Apple Faces Boycott Over Worker Abuses In China. It's Not Crazy Talk. - Forbes

Fair-labor organizers, Change.org and SumOfUs.org, delivered 250,000 signatures to Apple stores in six cities around the world on Thursday in protest of the company’s working conditions in China, according to a report in Mashable.

Last month, an excellent New York Times exposé ripped at Apple’s core, building on previous concerns about abuses at firms that Apple uses to make its bestselling iPhones, iPads and Mac computers.

The claims should be familiar by now as Foxconn in southern China, one of Apple’s primary suppliers, has repeatedly been the subject of accusations of worker mistreatment and unsafe working conditions. From Mashable:

Foxconn has been accused of making laborers work long hours without breaks, use dangerous chemicals that have caused severe health problems and exposing workers to dangerous conditions. The repetitive work and spartan living conditions have also been to blame for suicides at the factory.

Charlotte Hill, communications manager at Change.org, pleaded with Apple to use its creativity to “think ethically” and create an iPhone without using factories that have harsh working conditions.

“No iPhone is worth that cost,” she said.

At the same time, Apple has also generated billions of dollars in profits, in part due to the cheapness of Chinese labor. (Revenue last quarter surged 74 percent to a record US$46.3 billion and profit more than doubled to US$13.1 billion, blowing away Wall Street‘s expectations as Apple sold more stuff than in any quarter in its history.)

The Mashable report comes as rumors point to Siri, the much lauded iPhone 4S intelligent personal assistant, adding Mandarin Chinese support next month.

For perspective, read “The Apple Boycott: People Are Spouting Nonsense about Chinese Manufacturing.”

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China Vows Net Phone Crackdown - Radio Free Asia

Beijing may be moving to tighten censorship and protect state-owned companies.

AFP

A Hong Kong man looks at the image of a Mandarin teacher in mainland China speaking to students across the globe via Skype, March 27, 2007.

Chinese officials and media are warning of a crackdown on "illegal" Internet telephony services, like those provided by Skype, that are not licensed or approved by the country's powerful telecoms regulator.

"We are currently working together with relevant departments to launch a crackdown on illegal voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephony," Beijing's ministry of industry and information technology (MIIT) said in a statement carried on its website.

"We are looking to recruit members of the public who have clues in cases of illegal Internet telephony," said the statement, dated Dec. 10 but featured prominently in official media reports on Friday.

The statement provided a hotline number for anyone wanting to report information to the authorities.

Lucrative

The ministry's move is seen by some as a means of protecting the lucrative international call business of China's state-owned telecom operators.

Others have speculated that the government is also concerned that high-level encryption on VoIP services such as Skype make calls too difficult for the authorities to monitor.

Skype has been a popular tool with activists and others who want to share information relatively freely, getting around the complex system of blocks and filters known collectively as the Great Firewall (GFW).

Gong Shujia, an expert in electronic communications at George Mason University, said the fixed-line service providers found it very hard to compete with the Internet-to-phone services.

"If you have a fixed-line telephone in your home, that'll cost you 30-40 yuan per month, whereas if you use Internet phone services you will only spend 2-3 yuan per month," Gong said.

Important factor

But he said profits were not the only concern behind Beijing's planned crackdown on Internet telephony.

"There are two issues here. One is the issue of the profits of the telephone service providers," Gong said.

"The other is that any information sent as speech over these networks...is already encrypted when it leaves your computer."

"Even if someone was listening in, they wouldn't be able to hear the sound, so I think that is also another important factor [behind this decision]," he added.

Officials have so far declined to clarify the implications of the message for specific services.

But the Beijing Morning Post on Thursday quoted MIIT vice-minister Xi Guohua as saying only state-owned major Chinese telecommunications operators were licensed to provide Internet phone services linking telephones and computers.

Discounted rates

Beijing officials have made similar statements in the past, and also declined to clarify their implications for services such as Skype.

However, Xi said communications between computers (PC-to-PC) remained open to China's 450 million Internet users.

Currently, Skype operates both PC-to-PC calling services, which are free, and PC-to-phone services which enable users to dial international phone networks from their PC at discounted rates.

The ministry has previously said unlicensed VoIP services are illegal, but has declined to specify what action would be taken.

