Senator Andrew Bartlett
Saturday, June 11, 2005
 
China cracksdown further on bloggers

China's poor record on human rights and the threats to dissidents have been receiving a rare degree of serious attention from the mainstream media following the defection of Chinese Consul official Chen Yonglin. It should be mentioned that there are many other asylum seekers in Australia whose cases aren't in the public domain (and it usually preferable for everyone that their cases stay that way). UNHCR figures show that 1042 Chinese people sought asylum in Australia in the 15 months to the end of March this year. This is out of a total of 3815 seeking asylum over that period, which makes China the largest source of asylum claims in Australia. Many, although far from all of them, are Falun Gong practitioners, a group who the US State Department acknowledges face torture, abuse and death in China.

One common thread amongst dictatorships is their intimidation and persecution of dissidents and their fear of free expressions of opinion and thought. I have written before about the Iranian regime cracking down on bloggers and the internet, which is also happening in Vietnam and China.

There was a copy of the Asian Wall Street Journal on the plane when I was flying back home from Jakarta this week, and it contained an interesting editorial entitled "Beijing vs the Bloggers". Following on from China's jailing of dissidents who have placed their views on the Internet, it has now "ordered all domestic blogs and Web sites to register with the government or risk being fined or shut down." The "Great Firewall of China" already tries to block or severely filter the availability of information from the rest of the world and there are continuing efforts to ensure the flow of ideas and information within the country is also controlled. The editorial suggests there are over half a million blog sites in China who are now being targeted with renewed vigour by the government. This sort of clamping down on any dissent makes it all the more important for those of us who do have freedom to defend the rights of those who don't and to draw attention to abuses of human rights by their governments.

For more details on China’s crackdown on bloggers, go to this story. The site it is on, The Committee to Protect Bloggers, has good information about crackdowns on freedom of thought and speech around the world. Some other recent entries give details about how serious the crackdown is in Iran at the moment.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Saturday, June 11, 2005 Permalink
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