Tag Archive for 'China'

Wow, a year in a labour camp for one retweet!

Published on November 18, 2010 in Twitter, politics and social media. View Comments

Amnesty International has urged Chinese authorities to release a woman from a labour camp after she was sentenced to a year of detention for retweeting a supposedly anti-Japanese message:

@wangyi09 retweet

According to the BBC, the woman, Cheng Jianping, is the fiance of human rights activist Hua Chunhui and has been accused of disrupting social order. She has been sentenced to reeducation through labour, even though she says her message was just a joke. There was no trial.

The offending tweet mockingly encourages nationalist protesters to smash the Japan pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, and when she retweeted the message, she added the words “Charge, angry youth” to it as a joke. Obviously this was taken all too seriously by Chinese authorities.

As the BBC points out, her detention is a sure sign of how closely China’s government scrutinises what is said on the web by its citizens. No kidding! That’s a rather severe punishment for one sarcastic tweet. The authorities must really worry about the power of social media to spread subversive ideas.

Race To Become The Cleanest Tech Country?

Published on June 11, 2009 in clean tech, environment, politics and technology. View Comments
Huge windfarm in Xinjiang China. Image by Kiwi Mikex

Huge wind farm in Xinjiang China. Image by Kiwi Mikex

Just as China and the US meet to talk climate change and emissions reduction targets, it seems that China has now begun to publicly express its desire to match Europe by producing 20% of its energy from renewable resources by 2020. Together China and the US account for about 40% of world greenhouse gas emissions, so their negotiations are important to say the least.

As this article suggests, China’s new goal “represents a direct challenge to Europe’s claims to world leadership in the field”. It has also been suggested that this may represent a game changing moment in the area of clean tech. China will soon release a “new energy” program that could actually move the country past Europe and the US into a  position as a global leader in renewable energy and low carbon technology.

It’s clear that there is much work to be done by many nations, and a decent global agreement to be negotiated at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December. However, it’s amazing to think that we may  be on the verge of a race between major polluting nations to become the cleanest and greenest in the eyes of the world, with countires vying for position as the leader in clean tech and renewable energy development. Now that is one arms race that would be well worth having!

The Politics Of Censoring The Web

Published on June 4, 2009 in Twitter, politics, social media and technology. View Comments

Apparently, Twitter and many other social networks were blocked in China in the lead-up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. According to Mashable, the networks included Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, Flickr and others. Also included were local sites such as Fanfou, Xiaonei and Wordku, although these said they were closed for maintenance.

The blocking of these networks must have been frustrating for a lot of people, to say the least! I can only imagine the uproar that would occur if the government tried to block or filter the internet in Australia.

Oh, hold on a second, there has been a debate going on in this country about the government introducing a contentious plan to force internet service providers to filter the internet to a certain (or rather uncertain) extent. Talk of this kind of censorship raises quite a few questions. How is it decided what gets censored and what doesn’t? Who decides? Where do you draw the line in a medium that is constantly being updated and changed? Is any system for censoring the internet workable in practice? Is it healthy for a democracy to begin censoring the internet at all?

The plan by the Australian government to filter the internet is one thing,  blocking whole social networks for days at a time for political reasons is quite another.