Chinese Stranglehold

The now infamous saga highlights the difficulties for U.S. communications companies that do business with China. Just one week after a public shaming before Congress, Yahoo settled on Nov. 13 a civil lawsuit accusing the Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet power of cooperating with Chinese authorities in the jailing of journalist Shi Tao for a decade. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. A reporter...

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese Olympic officials defended on Tuesday the collection of information on journalists, saying such databases would be used to help the media at Beijing 2008, not to create blacklists or hinder reporting. The comments came a day after state media said authorities were building a database of information on about 30,000 foreign journalists accredited to cover Beijing 2008...

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's muzzled press and burgeoning Internet have given citizen reporters an audience and an opportunity -- however fleeting -- to spread news quicker than government censors can control it. Zhou Shuguang, whose amateur reporting of a famous property dispute lead to him being hailed as China's "first citizen reporter", poses in front of a dismantled house in Beijing November 2...

Chinese authorities closed an unregistered newspaper and arrested two "fake" reporters, state media reported yesterday. Social News was not licensed for publication in China and provided false information about its registration in Hong Kong, the Xinhua news agency quoted the General Administration of Press and Publication saying. President and chief reporter Gao Yang, who was not accredited by the...

(RSF/IFEX) - On 6 November 2007, two plainclothes police officers disrupted an interview with demobilised soldiers by "Economist" reporter James Miles and his assistant Jin Dan from the British weekly's Beijing bureau in Yantai, Shandong province, eastern China. The two had been followed by an unmarked car as soon as they arrived in Yantai the previous day. Two police officers who had been...

Yahoo shares plunged again Wednesday, a day after Congress hammered top executives over the company’s cooperation with Chinese officials in the jailing of a pro-democracy journalist. Shares slumped 7.7% as Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., renewed a call for Yahoo to endorse his bill banning such cooperation. Smith said he remained “absolutely bewildered and angered” that the beleaguered Internet portal...

Reporters Without Borders is disappointed by yesterday’s testimony by Yahoo! chief executive officer Jerry Yang and the company’s vice president and senior general counsel, Michael Callahan, to a US House of Representatives foreign affairs committee hearing on Callahan’s earlier controversial statements to Congress about the company’s involvement in the arrest of Chinese journalist Shi Tao in 2005...

On the eve of “Journalists’ Day,” which China is celebrating tomorrow, Reporters Without Borders calls on the authorities to stop violating journalists’ rights on a massive scale. The record leaves no room for doubt - 33 journalists are currently detained, several dozen have been injured this year and one has been killed. To illustrate the scope of the government’s editorial control, the press...

Two top Yahoo Inc. officials on Tuesday defended their company’s role in the jailing of a Chinese journalist but ran into withering criticism from lawmakers who accused them of complicity with an oppressive communist regime. Yahoo gave the Chinese government information about Shi Tao’s online activities, and he was jailed for 10 years. “While technologically and financially you are giants, morally...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has asked Yahoo! to take advantage of the 6 November 2007 Congress hearing to set the record straight on the company's collaboration with the Chinese authorities. Congress is investigating sworn statements Yahoo! made during a February 2006 Congress hearing regarding its role in cyberdissident Shi Tao's arrest and conviction on a charge of "illegally...