Are we ready for the official Beijing Olympic cheer?
Showing all posts tagged China
Free speech, Beijing-style
My following article appears in the Amnesty International Australia’s Uncensor campaign about human rights in China: One-party rule is here to stay, but cracks are starting to appear, writes Antony Loewenstein. For anybody thinking of attending the Beijing Games, China this week announced, in Chinese, the rules of the game. Religious or political banners are…
Trouble in the Communist “paradise”
My following article appears in the Amnesty International Australia’s Uncensor campaign about human rights in China: The suffering of earthquake victims should not mask the authoritarian tendencies of the ruling elite, writes Antony Loewenstein. The ongoing humanitarian catastrophe after the Sichuan earthquake has revealed a side of China that is rarely glimpsed. After months of…
The Left should oppose repression
I’ve spent most of my professional life skewering the unhinged tendencies of the Right (not least debunking its support for Israeli violence). Sadly, some on the Left are equally ideological and blind to their own propaganda. Western support for Cuba remains fairly strong on the Left, despite the vast evidence that Fidel Castro ran a…
How to help our friends
China is a repressive regime. Clearly it now makes sense, in a post 9/11 world where the US engages in torture of its own, to join forces with the Communists: U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay allegedly softened up detainees at the request of Chinese intelligence officials who had come to the island facility to…
Earthquakes, Twitter and compassion
My following article appears in the Amnesty International Australia’s Uncensor campaign about human rights in China: The horrific Chinese earthquake has focused the world’s attention on human suffering, but censorship issues were never far from the surface, writes Antony Loewenstein. The devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province last week shifted the global focus away from the…
China, 2008
Mr. X, Far Eastern Economic Review, May: Ultimately, to succeed in China, businesses must assume the goals of the Communist Party as their own. One of the first steps into the market for a major multinational is to hire a government-relations director who will interpret China’s policies and articulate the company’s fealty to those policies…
The small details matter
The wonders of Twitter (a technology that I’ve generally thought of as fairly irrelevant to the pursuit of journalism.) Jeff Jarvis explains why I may be wrong: We online citizens are living in public, revealing small details of our lives with our updates and our content. It’s in the smallness of this personal news that…
Our future is repressed
Naomi Klein reports: With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.
Growth + power = abuse?
My following article appears in the Amnesty International Australia’s Uncensor campaign about human rights in China: China’s rapid growth is often forgotten when analysing the country’s human rights record, but these issues should not be ignored in the rush for super-power status, writes Antony Loewenstein. Amidst all the current stories about China and the Beijing…