China admits it runs illegal black jails

A magazine run by the Chinese government has revealed the existence of a network of secret detention centres or "black jails" in Beijing where inmates are often beaten or tortured.

大陆甲流快速蔓延 辽宁惊现“白肺”现象

【大纪元11月27日讯】（大纪元记者方晓采访报导）随着大陆甲型H1NI流感疫情的快速全面蔓延，患者人数众多，中共卫生部规定只针对重症患者才能做甲流筛选检测，“轻型”患者被拒之门外。据专家介绍，甲流重症患者双肺受累，导致肺部出现实质性病变。辽宁近期惊现“白肺”患者死亡病例，从发病到死亡极快。“白肺”死亡病例被卫生部隐瞒。目前除对甲流重症者使用药物“达菲”外，其他人与普通流感患者同等对待。

由于流感疫情快速蔓延，近期中共卫生部将疫情通报改为一周通报一次，25日其通报11月16日至11月22日的疫情，这一周中国境内31个省份报告甲流确诊病例9733例，死亡51人。吉林、广东、山东等地都有新增死亡病例。北京全市累计甲流死亡病例报告26例。

“白肺”死亡几例 未见报

近日沈阳知情民众透露，当地医院有6、7个因甲流重症死亡的，病人的肺80%都烧白了。据沈阳日报报导，辽宁甲流很凶险，中国医科大学附属第一医院专家发现，甲流重症病人往往是双肺受累，病情变化非常快，有感染者在发热、咳嗽仅两天，就出现了“白肺”，即肺CT显影呈现白色，肺部出现实质性改变，血氧饱和指数急剧降低。

大纪元记者近日去电沈阳市疾病防疫控制中心，询问“白肺”病例的具体情况，其工作人员解释到，国家还没有对“白肺”进行解释，还没有查清楚。这种病例现在是个别的。发展太快的，诊断都来不及。我们现在所知道的几例“白肺”死亡病例，是属于发展比较快的，具体情况我们目前还不清楚。

而在辽宁省卫生厅通报的甲流死亡病例中，不见“白肺”死亡病例。当地民众说，辽宁现在很多人还不知道甲流流行到如此严重的情况，因为报纸电视没有报导，老百姓想不到共产党会撒这么大的谎。

今天（27日），辽宁省甲型H1N1流感防控工作领导小组办公室，下发《关于进一步做好甲型H1N1流感重症病人早发现早治疗工作的通知》，称当前该省甲流防控工作形势十分严峻，重危病例、死亡病例不断发生。

卫生部：只对甲流重症做检测

大纪元记者去电中国医科大学附属第一医院发热门诊，相关工作人员强调说：咽试子检测不是谁都给做的，是有一套标准的：必须有症状表现，如肺炎、肺内拍片有阴影，才够条件做这个筛选。即使医院按病人要求申请做咽试子测试的话，防疫站的人也不会过来采样的。就按照病毒感冒给治，这是上级规定的。

记者致电沈阳疾控中心，询问做甲流检测有什么条件，疾控中心的人员肯定地说：只对重症患者才做，全国都规定了，只有重症才做，不是针对所有的人群。卫生部这么规定的，从10月底开始起，只筛查重症的，就是连续三天发烧39摄氏度不退烧的、肺部有阴影的，肥胖的、有基础性疾病的病人才符合甲流确诊的条件。我们只能按照国家的要求做，而且医院里必须有专家组会诊，卫生局进行审批，然后才能做甲流检测。

“轻型的甲流只用抗病毒和抗感染同时治疗。国家在不同的时期有不同的规定，刚开始时都给检测，从国外回来的，发热的都给检测排查甲流，随着甲流疫情在国内的迅速蔓延和增多，对这个病情了解之后，就只针对重症了。不检测，按流感治疗，用抗病毒的药。只有医疗机构怀疑患者是甲流重症的话，才可以给用达菲进行治疗。”

“胸部无阴影 不够达标”

中医大发热门诊的另一位工作人员对记者进一步讲解到，感冒发烧咳嗽厉害的病人，到发热门诊后拍胸片，如果肺部有问题、有阴影和一些症状表现了，医院认为达标了，可以给病人申请做甲流的筛选，如果胸部没影，也不会给做甲流鉴定的。不达标的话，就是按照通常的病毒感冒治，不是非得给病人确诊，说你得的就是甲流。甲流的轻症就是用病毒感冒的那些药物治疗。

受访者说：“如果上不来气，需要呼吸机的话，才够住院治疗的标准，否则就是在家隔离治疗。再说确诊甲流之后，也是与普通流感一样的治疗方案，不会有什么变化，这个原则是上级的规定。而且医院报上去的申请，人家要病人的胸片——肺部的检查结果。防疫站说不需要做的，就按普通感冒治。如果出现症状告诉病人再回医院。就是说有了喘不上气来的症状了，再到医院复查来。轻症患者想确诊是否甲流，现在顾不了。而且甲流也不针对个人做采样的。”

医院人员还解释了甲流重症的症状：起码胸腔里感觉闷，上不来气，一咳嗽痛得躺不下去，有这种症状才给拍胸片。这种情况还没到“白肺”程度呢，CT检查就有影了。肺烧白了（白肺），那得高烧到什么程度呀？烧多少天呀？烧白了就很危险了，相当危重了。

专家门诊不能保证

中国医科大学附属第一医院专家门诊部的工作人员接到记者电话谘询时表示，目前只有一个专家有门诊，每周三和周五有门诊，病人还要早上6点半开始挂号，每天只挂20～30个号。不是想看专家门诊就能看的。

据专家门诊部的工作人员介绍，发烧的病人应先到发烧门诊，医生给验血相，确定是否病毒性的感染。检验结果是细菌性质的话，才需要到门诊或找专家，不能直接去看专家。感觉特别难受的去急诊室。

美东时间: 2009-11-27 06:17:06 AM  【万年历】
本文网址：http://www.epochtimes.com/gb/9/11/27/n2736256.htm

Epoch Times Staff Created: Nov 26, 2009 Last Updated: Nov 26, 2009

NEW YORK—An earnest group of Chinese gathered on Sunday to mark the five-year anniversary of the publication that sparked perhaps the largest Chinese dissident movement in history, the movement to renounce Chinese communism.

It started in November 2004 when The Epoch Times published the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, a scathing critique of communism, particularly the Chinese kind.

The Commentaries made a splash. Within a few months most people in the mainland knew about them despite the regime’s tight media control. The book-length editorials were a sensation in Hong Kong, and over a million copies were sold and distributed within the first week.

