Chinese Stranglehold

BEIJING - A Straits Times reporter arrested in China on charges of spying will have his case referred to the prosecution department within days, Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang said on Wednesday. Mr Tsang had brought up the case of Ching Cheong, who was based in Hong Kong, during meetings in Beijing with President Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. Mr Ching, 56, was first detained in April in...

A Chinese researcher for the New York Times was indicted Friday for revealing state secrets to the newspaper and on a lesser charge of fraud, a move that should send the case to trial within six weeks, his lawyer said. The indictment signified a decision by prosecutors to proceed with a trial of 43-year-old Zhao Yan, after 15 months of investigation by the State Security Ministry during which Zhao...

China is sending a Chinese journalist working for the New York Times to trial charged with exposing state secrets, his lawyer said on Friday. Zhao Yan, who worked as a researcher for the paper before his arrest in September last year, won the Reporters Without Borders 2005 prize this month for journalists who have “shown a strong commitment to press freedom”. “The way they have done this shows...

WHEN a dozen Chinese newspapers recently ran stories about a rash of sadistic cat killings in Shanghai by a perverse postgraduate student, it was another quiet triumph for a young man in Beijing called Zhao Jing. To a widening blog readership in China and abroad, Zhao is better known by the pseudonym Anti. As well as indicating an oppositionist stance in English, it also strikes a dissident note...

EC VICE president Margot Wallstroem has accused Microsoft, Yahoo and Google of having flexible morals when it comes to dealing with China. Writing in her bog, Wallstroem criticised the three companies for helping China silence its domestic critics. She said that Vole, Yahoo and Google were matching their morals to suit new markets and had words such as "ethics" and "corporate social responsibility...

A Beijing-based correspondent for the respected German weekly newspaper Die Zeit was detained for five hours Friday near so-called cancer villages along a severely polluted river in central China. Georg Blume said in a telephone interview from the hotel room where he was being held in Shenqiu, Henan province, and was accused of conducting 'illegal interviews'. He was cross-examined until he was...

As Chinese Prime Minister Wen continued a four-day visit to France that began yesterday, press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said it has confirmed that journalist Shi Tao, who is serving a 10-year-prison sentence, is having to do forced labour and he is suffering from respiratory problems and a skin inflammation. Shi, who was convicted of "illegally divulging state secrets abroad"...

The head of the Chinese Internet company that has acquired Yahoo's China operations has defended the US portal's decision to help communist authorities track down and prosecute dissident journalist Shi Tao, the Financial Times has reported. Yahoo has been widely condemned for assisting the case against Shi Tao, who was jailed for 10 years in April this year for revealing information about...

The impressive growth of the Internet in China is matched by the authorities’ energetic attempts to monitor, censor and repress Internet activity, with tough laws, jailing cyber-dissidents, blocking access to websites, monitoring online forums and shutting down cybercafés, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). MONITORED: There are just five backbones or hubs through which all traffic must...

China now has more than 100 million Internet users. The number of netizens in China rose to 103 million by late June this year, according to official figures. Mao Qian, head of Optical Telecommunications Committee of China Telecommunications Society, said the statistitcs were from a report that was recently completed based on the 16th survey into the development of the Internet in China. NET...