Chinese man sentenced to 11 years for downloading articles

Digital Freedom Network ^ | 8/6/02 | Bobson Wong

[Valin]

A Chinese court sentenced a former police officer to 11 years in prison for downloading articles from the Internet, a human rights group announced yesterday.

Li Dawei, a former police officer from Gansu province in northern China, was arrested in April 2001 and later charged with using the Internet to overthrow the Chinese government, according to the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

Li was accused of downloading 500 "reactionary" articles from the Internet and publishing them in 10 books. He was also accused of communicating with overseas "reactionaries" by phone and e-mail.

The Center said that on July 24, the Tianshui Intermediate People's Court sentenced Li to 11 years in prison. A court in Gansu had reportedly accepted an appeal from Li but had not set a hearing date.

To date, at least 26 individuals are being detained by China for using the Internet for political or religious purposes. (The complete list is available at http://dfn.org/focus/china/netattack.htm .) The Digital Freedom Network has been unable to determine their status.

Many Chinese officials view the Internet not only as a valuable tool for communication and commerce. According to reports from the China Internet Network Information Center, the number of Internet users in the country grew to 45.8 million users by July 2002. Many studies indicate that the number of Net users in China is roughly doubling every year or two. Even if these studies exaggerate the number of users, there are clear indications of rapid Internet growth in China.

Such growth concerns officials also view the Internet as a potential threat to social stability. Many overseas sites — over 500,000, according to one report — are banned for their "subversive" content. Through a combination of national firewalls; tough laws aimed at users, Webmasters, and Internet service providers; and voluntary codes of conduct, China has encouraged an online culture of self-censorship in which taboo topics, such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and human rights, are rarely discussed.

Sources for this article include the Associated Press, the South China Morning Post, and Agence France-Presse.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

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[First_Salute]

Just a reminder:

Nuns are driven to suicide by Chinese torture

By David Rennie
London Daily Telegraph - Friday 6 October 2000

A HUMAN rights group investigating the fate of five nuns who committed suicide in a Tibetan prison two years ago has said that they were driven to their deaths by weeks of torture by Chinese authorities.

The claims of the Tibet Information Network centre on the bleak prison of Drapchi, just north of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, where in May 1998 a pro-independence protest took place. It was there, in a yard between the jail's inner and outer gates, that officials chose to welcome the British ambassador and two European colleagues as they investigated human rights in Tibet.

The ambassadors recorded being puzzled about their briefing outside the main prison. Only later did they learn that their visit coincided with bloody protests inside...

Prison authorities were in a rage. For the second time in four days, inmates had refused to sing Socialism is Good and other patriotic songs as the Chinese flag was raised, and instead shouted pro-independence slogans. For the second time they were beaten.

One of the nuns told TIN, an openly pro-Tibet group: "They beat us so savagely that there was blood everywhere, on the walls and on the floor. It looked like an abattoir. They beat us with their belts, until their belts broke. Then they used electric batons. Some [of us] had torn ears, others had wounds in their heads."

There followed a week of interrogations, in which suspected ringleaders report being stripped and given electric shocks and beatings with sand-filled hoses. Finally, the nuns were ordered into an exercise yard to stand stock-still in the summer sunshine for four days.
On the fifth day five nuns, ranging in age from 22 to 28, were found dead in a storeroom. They had hanged themselves or suffocated themselves by "swallowing their scarves". Inmates being released were later threatened with re-imprisonment if they ever talked of what they had seen...

Beijing routinely denies human rights abuses in Tibet and points to new roads, factories and hospitals as evidence of its "benevolent" rule. But for the country's two and a half million people Tibet is where China looks, and acts, like the dictatorship it still is.

And another:

 

[Valin]

On the fifth day five nuns, ranging in age from 22 to 28, were found dead in a storeroom. They had hanged themselves or suffocated themselves by "swallowing their scarves".

Sounds like "shot while trying to escape" scenario.

[First_Salute]

Bump.