Glutter alerts us to an item in the Guardian profiling jailed Chinese journalist Shi Tao:

According to Kultalahti, the main evidence provided against Shi Tao came not from inside China, but from the global internet service provider, Yahoo. In its defence, Yahoo claims that it was only following local legislation. When quizzed about the case in China earlier this year Yahoo’s co-founder Jerry Yang said that the company was never informed by the authorities of the reasons why they were requesting the firm to provide information. “To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world, we have to comply with local law,” he said.

Kultalahti offers further explanation. “Every company has to sign a public pledge on self-discipline for the internet industry,” she says. “In effect it means that they agree to the Chinese system of censorship and control. “There has also been some debate as to whether Yahoo was legally bound to provide such information to the authorities, since they are based in Hong Kong, which has a separate legal system from mainland China. We are very disturbed by Yahoo providing information to the Chinese authorities which was used to convict Shi Tao.”

In a second item, a Guardian-hosted blog reports on a Amnesty International poetry event.:

Yang Lian’s outrage seemed much closer to the surface as he brought up the case of Chinese journalist and poet Shi Tao, imprisoned in Chishan Prison, Yuanjiang City for distributing a Chinese Communist Party memo to websites based outside China. “When people speak of China there are two different pictures in mind,” he said. “China presents one face to the world and another to its own people. Shi Tao is a very important symbol of this split. Western companies rush to China and shake that blood hand and shut their mouths.” He told of how protests with which he was involved in New Zealand at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre made it impossible for him to return to China, before moving to the lectern to welcome the actor Peter Forbes to the stage.

Yang began his readings with ‘June’, a poem by Shi Tao remembering the Tiananmen Square massacre, which he performed in Chinese before Forbes provided the translation. He was louder as he leant towards the microphone, suddenly more insistent, reading with an unstoppable momentum. Forbes seemed almost diffident in reply. Yang continued with a poem of his own about the massacre, ‘1989′, and a poem about the day when he discovered his work had been banned in China, ‘Banned Poem’, before finishing with ‘London’, a striking description of the texture of exile.

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, china, east asia, northeast asia