A month later the natural conclusion of the Commentaries, the idea of “tuidang,” had come about. Tuidang is at once an idea and an action. Tui means to renounce or quit; Dang is the Party. The annals of those who have renounced the CCP now tally close to 64 million, with tens of thousands added every day. If they were printed on paper the stack would be over 300 miles high.

Over the last five years the “Great Wave of Tuidang,” as it is called in Chinese, has become a unifying beacon for Chinese dissidents of all stripes. And so have the ideas that underpin it.

“Falun Gong figured it out early,” says John Kusumi, executive director of the China Support Network, referring to the spiritual group that did much to popularize both the book and movement under discussion. He spoke in an earlier interview.

“Just about everyone protests the Communist Party in one way or another, but Falun Gong took a lead on this matter, which was a boon for everyone else who’s seeking freedom from Beijing,” he said.

The Commentaries are “the most deep and most thorough unmasking of the Chinese Communist Party in history” according to Tang Baiqiao, a prominent dissident who spoke at the forum. Tang has been involved in these activities for a long time; earlier this year he was beaten to the point of hospitalization by a group of Chinese men he thinks were acting on behalf of the CCP.

“Many of us wrote essays where the starting point is spreading democracy, or expressing righteous indignation, emotion, or a fervor to expose the CCP,” he said at the forum. “But what is the starting point of the Nine Commentaries? It comes from humankind’s most original sense of justice and conscience. This is what gives it such a strong life force, and what means that people from all walks of life identify with it.”

The basic thesis of the Nine Commentaries is that the Chinese Communist Party’s rule is based on two methods: “one is pressure and violence, the other is spiritual brainwashing,” in the words of David Gao, president of the worldwide volunteer group which solicits the renunciations of the CCP. He also spoke in an earlier interview.

“They tell the Chinese people that there is nothing divine, there are no Buddhas, Gods, and Taos, that this is all fake, and that you shouldn’t believe it. Just believe in the Communist Party, just believe in money, just believe in the material world,” he says. “This is how the CCP tells them to do things.”

When making membership vows, Chinese youth are expected to swear their lives to the CCP, and are told that the Chinese flag is “dyed with blood.” Most all of the 1.3 billion Chinese in the country have been implicated in one way or another.

It is in this context that the meaning of tuidang is something “no movement can replace,” Tang said at the forum.

“After ’89 everyone lost hope for democracy in China. The CCP is brutal, and people are terrified of it,” he said. “But after the Nine Commentaries and tuidang, people started to think about many issues anew, and their fear became less and less.”

Nowadays in China popular expressions of mistrust, disdain, or outright hatred toward Communist Party officials are more commonplace, and the country is rocked by hundreds of thousands of “mass incidents” (riots) each year.

Why Tui the Dang?

Different people have different reasons for renouncing the Party.

For the common people, it is often the only means of expressing their dissatisfaction. For many overseas democracy activists, it’s a matter of principle.

“I think it’s very significant to quit the party. And if you want to be a real democrat … you don’t want to be a double thinker, you have to quit the party,” said Yang Jianli, founder of the NGO Initiatives for China, in an earlier interview.

For Wu Fan, president of the China Interim government, the significance is twofold.

“Firstly, it can disintegrate the party in a peaceful way, without spilling the blood of the people,” Wu said. “Secondly, mentally, it can help people free their minds of the communist ideology.”

The CCP delineates three forms of membership: the Young Pioneers of China (for children ages 6-14), the Communist Youth League of China (for ages 14-28), and full membership. At some point in their lives, almost every Chinese citizen joins one of these three organizations.

Though official membership expires after people grow beyond those age limits, tuidang is understood more as a spiritual affair.

“When Chinese people read the Commentaries they will realize that people in this world have kind returns for good deeds and evil returns for bad deeds. Quitting the Party is to realize from your heart that the Party is very bad, to realize how good traditional culture is,” says David Gao. “It’s about saying: ‘I want to be a person with morality. I don’t want to be a bad person; I want to be a good person.’”

In renouncing the Party, then, the only thing that counts is the spark of individual understanding, conscience, and wish for redemption, tuidang organizers say. Every renunciation is recorded in the database at tuidang.epochtimes.com, with more streaming in every day.

“Tuidang has become a movement,” said human rights lawyer Ye Ning at the forum on Sunday. “A large scale movement opposed to politics.” He said that the Nine Commentaries are “sacred, a grand thought” and that it is an “enormous grace to the Chinese people who have been suffering for a long time.”

In China now, the book is printed on the black market and circulated in secret. It gets left on park benches for people to read, and slogans from the book get spray-painted on light posts and stamped onto currency. A few months ago a state-run newspaper was suspended after printing a front page with the text “Heaven destroys the Chinese Communist Party” written in graffiti on a pole in the corner of an image.

For some, the Commentaries and tuidang are a movement of prescience. Wu Baozhang, a journalist who spent 27 years working at China’s state run Xinhua news agency, said to The Epoch Times separately: “For these past five years, I have kept the Nine Commentaries at my bedside and read it again and again. In its words, I vaguely see a blueprint of a democratic free China.”

The Nine Commentaries and tuidang don’t advocate a new political system for China. They merely give a simple message: “The Chinese need to help themselves; they need to reflect, and they need to shake off the CCP.”

Speakers at the forum in Flushing underscored this point many times in the afternoon, and said they’ll carry the message forward, until the end.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/25684/

Yayım tarihi: Pazartesi 23 Kasım 2009

FDI: İspanyol Mahkemesi Çin Eski Cumhurbaşkanı Jiang Zemin Dâhil Çin Komünist Partisinin Üst Düzey 5 Yetkilisi Hakkında İşkence ve Soykırım Suçlarından Dava Açtı
—Sanıklar 4 ile 6 hafta içinde cevap vermek zorundalar ve büyük ihtimalle Uluslararası Çapta Tutuklama Emriyle karşı karşıya kalacaklar
Minghui/Clearwisdom muhabiri tarafından

NEW YORK - İspanya Ulusal Mahkemesinden bir yargıç Falun Gong uygulayıcılarına karşı yürütülen işkence ve soykırım suçlarında aktif role sahip Çin Komünist Partisi (ÇKP) eski lideri Jiang Zemin dâhil ÇKP’nin üst düzey beş yetkilisi hakkında emsali olmayan bir karar verdi. Mahkemenin duyuru mektubunda, eğer sanıklar suçlu bulunursalar en az 20 yıl hapis cezası ve aynı zamanda tazminat ile karşı karşıya kalacakları belirtildi.

