China Allows Dissident Artist’s Wife to Visit Him
BEIJING — The dissident artist Ai Weiwei was allowed a visit from his wife on Sunday, the first time he has been seen or heard from since being detained by authorities 43 days ago and held incommunicado in a secret Beijing-area location, Mr. Ai’s attorney said on Monday.
The attorney and family friend, Liu Xiaoyuan, said he had met on Monday with Ms. Lu and that she said her husband appeared to be in good physical condition. Mr. Ai also asked about the health of his mother and family, he said, but the circumstance of the supervised visit offered no chance to discuss how his captors were treating him or other details of his confinement....
China arrested ‘Jasmine’ activists
Scores of government critics, lawyers, activists, bloggers, artists and "netizens" have been arrested since February, amid government fears of a "Jasmine Revolution" inspired by events in the Middle East and North Africa. Amnesty International profiles some of the new generation of Chinese activists caught in the sweep.
Liang Haiyi aka Tiny: Early victim of the "Jasmine Revolution" crackdown
Status: In detention on suspicion of "subversion of state power"
In her own words: "When the country cannot protect a beggar, it cannot protect the emperor!
Liang Haiyi was reportedly taken away by police on 19 February in the northern Chinese city of Harbin for sharing videos and information about the ”Jasmine Revolution” on the internet. Her lawyer confirmed she was detained on suspicion of “subversion of state power”.
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Protest in Hong Kong over Ai Weiwei detention
Supporters of the detained Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, have scuffled with the police in Hong Kong, with at least one person being detained after protesters pushed through police barricades.
Around 150 protesters held banners and pictures of Ai on Sunday, and carried a large statue representing democracy.
Ai disappeared into police custody two weeks ago at Beijing's international airport. China's foreign ministry has said that the prominent artist was being investigated for unspecified "economic crimes".
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Shortly after christmas, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof opened an account on Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblog service that, like Twitter, allows users to share short messages of up to 140 characters. Kristof began testing what topics would be censored. He found out quickly. One of his first messages was "Can we talk about Falun Gong?" — a reference to the spiritual movement banned by Beijing. Within an hour of his first post, Kristof's account was canceled.
At first glance it would seem that China's new Internet is a lot like its old Internet. Overseas sites that are deemed sensitive — including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, among thousands of others — are blocked, part of a network of control sometimes called the Great Firewall of China. Inside the wall, Chinese search engines won't, for example, link to content to do with the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo or Tibetan independence; also, domestic Internet companies are required to delete any material that the authorities find objectionable. Even as China's Netizens have rushed to embrace Web 2.0, an Internet in which users are more closely and quickly linked by social-networking services, microblogs and free video hosting, those rules have still applied. ...
BEIJING — In another era, China’s leaders might have been content to let discussion of the protests in Egypt float around among private citizens, then fizzle out.
But challenges in recent years to authoritarian governments around the globe and violent uprisings in parts of China itself have made Chinese officials increasingly wary of leaving such talk unchecked, especially on the Internet, the medium some officials see as central to fanning the flames of unrest.
So the arbiters of speech sprang into action over the weekend. Sina.com and Netease.com — two of the nation’s biggest online portals — blocked keyword searches of the word “Egypt,” though the mass protests were being discussed on some Internet chat rooms on Monday. Searching for “Egypt” has also been blocked on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter....