{"id":31012,"date":"2012-11-22T10:14:00","date_gmt":"2012-11-22T10:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=31012 "},"modified":"2012-11-22T10:14:00","modified_gmt":"2012-11-22T10:14:00","slug":"31012-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=31012","title":{"rendered":"Online protests after Chinese Twitter user arrested"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The tweet was posted just days before the Chinese leadership handover<\/div>
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Hundreds of web users have signed a petition demanding the release of a Beijing man accused of criticising China’s authorities on Twitter.<\/div>
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Zhai Xiaobing, who is being linked to Twitter name @Stariver, was stopped by police days before the new Chinese leaders were confirmed on 15 November.<\/div>
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In a tweet, the account compared the Communist Party 18th National Congress to horror film Final Destination.<\/div>
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In it, characters at first escape death but still end up dying one by one.<\/div>
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The tweet, posted on 4 November, read, as translated from Chinese: “#SpoilerTweet# #EnterAtYourPeril# Final Destination 6 to arrive soon.<\/div>
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“The Great Hall of the People suddenly collapses, only seven of more than 2,000 people inside survive.<\/div>
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“Later, one-by-one the survivors die in strange ways. Is it the game of God, or the Devil venting his wrath?<\/div>
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“What does the mysterious number 18 have to do with opening the gate to Hell? A shocking global premiere on 8 November!”<\/div>
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All the numbers mentioned in the tweet make reference to the leadership handover – the 18th Congress began at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on 8 November, and the new leadership consists of seven members, one of whom is the newly appointed Communist Party chief Xi Jinping.<\/div>
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According to the Wall Street Journal, the Miyun detention centre has confirmed Mr Zhai was there, having been arrested because “he wrote a micro-blog post containing false information on the internet”.<\/div>
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‘Significant case’<\/div>
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Chinese authorities closely monitor domestic social-media sites, including the Twitter equivalent, micro-blog Sina Weibo.<\/div>
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One analyst said that Mr Zhai’s arrest was significant because it had happened after a post on Twitter – which is officially blocked in China – and not on Weibo.<\/div>
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“It did surprise me at first – it’s a white-collar guy that seemed to have a misfortune to be arrested and made an example of, as there were many posts on Weibo worse than his,” Duncan Clark, chairman of consultancy BDA China, told the BBC.<\/div>
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“But the story is significant on a whole other level because he used Twitter and not Sina.”<\/div>
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Some 35 million people access Twitter from inside China, using a proxy or VPN (virtual private network) that allows users to penetrate the country’s “great firewall”.<\/div>
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Although the authorities are unable to censor content posted on Twitter, they monitor what Chinese users write.<\/div>
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“In China, domestic sites have to hand over the IP address of a user when demanded to do so by the authorities, but with a foreign site there’s no such jurisdiction – so the Chinese government must have used other means to identify this person,” said Mr Clark.<\/div>
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It is not clear how Mr Zhai was identified.<\/div>
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Chinese authorities have arrested people for their Twitter posts before.<\/div>
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In 2010, human rights activist Cheng Jianping was sentenced to a year in a labour camp after repeating a Twitter comment urging nationalist protesters to smash Japan’s pavilion at the Shanghai Expo.<\/div>
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At the time, China and Japan were embroiled in a diplomatic row over a group of uninhabited, but disputed, islands in the East China Sea.<\/div>
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Groups of young Chinese were demonstrating against Japan, publicly smashing Japanese products.<\/div>
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 <\/div>Continue reading the<\/span> original article. <\/a><\/strong>
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