Çin Komünist Parti eski lideri Jiang Zemin, 1999 yılında tek başına aldığı kararla, anakara Çin’de “Doğruluk-Merhamet-Hoşgörü” ilkelerine göre uygulama yapan Falun Gong uygulayıcılarına karşı bir “yok etme” kampanyası başlattı. “Şöhretlerini yık, ekonomik açıdan iflas ettir, fiziksel olarak yok et ve işkence sonucu ölenleri intihar etti olarak say” gibi soykırım politikaları, geçmiş yıllar boyunca çok sayıda Falun Gong uygulayıcısının tutuklanmasına, işkence görmesine, dövülerek öldürülmesine ve kaybolmasına neden oldu. Hatta onlarının birçoğunun büyük karların döndüğü organ nakli ticareti için hala canlılarken organları toplandı. Diğer dört sanık, Luo Gan, Bo Xilai, Jia Qinglin ve Wu Guanzheng, Jiang Zemin’in sadık taraftarlarıdır. Bu beş sanık, Falun Gong’a karşı yürütülen acımasız zulmün baş sorumlularıdır.

Sanıkların mahkemenin kararını cevaplamak için 4 ile 6 haftalık zamanları bulunmaktadır. Sonrasında davada adı geçen sanıklar İspanya ile suçluları iade sözleşmesi imzalayan herhangi bir ülke sınırları içine girdikleri anda İspanyol yasalarına göre İspanya’ya iade edileceklerdir. Bu karar “evrensel yargılama hakkı” yasal maddesine göre alındı ve bu maddeye göre soykırım ve insanlığa karşı suç işleyenler suçların meydana geldiği yer ne olursa olsun davanın açıldığı yerli mahkemeler tarafından yargılanabilmektedir.

İki yıldır süren bir araştırmadan sonra İspanyol Ulusal Mahkemesi Yargıcı Ismael Moreno geçen hafta İnsan Hakları Hukuk Vakfının (HRLF) avukatı Carlos Iglesias’a bir dilekçe yollayarak mahkemenin Çin’deki beş sanığa ayrı ayrı Falun Gong zulmü ile ilgili sorular yönelten sorgulama mektupları (talep mektupları) yollamayı kabul ettiği bilgisini verdi. Mahkemenin sanıklara karşı bu kararı, İnsan Hakları Hukuk Vakfının avukatı Bay Carlos Iglesias ve diğer çalışanlar tarafından verilen evraklar ve sunuşlar sonucu alındı.

Avukat Bay Iglesias, “İspanyol bir yargıç tarafından verilen bu tarihi karar, Çin Komünist Parti liderlerinin işledikleri acımasız suçlar için şimdi adalet önünde yargılanmaya bir adım daha yaklaştıkları anlamına gelmektedir. Soykırım ya da işkence suçunu işleyen biri, sadece Çin vatandaşlarına karşı değil aynı zamanda uluslararası topluma karşı bir suç işlemiştir. İspanya, insan haklarının ve evrensel adaletin savunulmasında bir öncü olmuştur.” dedi.

Bu davadaki sanıklar arasında eski Çin Komünist Parti (ÇKP) lideri ve Çin Halk Cumhuriyeti Cumhurbaşkanı Jiang Zemin’de yer almaktadır. Herkesin bildiği gibi, Jiang Zemin 1999 yılında tek başına Falun Gong’a karşı “yok etme” kampanyası başlattı. Sanık Luo Gan ise ülke çapında şiddet kampanyasına liderlik etmek için kurulan gizli polis birimi olan 610 Ofisinin başındaki sorumludur. Çinli avukatlar 610 Ofisini, acımasızlığı ve yasal otoritenin üstünde yetkisi ile Nazi Almanya’sındaki Gestapo’ya benzediğine dikkat çekmektedir.

Diğer üç sanık ise sırayla: Şu andaki Chongqing Parti Sekreteri ve eski Ticaret Bakanı Bo Xilai; Parti hiyerarşisinin dördüncü en büyük üyesi Jia Qinglin; ve ÇKP Disiplin İnceleme Komisyon Başkanı Wu Guanzheng. Bu üç kişi için alınan kararda, Liaoning, Pekin ve Shandong Eyaletlerinde en üst düzey lider konumundayken ellerindeki gücü Falun Gong uygulayıcılarına acımasızca zulmetmek için kullanmaları temel alınmıştır.

Wall Street Journal gazetesinden Ian Johnson’ın Pulitzer ödüllü makalesinde Wu Huanzheng’in Falun Gong zulmüne aktif olarak katılmayan hatta yerli vatandaşlara işkence yapması için memur göndermeyen alt birimlere nasıl ceza verdiğini hatta bazılarının ölümüne bile neden olduğunu açığa vurdu.
HRLF avukatı Iglesias, “Yargıç tarafından yapılan araştırmada 15 Falun Gong uygulayıcısından yazılı ifade ve işkence kurbanı ve Çin’de gözaltında öldürülmüş bireylerin akrabaları dâhil yedi uygulayıcının sözlü ifadelerinin de yer aldığı diğer kanıtları değerlendirildi. Karar da tüm bunların yanında Uluslararası Af Örgütü, İnsan Hakları İzleme ve Birleşmiş Milletler İnsan Hakları Komisyonu gibi uluslararası kuruluşlar tarafından hazırlanan raporlara da dayanak oluşturdu.” dedi.

Çince metin: http://www.minghui.ca/mh/articles/2009/11/20/212992.html
İngilizce metin: http://www.clearwisdom.net/html/articles/2009/11/21/112511.html

DAHA FAZLA BİLGİ İÇİN LÜTFEN FALUN DAFA BİLGİ MERKEZİ İLE İLETİŞİM KURUN

İlgililer: Gail Rachlin (+1 917-757-9780), Levi Browde (+1 646-415-0998), Erping Zhang (+1 646-533-6147), or Joel Chipkar (+1 416-731-6000)

Fax: 646-792-3916 E-mail: contact@faluninfo.net, Web sitesi: http://www.faluninfo.net/

İlgili link: http://faluninfo.net/article/924/?cid=84

Clearharmony'de yayınlanan tüm makaleleri kopyalayabilir ya da çıktı alabilirsiniz, fakat lütfen kaynak belirtiniz.

http://www.tr.clearharmony.net/articles/200911/6763.html

 

By Cindy Chan
Epoch Times Staff Created: Oct 21, 2009 Last Updated: Oct 21, 2009

It was in 1973 that the late Dr. Hendon Harris Jr. published a book documenting what he believed was proof that the Chinese discovered and colonized America thousands of years before Columbus arrived.

