Chinese Stranglehold

On the afternoon of April 20, 2004 Shi Tao, head of the Editorial Department of Contemporary Business News, located in Hunan Province, PRC, took notes at a department meeting. Those notes contained references to information in a CPC official document entitled: "A Notice Regarding Current Stabilizing Work" -- a euphemism for the central government's efforts to keep dissent to a minimum on the eve...

China's new Internet rules China tightened its already stringent regulations on Internet content this week. A September 25 statement from the Ministry of Information Industry banned "subversive" material–including pornography, criticism of the government, and sensitive topics like Tibet and Taiwan independence–from the country's computer networks. Instead, only "healthy, civilized news and...

China's repressive government may one day allow the full flood of the Internet to sweep through Chinese society, but for now it is still dedicated to building ever higher and stronger seawalls against liberating knowledge. Over the weekend, two state censorship agencies issued new and more stringent rules about what news can be published on the Internet and who can publish it. The rules...

This week's revelations involving a Chinese journalist sentenced to 10 years in jail for revealing state secrets indicates the weaknesses of human rights and corporate behavior in the virtual world. Media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders in Paris issued a scathing indictment of Yahoo! China for its IP address information sharing that contributed to the arrest and conviction of Shi Tao, a...

As U.S. technology companies pour investments into China, the one thing they’re not exporting is good old-fashioned American values of individual freedom. French media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders called Yahoo Inc. "a Chinese police informant" earlier this week after it gave information about a journalist's personal email account to the Beijing government, which has imprisoned him for...

Yahoo! Inc co-founder Jerry Yang said that the company legally had no choice but to provide Chinese authorities with information used to prosecute and jail Chinese journalist Shi Tao for 10 years. Yang said that the company had a very clear-cut set of privacy rules and that in every country that it operates when it provides information to governments it must be supported by legal rules and...

The role of the US Internet firm Yahoo in helping Chinese security officials to finger a journalist sentenced to 10 years for e-mailing "state secrets" is filtering into mainland China. The revelation reinforces a conviction among many Chinese "netizens" that there is no place security forces can't find them. Yet if netizen reaction in China is resignation, the story of Yahoo's complicity in the...

A statement this week from Reporters Without Borders will make unsettling reading for foreign companies eager to join China's internet boom. The press freedom watchdog accused the US internet portal Yahoo of helping Chinese authorities to identify and convict a local journalist of leaking state secrets. In April, Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison for sending foreigners an e-mail that...

The human-rights group is calling for action over claims Yahoo is 'cheerfully sacrificing human rights in return for a cut of the Chinese market'. Privacy International (PI) has called on Internet users to boycott Yahoo over allegations that the Web giant provided information that helped Chinese officials convict a journalist accused of leaking state secrets. Simon Davies, director of PI...

Yahoo, the American internet giant, stands accused of helping Beijing to send a dissident journalist to prison for 10 years. The company is said to have supplied the authorities with computer records proving that Shi Tao had posted on the internet an internal government document banning the Chinese media from commenting on last year's 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. It is easy...