A late-night quickie:

The European Parliament on Thursday awarded its top human rights prize to jailed Chinese dissident Hu Jia despite warnings from China that its relations with the 27-nation bloc would be seriously damaged if it did so.

In selecting Hu to receive the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, the European lawmakers said they are “sending out a signal of clear support to all those who support human rights in China.” Hu has advocated for the rights of Chinese citizens with HIV-AIDS and chronicled the arrest, detention and abuse of other activists.

After I posted a few weeks ago that I felt Hu was deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize, I had an opportunity to discuss his career with friends of mine (Westerners involved in government) who are much more familiar with his activities than I. Since then, I’ve had rather mixed feelings about Hu Jia.

His arrest is certainly prima facie evidence that today’s CCP retains much of the prickly, pig-headed, uptight, asinine qualities of yore. And yet, there’s no denying Hu was often a self-promoter, practically shouting at the government, “Arrest me,” especially considering his timing. (He was warned that such antics right before the Olympic Games would not be tolerated, and he persisted in a most in-your-face manner.) None of that even begins to justify his arrest, but maybe it raises questions about Hu’s judgment and motivations?

Hu did dedicate much of his time to raising awareness of AIDS and environmental issues in China. But my friends, one of whom works at the United Nations, challenged me about what Hu has actually done aside from draw attention to himself and get himself arrested. I mentioned a project he launched to help AIDS orphans in Henan, and they countered that it was more hype than anything else. “Basically he wrote some emails,” my friend countered. “Do we award the Nobel Prize to someone who just sent out emails?” Before anyone jumps on a high horse and says I’m slandering Hu Jia (whom I’ve defended many times on this blog), please understand I am only saying I don’t know – that maybe he’s an example of our emotions (mine included) making us jump to conclusions. Or maybe he actually did deserve the Nobel Prize. As I said, mixed feelings.

Whether he deserves the Sakharov Prize is up for debate, as with any prize for political activism. In any case, if this inspires greater scrutiny of China’s repressive tendencies, paranoia and eagerness to arrest anyone who threatens to shed light on them, then I’m glad Hu Jia won.

I meant to put up a one-liner, and suddenly it became a tome. Good night.

Check out these exraordinary posts over at China Smack – both the video and the post. Shocking. And get a load of those comments. Some try to justify it (of course). But I don’t think there is any way to justify what the police did, even if the 22-year-old student was being a violent jerk. Nothing can justify this. Nothing.

Just rewatched the video. Unfuckingbelievable. Maybe it’s an Internet hoax? Something about it doesn’t make sense, especially the student’s sudden lunge and punch… Why?

A final link for the night, and it’s a good one. Artists in China have to go to great lengths to get their works approved, often to no avail. An interesting and unusual look at what the Propaganda Department does, how the censors operate, how artists seek to second-guess them, and the effects of their efforts on Chinese talent.

A tiny snip, and then the computer goes off.

About the intellectuals, Mao Zedong often remarked, “If they don’t listen to us, we won’t give them food.” This kind of dependence on the state for one’s physical existence has handicapped Chinese writers and artists and intensified their self-censorship. Worse, China’s literary apparatus automatically excludes and isolates writers who are determined to exist outside it. Every now and then, some young writers raise a war cry against the Writers’ Union, but the truth is that most writers, old and young, are eager to join it.

Is it that hard to figure out why?

Wait. That is not my theory, but that of the author of an article written more than four years ago that a reader pointed me to and that I recommend you read. Not because it’s necessarily right, but because it’s fascinating to see where we actually stand four years after the writer’s prediction.

Today, the currency and export policy of China is anchored around its peg to the dollar. The main reason for this is that by artificially undervaluing its own currency, and therefore overvaluing the dollar, China artificially stimulates its manufacturing exports. The second reason is that by buying the excess U.S. dollars and reinvesting them in U.S. government bonds, it acts as a foreign lender to the United States. The third reason is that this foreign lending stimulates American demand for Chinese manufacturing exports and allows the Chinese government to relieve its current unemployment problems… No doubt, most of these loans will turn out to be very expensive because they will be repaid with greatly depreciated dollars, which in turn will exacerbate down the road the growing financial distress of the banking sector in China.

