389 Georgina Higueras Dissent and Human Rights in China Stadium. Transformed into an enfant terrible, Ai Weiwei has taken his harsh criticisms of Chinese censorship to all four corners of the planet; and even uploaded photos of himself naked, as well as a video in which he is dancing with friends in his garden to Gangnam Style by South Korean rapper Psy. In the video he altered the lyrics of the song to Caonima style19, a controversial term that literally means “grass, mud, horse” or llama (the Andean animal), but in Mandarin sounds like an insult: “f*ck your mother”; and he supposedly uses this to criticise the government for having detained him and kept him in solitary confinement for three months, after having accused him of tax fraud. ONE CHILD POLICY In the name of the one child policy, introduced by China in 1979 to limit population growth, serious atrocities have been committed against the intimacy and rights of Chinese women for decades, including against their right to unrestricted reproduction. Many activists have denounced forced abortions, as well as the existence of thousands of ‘clandestine’ girls who have not been registered so as to give their parents the opportunity of having a son through a second pregnancy. One of these activists is Mao Hengfeng who went up against the authorities in 1988 when she refused to abort her third child. Since then, she has been imprisoned several times, detained in re-education camps and psychiatric hospitals, and been placed under house arrest. She was released on the 8 February 2013 from the detention centre in which she had been imprisoned two years previously. Chen Guangcheng is the Chinese activist who has put forward the greatest criticisms of forced abortions; a “barefoot lawyer” and blind, he self-taught himself Chinese law so as to be able to defend women and society’s most vulnerable from corrupt officials. In 2005, he reported that 7000 women in the Eastern province of Shandong had been sterilised against their will or suffered forced abortions – both illegal activities – in a local government campaign to achieve their birth control objectives. This lawsuit took him straight to prison for “disturbing traffic”. In 2010, he was released but placed under house arrest. On 22 April 2012, Chen outsmarted his surveillance. He escaped and fled to the 19 See the video under: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNN50VY4rz4 Consulted: 15/05/2014
REVISTA IEEE 3
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