SUNNYVALE, California—Yahoo! ignored the complaints of a large crowd of Chinese dissidents gathered at its headquarters in Silicon Valley, California, July 20.
The crowd came to protest the company’s alleged role in providing private information to the Chinese communist regime. On July 27 The Epoch Times asked the company specifically about the allegations of the dissidents. Yahoo! referred questions to its PR agency, GPG, based in Washington D.C. They forwarded a standard letter which did not respond to the allegations, but claimed that Yahoo! has protected human rights without elaborating.
The protesters claim Yahoo! provided information to Chinese security forces, leading to many dissidents being detained. They demanded the company “stop being an enemy of freedom of speech,” and instead help improve Internet freedom in China.
Zheng Cunzhu, a representative of the West Coast Chinese Democratic Party and organizer of the protest, said Yahoo China disclosed the personal information of Chinese dissidents Tao Jun, Wang Xiaolin, Shi Tao, Li Zhi, and many others.
Tao Jun of Anhui Province, one of the 1989 student democracy movement leaders, was sentenced to three years in prison on the charge of “subversion of the state.” He ran the Web site MAFFA.com, which hosted political commentary on communist rule the regime objected to.
Yahoo! is alleged to have provided Shenzhen police contents of his personal email, which was later used as evidence in sentencing. Tao Jun was forced into exile to the United States in 2008.
Tao Jun claims that Yahoo! has not made any changes since the U.S. Congressional Hearings on Chinese Internet Censorship in early 2006. In 2006 the U.S. Congress held a hearing on Chinese Internet censorship that featured Yahoo!’s testimony about. Tao Jun claims that since those hearings, Yahoo’s actions have not changed. According to Tao, Yahoo!’s complicity in disclosing emails to the Chinese regime dates back to 2001, and has caused “more than 60 people to be arrested.”
“Yahoo China, the second largest search engine company in the mainland, continues to assist the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party. When we conduct a Yahoo! search of the Chinese dissidents, the results are very disappointing. For example, when we typed in Zhao Ziyang, former party chief, the result was ‘sorry, no one is found.’
“On the contrary, the Google search would give more than 100,000 hits,” he said at the rally.
Tao Jun considers the discrepancy has two possible explanations, either Yahoo has “manually eliminated all information about Zhao,” or has “programmed or implemented procedures to filter out relevant information.” The latter is a “very serious matter,” he said.
The difference between Yahoo! and Google’s international services are also tremendous, Tao said. The first three pages of search results from Yahoo! have minimal hits for both “The Epoch Times” and “Boxun.com,” compared with Google.
Tao believes this is part of Yahoo’s apparent political agenda, and is considering organizing a protest against the corporation to the U.S. Congress, if Yahoo! cannot explain its actions.
Zheng Cunzhu cited the public assault of Tang Boqiao as an example of how the Chinese Communist regime has behaved outside of China, apparently undermining the freedom of speech of overseas Chinese. Tang Boqiao was hospitalized after being beaten by Chinese men, in a bar in Flushing, New York, for his criticism of the Communist Party.
