REFLECTIONS IN A CHINESE EYE

Lu Xun - May 4th Movement

Lu Xun (simplified Chinese: 鲁迅; traditional Chinese: 魯迅; pinyin: Lǔ Xùn) or Lu Hsün (Wade-Giles), was the pen name of Zhou Shuren (simplified Chinese: 周树人; traditional Chinese: 周樹人; pinyin: Zhōu Shùrén; Wade–Giles: Chou Shu-jen) (September 25, 1881 – October 19, 1936), one of the major Chinese writers of the 20th century. Considered by many to be the leading figure of modern Chinese literature, he wrote in baihua (白話) (the vernacular) as well as classical Chinese. Lu Xun was a short story writer, editor, translator, critic, essayist and poet. In the 1930s he became the titular head of the Chinese League of the Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai.

Lu Xun's works exerted a very substantial influence after the May Fourth Movement to such a point that he was highly acclaimed by the Communist regime after 1949. Mao Zedong himself was a lifelong admirer of Lu Xun's works. Though sympathetic to the ideals of the Left, Lu Xun never actually joined the Chinese Communist Party. Like many leaders of the May Fourth Movement, he was primarily a liberal.

Lu Xun's works became known to English readers through numerous translations, beginning in 1960 with Selected Stories of Lu Hsun translated by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang. More recently, in 2009, Penguin Classics published a complete anthology of his fiction titled The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun which the scholar Jeffrey Wasserstrom^[2] said "could be considered the most significant Penguin Classic ever published."^[3Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Chinese Anger Diverted by the Saga of a Hoodlum’s Girlfriend

A pro-China protester tore a Japanese flag at a rally outside the Japanese consulate in Hong Kong on Thursday.

BEIJING — Perhaps topics like the beautiful moll of a multiple-murdering hoodlum just shot dead by police will always fascinate more than politics — even issues that bristle with anger like territorial sovereignty.

Or are China’s netizens so cynical about their own government that they’d rather discuss a criminal’s girlfriend than a clash over land with their historic enemy, Japan?

Genuine anger built online in China on Thursday over the detention the previous day of 14 Chinese activists by the Japanese coast guard on the Diaoyu islands, which China claims but Japan controls. China demanded that Japan immediately release the activists, something that may happen soon, as my colleague Martin Fackler reports.

Hitoshi Maeshiro/European Pressphoto AgencyA Chinese activist in shackles was in Japanese custody on Okinawa.

Inflaming tempers, two Japanese government ministers — the National Public Safety Commission chairman, Jin Matsubara, and the land minister, Yuichiro Hata — visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on Wednesday to mark the anniversary of Japan’s capitulation in World War II. The shrine honors Japan’s war dead, including 14 declared war criminals. Many Chinese harbor deep resentment of what they perceive as Japan’s refusal to acknowledge its war crimes in China.

Read more The New York Times

China to protest after Japan arrests activists on disputed isle

HONG KONG/TOKYO (Reuters) - China will lodge a complaint with Japan after it detained five Chinese activists who landed on disputed islands on Wednesday, China's Xinhua news agency said, as tension between Japan and its neighbors escalated on the anniversary of the end of World War Two.

The landing by the activists on the islands in the East China Sea and their detention by Japan's coastguard came on a day of regional diplomatic jousting, underscoring how history haunts Japan's ties with China and South Korea.

Earlier, South Korea prompted an official protest from Japan after comments by South Korean President Lee Myung-bak which some saw as going too far by insulting Japanese Emperor Akihito.

And in a move likely to anger Japan's neighbors, two Japanese cabinet ministers paid homage at a controversial Tokyo shrine for the war dead.

Memories of Japan's wartime occupation of much of China and colonization of South Korea run deep despite close economic ties in one of the world's wealthiest regions.

