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.

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).

...we're on the Huffington Post!　LRF's Washington, DC Director Nicole Kempton and our Deputy Director Megan Fluker are contributers to the "The Internet's Newspaper".

Make sure you check out their LRF related contributions China's Horrid One Child Policy Continues and Calling It Quits?.

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.

The film industry and Chinese government have maintained a confusing relationship in the public eye for a considerable time.  Whether that is the result of Hollywood’s vocal attempts to stop the “ubiquitous and very cheap” nature of pirated DVD’s in mainland China, or China’s confusing and occasionally contradictory policies for filmmakers, is rather hard to say.  However, some recent actions by Chinese officials have led many to believe China is trying its hands at a new export:  censorship.  According to the BBC, before the start of this year’s Melbourne film festival, the local Chinese consulate called the executive director of the festival in an attempt to convince the director to pull the film “The 10 Conditions of Love” about exiled Uyghur activist Rebiya Kadeer.  When the festival decided to go ahead with the film, they were “subjected to an intense campaign of threats, intimidation and disruption” and “hackers managed to … mak[e] it appear that session tickets had been sold out.” 

Unfortunately, China’s attempts to censor international events is becoming an increasingly common occurrence.  When “The 10 Conditions of Love” was screened four times at the Kaohsiung Film Festival in Taiwan, China threatened a tourism boycott.  And when the Frankfurt Book Fair, billed the “worldwide marketplace for ideas”, invited Chinese writers Dai Qing and Bei Ling to present at the fair, China demanded the writers be banned.

According to Dai Qing, "China is using its economic influence to threaten its trade partners in order to censor what they don't like.”