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April 22nd, 2013
Party ‘Self-Confidence’ Breeds Corruption, Pollution
The 18th Party Congress has nearly been forgotten, but I would like to remind people in a serious tone of its essence. The way in which the communique ... brought up the idea of building a learning-focused, creative, and service-oriented Party was second to none and without precedent. It was more succinct than Stalin's "Concluding Remarks on the History of the Soviet Communist Party," more so than Mao Zedong's "Report on the Amendments to the Party Constitution," and pithier than the speeches on amendments to the Party constitution delivered separately to the 7th and 8th Party Congresses by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. As for Jiang Zemin's "Three Represents" theory, it is a flaw in the annals of Party construction.
Jiang Zemin's Three Represents theory (which supposedly represents "the broadest and the most advanced") is really three jokes about three self-serving ideas and three monopolies, turned by the three prides into the fulfillment of Mao's prediction about the people falling behind. In doing away with the old figures of speech (the proletariat, the revolution, and Marxism-Leninism), it probably had three effects, but it also lifted the veil on its own inner workings.
So, the 18th Party Congress said it would ...
April 22nd, 2013
Lukianoff and Shibley: ’6 Ways to Defeat Campus Censors’
Today over at Manhattan Institute's Minding the Campus, FIRE President Greg Lukianoff and Senior Vice President Robert Shibley discuss "6 Ways to Defeat Campus Censors." They suggest that possible solutions may include forcing all colleges accepting federal funding to enact policies promising free speech, targeting prime constituencies like alumni and high school students, or even launching an aggressive litigation campaign against those schools maintaining unconstitutional speech policies.
Head on over to Minding the Campus to read Lukianoff and Shibley's thought-provoking piece and join the conversation!
April 22nd, 2013
Activists, Monks Blocked From Sichuan Quake-Hit Area
Chinese authorities have blocked rights groups and Tibetan monks from participating in rescue efforts in an earthquake-struck zone in southwestern Sichuan province, activists said Sunday as the toll of the dead and missing from the tremblor climbed past 200.
The quake—measured by China's earthquake administration at magnitude 7.0 and by the U.S. Geological Survey at 6.6—struck early Saturday in Lushan county, near the city of Ya'an, close to where a devastating 7.9 quake hit in May 2008, leaving 90,000 dead or missing.
Veteran Sichuan activist Huang Qi told RFA's Mandarin Service on Sunday that he and several other activists were intercepted by police while they were hurrying to Ya'an, a city of 1.5 million people and home to one of China's main centers for protecting the giant panda.
“The authorities kept us for several hours, warning us not to ‘add more trouble’ to the disaster," Huang said.
A policeman indirectly reminded Huang about his imprisonment for his involvement in relief efforts during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, in which 5,335 schoolchildren were among the dead.
“I explained to them that we would not and cannot create any trouble in the quake zone … But they blocked us from going there,” ...
April 19th, 2013
Six Charged Over China-Burma Pipeline Protests
Burmese authorities charged six villagers with illegal assembly on Friday for protesting a controversial China-backed pipeline project in western Rakhine state which they say is destroying their community’s livelihood.
The six were believed to be among organizers of mass protests on Thursday against the Shwe Gas Project, a joint venture largely between the official petroleum groups of China and Burma in Maday Island off the coast of Kyaukpyu town in the Bay of Bengal.
They were charged with holding the demonstrations without official permits.
According to reports, a number of Maday residents who work as laborers for Beijing’s state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) were fired Friday for protesting the project.
About 400 people had participated in the protests, complaining they were inadequately compensated after giving up their land for the project and demanding that the project developers provide better transportation infrastructure and higher salaries for local workers.
The group had applied for permits to protest in December at both the Kyaukpyu township and Rakhine state level, but were rejected both times.
Maung Maung Myint, Sai Aye, Myo Naing, Yein Hla, Maung Maung Soe and Thein Kyaw, who had led the protests in front of the developer’s office in Kyaukpyu, ...
April 19th, 2013
Exciting Job Opportunity: FIRE Seeking Summer Research Assistant
FIRE is pleased to announce a new Research Assistant position for which we will start taking applications immediately. The position, described in full at the link above, is an excellent opportunity for an undergraduate or graduate student with an interest in higher education seeking an internship-like experience this summer. Work location and specific work hours for this position are negotiable. If you are interested, don't hesitate to submit your application! FIRE is looking to fill this position quickly, so apply now. If you know someone who may be interested, please pass this job opportunity on to them. Philadelphia skyline photo by Rebecca Wilson. 
April 19th, 2013
Petition Drive as Australian University Cancels Dalai Lama Talk
The University of Sydney, one of Australia's top institutions of higher learning, has canceled a scheduled talk by Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, apparently due to pressure from China, triggering a global petition drive by a Tibetan students group to get the university to reverse the decision.
