Yahoo! blamed for another Chinese detention

Posted on 20 Apr 2006 at 12:37

The moral dilemma of doing business in China has been brought to the fore with the news that information from Yahoo! was used to jail a pro-democracy campaigner.

Reporters without Borders says it has a copy of the verdict that put Jiang Lijun behind bars for four years in 2003 because of a series of online pro-democracy articles, and that evidence leading to conviction was provided by Yahoo!, through its Chinese partner Alibaba.

The verdict claims that Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) confirmed that the email account ZYMZd2002 had been used jointly by Jiang Lijun and another pro-democracy activist, Li Yibing. However, it remains unclear as to whether it was Yahoo! or Li Yibing that provided the Chinese authorities with evidence of the pro-democracy leanings of Jiang Lijun. The latter is suspected of being a police informant.

Through the email account, the prosecution gained evidence that Jiang Lijun had planned to disrupt the 16th Communist Party Congress by phoning the police with a false bomb alert, along with articles favouring a 'so-called western-style democracy'.

This is the third such sentence to implicate the Internet giant Yahoo! following the cases of Shi Tao and Li Zhi. But in February Reporters without Borders sent Yahoo! a list of some 80 cyber-dissidents and journalists in prison in China, asking it to say where or not it was involved in their arrests. Yahoo! has yet to reply.

Reporters without Borders wants the company to withdraw servers from mainland China in order for it to be able to refuse demands by the Chinese authorities for censorship and invasions of privacy. But it said a recent meeting with Yahoo! proved fruitless.

Like many US companies now operating in China, Yahoo! says it is simply abiding by local laws, as it must in whatever territory it is in.

Yet the human aspect aside, it is something of a nightmare from a PR perspective. Google in particular, with its Do No Evil flag waving came in for a lot of flak when it capitulated to China's demands in order to start operations there.

In fact the only company that appears to have taken any stance against the regime is Microsoft, which changed its policy for its blogging service. Importantly, this meant that rather than having to second-guess content that might offend the Chinese authorities, it would only censor blogs on the receipt of a legally binding notice that the content violates local law. So the monitoring overhead falls on China, not Microsoft.

You can download the PDF of the Jiang Lijun verdict from Reporters without Frontiers.

Author: Matt Whipp