Reporters Without Borders calls on the Chinese authorities to produce evidence that detained human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, of whom there has been no news since 4 February 2009, is still alive.
“We fear the worst,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The authorities must provide his relatives with proof that he is still alive. They must give the family details about his current place of detention and must allow his wife to have direct contact with him.”
The press freedom organisation added: “If anything has happened to him while in detention, the authorities will be held responsible and those who had a direct hand in it must be identified and punished. The uncertainty about his fate has gone on long enough.”
After being sentenced for the first time to three years in prison in 2006, he was released and then rearrested several times. He was arrested for the last time in his home in Shaanxi by Public Security Department officials on 4 February 2009. When later asked what had happened to him, the police said he “disappeared” in September 2009.

China has some of the tightest media restrictions in the world
China has intensified efforts over the past year to control what the media can say, a report by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) says.
It says hundreds of regulations have been introduced since the Beijing Olympics in 2008 to restrict reporters writing on social unrest or scandals.
Journalists were told they could only use the official Xinhua news agency during the 2008 tainted baby milk row.

Despite claims by the Chinese authorities that restrictions on Internet services and communications are gradually being lifted in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, this is not the case. Official websites such as Xinhuanet.com and People.com.cn are again available but most of the Internet is still cut off seven months after the riots.
“We condemn the Chinese government’s propaganda, which is trying to give the impression that communications have been restored in Xinjiang,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Despite a few highly-publicised measures, the Internet in Xinjiang continues in practice to be cut off from the rest of the world.”

Reporters Without Borders is very worried about the state of health of online journalist and writer Huang Xiaomin, who has been detained since March 2009 in the southwestern province of Sichuan and is due to be tried on 1 February. “We urge the authorities to drop the charges against him and free him at once,” the organisation said.
Huang Xiaomin was arrested by the Jinniu district public security bureau in connection with his coverage of a 23 February demonstration outside the intermediate people’s court in the provincial capital of Chengdu for the release of cyber-dissident Huang Qi, the creator of the Tianwang website and human rights network, who has been unjustly detained since June 2008.
A contributor to several independent websites, Huang Xiaomin is accused of “disturbing the social order” although all he did was take photos of the dozen or so protesters. He has been held since April in a detention centre in the city of Leshan. His family has never been given a copy of any arrest warrant.

BEIJING — China delivered a bristling response on Monday to the United States’ demand that it investigate recent attacks on American computers from Chinese soil, saying that any suggestion that it conducted or condoned the hackers’ intrusions was “groundless and aims to denigrate China.”

The comment, in a published interview with a government spokesman, was part of a broadside in China’s state-run news media on Monday that cast the United States as a cyberhegemonist, trying to dominate the global information flow by meddling in Chinese Internet policies.

Interviews and news articles placed in major state newspapers and on prominent Web sites underscored the chill in public exchanges between the governments since Jan. 12, when Google threatened to leave China unless Beijing stopped censoring its search results.