Read more at: http://news.yahoo.com/china-activists-land-isles-disputed-japan-093034110.html

'Twitter Is My City': An Exclusive Interview with Ai Weiwei

Beijing's best-known dissident, architect, and creative provocateur tells Jonathan Landreth what's wrong with China's frenetic capital

INTERVIEW BY JONATHAN LANDRETH |SEPT/OCT 2012

Ai Weiwei's studio compound sits behind high, ivy-covered gray brick walls on an isolated street in Beijing's shabby northeast outskirts. China's best-known dissident, architect, and creative provocateur, Ai used to travel around the country making art and recording injustice: He helped design Beijing's famous Bird's Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympics (before denouncing it as "propaganda") and fought with authorities in Sichuan province over their handling of the 2008 earthquake, in which thousands of children died. All that stopped, however, when Chinese police imprisoned him in April 2011 on politically motivated charges of tax evasion; when he was finally released after 81 days in custody, he was forbidden from leaving Beijing for a year. (He has since been given permission to travel domestically.) Ai, who lived in New York for much of the 1980s, has become a patron of China's disaffected urbanites, and here, in his tranquil garden, he holds court, offering advice to the thousands of fans, bloggers, activists, and petitioners who visit from all across China and the world. Despite the government's relentless attempts to shut him up, Ai is still talking. The first change he would make to Chinese cities? Free the people.

Read more at Foreign Policy

Hong Kong protests Chinese Communist educational brainwashing

See also The Peking Duck

And The New York Times

I fear Beijing might react violently, in some form, if these protest against her authority continue.

Tiananamen.  Remember.

 

Dissident Chinese artist defiant in first interview since his release

(CNN) -- Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei pledged to continue
fighting injustice in his first interview since his release from detention.

The outspoken critic of the nation's human rights record was arrested in April, detained for three months and charged with tax evasion.

"Of course you might live an easier life if you abandon some rights. But
there are so many injustices, and limited educational resources," Ai told the
Chinese Communist party's Global Times newspaper. "They all diminish happiness.
I will never stop fighting injustice."

The paper describes Ai as "feisty" in his first interview since being
released from prison in June after a three-month detention on tax evasion
charges that some observers alleged were trumped up.

Continued at CNN

Imitation Outrage: Faking Concern for the Chinese Masses

from Peking Duck

Original Article at Huffington Post

Do Westerners care about human rights in China?

This journalist clearly believes they do not.

Let’s stop jacking the Chinese around. We do not care a whit now — nor have we ever cared — about their human rights or any other aspect of their lives as long as they satiate our unbridled appetites. To pretend otherwise is to deny centuries of exploitative history in which the West drugged the Middle Kingdom and plundered it for its resources and cheap labor while obliterating any sign of popular resistance to our imperial sway.

From the Opium Wars to the contemplation of using nuclear weapons to bomb China back to the Stone Age because of our differences with it over Korea and Vietnam, the response of the West has been one of brute intimidation. Never have we been willing to acknowledge that China, for all of its immense contradictions, upheavals, sufferings and errant ways, represents the most complex and impressive example of national history.

Instead we intrude upon China in fitful moments of pique or treat it as a plaything. Who owns China? That was the question that marked the first period of U.S. involvement, when we joined other Western imperialists in carving up China into economic zones. And then came the bitter argument in the U.S. in the late 1940s and the ’50s about “Who lost China?” Now Americans find themselves preoccupied with how best to exploit China’s amazing economic prowess while feigning interest in the well-being of its people.

My problem with the article is the use of the word “We,” as if this lack of interest in human rights in China is monolithic and universal. Is it not possible that many of us care about human rights violations in China? Who is the “We” that doesn’t “care a whit” about the subject? Who are these “Americans” who feel this way? Are they to a large degree strawmen?

I would probably agree that most of the government and the oligarchy of multinational companies don’t care much if at all. But there are many sincere people in the West who do truly care. They are probably the same people who care about human rights in other countries, the kind of people who were appalled at the treatment by the US military of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and who spoke out against atrocities committed in the name of the “war on terror.” Most Western journalists I know in China care deeply about the plight of dissidents in China. I know I do, just as I care about the repression of women in Saudi Arabia, or the arrest and torture and murder of innocents in Syria.

Read more at Peking Duck

U.S., China grapple with trust gap amid Chen fallout

Ananth Krishnan

Chinese police officers watch over journalists outside the hospital where Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng is recuperating in Beijing on Thursday. Photo:AP

United States and Chinese officials on Thursday called for measures to deepen trust at the start of an annual strategic dialogue, a day after the two countries grappled with a major diplomatic crisis over the case of Chinese lawyer and activist Chen Guangcheng.

The fate of the visually challenged rights campaigner remained unclear on Thursday after it emerged that he had expressed strong reservations about a deal reached by U.S. and Chinese officials to arrange his leaving of the American Embassy in Beijing, following a six-day stand-off with Chinese authorities.

