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Maidan was a group of tech-savvy pro-democracy activists who used the Internet as a tool to support their movement. Maidan in Ukranian means public square and Maidan’s website features the slogal “You CAN chnage the world you live in. And you can do it now. In Ukraine.”

The main activity of Maidan was election monitoring and networking with other pro-democracy organizations around Eastern Europe.

“websites cannot produce an activist organization.”

Modern Chinese nationalism often veers between Mr. Coubertin's and Mr. Maurras's ideas of nationhood. Officially, the government likes to talk about friendship between peoples, and harmony and peace, while at the same time promoting an injured sense of historical Chinese victimhood at the hands of foreign powers. When demonstrations of Chinese nationalism run out of control, with or without official encouragement, the feeling of national hurt can turn to violent aggression. It has been happening of late in the U.S., among other places, when Chinese students attacked Tibetans, or indeed anyone who "offended the feelings of the Chinese people."

This type of official patriotism is based on a peculiarly skewed view of history. Rather than celebrate the high points of Chinese civilization, the emphasis falls entirely on suffering at the hands of foreigners. The sense of victimhood runs so deep that it is impossible for most Chinese to view themselves as aggressors. The idea that Tibetans, for example, might have some reason to see themselves as victims of the Chinese, is absurd. More than that, many Chinese genuinely believe that this type of Tibetan "propaganda" has been deliberately taken up by the Western press to inflict yet another humiliation on the Chinese people.

This does not mean, however, that democracy would be an automatic cure. In the unlikely event that China were suddenly to have a peaceful transformation to a liberal democracy, nationalism would not go away. No party seen to be soft on foreign powers, especially Japan and the U.S., would be. Modern Chinese history has been so bloody that the scars will take a long time to heal. Ethnic nationalism can be a kind of poison, especially when it is based on a feeling of victimhood. Political freedom should help to soothe such feelings in the long run, but this will not happen in time for the Beijing Olympics.

When you moved into Taiwan's media market, some people saw it as a vote of no confidence against Hong Kong.You're suggesting it was an insurance policy? That was the intention. I couldn't go to the United States and say: "Can you protect me?" Nobody would care. But I knew Beijing was thinking very much about Taiwan, and that they don't want bad press there. So we built the Taiwan business as leverage. If they do anything to us, our Taiwanese readers will know what happened. And Beijing knows that [should they move against us] we will do everything we can to make them pay on Taiwan.

Some experts argue that China does not intend to Westernize or liberalize, but only to modernize. Do you think people in China understand what democracy is and want it?Not at this moment. But anyone who would differentiate between Westernization and modernization is just talking rubbish. Take out the western culture and what else is modern? Nothing. The technology is Western, the trendy culture is Western, all this modernization is Westernization. China is prosperous today because it deals and interacts with the West. No, democracy isn't on normal people's radars yet. China will be open to it only when the economic cycle turns down. And when that happens, China will be in chaos. How so? In other countries, when there is a recession, you have churches, temples, charities, NGOs, civic organizations, unions and other institutions reaching out to help each other. They are shock absorbers. In China, you don't have any of this. Organizations that are not governmental are not allowed. In China, you have two pillars: the market and the government. If the market fails, the government will be dragged down because there is nothing in the middle.

How so? In other countries, when there is a recession, you have churches, temples, charities, NGOs, civic organizations, unions and other institutions reaching out to help each other. They are shock absorbers. In China, you don't have any of this. Organizations that are not governmental are not allowed. In China, you have two pillars: the market and the government. If the market fails, the government will be dragged down because there is nothing in the middle.

I will never forget my first visit, in 2003, to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing. I was welcomed by Wang Luolin, the academy's vice-president, whose grandfather had translated Marx's Das Kapital into Chinese, and Huang Ping, a former Red Guard. Sitting in oversized armchairs, we sipped ceremonial tea and introduced ourselves. Wang Luolin nodded politely and smiled, then told me that his academy had 50 research centres covering 260 disciplines with 4,000 full-time researchers. As he said this, I could feel myself shrink into the seams of my vast chair: Britain's entire think tank community is numbered in the hundreds, Europe's in the low thousands; even the think-tank heaven of the US cannot have more than 10,000. But here in China, a single institution—and there are another dozen or so think tanks in Beijing alone—had 4,000 researchers. Admittedly, the people at CASS think that many of the researchers are not up to scratch, but the raw figures were enough.

