Cina: continua la repressione dei cyber-dissidenti

Le autorità cinesi hanno condannato a pene comprese fra 5 e 14 anni di carcere cinque dissidenti della setta Falun Gong, "rei" di avere pubblicato su Internet un articolo in cui denunciavano i maltrattamenti subiti in carcere da un loro compagno:

In a terse news story, the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, stated Feb. 19 that a court in western Chongqing found the three men and two women guilty of "vilifying the government's image through spreading fabricated stories on persecution of cult practitioners" and had given them prison terms of five to 14 years.

Dal canto suo, Reporters Senza Frontiere ha chiesto nuovamente il rilascio dei 22 cyber-dissidenti della Falun Gong attualmente detenuti in Cina:

"The crackdown on members of this spiritual movement is completely unjustified," said Julien Pain, who researches Internet speech issues for the group. "The five Internet users were convicted for posting online what is already very well-known to human rights organizations, that members of Falun Gong are systematically tortured in prison."



Falun Gong -- a spiritual discipline that combines exercise and meditation -- had an estimated 70 million adherents before President Jiang Zemin outlawed the movement in 1999, calling it a doomsday cult. Activists say more than 800 Falun Gong members have died in police custody since the ban.



The Feb. 19 sentencing is symptomatic of the communist government's struggle to control online content in a country that is second only to the United States in number of Internet users. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, 79.5 million Chinese are connected to the World Wide Web.



As China's Internet economy burgeons, so have the government's attempts to battle "subversive" content on home computers and in the country's 110,000 cybercafes. According to some estimates, China employs 30,000 technocrats to police the Internet.

La Cina sta tentando, secondo me, l'impossibile: sviluppare una economia di tipo "capitalistico" mantenendo al contempo il controllo politico-ideologico sulla società caratteristico dei regimi comunisti - come dire: vogliono la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca.



Secondo me si illudono: una struttura economica di tipo capitalistico non può funzionare in maniera efficiente senza una vera libertà economica, e la libertà economica non può esistere realmente senza libertà politica - è il liberalismo, baby: la libertà economica presuppone (e genera) la libertà politica, e viceversa.



Fonte: Wired News.