Yet another cyber-dissident bites the dust as China’s neandrathals lock him up for the most unpardonable of sins — exposing the stinking corruption of government officials.

Chinese official who exposed government corruption on the Internet has been sentenced to eight years in prison after being convicted of subversion, a Hong Kong human rights group says.
The sentence, handed down on Wednesday, was the latest in a string of jailings of dissidents and coincided with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to the United States and Canada.

The People’s Intermediate Court in Dazhou city in the southwestern province of Sichuan convicted Li Zhi, a 33-year-old municipal financial official, the Information Centre for Human Rights & Democracy said in a statement on Friday.

Chinese officials were not immediately available for comment.

Li wrote essays revealing corruption involving Sichuan officials on Web sites and chatrooms earlier this year, the group said.

Living in an authoritarian country where information flow is a matter of national security, dissidents have been flocking to the Internet as the medium gains in popularity.

Online police have tightened their noose by monitoring Web chatrooms and filtering text deemed objectionable as they pass routers at international gateways.

Wen acknowledged during his visit to the United States that China’s human rights situation was not perfect, but said it was among his government’s top priorities.

Not perfect?? Among his “highest priorities”??? Well, here’s a great opportunity to show you really mean it: Let the cyberdissidents go home and stop imprisoning new ones. That’s all you have to do.

(Not really, but it would be a damned good start.)

I had such a great time in China last week. Too bad news like this forces me to remember there is still trouble in paradise:

CHINESE Internet dissident Yan Jun, 32, has been sentenced to two years in prison on a subversion charge for posting essays online calling for change, including a free press and free expression, his family said today.

The Xi’an Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him this morning on a charge of “inciting subversion”, his mother Dai Yuzhen told AFP.

“The court took no more 20 minutes,” Dai said by telephone from Xi’an in Shaanxi province.

Family members and Yan could not understand the court’s decision, Dai said.

“I can’t accept this verdict. Just because he wrote a few essays, he’s going to jail? I can’t make sense of it,” Dai said.

What a shame. Such a robust country, such an ambitious people, still reigned in by good old-fashioned totalitarian terror.

UPDATE: The families of four cyber-dissidents sentenced to unbelievably harsh sentences have now appealed to Laura Bush for help. This is another must-read for those who think things are getting better in terms of self-expression. These guys range from 28 to 32, and their prison sentences range from 8 to 10 years. Those are very, very long sentences.

This is a bit of a bombshell and perhaps the harshest and most pointed criticism I have ever seen of China in the mainstream media.

Robert L. Bernstein, founding chairman of Human Rights Watch and former chairman of Random House, is speaking today to the World Press Freedom Committee, and the Washington Post has published the speech in advance.

Bernstein assails the media for continuously sugar-coating news about China, turning the “China is changing” line into a cliche, and failing to report the rising number of Chinese citizens killed by the police.

This guy holds no punches.

China, the last big totalitarian government, is brutalizing its own people. It limits and distorts information, keeping them ignorant on many critical subjects, and gives harsh prison terms to those who publish information the government would rather have suppressed.

[….]

Xu Wenli has been out of prison since Dec. 23, 2002. He served 16 years, four of them in solitary confinement, for writing down his thoughts on the need for a more open China. News of these types of convictions and harsh sentences reach Human Rights in China every week. The press and the public need to be reminded that there are many others still in prison for the peaceful expression of their views. Human Rights in China has provided information on well over 2,000 cases — people currently imprisoned for their ideas or beliefs.

And here’s a subject that the press simply has not covered, despite reliable information that is available: Outside every major Chinese city is a virtual “slave” camp. About 2 million to 3 million Chinese citizens live in some 800 of these so-called custody and repatriation camps. Can you imagine a story like this going unreported if such a camp existed outside a major Western city? People are put there for not having proper residence permits, and they are worked hard from early morning until nighttime.

I have taken Human Rights in China’s report on these camps to top editors of numerous publications with no results. Many reporters say they can’t do the story because they can’t get into the camps. But now is the time to insist on access.

