2014-12-04
Catholic lawyer and blogger Le Quoc Quan (C), one of Vietnam’s most prominent dissidents, speaks during his hearing at Hanoi People’s Court of Appeals, Feb. 18, 2014.
AFP
China and Vietnam are among the world’s worst abusers of Internet freedom, a new report said Thursday, as the two communist nations introduced tough new policies aimed at curbing freedom of expression within the online community.
U.S.-based Freedom House’s 2014 Freedom on the Net report, which scores 65 countries from zero (best) to 100 (worst), said that the two countries were the worst jailers of netizens and heavily targeted social media to crush dissent during the year-long reporting period ending in May.
China, which was given the status “not free,” dropped to a score of 87 in 2014 from 86 a year earlier, emerging third worst among abusers of Internet freedom after Iran and Syria, the report said.
It cited the intimidation and arrest of Chinese Internet users amid a crackdown on online “rumors” launched in May 2013 under State Internet Information Office chief Lu Wei, who later proposed more licensing for online platforms, more real name registration, and tighter controls on undesirable content.
President Xi Jinping in August last year proclaimed the Internet “the main battlefield for public opinion struggle,” which Freedom House said “provided the ideological underpinning” for the decline in online freedom during the reporting period.
The report said Chinese police detained hundreds of Weibo microblog users, and indicted some of the most prominent, after top legal authorities established 5,000 views or 500 reposts as a new threshold for prosecuting false, defamatory, or “harmful” comments online.
It said that the new justification gave China, which has imprisoned more Internet users than any other nation, “an additional tool to punish dissidents, while also serving as a warning to celebrity bloggers with millions of followers.”
Freedom House cited media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which documented a total of 74 netizens in Chinese jails as of August 2014—the most of any nation.
Among those in jail is Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, serving an 11-year sentence on charges of “inciting subversion of state power” for publishing online articles, including the prodemocracy manifesto Charter 08.
The report also noted the September 2014 sentencing of prominent ethnic Uyghur academic and webmaster Ilham Tohti to life imprisonment, which it called “the harshest punishment for online dissent in years.”
“Though these represent a tiny percentage of the overall user population, the harsh sentences have a chilling effect on the close-knit activist and blogging community and encourage self-censorship in the broader public,” it said.
In addition to widespread Internet censorship at the local and national level, the report cited nationwide blocking, filtering, and monitoring systems as hampering access to international websites within China.
It said authorities also routinely shut down access to entire communications systems in response to specific events, including in the wake of clashes between police and locals in the restive Xinjiang region, which is home to ethnic Uyghurs who chafe under Chinese rule.