U.S. officials came under strong criticism from activists on Wednesday after Mr. Chen revealed that he had actually wanted to leave China along with his family, and only agreed to exit the embassy after Chinese officials threatened to send his wife back to their home village in Shandong, where she had been beaten by local security personnel in recent days.

Mr. Chen spent Thursday at Beijing's Chaoyang hospital, which was surrounded by dozens of police personnel. He is receiving treatment for injuries sustained during his daring escape from Dongshigu village, where he had been kept under illegal house arrest for more than a year and a half on account of his legal activism against forced abortions.

U.S. officials on Thursday mounted a defence of the deal they reached with Chinese officials, saying Mr. Chen had changed his mind after agreeing to a deal to enroll in a university in China following assurances given by Chinese authorities over the safety of his family.

Read more at The Hindu 

Activist: U.S. will help me leave China



Chen Guangcheng regrets leaving U.S. Embassy

BEIJING (CNN) -

Chen Guangcheng, the Chinese activist at the center of a diplomatic firestorm, reiterated his intention to leave China and said he expects U.S. assistance.

"I believe they will help me," he told CNN in an interview early Friday, but declined to elaborate.

The activist, who left the refuge of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing after he escaped house arrest in his eastern China hometown, said Thursday that he regretted the move and now wants U.S. officials to help get him and his family to the United States.

Now in a hospital, Chen told CNN in an interview early Friday that he spoke with U.S. representatives by phone Thursday. They also met with his wife, Yuan Weijing.

When Chen left the embassy Wednesday, it was announced that the United States and China had worked out a deal for his future.

Read more at (ONE OF FIVE PAGES) KOAT

Blind activist goes free after promises of safety

BEIJING — A blind Chinese activist who fled persecution by local officials in his rural town and sparked a diplomatic standoff by holing up in the U.S. Embassy for six days emerged Wednesday after U.S. officials said China had assured his safety.

Chen Guangcheng's escape from illegal house arrest in eastern China and his flight into the protection of U.S. diplomats in Beijing last week had threatened to derail annual U.S.-China strategic talks with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton starting Thursday.

U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke escorted Chen to Chaoyang Hospital, where he was reunited with his family as he awaited medical treatment for injuries suffered during his escape. On the way, the activist called his lawyer, Li Jinsong, who said Chen told him: "'I'm free. I've received clear assurances.'"

Chen, 40, also received a call from Clinton, whom he thanked in Chinese for raising his case, a U.S. official said. Chen then told Clinton in halting English, "'I want to kiss you,'" the official said.

A close friend of Chen's gave a sharply different account, saying Chinese officials forced Chen to choose between going into exile alone or staying in China with his family.

Zeng Jinyan said she spoke by phone with Chen and his wife while he was in the hospital. A disappointed-sounding Chen told her that his wife's life had been threatened, she said.

"He said what he wanted was totally different but because no one can protect his wife and children" he had to accept, Zeng said via Skype.

Read more at STATESMAN

Chinese activist leaves U.S. Embassy on 'own volition'

Human rights activist Chen Guangcheng appears on YouTube after slipping away from house arrest

Beijing (CNN) -- A Chinese human rights activist who escaped house arrest and took refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing left for a hospital Wednesday, opening a new chapter in the life of a man at the center of a controversy between the United States and China.

Chen Guangcheng's presence in the U.S. Embassy prompted a flurry of diplomatic activity between the United States and China. It threatened to overshadow U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's scheduled meetings with senior Chinese leaders this week.

The situation has presented a complex test for the Obama administration's approach to relations with China, creating a strain between upholding human rights and maintaining steady ties with Beijing.

Chen departed the embassy "of his own volition" after spending six days there, reported Xinhua, the state-run Chinese news agency. He will be treated at a medical facility in the Chinese capital, where he will be reunited with his family, a senior U.S. official said.