I remember how at lunch one day my colleague in Beijing told me about the slave labor camps, and I found it impossible to believe since I never saw it in writing. Now I believe it.

Bernstein compares the media silence in China to a similar phenomenon in Iraq under Saddam, and says that in both cases there is no excuse, that it goes smack against what journalism is supposed to do.

Just about every word Bernstein say is worth citing, in bold, but for economy’s sake here are two more money quotes:

My experience as co-chair of the organization known as Human Rights in China has taught me that the international press in Beijing also has been “managed.” Tyrants throughout history have understood that information is power, and denying information to its own people or disseminating propaganda to the rest of the world have been China’s trademarks for years.

[…]

It has become almost a cliche to talk about the fact that China is changing rapidly, and therefore doesn’t require the kind of pressure that was needed with the Soviet Union. But to the thousands who are locked up in prisons and in mental institutions for their beliefs, that is cold comfort.

Sounds like me talking.

[Updated, 18.50 Singapore time]

Another Update: Conrad chimes in as well, and you think I’m outspoken…. (And I should have patented the phrase “Evil Empire,” which he shamelessly lifts from an earlier post of mine.)

It’s a week or two later than I expected, but at least it’s finally happened.

Liu Di, 23, a former psychology major at Beijing Normal University who wrote under the computer name “Stainless Steel Mouse”, was freed from Beijing’s Qincheng prison on Friday, the Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said on Sunday.

Two other “cyber dissidents”, Wu Yiran, 34, and Li Yibin, 29, also were freed from a jail for political detainees on Friday, it said in a statement.

The release came just over a week ahead of a visit by Premier Wen Jiabao to the United States. China frequently times releases of dissidents to coincide with important trips abroad or visits by world leaders.

This was predictable. The case was simply too controversial, too shocking for China’s trading partners (and everyone else) to just accept with a shrug. She was just a kid, and her arrest sparked a well-deserved international outcry.

So should we break out the Champagne and celebrate? Afraid not. From the same article:

Police also detained at least two people for organising online petitions for Liu’s release. Du Daobin, a civil servant, was detained in October, while Luo Changfu, a 39-year-old laid-off worker, was sentenced to three years in prison.

China has been cracking down on Internet content — from politics to pornography — as the government struggles to gain control over the new and popular medium.

I hope that ‘s clear to everyone. By releasing Liu Di, they’re admitting they didn’t have enough evidence to indict her. But the petitioners, who we now all know were correct in claiming her imprisonment was unjustified, they are now in jail! There’s a twisted irony here.

So as crackdowns on cyber-dissidents increase, this happy ending to one of the more outrageous cases should not be any reason to celebrate or let down our guard. To the contrary; all the recent news indicates the problem is getting much worse, not better.

The much-vaunted reforms don’t seem to have reached this province yet:

Villagers in southern China’s Guangxi province accused local police on Tuesday of arresting Bible owners and sentencing them to labour camps as part as a campaign to weed out “illegal religious organisations“.

Written testimony supplied to AFP by villagers in Xilin county accused up to 40 policemen of descending on Christian villages in the middle of the night and ransacking homes in search of Bibles and other religious materials.

Official arrest documents also show that following their detention three people from Weishan and Tianbao villages were sentenced without trial to 18 months in a labour camp run by the Nanning Glass Factory in the provincial capital.

Actually, it seems to be an equal-opportunity crackdown, with similar incidents taking place against “illegal religious organisations” in three other provinces. The article says the wave of crackdowns began after Hu Jintao had completed his transition to power in March.

So much for Hu ushering in a new era of measurable reforms.

[Link via Radio Free China.]

[Note: I have edited and retitled this post, which started off as an update on SARS, but ended up more an indictment of my host country’s inherently wicked government. TPD, April 19]

I was intrigued to see the NYT article today on how the Chinese government’s mishandling of SARS has totally demolished its painstaking efforts to position itself as a fast-changing, dynamic society that is moving closer and closer to liberalizing its laws, its policies and its general philosophy. You must read this article in full to understand just how grievously China has damaged itself with this fiasco.