China, according to the new political thinkers, will do things the other way around: using elections in the margins but making public consultations, expert meetings and surveys a central part of decision-making. This idea was described pithily by Fang Ning, a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He compared democracy in the west to a fixed-menu restaurant where customers can select the identity of their chef, but have no say in what dishes he chooses to cook for them. Chinese democracy, on the other hand, always involves the same chef—the Communist party—but the policy dishes which are served up can be chosen "à la carte."

乔治·华盛顿大学(George Washington University)国家安全档案馆(National Security Archive)首席法律顾问梅雷迪思·富克斯(Meredith Fuchs)

设在华盛顿的美国科学家联合会(Federation of American Scientists)的高级研究员史蒂文·阿夫特古德(Steven Aftergood)

这一文件是由一家名为Global Network Initiative（全球网络倡议）的实体负责制定的，起草小组人员包括了人权第一(Human Rights First)以及保护记者委员会(Committee to Protect Journalists)等人权组织。非盈利组织the Center for Democracy and Technology and Business for Social Responsibility（民主、技术和商业社会责任中心）也参与了制定。三家公司同意由独立专家监控他们对新原则的遵守情况。

该计划含蓄地批评了中国等国家的政策，也尚未得到这些国家互联网公司的支持。互联网巨头eBay Inc.发言人表示，该公司尚未看到这一计划，但希望进一步了解并获知更多细节。

The Internet is not the same for everybody. Despite it's reputation as a borderless, global, connected, democratic network, access and content filtering based on national boarders has become the norm. The BBC, for example, filters content for copyright reasons to visitors accessing their website from outside of Great Britain. Much more serious, however, is the heavy political censorship happening in countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. China, being the most extreme example, strictly censors political content on the web through the blocking of IP addresses and dynamic content filtering. With the support of western technology companies such as Cisco, Yahoo, and Google, The Golden Shield Project (sometimes referred to as the the Great Fire Wall of China) censors the web for China's 1.3 billion inhabitants. The Internet police in China is estimated to contain over 30,000 workers, and is responsible for blocking content such as Tibetan independence, Taiwan independence, police brutality, the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989, freedom of speech, democracy, religion, and some international news.

四十年后的今天，美国黑人作为一个种族，政治上是“彻底解放”了，在这一点上，毛泽东的预言实现了。不过，美国黑人政治上寻求彻底解放的途径，却没有遵循毛的预言。毛当年相信，金牧师这位非暴力主义民权领袖的被枪杀，一定会把美国民权运动推向暴力革命的道路；受歧视最深的黑人，一定会拿起枪杆子，跟他们的对头拼个你死我活。毛的声明里强烈地寄托着这样的期望和忠告。

The most interesting thesis is the idea that China could use international law as a weapon, or “lawfare” for short. The authors argue that citizens of democracies increasingly demand that their countries uphold international rules, particularly ones that govern human rights and the conduct of war. Governments are, therefore, constrained by regional or worldwide organizations, such as the European Union, ASEAN, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the WTO and the United Nations. The authors argue that China should copy the European model of using international law to pin down the USA: “there are far-sighted big powers which have clearly already begun to borrow the power of supra-national, multinational, and non-state players to redouble and expand their own influence.” They think that China could turn the United Nations and regional organizations into an amplifier of the Chinese worldview – discouraging the USA from using its might in campaigns like the Iraq War.

Beijing has been willing to allow the Organization of Islamic States to take the lead in weakening the new Human Rights Council. This subtle diplomacy has been devastatingly effective – contributing to a massive fall in US influence: in 1995 the USA won 50.6 percent of the votes in the United Nations general assembly; by 2006, the figure had fallen to just 23.6 percent. On human rights, the results are even more dramatic: China’s win-rate has rocketed from 43 percent to 82 percent, while the USA’s has tumbled from 57 per cent to 22 percent. The New York Times’ UN correspondent James Traub has detected a paradigm shift in the United Nations’ operations: “it’s a truism that the Security Council can function only insofar as the United States lets it. The adage may soon be applied to China as well.” Traub may be right. China’s capacity to influence the United Nations is increasing, and soon we may be complaining about Chinese behavior on big policy issues

In an interview last week, Powell asserts that issues like Network Neutrality in Obama’s agenda are “in the weeds,” because “[a] lot of the FCC’s issues aren’t ‘president of the United States’ issues.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Reasonable minds can differ over the right policies to preserve the open Internet, promote next-generation broadband, safeguard online privacy, and create a connected digital democracy. Supporters of Obama (like me) can think he made a mistake in his handling of the FISA telecom immunity legislation (as I do). The absolute worst approach is to label these as insignificant technical matters that the President need not address. That’s been the mindset, with disastrous results, the past eight years. As chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, John McCain was exposed to a wide range of tech policy issues. On the other hand, he admits he’s “computer illiterate.” Ask yourself how you’d feel about working for a corporation where the CEO doesn’t know how to use a computer. No matter how smart, someone who can’t open a web page, type a letter on a word processor, or compose an email message, is going to be fundamentally out of touch with the daily experience of every member of the knowledge economy.

