Eat your greens!

There’s an interesting article in Saturday’s Guardian about land theft in China. The Chinese economic miracle is based on taking land from peasant farmers and giving it to wealthy developers, via corrupt local officials. A fairly old story of capitalist corruption in the People’s Republic.

It’s well worth reading the whole thing. Here’s the part that interested me:

“China’s reforms so far have been introduced under pressure. There hasn’t been enough pressure in the field of land ownership yet. But there will come a time when our top leaders will be forced to reform the system to maintain social stability and prevent damage to the economy. We are not at that point yet. But I predict a change within five years.”

He may be too optimistic. There is a widely held assumption in the west that increased wealth automatically ushers in greater democracy and social justice. But what is happening in Guangdong suggests the opposite. This is China’s richest province, but it has also witnessed some of the most violent demonstrations, bloody crackdowns and ruthless measures to silence media criticism and crush grass-roots activism. The government’s answer to the unrest is to promise the peasants more money and to beef up its security forces. In the meantime, the land is being moved into ever fewer and richer hands.

Continuing the theme of China and human rights, Amnesty International’s new web site has an e-mail you can send to Yahoo, regarding their role in the case of the imprisoned journalist Shi Tao. Here’s a quote from their suggested message:

I am alarmed that in the pursuit of new and lucrative markets, your company is contributing to human rights violations. Yahoo! should urgently give consideration to the human rights implications of its business operations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights calls upon every organ of society, which includes companies, to respect human rights.

If you find Yahoo’s actions in this case quite despicable, you can follow the linkabove and let them know. It only takes a second to send an e-mail. I’ve sent a message and I’ll be interested to see if I get a response. Assuming, of course, that David Filo and Jerry Yang haven’t outsourced reading their e-mail to under-paid Chinese peasants.

Amnesty International celebrates its 45th birthday this week, with a new campaign and a new website: irrepressible.info.

Here’s a bit from the press release:

Around the world, Internet cafés are shut down, computers seized, chat rooms monitored, and
blogs deleted. Websites are blocked or heavily censored, search engines are restricted and
foreign news prohibited.

irrepressible.info highlights internet censorship and the cases of people imprisoned just for what
they have written in emails or on websites. It also highlights the role of companies who have helped
countries like China censor the web.

We’re asking people to go to www.irrepressible.info and sign our Pledge for internet
freedom; send our e-postcard to the Chinese authorities calling for the release of Shi Tao – doing
10 years hard labour for sending an email – and show their support by putting our badge on their
website or email.

The internet has become a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. A lot of has changed in 45
years – but some governments are still repressing their citizens, and Amnesty is still standing up
against them.