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New evidence of Yahoo's complicity in punishing `dissidents'

Beijing's hopes of a smooth summit yesterday between Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and US President George W. Bush were undermined on Wednesday amid new evidence that US Internet firms in China cooperated in the crackdown on dissidents.

Yahoo Inc turned over one of its users' draft e-mails to Chinese authorities, who used the information to jail the account holder on subversion charges, a rights group said.

It was the third time the US-based Internet company has been accused of helping to put a Chinese user in prison.

Jiang Lijun (姜力鈞), 39, was given a four-year sentence in November 2003 for subversive activities aimed at overthrowing the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

Yahoo's Hong Kong unit gave authorities a draft e-mail that had been saved on Jiang's account, the Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders said on Wednesday night, providing a copy of the verdict by the Beijing No. 2 People's Court.

Telephones at Yahoo's Hong Kong office and at Alibaba.com, which runs Yahoo's mainland China operations, rang unanswered.

The draft e-mail, titled "Declaration," was similar to manuscripts called "Freedom and Democracy Party Program" and "Declaration of Establishment," recovered from a computer and a floppy disk owned by two other Internet activists, the verdict said.

The information proved that Jiang and the other activists were planning to "make preparations for organizing a party and to use violence to overthrow the [Chinese] Communist Party," the verdict said.

Jiang was also one of five activists who signed an open letter that called for political reform and was posted on the Internet ahead of the Chinese Communist Party congress -- a major event -- in November 2002.

"Little by little we are piecing together the evidence for what we have long suspected, that Yahoo is implicated in the arrest of most of the people we have been defending," Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.

China encourages Internet use for business and education but tightly controls Web content.
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