China Change » Internet Freedom

Video: Six Policemen Came to the Home of a Young Woman at Night and Seized Her for Interrogation [Subtitled]

China Change, August 28, 2018 This 3-minute video has gone viral on Twitter the last couple of days. It’s not a movie; it’s an everyday reality in China that’s seldom captured on record. We, as many people do, know it’s a commonality, but the video somehow sends chills down the spine. The video emerged on Twitter on August [...] Keep reading »

Google Recommends Product From a Chinese Company with Communist Party and Military Ties for its ‘Advanced Protection Program’

Matthew Robertson, August 23, 2018 “Our goal is to make sure that any user facing an increased risk of online attacks enrolls in the Advanced Protection Program.” — Dario Salice, Advanced Protection Product Manager at Google. Journalists and dissidents involved in Chinese affairs are accustomed to [...] Keep reading »

‘Beep. Beep Beep’: A Group Emerges in China and a Code is Born

Yaxue Cao, April 17, 2018 On April 10, China’s State Administration of Radio and Television ordered the permanent closure of the Neihan Duanzi (translated roughly as ‘quirky skits’) app and website. In its announcement, the authorities denounced the app and its public WeChat account as having an “improper orientation and vulga [...] Keep reading »

Crushing a Rose Under Foot: Chinese Authorities Target Internet Chat Groups

China Change, April 4, 2018 Between February and March this year, rights activists from provinces around China were summoned, questioned, and threatened by secret police who demanded that they withdraw from the ‘Rose chatgroups,’ also known as the ‘Rose team.’ These chatgroups have attracted relatively large numbers of interne [...] Keep reading »

Political Prisoner’s Wife Beaten by Relatives Who Asked Her to Leave Husband

Yaxue Cao, November 1, 2017 Li Aijie (李爱杰) is from Henan province, China’s central plains. She married a man named Zhang Haitao (张海涛) in Urumqi, Xinjiang, who moved from Henan to the far northwestern region in the 1990s seeking job opportunities after being laid off from a state-owned enterprise. He made a living trading [...] Keep reading »

In Search of Better Digital Protection for Human Rights Defenders In China

Safeguard defenders, September 19, 2017 Among the many revelations into the systematic repression of the human rights community to have come to light since the beginning of the 709 Crackdown have been accounts from those released about the access of police and state security to chat logs and emails, even communications and documents t [...] Keep reading »

What to Make of the Explosive New WeChat and QQ Spying Revelations?

Safeguard Defenders, September 10, 2017 A new report by a Lookout, a Cybersecurity company, has generated renewed interest in the security, or lack thereof, of WeChat and QQ (https://blog.lookout.com/xrat-mobile-threat). Despite this, there has been limited attention paid to this explosive new revelation. It has long been known that d [...] Keep reading »

As Liu Xiaobo Dies in Isolation, It’s Time to Abandon ‘Quiet Diplomacy’

By Chang Ping, July 18, 2017 On July 7, the German professor Markus W Büchler, Chairman of the Department of Surgery, University of Heidelberg, traveled to Shenyang to take part in diagnosing the condition of Liu Xiaobo. Media reports noted that it was the first time in almost a decade that Liu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, had seen [...] Keep reading »

A Long Journey to Visit My Husband Zhang Haitao in Shaya Prison, Part Two

Li Aijie, April 29, 2017 This is the second and last installment of Li Aijie’s account of her trip. Zhang Haitao was sentenced to 15 years in prison on January 15, 2016, for “inciting subversion of state power” and 5 years for “providing intelligence to foreign organizations.” He’s currently imprisoned in Shaya Prison in remote western [...] Keep reading »