Thomas Friedman Could Not Be Reached for Comment

Link:

The Chinese government has intensified its crackdown on the internet, describing online criticism of the ruling Communist party as illegal and airing a televised confession from one of the country’s most popular online commentators.

An article in Monday’s edition of the influential party journal “Seeking Truth” described online criticism of the party and government as “defamation”, while Chinese-American investor and internet personality Charles Xue appeared on state television in handcuffs on Sunday to praise new legislation that in effect criminalises online dissent.

The moves are part of a wider campaign launched in recent weeks by newly installed President Xi Jinping to stifle calls for political reform in China and assert control over the country’s unruly internet.

Mr Xue, who boasts 12m followers on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo, was arrested in August for allegedly hiring prostitutes for group sex sessions, but most analysts and even senior officials say his arrest was intended as a warning to other prominent internet personalities.

There was no mention of the prostitute allegations in a 10-minute segment aired on China Central Television on Sunday, during which a chastened Mr Xue described how he had contributed to an “illegal and immoral” atmosphere on the Chinese internet.

“I felt like the emperor of the internet,” Mr Xue said when describing the thrill of speaking directly to more than 12m followers. “How do you think that felt? Awesome.”

The shackled Mr Xue also praised a legal interpretation issued by China’s judicial authorities last week, which allows people to be prosecuted for defamation or “spreading online rumours” if their posts are viewed by more than 5,000 internet users or forwarded more than 500 times.

Utterly Smash, Destroy and Obliterate the Rotting Counterrevolutionary Line Inherent in Being Reincarnated Without Great Proletarian Approval!

Not from the Onion:

In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation." But beyond the irony lies China's true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region's Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country. By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.

I just can't top that. (Via Charles Lipson.)

Internet Freedom--or the Lack Thereof--in China

Paul Rosenzweig reports on what one has to put up with:

• The one time I thought to go to an Internet cafe for access, I was waved off by my guide.  Turns out I would have had to show my passport (which was back in the hotel in a safe) to get access.
• We had a Gmail account (since deleted) for email contact.  Every time I tried to access it the processing got =very= slow.  By contrast, all the connections to Chinese websites were quite quick.  I strongly suspect that some serious filtering was slowing access.
• The same was true for access to non-Chinese, Western web sites.  Efforts, for example, to navigate to cnn.com or google.com proved to be exercises in either patience or frustration.  In the end, I had better things to do with my time and mostly gave up.
• The highlight (or lowlight) of the exercise was on my last attempt to get to the Gmail account.  I was using Internet Explorer 7 (old stuff) and as I went to the Gmail page, an explosion of pop-up web pages started propagating.   It got up to 58 different browsers opened before I could halt it with a 3-finger (CTL-ALT-DEL) hard stop.  I haven’t seen a virus (I assume it was a virus) like that on a US computer in several years.

I'd very much like to visit China, and I might be willing to put up with all of this hassle in order to do so. But it is a hassle. And it shouldn't be. Contra Rousseau, man may not have been born free, but in a host of places, he is in chains.

Edward Snowden: Hero of Transparency

Or, you know, not: 

Since he publicly acknowledged being the source of bombshell leaks about the NSA two weeks ago, Ed Snowden has portrayed government secrecy as a threat to democracy, and his own leaks as acts of conscience. But chat logs uncovered by the tech news site Ars Technica suggest Snowden hasn’t always felt that way.

“Those people should be shot in the balls,” Snowden apparently said of leakers in a January 2009 chat. Snowden had logged into an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server associated with Ars Technica. While Ars itself didn’t log the conversations, multiple participants in the discussions kept logs of the chats and provided them to the technology site.

At this point, Snowden’s evolution into a fierce critic of the national security establishment was in its early stages. Snowden was incensed at the New York Times, which had described secret negotiations between the United States and Israel over how best to deal with Iran’s suspected nuclear program.

“Are they TRYING to start a war? Jesus christ. They’re like wikileaks.” Snowden wrote. “You don’t put that s— in the NEWSPAPER.”