Read more at CNN

How Chongqing People View Bo Xilai

One April day in my birth city of Chongqing, I encountered a rare quarrel in People’s Park. The park is one of several places in downtown Chongqing that offer low-cost “baba cha” (open-space tea), where retirees and others with time on their hands lounge under leafy banyan trees with their teacups and bird cages for a good part of the day. Two fiftyish men sat at a plastic table drinking tea and chatting about Bo Xilai, their city’s ousted leader. One of the men said that Bo’s promotion of “people’s livelihood” had been a fake show, because during his four-year rule, prices of meat, food, and other daily goods had risen steeply in Chongqing. Two young women, who happened to be nearby, cellphones in hand and apparently waiting for someone, did not like what they heard and started to argue that Bo made Chongqing better. The man got very upset; his face reddened and he raised his voice, which attracted the attention of onlookers, including me. I asked the man whether his criticism was formed after Bo’s downfall. He was insulted. “This has always been my opinion! I’m not brainless, I was once a journalist!” he yelled.

Tea-drinkers in People's Park, Chongqing (April 2012)

This scene is rare because, seemingly illogically, in the weeks since his downfall, Bo’s local dissenters have been much quieter than his supporters.

Chongqing people’s attitudes toward Bo Xilai range from supportive to condemnatory to “who cares” and everything in between, a broad spectrum with two heavy ends. (For the indifferent, a typical expression I often heard was “The gods fighting is none of our business.”) So far, however, foreign journalists seem to have a hard time penetrating the famous fog of the river-mountain city to find more than one stratum of views. In the English media it is easy to see headlines such as “Bo Xilai Still Admired Locally in China” and “Bo Xilai Remains Popular in Megacity He Once Oversaw.” In those reports quoting “the average people on the street,” the term “average people” generally does not include intellectuals, writers, journalists, academics, and so forth.

In fact, among local intellectuals, professionals, and the middle class, there has been an overwhelming sentiment against Bo’s doings in Chongqing since 2009, according to a dozen such men and women I have spoken to this month, all of whom requested anonymity. One reason their opinions have not been widely reflected in the foreign media is that they are much more reluctant to speak than the “stick men” (棒棒, or porters-for-hire) who roam the streets. When I asked why they were still afraid of speaking up even after Bo was gone, a local journalist told me that the government had issued orders forbidding them from talking to foreign journalists.

Read more at INSIDE-OUT CHINA

They Choose China

In this feature documentary, Oscar®-nominated filmmaker Shuibo Wang (Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square) aims his camera at the astonishing story of 21 American soldiers who opted to stay in China after the Korean War ended in 1954. Back home in the United States, McCarthyism was at its height and many Americans believed these men were brainwashed by Chinese communists. But what really happened? Using never-before-seen footage from the Chinese camps and interviews with former PoWs and their families, They Chose China tells the fascinating stories of these forgotten American dissidents.

Uploaded by freespeechtv on Dec 20, 2011

Liu Xiaobo’s Plea for the Human Spirit

In absentia: An image of Liu Xiaobo in Oslo during the ceremonies marking his winning of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.

By JONATHAN MIRSKY

Published: December 30, 2011

“I have no enemies, and no hatred.” Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, spoke those words on Dec. 23, 2009, just before he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for “incitement of subversion of state power.” It was his fourth jail term since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. Liu is the only Chinese citizen to win any Nobel while living in China and, as Perry Link notes in introducing a new collection of Liu’s writings, one of only five Nobel Peace Prize winners unable to appear in Oslo to receive the gold medal: “In 1935, Carl von Ossietzky was held in a Nazi prison; in 1975, Andrei Sakharov was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union; in 1983, Lech Walesa feared he would be barred from re-entering Poland if he went to Oslo; and in 1991, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest in Burma.”

In NO ENEMIES, NO HATRED: Selected Essays and Poems (Belknap/Harvard University, $29.95), the well-­translated collection edited by Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao and Liu Xia — Liu’s wife — Liu demonstrates a considerable amount of anger while retaining his Gandhian nonviolent spirit. Taken together, his essays offer the best analysis I have read of what’s wrong in the People’s Republic of China.

Liu was the prime mover (although not the originator) of Charter 08, the petition signed by several thousand Chinese who demanded an accountable government and freedoms of speech, assembly, press and religion. The petition was the main evidence the Chinese government used against Liu when it sent him to prison in 2009, but his accusers might have reached further still, through his hundreds of articles and poems, and his 17 books. Even his 1988 Ph.D. dissertation, “Aesthetics and Human Freedom,” was “a plea for liberation of the human spirit,” as Link explains in his introduction.

