Google Inc. has drawn up detailed plans to shut its search engine in China and is “99.9 percent” certain of going ahead with the closure, the Financial Times reported today, citing a person it didn’t name.
The company may make the decision very soon, while it will take time to carry out a closure to make sure staff don’t suffer reprisals from authorities, the paper said, citing the person as familiar with Google’s thinking. Marsha Wang, a Beijing-based spokeswoman for Google, said she had no comment on the report when reached by phone.
Google said on Jan. 12 that it will stop filtering results in China after what it called an infiltration of its technology and the e-mail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists. China yesterday called Google’s plan to defy government censorship rules “unfriendly and irresponsible.”
The gap between word and deed is often so deep in China’s political landscape that it is impossible to know where China’s leaders really stand. Premier Wen Jiabao again picked up our hopes in his recent address to the National People’s Congress (NPC), in which he talked about the importance of press and public monitoring of power. The spirit of Wen’s remarks was contradicted in dramatic fashion, however, by Hebei Governor Li Hongzhong (李鸿忠), who rebuked a Jinghua Times reporter at the NPC for asking a probing question without, as he suggested, sufficient care for the party’s propaganda discipline.
Premier Wen’s words were: “We must let the people criticize the government and monitor the government, giving full play to the supervisory role of news and public opinion, so that power is exercised in the full light of transparency!”
Chinese netizens surf the Web at an Internet cafe in Hefei, in central China's Anhui province, Jan. 25, 2007.
HONG KONG—A former student leader from China's 1989 student-led pro-democracy movement has called current online protests against government curbs on the Internet an "online Tiananmen," saying the spirit of online activists is the same as that seen 20 years ago in Beijing.
"I have seen these online forums in China," said Feng Congde, who fled China after the People's Liberation Army (PLA) cleared the capital of protesters and hunger-strikers with tanks and machine guns on the night of June 3, 1989 and in the days that followed.
Many of China's Web users are disgruntled at the increasing failure of Internet circumvention tools to get around the Chinese government's sophisticated set of blocks and censorship filters known as the Great Firewall (GFW).
China’s police are again facing criticism after the latest in a string of embarrassing detainee deaths. Three top police officers in Lushan County, Henan, lost their jobs and four more officers face criminal prosecution following the death of Wang Yahui, a suspected thief who died suddenly in the county detention center on February 21, three days after being taken into custody.
A police official initially told a local television station that Wang had died after drinking some hot water during his interrogation, a claim immediately subjected to derision online. Wang’s family members demanded an autopsy after finding injuries to his chest, arms, head, and genitals, injuries that ultimately forcing police to accept responsibility for his death.
In April 2009, China’s State Council Information Office and Ministry of Foreign Affairs jointly released the “National Human Rights Action Plan (2009–2010),” which it promoted as a document guiding all government departments’ human rights work during the two-year period. In a section on guaranteeing the rights of the person, the plan makes clear that torture and illegal detention are prohibited under Chinese law and that violators are subject to criminal prosecution. Unlike elsewhere in the plan, no new concrete measures were introduced to address abuses in the criminal justice system, giving the impression that existing legislation and enforcement efforts are adequate to do the job.
Propaganda authorities are serious when it comes to ensuring that China’s annual Spring Festival Gala, broadcast on the official China Central Television, goes off without a hitch, or the merest hint of political incorrectness. The program, which reaches an estimated one billion people worldwide, is meant to be a sequin-studded display of wholesome national pride and unity.
This year, however, despite layer upon layer of censorship, officials overlooked a rather critical detail in a comedy skit by famous comedian Zhao Benshan (赵本山), which seemed to trivialize an issue on which government policy is firm.
Zhao, in his role as a simple peasant in the countryside, sits on the stoop outside his home, when two men — one with a video camera hoisted over his shoulder — come by introducing themselves as “online journalists.” They work for an imaginary Sohu.com program called “Seeking the Root of the Matter” (刨根问底). They want to interview Zhao’s character and make the interview available “to the whole world” via the Internet.