388 Journal of the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies N. 3 / 2014 CPC; these people are faced with the danger of being sentenced to lengthy prison terms for exercising their right to freedom of expression and belief, for writing their opinions on a blog or talking to foreign journalists about sensitive issues for China. This is what happened with activist Hu Jia, sentenced to a three and a half year prison term for “subversion”, due to comments made in various online fora and due to interviews with foreign media channels where he criticised the human rights situation in China, the functioning of the health system, and abuses against construction workers – while the state was concerned merely with making an impact on the international stage with the Olympic Games. Supported by ‘Reporters Without Borders Spain’ following his detention, the European Parliament awarded Hu Jia the Sakharov Prize in 2008 and thus “firmly and resolutely acknowledged the daily struggle for freedom of all Chinese human rights defenders”18. The dissident was released in June 2011. Before this last sentence, Hu Jia had suffered shorter periods of detention and house arrests, along with his wife Zeng Jinyan. The Chinese government, while considering the internet an essential tool for the economic, technological, scientific and defence development of the country, tries to stop the web from being used by the dissident movement to discredit the CPC and to bring the political system into question. In their effort to ‘stem the tide’, they have the highest number of cyber police in the world and large internet companies accept the filters and conditions that China imposes on them in order not to lose out on a market of 600 million internet users. Getting past these filters and outsmarting the censors has become a national sport, with millions of internet users dedicated to creating a cryptic language that will allow them to communicate with one another. And so, the 4 June – the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre – is known as the 35 May. They also adopt turns of phrase for important CPC slogans that the censors can’t delete and that then circulate among activists and their sympathisers with different meanings, such as in the case of “build a harmonious society”, one of the main government slogans. Internet users say “non-harmonious” to warn against a detention or any other type of danger. The dissident who has best exploited the inventiveness and plays on words to which the Chinese language lends itself so well is the plastics artist Ai Weiwei. Ai Weiwei, son of one of the most prestigious Chinese poets of the 20th century – Ai Qing, was favoured by the regime which entrusted him with the design of the Olympic 18 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+IM-PRESS+20090925 FCS61218+0+DOC+XML+V0//ES&language=ES#title3 Consulted: 16/05/2014
REVISTA IEEE 3
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