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The Tibetan Government-in-Exile has released new video footage of the protests in Lhasa last year that confirms the use of extreme violence and torture by Chinese authorities. The Chinese communist regime has always denied that torture is used in Tibet.

"This extremely rare and shocking footage confirms our worst fears about the horrific pain and suffering Tibetans are experiencing at the hands of the Chinese authorities in the wake of last year's uprising," said Lhadon Tethong, Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet, in a press release.

"The brutality of the Chinese authorities against Tibetans in this footage is not the exception to, but rather the rule of, Beijing's treatment of the Tibetan people over the past 50 years,” he said.

One segment of the video, recorded on March 14, 2008, shows Chinese police beating Tibetan prisoners with batons, after they were arrested in the protests. The prisoners have their hands tied behind their backs and can only curl in an attempt to resist the beatings.

Another segment of the video shows gruesome images of a young Tibetan by the name of Tendar being tortured by Chinese authorities. He was reportedly fired at, beaten with an electric baton, burned with cigarettes, and his right foot was pierced by a nail.

The video shows him after being brought to the TAR People’s Hospital. His body is covered with rotting wounds from lack of proper treatment. Tendar died from his injuries on June 19, 2008.

The protests in Tibet began on March 10, 2008, leading up to the Beijing Olympics.

Officials from the Chinese Communist Party have repeatedly denied that torture was used in Tibet. In November 2008 when the U.N. panel released a report on the use of torture on Tibetans by Chinese police, the Chinese Foreign Ministry called the reports “untrue and slanderous” and accused the committee members of being “prejudiced” against China. However, the regime imposed martial law and banned tourists and journalists from Tibet for months after the protests.

Tibetan activists have asked, why, if the communist regime has nothing to hide, does it lock down the country and deny any independent investigation?

In the Lhasa protests and the following crackdown by the communist regime, close to 220 Tibetans were killed, more than 1,294 were seriously injured, and more than 1,000 simply disappeared. The Chinese authorities arrested more than 5,600 Tibetans, of which 290 are known to have been sentenced.

The video, which is graphic and at times difficult to watch, can be seen:  http://footage.tibetanbridges.com/Torture-in-Tibet.mov

Three journalists from Japan’s Kyodo News were beaten on the night of September 18, 2009 by Chinese authorities who forced their way into their hotel room. The reporters’ laptops were destroyed in the process. Following the beating of three Hong Kong journalists in Urumqi, Xinjiang Province, this was another incident of Chinese police beating foreign journalists.

The Kyodo News report stated that the Japanese journalists were in their hotel room near Changan Street in Beijing, reporting on the rehearsal by troops for the upcoming National Day. However, a group of people claiming to represent the Chinese government broke into the room and condemned them for reporting on the rehearsals. These people even kicked the journalists, beat them around the head, forced them to kneel and threw their two laptops into the hallway.

The three journalists included one writer and two photo journalists,  however, it did not reveal their nationalities or the department they belonged to at Kyodo News.

Kyodo News said that China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had sent a notice to the media, banning the recording of the September 6 National Day rehearsal. However, similar notices have not been received since. After the incident on the night of September 18, Kyodo News filed a complaint with the China State Council and Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ask for an explanation of this beating.

The 60th anniversary of the Chinese Communist rule is fast approaching on October 1, 2009. The authorities have significantly increased the security level in Beijing. Tanks, military vehicles carrying missiles and other vehicle equipment have entered Changan Street and the avenues surrounding the Tiananmen Square. All of the shop and schools near the rehearsal location have been closed and traffic diverted.

China has stopped issuing travel documents to foreigners seeking to visit occupied Tibet, according to local tour operators, another indicator of the government’s skittishness over the coming anniversary of the Communist victory in 1949.

The ban on new permits, which took effect on Monday, will last at least three weeks, travel agents say.

This is the third time foreign travel to occupied Tibet has been halted since March 2008, when rioting killed at least 22 people in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and left part of its central business district in flames.

