According to the authoritative Black Book of Communism, an estimated 65 million Chinese died as a result of Mao’s repeated, merciless attempts to create a new “socialist” China. Anyone who got in his way was done away with—by execution, imprisonment or forced famine.
There appear to be fewer people in China.In a disturbing trend, the government has recently seemingly lost track of some of its most ardent critics. Most recently, the government’s inability to “locate” prominent human rights attorney Gao Zhisheng and 20 Uyghurs who were forcibly returned to China from Cambodia has become a cause for great concern in the international community.
Despite its immense system of internal travel controls and required registration, known as the Hukou system , the CCP has an extensive history of “losing” those who are hard to ignore.Prominent figures such as Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng were lost for significant periods of time during discord within the government, the Panchen Lama has been missing for over a decade, and, more recently, China has continued to lose NGO workers and protestors who portray the regime in a less than flattering light.
Largely, the cases of these “missing” persons have been met with outrage in the international community.Rosanne Rife of Amnesty International put it best when she offered, “It is a disgrace that Chinese law enforcement agencies disobey the law in such a blatant manner.” Not only is “losing” people against Chinese domestic law, but it is a blatant violation of international law as well.Hopefully, pressure from the international community can render these lost persons found before the CCP’s absent-mindedness continues.
According to this Boxun report, two Tibetan men who were arrested for their involvement in the March 2008 protests were recently sentenced by authorities. One man, a 37-year-old native of Shigatse prefecture in Tibet who grew up in India but returned to China to work with impoverished Tibetans, was sentenced to 14 years. The other, a 24-year-old from Lhasa whose father was active in Tibetan politics until he was forced into exile in 1993, was sentenced to 15 years.
The Boxun article comes as Radio Free Asia reports that two Tibetan brothers detained one month ago continue to be held without charge or trial, nor have their family members been allowed to contact them. The men are being held at a detention center in Pashoe county, in the Chamdo area of Tibet. Elsewhere in Chamdo it has been reported that three Tibetan monks from the Jorphu monastery were recently detained, two in late December and one in mid January.
An author who was one of the first signatories to Charter 08, Zhao Shiying (pen name Zhao Dagong) was released yesterday, January 25, after being held by authorities for two weeks. Mr. Zhao's wife confirmed his release, but did not mention any details of the case, saying only, "He's resting at home." Zhao is well known for being an outspoken critic of the current regime. He also serves as Secretary General of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, an organization that promotes freedom of speech worldwide. It is unclear why Mr. Zhao was detained in the first place, nor is it clear why he was suddenly released. Such harassment, however, is not unusual for Chinese dissidents.
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]
After all this business investment in the ideology of openness, it seems ridiculous for Chinese media to juxtapose Google's political imperative with its business imperative in China. There may have been a number of factors prompting Google's announcement, but it can without exaggeration be seen as another public commitment to the Open Internet. Rebecca McKinnon points out in the panel below that "[censorship] is not just a China problem... Google is making a stand about the global internet. This is really about the future of the global internet." Kudos to Google for taking that stand.