Last night around 7pm the land-line phone rang in my Beijing apartment, as I was getting ready for a dinner party. The caller ID indicated a number from overseas. I picked up the phone and found a pre-recorded Chinese program coming through the line. I was about to hang up on the spam call before I heard the name “Gao Zhisheng” mentioned in the program.
Gao was the dissident human rights lawyer I had interviewed before. So I listened to the whole 5-minute program over the phone. It was a broadcast from Radio Hope. The first part was about the government’s persecution of Falun Gong believers, and quoted extensively an interview with Gao who had represented some persecuted believers in court. The second part of the program told how a banned article in China, Examine CCP Nine Times, was causing massive numbers of communist party members to drop their party memberships. At the end of the program, I was prompted to press different buttons on my phone to withdraw my membership in the party or the Communist Youth League.
Regardless of how one feels about Falun Gong, we have to give them credits for their use of modern technology to penetrate China’s huge censorship barrier and spam their messages over phone lines. Yet somehow I felt apprehensive at the call, imagining all the photons and electrons moving over cross-Pacific cables and finagling their way into our apartment, as if I was besieged by an impending sense of gloom.
Oh well, I must have spent too much time reading Mao: The Untold Stories.
4 comments:
... and it's still spam ...
I hate those people; but I always took their flyers - in order to waste them.
they are bloody everywhere. where do they get the funding? I heard is from the US government. people get paid $50 half day for handing out paper. They keep doing it might for the sake of getting money from the US. Anyway, there is little room in China for them.
These suckers are liars. It's impossible to not be harassed by these jerks in the streets of New York. Not to mention the ridiculous live acts of people handcuffed to cages, spilled with fake blood, under the watch of a guy dressed up in police fatigues...
Forbes just had an article on how their network admin was supposed attacked by a few chinese agents. One has to wonder whether the flgers staged the whole story then had forbes reporters to come over.
Ok. These comments are at least unfair, if not outright wrong. The persecution of Falun Gong in China is an established fact. If you reflect how our dear "government" has suppress our own people in the past 50 years, I don't think you'd be surprised at the scale of persecution Falun Gong believers suffered.
I do have my own personal opinion on the practice itself. And I frown upon the vehemence of their counter-attack at CCP. However, a political oppression begets a political reaction, like what the communists once did to the nationalists. I don't think there's any way around it, even though I do hope that this confrontation could continued to be limited to hi-tech and media, and not expand into chaos in China proper.
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