Liu has always been most animated by democracy. This concern underlies his essays on Taiwan, Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union, the failures and lies of the Mao era, the “miracle” of the Deng Xiaoping reforms after Mao’s death in 1976 and, perhaps most emotively, Tibet. Even while Beijing condemned the Dalai Lama as “a wolf in monk’s clothing,” Liu breathtakingly suggested in 2008 that China could solve its ethnic unrest by inviting “the Dalai Lama back to China to serve as our nation’s president. . . . Such a move would make best use of the Dalai Lama’s stature in Tibet and around the world.”

An accomplished poet, Liu pays close attention to the power of language. Noting that the party charged him with “incitement of subversion of state power,” he said this was an excellent example “of treating words as crimes, which itself is an extension into the present day of China’s antique practice called ‘literary inquisition’ ” — a practice exemplified by the 18th-century emperor Qianlong’s purge of subversive books.

Read more here

China dissident-lawyer Gao jailed in far west: brother

BEIJING | Sun Jan 1, 2012 10:30pm EST

(Reuters) - Chinese authorities have jailed the prominent dissident-lawyer Gao Zhisheng in the remote far west, his brother said Monday, the first confirmation of Gao's whereabouts in nearly two years in a case that has fanned criticism about secretive detentions.

Gao has been imprisoned in the Shaya County Prison in Xinjiang region on charges of "inciting subversion of state power," his brother, Gao Zhiyi, told Reuters by telephone from his home in Shaanxi province, citing a court notice.

"Now we finally know where he is, I hope we can visit him in a few days, but it's a long way to travel," said Gao Zhiyi.

The court notice amounted to the clearest information of Gao Zhisheng's location since April 2010, when he briefly made contact with friends and foreign reporters after being held in secretive detention for more than a year.

Read more at REUTERS

Liu Xiaobo: new book lifts China's gag on jailed Nobel peace prizewinner

Liu Xiaobo, winner of Nobel peace prize, will have his collected writings published in English for the first time

Read 'Your Lifelong Prisoner' – Liu Xiaobo's poem from prison

 
Liu Xiaobo’s book contains a moving tribute to his wife, the poet Liu Xia. Photograph: EPA

The collected writings of Chinese Nobel prizewinner Liu Xiaobo have been translated into English for the first time, but there will be no interviews, bookshop signings or appearances at literary festivals. The author is not even aware of the English translation, because he remains incarcerated in a Chinese jail and his wife is under house arrest.

Liu, who won last year's Nobel peace prize, is serving an 11-year sentence that began in 2009 for "inciting subversion of state power". Friends have been unable to contact his wife, Liu Xia, even though she has not been charged with anything.

The 55-year-old former professor at Beijing University has repeatedly been detained or arrested and sentenced over the years for his relentless but peaceful political activities, calling for democratic reforms, including freedom of expression, and condemning China's treatment of Tibet. He was barred from attending the Nobel ceremony, and at the funeral of his father earlier this year he was forbidden from talking to anybody.

But, although silenced in China, his voice will be heard again in the west with the first English-language collection of his essays and poetry, which Harvard University Press will publish in January under the title No Enemies, No Hatred.

Read more at The Guardian

Dreaming of a Normal Life in China

BEIJING — One evening last month, I mentioned the name Chen Guangcheng in a speech I delivered at a university in Qingdao in eastern China. Chen, a well-known human rights lawyer, lives only a few hundred kilometers away from where I was speaking.

His life is anything but normal. As a price for his activism, Chen spent more than four years in prison. He was released in September of last year and promptly committed to house arrest, although officials deny he is a prisoner. For more than a year he has been under 24-hour surveillance by several hundred burly thugs — a prisoner in his own home. Chen, who turns 40 on Saturday, is blind and said to be in poor health.

After the speech a student asked me if I planned to visit Chen. I had never met him but I have felt an affinity for him for a long time: We both have legal backgrounds and I greatly admire his courage. I had talked about Chen on my blog but otherwise my support for him had been feeble. I felt ashamed that I did not respond one way or the other to the student’s question.

My calculations were simple: I don’t want my books banned; I don’t want my name on the government’s sensitive-word Internet filter; I don’t want my upcoming overseas trips jeopardized.

But most of all, I’m scared. I’m scared of being beat up, and I’m scared of losing my freedom. I live in a world in which freedom is scarce, and I treasure it a lot, even if that freedom is pathetically small.

You may ask, is visiting someone really that dangerous? This is a normal question that comes from normal people. But in the abnormal world that is modern China, an innocent visit can be dangerous.