Tour operators who arrange the paperwork said the new regulations were issued Sunday by the region’s tourism bureau without explanation. They said that foreigners already holding permits would be allowed to travel to occupied Tibet but with restrictions, including requirements that they travel only with guides and stay in government-approved hotels. Tour operators said they were told that the ban on new permits would remain in effect until at least Oct. 8.

Yong Hong, deputy sales manager at Xigaze China International Travel Service in Lhasa, said the new rules were unexpected and not particularly welcome. “It was a sudden thing, but this year is unusual,” he said, referring to the Oct. 1 National Day celebrations marking the founding of the People’s Republic.

Tourism, which makes up nearly 20 percent of the region’s economy, was battered by the rioting last year but has more than recovered, officials say. Nearly 1.4 million tourists visited the Tibet Autonomous Region in August, a monthly record, according to figures cited by Xinhua, the state news propaganda agency.

Foreign passport holders were barred from visiting Tibet in the months after the riots and again last spring, just before the 50th anniversary of a failed revolt that led to the exile of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader who has long sought greater autonomy for Tibetans living under Chinese rule.

Foreign journalists are also barred from travelling to occupied Tibet except those invited to attend a rare, tightly scripted official tour.

Security has been increased across the country in the weeks leading up to National Day events and has become especially tight in Beijing, which will be the scene of a vast military parade, a fireworks display and a speech by President Hu Jintao.

Less than two weeks from a massive celebration of China’s 60th anniversary as a Communist state, Beijing is flooded with policemen and the city is on the highest state of security alert permissible outside wartime.

But that did not stop a man going beserk with a knife yesterday evening not far from Tiananmen Square, where a huge military parade is planned for Oct. 1. He killed two people and injured 14.

So much for the massive security presence. But what is equally striking is that the public has been told practically nothing about the dramatic incident.

The state news agency Xinhua issued a terse report Thursday evening giving the man’s name, home town, and the number of his victims. On Friday it released another brief article saying he had been drunk when he went on the rampage.

No newspaper website was allowed to print anything more. Blogs and Twitter posts discussing the stabbings and adding supposed details of what happened were censored almost as soon as they went up. (The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, for example, reported that three men were wielding knives and that two escaped.)

Perhaps the authorities were embarrassed that something so dreadful could happen a few hundred yards from Tiananmen Square at a time when it was blanketed with policemen guarding preparations for a parade rehearsal due to be held throughout Friday night.

Perhaps the perpetrator had just lost his job, or suffered some other indignity that would not promote the image of harmony and peace that the government is so keen to present at the anniversary.

But perhaps, too, the massive and sudden censorship reveals something about the Chinese leadership’s idea of security – and of reality. They can’t keep people safe from an attack like this (nor can any government) but they can stop people talking about it, and it is the talking that really makes them nervous.

It is as if they think that if nobody knows what happened, it didn’t happen. But even if nobody hears a tree falling in the forest, that does not mean that it did not fall.

(Xinhua)  Why Are The Thirty-Year-Old Execution Photos Of A Corrupt Female Government Official So Popular On The Internet?  By Qin Henhai.

On April 23, 1979, the People's Daily had an exclusive news report: In Heilongjiang province, the largest corrupt gang was busted.  The criminal Wang Shouxin and others were arrested and investigated for the crimes of sharing illegal profits and then hiding and covering up the loot.

On February 28, 1980, this principal criminal of this internationally known crime -- Heilongjiang Province Bingyuan County Combustible Fuel manager and party secretary Wang Shouxin -- faced the legal consequences.  You can call her a "corrupt official" but she is a merely a manager of a combustible fuel company.  Nobody knows what the rank might be in the hierarchy of officialdom but it is probably the lowest possible.

A few years ago, the process of her execution was published by the photographer at the scene and then broadly circulated on the Internet.  Recently, someone posted these photos on Sohu.com.  Within a few days (ending 4pm on May 3), those photos had been seen by 1.132 million persons.  The popularity was astonishing.