His proof centred on a world map he found in an old map book a year earlier in an antique shop in Korea.

Entitled “Everything under Heaven,” the ancient Chinese map not only showed known major land masses such as Asia, Africa, Australia, and Europe, but located China’s fabled Fu Sang—literally “land to the east”—in the region we now know as North and South America.

Harris, a third-generation missionary born to American parents in Kaifeng, China, knew he had stumbled on something big.

He was aware of Fu Sang from his knowledge of “Shan Hai Jing,” or “Collection of the Mountains and Seas,” a Chinese classic believed to be written over 2,000 years ago. The classic documented ancient Chinese travels and described the geography and legends of China and its neighbouring regions overseas.

Based on the map and about 30 similar maps that came from the original “Shan Hai Jing,” Harris theorized in his book, “The Asiatic Fathers of America,” that seafaring Chinese reached the Americas beginning approximately in 2,200 B.C., and were the ancestors of the American Indians.

Only a few copies of Harris’ book were distributed, but by the time he died in 1981, he had collected seven similar map books and found 23 other maps in famous museums worldwide.

The oldest of the Harris maps are thought to be from the Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644), but the world map in each book is believed to have descended from a much earlier Chinese map.

Charlotte Harris Rees, one of Harris’ daughters, was initially skeptical of her father’s theory, and for years his map collection sat neglected under her brother’s bed.

But last year Rees published her own book, “Secret maps of the Ancient World,” which puts forward a compelling case that her father was right, that ancient mapmakers from Asia came to the Americas and documented the terrain of the New World long before Columbus arrived.

Secrets Hidden in Plain Sight

Currently on a speaking tour, Rees, who lives in Virginia, spoke on Tuesday at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University.

“Up until now it’s almost like the Da Vinci Code—secrets that have been hidden in plain sight,” Rees told The Epoch Times.

“It’s not that [the maps] have never been seen before, but people have misunderstood, and a lot of books are saying these are part real and part imaginary because they couldn’t believe that people could have come to America that early.”

In 2003, Rees was prompted to earnestly examine her father’s theory after reading “1421,” a book by Gavin Menzies which sparked worldwide debate. Menzies maintained that the Chinese discovered America in 1421, 71 years before Columbus.

Rees sent an email telling Menzies about her father’s maps showing that the Chinese discovered America much earlier than 1421. She also brought her family’s map collection to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where it stayed for three years while experts came from China to study it.

Meanwhile, she embarked on a five-year research effort that convinced her that her father was right.

Throughout her research, she was mentored by Dr. Cyclone Covey, Professor Emeritus of History at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, who for more than 50 years has studied ancient American history and its association with China.

With Menzies’ help, Rees was invited to speak at the Library of Congress in 2005. And to help her father’s book reach more readers, in 2006 Reed published an abridged version of his 800-page volume.

Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee, retired Chief of the Asia Division of the Library of Congress, has called Rees’ research “a major contribution to the early history of the Americas and the relations to China and other parts of Asia.”

Abundance of Evidence

But Rees has also run into resistance. “There are a few people who are very much against this. Anytime you’ve rewritten history, it’s hard to change it,” she said.

For example, an international group of academics runs a Web site that disputes Menzies’ theory. And Rees said that although schools were still teaching in the early 20th century that the Chinese had been in America for at least 1,000 years, this information was removed from textbooks when Columbus Day was declared a U.S. national holiday.

However, Rees is undeterred.

“There is so much evidence coming in from so many different areas, including DNA evidence, finding [ancient] Chinese writing in multiples places in the Americas, and people who have been comparing the Mayan calendar to the Chinese ancient calendar.”

Many independent studies have been completed or are taking place, and her book cites over 200 works containing evidence from various disciplines including science, archaeology, oceanography, philosophy, anthropology, art, linguistics, and mathematics, Rees noted.

Greater Glory, New Respect

How did the Chinese cross the Pacific as early as 2,200 B.C.?

According to historical records, 4,000 years ago the Chinese were already very advanced, said Rees. “They had writing. They had silk. They were ocean going.”

She added that a warm ocean current exists in the North Pacific that actually “acts as a conveyor belt” and pushes objects east from Asia to the Americas and then down the coast, with a return current at the equator.

Rees said her father believed that ancient Chinese and other Asians made many trips to the New World, but a great deal of evidence has been lost. In particular, China began a policy of self-imposed isolation in the mid 1400s. “It became a capital offence to go to sea, and they burnt their maps and their ships,” she said.

For 250 years, some European scholars have speculated that Fu Sang was in fact America. But without a map showing Fu Sang, they couldn’t prove it. When Harris discovered the ancient map in Korea, he was the first in recent times to make the association, said Covey.

Evidence continues to grow. Meanwhile, Rees is content to let more people know about her and her father’s research.

“The final result of these revolutionary discoveries will be the greater glory of China, East India, Japan, and Korea and a new respect for and the appreciation of the Indians of North, Central, and South America,” wrote Harris in his book.

For more information, visit www.harrismaps.com.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/24170/

 

Hacking the Regime

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad like to blame the uprising in Iran on outside influences. They particularly like to point their fingers at the British and the Americans, along with a requisite nod in the direction of the Zionists--a time-honored pretext for avoiding blame for discontent in their country. But, for all the phantom rabble-rousers, there’s one outside influence that has actually helped shape events: the Falun Gong.

To most metropolitan Americans, the Falun Gong are the yellow-shirt-wearing adherents of a Chinese religious sect who hand out flyers on street corners. Those flyers describe the group’s struggle against the Chinese government, which has banned the Falun Gong and subjected its members to organ-harvesting, electroshock therapy, and gulags. But, as the Chinese have escalated their efforts to stamp out the Falun Gong, the group has grown ever savvier in outwitting its oppressors. And it was the protestors in Iran who benefited from this savvy.

As the streets of Tehran erupted in the days following Mir Hossein Mousavi’s bizarrely lopsided defeat, the regime’s repressive apparatus kicked into full gear. Among its top priorities: shutting down access to the Internet. But, at this critical moment in the Islamic Republic’s history, some of the government’s Internet filters failed. Indeed, the most utopian proponents of the Internet’s liberating powers seemed vindicated--as social-networking sites organized mass demonstrations and YouTube videos documented the brutal truncheons of the basij and the making of martyrs.

When these dissident Iranians chatted with each other and the outside world, they likely had no idea that many of their missives were being guided and guarded by 50 Falun Gong programmers spread out across the United States. These programmers, who almost all have day jobs, have created programs called Freegate and Ultrasurf that allow users to fake out Internet censors. Freegate disguises the browsing of its users, rerouting traffic using proxy servers. To prevent the Iranian authorities from cracking their system, the programmers must constantly switch the servers, a painstaking process.

