Defect laptop as a present for the guest: Protest against China’s internet censure!

As a protest against the blocking of its internet page by Chinese censors the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has made the Chinese Prime Minister, Wen Jibao, the present of a non-functioning laptop to mark his visit to Germany. "The search for information about China on this laptop is futile – just like the search for the GfbV internet page on Chinese computers”, said the GfbV Asia consultant, Ulrich Delius, on Tuesday in Göttingen. For months the homepage of the human rights organisation has been closed in China because it provides information on the severe infringements of human rights against Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongols, Falun-Gong supporters and supporters of the movement for democracy.

"Some 298 million internet users in China are declared by their government to be "too immature” to be able to form their own opinion”, said Delius. In no other country of the world are so many people prevented arbitrarily from accessing the world-wide net. "The political leaders present a damning indictment of themselves as the future world power if they can send astronauts into space and are leaders in the development of high-tech industry, yet systematically suppress free information on the internet.”

The forthcoming sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China this year is evidently geared to demonstrate the dominance of the party on the internet in an increasingly ridiculous manner, criticised Delius. Apart from 30,000 internet police for the supervision and punishment of websites which are critical to the regime specially trained internet commentators are now being used, whose task it is to polish up the reputation of the Communist Party and its leaders in government with paid "hurrrah cheering”. China is not only a world champion in exports, but also in its policy of disinformation.

China is using the newest technologies and the most modern software to supervise the internet. Instead of looking for undesirable key-words – like Tibet, Dalai Lama, Uighurs, Falun Gong – software is now being used which indicates at an early stage when discussions on the internet find an above-average resonance. So attempts are made to influence and control these discussions right at the outset. China tightened up its internet censure again in January 2009.

Dozens of internet pages of Chinese civil rights organisations and Tibetan and Uighur supporters’ groups have been closed in the People’s Republic. The Chinese censure authorities take particularly harsh measures against the meditation movement Falun Gong, whose extensive presence on the internet is feared by China’s leaders.