The next day while eating lunch, four otherwise cowardly people found courage in companionship and decided to go to Chen’s village to visit the hero. We set off within an hour.

Early the next morning we arrived in Dongshigu. Near the entrance to the village there were houses filled with men on each side of the unpaved road. A short man wearing a gray-green jacket came out and blocked our way. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Is this Dongshigu village?” I smiled.

Read more at The New York Times

A voice for China's bottom rung

Persecuted author Liao Yiwu tells stories of an underclass the outside world rarely gets to see. He talks to Chris Barton

The Chinese Government hopes that every Chinese will be like a pig or animal - just eating and making money without thinking.

When Liao Yiwu escaped the "colossal and invisible prison called China" in July, calmly walking across the border into Vietnam, he couldn't believe his luck. "They stamped my passport," he says on the phone from Chicago, via an interpreter.

In light of Liao's predicament - hounded everywhere by the Chinese police, repeatedly denied an exit visa, barred from travelling to literary festivals abroad, his books banned in China and forced to sign a guarantee to cease publishing outside China - the exit stamp was nothing short of a miracle. Which perhaps explains why he's so taken with saying "good luck to you" - one of the few phrases of English he has, and which he's delighted to use at every opportunity.

The valid stamp is one of the reasons the persecuted Chinese writer doesn't see himself as an exile. "I consider myself as a writer who has to leave China to pursue my freedom to publish and to write." The choice of "Freedom or Exile?" is also the title of Liao's Writers and Readers Festival talk in Auckland next Saturday.

Read more at nzherald

China's web users are powering dissent

Tens of thousands of people have responded to Ai Weiwei's internet appeal for financial support

This week has seen an extraordinary surge in support for the artist and government critic, Ai Weiwei, from people around China.

By midday on Friday, one of his staff members says, 7.57m yuan (£740,000; $1.19m) had been donated to help the artist fight his tax demand from the government.

That is over a million dollars raised in little more than a week.

Without a doubt it is the appeals for help that have gone out over the internet that are behind this.

They have been posted by Ai Weiwei and others on China's microblogs.

More than 26,000 people have come forward.

Many of them are convinced the tax demand is an attempt to silence Mr Ai and they want to show their backing for him.

Famous for helping design Beijing's Bird's Nest stadium for the Olympics, Ai Weiwei has become of the most vocal critics of the ruling Communist Party.

Before his arrest the internet was the tool that he used to spread his thoughts.

He would spend hours avidly posting on Twitter or his Chinese microblogs.

Some of Ai Weiwei's supporters sent cash in envelopes, others used paper aeroplanes to launch it over a wall into his garden

Since he was held in secret detention earlier this year, then presented with his tax demand, he has been confined to Beijing and is officially banned from giving interviews.

But he has returned to the internet and that is what has enabled Ai Weiwei to reach out to those sympathetic to him.

The numbers responding seem to have surprised even the artist himself.

China's authorities have demanded that he pay 15.22 million yuan. To fight the claim he has to put down half that sum as collateral.

Read more at BBC

China orders Ai Weiwei to pay $2.4 million for "tax evasion"

By Sui-Lee Wee

BEIJING | Tue Nov 1, 2011 1:52am EDT

(Reuters) - China has ordered dissident artist Ai Weiwei to pay 15 million yuan ($2.4 million) in back taxes and fines allegedly due from the company he works for, Ai said on Tuesday, a case supporters said was part of Beijing's efforts to muzzle government critics.

The 54-year-old artist, famous for his work on the "Bird's Nest" Olympic Stadium in Beijing, was detained without charge for 81 days this year in a move that drew criticism from Western governments. He was released in late June.

Ai told Reuters he received the notice from the tax authorities that described his title as the "actual controller" for Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd., which has helped produce Ai's internationally renowned art and designs.

The company is owned by his wife, Lu Qing, who is the firm's legal representative.

"They made up this new title," Ai said. "I'm a designer for the company. I'm not a director, or even a manager. Of course, I know this matter is targeted at me.

"They said: 'We're fining the company, not you.' But I said: 'Why was my name singled out by the government, at the foreign ministry briefings?' But they still said to me: 'This has nothing to do with you.'"

Rights activists said the charges were a pretext for silencing the artist who has been a fierce government critic.

"It appears that the government is set to destroy him, if not economically then at least by setting up the stage to later arrest him for failing to pay back taxes," said Songlian Wang, research coordinator for Chinese Human Rights Defenders.