The Beijing Morning Post cited the case of UUCall, a homegrown VoIP service which calls itself "the first Chinese Internet phone brand," which was shut down in October 2009.

UUCall resumed business in February after moving its domain name to Hong Kong, the paper added.

"Not banned"

Netizens hit back at the proposed ban, complaining that VoIP was a public good that should not be declared illegal.

"What benefits people is not legal. I really want to curse out loud," one angry user said.

Skype told Bloomberg on Friday that its services in China remained operational.

“Skype is not banned,” Jennifer Caukin, a Palo Alto, California-based
spokeswoman for the service provider, said in an e-mail to the financial news service.

“Our users in China currently can access Skype via Tom Online, our majority joint venture partner.”

Reported by Shi Shan for RFA's Mandarin service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

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China must do more to restrain N. Korea, Mullen says - Washington Post

TOKYO - As North Korea on Wednesday startled Seoul by firing artillery off the peninsula's west coast, the top U.S. military official directed sharp criticism at China for its "tacit approval" of North Korea's recent behavior.

In Seoul to meet with South Korea's top defense officials, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described China's "unique influence" and "unique responsibility" to restrain North Korea, which in recent weeks has shelled a South Korean island and revealed an advanced uranium-enrichment facility.

"The Chinese have enormous influence over the North, influence that no other nation on Earth enjoys," Mullen said. "And yet, despite a shared interest in reducing tensions, they appear unwilling to use it. Even tacit approval of Pyongyang's brazenness leaves all their neighbors asking, 'What will be next?' "

Mullen's message for Beijing exposed the fault line separating the Obama administration and the Chinese. China - North Korea's lone ally and primary benefactor - is pushing for a resumption of six-party talks, the process designed to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons. But the United States, South Korea and Japan don't feel ready, doubting North Korea's willingness to roll back its nuclear arms ambitions.

On Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met in Washington with South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan and Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara for a show of hand-holding and condemnation of North Korea's provocations.

Two South Korean marines and two civilians were killed Nov. 23 when North Korea launched artillery at Yeonpyeong Island, triggering the latest crisis on the often-tense peninsula. Days earlier, North Korea had revealed to a U.S. nuclear specialist a new facility filled with roughly 2,000 centrifuges. North Korea says the uranium program will be used for energy purposes, but it has the capacity to produce highly enriched uranium and expand Pyongyang's nuclear weapons stock.

The lingering anxiety in the South was reflected Wednesday morning, when its military reported hearing North Korean artillery fire near the maritime border. Though the shells landed in North Korean waters, South Korean financial markets were briefly rattled by the news, recovering only when local television stations attributed the fire to military drills, not an attack.

South Korea has held its own live-fire exercises this week, continuing a show of military readiness that North Korea says threatens a "full-scale war." The United States and South Korea last week conducted joint military drills, with more to come. The Yeonpyeong attack - which prompted the resignation of South Korea's defense minister - caused Seoul to reassess its restrained response to the shelling, with new Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin vowing airstrikes against North Korea if the South is attacked again.

Still, Mullen on Wednesday called for caution.

"Rather than meet belligerence in kind, you chose to meet it with restraint and resolve and with readiness," Mullen said of South Korea. "The North should not mistake this restraint as a lack of resolve, nor should they interpret it as willingness to accept continued attacks to go unchallenged."

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China Debuts at Top of International Education Rankings - ABC News

American educators received a wake-up call today when it was revealed that students in Shanghai rank number one globally in reading, math and science, far outpacing their American peers. Despite modest gains in math and science, the U.S. continues to lag behind other developed countries.

A report out today, "Highlights From PISA 2009: Performance of U.S. 15-Year-Old Students in Reading, Mathematics, and Science Literacy in an International Context," shows the U.S. now ranks 25th in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading out of the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

While OECD countries such as Finland, South Korea, Canada, Japan, Switzerland and New Zealand continue to outpace the U.S. in reading, science and math, all eyes are on China. In its first year to be included in the study as a non-OECD education system, Shanghai ranked first in all three categories. Hong Kong came in second in reading and science and third in math.

"The 2009 PISA data demonstrate the rise in the quality of education in Asia -- among the top performers were Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and Korea," said Tony Jackson, Vice President of Education at the Asia Society. "Aligning education goals to economic development, Asian nations have scoured the world for models of effective education systems, and implemented them consistently through deliberate policies and long-term investments. Any definition of a world-class education must include knowledge of Asia and the language and cultural skills to deal with Asia. It's a two-way street: America must now learn from — and with — Asia and the world."

