Freedom of Expression Dispatches
Throughout the PEN Poem Relay, PEN will be posting essays, articles, and dispatches about threats to freedom of expression in China.
“What happened to the New Youth Study Group offers a glimpse into the methods the party uses to maintain its monopoly on power and the difficult moral choices faced by those caught in its grip.”
“A Study Group Is Crushed in China's Grip”, by Philip P. Pan, Washington Post Foreign Service, Friday, April 23, 2004; Page A01. Read this harrowing account of the infiltration and arrest of a Chinese study group, many of whose members, including Yang Zili, Xu Wei, and Jin Haike, are now in jail.
“Once again, on the afternoon of December 14, I was interrogated by agents of the Pudong Subdistrict Security Bureau. After two hours of small talk, they had asked about my daily life and my continuing job search and expressed their concern, and after they had gotten a good sense of my personal affairs, they finally got to the point: “We received a notice from the police in Beijing. The Independent Chinese PEN Association is having an awards ceremony on December 22 in Beijing. Did you know about this?”
Read the rest of “Days of Illegal Detention” by Li Jianhong, who was detained following the most recent crackdown on Independent Chinese PEN Centre in December 2007, when Chinese police prevented writers meeting. Li Jianhong is a Shanghai writer, Internet essayist, activist, and prominent ICPC member. Source: American PEN.
“When you come to the Olympic Games in Beijing, you will see skyscrapers, spacious streets, modern stadiums and enthusiastic people. You will see the truth, but not the whole truth…”
Read "The Real China and the Olympics”, an Open Letter by Hu Jia and Teng Biao from Human Rights Watch, in Chinese and English.
“When state security agents burst into his apartment last month, Hu Jia was chatting on Skype, the Internet-based telephone system. Mr. Hu’s computer was his most potent tool. He disseminated information about human rights cases, peasant protests and other politically touchy topics even though he often lived under de facto house arrest.”
Read how the police nabbed civil rights, environment and AIDS activist Hu Jia in “Dissident’s Arrest Hints at Olympic Crackdown”, by Jim Yardley, The New York Times, January 30, 2008.
This four part video uploaded anonymously to YouTube shows the police surveillance and pressure placed on activist Hu Jia and his wife Zeng Jinyan.
“Every person who has lived under mainland China’s totalitarian, despotic system has experienced having their emotions and feelings suppressed. As I remember it, my experience of this kind of suppression started when I was eight.”
Renowned Chinese journalist Gao Yu recounts her early years in her speech, “The Suppression of Feelings Leads to the Loss of Freedom”, delivered at the International PEN Asia and Pacific Regional Conference, Hong Kong, February 2007. Source: Sydney PEN.
“The top editors of the China Youth Daily were meeting in a conference room last August when their cell phones started buzzing quietly with text messages. One after another, they discreetly read the notes. Then they traded nervous glances.
“Colleagues were informing them that a senior editor in the room, Li Datong, had done something astonishing. Just before the meeting, Li had posted a blistering letter on the newspaper's computer system attacking the Communist Party's propaganda czars and a plan by the editor in chief to dock reporters' pay if their stories upset party officials.”
Read this case of how the Internet works against newspaper censorship in China. “The Click That Broke a Government's Grip”, by Philip P. Pan, Washington Post Foreign Service, Sunday, February 19, 2006; Page A01.
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Sydney PEN Magazine: Torch Song - one Poem's Fight for Freedom of Expression in China