Read more at REUTERS

China human rights activists beaten for trying to visit Chen Guangcheng

In China, human rights activists report being attacked by some 100 thugs Sunday when they tried to visit activist Chen Guangcheng, who has been illegally confined to his house.

Beijing

Liu Li knew he might not be able to get to see the blind barefoot lawyer Chen Guangcheng on Sunday. After all, Mr. Chen, a persistent thorn in the Chinese government’s side, has been under heavily guarded house arrest for more than a year. But Mr. Liu did not expect to return on crutches from his attempted visit.

• 

In this undated file photo released by his supporters, blind activist Chen Guangcheng, right, sits in a village in China.

“About seven or eight men rushed up to me, kicked me to the ground, stole my cellphone, smashed my ankle and knocked me out,” Liu recalled Tuesday. “And the police did nothing when I reported what had happened.”

Liu was one of a group of around 40 activists who were attacked and beaten by more than 100 thugs on Sunday afternoon outside the village of Dongshigu in the eastern province of Shandong where Chen has been illegally locked up in his house with his family since being released from jail in September last year.

“I did not think the situation was so dark,” said Liu. “There is no law in that area.”

The violence marked the second weekend in a row that unidentified thugs have violently broken up efforts by human rights activists and ordinary citizens to visit Chen in a burgeoning campaign to win his freedom.

“Though it is extremely costly for the activists, [the campaign] is bringing a lot of attention to Chen’s case and there are chances that it could ultimately succeed if the pressure continues,” suggests Nicolas Bequelin, a China analyst with Human Rights Watch.

Chen has been under round-the-clock guard in his home village since being released at the end of a 51-month jail sentence he had incurred on charges of disrupting traffic. Human rights activists say the real reason he was imprisoned was his vigorous defense of women who had been forcibly sterilized in abuses of China’s one child policy.

Instead of being freed, Chen was put under house arrest with his wife and daughter, and forbidden to contact the outside world. Local and foreign activists doing their best to monitor his situation say they fear he has been regularly beaten.

Foreign journalists and European diplomats are among those who have been violently turned back when they have tried to visit Chen, and in recent weeks a growing number of courageous Chinese activists have risked being beaten up or detained trying to reach his house.

Read more at The Christian Science Monitor

The Real Deng

Fang Lizhi

When a scientific experiment uncovers a new phenomenon, a scientist is pleased. When an experiment fails to reveal something that the scientist originally expected, that, too, counts as a result worth analyzing. A sense of the “nonappearance of the expected” was my first impression of Ezra Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. The term “human rights” does not appear in its index, and it turns out that this omission was not an oversight of the indexer. Systematic nonconsideration of human rights is one of the book’s features.

Mao Zedong died in September 1976. From 1979 until the years just before Deng Xiaoping’s own death in 1997, Deng was, in fact if not always in title, the top leader of the Communist Party of China, of the People’s Liberation Army, and of the Chinese government. He is known outside China, especially in the West, mainly for his decision in 1989 to send field armies with tanks into the heart of Beijing to carry out what came to be known as the “Tiananmen Massacre”: a bloody suppression of unarmed students and other citizens who were demonstrating peacefully in and around Tiananmen Square. Not everyone in the world has looked unfavorably on Deng’s decision. On February 22, 2011, at the height of the “Arab Spring,” Libya’s dictator Muammar Qaddafi had this to say about it:

People in front of tanks were crushed. The unity of China was more important than those people on Tiananmen Square…. When Tiananmen Square happened, tanks were sent in to deal with them. It’s not a joke. I will do whatever it takes to make sure part of the country isn’t taken away.

Deng’s example of the utility of massacre had not been lost on Qaddafi.

Vogel, an emeritus professor of social sciences at Harvard, retells the story of the massacre in a chapter he calls “The Tiananmen Tragedy,” which ends with a meticulous—and, it seems, angst-ridden—review of all the ways one might evaluate the “tragedy.” In the end Vogel comes down to the following:

What we do know is that in the two decades after Tiananmen, China enjoyed relative stability and rapid—even spectacular—economic growth…. Today hundreds of millions of Chinese are living far more comfortable lives than they were living in 1989, and they enjoy far greater access to information and ideas around the world than at any time in Chinese history. Both educational level and longevity have continued to rise rapidly. For these reasons and others, Chinese people take far greater pride in their nation’s achievements than they did in the previous century.

