IP Democracy: Yahoo! Implicated in Jailing of Chinese Man

Sooner or later the Chinese people will rear up and revolt for good against the crushing burdens placed on their freedom of expression. And when they do, I hope they hold accountable the American technology firms that currently collaborate with the Chinese government in its effort to silence and imprison its people.

For now, all I can do is rail in this little blog. The latest bit of news that has got my dander up: Reporters Without Borders said today that Yahoo! is responsible for yet another jailing of a Chinese person.

Jiang Lijun was sentenced to four years in prison for an email he sent. That email was turned over to authorities by Yahoo! and supposedly contained information on Mr. Jiang’s plans to overthrow the Communist party. Among the purported inflammatory statements in the email were Mr. Jiang’s stated preference for “so-called western-style democracy.”

Reporters Without Borders has visited and lobbied Yahoo! to take its servers out of China.

Last week we went to the headquarters of the company to urge them to end this collaboration. We called on them to remove their email servers from China, because it is the only way to avoid taking part in the current crackdown against journalists and democrats.

Fat chance. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and all the others can only see the huge riches to be made in the enormous Chinese market. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a capitalist too; I just also like to sleep at night. I wonder what kind of sleep the folks at Yahoo! get.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on April 19, 2006 7:23 PM to IP Democracy