If This Were China, You’d Be in Jail Right Now

Just as a reminder of how good you got it, reports have come out of China that a woman who Re-Tweeted (copied/reposted a Tweet) a sarcastic comment from her fiancee about an anti-Japanese protest was taken from her home and thrown into a labor camp.

From the article (CNN.com):

Eleven days later on the day the couple had planned to marry, Cheng’s fiance, Hua Chunhui was taken away by the police from his office in the southeastern city of Wuxi.

Although he was released 5 days later, Hua hasn’t seen Cheng since. He learned from her family that she was taken away by the police from in front of the couple’s apartment on the same day as his arrest.

Cheng, 46, was sentenced to one year in a Henan Province labor camp for disturbing social stability.

A year for a sarcastic Tweet? Just imagine what they’d do to the frustrated State employees who frequent this (and other) TU blogs.

I’m not saying you people should be in Labor Camps (since that would require you to do actual work – HA!). I am saying, though, that stuff like this reminds me how lucky I am to live in the type of country that allows this type of free exchange of discourse and ideas.

It’s also another example of the quiet crisis of gross human rights violations in the world’s largest economy, which in the last couple years has found it increasingly more difficult to keep a lid on its oppression.

Related: Chinese Government Warning Countries Not to Attend Nobel Prize Honoring Dissident Liu Xiaobo

UPDATE 12:20pm: Minutes after this blog entry was published, the Times Union blogs went down and were unavailable for approximately one hour. I have not yet heard from the TU as to the cause for the downtime, and I can neither confirm nor deny that the outage was the result of a DNS attack orchestrated by the Chinese government in retaliation for my blog post about the jailing of dissidents. I can merely cause unwarranted speculation.