Ordinarily speaking, when a life is terminated, one should be studying the pathos of the death, no matter how much this person deserves to die.  But why are so many people looking at these photos in so many different ways (calmly, emotionally, carefully or thoughtfully)?  Some people even long for this scene to occur today.  Now that is truly thought-provoking.

Today as it was thirty years ago, everybody hates those people who loot state resources through bribery and corruption.  Therefore, when people see photos of a corrupt government official being executed, they are pleased.  However, there are some differences in feelings between today and thirty years ago.

Thirty years ago, a case involving several hundred thousand RMB results in the death penalty.  Today a case involving hundreds of millions only results in a suspended death penalty.  In Heilongjiang province, the later and greatest corrupt female government official Han Jiazhi was given a suspended death penalty for seven million RMB in ill-gotten gains.  The former Heilongjiang governor and later State Land Resources Department director Tian Fengshan was given a life sentence for corruption involving 4.98 million RMB.  If Wang Shouxin was executed in her time, why should Han Jiazhi and Tian Fengshan be allowed to live?

... Thirty years ago, there would a public meeting after which the convict is taken out to the execution field and shot.  Today, many localities use lethal injections for execution and also give certain rights to those who were given life sentences and deprived of their political rights.

Therefore, fewer and fewer death penalties are carried out.  The number of public executions has also decreased.  Correspondingly, the deterrent effect against corrupt officials has weakened.  This is why people become nostalgic for the photos of the execution of government officials several decades ago.  Apart from this current series of photos, another series entitled <Mao Zedong personally signed the approval to execute seven criminals> has also been popular on the Internet recently.

It is hard to explain all the reasons but one thing is quite obvious: if we can be more decisive, powerful and open in punishing government corrupt officials, people would be less concerned about events that occurred several decades ago.

\

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Sep 16, 2009

YA News

China's increasingly advanced weaponry could undermine US military power in the Pacific, Defence Secretary Robert Gates said on Wednesday.

Echoing US intelligence guidelines released on Tuesday that warned of Beijing's military modernization, Gates said US naval carriers and air bases in the Pacific faced new threats from China.

"In fact, when considering the military-modernization programs of countries like China, we should be concerned less with their potential ability to challenge the US symmetrically -- fighter to fighter or ship to ship -- and more with their ability to disrupt our freedom of movement and narrow our strategic options," Gates said in a speech to the Air Force Association.

"Investments in cyber and anti-satellite warfare, anti-air and anti-ship weaponry, and ballistic missiles could threaten America's primary way to project power and help allies in the Pacific -- in particular our forward air bases and carrier strike groups," Gates said in National Harbour, Maryland.

The new threats meant long-range military aircraft would take on greater importance as the latest weaponry would "degrade the effectiveness of short-range fighters and put more of a premium on being able to strike from over the horizon -- whatever form that capability might take," he said.

Defense analysts have warned that the US military will soon lose its dominance on the high seas, in space and in cyberspace as China and other emerging powers obtain sophisticated weaponry and missiles.

The United States released its 2009 National Intelligence Strategy document Tuesday, in which China's "natural resource-focused diplomacy and military modernization" were cited as factors making it a "global challenge."

The intelligence guidelines for the next four years also elevated the importance of the cyber domain, singling out China as "very aggressive in the cyberworld."

Barack Obama has quietly postponed an audience with the Dalai Lama until after he visits China in November.

The move comes in the wake of Obama's decision to slap a 35 per cent import duty on tires from China and avoids a potential second affront to Beijing.

The news was contained deep in a press release issued by the Dalai Lama after his meeting Monday with top-level emissaries from Obama, senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett and State Department under secretary Maria Otero.

Issued from his home in exile in Dharamsala, India, the third from last paragraph of the press release said: "His Holiness is looking forward to meeting President Obama 'after' his visit to China."

The Tibetan holy man was widely expected to meet the president as part of his North American tour that begins in Memphis on Sept. 23, includes more than a week in Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal with events slated from Sept. 27 to Oct. 3, and ends up in Washington on Oct. 10.

