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Remarks before the Congressional Human
Rights Caucus Briefing
"China and the Internet: A Virtual Road
to Prison"
Joshua Rosenzweig
Manager of Research and Programs
The Dui Hua Foundation
November 7, 2007
I am privileged to be able to
participate in this briefing this morning and thank the organizers for
inviting me. My organization, The Dui Hua Foundation, has for many years
been engaged in an effort to uncover the names of individuals imprisoned
in China for the non-violent expression of their political and religious
beliefs. Our database of prisoner information includes the names of more
than 14,000 persons imprisoned for these reasons since 1980, of which
4,000 make up an “active registry” from which we develop prisoner lists
designed to raise individual cases directly to the Chinese government
and encourage better treatment and early release.
Dui Hua’s research helped to uncover three of the four individual cases
in which Yahoo!’s Beijing office is known to have provided information
to Chinese law-enforcement agencies. Yahoo!’s role was first revealed in
court documents, beginning with the May 2005 verdict in the case of Shi
Tao, and became even more plain through copies of police documents that
we obtained in July of this year. Careful examination of those documents
led us to conclude that they were most likely authentic, and we made
them available to a wider public audience.
These requests from the Beijing State Security Bureau to Yahoo! Beijing
led directly to yesterday’s hearing, at which Yahoo! senior counsel
Michael Callahan acknowledged that his testimony in February 2006 had
been incorrect. Yahoo! did, in fact, have information about the nature
of the crime being investigated in
Shi Tao’s case. Moreover, the police documents made public in July
show that Yahoo! actually had the same amount of information about the
crime being investigated in
Wang Xiaoning’s case two years before. We infer from the similarity
of these two documents that Yahoo! knew the crimes being investigated in
the cases of Jiang Lijun and Li Zhi as well.
All four of these men were convicted of crimes that fall under the
category of “endangering state security” in Chinese law. This category
of crime, which, following legal reforms a decade ago, largely replaced
the earlier category of “counterrevolution,” aims to protect the
“security and interests of the [Chinese] state.” There is no purpose for
the laws against subversion, inciting subversion, or “splittism” other
than to repress politically dissident activity. The law against leaking
state secrets outside of China that was used against Shi Tao has been
used to silence journalists, rights-defending lawyers, advocates of
religious freedom, and those who champion the rights of ethnic
minorities such as the Uyghurs and Tibetans to seek greater autonomy or
even independence. It is unconscionable for Yahoo! to have knowingly
contributed to police investigations into such crimes for at least two
years without a red flag being raised and closer scrutiny being paid to
whether the price of their Chinese operation might have been too high.
Yet, while we must demand that foreign companies find ways to avoid
being complicit in this sort of political repression, we should not
overstate the role played by companies such as Yahoo! in the overall
system of repression as it exists in China. Chinese police are adept at
amassing multiple layers of testimony, physical evidence, written
evidence, and confessions that make any single piece of evidence
essentially superfluous. (And this of course, is giving the Chinese
legal system the benefit of the doubt, assuming that courts carefully
consider the evidence at all, rather than simply announcing decisions
made behind the scenes, often in advance.) Chinese police have
constructed massive intelligence-gathering networks to root out possible
cases of political and social disruption, and surveillance over the
Internet is but one part of this—albeit a part that’s obviously growing
in importance in light of the Internet’s growing ubiquity.
These individuals and scores of others like them have been imprisoned
for things they said or did using the Internet. Years earlier, they
might have been arrested (indeed, many were) for expressing similar
ideas via fax or through the mail. Or perhaps they would have been
apprehended disseminating leaflets or putting up posters. When the crime
is defined by the insecurity of the political system and when the rights
of individuals are subordinate to the interests of the state, the medium
through which these expressions are voiced is less significant than the
repression with which they are inevitably met.
Thus, while it is important to pay careful consideration to the special
nature of the Internet and Chinese efforts to control its use, we should
not lose sight of the fundamental issue: What China considers “criminal”
activity, at least as far as perceived threats to national security are
concerned, is so broadly defined as to encompass all sorts of behavior
that should be protected under international human rights law. Appeals
to free speech provisions in the Chinese constitution consistently fail
because China has never embraced one of the fundamental premises of
international human rights law: that individual rights take precedence
over the interests of the state. So China has enacted vague,
all-encompassing statutes in the name of protecting national security
and social stability and can thus point to those laws as the basis for
imprisoning individuals it sees as threats.
The Internet, as a specific medium of communication, has in fact had a
significant impact on the modes of oppositional political expression and
organization in China—and on the nature of the state’s response. BBS
postings may be the anonymous leaflets of the Internet age, with chat
rooms serving as the new dissident salons. Without a doubt, the Internet
has enabled an individual’s writings to cross boundaries and reach an
audience far wider than any leaflet ever could and with unprecedented
immediacy. Activists from different parts of China are more aware of
each other than ever before, and they are able to share and absorb ideas
with other activists overseas.
New technologies can help to thwart surveillance until they are in turn
matched by newer technologies designed to aid police. This cat-and-mouse
game will no doubt continue indefinitely, with the technological
advantage always being on the side, however temporarily, of free
expression. Achieving a situation in which the expression of dissident
political views does not result in imprisonment will ultimately rely not
on technology, but on laws. The only way to end China’s history of
repressing free speech—a history that far predates the advent of the
Internet—is for the Chinese government to embrace one of the fundamental
premises of international human rights law: that individual rights take
precedence over the interests of the state. There is a history hundreds,
if not thousands of years old that works against China’s full acceptance
of this principle, but there is hope that an expanding rights discourse
among the Chinese people—a discourse aided by the Internet—will help to
make it happen.
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