The Falun Gong has proselytized its software with more fervor than its spiritual practices. It distributes its programs for free through an organization called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC), sending a downloadable version of the software in millions of e-mails and instant messages. In July 2008, it introduced a Farsi version of its circumvention tool.

While it is hardly the only group to offer such devices, the Falun Gong’s program is particularly popular thanks to its simplicity and relative speed. In fact, according to Shiyu Zhou, the deputy director of GIFC, the Farsi software was initially so popular that the group shut it down soon after introducing it. Iranians had simply swamped their servers, even outnumbering Freegate’s Chinese users. (Iranian Internet restrictions are more lax than the Chinese, allowing much heavier outbound traffic than the GIFC is accustomed to handling.)

But, on the day after the presidential election this past June, the engineers reopened Freegate to Iranians, as a gesture of solidarity. And, once again, they were overwhelmed. “From then on, it got out of control,” Zhou told me. Within 20 hours, the number of Freegate users doubled to an estimated one million. Zhou and his comrades were faced with a wrenching decision. They could continue helping the Iranians, which might flood and wipe out all of their operations. Or they could focus on trying to preserve lines of communication for their core users in China. “We had to restrict the traffic in Iran or else all of our servers would crash,” Zhou said.

During the cold war, the dominant metaphor for describing the repression of totalitarian regimes was The Berlin Wall. To update that metaphor, we should talk about The Firewall. (The Great Firewall is what they call it in China.) There’s a dream that the censors manning it will be overcome and the Internet will be used as a force of liberation--giving closed societies a tantalizing glimpse of the West, allowing repressed people to build social movements. And all that’s a distinct possibility. But the Web is not nearly the implacable force for freedom that some of its champions have portrayed. The world’s authoritarians have shown just as much aptitude for technology as their discontented citizens. Indeed, the race to beat the Internet censors is a central battle in the global struggle for democracy--a cat-and-mouse game where the fate of regimes could rest in no small measure on the work of the Falun Gong and others who write programs to circumvent Web censorship.

 

The Internet tactics of the Chinese and Iranian governments began innocently enough in American libraries. To meet federal preconditions for funding, libraries installed cyber-nanny software that blocked the ISP addresses of pornographic websites. This software developed by Silicon Valley companies like Macafee became widely available. And some repressive regimes like Iran simply repurposed it.

China, however, had a keener understanding of how technologically sophisticated youth might find their way around such filters and set out to create a more stalwart firewall. According to Chinese dissident Harry Wu, the state spent $800 million and enlisted the help of U.S. tech giants like Nortel and Cisco Systems to develop an initiative called the Golden Shield. This was a massive effort to harness technology to control and monitor the citizenry, leading to the creation of digital identification cards containing a microchip that stores a person’s vital statistics (age, name, address, etc.) and a database that gives the state the capacity to recognize the voices and faces of its 1.3 billion people.

From the start, the Golden Shield was positioned to build an impenetrable firewall. That’s because China’s Internet traffic enters the country in fiber optic cables at only three locations. At these chokepoints, filters block many sites that have been flagged as unacceptable and scan unfamiliar sites for keywords (like “falun gong”) that suggest subversiveness. Robert Guerra, the project director for Freedom House’s Internet Freedom Initiative, compared China’s Internet infrastructure to a national highway system that is riddled with potholes and speed traps. “Even if you drove a Porsche on that highway, you would never be able to drive the car to its full capacity.”

Success doesn’t merely depend on technology. A large bureaucracy is deployed to fine-tune and enhance the filters--giving the Chinese the capacity to allow users to read The New York Times while denying them articles in the Times that the regime deems dangerous. And that full-time bureaucracy is supplemented by hundreds of thousands of nationalistic part-timers who are paid to post pro-government comments on blogs and to drown out dissenting voices in Web forums. These bloggers are called the Fifty Cent Army, indicating that Chinese Web labor is cheap.

The Golden Shield has become the envy of the authoritarian world. China has exported its technology to countries like Cuba and Belarus, according to Reporters Without Borders. And others, such as Iran, have studied their model. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard, for instance, has gotten into the game of Web censorship as part of a new initiative to counter what the regime dubs “soft revolution.”

For all the success of the Golden Shield, there are still gaps that it can’t fill. Censors have struggled to squash homegrown blogs, which can’t be blocked at inbound chokepoints (although newfangled local Internet providers have censored these sites). The Falun Gong understands the gaps. It has probed for them and then rushed through them.

The Chinese assault on the Falun Gong has been ruthless. Since 1999, when the government outlawed the group, hundreds of its practitioners and most of the group’s leading figures have been arrested and then abused. A January 2002 Human Rights Watch report on the crackdown said, “[S]erious human rights violations--including restrictions on freedom of thought, belief, and expression, wrongful detention, unfair trials, torture, and deaths in custody--have accompanied the Chinese government response to Falun Gong.” Unlike many international human rights groups, whose sites will sporadically load, the Falun Gong pages have been comprehensively blocked.

For the Falun Gong, whose members are treated like terrorists, the Web is the only vehicle for connecting its underground to the world. Following the July 1999 crackdowns, the Internet also became the only venue for the group to counter the Chinese government’s propaganda campaign against it.

The Falun Gong does not keep records of its membership in the United States or around the world. Nor does the group have a formal hierarchy. The closest thing the organization has to a leader is Li Hongzhi, whom practitioners call “teacher” and who currently resides in New York state. Falun Gong’s practitioners happen to include a number of talented engineers employed by tech companies like Microsoft and Google, as well as by government agencies like NASA. And, in the face of the crackdown, and at the height of the dot-com bubble, the Falun Gong launched its own tech division, the GIFC.

For all their cleverness, members found themselves constantly outmaneuvered. They would devise a strategy that would break past China’s filtering tools, only to find their new sites quickly hacked or stymied. In 2002, though, they had their Freegate breakthrough. According to David Tian, a programmer with the GIFC and a research scientist at nasa, Freegate was unique because it not only disguised the ISP addresses, or Web destinations, but also cloaked the traffic signatures, or the ways in which the Chinese filters determined whether a Web user was sending an e-mail, navigating a website, sending an instant message, or using Skype. “In the beginning, Freegate was rudimentary, then the communists analyzed the software, they tried to figure out how we beat them. They started to block Freegate. But then, we started hiding the traffic signature,” says Mr. Tian. “They have not been able to stop it since.”