Therefore, it is clear that China travels today the road to Depression. How severe this depression will be, will critically depend on two developments. First, how much longer the Chinese government will pursue the inflationary policy, and second how doggedly it will fight the bust. The longer it expands and the more its fights the bust, the more likely it is that the Chinese Depression will turn into a Great Depression. Also, it is important to realize that just like America’s Great Depression in the 1930s triggered a worldwide Depression, similarly a Chinese Depression will trigger a bust in the U.S., and therefore a recession in the rest of the world.

Unless there is an unforeseen banking, currency, or a derivative crisis spreading throughout the world, it is my belief that the Chinese bust will occur sometime in 2008-2009, since the Chinese government will surely pursue expansionary policies until the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in China. By then, inflation will be most likely out of control, probably already in runaway mode, and the government will have no choice but to slam the brakes and induce contraction. In 1929 the expansion stopped in July, the stock market broke in October, and the economy collapsed in early 1930. Thus, providing for a latency period of approximately half a year between credit contraction and economic collapse, based on my Olympic Games timing, I would pinpoint the bust for 2009. Admittedly, this is a pure speculation on my part; naturally, the bust could occur sooner or later.

Of course, macro-economic predictions like this usually prove to be far off the mark (except those made by me), the most (in)famous perhaps being Gordon Chang’s prediction of “The Coming Collapse of China.” In the case of the article above, the story seems to have occurred almost in reverse – a US (and increasingly European) crisis is what is plunging the world into a recesion, not government-generated inflation in China. America’s economic crisis, not China’s, was the catalyst for the tailspin, and if China is be plunged into a depression, it will be for reasons very different from what the author envisaged. (He was shrewd enough to say that his theory might be offset by “an unforeseen banking, currency, or a derivative crisis spreading throughout the world.” And what we are seeing today was certainly unseen by most in 2004.)

However…however… I honestly believe China is going to be one of the few players that emerges from the current crisis relatively unscathed (and “relatively” is a key word.). Simply because of the size of its own domestic markets and the trade it carries out in Africa and Asia. It will suffer, lots of factories will continue to close and lots of dreams will be erased and jobs lost. But it won’t be depression. What it will be, more than anything else, is a test for the CCP. Running a country the size of China with the staggering problems is hard (to say the least), but it sure helps when the economy is roaring year after year.

One of the most frequently repeated motifs is that as long as the economy is kicking, most Chinese don’t give a damn about human rights and censorship and corruption. Once things slow down and people have more time (and more fear), as they see their opportunities dimming, as they realize the joy ride they were counting on was finite while the ruling classes are doing just fine – will they lose some of that Zhongguo jia you spirit and begin to demand their government do better? Will they look at they way America ousted the Republicans, and demand that same freedom? Short answer: probably not; at least not yet. China is better positioned to weather the current storm without enough rampant misery in the cards to get people thinking about revolution. The government can still spend its way out of this mess they way it usually does. One day China will face an economic moment of truth, the way America is facing one now. I’m pretty sure this isn’t it. Yet.

I swore I wouldn’t post anything today, that I’d focus only on my homework. The Internet is such a monumental distraction. And that will be the subject of an upcoming new post.

At the risk of igniting a blog war, I feel I have to point out what might be the very worst post on China I have read in a long, long time, from a blog I respect enough to include on my blogroll. When I say bad, when I say dumb, when I say wrong – let’s just say it’s the equivalent of what I’d expect Sarah Palin to write about the Iraq war, saying how it was an exercise in successful American can-do determination and that no civilians were hurt and it all went like a cake-walk. I mean the type of post where you have to willfully block out any and all hints of truth as you arrive at your own fact-free truthiness.

It’s about the milk scandal, and it could have been written by HongXing:

While dismayed by the rogue manufacturers’ ability to abuse the public for such a long time (a year, I heard), I am relieved that eventually the scams were exposed, exclusively by forces within the Chinese society. No foreign White knight was in a position to rescue the Chinese people from their rulers and deliver them from their misery. In fact, the New Zealand diary company who owned a stake in the main culprit, Sanlu Diary Corporation, was part of the problem. The Western media have been on the sideline; their opinions on this event are largely irrelevant to the Chinese public. It has been the Chinese parents’ outrage and the Chinese media’s probing and revelations that constitute the main source of the Chinese authorities’ embarrassment and the main forces that prompted them into action. Heads have been rolling, with the resignation of a mayor and a cabinet member, and an executive’s arrest.

