED. When I read the State Department briefing on the S&ED this morning, there was no mention of human rights, and no indication that human rights issues will be raised at the meeting. As Elizabeth Lynch of China Law & Policy has written, the Chinese government places much more importance on the S&ED, and human rights issues raised there, on Chinese soil, are likely to have much more of an actual impact. 

As the years go by, it makes less and less sense to separate the two dialogues anyway.  Specifically,

-On cybersecurity:  The US is just now waking up to the issue of cybersecurity.  There is good evidence to suggest that while China may not be engaging in direct state-sponsored hacking of foreign corporations, government networks, and human rights activists’ emails, there is at the very least tacit approval (dare I say encouragement?) of the practice.   Those hacking the Chinese government are punished.  Those hacking foreign governments are smiled upon.  Almost every single day I walk into the office to find emails in my inbox containing tracking software or malware intended to shut down my ability to do work.  My boss, Harry Wu, receives at least five such threats each day.  In the larger scheme of things, we’re the little people who are unimportant in these sorts of dialogues, but multinational corporations, many of whom are headquartered in the US, are facing similar difficulties.  It costs American businesses a huge amount of money and time to fight these threats.  Not to mention that it would be pretty catastrophic if Chinese hackers did something like shut down a major electrical grid or something like that, which they have been shown to be capable of doing.  (Read more after the jump)

Google's China operation has been grabbing global headlines since last Tuesday, when it announced that it would plan to stop censoring Google.cn search results or pull out of China after discovering a significant attack on it's technology infrastructure.  Later Google clarified that it was interested in staying in China, but would plan to reduce censorship of its Chinese search results.  Official Chinese media has dismissed Google's human rights concerns as ridiculous, stating "Whatever the real cause for Google's possible move, this case is purely business in nature and it should have nothing to do with political ideology" and adding that it was "inappropriate to play up the issue, or turn it into a political one."  

But Google's business model is particularly dependent upon a political ideology - their own, very public, vision of the Open Internet, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to yesterday when she proclaimed that the United States "stand[s] for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas."  Google has become a particularly strong voice for this growing movement toward true openness, not merely the absence of censorship but also the active practice of business transparency, content fair use, and open technology.  Their strength in the field of technology is in no small part because of their politics, and while it is true that they submitted to censorship to enter Chinese markets in 2006, in many other ways they've continued investing in the "openness" movement at home (and, of course, sparking controversy within it).  [Read more after the jump]

...in China, that is.  According to Facebook's latest statistics as reported by the China Realtime Report (h/t China Digital Times), the website only has 14,000 active users in China - out of China's over 298 million users total.

Facebook's dismal outlook in China is perhaps more of a testiment to the Communist Party's distate for free forums and uncensored status updates than Facebook's inability to capture the imagination of Chinese users -- afterall, in July of this year, Facebook had a million active users in China.  Unlike other notable corporations who willingly impede freedom of speech (Google), or worse, cooperate with the CCP to track and turn over political dissidents (Cisco and Yahoo, respectively), Facebook has apparently taken a higher road.

The price Facebook will pay for not censoring users (at least to the extent the Chinese government would require), is joining the ranks of other popular websites which encourage users to express themselves - politically, personally, or otherwise. That list, compiled by Lost Laowai, follows after the jump: