My following article appears in the Amnesty International Australia’s Uncensor campaign about human rights in China: The nationalistic genie has escaped the Chinese bottle. Citizens across the world have reacted strongly to the perceived anti-Chinese political and media elite in the West. Protests have mushroomed throughout China against what demonstrators view as a slight against…
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Two faces of China
Here’s to a celebration of Chinese human rights: Known among schoolmates for his spirited antics and ability to make light of almost any situation, classroom jokester Wei Xiang, 11, was put to death by the Chinese government for drawing a mustache on an image of Education Minister Zhou Ji in one of his textbooks, sources…
Money always trumps human rights?
This is how Western internet multinationals, such as Yahoo and Microsoft, are helping the Chinese regime in their hunt for Tibetans: Yahoo China pasted a “most wanted” poster across its homepage today in aid of the police’s witch-hunt for 24 Tibetans accused of taking part in the recent riots. MSN China made the same move,…
China’s darker side
China is preparing for this year’s Olympic Games but human rights appear not to be a priority. The regime can’t suddenly disappear beggars from central Beijing and local bloggers are revealing the extent of the problem: To the east of Zhengyangmen, there is an old railway station which used to be one part of Beijing-Shenyang…
Humans do matter. Really.
While the Australian media fawns over the arrival in Australia today of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao – after all, who cares about human rights when there is money to be made? – the Falun Gong Human Rights Group provides some much-needed perspective on China’s attitude towards its own people: Since the persecution of Falun Gong…
Blogging for human rights
The Committee to Protect Bloggers primary aim is to “focus…on the inappropriate use of state force against bloggers.” They link today to a new project from Human Rights Watch, aimed at convincing people to speak out, research and disseminate information to fight for human rights through blogging. In countries such as Iran and China, bloggers…
Greed, privatisation and the tech Palestinian laboratory
The thesis of my book, The Palestine Laboratory, continues to resonate around the world. In Spain, journalist Marta Peirano writes in the leading newspaper, El Pais, about the significance of Israeli arms and repressive tech in the hands of autocrats and dictatorships. Here’s the English translation (via Google translate): The most militarized country in the…
Dangers of an Israeli spy in your pocket
My book review appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age: Imagine a weapon so powerful that it makes every person on the planet with a mobile phone potentially vulnerable. It isn’t a scammer or traditional hacker but a new, much more virulent form of intrusion that takes control of all your personal information…
Australia’s role as a sub-imperial power
My review in The Saturday Paper, of the new book by Clinton Fernandes, Subimperial Power Australia in the International Arena: In early October, Australia’s deputy prime minister and minister for Defence, Richard Marles, was in Hawaii to meet the American and Japanese defence chiefs near Pearl Harbor. “The global, rules-based order is being pressured in…
Britain and Australia’s secretive relationship
The recent launch of Declassified Australia coincides with the first piece by journalist Peter Cronau and me for the great news organisation Declassified UK on the often sordid and secretive relationship between Australia and the UK. Some highlights (but read the whole thing): Australia’s independence from Britain has been contested ground since the nation’s birth in…