The video below is the subject of some controversy. It appears to show Chinese police beating Tibetan prisoners during last year’s protests. The Chinese government claims the video is a fake, and shut down access to YouTube for some time last week in order to prevent access to the tape. The tape has now been removed by YouTube, presumably at the behest of the ChiCom government, which means Google is complicit in the crimes of an authoritarian regime in exchange for the chance to make an extra buck. The beating starts at about 3 minutes in. Indispensable China blogger Tim Johnson has the background here. And James Fallows will presumably have nothing to say on this because he “decline[s] to be drawn into the exhausting and irreconcilable historiographical controversies on this topic and will post no further retorts or elaborations on it.” Perhaps Fallows can provide us with the Party’s perspective on all this at his convenience. Update: Ben Smith does the legwork and finds the video is still available on YouTube. So my apologies to the folks at Google who, unlike James Fallows, are apparently willing to stand up to the Red Chinese.
HT: Josh Rogin