The meeting was fraught with difficulty even before Obama last week signed the tire tariff which the Chinese claim violates World Trade Organization rules.

Beijing considers the Dalai Lama a dangerous "splittest" who wants to separate Tibet from China and it routinely retaliates against heads of state and governments who deign to meet the Buddhist monk, even in a so-called "private" capacity.

Last year, Beijing cancelled an important summit with the European Union after French President Nicolas Sarkozy met with the Nobel Peace laureate and bilateral relations with Germany went in the deep freeze in 2007 when Chancellor Angela Merkel received him in the chancellery. Earlier this year, under pressure from China, South Africa refused to even issue him a visa.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper held a 40-minute meeting on Parliament Hill with the exiled spiritual leader in 2007. Canada's already cool relations with China grew frostier still as a result. Sun Lushan, political counselor at the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa, warned at the time that the meeting would "gravely undermine" Sino-Canadian relations and called it "blatant interference in China's internal affairs."

Obama's emissaries were obviously keen to assure the Dalai Lama that just because the president would not meet him before his first official visit to Beijing, it did not mean he was not concerned about the Tibet issue.

The release said: "Ms Jarrett discussed with His Holiness on the best way the United States could assist in the resolution for the Tibetan issue, particularly in the light of the first visit by President Obama to China in November. His Holiness conveyed to Ms. Jarrett the issues that he would like President Obama to make when he visits China."

Even without a stop at the Oval Office, the 74-year-old globetrotting monk has a punishing schedule of meetings and appearances in the U.S. and Canada this fall.

In Vancouver, the Dalai Lama will be guest editor of the Vancouver Sun on Sept. 26, the day before he participates in a two-day Peace Summit with six fellow Nobel laureates, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

He then crosses the mountains to Calgary for a speech at the Saddledome and events at the University of Calgary on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1. He wraps up the Canadian leg of his tour in Montreal on Oct. 3 with a public lecture on The Power of Compassion.

“If you choose not to comment on this post, then you don’t deserve to be a Chinese.” This is a typical post on a Chinese BBS. The content of this kind of post is usually a picture of the Chinese flag or the Nanjing Massacre. On one of the most popular Chinese BBS, the Baidu BBS, there are over two thousand comments already on such a post.

GOOGLE'S head of China resigns; Debate over censorship flares up...

The head of Google’s operations in China quit on Friday, ending a controversial four-year tenure that saw the company censored version of its search engine  to gain a foothold in the most populous internet market.

The departure of Kai-Fu Lee comes close on the heels of a renewed debate inside the company about whether Google should pull out of China – a discussion prompted by the latest flare-up of its battle with the Chinese authorities, according to people close to the situation.


That running debate has remained unresolved since the US company introduced a local, censored version of its search engine, Google.cn. Co-founder Sergey Brin in particular is still said by associates to be troubled by the company’s involvement in censorship.

“There are senior people who still wonder about the wisdom and morality of being there,” said one person close to the company’s thinking.

But there was no indication on Friday that Mr Lee’s departure was tied to a change of heart over Google’s presence in China. Alan Eustace, senior vice-president for engineering, credited him with “helping dramatically to im­prove the quality and range of services that we offer in China”.

Mr Lee, a former Microsoft executive, is one of the most prominent figures in the Chinese internet world and enjoys rock-star status in university engineering departments across the country.

His departure from Microsoft became an early lightning rod in the company’s rivalry with Google, prompting lawsuits and angry accusations from each side.

After launching Google.cn, he was able to gain a foothold for the US search engine inside the country, although the company has been repeatedly frustrated in its attempts to make deeper inroads into the market share of Baidu, the local market leader.

Independent research firms put Google’s share of the Chinese search market at about 30 per cent, although internal measures suggest it is only a little more than 20 per cent, according to one person close to the company.

