Communist authorities information of journalist Shi Tao who was later convicted under controversial state secrecy laws and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The admission by the company’s co-founder Jerry Yang at an Internet forum in the Chinese resort city of Hangzhou came shortly after human rights groups said Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd., part of Yahoo’s global network, provided e-mail account information that helped lead to Shi’s conviction, The Associated Press (AP) news agency said.
Yang, responding to questions during the forum was quoted as saying he could not discuss the details of the case involving Shi Tao, a former writer for the financial publication Contemporary Business News, who was sentenced on April 27.
Reporters Without Borders, which investigates the plight of persecuted journalists, said Shi, 37, sent an online publication the abstract note of a document sent to his newspaper by Chinese authorities "warning journalists of the dangers of social destabilization and risks linked to the return of certain dissidents on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre."
"TOP SECRET"
The Ministry of State Security reportedly told the Procuratorate the document was "top secret," and Shi was charged with “illegally providing state secrets abroad.”
Other Chinese journalists and investigators, including Christians, have faced similar charges of violating vague security laws as communist leaders struggle to maintain
control of information in the burgeoning Internet era.
Yahoo, which last month paid $1 billion for a 40 percent stake in Alibaba.com, host of the Hangzhou conference, has said it was obliged to comply with Chinese laws and regulations at a time when it fights for market share in China with rivals such as Microsoft.
Ahead of Saturday’s meeting, Human Rights in China and Reporters Without Borders urged the keynote speaker, former US President Bill Clinton, to raise the case of the jailed journalist and encourage Internet companies like Yahoo, "to implement their human rights obligations."
CLINTON DECLINES
However Clinton apparently declined to be drawn into the discussion. "The Internet, no matter what political system a country has, and our political system is different from yours, the Internet is having significant political and social consequences and they cannot be erased," he reportedly said.
"The political system’s limits on freedom of speech … have not seemed to have any adverse consequences on e-commerce," he said. "It’s something you’ll all have to watch and see your way through," AP quoted Clinton as saying.
The case is the latest instance in which a prominent high-tech company has faced accusations of cooperating with Chinese authorities to gain favor in a country that’s expected to become an Internet gold mine and the world’s most powerful economy within four decades.
Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo and two of its biggest rivals, Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN, previously have come under attack for censoring online news sites and Web logs, or blogs, featuring content that China’s communist government wants to suppress, AP reported. (With BosNewsLife Chief International Correspondent Stefan J. Bos, BosNewsLife Research and reports from China).