Even in the United States, this is risky work. In 2006, one of the GIFC’s chief engineers, Peter Li , was attacked in his suburban home outside of Atlanta by three or four Asian men pretending to deliver water. He was bound and beaten, and two of his laptops were stolen. There’s no way to prove this was not a random attack. But there was good reason to believe that the Falun Gong had managed to significantly irk its adversary.

This has led GIFC to keep their work under wraps. Their code is a tightly held secret, according to Shiyu Zhou. “The Chinese will constantly have people block you, reverse-engineer the tool, sabotage the tool,” he says.

 

The Falun Gong was hardly alone in developing this kind of software. In fact, there’s a Coke-Pepsi rivalry between Freegate and the other main program for skirting the censors: The Onion Router, or TOR. Although TOR was developed by the U.S. Navy--to protect Internet communication among its vessels--it has become a darling of the libertarian left. The TOR project was originally bankrolled, in part, by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the group that first sued the U.S. government for warrantless wiretapping. Many libertarians are drawn to TOR because they see it as a way for citizens to shield themselves from the prying eyes of government.

TOR uses an algorithm to route traffic randomly across three different proxy servers. This makes it slow but extremely secure--so secure that both the FBI and international criminal gangs have been known to use it. Unlike the Falun Gong, the TOR programmers have a fetish for making their code available to anyone.

There’s an irony in the EFF’s embrace of TOR, since the project also receives significant funding from the government. The Voice of America has contributed money so that its broadcasts can be heard via the Internet in countries that have blocked their site, a point of envy for the GIFC. For the past four years, the Falun Gong has also been urging the U.S. government to back Freegate financially, going so far as to enlist activists such as Michael Horowitz, a Reagan administration veteran, and Mark Palmer, a former ambassador to Hungary, to press Congress. (Neither was paid for his work.) But, when the two finally persuaded Congress to spend $15 million on anti-censorship software last year, the money was redirected to a program for training journalists. Both Palmer and Horowitz concluded that the State Department despised the idea of funding the Falun Gong.

That’s a reasonable conclusion. The Chinese government views the Falun Gong almost the way the United States views Al Qaeda. As Richard Bush, a China expert at the Brookings Institution, puts it, “An effort to use U.S. government resources in support of a Falun Gong project would be read in the worst possible way by the Chinese government.”

Still, there will no doubt be renewed pressure to direct money to the likes of the GIFC and TOR. In the wake of the Iran demonstrations, three bills to fund anti-censorship software are rocketing through Congress, with wide support. Tom Malinowski, the Washington director for Human Rights Watch, argues that such software “is to human rights work today what smuggling mimeograph machines was back in the 1970s, except it reaches millions more people.”

 

In the brief history of the Internet, there’s been an assumption that the little guy (the blogger, Apple, Firefox) has an advantage over the slow-footed giants of the world. With Web circumvention tools, the little guys might ultimately prevail, too. When the Iranian regime deliberately slowed down the speed of its Internet and deployed its full resources to squash traffic, it made it very difficult to upload video to social networking sites--but those videos have still trickled through.

The authoritarian regimes of the world, however, understand their new vulnerabilities. Many aren’t exactly known as technology leaders. Yet countries like Russia have pioneered cyber-warfare--and can devastate a website if they desire. A key component in Russia’s battle plans against Georgia last summer was a swift denial-of-service attack on government computers in Tbilisi. Even North Korea has developed an offensive cyber-warfare capability, according to U.S. intelligence.

And, while the Falun Gong has managed to win the upper hand in its battle with the Chinese government, it has reason to be less sanguine about the future. The Chinese have returned to the cyber-nanny model that U.S. libraries have deployed. This notorious project is called the Green Dam, or, more precisely, the Green Dam Youth Escort. Under the Green Dam, every new Chinese computer is required to come with a stringent filter pre-installed and, therefore, nearly impossible to remove. As the filter collects data on users, it relies on a government database to block sites. If anything, the Green Dam is too comprehensive. In its initial run, the software gummed up computers, crashing browsers and prohibiting virtually every Web search. In August, Beijing announced that it would delay the project indefinitely. Still, China had revealed a model that could, in theory, defeat nearly every Web-circumvention tool. 

When I asked David Tian, the GIFC programmer, about Green Dam, he spoke about it with a mix of pride and horror. The pride comes from the fact that the GIFC’s successes have placed the Chinese on the defensive. “One of the reasons they started this Green Dam business and moved the filter to the computer is because they cannot stop our products with the current filters,” he said. But he conceded that Green Dam will render Freegate useless.

In the world of product development--and freedom fighting--you innovate or die. The Falun Gong is determined not to go the way of the Commodore 64 into technological irrelevance. It has released a beta version of a new piece of software to overcome the Green Dam. Without a real chance to test it, it’s hard to tell whether it will work. But it has overcome the first hurdle of product development. It has marketed its product with a name that captures the swagger of the enterprise. It is called Green Tsunami.

Eli Lake is a contributing editor at The New Republic and a national security correspondent for The Washington Times.

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/hacking-the-regime

 

US Could Help Disrupt China's Internt Censorship

The means exist to rupture Internet censorship in China and Iran -- if the State Department will cooperate.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

THE MOST interesting question President Obama fielded in China came over the Internet, via the U.S. Embassy, from a Chinese citizen who asked, "Do you know of the firewall? Should we be able to use Twitter freely?" In response, Mr. Obama, speaking at a town hall in Shanghai, did not directly address China's massive Internet censorship operation -- "the firewall" -- and he confessed that he does not use Twitter. But he said, "I'm a big supporter of not restricting Internet use, Internet access, other information technologies like Twitter."

By Shar Adams
Epoch Times Staff Created: Nov 18, 2009 Last Updated: Nov 19, 2009

AUSTRALIA—Sun Xiaodi, a warehouse manager at China’s No. 792 uranium mine in Gansu Province, was ignored when he first began to report on corruption and radioactive contamination by mine operatives in 1988.

The military-run mine, located in Gansu’s Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, one of China’s most important bases for uranium, was pouring radioactively contaminated water into the Bailong River, Sun said, selling contaminated equipment, and ignoring safety guidelines for workers.

In 2006, after finally gaining serious attention by being detained for eight months, Sun was still petitioning and reporting on the mine’s frightening practices. Nothing had changed there.

"We have collected hard evidence,” Sun told Sound of Hope Radio at the time, "We took the samples of the water at about one in the morning one day. The samples indicate that residents near and downstream of the Bailong River, as well as residents in cities along the Yangtze River, are in for big trouble. Ores soaking into the water are being washed by the water, which means that uranium is moving through the water and thus contaminating the water."

