Hao Wu updates

Reuters has picked up the story, the first sign, I believe, of Hao Wu’s arrest making the mainstream news.

In addition, the Business Week blog includes a post by BW reporter Bruce Einhorn, who interviewed Hao Wu about the Google China story a few week’s before his arrest.

I interviewed Wu a few weeks before the police detained him. This was when the debate was raging in the U.S. about Google, Yahoo et.al. and their role in facilitating censorship of China’s Internet. Wu was surprisingly upbeat. Yes, there were problems, but Wu said that censorship wasn’t a huge issue thanks to “work arounds” that enabled him and others to avoid the Chinese firewall. And in his blog, Wu hasn’t been shy about addressing hot-button topics. In one post, he describes a conversation with a cabdriver denouncing China’s high-flying Communist leaders as “worse than the Kuomintang,” the notoriously corrupt regime of Chiang Kai-shek that Mao’s army kicked out of the mainland to Taiwan back in 1949. In another post, Wu (who is gay) mentions how a favorite high school teacher cut him off after he came out to her. Blogging about an argument with his mother, he writes about how Chinese are expected to behave as deferentially toward their governent as they are toward their parents: “However, is the government really a surrogate of our great dear ephemeral Motherland whom we should forgive for any wrongdoing and defend from any badmouthing? Should this devotion be as unconditional as that to our own mothers?….This government is not our mother. My mother, despite her great difficulty dealing with me being whom I am, still loves me and always worries about me. I came from her and I once ran away from her smothering love. But that love is real and now I’m back, I can accept the suffocating Confucian teachings just for her. Not with this government. Not with a government that demands loyalty with no love in return.”

Yes, I like that last line. It’s a sentiment I heard so often from Chinese people. “I love my country, but my country doesn’t love me,” one of my friends in Beijing told me. And truer words were never spoken. Hao Wu loved China, too, and probably still does. And we all know what he got in return.

I love my country, but my country doesn’t love me. If there were any one sentence to sum up poetically the relationship between the Chinese man on the street and his government, that would be it.

Links via this blogger, who is keeping a news ticker of Hao Wu updates.

The Discussion: 2 Comments

I posted a question on China Daily’s bbs forum, asking what had happened to their star writer (Hao Wu wrote a regular column for them under the name Beijing Loafer). Needless to say the post disappeared within minutes and I have now been blocked from accessing the China Daily bbs site. It would be interesting to ask Zhu Ling, editor of China Daily, what has happened to his writer. It’s a sign of how backward China is that a) A leading writer can just disappear with the police denying anything about the case. b) The writer’s own newspaper is completely silent on the whole matter.

March 29, 2006 @ 5:44 am | Comment

Yeah, but what do you expect? This is strictly status quo for the CCP.

March 29, 2006 @ 5:50 am | Comment

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