WSJ Opinion Asia: Attempts to silence critics extend beyond the mainland’s borders.
Google’s recent travails have drawn much-needed attention to the threat of Chinese cyber attacks on corporations. But there’s another war being fought against a less publicized target: China’s online human-rights activists.
Only two days after Hillary Clinton’s January 21 speech supporting Internet freedom, five Chinese human-rights groups’ Web sites, most of which have foreign-based servers, were paralyzed for up to 16 hours by denial-of-service attacks.
It’s impossible to pinpoint exactly where the attacks on the weekend of January 23 to 24 originated, but the groups’ sites have been attacked before, usually at sensitive times such as the 20-year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre last June and China’s 60th anniversary in October. For about the last three years, human-rights sites have not been able to operate from within China’s censored borders.