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the findings, "to be brutally honest, show that a host of developed nations are out-educating us."

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US steps up pressure on China to rein in North Korea - Washington Post

The United States has stepped up diplomatic pressure on China by accusing its leaders of "enabling" North Korea to start a uranium-enrichment program and to launch attacks on South Korea, a senior U.S. administration official said this weekend.

In response to the North Korean moves and apparent Chinese acquiescence, Washington is moving to redefine its relationship with South Korea and Japan, potentially creating an anti-China bloc in Northeast Asia that officials say they don't want but may need.

In meetings with their Chinese counterparts in Beijing and in Washington since North Korea launched a deadly artillery barrage at a South Korean island on Nov. 23, U.S. officials have charged that China is turning a blind eye to North Korean violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions, international agreements and a 1953 armistice halting the Korean War that China helped to negotiate.

The accusations mark a further deterioration of the tone and direction of the U.S. relationship with Asia's emerging giant and come as both countries prepare for a second summit next month between President Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao.

"The Chinese embrace of North Korea in the last eight months has served to convince North Korea that China has its back and has encouraged it to behave with impunity," said a senior administration official speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "We think the Chinese have been enabling North Korea."

The Korean Peninsula, the official added, has catapulted to the "top of the security agenda when President Hu comes here . . . and the Chinese are aware of it."

Obama called Hu on Sunday night to discuss North Korea and urged China to help send a clear message to Pyongyang "that its provocations are unacceptable," the White House said Monday.

"The president emphasized the need for North Korea to halt its provocative behavior and to meet its international obligations," the White House said. "The president condemned the North Korean shelling of a South Korean island on November 23 and its pursuit of a uranium enrichment program in defiance of its obligations." It said Obama "also highlighted the American commitment to the security of our allies in the region."

The White House statement said Obama and Hu agreed on the importance of working together toward the "shared goals" of peace and stability in Northeast Asia and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. But it made no mention of Hu's response to Obama's complaints about North Korea."

A Chinese statement on the phone call said Hu "regrets the loss of lives and property" in the North Korean shelling last month. It was the first such comment from Hu about the attack, but it echoed an earlier North Korean expression of regret for killing civilians.

The U.S. exasperation with China over the Koreas has been evident since June, when Obama accused China of "willful blindness" in remaining silent over North Korea's suspected sinking of a South Korean warship in March. But the administration's position now that China is in effect partially to blame for the problems is new.

At a meeting Monday with the foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton hopes to begin the process of tightening the three-way relationship, as a response to the persistent North Korean provocations and China's inaction. The United States and South Korea announced Friday the successful renegotiation of their free-trade agreement, which will be as important strategically as it is economically to the U.S. presence in the region.

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China proposes 'six-party talks' meeting amid Korean tensions - CNN International

South Korean soldiers lay tracks to prepare for landing operations on a beach in Taean, southwest of Seoul on Nov. 28, 2010.NEW: McCain says China is not doing enough to resolve the conflictTensions are high after a fatal North Korean shelling of a South Korean islandChina: Six-party talks play an important role in "safeguarding peace and stability"The discussions were put on hold in 2008

(CNN) -- As both North Korea's largest trading partner and a country engaged in diplomatic talks with South Korea, China is dealing with both sides of an increasingly divided Korean peninsula.

China is proposing to convene an emergency consultation with members of the six-party talks amid growing tensions on the Korean peninsula, a Chinese official said Sunday.

"The Chinese side, after careful studies, proposes to have emergency consultations among the heads of delegation to the six-party talks in early December in Beijing to exchange views on major issues of concern to the parties at present," Wu Dawei, Chinese special representative for Korean peninsula affairs, told journalists.

"The six-party talks play an important role in strengthening communication among the parties, advancing denuclearization on the peninsula and safeguarding peace and stability on the peninsula and in northeast Asia," he said.

Diplomats, seeking a lessening of tensions and a return to the six-party talks with North Korea over the country's nuclear aspirations, have busily labored to avert more hostilities. The United States, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and North Korea are the six countries that have been involved in the discussions, which were put on hold in 2008.

