
How does the song go...
It's like being arrested for propagating anti-Japanese sentiment on a banned web seeeeeeeervice on your wedding day...
Apologies to Natalie...
It's not just the UK that takes action against people being nasty on Twitter - Chinese authorities have sentenced Cheng Jianping to a year's "Re-education Through Labour" for retweeting an anti-Japanese message. Cheng retweeted a message from her fiance – who has not been charged – which suggested nationalist students …
Surely it goes more like:
I've got your Twitter, I've got your Twitter
I'd like a million re-tweets of myself
I asked the government to take your Twitter
So I can look at you from inside the cell
You've got me tweeting up and tweeting down
and tweeting in and tweeting 'round
I'm anti-Japanese
I tweet I'm anti-Japanese
I really think so
Anti-Japanese
I tweet I'm anti-Japanese
I really tweet so
I'm anti-Japanese
I tweet I'm anti-Japanese
I really think so
Anti-Japanese
I think I'm anti-Japanese
I really think so
With apologies to The Vapors for ruining a perfectly decent song...
If I were part of the Chinese security forces I'd be loving all the Web 2.0 stuff - there was a time when the dissidents they were charged with tracking were actually secretive. The formula is pretty simple really:
1.) Ban a bunch of online sites/services
2.) Half-arsed block said sites/services leaving it not too difficult to circumvent
3.) Monitor the banned sites/services for use - using it to populate their dissidents list
4.) Scrape through the logs and find a violation as necessary to keep up appearences (assuming that bureacrats in China aren't too different from the states)
I can almost hear them chuckling watching the twitter feeds: "lawl, these stupid so-and-so's catch themselves"
*Disclaimer: I am not encouraging or condoning any of this, just pointing out that for an oppressive Police State Web 2.0rhea really does make their job easy.
“Anti-Japanese demonstrations, smashing Japanese products, that was all done years ago by Guo Quan [an activist and expert on the Nanjing Massacre]. It’s no new trick. If you really wanted to kick it up a notch, you’d immediately fly to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion.”
is way more than 140 characters, even with the stuff in square brackets taken out, so either Twitter in China has more than 140 characters, or there's some way they can use Chinese characters to save space, or this article is rubbish, or I'm wrong.
“Anti-Japanese demonstrations, smashing Japanese products, that was all done years ago by Guo Quan [an activist and expert on the Nanjing Massacre]. It’s no new trick. If you really wanted to kick it up a notch, you’d immediately fly to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion.” is three characters, four if you actually include "[an activist and expert on the Nanjing Massacre]".
Okay, so the punishment is disproportionate, but this does at least seem to be an intended incitement rather than an innocent joke. Also, it's more than a little naive to expect China.gov to uphold the right to free speech. ("China prosecutes someone for saying something they didn't approve of" seems to be right up there with the famed disclosure of the Pope's religion in newsworthiness stakes).
That said, I'm not in full posession of the facts or context
Ignoring the fact that the service is "banned" (and how effective that really is, combined with the likely usefulness to the authorities themselves), the basic story here is "Citizen incites violence and criminal damage with a racist / nationalist agenda. Citizen is arrested and subsequently sentenced for the offence."
Perhaps if we were as fast and effective in the UK, for example with the morons in the recent so-called demonstration against tuition fees (which is busy peddling nonsense anyway and aye, I went to University too and still owe money for it) people would be less keen to smash property and assault members of the public and police.