“They have a HISTORY of this s—,” he continued, making liberal use of capital letters and profanity. “These are the same people who blew the whole ‘we could listen to osama’s cell phone’ thing. The same people who screwed us on wiretapping. Over and over and over again.”

He said he enjoyed “ethical reporting.” But “VIOLATING NATIONAL SECURITY? no. That s— is classified for a reason. It’s not because ‘oh we hope our citizens don’t find out.’ It’s because ‘this s— won’t work if iran knows what we’re doing.’”

“I am so angry right now. This is completely unbelievable.”

People change, of course. But few change so drastically. Fewer still currently claim to be champions of openness and transparency while using unfree societies to shield themselves from the law, and very few openness and transparency advocates get jobs under false pretenses.

Edward Snowden's Dubious Achievement

To be entirely fair to Edward Snowden, there are whistleblowers who stand with him and who applaud what he has done in exposing NSA surveillance programs and techniques. But it is also worth noting that there are plenty of whistleblowers who think that Edward Snowden has done the cause of whistleblowing no good whatsoever:

When Edward Snowden first started revealing secrets about the National Security Agency's massive surveillance operations, the small community of U.S. government whistleblowers and their advocates publicly leapt to Snowden's defense. But now that the world's most famous leaker has apparently left Hong Kong for Moscow (and beyond), that support has begun to erode. Some of the best-known whistleblowers of the past decade are now concerned that Snowden's flight to America's geopolitical rivals will make it easier to brand tomorrow's whistleblowers as enemies of the state.

[. . .]

"By fleeing to foreign countries of questionable taste, [Snowden] has taken his acts beyond the normal American view of a whistleblower," adds veteran investigator Glenn Walp, who exposed huge security holes at Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory. "Ultimately he will not be remembered or identified as a whistleblower, but rather, in most circles, as a traitor - that's the difference."

Other whistleblowers have latched onto Snowden's recent admission that he took his job with Booz Allen Hamilton for the sole purpose of gathering evidence on the NSA's cyberspying networks. "That's not how a whistleblower behaves," said Martin Edwin Andersen, a former whistleblower who exposed misconduct within the Justice Department. "He had a number of legal recourses he could have pursued; for example, he could have gone to Congress, where many members -- Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative -- regularly and vocally challenge the system. Instead, he knowingly went back on his word and broke the law."

And remember: Snowden, the supposed advocate of an open, free and democratic society is relying on countries that are anything but open, free and democratic to shield him from the legal consequences of his actions.

On the Obama Administration's Embarrassment and Edward Snowden's Insincerity

The fact that Edward Snowden was able to leave Hong Kong, transit through Russia and fly to Ecuador for asylum has to be humiliating for the Obama administration, especially in light of the "resets" in diplomatic relations that the administration has been seeking with China and Russia. I am sure that the president and his team will try to claim that everything is hunky-dory when it comes to the state of Sino-American and Russian-American relations, but the United States's inability to get China and Russia to cooperate in bringing Edward Snowden to justice serves to undermine any such claim. 

The above having been written, it is important to remind ourselves that Edward Snowden is absolutely, positively no hero whatsoever. The following statement has Snowden dead to rights:

Mr. Snowden’s claim that he is focused on supporting transparency, freedom of the press and protection of individual rights and democracy is belied by the protectors he has potentially chosen: China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador,” the official said. “His failure to criticize these regimes suggests that his true motive throughout has been to injure the national security of the U.S., not to advance Internet freedom and free speech.

What the Chinese People (Shockingly) Don't Know

June 4th was the 24th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre. NPR reports  that thanks to Chinese government censorship, a lot of people know very little about the history of the massacre:

. . . it's important to remember that a lot of people here have some familiarity with what happened 24 years ago, but a lot of people aren't that clear on it. For instance, I'll just give you an example. Back in 1997 when I first came to Beijing, I met a number of young women - they were in their 20's - and they were chatting with some American men. And the American men said, you know, we really respected what the Chinese did back in 1989 and that man standing up against those tanks.

And the women said: What man? What tanks? They hadn't actually ever seen that image. More people now, because the Internet is so big here, have seen it. But by and large, people aren't that familiar with what actually happened.

In China, Big Brother is winning.