CHINA: The internet service provider Yahoo faced a wave of criticism from human rights groups yesterday over accusations that it passed information to the Chinese government which led to a journalist being jailed for 10 years.
Shi Tao, a former news editor for the Contemporary Business News in Hunan province, was sentenced in April to 10 years' imprisonment for leaking "state secrets".
He was convicted on charges of e-mailing foreign-based websites with the text of an internal message circulated to Chinese journalists last year about dangers surrounding the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
The Paris-based human rights group Reporters Without Borders said that Yahoo's Hong Kong unit provided the details of the e-mail to Chinese security agents, which helped to identify, and ultimately convict, the journalist.
Yahoo, which recently spent $1 billion on buying a chunk of the Chinese website Alibaba, has neither confirmed nor denied that it supplied the Chinese government with the information.
"Just like any other global company, Yahoo must ensure that its local country sites operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based," company spokeswoman Mary Osako said in a statement.
The harshness of Mr Shi's sentence came as a shock to journalists. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said it was "alarmed" by the news that information from Yahoo had helped to jail Mr Shi.
"China's chokehold on the use of the internet for disseminating crucial information and opinion must end. We categorically condemn the outrageous prosecution of Shi Tao," said CPJ executive director Ann Cooper.
The Chinese government considers the internet to be a hothouse of subversive thought. About 40,000 government officials are believed to have been assigned to monitor e-mails and websites.
Since the end of last year the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda department is believed to have stepped up operations at the organisation known as "Office 1106", which trawls through cyberspace for signs of subversion.
However, it seems that many western companies are happy to do the work for the Chinese authorities. For example, Microsoft's China-based internet portal blocks the words "democracy", "freedom" and "human rights".
Back in 2002, Yahoo was among the companies which voluntarily signed a self-censoring "Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry".
Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are competing for a bigger share of China's fast-growing internet market, which has grown by 18.4 per cent this year and had 103 million users by the end of June.
What constitutes a state secret in China is difficult to define, but it broadly encompasses anything which affects state security or which could be used for political ends to silence dissidents and journalists.
Ching Cheong, a Hong Kong correspondent for the Singapore Straits Times, is currently detained on charges of selling state secrets, while Zhao Yan, a researcher for the New York Times, is also being held, without charge, on suspicion of stealing state secrets.
In a statement, Reporters Without Borders asked how far Yahoo would go. "Does the fact that this corporation operates under Chinese law free it from all ethical considerations? How far will it go to please Beijing?
"It is one thing to turn a blind eye to the Chinese government's abuses, but it is quite another thing to collaborate."