But China said the proposed emergency consultations do not mean a resumption of the six-party talks, China's state media reported.

The South Korean government will "bear in mind" China's proposal, according to a Foreign Ministry press release. But the government added that given the current situation, the proposal "needs to be carefully reviewed."

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday that China is the key to resolving the conflict, but said the country is "not behaving as a responsible world power."

"They could bring the North Korean economy to its knees if they wanted to. And I cannot believe that the Chinese should, in a mature fashion, not find it in their interest to restrain North Korea. So far, they are not," McCain said.

McCain called the proposal for a six-party meeting a "fine first step," but said that North Korea's history of confrontation will not come to a stop without significant penalties.

Tensions on the Korean peninsula mounted last week when four South Koreans died after North Korea's shelling of Yeonpyeong Island during a South Korean military drill Tuesday.

North Korea said the South provoked the attack because shells from the South Korean drill landed in the North's waters.

"We express our condolences to the victims of the Yeonpyeong island incident and will make efforts for the sake of peace between North and South Korea so that the situation does not deteriorate," Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo said during a meeting with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak on Sunday.

The South Korean president asked that China "contribute to achieving peace on the Korean peninsula with a fairer and responsible position in regards to North and South Korean relations."

Lee added that "South Korea has endured endless provocations from the North since the Korean War, but if North Korea carries out an additional provocation, we will take strong countermeasures."

On Sunday, South Korea and the United States began joint military exercises on the Yellow Sea -- another point of contention in the region.

North Korea has warned of unpredictable "consequences" if the United States fulfilled its vow of deploying an aircraft carrier to the Yellow Sea for the military maneuvers.

"The DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] will deal a merciless military counter-attack at any provocative act of intruding into its territorial waters in the future," North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency said Sunday.

China appeared to have criticized the joint military exercises last week.

"We oppose any party to take any military acts in our exclusive economic zone without permission," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said in a statement, according to China's state-run Xinhua news agency.

The China-North Korea relations take another step on Tuesday, when Choe Tae Bok, chairman of North Korea's Supreme People's Assembly, will pay an official visit to China, Xinhua reported. Choe was invited by Wu Bangguo, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of China, the agency said.

CNN's Steven Jiang and journalist Jiyeon Lee contributed to this report.

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US, China work on Chinese currency deal - USA Today

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

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US, Japan Seek Calm With China on Island Dispute - BusinessWeek

October 30, 2010, 4:32 PM EDT By Daniel Ten Kate and Nicole Gaouette

(Adds Clinton meeting with Dai in the sixth through 10th paragraphs.)

Oct. 31 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. and Japan sought to ease tensions with China fueled by territorial disputes in waters off its coast that have hindered talks on currency and trade policies before a Group of 20 summit next month.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan told reporters he met for 10 minutes yesterday with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao after a spat over a disputed island chain in the East China Sea scuttled more formal talks. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered to host a meeting to mediate between the two sides while repeating a U.S. obligation legally to defend Japan’s claims.

“We’ve encouraged both Japan and China to seek a peaceful resolution of any disagreement,” Clinton said in a speech in Hanoi yesterday, where she attended a regional summit with Wen, Kan and 15 other Asia-Pacific leaders. “It’s in all of our interests to have stable, peaceful relations” between China and Japan, she said.

The conflict has distracted Asian leaders as they prepare to iron out a global deal on currency policy for the G-20 meeting in Seoul. Clinton “made very clear we want the temperature to go down,” a U.S. official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity said after Clinton met Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi. “The stakes are so high.”

Return to Talks

Hours after her remarks in Hanoi and a meeting there with Japan’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, Clinton landed on China’s Hainan Island for talks with State Councilor Dai Binguo, who outranks Yang.

In the course of a two-hour meeting, Clinton touched on tensions over the island chain, North Korea and the U.S.-China relationship. She encouraged Dai to get North Korea to return to talks about dismantling its nuclear program and reviving ties with South Korea, according to a U.S. official.

Clinton also told Dai that the U.S. expects China to ensure that North Korea in no way takes provocative steps during the G- 20 that South Korea will host next month.

In her talks with Dai, Clinton stressed the U.S. desire to see tensions between Japan and China ease. The two leaders also discussed a “roadmap” for the U.S.-China relationship, including steps that will lead to the resumption of military-to- military ties and a possible visit to China by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the official said.

