12 year sentence for blogging (while the world yawns)

Speaking of unpaid volunteers, earlier I was trying to ascertain the proper term to describe the imprisoned writer in this story. Headlined "Chinese writer sentenced to 12 years for subversion," it uses a variety of terms to describe online Chinese, um, journalists:

BEIJING - A free-lance writer was sentenced to 12 years in prison yesterday, receiving an unusually harsh penalty amid one of China's most severe media crackdowns since the 1980s.

The sentencing of Yang Tianshui on subversion charges was one of a flurry of court actions yesterday against Chinese reporters. In Beijing, prosecutors filed a new indictment against a Chinese researcher for the New York Times who has been in custody since 2004 on state-secrets charges. In southern China, a journalist went on trial and pleaded not guilty to extortion charges.

What is the right word? Writer? Reporter? Journalist?

Isn't there another word? The "B" word?

"Was that guy a blogger?" I wondered to myself.

Sure enough, the Times Online said he was, and they're not afraid to use the "B" word. Their headline reads, "Blogger jailed for backing elections."

While I don't have time to check out the entire blogosphere, I see that Captain Ed headlines his post "China Jails Dissident Blogger For Twelve Years." He concludes,

. . .we can show our solidarity by at least noting the muzzling of one of our own, and reminding everyone of the complicity of those firms that assist China to achieve the silence that will never come.
Not that it matters a whole lot whether Yang is called a blogger or a journalist, a writer, or a reporter. (Frankly, I've been having a lot of trouble finding any of Yang's postings anywhere, so I can't honestly declare him a "blogger.") What should matter is that he received a twelve year sentence for his writing. (And according to International PEN, "at least five writers were jailed for up to 10 years last year as part of a government crackdown on free speech." More on China's reopening of charges against the New York Times researcher.) The world should be outraged.

Where's the outrage, you might ask?

When I last looked, Ed's post received a single, very outraged comment. But the outrage was over an unrelated issue and the commenter was smugly unsympathetic to Yang's plight:

Chinese dissident goes to jail? yeah... too bad about that. At least in China they enforce their laws.....
Nice. I hope such callusedness doesn't typify the American viewpoint, but I suspect a lot of Americans not only couldn't care less, but won't even be as honest as Captain Ed's commenter in saying so.

That's why the Beijing rulers are getting away with it:

Beijing's economic success has persuaded its leaders that they can ''basically behave like they want," said Jean Philippe Beja, research director at the Paris-based Center for International Studies and Research.

While Ed's commenter's lack of sympathy was based on anger over immigration (what that has to do with free speech in China, I'm not sure), most Americans have their pet peeves -- all of which are far more important than human rights in China:

those who bitch and moan about a secretive Bush administration, secret prisons for terrorists or listening in on the telephone calls of suspected terrorists do nothing to enlighten the American people about the truly heinous abuses of freedom around the world. Yet, they still somehow find time for three weeks to cover a vice president who accidentally shot his hunting partner, a week to talk about Exxon’s excessive profit this year or four months to discuss a single girl missing in Aruba.

Why don’t most of us care? Is it because those who are being oppressed are Chinese and do not carry the same physical characteristics as Westerners? Is our entire nation so subconsciously racist that we simply ignore the plight of those who do not look like us? Would we be this apathetic if Germany or England became a communist state and sent people to prison for supporting freedom or forced people to have abortions? Or, have we become so self-consumed that we don’t care about anybody other than ourselves?

That's about right.

Well, I cared enough to write a post about Alaa, the blogger jailed in Egypt. And I figured that if bloggers in China are being imprisoned for twelve years that I should at least say something in a blog post.

It beats boycotting China. (That's a "B" word less likely to be used in conjunction with China than "blogger.")

Seriously, can anyone imagine how difficult it would be to do that? Even for a day?

posted by Eric on 05.17.06 at 09:10 AM





TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://classicalvalues.com/cgi-bin/pings.cgi/3616








December 2006
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
          1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31            

ANCIENT (AND MODERN)
WORLD-WIDE CALENDAR


Search the Site


E-mail




Classics To Go

Classical Values PDA Link



Archives




Recent Entries



Links



Site Credits