With these words Vogel indicates that he basically accepts an argument that the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department has been making for the past twenty years: that “stability” and economic growth show that the repression at Tiananmen was justified in the long run. When foreign dignitaries or journalists have asked about the massacre, the response of Party leaders has been consistent: if Deng Xiaoping had not taken “resolute” (i.e., murderous) measures, China could not have had the stable society or flourishing economy that it enjoyed in the ensuing years.

Other aspects of government rhetoric, however, suggest that even the sources of such statements do not quite believe them. If it were really true that Deng’s “resolute action” led to economic growth, and that this causal connection is plain for Chinese people to see, one would expect Party propaganda to be highlighting “the suppression at Tiananmen.” But they do the opposite. Over the years, the official description of the massacre events has steadily shrunk from “counterrevolutionary riot” to “turmoil” to “incident” to “flap.” The leaders are well aware that what happened is an extremely ugly mark on their historical record, and they have been eager to have the world forget it as soon as possible.

Read more at  The New York Review of Books

The activists shining light on China’s dark corners

China’s 'netizens’ skip censorship and brave beatings to expose the torment of a blind lawyer, Chen Guangcheng.

Chinese activist Wang Xuezhen buying stationery for Kesi the daughter of blind lawyer activist Chen Guangcheng using donation collected from concerned online users Photo: Peter Foster

By Peter Foster, Dongshigu

The policeman’s hand slapped the woman’s face with an audible crack. Standing only five feet tall in her trainers, barely the height of her assailant’s epaulettes, she took the blow without a cry.

This scene was witnessed by The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday in a small police station near a village in Shandong province, north-east China, that has become a magnet for activists of all stripes protesting against a dark corner of the Chinese state that operates beyond the law.

The woman who took the slap, 30-year-old Wang Xuezhen, is one of a stream of people who have marshalled themselves over the internet and travelled to Dongshigu village to support a man they believe is being persecuted, a blind lawyer named Chen Guangcheng.

Stumbling out of the police station and holding her stinging face, Miss Wang bitterly observed a truth about contemporary China: the country’s lawlessness begins with the law itself.

Then she turned on her mobile phone and asked a friend to post a message on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, relaying the news of the assault to the world.

Almost immediately, her supporters began passing on the message and posting their own messages of support. By the evening the slap had been picked up by an Asian television channel.

“These animals, they lack all humanity, I hate them so much. I wish I could go and join your fight!” wrote one of her followers.

The power and speed of China’s social networks has alarmed the government, which announced plans on Wednesday to police the buzz of messages more tightly, in the name of maintaining what it calls “social stability”.

In the two years since it was launched, the Weibo platform has attracted more than 200 million Chinese, creating a chorus of commentary on the failings of an authoritarian state that often questions and contradicts the output of the tightly-controlled state media.

Even though the Weibo microblogs are carefully policed, with censors blocking and deleting content deemed seditious, the controls are often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of outpourings by the so-called “netizens” – a “Chinglish” coinage for online activists and contributors.

“Operation Free Chen Guangcheng” is perhaps one of the clearest examples of what frightens the Communist Party. It began earlier this year when activists began suggesting online that people should go as “tourists” to visit the 39-year-old blind lawyer, who has been kept under illegal house arrest for more than a year.

Read more at The Telegraph

Women Of The Country

 

 

 

There have been radical changes for women in China in just a century. Here we profile some extraordinary women working to improve human rights, the environment and AIDS education. You may also nominate your own candidates to be added to our gallery.

  MORE AT PBS

Ai Weiwei is named ArtReview's 'most powerful artist'

The artist has spoken out against human rights abuses in China

Continue reading the main story

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has been named the most powerful person in the art world, according to a poll compiled by ArtReview magazine.

But Mr Ai, who was released in June after being detained for more than 80 days by Chinese authorities, told the BBC he does "not feel powerful at all".

The magazine said he was chosen by the panel because of his political activism, as much as his artwork.

China criticised the selection saying it was based on "political bias".

In a statement, ArtReview magazine said: "[His] activities have allowed artists to move away from the idea that they work within a privileged zone limited by the walls of a gallery or museum."

"It's expanding the possibilities of what you can do with art, and as an artist how you can use your voice," it added.

Read more at BBC