Thanks (yet again) to Esra’a Ahmed, the director of the Free Kareem Coalition, this website has been written up in The Daily Star (Egypt), sadly one of that country’s few independent voices. The paper is distributed by the International Herald Tribune, so the story is certain to see some daylight. Here’s a sample:

“It was from watching the success of freekareem.org that we began to think that we could make a difference here in China. I contacted some friends who knew the people behind Freekareem.org and they seemed to understand at once how important our project in China was,” the New Youth 4 Coordinator who asked to remain anonymous told The Daily Star Egypt in an email interview.

Esra’a Ahmed, director of the Free Kareem Coalition told The Daily Star Egypt that the right to free speech is an “incredibly important cause to fight for,” leading her team to help set up the New Youth 4 only days after receiving the request.

Furthermore, Ahmed emphasized the importance of networking between activist communities in different parts of the world.

“Networking is extremely powerful. Today these Chinese activists need our help, tomorrow we might need theirs. We help each other and that will strengthen our campaigns and hopefully help us achieve our goals,” she said.

Both Egypt and China have come under strong criticism from rights groups for alleged web censorship and crackdowns on the countries’ so-called “cyber dissidents.”

Also a big word of thanks to Richard at the incomparable Peking Duck blog for his post on our project. His blog is consistently one of the most engaging of the English-language China blogs. In the next day or so I’d like to comment on Richard’s closing thought on the relative futility of our effort. I understand his point, but as one would probably imagine, I hold a different opinion.

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While our policy is to only post about the New Youth 4 case or issues directly related to it, exceptions will be made when we feel it will help people to better understand the power structure in China.

It’s easy to look at China and see a country ruled by a strong, centralized government controlled by the Communist party. While in one sense this is a descriptive statement, it really only has coherence in regards to China’s foreign policy. Domestically, local governments have as much, if not more power than Beijing, and many local companies with connections to key government officials have more power than local governments. A recent article by the New York Times business correspondent David Barboza is illuminating:

AS an American journalist based in China, I knew there was a good chance that at some point I’d be detained for pursuing a story. I just never thought I’d be held hostage by a toy factory.

That’s what happened last Monday, when for nine hours I was held, along with a translator and a photographer, by the suppliers of the popular Thomas & Friends toy rail sets.

“You’ve intruded on our property,” one factory boss shouted at me. “Tell me, what exactly is the purpose of this visit?” When I answered that I had come to meet the maker of a toy that had recently been recalled in the United States because it contained lead paint, he suggested I was really a commercial spy intent on stealing the secrets to the factory’s toy manufacturing process.

“How do I know you’re really from The New York Times?” he said. “Anyone can fake a name card.”

Thus began our interrogation, which was followed by hours of negotiations, the partial closing of the factory complex and the arrival of several police cars, a handful of helmet-wearing security officers and some government officials, all trying to free an American journalist and his colleagues from a toy factory.

Factory bosses, I would discover, can overrule the police, and Chinese government officials are not as powerful as you might suspect in a country addicted to foreign investment.

Now, it becomes obvious that local factory bosses are in fact a de facto branch of the local government (or perhaps the other way around). Journalists who try to investigate local power abuses are threatened more from local officials than they are from Beijing. While the New Youth 4 ran afoul of the government in China’s capital, scores of other would-be reformers and journalists require protection from city and provincial governments.

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In creating New Youth 4, we’ve been able to work with some amazing and tireless people, especially Esra’a from Mideast Youth fame and the star web designer Jina.

Esra’a has written a post over at Mideast Youth on their outstanding efforts to help with with the project, and it can be truly said that without their help, this wouldn’t have been completed. In addition to their heroic work promoting reform and progress in the Middle East, they’ve now become friends with those of us in China working for free speech.

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Welcome to Newyouth4.org. This website was created in the hopes of bringing awareness to the current imprisonment of Jin Haike ((靳海科), Xu Wei (徐伟), Yang Zili (杨子立) and Zhang Honghai (张宏海) for the crime of “subverting state power.”

We hope this website forms a clearinghouse for information on the case and a community in which individuals from around the world who are concerned about this case can interact. For now, the right-hand side of the website is purely informational and we’ve tried to collect as much information as we can about the case.

In the future, we hope to add more features. If you have any comments or suggestions, please contact us at newyouth4@hushmail.com. If you come across any news clips or blog posts about the case, please pass them along.

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