Although the mine had been officially closed in 2002—allegedly resources had been exhausted—it had only changed hands and continued to pump out uranium illegally.

"All of their written reports were false,” Sun said,” They simply changed a military enterprise into a civilian enterprise, and continued with large-scale mining. They are still mining the uranium on a large scale."

Sun has since been arrested again, but this time his 26-year-old daughter, Sun Dunbai, was implicated and the prison term was longer. Non-government organization, Human Rights in China (HRIC) reported in July this year, that both father and daughter were sentenced to a year and half of re-education through labor (RTL). They were accused of inciting the public “with libelous slogans of ‘nuclear pollution’ and ‘human rights violations.’” Sun Xiaodi was also accused of stealing information from the mine and giving it to his daughter to supply to overseas organizations.

Australian Uranium

It is into this world that Australia has just sent its second shipment of uranium, its first from Olympic Dam in South Australia.

The first shipment to China, from the Rio Tinto Ranger mine in the Northern Territory, was sent last year.

Both deals were made possible by a 2006 agreement between the previous Howard government and Beijing on a nuclear safeguards pact. They have occurred way in advance of the agreed date for the first shipment, which was not anticipated to take place until 2010.

The Rudd government is not holding back in pushing uranium exports to China. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith accidentally let slip in April this year that negotiations were underway to export more uranium to China from the BHP Billiton-owned Olympic Dam.

Documents, which the minister later admitted were tabled to Parliament in error, said Australian officials had attended talks in Beijing earlier in the year to discuss a proposal by BHP Billiton to sell uranium-infused copper concentrate to China, the ABC reported.

The sale will require expanding the Olympic Dam mine, and will need Federal government permission to do so. The expansion is expected to increase output six-fold.

According to the Australian Uranium Industry Association, Olympic Dam is the world's largest uranium deposit and presently the world’s third largest uranium mine. Australia is considered to have nearly 40 percent of the world’s recoverable uranium but only 19 percent of the world market.

Australian resource minister, Martin Ferguson, is blunt about where the Australian government’s interests lie.

"Expansion of the uranium industry could generate up to $17 billion in GDP for Australia to 2030 and avert up to 15 billion tons in carbon emissions through the use of uranium in the global power sector,” he said in a statement.

For David Noonan, spokesperson for the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), this sort of statement sounds alarm bells.

“We believe it is unacceptable for the Australian government and BHP to look the other way and to claim that they can conduct trade simply for profit, particularly the uranium sector, and ignore all those human rights and transparency issues that are so apparent in China,” Noonan told The Epoch Times.

The case of Sun Xiaodi highlights just some of the concerns the ACF has with the China deal.

Whistleblowers like Sun Xiaodi and his daughter are being punished for raising legitimate concerns about the environment, in this case nuclear contamination and slack environmental and workplace safety practices, Mr. Noonan said, adding that it “demonstrates clearly that China is not going to be accountable in what may happen with Australian uranium in the future.”

Ferguson said the Rudd government sees Australia's economic relationship with China as “mutually very important” and a means of “government-to-government dialogue on many fronts.”

When asked to respond to concerns about Sun Xiaodi’s case he said the “bilateral safeguards agreement Australia has with China is the strictest in the world and we have measures in place to ensure and monitor compliance with the safeguards agreement.”

The Australian Greens say China cannot be trusted to abide by international safeguards, and it is impossible to monitor how Australia’s uranium is used in China.

Noted by Greens senator, Christine Milne, is the secrecy surrounding China’s military industrial processes.
Under the joint agreement Australia’s uranium is only to be used at “declared facilities,” but Senator Milne said, declared facilities are only declared at Chinese discretion.

“The Chinese government can withdraw these facilities from IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) oversight at any time simply by stating concerns about national security,” she said.

The Greens say they want Australia to withdraw from the 2006 deal because of China’s failure to comply with Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty disarmament obligations; its failure to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; and its failure to separate its military and civilian nuclear sectors.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/25373/

 

Shanghai Road Signs Cost 40,000 RMB Each

From NetEase:

A National Highway centralized numbering and naming system is gradually being carried out, and Shanghai is one of the cities where this is currently happening. It is reported that Shanghai needs to replace about 5,000 signs, but the whole project will cost 200 million yuan.

The huge cost lead to Han Han, who is a writer and race car driver, to question the plans. On October 15, Sichuan News Network reported Han Han’s sarcastic comment of “a sheet of iron costs 40,000 RMB”. Shanghai Highway Management Department responded that the number of street signs to be replaced is far more than 5,000. Many signs are being updated when they are replaced.

In Shanghai, both street signs and license plates cost thousands of RMB

In Shanghai, according to media reports, the deputy leader of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau Traffic Police Corps, Zuo Tianfu said, in order to be in line with the updates, there will be about 5,000 guideposts that need to be changed. Including the replacement of highway signs, the expense of the renaming and renumbering project will reach 200 million RMB.

Han Han published the post “G8 highway” on his blog, and said that “every sheet of iron costs 40,000RMB. Does it sound familiar?

Yes, it’s the same price of the iron sheet on your cars [Note: In Shanghai, vehicle license plates are obtained by auction. It's normal that each license plate costs thousands of RMB]. This shows that, for so many years, Shanghai’s car-owners were actually unfair to the Shanghai government. Do you think this is extortion? No, the 40,000 is the cost of raw materials. Otherwise, the Shanghai government would not charge the same amount of money for their own iron sheets.”

A netizen on the XCar website said,” A spray painted metal sign for 40,000RMB. Farmed out to me, I would only charge 20,000 each. ” This comment lead to a price competition on line. “Lou zhu you are too greedy, I would laugh to death if they would pay me 10,000 each”, “Give me 8,000, and I will kickback 2,000″, “6000 each, a lifetime guarantee”… …

The most expensive quoted price from suppliers is 1,000 RMB every square meter.

In many Shanghai forums, Han Han’s post has become really popular. Most people agree with his views:” Highway projects are so dark [questionable, shady].” “These signs are so valuable? If so, I won’t go to work anymore. I will steal road signs.” Besides Shanghai,  everywhere in the country, they are gradually replacing road signs. According to reports, Foshan, Guangdong province “estimated that the number of the road signs which need to be replaced would be between 2,000 and 3,000, and cost about 5 million RMB or more”. According to the report, the cost is far lower than 40,000 RMB for each sign.

The reporter found some road sign suppliers from Zhejiang, and Shanghai and consulted their prices. The other side responded that the price of the highway signs with the highest quality is between 850 and 1,000 RMB per square meter. To judge from the news pictures, in Shanghai, the size of the signs is about 2 to 5 square meters.

