Chinese College Student Arrested for Tweet Urging Dissemination of Information on Tiananmen

June 17, 2014 by admin

On June 9th news broke that a 22-year-old sophomore at Beijing International Studies University named Zhao Huaxu had been arrested by Chinese authorities.

According to Chinese state-run media she had posted an article on Twitter that described how to use a pseudo base station “to send illegal information.” The actual tweet detailed a plan to use pseudo base stations to spread “knowledge about June 4th and message to 2G cell phone users in certain areas to promote a ‘Return to Tiananmen’ campaign.” According to an article on Chinachange.org, which details the incident, a pseudo base station “is a security flaw of the GSM, or Global System for Mobile Communications, where a base station will verify a user, but the end user will not verify the base station. In other words, as long as you can send radio signals similar to that of a GSM base station, you can connect GSM cell phones in your vicinity with your pseudo base station, and you can send text messages to these cell phones.” By taking advantage of this security flaw, a group of dedicated individuals could theoretically punch a hole in China’s sophisticated information wall, allowing unwelcome facts such as the truth about the Tiananmen Square Massacre to leak through.

The mention of the incident in a state-run media article, which noted that a task force had immediately been assembled to discover the culprit, was probably intended to serve as a message to others with similar ideas. This warning coupled with the swift arrest of Ms. Zhao demonstrates the degree to which the CCP feels threatened by even the hint of any kind of popular movement. As the government continues to severely restrict the use of pseudo base stations and suppress free communication, it fails to address the root causes of the mass dissatisfaction that it increasingly fears. No matter how tightly the CCP closes its fist, it remains a corrupt, oppressive regime that serves its own interests, not those of its citizens and as long as that is the case, the threat of unrest remains.