There is no doubt that in some ways China is changing, especially in regard to trade and economic policy. There have also been some baby-steps in the right direction when it comes to education (problem solving is slowly being encouraged, not simply “chalk and talk” memorization). But what SARS has shown the world is that for all the fireworks, for all the self-congratulatory praise we see on CCTV and read in China Daily about “the new China,” politically the country is rotten to the core, atrophied and senile.

The article wastes no time getting to the point:

China’s restrictions on information about a highly infectious respiratory illness has undermined five years of diplomacy intended to alter its image as a prickly regional power and to improve relations with neighboring countries, Asian politicians and analysts say.

Beijing’s secretiveness for much of the last several weeks about severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, contrasts sharply with the openness of its neighbors, even one-party states like Singapore. It also reflects the emphasis China puts on overall social stability above individuals’ well-being, many argue.

That last sentence contains the keys to understanding this strange nation. The obsession, to the point of insanity, that the government places on “social stability” and “harmony” makes this government an enemy to its own people. To ensure social stability and harmony, the fundamental necessity is to look good. This is a government that lives to make itself look good, so that people remain placid and accepting of (or better still, oblivious to) the shit going on around them.

Worried about a new catastrophic disease that could kill your citizenry by the thousands? Don’t give it a second thought — the Chinese plutocracy has the ideal answer: Don’t do anything. If you say nothing, you might be able to contain it. Taking that awful risk is far more attractive an alternative than informing people, and in so doing creating “disharmony.”

Now, any sane, rational government knows that contagious diseases don’t give a flying fuck about Mao’s Red Book and won’t be contained in just one village because Jiang Zemin wants them to be. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt for a moment and assume the Chinese leaders are not totally brain damaged. Let’s say they really believed this sort of wishful thinking might work. After learning that this policy was an absolute disaster — in fact, a tragedy of unimaginable dimensions for millions of Chinese citizens — wouldn’t they then know at least not to do the same thing again?

Normally the answer would be yes. But this is no normal government. This government did the exact same thing for nearly 10 years with AIDS, ignoring it, stigmatizing those infected, and setting up every conceivable obstacle to creating awareness and preventative measures for its people. Its people, for whom this government supposedly exists. Ha. (For reference, see what I wrote just a few days ago on the AIDS holocaust here in China.)

In other words, they learned nothing from their repellent “see-no-evil” approach to AIDS, which now threatens to turn China into the next Africa in terms of AIDS infection. The audacity, the sheer hubris of these pompous oafs who, as SARS began to spread through Beijing were lauding one another on television and clinking champagne glasses for the farcical rubber-stamp “People’s Congress” — these bastards knew, and they did nothing, just as they did nothing in the late-80s as contaminated blood flowed into the veins of its citizens across their vast nation, sentencing innocent men, women and children to a lifetime of stigmatization and the guarantee of death without dignity. Acknowledging the tragedy may have made them look bad, and we can’t have any of that now, can we?

They knew. And they said nothing. Fifteen years ago, and today. And you wonder why I am hard on the Chinese government?

As I prepare to leave this country, I worry less and less about telling the truth. To say that another way, I have always tried to tell the truth here, but often I felt I had to tone down my rancor, soften the blows. Right now, I just don’t care, and I want whoever happens to stop by this little site to know the truth about China, or at least what I perceive that truth to be: China is the Evil Empire, a tottering, power-drunk, paranoid nation of thugs dressing themselves up as saviors — a bad country. It was for the bastards we saw smiling and waving at the “People’s Congress” that my God made hell.

Any questions?

Footnote: I refer only to the Chinese government here. The people I know here are gracious, kind and good. They know, to a large extent, what their “leaders” are all about. Luckily for these good people, the SARS fuck-up has been of such great magnitude that it could end up resulting in long-term change and improvement here. Maybe. It has certainly opened the eyes of the world as to what “the new China” is all about.