Exiled Chinese dissident Wang Dan (王丹) said yesterday that the conflict between Google and the Chinese government was unavoidable.
The global online search engine threatened to leave China in response to an attack on its computer systems last month that targeted some firms and the Gmail accounts of human rights activists in China.
“As China grows stronger economically, there will be more conflicts of values [between China and foreign companies],” Wang said in a telephone interview.
“Cyberspace has created many business opportunities, but any restrictions on Internet freedom will have a negative impact on business interests,” said Wang, a student leader during the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989.
Wang said he did not believe that Google threatened to leave China for moral reasons, but rather because of the threat to its reputation.
“In a market economy, reputation brings huge business benefits,” he said.
“If Google becomes the first to leave China, it would put pressure on the Chinese government over its efforts to restrict Internet freedom,” Wang said.
He also said he and his fellow dissidents were forced to change their e-mail passwords “every month” because their e-mail accounts were hacked to disseminate untrue political articles.
Wang said he was observing whether Yahoo would follow Google, triggering a chain reaction.
He said the Google incident has escalated into a “diplomatic incident” between China and the US, with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing concern.
Despite Beijing’s stringent controls, the Internet has had a growing influence in China in recent years, Wang said.
“In [the] cyberworld, citizen power has been on the rise, while state power has been on the decline,” he said.
Opposition voices from the Internet community, for example, forced the Chinese government to abandon a plan to install censorship software on personal computers, he said. Under similar pressure, a Chinese court dropped charges against a woman who killed an official that tried to rape her, he said.
There are 77 incidents of Taiwanese travelers going missing in China between January last year and last month, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) said. More than 40 remain unreachable, SEF Secretary-General Luo Wen-jia (羅文嘉) said on Friday. Most of the reachable people in the more than 30 other incidents were allegedly involved in fraud, while some had disappeared for personal reasons, Luo said. One of these people is Kuo Yu-hsuan (郭宇軒), a 22-year-old Taiwanese man from Kaohsiung who went missing while visiting China in August. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office last month said in a news statement that he was under investigation
An aviation jacket patch showing a Formosan black bear punching Winnie the Pooh has become popular overseas, including at an aviation festival held by the Japan Air Self-Defense Force at the Ashiya Airbase yesterday. The patch was designed last year by Taiwanese designer Hsu Fu-yu (徐福佑), who said that it was inspired by Taiwan’s countermeasures against frequent Chinese military aircraft incursions. The badge shows a Formosan black bear holding a Republic of China flag as it punches Winnie the Pooh — a reference to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — who is dressed in red and is holding a honey pot with
Celebrations marking Double Ten National Day are to begin in Taipei today before culminating in a fireworks display in Yunlin County on the night of Thursday next week. To start the celebrations, a concert is to be held at the Taipei Dome at 4pm today, featuring a lineup of award-winning singers, including Jody Chiang (江蕙), Samingad (紀曉君) and Huang Fei (黃妃), Taipei tourism bureau official Chueh Yu-ling (闕玉玲) told a news conference yesterday. School choirs, including the Pqwasan na Taoshan Choir and Hngzyang na Matui & Nahuy Children’s Choir, and the Ministry of National Defense Symphony Orchestra, flag presentation unit and choirs,
China is attempting to subsume Taiwanese culture under Chinese culture by promulgating legislation on preserving documents on ties between the Minnan region and Taiwan, a Taiwanese academic said yesterday. China on Tuesday enforced the Fujian Province Minnan and Taiwan Document Protection Act to counter Taiwanese cultural independence with historical evidence that would root out misleading claims, Chinese-language media outlet Straits Today reported yesterday. The act is “China’s first ad hoc local regulations in the cultural field that involve Taiwan and is a concrete step toward implementing the integrated development demonstration zone,” Fujian Provincial Archives deputy director Ma Jun-fan (馬俊凡) said. The documents
RSS