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发帖数: 7037 | 1 女朋友住 Upper Manhattan 的 Morningside Heights 公寓。这区据说很犹太很不便宜
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/29/world/asia/29jasmine.html?pag
April 28, 2011
Trying to Stir Up a Popular Protest in China, From a Bedroom in Manhattan
By J. DAVID GOODMAN
From a pair of computer screens in a lime green bedroom in Upper Manhattan,
a 27-year-old man from China is working to bring about a popular uprising.
Two months after calls shot across the Web for a Tunisian- and Egyptian-
style “Jasmine Revolution” in China, he is among the few online dissidents
still trying to promote a popular protest movement inside the country. The
effort has failed to provoke any major street demonstrations, but it has led
to a fierce crackdown by the authorities.
Yet despite the widespread arrests of activists, including the well-known
artist Ai Weiwei, many of those who began the grass-roots push for change
remain active. They guard their anonymity closely, especially inside China,
where they communicate using Gmail and Skype and broadcast messages to
supporters beyond the country’s so-called Great Firewall of censorship.
“Our group is expanding,” said the uptown blogger, who studied the
classics and graduated in New York. He asked to be called Gaius Gracchus, in
honor of the ancient Roman reformer, but also uses the pseudonym Hua Ge, or
“Flower Brother,” online.
He spoke confidently of the power of his group of 25 young Internet-savvy
activists inside and outside of China — in Paris, Seoul, Hong Kong,
Australia and Taiwan — to influence China’s top leaders. With a partner in
China, he was among the first to publish the times and places for
protesters to gather, and he remains one of the strongest voices calling for
a revolution modeled on those in the Middle East, online activists said.
“The Jasmine Revolution is like a flag,” he said. “It’s out there to be
taken up by whoever wants it.”
That is the hope of the dissidents, and it appears to be a concern of the
Chinese authorities. For both, the thousands of isolated protests each year
over an array of issues — including environmental grievances, land seizures
and corruption — have the potential to become a national movement.
“The government seems to fear how easy it is to make the small protests
meaningful,” said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific
director.
But that online bravado has not succeeded in rallying disparate interest
groups under a single banner for political change. In two recent large-scale
protests — the truck drivers who protested rising prices by blocking a
dockyard in Shanghai, and the Nanjing residents who delayed the destruction
of the city’s iconic French plane trees — the organizers neither sought to
connect their efforts to a Jasmine movement nor displayed any indication
that they were even aware of it.
Some activists question the value of such efforts, saying that the calls for
widespread protests have accomplished little except to provoke the
government into arresting dozens of activists since February.
“It’s an admirable attempt at free expression, but we have not seen any
sudden change come of it,” said Pu Zhiqiang, a leading human rights lawyer
and advocate of democratic reform in China. “Instead, we’ve mainly seen
the Chinese Communist Party frighten itself over it. So it’s hard to see
the significance of it in the short term.”
The very first call for a Jasmine movement was broadcast from a Twitter
account using the name mimisecret0, which was quickly overwhelmed by suspect
messages and subsequently shut down, dissidents overseas said. The call was
taken up by Boxun, a Chinese-language site run out of North Carolina,
before that site too suffered a massive cyberattack in late February. Those
attacks continue to cripple the site, said its editor, who is known by the
pseudonyms Wei Shi or Watson Meng.
After the Boxun site was attacked, the New York blogger who calls himself
Gaius Gracchus connected with activists in China to publish molihuaxingdong.
blogspot.com, or Jasmine Movement, a simple blog on Google’s blogger
platform, to keep the momentum going online. His role was first reported by
The Associated Press.
The blog has registered more than 600,000 visitors, more than half of them
from within China, and his group’s e-mail list includes more than 3,000
names.
Sitting at a spare black desk in his girlfriend’s Morningside Heights
apartment, where he lives, Gracchus said that his group protects itself
against malicious viruses by using Linux-based operating systems and by
opening e-mail attachments using iPads, both of which are less susceptible
to them. To secure his communications, he employs a Google application that
sends a unique code, which changes every minute, to his mobile phone so he
can log into his e-mail.
Such commercially available security precautions are not the stuff of cloak-
and-dagger cyberwarfare, and Gracchus readily admits putting his faith in
Google. “If Google falls, we would worry about our safety, but we believe
that Google has better engineers than the Chinese government,” he said.
Despite his work, the revolution remains notional. No protesters have
gathered in Chinese streets under the banner of the Jasmine movement since
late February. Only the police heed the calls for protest each Sunday,
blanketing areas in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities in an attempt to
snuff out coordinated gatherings.
Activists say the officials’ reaction proves that their movement still
worries the authorities. “Our goal, for the time being, is to get the
police to gather in those spots,” Feng Chongde, another online organizer
who was part of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, said in a telephone
interview from the San Francisco area, where he now lives. “For us, if
there are police, that’s Jasmine.”
Mr. Feng is among a group of Tiananmen Square veterans living abroad who
have sought to support the generation of online dissidents. In Times Square
each Saturday night, other Tiananmen veterans, members of the banned
Democratic Party of China, have held demonstrations that attract a handful
of protesters — some in black hats with white letters reading “Democracy”
— to the red steps above the TKTS booth. “If the people in China keep
calling for it, we will keep responding in Times Square,” said one of the
organizers, Fu Shenqi, who has been working to bring democracy to China
since the 1970s.
Gracchus said he consulted regularly with members of the exiled party,
especially with Wang Juntao, one of its leaders. “Whenever I have questions
, I will call him,” Gracchus said. “Because I’m still young.” The
average age in his Jasmine group is 22, he said.
Mr. Wang, sitting under a photograph of Tiananmen Square in the party’s
modest New York headquarters in Flushing, Queens, said there was a debate
among dissidents about whether China was ready for an Internet-driven
revolution coordinated by a new generation. “We are excited with the ‘
Jasmine Revolution’ because we see that the young Chinese, they want to
return to the streets,” he said.
While there is no clear evidence that such broad sentiment exists, Chinese
authorities are clearly readying for the possibility.
The country’s Internet security system reacted so swiftly to the initial
calls for an uprising, activists say, that virus-spreading e-mails directed
at the dissidents might have also carried the dates and times of protests,
accidentally spreading the news.
Mark McDonald contributed reporting from Seoul. | l******t
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发帖数: 7037 | 3 给钱又给人？
【在 l******t 的大作中提到】
: 有NED呢。
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