Google has faced several official actions that have served to cap any gains in market share it has managed to achieve. In June, it was ordered to suspend some features on Google.cn over allegations it allowed pornographic content.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

September 6, 2009

By JONATHAN ANSFIELD

 News Web sites in China, complying with secret government orders, are requiring that new users log on under their true identities to post comments, a shift in policy that the country’s Internet users and media have fiercely opposed in the past.

Until recently, users could weigh in on news items on many of the affected sites more anonymously, often without registering at all, though the sites were obligated to screen all posts, and the posts could still be traced via Internet protocol addresses.

But in early August, without notification of a change, news portals like Sina, Netease, Sohu and scores of other sites began asking unregistered users to sign in under their real names and identification numbers, said top editors at two of the major portals affected. A Sina staff member also confirmed the change.

The editors said the sites were putting into effect a confidential directive issued in late July by the State Council Information Office, one of the main government bodies responsible for supervising the Internet in China.

The new step is not foolproof, the editors acknowledged. It was possible for a reporter to register successfully on several major sites under falsified names and ID and cellphone numbers.

But the requirement adds a critical new layer of surveillance to mainstream sites in China, which were already heavily policed. Further regulations of the same nature also appeared to be in the pipeline.

And while the authorities called the measure part of a drive to forge greater “social responsibility” and “civility” among users, they moved forward surreptitiously and suppressed reports about it, said the editors and others in the media industry familiar with the measure, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid putting their jobs at risk.

Asked why the policy was pushed through unannounced, the chief editor of one site said, “The influence of public opinion on the Net is still too big.”

Government Internet regulators have been trying to usher in real-name registration controls since 2003, when they ordered Internet cafes around China to demand that customers show identification, nominally to keep out minors. Last year, lawmakers and regulators began discussing legislation on a more extensive “real name system,” as it is known.

But such proposals have aroused heated debate over the purview of the state to restrict China’s online community, which is the largest in the world at about 340 million people and growing.

Proponents, led by officials and state-connected academics in the information security field, argue that mandatory controls are necessary to help subdue inflammatory attacks, misinformation and other illegal activity deemed to endanger social order. They often note registration requirements on large sites in South Korea to support their point.

Critics counter that government regulation represents an incursion on free speech, individual privacy and the watchdog role of the Web in China.

The critics say sites and users should retain the right to discipline themselves. Given the country’s huge population of Internet users and its failure to guarantee freedom of expression, they argue, the case of China is hardly analogous to that of South Korea.

In 2006, Internet users and the news media rebuffed one official proposal to require real-name registration on blog hosting sites. Star bloggers denounced the notion, while ordinary users overwhelmingly rejected it in surveys conducted on sites like Sina.

In another key test of the policy earlier this year, the legislature in Hangzhou, near Shanghai, passed a regulation that would have placed the requirement on users who comment, blog or play games on sites based there. Amid a popular outcry, however, the city shied away from enforcing the regulation.

Central authorities have gone to new lengths to tame online activity in 2009, a year peppered with politically delicate anniversaries.

Government censors have closed thousands of sites in a continuing war on “vulgarity,” closed liberal forums and blogs for spreading “harmful information,” blocked access to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and cut off Internet service where serious unrest has erupted, notably in the Xinjiang region of the west after deadly clashes between ethnic Uighurs and Han in July. Increasingly, officials have defended the Web shutdowns on the grounds of national security.

The government recently set off an international furore when it ordered that all computers sold in China come prepackaged with pornography filtering software that authorities could remotely control. Officials were forced to retreat from the order after international companies and trade bodies protested and Chinese hackers showed that the software was designed to block politically offensive content as well.

The authorities had aimed to avoid a similar showdown over the new real-name requirement. “We had no recourse to challenge it,” said the news editor of another portal.

Ta Kung Pao, a Hong Kong-based newspaper loyal to Beijing, first leaked news of the State Council edict in late July. But the report was scrubbed from the paper’s Web site within a few days.

Another state newspaper tried to follow up on the Ta Kung Pao report soon thereafter, the paper’s editors said, but they were forced to abort their article because they were warned that the order was a state secret.