The university's Institute for Democracy and Human Rights had organized the on-campus talk by the Dalai Lama during his visit in June but decided recently to move the event off campus.
The move came after the university warned the organizer against using its logo or allowing media coverage or entry to the event by Free Tibet activists, according to reports.
"The university 'withdrew its support,' I think are the words that are used," Stuart Rees, emeritus professor at the University of Sydney, told Australia's national public broadcaster ABC News.
"Now whether they withdrew their support because they didn't think he was an appropriate person to have intellectually or politically or whether they withdrew their support because of outside pressures, I'm not sure," he said.
ABC said it had obtained emails from the head of the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights to the university's vice chancellor, Michael Spence, confirming the decision "to ...
April 19th, 2013
Syracuse University Students Risk Discipline to Cheer Each Other Up
Students at Syracuse University have followed in the footsteps of their peers at Rutgers University with a project called SU Stickies. Syracuse student Allie Caren said that she started the project to "spread happiness and a smile" by leaving inspirational messages on Post-it notes around campus. Students have reacted positively, noting that the stickies seem to pop up just when they need to hear encouraging words. And project participants are motivated to use the stickies to create a greater sense of community on campus.
But it turns out that this uplifting and inspiring expression actually violates Syracuse's campus posting policy. The policy limits posted items to general-purpose bulletin boards in campus buildings and requires that all items include the poster's name. Posting in some locations even requires approval from "the appropriate department."
Syracuse has earned a "red light" rating from FIRE for enacting policies that restrict protected speech, despite its statement that "freedom of discussion is essential to the search for truth." In the past, Syracuse has responded negatively to anonymous speech in particular.
So will Syracuse enforce its posting policy consistently and without considering the content and viewpoint of the speech? Syracuse has created a dilemma for itself—it ...
April 19th, 2013
Uyghur Businessman Attacked After Demolition Complaint
A Uyghur man who protested a Chinese company’s demolition of his grandmother’s house in the restive Xinjiang region has been seriously assaulted and threatened with being forced into a psychiatric facility, according to sources.
Eli Quddus, a businessman who runs an import-export company, suffered a head injury when he and his brother-in-law were attacked at the company’s office by a group of up to 20 Han Chinese men armed with sticks and knives in the regional capital Urumqi on Monday.
The two had discussed compensation with a manager at the Touxing Company and were waiting to speak with a director when the group stormed into the office, calling them “troublemakers,” and assaulted them.
Land disputes, a common occurrence in China, have aggravated ethnic tensions in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where Uyghurs complain of an incoming tide of Han Chinese taking over their homeland.
After Eli Quddus was treated for the head injury in the emergency room of Urumqi’s No. 2 Hospital, doctors warned him that he could be sent to the No. 4 Hospital, a facility for the mentally ill. They told him there was no space for him to have a regular bed at the No. 2 Hospital.
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April 19th, 2013
Student Challenges Des Moines Area Community College Speech Code
On Monday, Des Moines Area Community College student Jacob Dagel filed a lawsuit challenging the school’s strict limitations on where students may distribute flyers. In addition to restricting leaflets to a “speech zone” consisting of a hallway with tables, the complaint alleges that the school requires students to “obtain a permit to use the speech zone 10 business
days in advance of the expected activity, but the College retains unfettered discretion to determine whether student speech may occur at all.” The suit was filed with assistance from the Alliance Defending Freedom.
The Des Moines Register reports that on March 28, a campus security official prevented Dagel from
handing out flyers protesting school subsidies to the Iowa Governor’s Conference on LGBTQ Youth. Enforcement of the school’s policy is particularly deplorable in this case because political speech like Dagel’s is at the core of what the First Amendment is meant to protect.
ADF Senior Counsel Kevin Theriot emphasizes what is at stake:
Free, spontaneous discourse on college campuses is supposed to be a hallmark of higher education rather than the exception to the rule. … A permission slip should not be needed every time students wish to express their views on ...
April 19th, 2013
A Librarian Considers Persepolis
Last month a Chicago Public Schools’ (CPS) directive seemed to require that copies of Marjane Satrapi’s memoir Persepolis be removed from classrooms and school libraries. A later memo clarified that the book was allowed to remain in libraries; the concerns about its content — specifically, visual depictions of acts of torture — were limited to its instructional use in seventh grade.
How CPS handled this particular situation is beyond the scope of my comments. Similarly I don’t intend to address whether seventh graders are equipped to handle a couple of pages of visually stylized barbarism. Instead, as a librarian, I want to touch on the issue of what belongs in a school library’s collection.
Twenty years ago, I was a school librarian in a central Indiana high school. Comics and graphic novels were not much on librarians’ radars at that time. In fact, the only comics that were in the library’s collection were ones I added: Maus, The Cartoon History of the Universe, and a handful of Garfield and Calvin & Hobbes collections. I wasn’t worried about anyone asking me to remove those books, but I was nervous about some of the other titles I purchased.
My first ...