Yahoo Settles With Imprisoned Chinese Journalists

Terms of the deal are secret, but Yahoo has reached settlements with two Chinese journalists who were arrested based on information the company provided to the ruling Communist government. "[...] a source at Yahoo said the company has been 'working with the families, and we're working with them to provide them with financial, humanitarian and legal assistance.' Yahoo has also agreed to establish a global human rights fund to provide 'humanitarian relief' to support dissidents and their families. The source said that details still have to be worked out."

Wow

[db32]

This is rich. Yahoo gets dissenters thrown in prison. Yahoo then generates PR by funding these organizations. Somewhat like MS spending so much time/money in Africa helping with medical problems...that are tied to the chemical plants that the Gates Foundation invests in. Generate your own PR opportunities. Genius!

Re:Well,

[superpulpsicle]

The loser = the guy in jail and Yahoo with the bad reputation.

The winner = US government who continue to tax Yahoo. And the politician who insulted the CEO in public.

This is more like US government vs US corporation. China has had the same law since the founding of the communist government.

no law, of any nation

[circletimessquare]

is to be respected, if that nation does not respect the will of it's people

therefore, if the country is not democratic, anything goes: you as a citizen should not respect any law of your country

authority is not to be respected if authority is not accountable to the common citizen

if a government is accountable to theocrats, royals, despots, autocrats, or technocrats, that government is not to be respected, by its citizens, or the international community

because those governments certainly don't respect their citizens

only in a democracy are the will of the citizens respected, via the vote, so only in a democracy is the government accountable to its citizens, and only democratically elected governments are to be respected by its citizens and the international community

Re:Well,

[mabhatter654]

but this was an ILLEGAL action in China and Yahoo China provided the legally required data under rules very similar to the USA PATRIOT Act here.

I believe there was some help from Yahoo US in locating the data in US servers. Here's the deal, how is this morally different from Big Box retailers propping up China's govt by paying their legal share of chinese taxes for the police that arrested these guys? Or for providing commerce to the regime?

How about when an airline provides a passenger list including passengers that won't be debarking then allows the plane to "land for repairs" causing them to get arrested for things like Online-gambling even when they don't get off the plane? How about those people that got arrested off the plane returning from the middle east and sent to Cuba? Can they sue the airline because they were illegally treated by the US and were ratted out?

It cuts both ways in spite of how Congress wants to be all high-n-mighty about it, they have passed dozens of laws that require US companies to do the same thing to both companies and citizens of foreign lands when it's convenient for them.

Re:Well,

[MightyMartian]

The fact is that laws have always been incidental to the Communist regime in China. The notion of the "rule of law" has little meaning for the leadership. Essentially, how it works, is you have a practically meaningless legislature; the National Peoples' Congress, and you have the real power brokers, the President, the Premier of the State Council and the Peoples Liberation Army. For all intents in purposes, they do as they please, the only checks being each other. To imagine that one need actually have violated a law in China to be arrested in detained is hopelessly naive. There are any number of laws which can be made to apply, and if you piss of the Chinese government, you'll be hauled in, go through a show trial and then sent off to prison.

The very idea that you can equate breaking Chinese laws, particularly those designed to shield the leadership and the organs of state from any kind of oversight by the people they claim to serve, with breaking the laws in a liberal democracy is just daft. The Chinese leadership simply has an entirely different view which isn't by any means the statutory view that you'll find in Western nations.

Re:Counter-revolutionary article removed

[Fozzyuw]

[Yahoo] are more interested in getting some traction in a new market rather than being good human beings.

The sad thing is that it doesn't matter what Yahoo! (or any other American company) does to gain market share in China, it can all swiftly be taken away should they anger the wrong person [news.com].

Re:Well,

[LingNoi]

I guess you also think that bulldozing down Chinese owner's homes to make space for the olympics is also...

abiding by its own laws, customs, and regulations.

When the BBC found the home owners in a jail for protesting the BBC crew wear beaten and then arrested (after being beaten). They were then made to delete the footage (they didn't because we were watching it).

I couldn't find that video, but here is another.. http://youtube.com/watch?v=kxUZIG0Eea4 [youtube.com]

Or perhaps we should look at how China kills more people a year then every other country in the world combined. Especially their treatment of Falun Gong [wikipedia.org] worshippers. They beat them to death and tell people they committed suicide. Then they take the dead body to the hospital for organ harvesting.

