IT IS common for tyrants to claim that human rights are an \u201cinternal matter\u201d and should not concern outsiders.<\/p>\n
IT IS common for tyrants to claim that human rights are an \u201cinternal matter\u201d and should not concern outsiders. When faced with complaints that they deny people freedom to speak, protest, worship and vote, these autocrats like to say: Buzz off. That\u2019s how China\u2019s leaders have responded for decades when called out for their abysmal record on human rights. Yet Beijing is increasingly exporting its \u201cinternal matters\u201d \u2014 the repression of critical or even independent voices \u2014 to other countries.<\/p>\n
We noted previously how China used a computer attack in March to damage servers in the United States that enabled citizens to bypass the Great Firewall, that massive, smothering blanket imposed by the state on Internet freedom. Researchers in Canada concluded that Beijing has developed an offensive cyberweapon, dubbed \u201cthe great cannon<\/a>,\u201d to take down Web sites outside China to which it objects.<\/p>\n Now we are concerned about how China is attempting to punish <\/a>the ethnic Uighur journalist Shohret Hoshur of Radio Free Asia<\/a> by imprisoning his three brothers in China. Mr. Hoshur left China in 1994 after he ran into trouble with the authorities because of his reporting. He has since become a U.S. citizen, and his work has provided an important window on events in the largely Muslim province of Xinjiang, beset in the past few years with a violent conflict that China blames on Uighur separatists. Radio Free Asia is funded annually by the U.S. government\u2019s Broadcasting Board of Governors.<\/p>\n