An indigenous and home-grown momentum of change is a hopeful sign of the Chinese society at these turbulent times. The society has demonstrated the means and resilience to channel the momentum into productive movements of improving the way businesses are supervised in particular and social activities regulated in general, developing mechanisms for righting wrongs and addressing grievances. The same resourcefulness and resilience were demonstrated in the revelation of kidnapped and enslaved teenagers in Shanxi province’s brick making factories, in the organized reactions when the snow storms in southern China stranded millions of migrant workers on their way home for the spring festival in railway stations, and when earthquake struck Sichuan.

It is heartening to observe that foreign elements and forces have little influence over the Chinese authorities, on either their legitimacy or policy preferences.

The light at the end of this dreary tunnel: the commenters on this site ripped the writer to shreds, called him out on his fact-averse approach and made a fool of him, in the spirit of the blog’s title. This post is all about looking at some of China’s most shameful recent catastrophes and pointing to each as proof of China’s greatness. Now, I’m not saying China isn’t great. It is. (That and much more.) I think America is great, but I don’t point to the Abu Ghraib photos and say there’s the proof of our greatness.

The whole things is a bit surreal, like a big practical joke, like a parody of the party propagandist transforming a nation’s flaws into virtues. And then there’s the closing sentence: “This is the silver lining I see in the scandals and disasters inflicted upon us in the year of 2008” – as if these scandals were “inflicted upon us” by some passive-voiced villain, and not by the sleazy corruption that is a defining characteristic of the CCP.

Nothing in this post seems to make any sense. It’s a Sarah Palin interview. Unless I’m missing something. Am I missing something?

Raj

The Olympics have only recently kicked off, but there is already a lot to talk about. For example, Michael Phelps is bidding to win an unprecedented eight gold medals in the swimming, something that he could quite possibly do – one down, seven to go. But regardless of whether he can reach this target or not, all Americans should feel proud of him anyway – even with a “mediocre” haul this year he would still be one of the most impressive athletes ever to contest the Games.

But perhaps some of the more interesting news deals with events surrounding the Olympics. The start was tainted by the sad murder of an American tourist, Todd Bachman, by some psychopathic Chinese man, who then himself committed suicide. But what I found even more horrifying were allegations that the Chinese authorities have been trying to sweep this under the carpet.

Chinese residents who lived and worked close to the scene of the crime appeared to be under orders not to discuss the incident. ‘Why are you paying so much attention to this? Murders happen all the time. You should pay attention to the two gold medals that China won today,’ said a middle-aged woman in a flower-patterned shirt.

Yes, so long as China tops the medal table who cares if visitors to Beijing are murdered?

We can hope that the report is wrong, but what this woman said seems like a typical result of Chinese propaganda enforcement. When people are told to ignore bad news and focus on the good, comments like these slip out. The other explanation, that this was a genuine view, would be even more terrible if it reflected a wider attitude and would indicate that Chinese nationalism being whipped up by the CCP over the Olympics is now leading many Chinese people to abandon common-sense.

Then we had the eruption of conflict in Georgia, with Russian troops responding to an attempt by Tbilisi to bring the rebel region of South Ossetia under its control – thousands may have died already. There have also been reports of gun-fights and attempted bombings in Xinjiang.

In regards to overly optimistic hopes that the Olympics would lead to greater openness/freedom in China, AP reports that human rights activist Zeng Jinyan has “disappeared”.

A Chinese human rights activist whose husband was jailed earlier this year has disappeared and may have been taken by police to prevent her from speaking to journalists during the Beijing Olympics, an overseas-based human rights group said Friday.

The group, Chinese Human Rights Defenders, said Zeng Jinyan disappeared on Thursday and has not been heard from. Zeng is married to activist Hu Jia, who was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison in April.

I’m sure the Chinese authorities will claim that she has wandered off on his own accord and have no idea where he is. That’s CCP regional monitoring at its best – its defence to detention of people who give a damn about something other than their own interests is that it has no idea what the local authorities are doing. If that’s the supposedly “efficient” Communist autocracy that we’re repeatedly told is China’s only future, God forbid that we see chaos and incompetance from the CCP.

Furthermore it appears that anyone asking for a protest permit is being turned down – what a surprise! Indeed, it’s an even better wheeze for the Chinese authorities, as they can use the lure of Olympic protest to flush out protestors and detain/arrest them. Not unlike the way Mao used the Hundred Flowers Campaign to identify and then silence his critics and potential opponents.