The State Council Information Office had yet to respond to a list of submitted questions about the move.

The new mandate did not appear to affect formerly registered users of the portals. Nor did it affect blog hosts, forums or government news sites like People’s Daily or Xinhua.

Whether because it had an impact mainly on rookie users or because of the void of news about it, bloggers in China were unusually slow to recognize the measure. But those who did were critical.

One commentator on the popular forum Tianya wrote, “Not daring to write one’s real name, in truth, is a form of self-protection for the weak.”

There were signals in the state media in recent weeks that more name registration measures would follow.

An influential advocate of the policy, Fang Bingxing, the president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told a forum in August that the “time was ripe” to roll it out widely to bolster information security, newspapers reported.

A trail of comments on Sina thrashed the report.

Late last month, the Communist Party-run Guangming Daily ran a positive story about a city government portal in western China that imposed the requirement on new bloggers, calling it a “forerunner.”

Hu Yong, a new media specialist at Peking University, said government-enforced registration requirements carried long-term side effects.

“Netizens will have less trust in the government, and to a certain extent, the development of the industry will be impeded,” he said.

From a comparison of the most commented-on articles in July and August on a number of portals it was hard to determine whether the volume of posts had been affected so far.
But both editors at two of the major portals affected said their sites had shown marked drop-offs.

I have been abducted by aliens, says Japan's first lady

(Oh, and she also knew Tom Cruise in a previous life)

Filmmakers Barred From China Festival

When the American filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill traveled around Sichuan Province last year to document the anger of parents whose children had died in school collapses during the earthquake in May, they ran into a chilly reception from officials.

Police officers harassed the two men and their co-workers, detained them and interrogated them for eight hours, they said.

Now, the Chinese government has denied both of them visas, blocking them from presenting their documentary, “China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province,” at the Beijing Independent Film Festival this week. The two men, said their visa applications were rejected late last week.

“We are extremely disappointed that the Chinese government denied our request for visas and that we will not be permitted to discuss this film with a Chinese audience in Beijing,” Mr. Alpert and Mr. O’Neill said in a joint e-mail message. “The denial of our visas fits in with a pattern of what seems to be a complete commitment on the part of this Chinese government to crush any inquiry into the possibility of wrongful deaths during the earthquake in Sichuan.”

Chen Cong, a vice consul in the press office of the Chinese Consulate in New York, declined to explain the rejection, saying that diplomatic organizations had “the right not to give a reason for why the visa was denied.”

Mr. Alpert and Mr. O’Neill have both won Emmy Awards and have worked together on highly praised documentaries, including Baghdad ER. The Sichuan documentary was shown on HBO in May, one year after the earthquake, and got positive reviews. The official Web site of the film is blocked in fascist China.

The Chinese regime has gone to great lengths to silence any mention of the collapsed schools and, according to an official count, the 5,335 children who died or remain missing. In the weeks after the earthquake, which left nearly 87,000 people dead or missing, parents took to the streets to demand official investigations into why so many school buildings had collapsed even though other buildings around them remained standing. The parents said shoddy construction and corruption were the obvious causes.

Local officials ordered security forces to detain the parents or tried to buy the silence of the parents with compensation money. Meanwhile, journalists who tried approaching the schools were stopped, and two rights advocates who pressed for official inquiries were detained. The two advocates, Huang Qi and Tan Zuoren, were put on trial last month.

Artists trying to raise consciousness over the collapsed schools have been similarly harassed. The Chinese filmmaker Pan Jianlin, was tracked by security officials after his documentary on the deaths, “Who Killed Our Children?” was shown last year at the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea. Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist who often criticizes the Communist Party, had his Web site blocked after he tried to compile online a comprehensive tally of dead schoolchildren. He was detained by regime forces in Sichuan last month when he tried to attend the trial of Mr. Tan.

A person helping to organize the film festival in Beijing said the HBO documentary would be shown on Thursday even though the filmmakers will not be able to attend. The festival is showcasing more than 80 films, and each one is generally shown once.