PEN ALERT: Free Liu Xiaobo
PEN American Center is the largest of the 145 centers of International PEN, the world’s oldest human rights organization and international literary organization. The Freedom to Write Program, which works to protect the freedom of the written word, has been working to end China’s imprisonment, harassment, and surveillance of writers and journalists and curtail Internet censorship and other restrictions on the freedom to write in that country. For more information, please visit www.pen.org/china.
PEN American Center has written a letter to President Obama asking him to help pressure the Chinese authorities to release a Tiananmen dissident, writer, and activist. Read more about the case.
What About China's Dirty Secrets?
Dr. Sophie Richardson is the Asia Advocacy Director at Human Rights Watch.
As he makes his first visit to China, the president will be grilled about loans and deficits. Sophie Richardson on why Obama needs to turn talk to Beijing's state secrets and "black jails."
Facebook's Israel Problem
Benjamin Sarlin is a reporter for The Daily Beast. He previously covered New York City politics for The New York Sun and has worked for talkingpointsmemo.com.
A dispute over Facebook's geography settings has riled Israeli settlers and spurred a Syrian boycott of the site. Benjamin Sarlin on the latest skirmish in an online Mideast proxy war.
China's Dangerous Delusion
Paul Mooney, a freelance journalist, has been reporting from Beijing since 1994.
Beijing's response to the Uighur massacre is just like its reaction to last year's Tibet uprising-self-denial and scapegoating. Until the party honchos realize their own abusive rule is to blame, they'll face increasing challenges to their power.
Hillary's China Game
Leslie H. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and senior government official, is author of Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (HarperCollins 2009), a book that shows how to think about and use power in the 21st century. He is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
China, where the new secretary of state is holding talks, is one of the few countries that actually preferred George W. Bush. Leslie H. Gelb on what she'll say behind closed doors.
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Lee Siegel has written about culture and politics and is the author of three books: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination; Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television; and, most recently, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. In 2002, he received a National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism.
Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is a professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
Gerald Posner is The Daily Beast's Chief Investigative Reporter. He's the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism. His latest book, Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth and Power—A Dispatch from the Beach, was published in October. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Trisha Posner.
Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the UK think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.
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