A housing activist who applied for permission to hold a demonstration in Beijing’s specially designated Olympic protest zones has been detained by police. The detention of Zhang Wei, whose home was demolished two years ago to make way for an upmarket development in Beijing’s Qianmen district, highlights the Chinese government’s crackdown on dissent ahead of the opening of the games on Friday.

Police detained Ms Zhang on Wednesday for allegedly “disturbing social order”, a member of her family said on Thursday. She was told Ms Zhang would be transferred to a detention centre in south Beijing, family members said.

Yes, “distburbing social order”. Otherwise known as “highlighting the not-so-heroic actions of the Chinese ruling party” and spoiling their attempts to trick the Chinese people into think that they are practically-perfect-in-every-way. This theme is continued by the laughable assertions of Wang Wei, who said that blocking websites is “good” for Chinese people.

“That’s an assessment made by the authorities of which sites are good and which are not good for our youth. It’s like what any other country does.”

Perhaps Wang would like to tell us what websites critical of the ruling Labour Party and its policies are blocked in the UK? Conservatives.com? libdems.org.uk?

The feeble rebuttals of Jacques Rogge, IOC chief puppet, to examples of China violating its Olympic promises continue.

“But there will be a review of what happened when we come to audit the Games when they are over.”

Yes, after the Olympics are over and the CCP has already have extracted maximum propaganda effect from it, the IOC can come down hard for the 2012 Olympics to ensure that us Brits don’t block websites for criticising the UK – which we already doesn’t do…..

Does the IOC have any shame? Guess not – the flood of dollars and yuan make up for that.

Finally we have the damning comments of a former top Party official, Bao Tong, on the way China trains its athletes.

It is very naive to take the number of gold medals won as an indicator of the rise of China. That sort of patriotism…has nothing to do with the Olympic spirit…

China has sponsored a top-down professionalized system, a totally segregated approach to athletic training… It has its roots in the Chinese Communist Party’s experience of the 1927-37 Chinese civil war, when peasants who relied on the land for their existence took up arms as their revolutionary duty to fight for a share of it. In the process, they were torn away from their families, from the rest of society, and from normal economic activities…

China’s athletes are chosen as young children…and taken away from their families, from their schools, and totally cut off from normal social activities. The door is closed, and they give up their entire youth and part of their childhoods for the sole aim of entering and winning competitions, an aim for which they are totally re-molded by the system.

The whole article should be read, but I thought these comments especially good:

China’s array of medals and prizes was produced out of the sweat, tears, and lives of generations of athletes and paralympians…You can’t use the achievements of our young people to cover up or to dilute the mistakes of the country’s leaders.

That the CCP tries to do that shows its real nature. To it, any Chinese person is a “natural resource” that can be exploited in any way, at any time, to prolong its rule.

There is one clear barometer of how good a political system is. It’s no good listening to what people say; mouths are very unreliable. You have to look at what the feet are doing. A good system will attract people. People in China may be living quite happily, and foreigners may make light of traveling a thousand miles to visit. But would they want to emigrate here? When they have seen the Olympics, seen the show, and had a chance to understand Chinese people a bit better, and to compare China to their own country, then what? I am certain that while they will say a lot of nice things about China, they are not going to start flooding in to live here. Whereas Chinese people would be leaving in their tens of thousands if the opportunity was there.

Quite true.

That time of year again. I remember my rage back in 1989. It was the first time I ever watched CNN, and I was glued to the TV set although I knew next to nothing about China at the time. I remember my shock at Bush I’s “punishment” of the dictators with blood on their hands – some all but meaningless sanctions. The man who stood up against the tank, the stranger who entered all of our living rooms and shook the conscience of the world. The moment of hope, when it seemed to so many of us that the students were really going to make a difference and force their corrupt leaders to reform. No one imagined the idealistic young men and women would be greeted with live ammunition, shot dead in the streets like animals.