Disputed Islands

While the frequency and level of U.S.-China meetings have increased, Clinton also suggested that U.S. and Chinese officials meet informally more often, a proposal Dai agreed with.

Japan ruined the atmosphere for talks between Wen and Kan by giving “untrue” media statements, the state-run Xinhua News Agency cited Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Hu Zhengyue as saying Oct. 29. China’s foreign ministry also expressed “deep dissatisfaction” with Clinton for saying the disputed islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, fall within the Japan-U.S. security alliance, Xinhua said in a separate report.

Yang told Clinton yesterday that the U.S. should respect China’s sovereignty and not make any “irresponsible remarks,” Xinhua reported.

A sea collision between a Chinese fishing boat and Japanese Coast Guard vessels near the disputed islands last month soured relations and reportedly prompted Beijing to cut exports of rare-earth minerals. Wen pledged a steady supply of the minerals during an Oct. 28 meeting with Kan and South Korean President Lee Myung Bak. Both Yang and Dai repeated those vows to Clinton yesterday.

National Interest

The U.S., Japan and several countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations continued to push China to agree to a set of rules at sea at the three days of meetings in Hanoi. Clinton said yesterday she was “encouraged” that another round of working-level talks on a sea code involving Asean and China, which have been stalled since 2002, will take place in December.

“The United States has a national interest in the freedom of navigation and unimpeded lawful commerce,” Clinton told the summit. “When disputes arise over maritime territory, we are committed to resolving them peacefully based on customary international law.”

In July, Yang said Clinton’s assertion that the U.S. had a “national interest” in the South China Sea was “virtually an attack on China.” U.S. Defense Secretary Gates said Oct. 12 that China’s actions in the seas are “clearly on everybody’s mind” and fall within the sphere of maritime security.

A Rising China

The issue came up at the East Asia Summit, a forum of 16 nations that the U.S. and Russia joined for the first time yesterday. Rocky outcrops in the South China Sea that may contain oil and gas reserves are claimed in whole or in part by China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.

“The region fears being dominated by a rising China,” said Ernest Bower, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “The solution? Invite the Americans to join. This gives the rest of Asia the balance they want.”

China has aimed to keep its territorial disputes with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines off the agenda at regional meetings, preferring one-on-one negotiations.

U.S. allies in the region include Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand and Australia. Washington has boosted its naval presence in Singapore and is increasing cooperation with the Indian navy in the Pacific Ocean, Clinton said on Oct. 28.

She denied that increased military ties with Asian countries were aimed at containing China, saying the U.S. supports the country’s growth. Last night she visited China’s Hainan Island, home to a naval base with quick access to the South China Sea.

--With assistance from Bomi Lim and Giang Nguyen in Hanoi. Editors: Sylvia Wier, Mark Rohner

To contact the reporter on this story: Daniel Ten Kate in Hanoi at dtenkate@bloomberg.net Nicole Gaouette on Hainan Island, China at ngaouette@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Austin at billaustin@bloomberg.net; Paul Tighe at ptioghe@bloomberg.net

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Is China a supercomputer threat? (Q&A) - CNET

Jack Dongarra, a professor at University of Tennessee's department of electrical engineering. China's supercomputer is a 'wake-up call.'

(Credit: University of Tennessee)

With China expected to officially take the supercomputer performance crown next month, I asked an expert about the state of supercomputing in the U.S. and whether China poses a long-term threat to the United States' current preeminence in supercomputing.

Nvidia announced yesterday that its chips are powering the "Tianhe-1A" Chinese supercomputer that achieved 2.507 petaflops, beating a U.S.-based system that is currently ranked No. 1 on the June Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The Chinese system is a unique hybrid design that uses approximately 7,000 Nvidia graphics chips along with 14,000 Intel Xeon CPUs. The graphics chips are what give the system the extra oomph to catapult it into the top supercomputer spot.

I spoke with Jack Dongarra, university distinguished professor at University of Tennessee's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and part of a group from the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and Georgia Tech that recently purchased a hybrid system. It is important to note that Oak Ridge houses the supercomputer, dubbed "Jaguar," cited above that is currently ranked No. 1 in the world based on the Top500 June list: it is not a hybrid system.