I found a video on that here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Fkf2u1Umzi4 [youtube.com]

Does the U.S. not have the right to enforce its own laws? Why not so with China? Just because you are American and don't like China (even though you buy the majority of your imports from them)? Hypocrisy is rich.

It's got nothing to do with hating china and when you use that line you sound like you're working for the Chinese government, because that is EXACTLY what their defence is to any allegations of abuse against its citizens.

Although America is a crap country in my opinion that I'd never want to visit, at least they don't bulldoze down people's houses and give them almost nothing in return. They don't round up the religious people they don't like, beat them to death, tell the families they killed themselves and then take their heart, lungs, liver and then cremate the body to hide any evidence.

Re:that's incredibly retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

So is OK if the majority agenda is to kill the minority? For example, was the armenian genocide just a good example of democracy in action?

Re:Jailing Dissidents is Stupid.

[Burz]

From the Australian ambassador to China, [ucla.edu] of that period:

Why someone who had suffered cruelly at the hands of Cultural Revolution hardliners and who did so much to push China on the path of liberalization should himself become a hardliner is not explained. Even less does anyone seem to have felt any need to check out just what actually happened in Tiananmen in 1989. Eyewitness accounts that say there was no massacre have been conveniently ignored. Blatantly anti-Beijing propaganda accounts have been unquestioningly accepted. Fortunately we now have a source whose sober impartiality cannot possibly be doubted, namely the de-classified reports from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing at the time (see Google under Tiananmen, Document 30 especially).

They confirm that there was no massacre in the square, that almost all the students who had been demonstrating there for two weeks had left the square quietly in the early hours of June 4, and that the real incident was panicky fighting triggered by crowds attacking troops, initially unarmed, as they headed for the square on June 3.

In the process a still indefinite number of troops, students and civilians were killed and many military vehicles were torched. Call it a mini civil war if you like, with troops eventually getting the upper hand over unarmed insurgents. But that is not a deliberate massacre of innocent students.

Curiously, the photo that most media use to illustrate the alleged student massacre shows a row of blazing army vehicles, some with crews trapped inside, in a long avenue that clearly is not part of Tiananmen Square. Indeed, the U.S. Embassy material speaks of troops only finally entering the square after some students attacked and killed a soldier in a vehicle at the entrance.

Most of the discussion you see here is doctrinaire (freedom, liberty, freedom, etc.) oligarch propaganda. The media-owning conglomerates/monopolists send their ready-made legislation and paid-for legislators to Washington, and what you see on TV is the party line that is to be toed.

"Oligarchy", now there is a label you basically never hear in the USA media even though it is the economic-political structure under which it operates. Journalists and activists who use it inside the borders get character-assassinated, whereas those who use it in foreign protectorates like Columbia and Philippines get murdered by US-supported "guerrillas" (terrorists). Meanwhile, the USA mouthpiece media wants you to see another of Bush's speeches linking Queda to 9-11, and another rehash about two murdered Russian journalists, and Tiananmen too; and you will still hear much about communism even though it supposedly doesn't exist anymore. But not oligarchy. Even "capitalism" is curiously infrequent, as self-examination of the system is discouraged.

What is the true difference between the USA and rivals like China and Russia? It boils down to USA enjoying the spoils of empire, creating political apathy officially labeled "peace and lawfulness" at home... while people on the frontiers burn and starve and those elements that not friendly to the military-industrial-legislative complex get drugs trafficked into their communities and a draconian "zero-tolerance" police state apparatus that sends more adult males to prison than any other country by far.

China is resource-strapped, hungry and crowded to the gills (though they can be thankful that US/UK forces have not fed their population drugs for many decades). And Russia has a waning civil war on its hands. Neither of them has had the luxury of sending their scoundrels abroad to rape and pillage, while playing potemkin village at home, for quite some time. And what makes either of them much different than India, for that matter, is beyond me... human rights violations abound with respect to all of the above.

What differs above all is the combination of selective blindness and hysteria generated in the pivotal Anglophone media. It will be interesting to see how their attitude changes as their influence abroad subsides... how much more cheerleading and demonizing will they be willing to do for the next conquest (er "liberation")?