THE MCCAIN NEGATIVE WORDCLOUDWords Not in McCain’s Tech Policy | blog |social network | collaboration | hyperlink | democracy | google | wikipedia | open access | open source | standards | gnu | linux | | BitTorrent | anonymity | facebook | wiki | free speech | games | comcast | media concentration | media | lolcats |

Even if we ignore the cultural, social, and democratic aspects of the Net, even if we consider the Net to be nothing but a way to move content to “consumers” (his word), McCain still gets it wrong. There’s nothing in his policy about encouraging the free flow of ideas. Instead, when McCain thinks about ideas, he thinks about how to increase the walls around them by cracking down on “pirates” and ensuring ” fair rewards to intellectual property” (which, technically speaking, I think isn’t even English). Ideas and culture are, to John McCain, business commodities. He totally misses the dramatic and startling success of the Web in generating new value via open access to ideas and cultural products. The two candidates’ visions of the Internet could not be clearer. We can have a national LAN designed first and foremost to benefit business, and delivered to passive consumers for whom the Net is a type of cable TV. Or, we can have an Internet that is of the people, by the people, for the people. Is it going to be our Internet or theirs?

“Senator McCain’s technology plan doesn’t put Americans first—it is a rehash of tax breaks and giveaways to the big corporations and their lobbyists who advise the McCain campaign. This plan won’t do enough for hardworking Americans who are still waiting for competitive and affordable broadband service at their homes and businesses. It won’t do enough to ensure a free and open Internet that guarantees freedom of speech. It won’t do anything to ensure that we use technology to bring transparency to government and free Washington from the grip of lobbyists and special interests. Senator McCain’s plan would continue George Bush’s neglect of this critical sector and relegate America’s communications infrastructure to second-class status. That’s not acceptable,” said William Kennard, Former Chairman, Federal Communications Commission.

陈志武：其实，我觉得改革最大的动力可能是来自于包括互联网在内的媒体、社会，而不是体制内既得利益集团。因为到目前为止，我知道很多的朋友特别是年轻人，包括一些学者都会说中国有没有民主不是那么重要，法制也不是很重要的，像刚才说的过去30年这些东西也发展的很快，所以很多人会有错觉，就觉得民主不民主、法制不法制，对于发展的问题、生存的问题、生活的文化都没有什么影响。 但很遗憾的是，一方面因为现在对权力的制约体系并没有真正的成型，所以我们看到去年政府财政收入增长了31%，而今年到目前来看，根据我所了解的一些情况，有可能国家财政收入相对于去年会增长40%甚至是50%。 所以在行政部门的征税权不受任何制约，跟其他的发达国家不一样的是，在民主宪政的国家里面，征税权一般是被控制在国家的立法机构手中，这样的话在增加新的税种或者是调高税率的时候，必须是由老百姓选举产生的议员投票通过才可以增加税种、调高税率。 但在中国不一样，似乎很多部门都可以随意增加税种、调高税率，当然也有一些学者也帮着他们找接口增长各种各样的税收名义和品种。 但是，这样做以后没有几个人真的去问，政府拿到这么多的税收以后在干什么，是不是政府每收上去1块钱又给民间社会回馈1块钱的服务，带来1块钱的好处？

In fact, this debate on the premier’s crying should not be a trivial matter. Its poignancy and enormous political implications have been closely related to Wen’s former mentor, Zhao Ziyang, the CCP general secretary who famously cried in Tiananmen Square, begging the protesters to leave the place that would soon become an intended killing field. If Zhao were not indecisive or did not cry in Tiananmen Square in 1989, or if he instead stood on top of a tank sympathetic to the pro-democracy forces—bravely commanding the tremendous force of the millions yearning for freedom, human rights, and for a change of the corrupt system, like Boris Yeltsin in the waning days of the Soviet Union—China may have already had a bold and visionary political leader and a brand new political reality. But in the final crucial moments that decided history, Moscow did not believe in tears, and Beijing did. A great historic opportunity was lost by Zhao for the complete lack of a strong and resolute visionary leader from within the power elite who alone could command the enormous political and military resources to change history. And now, as Zhao’s erstwhile protégé, Wen continues that legacy [7].

