Below is the translation of an article written by the prominent author and dissident Yu Jie on July 7th, 2010. Yu Jie was recently interrogated by government officials. This long, but interesting article details the conversation that took place between Mr. Yu and his interrogator. The original Chinese article can be viewed here.

Censorship Everywhere in China-My Second Interrogation by the Chinese Police
-Yu Jie

“The real symbol of China’s openness should be: when asked at a press conference what his favorite book is, Premier Wen Jiabao would show China’s Best Actor Wen Jiabao, a book by Yu Jie, to the audience and say, ‘This book, certainly this one. It is my best reference.”-from Twitter username: “Playboy”

July 5 2010, Officer Li called me at 10 am, notifying me that the officers from the municipal State Security Bureau wanted to talk to me at the police station in my neighborhood at 3 pm that day. I refused, because I was busy finalizing my new book China’s Best Actor Wen Jiabao, which is to be published in half a month. The state security officers get paid for their time “talking to” people like me, since it is part of their job. But I cannot waste my time, and it is certainly my civil right to refuse their demands. (Read more after the jump)

On the heels of the release of a White Paper outlining the internet rights of Chinese citizens - zealously titled "Guaranteeing Citizens Freedom of Speech on the Internet"  - the Chinese government is instituting strict regulations that extend its internet surveillance controls. 

Across China, regulations now mandate that Internet cafes require smart ID cards for internet access and install surveillance cameras accessible by provincial government authorities monitoring their customers.  Businesses that do not comply with these terms are threatened with fines and other punishments. 

In the past year the Chinese government has gone to some lengths to limit public opinion of dissent online by limiting Internet access via Internet cafes.  But as always, behind such censorship initiatives - ostensibly intended to protect children from pornography and guide them in "wholesome and correct" Internet usage - lurks the specter of a more disturbing, Orwellian exercise of control over Chinese netizens seeking public forums. 

So take a seat in an Internet cafe in Sichuan.  After we check to make sure your face matches your ID card, don't forget to swipe it so we have record of your patronage.  Don't mind the cameras, please, just go about your business, accessing the free and open internet safely.  Keep in mind that you may be traced and punished for letting loose opinions which include any of the following: "divulging state secrets," "subverting state power," "jeopardizing national unification," "damaging state honor and interests," "jeopardizing ethnic unity" or "state religious policy," (Read more after the jump!)

With new polls underscoring the continuation of a long-standing lack of basic knowledge   between the populations of two of the world’s biggest powers, it seems only appropriate to lay out a few basic facts to ground any ensuing argument.  As of May 1^st of this year, there are over 404 million internet users in the People’s Republic of China, despite the limitations to access imposed on the Xinjiang/East Turkestan region, giving China the largest online population of any country.  Within a year of the release of Charter 08, a vocal call for democracy and governmental reform signed by 300 mainland Chinese intellectuals, 70 of the signatories had been detained or interrogated. 

Rumors that Google may pull out of China has thrown the state of the Chinese Internet into sharp focus. It says much about the disconnect between the idealism of the Internet pioneers and the reality of how the Internet is utilized in undemocratic states.

During the 1990s, we were told that the Internet was going to single-handedly topple totalitarianism throughout the globe. Regimes would no longer be able to control the free global flow of information to repressed citizens, and knowledge would be power enough to squeeze the dictators out. Everything the optimists said about the Internet is true: unfettered access does have the power to liberalize less than undemocratic public spheres. But it's getting to that free and unfettered version of the Internet that's the problem these days. And the authoritarians -- most notably China and Iran, but others too, like Vietnam -- have been amazingly adept at filtering out what they don't want people to hear. Normally we don't think of business interests in China overlapping with human rights, but in the case of American technology companies, the two camps are, and will continue to be, more closely aligned than we might think. (Read more after the jump)

I'm in the process of pulling together a presentation on the special tension between security and openness faced by organizations like the Laogai Research Foundation, who serve the impossible-to-secure dissidents of the repressive Chinese Communist Party.  So I was particularly interested, in light of our Twitter campaign to Free Liu Xiaobo, and our own interest in how the growing community of Chinese dissidents on Twitter have managed to create a much-needed public forum, in the question posed yesterday by C. Custer - "Is it a trap?"

Is Twitter a trap?  Custer certainly makes a compelling argument that Twitter, as an immensely popular micro-blogging service, provides a lovely pool of material for "would-be prosecutors to compile evidence of thoughtcrime".  And he certainly doesn't overstate the danger involved in public dissent in China - Just last week activist Tan Zuoren was sentenced to 5 years in prison for reporting on the Sichuan earthquake and the Beijing Municipal High Court rejected the appeal of democracy activist Liu Xiaobo.  There is reason to be concerned about the safety of the Twitter community of Chinese dissidents, and to a certain extent the platform is the responsibility of its creator.  (Read more after the jump)

From Xinjiang: Far West China Blog:  As of midnight last Friday, February 5th, it was announced that 27 more “outside Xinjiang” websites have been opened in addition to the four sites that were already accessible. After spending this past weekend searching over all these sites I can tell you that progress has been made, although each of them loads quite slowly. What’s more…one of them doesn’t load at all (the China Rail site received a "Connection Interrupted").

Excuse me, folks. That would be 26 more websites open, not 27.  (Continue reading on Xinjiang: Far West Blog)

U.S. President Barack Obama will meet with the Dalai Lama, despite threats from China that the meeting "would further hurt already strained bilateral relations." The President, who "snubbed" a visit with the Dalai Lama back in late 2009, will meet with His Holiness, although a date still has not been set.

While China regards the Dalai Lama as a "dangerous separatist," the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is known around the world as a "respected religious and cultural leader." The Dalai Lama wants Tibetans to be able to "freely practice their culture, language and religion under China's rule" - conditions that do not currently exist.

To aid in its control of Tibet and the repression of Tibetan human rights, the Chinese government extended its vast Laogai system into Tibet. According to the International Campaign for Tibet, "the Chinese government severely restricts the rights of Tibetans, including the freedoms of speech, press, association, and religion. Tibetan political prisoners endure harsh prison conditions and torture... Since 1949, hundreds of thousands have died as a direct result of China’s policies."

In October 2009, the Dalai Lama visited the Laogai Museum.  Watch his visit below:

Google's China operation has been grabbing global headlines since last Tuesday, when it announced that it would plan to stop censoring Google.cn search results or pull out of China after discovering a significant attack on it's technology infrastructure.  Later Google clarified that it was interested in staying in China, but would plan to reduce censorship of its Chinese search results.  Official Chinese media has dismissed Google's human rights concerns as ridiculous, stating "Whatever the real cause for Google's possible move, this case is purely business in nature and it should have nothing to do with political ideology" and adding that it was "inappropriate to play up the issue, or turn it into a political one."  

But Google's business model is particularly dependent upon a political ideology - their own, very public, vision of the Open Internet, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to yesterday when she proclaimed that the United States "stand[s] for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas."  Google has become a particularly strong voice for this growing movement toward true openness, not merely the absence of censorship but also the active practice of business transparency, content fair use, and open technology.  Their strength in the field of technology is in no small part because of their politics, and while it is true that they submitted to censorship to enter Chinese markets in 2006, in many other ways they've continued investing in the "openness" movement at home (and, of course, sparking controversy within it).  [Read more after the jump]