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.”
 

This article from BBC News is so bizarre it is almost comical. A group of book salesmen were handing out pamphlets on a lecture at a primary school in Zhejiang Province. Somehow, a rumor spread that these men were actually a child trafficking gang trying to kidnap the students. Angry parents mobbed the five salesmen and beat them, according to reports from the local police. Eventually the police broke up the mob and sent the salesmen to a local hospital, but one of the men was beaten so severely he died soon afterwards. 

Assuming this report is true – and reports emerging from local police in China should always be taken with a grain of salt – it highlights several underlying human rights issues. The first issue is media censorship and the likelihood of rumors leading to violence in China (remember the Guangdong toy factory?). Rumors are common worldwide, but in China they are particularly dangerous for two reasons: one, due to media censorship, people trust rumors more than they trust what they see in the media; and two, because local officials, particularly police, are so often corrupt, upon hearing a rumor people in China are likely to turn to vigilante justice, rather than calling the police.

Not only does Green Dam censorship software contain gaping security flaws, it also (allegedly) contains stolen code from a U.S. software company.  According to the Associated Press,  “Solid Oak Software of Santa Barbara said Friday that parts of its filtering software, which is designed for parents, are being used in the “Green Dam-Youth Escort” filtering software.” The company plans to pursue legal action, but is still “trying to assess” the situation.

Having been  “ridiculed for sloppy programing, possible intellectual property violations and… security holes,” Green Dam Youth Escort has turned into a public relations disaster.  An opinion piece in Forbes notes, “This move was so ham-fisted that it provoked exactly what the government doesn’t want: a raging public controversy about government censorship.”

The Chinese government is on the defensive after its mandate requiring web filtration software on all computers stirred a huge controversy.  In the party’s official paper, the Guangming Daily, a report called “the software a breakthrough in the drive for a ‘civilized Internet’”.  State television even claimed that the “filtering was endorsed by a ‘vast number’ of parents and experts.”  Who these vast number of supporters are and where they have been voicing their support is anyone’s guess.

Rather, reports about the flaws and the outright absurdity of the mandate are surfacing in great numbers.  The Wall Street Journal Blog reports that some internet users have started substituting “the words for Green Dam (绿坝, pronounced lüba in Mandarin) with homophones that translate as ‘filter bully’ (滤霸) or ‘donkey king’ (驴霸).”

On June 8, the New York Times reported that China “issued a sweeping directive requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include sophisticated software that can filter out pornography and other ‘unhealthy information’ from the Internet”.

This new software called “Green Dam Youth Escort” has been developed by Jinhui, a company with close relations to China’s security ministry and military — making the prospect of abuse all the more worrisome.

The announcement of the software mandate, scheduled to be in place by July 1, has caused a great stir in China and abroad.  According to Reuters, “a Chinese lawyer has demanded a public hearing” on the “lawfulness and reasonableness” of the mandate, also noting that the plan “lacks a legal basis.”  Other community leaders are even “preparing a mass petition to mobilize opposition to the software”.

Over the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, China’s censorship authorities were working overtime, blocking access to Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, and other popular sites. Attempting to squelch information and opinion that would damage China’s Communist Party’s reputation, the CCP even “detained a number of political dissidents seen as threats to public order during the anniversary period,” the New York Times reported.

According to Reporter Without Borders, “The information blackout has been enforced so effectively for 20 years that most young Chinese are completely unaware of this major event.” “Twenty years later, it is still impossible for the Chinese media to refer freely to the ruthless suppression of China’s pro-democracy movement in June 1989.”