Censorship in China doesn't usually work


Internet activists are pecking at the edges
Another bit about China's censorship fraying and slipping.

Chinese Communist Party elders and U.S. lawmakers fired shots at China's powerful censors this week, but Li Xinde says muck-raking campaigners like himself are undermining the country's barriers to free speech every day.

Li is one of just a handful of Internet investigative reporters, exposing corrupt officials and injustice on his China Public Opinion Surveillance Net (www.yuluncn.com).

Then he spreads his often outrageous, sometimes gruesome stories on some of the 49 blogs he uses to slip past censors.

"They shut down one, so I move to another," he told Reuters.

"It's what Chairman Mao called sparrow tactics. You stay small and independent, you move around a lot, and you choose when to strike and when to run."

Li, 46, lives in Fuyang, a city of 360,000 in the rural eastern province of Anhui, and he is far from a household name among Chinese readers, even Internet enthusiasts.

But some of the cases he first reported became notorious after other reporters, even state-run television, took them up. Li's Web site has become a magnet for discontented rural citizens hoping to turn his spotlight on their complaints.

Freedom is going to happen in China. It has to, or they will never feed their people. And it is going to happen in some of the most remarkable ways.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - February 17, 2006 at 04:44 AM  Tag


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