Heard this first at The Rumpus -- it's pretty incredible:
According to the BBC, a 46-year old female human rights activist was jailed in China over a message she posted to her Twitter-feed. The tweet was apparently mocking Chinese protestors of Japan who were smashing Japanese products in the streets over a debate concerning uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. The tweet encouraged protestors to attack the Japanese pavilion at the Shanghai Expo instead, with the attached message to "charge, angry youth."
The activist, Cheng Jianping, was sentenced to a year in a labor camp. Obviously, this underlines the absurd, on-going, and general absolute fucked-up-ness of the Chinese government.
I wanted to say again that we are making a section from Xiaoda Xiao's forthcoming The Visiting Suit: Stories From My Prison Life (Dec.) downloadable for free in Chinese. By doing so, we hoped his tale would be available to members of the population still affected by the extreme policies and daily hardships that Xiao describes who are only receiving and exposed to heavily censored news and stories.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
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2 comments:
I read this same story and did a double take. Being jailed for a satiric remark, while definitely not surprising, always adds a little salt to the wound, particularly since the remark in question was characterized by irony. It's not surprising that attacks on the government of a repressive society are met with retribution, but humor and the figures of speech that attend it have always provided a special cushion, a dispensation, a camouflage, which affords a refuge for thought. When that is taken away it is both laughable and frightening.
She knew what she was doing, stirring up trouble. Violence advocacy is no joke. Do you want to go out on street with baton to calm the mob because of "jokes" like hers?
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