Q: Does Oak Ridge have anything analogous to the Chinese hybrid system?
Dongarra: Oak Ridge has a small version of a machine that is hybrid in nature. So, this is an acquisition that just took place...out of a grant from the National Science Foundation. It involved Oak Ridge National Labs, University of Tennessee, and Georgia Tech. But it's much, much smaller than the Chinese system. The machine is in place and testing is being carried out at Oak Ridge. A node has two Intel Westmere chips and three Nvidia Fermi boards. There are 120 nodes in the system.

What makes the Chinese supercomputer so fast?
Dongarra: The Chinese designed their own interconnect. It's not commodity. It's based on chips, based on a router, based on a switch that they produce.

Is that in essence the secret sauce?
Dongarra: It's similar to Cray. Cray's contribution, besides the integration and software, is the interconnect network. They have a very fast interconnect that makes that machine perform very well. Though [the Chinese] project is based on U.S. processors, it uses a Chinese interconnect. That's the interesting part. They've put something together that is roughly twice the bandwidth of an InfiniBand interconnect [which is used widely in the U.S.]

Will the Chinese system in fact take the No. 1 spot on the Top500 list in November?
Dongarra: Yes. I saw the machine. I saw the output. It's the real thing.

Why doesn't Oak Ridge do what the Chinese are doing?
Dongarra: Oak Ridge doesn't have the ability or technology to develop an interconnect or a router. We don't make computers. We buy computers and use them. It's not within our scope or mission to be in the computer design business.

What's your advice?
Dongarra: You have to remember that you have to not only invest in the hardware. It's like a race car. In order to run the race car, you need a driver. You need to effectively use the machine. And we need to invest in various levels within the supercomputer ecology. The ecology is made up of the hardware, the operating system, the compiler, the applications, the numerical libraries, and so on. And you have to maintain an investment across that whole software stack in order to effectively use the hardware. And that's an aspect that sometimes we forget about. It's underfunded. We fund the hardware but we don't fund the other components. The ecosystem tends to get out of balance because the hardware tends to run far ahead of what we can develop in terms of software. We have machines that have a tremendous level of parallelism. We currently have a very crude way of doing programming.

Who would do that?
Dongarra: The research is performed under the auspices of the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense.

Is this a red flag for the U.S.?
Dongarra: Yes, this is a wake-up call. We need to realize that other countries are capable of doing this. We're losing an advantage.

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China detains Nobel Peace Prize winner's wife: U.S. rights group - Reuters

Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo and his wife Liu Xia pose in this undated photo released by his family on October 3, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Handout

By Susan Heavey

WASHINGTON | Sun Oct 10, 2010 12:59pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Chinese authorities are detaining the wife of jailed Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Price laureate Liu Xiaobo at her Beijing apartment, a U.S. human rights group said on Sunday.

In a statement, Freedom Now said that Liu Xia has not been charged with a crime but has not been allowed to leave her home or use her mobile telephone after visiting her husband in jail to tell him about his award.

When he heard the news, Liu Xiaobo cried and said the Nobel "award is for the Tiananmen martyrs," according to the Washington-based group, which said it represents the Chinese dissident. The group works worldwide for the release prisoners of conscience and provides free legal counsel.

Freedom Now lawyer and spokeswoman Beth Schwanke said one of the group's human rights specialists, Yang Jianli, obtained news of Liu Xia's detention from a source in China they could not name over fears that the informant would also be detained.

"Liu Xia is under enormous pressure," said Jianli, who the group said is currently in Taiwan.

Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for two decades of non-violent struggle over human rights, infuriating China, which called the award "an obscenity.

The prize shines a spotlight on human rights in China at a time when it is starting to play a leading role on the global stage as a result of its growing economic might.

Liu has been in and out of jail since 1989, when he joined student protesters on a hunger strike days before the army crushed the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement. He was jailed for 11 years in December for subversion of state power.

Liu Xia said on Friday she was being taken to visit her husband in jail but that police were preventing her from talking to reporters.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Anthony Boadle)

I condemn the incarceration of Mr. Liu Xiaobo and his wife. Even more strongly I condemn the treatment of Guantanamo Bay victims, the occupation Australia & Canada and extermination of their aboriginal population.
Every country has its laws. You shouldn’t preach what you don’t practise.
We need China for the right balance of power in this world (instead of Al-Qaeda)

gsuomi Report As Abusive

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