| Submit your comments on this article |
| China-Japan-Koreas |
| China's Web police block US ambassador's name |
| 2011-02-25 |
| BEIJING (AP) - China widened its Internet policing after online calls for protests like those that swept the Middle East, with social networking site LinkedIn and searches for the U.S. ambassador's name both blocked on Friday. Searches for Ambassador Jon Huntsman's name in Chinese on popular microblogging site Sina Weibo were met with a message saying results were not available due to unspecified "laws, regulations and policies." A video circulating online shows Huntsman, who has been mentioned as a potential Republican presidential candidate, scanning the crowd at the site of a tiny protest in Beijing last weekend. An unidentified Chinese man asked Huntsman what he was doing there and whether he wanted to see chaos in China. Huntsman walked away from the scene after that comment. The U.S. Embassy was aware that Huntsman's name was being "restricted on some searches" on China's domestic Internet, spokesman Richard Buangan said, but declined further comment on the issue. He said the ambassador and some family members were passing through the bustling Wangfujing shopping street on Sunday and it was a coincidence that they were there at the same time as the planned protest. Notices that began circulating last week on an overseas website and called for protests in cities across China every Sunday have so far attracted few overt demonstrators but nevertheless unnerved the authoritarian government. In addition to increased filtering of the Internet, police have also questioned, placed under house arrest and otherwise detained more than a hundred people, the monitoring group China Human Rights Defenders said. At least five have been detained on subversion or national security charges, in some cases for passing on information about the protest calls. The Beijing police department on Friday, in an unusual move, summoned The Associated Press and several other foreign news organizations for brief meetings to restate regulations requiring foreign reporters to receive permission from government agencies, companies and individuals for interviews. LinkedIn does not have a strong following among Chinese users, who make up one million of its 90 million-plus members, but the site had previously been accessible. On Friday, it could not be opened within China. The Mountain View, California-based company said in a statement that the site was blocked for some people and they were continuing to monitor the situation, which was apparently "part of a broader effort in China going on right now." The appearance of the U.S. ambassador at Sunday's protest feeds into a frequent theme in state-controlled media: that the U.S. is trying to subvert China. One website that focuses on criticizing Western media coverage, anti-cnn.com, said Huntsman's presence at the protest site "obviously reflected" a "coordinated campaign to disrupt China." The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Thursday sidestepped questions asking whether Beijing believed Huntsman was there by coincidence. Spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said he was not aware of specifics of the case. |
| Posted by:Jack Salami |
| #5 Here's some commentary from someone who claims he showed up in Guangzhou, but was frightened off by the massive security presence (translation from Roland Soong's East South West North): 2:30pm, 2:40pm, 2:50pm. The pedestrian traffic was thinning out. All those people like my type have left. I knew that there would be no show today. That was all there was today. So I strolled around the park. I spotted some signs. The police were everywhere in the park. During my walk in less than half the park, I saw several hundred police officers and several dozen police vehicles. My former company was located in a building by the park. One morning, I saw a large group of police officers in the building lobby. I asked my colleague who told me quietly that there was a sit-in demonstration. I realized that we were right next to city hall and the police were reserve forces who were staying out of sight. So I figured that there must be over one thousand police officers in the surrounding buildings. I went back to the plaza. Apart from park tourists, there was hardly anyone around. So I had to go home. On the subway, I began to think about why the jasmine flowers didn't bloom today. Fang Bingxing* is the main perpetrator. The Great Firewall kept all the news out of China. The news was originally posted at the Boxun website, which has been inaccessible for several days already. Even a veteran wall-climber like myself only saw it at Epoch Times in the middle of the night. So others are even less likely to know. Not many people in Guangzhou would know, unless they work for the government. How many people can come? If too few people show up, nobody dares to take the lead. So this bastard Fang Bingxing is evil. Someday we will hold a public trial for this old bastard and send him off to jail for the rest of his life. Some people say that the Chinese are cowardly and feeble. This is an excuse. If you read the Twenty-Four Histories, there is nothing except for rebellions. The entire history of China is about rebellions. We have five thousand years of rebellions. Xiang Tang started it, and Liu Bang, Xiang Yu, Zhu Ruanzhang, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong were all rebels. There are far too many Chinese persons who are unafraid to die. The key is whether they can be mobilized and organized. We don't want a violent revolution that will smash everything. We want a peaceful revolution. On this day, the jasmine flowers did not bloom in Guangzhou. That is okay. I will be returning next Sunday at 2pm. And the week after that. As the news spreads, more and more fellow travelers will come. There will be more and more of us. The People of Guangzhou, see you next week at Starbucks Plaza, People's Park. * Fang Bingxing, the father of China's Great Firewall, got himself a Twitter-style account on Sina.com. He stopped tweeting after being inundated by an avalanche of hatred from Chinese internet users. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2011-02-26 00:03 |
| #4 In that case, I'm sorry, I misunderstood your intent yesterday. |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2011-02-25 18:35 |
| #3 Yyyyyeah. That article from yesterday that I clearly indicated came from a biased source? |
| Posted by: gromky 2011-02-25 15:04 |
| #2 Meanwhile, you're reading items about "EEvul US tries to forment chaos in China" and you're accepting them at face value. |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2011-02-25 13:09 |
| #1 You read the story on Rantburg yesterday. The MSM wouldn't have even bothered to report it except for this ban. You'll notice that the story was not "US ambassador attends protest that nobody showed up to" but rather "Evil China blocks his name" with the incident barely mentioned in passing. |
| Posted by: gromky 2011-02-25 11:32 |