Nearly 20 years later it seems so far away, so distant. But not at all forgotten. At least not for me. Talking with my Chinese friends in Beijing, it also seems so irrelevant, something they would rather not acknowledge let alone dwell upon. I only really began to understand the Chinese perspective on the tragedy five years ago when I held an extensive conversation with an actual demonstrator. His words sounded so strange to me. He had gone to demonstrate, to actively protest against his government, and now he looks upon the massacre as a practical and necessary business decision. Painful to make at the time but ultimately good for the country. And I believe it’s safe to say that his opinion is in line with that of most young Chinese people today. There is almost a sense of gratitude for what the government did, saving them from the anarchy that consumed Russia in its rush to democratize. Preserving the harmony that allowed the economic miracle to rise to undreamed of height. Surely it was all for the best, and your heart has to go out to the poor officials forced to make such a difficult decision.

I understand his argument, and I understand why my Chinese colleagues across the board tow the line on this topic. Many months ago I gave up hope of having a rational discussion with them on topics like this. The last time I tried was about two weeks ago, when I argued with a beloved colleague about whether Mao had been good for China or bad. When I recited the litany of his sins, which are nearly as bountiful as Hitler’s, I got the tape recorded message that still, he was good for China. You know, seventy percent and all that. At least now I understand why she says that.

If you read my other posts on Tiananmen Square, you’ll know I don’t see the students as angels. Nothing is ever that simple. Nor were the party’s players all devils. Forces inside the party were grating against each other and…well, no sense in restating what most of us know. For me, the bottom line was that the party showed us just how ruthless and obsessed with self-preservation they were, not that there was ever much doubt. And for that, I can never forgive them, even if their own people can. I see what they are doing today, stopping parents who lost children to the Sichuan earthquake from demonstrating, and I remind myself that for all the steps forward, theirs is still an authoritarian government that can easily morph into a totalitarian police state when it feels threatened. The script is so similar; all of our hopes were raised when we saw the relative media transparency the state was allowing in the earthquake’s coverage. It didn’t take long to bring us all back down to earth.

And so we can wring our hands and complain and blog and point out the hypocrisy and the two-facedness and the outright badness. But as long as the Chinese people refuse to call the government to account or even to acknowledge its selfish intentions, like my friend who insists Mao was a net plus for China, meaningful political reform will remain minimal and painfully slow. Some uplifting spurts forward, some painful setbacks. It’s gotten better, as the cliche goes, but let’s not fool ourselves: if a similar threat were to arise now or in the future, those in power would be willing to replay the ‘incident” all over again. Reluctantly, for sure, but in the end it would be “the best thing for China.”

I’m in America for my last vacation before the fall. I know I’ve disappointed a lot of readers with the sparse posting, and no one is more depressed than I am at the inanity of some of the recent comment threads. I simply feel I have no choice. A lot of emails have gone unanswered and a lot of topics I’ve been dying to post about have gone unwritten. That’s the best I can do for now, and it won’t get better until the autumn. Let me just close by saying my work has involved me in the relief efforts for the children displaced and orphaned by the earthquake, and no matter how the government may have infuriate me in recent days, and no matter how frustrated I feel with Chinese friends who refuse to see the world as i do, the rush to help and sacrifice and give has been one of the most inspiring and moving things I’ve ever seen. As usual with China, a flood of contrary emotions collide, from tearful joy at the selflessness and generosity of the people to anger and impatience at the cruelty of some in the government to indignation over the corruption that allowed the schools to crumble. Each of these emotions is equally legitimate, and one does not invalidate the other.

Update: And let’s not forget, the TSM remains the most taboo subject in China. And for good reason.

Raj

Recently we’ve read about the shameful treatment of a Chinese student in the US, Grace Wang. The Washington post gave her the opportunity to explain her side of the story.

Over Christmas break, all the American students went home, but that’s too expensive for students from China. Since the dorms and the dining halls were closed, I was housed off-campus with four Tibetan classmates for more than three weeks…

I’d long been interested in Tibet and had a romantic vision of the Land of Snows, but I’d never been there. Now I learned that the Tibetans have a different way of seeing the world. My classmates were Buddhist and had a strong faith, which inspired me to reflect on my own views about the meaning of life. I had been a materialist, as all Chinese are taught to be, but now I could see that there’s something more, that there’s a spiritual side to life.
We talked a lot in those three weeks, and of course we spoke in Chinese. The Tibetan language isn’t the language of instruction in the better secondary schools there and is in danger of disappearing. Tibetans must be educated in Mandarin Chinese to succeed in our extremely capitalistic culture. This made me sad, and made me want to learn their language as they had learned mine.

