In April 2004, The
Washington Post described a typical cyberdissidence case involving a
group of students who were arrested for participating in an informal discussion
forum at Beijing University. It was a chilling report that covered the
surveillance, arrest, trial, and conviction of the dissidents and police
intimidation of witnesses.
Yang Zili, the group's
coordinator, and other young idealists in his Beijing University circle were
influenced by the writings of Vaclav Havel, Friedrich Hayek, and Samuel P.
Huntington. Yang questioned the abuses of human rights permitted in the "New
China." His popular Web site was monitored by police, and after letting him
attract a substantial number of like-minded others, China's cyberpolice swept up
the entire group. Relentlessly interrogated, beaten, and pressured to sign
confessions implicat­ing each other, the core members nevertheless
with­stood the pressure. The case demonstrated that stamping out
cyberdissent had become a priority state function. According to the Post,
Chinese leader Jiang Zemin considered "the investigation as one of the most
important in the nation." In March 2003, the arrestees were each sentenced to
prison terms of between eight and ten years-all for exchanging opinions on the
Internet.[9]
Then there is the case of Liu Di,
a psychology student at Beijing Normal University who posted Internet essays
under the screen name of Stainless Steel Mouse. She is an exception among
cyberdis­sidents-after a year behind bars, she is now out of jail. The then
23-year-old Liu was influenced by George Orwell's 1984 and became well
known for her satirical writing and musings on dissidents in the former Soviet
Union. She defended other cyberdissidents, supported intellectuals arrested for
organizing reading groups, attacked Chinese chauvinists, and, in a spoof, called
for a new polit­ical party in which anyone could join and every­one
could be "chairman." Arrested in November 2002 and held for nearly one year
without a trial, she became a cause célèbre for human rights and press
freedom groups overseas and apparently gained some notoriety within China as
well. Although she had been held without trial and was never formally charged,
she was imprisoned in a Beijing jail cell with three criminals. In December
2003, she was released in anticipation of Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to the U.S.
Yet nine months after returning to the Beijing apartment that she shares with
her grandmother, Liu still finds police secu­rity officers posted at her
home. She has found it impossible to find a regular job, and police
moni­tors block her screen name Stainless Steel Mouse from Web
sites