December 26th, 2007
Chinese dogowner's lawsuit may signal resistance to censorship
It might be a sign that Chinese citizens are increasingly unwilling to submit to government censorship. A dog owner is taking on government officials by filing suit over their censorship of his blog post, The Washington Post reports.
“It is so funny that people may have a 35-centimeter-high dog but may not have a 36-centimeter-high dog,” Chen Yuhua wrote online about Beijing’s dog ownership rules.
This complaint was censored by Chinese censors. China employs about 30,000 watchful pairs of eyes, the Post says.
They are equipped with advanced technology to block sensitive sites and sound the alarm when words deemed off-color or politically incorrect show up on the screen. The system, part of a vast apparatus extending to newspapers, theaters and art galleries, remains part of life for most people in a China otherwise modernizing at breakneck speed.
Not surprisingly, the Chinese courts decided to reject Chen’s case.
“They said, ‘You know what things are like in China,’ ” Chen recalled in an interview. “They said I should understand, since I was a former government official. They said this is a sensitive matter. But for me, that is not sufficient.”
