"One cannot claim democracy has played a part, but freedom certainly has. The colonial power at least knew enough to follow laissez fair policies with freedom of speech and of the press as much as with the economy." (3)
Within an hour after a Shanghai court in January 1999 sentence businessman Lin Hai to two years' imprisonment for "inciting to subvert the state power," the verdict was faxed to the international media. The man who released the news wasn't in Shanghai, but, in a small, cramped office in Hong Kong, where he received word from Lin's family.
"A relative who was in court paged me just a few minutes after the sentence was announced," said 34-year-old Lu Siqing, in an interview with Maureen Pao in the Far Eastern Economic Review. "I immediately called back the number he left and in a few minutes. I had the information."
In the past two years, Lu has become the channel through which news about Chinese dissidents--as well as peasant and worker unrest in far-flung regions of China-reaches wire services, newspapers and broadcasters around the work. His Hong Kong based Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movements in China is practically a one-man news agency - and proves that "subversive" information can still flow in and out of China.
Lu appears able to maintain that flow in the face of the Chinese government's mounting efforts to control information entering and leaving the country electronically. New regulations of the Internet aim to police its use, while its users are now more vulnerable to prosecution. Lin Hai, who owns a software company, was convicted of subversion for trading 30,000 mainland e-mail addresses with VIP Reference, an U.S.-based, on line pro-democracy magazine.
Lu is an unlikely information warrior. His weapons are a fax machine, a pager and a mobile phone--all relatively tow-tech weapons in a high-tech era. He recently received an award for being an "outstanding personality for democracy" from the respected Chinese Democracy Education Foundation, based in San Francisco. Other recipients of the annual awards have been jailed China Democracy Party leader Wang Youcai and Bao Tong, a former Communist Party official ousted for sympathizing with students in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest.
But perhaps the best testimony to Lu's effectiveness is the fake pager messages and blank faxes he's being plagued with. He is convinced that the Chinese authorities are behind the "jamming," which he says began in November--the same time that Beijing began cracking down on dissidents who were trying to get permission to register the China Democracy Party. (4)
