Chinese Officials In A Figurative Battle For a Virtual War

 Beijing bureaucrats are in a vicious fight over control of internet content particularly on-line games. It seems an unlikely battleground for an internal government turf war but gaming is a sector that promises fast-growing revenue.
It is also set against the background of the Government’s wider desire for control over internet content.
And the biggest prize in the [...]

Hard Times in Tibet

Getting news out of Tibet remains extraordinarily difficult since the March 2008 uprising that rattled Chinese authorities on the eve of last year’s Beijing Olympics. But now a number of sources are reporting that at least three people have been executed for their roles in the unrest. They would be the first people executed in [...]

Yahoo! pledge to be a good Netizen

It’s about time: Yahoo! new chief executive Carol Bartz says that human rights trump doing business. Bartz’s remarks on May 5 opened a Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Summit at which she acknowledged that the US Internet pioneer made some mistakes in foreign markets. “It is really going to take all of us working together [...]

Is it culture or censorship?

Great article today in the New York Times on the Chinese media and its resistance to foreign content and management. Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp are scaling down their hopes for the Chinese market. Murdoch – who has been successful in various anglo-saxon markets – tried to bring MySpace with the help of his Chinese [...]

Burma, Worst for Bloggers – CPJ

According to the New York based Center to Protect Journalists, Burma is the worst country for bloggers. Vietnam comes number 6 on the list of difficult places for freedom of expression and China number 8.
“Bloggers are at the vanguard of the information revolution and their numbers are expanding rapidly,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. [...]

Should the Uyghur Guantanamo Detainees be allowed in the United States

A discussion on the New York Times.

National Guard Families Seek Compensation

The families of 58 national guards plan to lobby the central Chinese government in Beijing for greater compensation after their relatives were killed in a May earthquake, RFA’s Cantonese service reports.

The Tibetans you’ve never heard of

Who hasn’t heard of Tibet? And who outside of Asia can even pronounce “Uyghur”?
Millions of Uyghurs (pronounced “WEE-ger”) live in China’s northwesternmost province, Xinjiang. They, like the Tibetans, are a religious as well as an ethnic minority; they have chafed under Beijing’s heavy-handed rule for the last six decades; and Chinese authorities have faced persistent [...]

China: Quake aftermath in Sichuan

China’s official media now say the earthquake death toll in Sichuan province has topped 12,000 and could surge higher.
The vice governor of the southwestern province, Li Chengyun, said the death toll was based on incomplete figures as of Tuesday afternoon. He said 26,206 people were injured, up to 3.5 million homes [...]

China, Tibet: Interview with Grace Wang

A Chinese student at Duke University in North Carolina who wrote “Free Tibet” on the back of an anti-Chinese protester during an attempt to mediate a campus dispute over Tibet is now hated by former classmates and teachers alike, a former teacher said.