ON DECEMBER 25th, some three years after taking over as China’s leader, Xi Jinping posted his first tweet. For a man clearly rattled by the rapid spread of social media, and grimly determined to tame them, the venue was fitting. Uniformed military officials stood around as he typed his message into a computer in the office of an army-run newspaper (see picture). His new-year greeting was not to China’s more than 660m internet users, but to the armed forces—most of whose members are banned from tweeting.
It was clearly in part to intimidate feistier members of the country’s online community that the authorities arrested one of the country’s most prominent civil-rights activists, Pu Zhiqiang, in 2014 and eventually put him on trial on December 14th. On the basis of seven messages posted on Weibo, China’s heavily censored version of Twitter, Mr Pu was charged with “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble” as well as “inciting ethnic hatred”. The court handed down a three-year suspended prison sentence, which means that Mr Pu will not be allowed to continue his widely acclaimed work as a lawyer (less than three years ago, he was the...Continue reading
Source: China http://ift.tt/1R8f7SX
EmoticonEmoticon