Chinese will complain that foreigners have never been to Tibet, but they haven’t lived with ordinary Tibetans either. Maybe they’ve come across a couple of very wealthy ones who work and live in big Chinese cities, but they’re the minority – it’s like hob-nobbing with someone who lives in Chelsea, as if they can tell you what it’s like for most Londoners. In any case they don’t understand Tibetans that well either.

The Chinese protesters thought that, being Chinese, I should be on their side.

It appears that in China some people believe your race dicatates what your opinion can be.

Some people on the Chinese side started to insult me for speaking English and told me to speak Chinese only. But the Americans didn’t understand Chinese. It’s strange to me that some Chinese seem to feel as though not speaking English is expressing a kind of national pride. But language is a tool, a way of thinking and communicating.

(more…)

(By Raj)

Yahoo settles its China lawsuit

Yahoo has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought against it on behalf of several Chinese dissidents, according to papers filed in a California court. No details have been given of the settlement but Yahoo will be covering legal costs.

The case alleged that Yahoo had provided information to the Chinese government that had then been used to prosecute the dissidents. Yahoo said it had to comply with Chinese laws to operate in the country. A statement released by the World Organization for Human Rights USA, which brought the case, said Yahoo had decided to settle the case following criticism at a US Congressional hearing on 6 November.

It’s clear that Yahoo’s weak excuse that it had to comply with whatever mysterious Chinese law was thrown at it, otherwise known as “some official told me to do X”, wouldn’t hold water in any reasonable court.

Did Yahoo even consider challenging whichever organisation filed the request for the information? Argue it didn’t have to give it under the Chinese Constitution? Demand a formal request from the relevant minister, or whatever? No, of course not. Can’t rock the boat. No obligation to the customers at all. China’s a place without law or due-process, so Yahoo’s blameless.

(Out of curiosity, did Yahoo even say what law they had to comply with? Or was it really a case of “I was told to do X by someone in authority, so I did it without question”?)

Michael Callahan, Yahoo’s executive vice-president and general counsel, then told a congressional panel in February 2006 that he did not know why the Chinese authorities wanted to trace Shi Tao.

At best Callahan made the Chinese wing of his company look like it’s run by a bunch of morons.

Guys, it’s called join the dots. What possible reason could there have been other than to throw him in jail – to give him a prize?! Anyone with a modicum of understanding of China would have known what they wanted to do with that poor guy. The Chinese government focuses its internet attention on finding out who potential “troublemakers” are so that it can silence them. It’s as simple as that.

If was in charge of HR at Yahoo I’d create a new opening to ensure this problem doesn’t occur again.

Job Description
Yahoo seeks advisor to help run its affairs in the People’s Republic of China. Applicants must demonstrate they do not have their head crammed up their backsides and are capable of rationally processing information brought to their attention.

Anyone up for it?

Yes, the only possible answer is that Yahoo (China) – or whoever they are – really don’t know what they’re doing. That, or Mr Callahan lied to Congress. You decide which it was.

Richard did not write this post and may not agree with it.

Regardless of the outcome, I think it’s good that Yahoo is being taken directly to task over what it did.

Yahoo! sued over disclosure of Chinese citizens’ identities

The internet company Yahoo! has become embroiled in a legal battle with a human rights group over a decision to disclose the identity of Chinese citizens, leading to their arrests. Yahoo! is being sued by the World Organisation for Human Rights, based in Washington, on behalf of Wang Xiaoning and his wife, Yu Ling. He is serving a 10-year prison sentence for advocating democratic reform in articles circulated on the internet.

The group is also suing Yahoo! on behalf of Shi Tao, a journalist serving a 10-year sentence for sending an email summarising a Chinese government communiqu̩ on how reporters should handle the 15th anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on the pro-democracy movement. The suit alleges that these people Рand others yet to be identified Рwere tortured or subjected to inhumane treatment at the hands of the Chinese authorities because of information that Yahoo!, Yahoo! China or Alibaba.com, a Chinese company in which Yahoo! has a minority stake, had passed on to the government.

Regardless of whether or not Yahoo! “had” to comply with Chinese law, it decided to operate in China and not contest the technically unconstitutional laws that were supposedly being quoted by the authorities. If it willingly operates in a country like China and does things that it knows will lead to people being abused, it can’t avoid the repercussions.

No one has to sell their soul to the Devil.