共产党对于信息和言论的铁腕控制本已逐渐受到挑战，而此次地震造成的死亡人数之多和破坏性之大更是加快了这一变化。

越来越富进取精神的媒体，加上互联网的巨大覆盖范围使这个原本可能只是地方性问题的事件一下子进入了全国人民的视线。过去几天，许多中国网站都刊登了这样一张照片：绵竹市委书记蒋国华面对因校舍倒塌而失去孩子的学生家长突然下跪。这张照片也成为公众展示权力的一个象征。

不过政府依然在严格控制着有些话题的讨论，无人预计政府会允许民众不受限制地随意谈论西藏等敏感话题。然而地震引发的公众反应正令已经发生的一些变化更加不可逆，以致于在许多人看来，很难再走回头路。

异见群体也好，独立知识分子也好，最忌讳的就是“自恋”，把个人的受难经历放大后来看整个社会。我如果要用我自己的经历放大来看，我这18年就没有好日子过，我凭什么跟共产党那么温柔啊，但是事实上社会的其他各个层次都在变。例如1990年代我在知识界一些特别好的朋友，和我们这样的人一块吃顿饭都要四下张望，根本不敢去我家，他们担心我家肯定有窃听器。现在就有了很大的变化，比如有个朋友举行婚礼的时候，盛情邀请我去，并在婚礼上第一个介绍我，而警察就尾随在我的身后。还有一次我去上海，和朋友们见面的时候警察也有车辆尾随，但是那些年轻人一点恐惧也没有，反而觉得很好玩，争相给警察的车拍照。这说明民间的恐惧感正在慢慢消失，恐惧感的消失是很重要的。你看90年代能够从事政治案件辩护的律师只有张思之和莫少平，你看看现在有多少了。尽管整体数量还是小，但是现在不断地有新的维权律师进来。民间在不断地进行突破。

　今天中国的维权行动实际上也是一种迈向和解的方式，因为社会上很多的冲突，如果没有正确引导的话很容易走向暴力，而维权实际上是用法律来化解冲突，和解和法律是分不开的，就是要用法律的方式来去看待以前发生的事情，包括正在发生的冲突。另外我特别提醒诸位西藏与新疆的问题，我个人觉得中国目前的公共知识分子对于西藏新疆的问题还缺乏足够的重视，也非常缺乏了解，我跟王力雄谈过几次以后，我觉得这个问题非常重大，如果我们这些所谓的公共知识分子还对西藏新疆那么不了解的话，那将来民主化的过程，和民主化之后那个灾难恐怕很难避免，所以我希望大家对西藏、新疆的问题在历史、宗教、民族文化等角度多做一些思考，多做一些表达。

　　最后我要提醒大家重点关注西藏问题。西藏问题在我看来是全局性整体性危机深化的关键标志。西藏问题本身并不会导致很大的变化，但是根据我所了解到的体制内外的各种信息，充分表明了随着整个经济危机的深入，西藏危机是全局的打击控制更加弱化的一个标志，就这点来讲的话西藏问题实际上是影响到中国未来和平转型模式选择的关键性事件。现在国际社会以及国内王力雄、张祖桦、刘晓波老师所表现出来的立场，都是国内外各种合力阻遏在西藏的军事冒险，如果西藏问题得不到遏制的话，胡锦涛的军事冒险再次成功了，那么更大规模的中华民族的流血牺牲就不可避免。未来中国只有两个前途，一个前途是中国共产党尽快开启真正意义的、软着陆的政治变革，可以维持比较长时间的统治，另外的选择就是在一系列事件中失去理性，很悲惨地下台，所以需要围绕西藏问题，形成关于和解与和平转型的高度理性和富有智慧的看法。

The Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search and seizure made it into the U.S. Constitution precisely because its drafters understood that the power to snoop is addictive. Even if we happen to trust in the good intentions of the snoopers, the nature of any government can change rapidly — which is why the Constitution places limits on the tools available to any regime. But the drafters could never have imagined the commercial pressures at play today. The global homeland-security business is now worth an estimated $200 billion — more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Any sector of that size inevitably takes on its own momentum. New markets must be found — which, in the Big Brother business, means an endless procession of new enemies and new emergencies: crime, immigration, terrorism.

here is a large and powerful country that, when it comes to human rights and democracy, is so much worse than Bush's America. But during my time in Shenzhen, China's youngest and most modern city, I often have the feeling that I am witnessing not some rogue police state but a global middle ground, the place where more and more countries are converging. China is becoming more like us in very visible ways (Starbucks, Hooters, cellphones that are cooler than ours), and we are becoming more like China in less visible ones (torture, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, though not nearly on the Chinese scale).