The reporter also found an invitation of tender from a Suzhou City government for road signs. The quoted price relates to not only the construction cost, but also auxiliary materials, accessories, delivery, labor, machinery, storage, installation, insurance, design fees, supervision fees, labor insurance, various taxes and fees (for example imported products should include tariffs), patent technology, all the charges in the warranty period, and so on.

The official response from the Highway Management Office: There are more than 5,000 signs.

About the number of the signs, a Shanghai Highway Administration official said, the point that “each sign cost 40,000 RMB” in Han Han’s blog is wrong. Because the 200 million RMB will not be spent on the 5,000 signs as Han Han said. In fact, the replacement of the signs is a large and complex system project. The 5,000 signs mentioned in Han Han’s blog only refer to the road signs between Shanghai urban districts and highways, which need to be changed. It only takes into account a small part of the project. In fact, the number of the signs which will be changed, in the entire highway, is much more than that amount.

To update all related signs includes all the highway traffic signs, especially the guiding signs, such as entrance notice signs, entrance signs, start (end) point markers, exit notice signs, exit signs, distance signs, services/facilities notice signs, toll station notice signs, etc.; adjusting the highway mileposts, as well as changing the name of toll stations and so on. In addition to the replacement of road signs, but also in accordance with national standards to re-design and re-brand, and some key signs of the basis for reinforcement, protection, handling, etc., involving a wide range of human and material resources.

Read more: Han Han’s original Chinese post “G8 Highway“, and his response to “a large and complex system project“.

http://www.chinasmack.com/stories/shanghai-road-signs-cost-40000-rmb-each/

 

Thief Returns Stolen Wallet, Praised For Professionalism

From Mop:

Thank you Chengdu thieves! Your professional character is admirable and I salute you! I will learn from you!

This morning was the first time I’ve had my wallet stolen, I just couldn’t believe it. But on the other hand what happened afterward made me both sad and moved!

This is what happened: On the morning of November 15 2009, I got up and because it was the weekend decided to go to the market to buy some food to reward myself. But after I bought the meat and was just about to buy the vegetables, I felt for my wallet and found that it wasn’t there. I felt so stupid, all of my cards were in there. Then I ran to the local police station to let them know, and ask them to cancel my ID card. – I was afraid that someone would use it to commit a crime (I wasn’t worried about my bank cards, but replacing them would be a pain). When I got to the police station and was asked what I needed, the policeman first asked how much money was in the wallet, I said seven hundred RMB, he said that I hadn’t lost much money and his tone became less helpful (But the cards which were in the wallet were really important). I said that I wanted to cancel my ID card, the lovely police lady said that I couldn’t do that without first putting an ad in a newspaper. But I’d lost all my damn possessions, how could I pay for an ad in a newspaper? I started to feel down. I shook my head and left. As I walked out I thought crap, why didn’t the “pol.ice” ask me to make a report (If I made a one, if someone else took my ID and committed a crime I couldn’t be held responsible)? I angrily went back and said that if I wanted to make a report I could, couldn’t I? And only then did they arrange for someone to take my statement. What do you think of that? Seems like next time I’ll need to say that I’ve lost tens of thousands, only then will people take notice of me! Ya….

But what happened after moved me and made me admire what real professional attitude is! After I left the police station, I returned to where my wallet had been taken, to see if the thief had taken the cash and abandoned the rest of my wallet or not, I went back to the market, public areas near it, rubbish bins, and recycling areas many times, when I got there a few uncles and aunties who sell meat called out to me, saying buddy your wallet and cards are all here. As soon as I saw I couldn’t believe it, an envelope containing my insurance card, accumulation fund card, bank card, ID card, work card and everything, please note that they were all put in an envelope. In addition to thanking those market sellers, what I want to say even more is…!

This thief’s professionalism makes you admire him, I want to thank the thief who stole my wallet, now this is real professionalism, and I must learn from you…!
Also, readers who lose their wallets, don’t just go to the police station, look around the general area for what you’ve lost (except for the cash), their professionalism will move you!

http://www.chinasmack.com/stories/thieves-pickpockets-professionalism-chengdu/

 

Only CCP Members Can Question Government Officials

“Are you a member of Communist party?” This is a very normal question, but it has become an incredibly popular internet meme on the Chinese language internet.

From Mop:

A Journalist was inquired if he is a Communist Party member.

On November 4, 2009, a newspaper in Zhengzhou city published a post, “‘Animal Control Office’ took money from people, but did not do anything”. In the post, the journalist asked how the “animal control fee” was used and where the money went. The journalist interviewed the person in charge of the “animal control office”, Wang Ping. The journalist hoped the office would publish the budget, but Wang asked the journalist to go to the local Bureau of Finance.

The journalist got in touch with the person who was in charge of the fee, Wang Guanqi, through the Zhengzhou Bureau of Finance. However, Wang didn’t answer the journalist’s question. Instead, he asked, “Are you a Communist Party member? If you want to ask for the expenses of the fee, then you must have the permission of the Communist committee and spokesman! It violates the rules that you come and interview me first!”

As soon as the report was published, “Are you a Communist party member?” became a new catchword online. This “stunning sentence” has completely shocked people.

Comment from a netizen: OMG. Is the information of the “Animal Control Office” only open to Communist Party members? Wang Guanqi has no common sense. The money in his hands are taxes, and the taxpayers are not all Communist Party members. People who don’t join the party want to know where their money goes through the journalist. It is proper and also a right based on the law. The right to interview is written in law. None of the power of the Communist committee or spokesmen is bigger than the law.

Extensions: Stunning words appeared frequently on the Internet recently.

In June of this year, a journalist in Zhengzhou City interviewed the deputy director of Zhengzhou Municipal Planning Bureau, Dai Jun. The journalist asked director Dai why villas were built in the place designated for economically affordable housing. The director answered very directly: “Are you prepared to speak for the Communist party, or for the people?” The shocking “official responses” were the rage all over the country.

On October 27 at a Guangzhou traffic remediation conference, when a reporter questioned whether advance publication of road closures is needed, a middle-aged man who was in the meeting suddenly said: “So do I have to tell you whether or not I need to shit or whether my shit smells?” Once the phrase was reported, this person was immediately labeled as a “shit official”, this phrase was known as “the most niu official response.”

Now, including “Are you a Communist Party member?”, there are three niu officials and three shocking phrases. One netizen commented that the officials and the phrases all showed the same “Pride and Prejudice”.

http://www.chinasmack.com/stories/only-communist-party-members-can-question-government-officials/