back to article Chinese bride sentenced to hard labour for retweet

It's not just the UK that takes action against people being nasty on Twitter - Chinese authorities have sentenced Cheng Jianping to a year's "Re-education Through Labour" for retweeting an anti-Japanese message. Cheng retweeted a message from her fiance – who has not been charged – which suggested nationalist students …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How does the song go...

    It's like being arrested for propagating anti-Japanese sentiment on a banned web seeeeeeeervice on your wedding day...

    Apologies to Natalie...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      Actually....

      ...it was Alanis Morrisette. Squeaky, nasal Canadian singer popular in the late 90's, but never heard from since, at least not in the UK anyway!

    2. JasonH
      Thumb Up

      Wrong song?

      Surely it goes more like:

      I've got your Twitter, I've got your Twitter

      I'd like a million re-tweets of myself

      I asked the government to take your Twitter

      So I can look at you from inside the cell

      You've got me tweeting up and tweeting down

      and tweeting in and tweeting 'round

      I'm anti-Japanese

      I tweet I'm anti-Japanese

      I really think so

      Anti-Japanese

      I tweet I'm anti-Japanese

      I really tweet so

      I'm anti-Japanese

      I tweet I'm anti-Japanese

      I really think so

      Anti-Japanese

      I think I'm anti-Japanese

      I really think so

      With apologies to The Vapors for ruining a perfectly decent song...

      1. LaeMing
        Thumb Up

        You are the man!

        I really think so!

  2. CD001

    Aaah

    China is finally catching up with the UK in curtailing freedom ... no, hang on....???

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is this..

    one of the first fruits of Camerons visit to drum up business in China? Selling stupid law interpretations to the Chinese maybe the next "big thing"....

  4. TeeCee Gold badge
    Happy

    "Twitter is officially blocked in China."

    Nice to see that's working so well for them.

    Maybe they should get the lads on the case who managed to get half the world's internet traffic to go where they wanted it to. Managing a little bit of it should be a doddle for them.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Dastardly Scheme

      If I were part of the Chinese security forces I'd be loving all the Web 2.0 stuff - there was a time when the dissidents they were charged with tracking were actually secretive. The formula is pretty simple really:

      1.) Ban a bunch of online sites/services

      2.) Half-arsed block said sites/services leaving it not too difficult to circumvent

      3.) Monitor the banned sites/services for use - using it to populate their dissidents list

      4.) Scrape through the logs and find a violation as necessary to keep up appearences (assuming that bureacrats in China aren't too different from the states)

      I can almost hear them chuckling watching the twitter feeds: "lawl, these stupid so-and-so's catch themselves"

      *Disclaimer: I am not encouraging or condoning any of this, just pointing out that for an oppressive Police State Web 2.0rhea really does make their job easy.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    sounds like

    Sounds like insighting terrorism to me. The UK Plod could take a page out of their book and set up their own "Re-education Through Labour" schemes to sort out similar miscreants.

    I don't agree with it, though you expect it from China, not the UK.

  6. ShaggyDoggy

    140 characters

    “Anti-Japanese demonstrations, smashing Japanese products, that was all done years ago by Guo Quan [an activist and expert on the Nanjing Massacre]. It’s no new trick. If you really wanted to kick it up a notch, you’d immediately fly to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion.”

    is way more than 140 characters, even with the stuff in square brackets taken out, so either Twitter in China has more than 140 characters, or there's some way they can use Chinese characters to save space, or this article is rubbish, or I'm wrong.

    1. Rebecca 1
      Stop

      or....

      That is a translation which is much shorter in the original language?

    2. IglooDude

      In Chinese...

      “Anti-Japanese demonstrations, smashing Japanese products, that was all done years ago by Guo Quan [an activist and expert on the Nanjing Massacre]. It’s no new trick. If you really wanted to kick it up a notch, you’d immediately fly to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion.” is three characters, four if you actually include "[an activist and expert on the Nanjing Massacre]".

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      oh SHI!

      The fuzzy foreigners got txt spk too! We're doomed.

      I've got loads of Koreans and Japanese on my twitter and 140 characters is a shed load of content particularly when they're talking in their equivelent of text speak.

    4. Andre Koster
      Megaphone

      Re: 140 characters

      Guess what, you can say a lot more in 140 CHINESE characters!

  7. Alex King
    Grenade

    Ummm

    Okay, so the punishment is disproportionate, but this does at least seem to be an intended incitement rather than an innocent joke. Also, it's more than a little naive to expect China.gov to uphold the right to free speech. ("China prosecutes someone for saying something they didn't approve of" seems to be right up there with the famed disclosure of the Pope's religion in newsworthiness stakes).

    That said, I'm not in full posession of the facts or context

  8. Tom 15

    Re-education through Labour?

    Sounds scary... the 13 years of Re-education Through Labour we had over here were bad enough.....

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Big Brother

      Yes.....

      That poor woman is going to spend the next year with Gordon Brown being re-educated about bigotry!!

  9. J 3
    Big Brother

    Lawks...

    That's the price of our cheap socks, plastic junk, computers... well, mostly everything nowadays.

    Is El Reg banned in China yet?

  10. John PM Chappell
    Thumb Up

    Good on China, for once

    Ignoring the fact that the service is "banned" (and how effective that really is, combined with the likely usefulness to the authorities themselves), the basic story here is "Citizen incites violence and criminal damage with a racist / nationalist agenda. Citizen is arrested and subsequently sentenced for the offence."

    Perhaps if we were as fast and effective in the UK, for example with the morons in the recent so-called demonstration against tuition fees (which is busy peddling nonsense anyway and aye, I went to University too and still owe money for it) people would be less keen to smash property and assault members of the public and police.

  11. Mark .

    Land of the free

    It's a good thing that something like this would never happen here! How lucky I am to live in such a free country!

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