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Mo Shaoping, a human rights lawyer, shown above in 2008, was stopped from from leaving China on Tuesday on charges that his departure might endanger national security
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: November 9, 2010
BEIJING — Two prominent legal scholars and rights advocates bound for an international law conference in London were blocked from leaving China on Tuesday on vague charges that their departure might endanger national security, they said.
The scholars, Mo Shaoping and He Weifang, said they suspected that the government feared that they would try to attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo next month honoring the jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo.
Both men were on the list of 143 Chinese activists, academics and celebrities that Mr. Liu’s wife invited to the award ceremony in an Internet posting two weeks ago, noting that neither she nor her husband were likely to be allowed to attend.
Mr. Mo and Mr. He said that officers who detained them said a superior had described their overseas journey as a threat to state security. “That’s the most imbecilic thing I’ve heard,” Mr. Mo said in an interview, adding that he had no intention of traveling to Oslo. “I don’t have a visa for Norway, and I have a ticket to return to Beijing on Nov. 15.”
In recent weeks, the government has demonstrated its resolve to stop Chinese citizens from attending the ceremony on Dec. 10. It has kept Mr. Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, incommunicado in her Beijing apartment and subjected scores of other writers, academics and lawyers to varying degrees of detention or surveillance.
Among those facing restrictions are Hua Ze, a Beijing-based filmmaker who was forcibly returned to her hometown in southern China; Liu Suli, a Beijing bookstore owner who says he was injured during an assault by security agents last month; and Yu Fangqiang, a human rights lawyer who was stopped at the Hong Kong border last Friday on his way to a United Nations training session in Geneva.
At the same time, China has ramped up pressure on foreign governments, warning foreign officials to stay away from the event next month or “bear the consequences,” as Cui Tiankai, China’s vice foreign minister, put it last week. On Tuesday, the Japanese foreign minister told Parliament that Beijing had requested Japan not to send a representative to the ceremony.
Liu Xiaobo, 54, an essayist who is among China’s best known advocates of political reform, is serving an 11-year prison term for his writings, including Charter 08, a manifesto calling for human rights, the rule of law and an end to single-party rule.
In addition to using its economic might to warn world leaders away from the ceremony, China has waged an equally vociferous campaign at home to tarnish Mr. Liu’s reputation and delegitimize the award in the eyes of the Chinese people.
After a brief news blackout on the announcement of the prize, China’s state-controlled media began rolling out articles and editorials describing the award as an insult to the country’s criminal justice system, a ploy to hold back China’s rise and a tactic to subvert the country’s political system. Other commentaries have painted Mr. Liu as a corrupt pawn of Western governments.
The warnings have already prompted a handful of European countries, among them France, Britain, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands, to announce that they would hew to established protocol and send ambassadors.
Michael C. Davis, a law professor and human rights expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said he thought China’s effort to organize a boycott of the ceremony — like its earlier campaign to dissuade the Norwegian Nobel Committee from selecting Mr. Liu — would probably backfire. In fact, he said Beijing’s overall handling of the matter was only drawing more attention to Mr. Liu’s plight and to the country’s checkered human rights record. “The Chinese often unintentionally turn their enemies into heroes,” he said.
Mr. Mo, an outspoken advocate of legal reform who signed the Charter 08 manifesto, has so far escaped serious persecution. He was barred from defending Mr. Liu last year, but other lawyers from his firm were allowed to take on the case.
Mr. He is a prominent legal scholar at Peking University whose frequent critiques of China’s judicial system may have played a role in his recent transfer to an isolated university in western China.
Both men were scheduled to take part in discussions in London on Wednesday about the difficulties facing civil society lawyers in China. Speaking at a restaurant in Beijing, where they were fielding media calls, the two said the decision to block them from the conference was nonsensical. “This is the Chinese government defacing its own image on the international stage,” Mr. He said.
The scholars, Mo Shaoping and He Weifang, said they suspected that the government feared that they would try to attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo next month honoring the jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo.
Both men were on the list of 143 Chinese activists, academics and celebrities that Mr. Liu’s wife invited to the award ceremony in an Internet posting two weeks ago, noting that neither she nor her husband were likely to be allowed to attend.
Mr. Mo and Mr. He said that officers who detained them said a superior had described their overseas journey as a threat to state security. “That’s the most imbecilic thing I’ve heard,” Mr. Mo said in an interview, adding that he had no intention of traveling to Oslo. “I don’t have a visa for Norway, and I have a ticket to return to Beijing on Nov. 15.”
In recent weeks, the government has demonstrated its resolve to stop Chinese citizens from attending the ceremony on Dec. 10. It has kept Mr. Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, incommunicado in her Beijing apartment and subjected scores of other writers, academics and lawyers to varying degrees of detention or surveillance.
Among those facing restrictions are Hua Ze, a Beijing-based filmmaker who was forcibly returned to her hometown in southern China; Liu Suli, a Beijing bookstore owner who says he was injured during an assault by security agents last month; and Yu Fangqiang, a human rights lawyer who was stopped at the Hong Kong border last Friday on his way to a United Nations training session in Geneva.
At the same time, China has ramped up pressure on foreign governments, warning foreign officials to stay away from the event next month or “bear the consequences,” as Cui Tiankai, China’s vice foreign minister, put it last week. On Tuesday, the Japanese foreign minister told Parliament that Beijing had requested Japan not to send a representative to the ceremony.
Liu Xiaobo, 54, an essayist who is among China’s best known advocates of political reform, is serving an 11-year prison term for his writings, including Charter 08, a manifesto calling for human rights, the rule of law and an end to single-party rule.
In addition to using its economic might to warn world leaders away from the ceremony, China has waged an equally vociferous campaign at home to tarnish Mr. Liu’s reputation and delegitimize the award in the eyes of the Chinese people.
After a brief news blackout on the announcement of the prize, China’s state-controlled media began rolling out articles and editorials describing the award as an insult to the country’s criminal justice system, a ploy to hold back China’s rise and a tactic to subvert the country’s political system. Other commentaries have painted Mr. Liu as a corrupt pawn of Western governments.
The warnings have already prompted a handful of European countries, among them France, Britain, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands, to announce that they would hew to established protocol and send ambassadors.
Michael C. Davis, a law professor and human rights expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said he thought China’s effort to organize a boycott of the ceremony — like its earlier campaign to dissuade the Norwegian Nobel Committee from selecting Mr. Liu — would probably backfire. In fact, he said Beijing’s overall handling of the matter was only drawing more attention to Mr. Liu’s plight and to the country’s checkered human rights record. “The Chinese often unintentionally turn their enemies into heroes,” he said.
Mr. Mo, an outspoken advocate of legal reform who signed the Charter 08 manifesto, has so far escaped serious persecution. He was barred from defending Mr. Liu last year, but other lawyers from his firm were allowed to take on the case.
Mr. He is a prominent legal scholar at Peking University whose frequent critiques of China’s judicial system may have played a role in his recent transfer to an isolated university in western China.
Both men were scheduled to take part in discussions in London on Wednesday about the difficulties facing civil society lawyers in China. Speaking at a restaurant in Beijing, where they were fielding media calls, the two said the decision to block them from the conference was nonsensical. “This is the Chinese government defacing its own image on the international stage,” Mr. He said.
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”
This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”
Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.
The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.
And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.
Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.
But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.
Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.
So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.
Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.
Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”
There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.
“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.
Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.
There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.
________________________________
A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.
But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.
Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.
Zhou Family Ties
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.
Write a comment
David Lu (Sunday, 28 November 2010 20:44)
One-party dictatorship will be continued for hundreds years.