To manage the fund, Yahoo partnered with Harry Wu—a noted Chinese dissident turned powerful anti-China activist—and his nonprofit, the Laogai Research Foundation. But Wu grossly mismanaged YHRF, spending less than $650,000—or 4%—of the fund’s total $17.3 million on support for online dissidents, according to the current lawsuit. One year, YHRF allegedly spent $0 on what was meant to be its primary purpose. (Some defendants contest these calculations.)
Wu was born into an affluent family in Shanghai; his father was a banking official and his mother had descended from a family of well-to-do landlords.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Wu
edit: Also an accused paedophile:
In March 2015, a Virginia woman named Wang Jing publicly accused Wu of sexually assaulting her and three underage girls, the daughters of Chinese dissidents who were under her guardianship, in late 2013. Wu denied the accusation. Wang filed a lawsuit against Wu with the Fairfax County Circuit Court, and the case was scheduled to go on trial in January 2017.[
Yup, that sounds like run of the mill Chinese dissident alright.
Who could have thought that the deranged right wingers who froth at the mouth about China were deranged right wingers the whole time!
Of course he’s from Shanghai
I lived in Shanghai for many years and I just want to add that while there’s more than a few of these Gusanos floating around, the majority of the people are pretty cool and many of them are very patriotic.
Is this because Shanghai is often viewed as a technologically advanced yet morally depraved equivalent to Las Vegas, in China?
I hope that I’m able to move to Shanghai one day.
Shanghai was a primary “treaty city” meaning it was EXTREMELY heavily influenced by the western world and liberal ideology for nearly 2 centuries.
Its also a financial capital, meaning its full of bankers, investment moguls, and the ultra rich.
Yeah, I get all of that. From what I’m seeing though, it hopefully looks to be shedding that reputation piece by piece.
Not really in all honesty, China needs a financial capital for the time being, and Shanghai has worked perfectly for that. Little changed has happened there, and it is a major international hub, so the influence persists.
Hopefully in the near future.
Think of it more as the NYC of China. You’ll know when someone is from there because they’ll tell you in the first five minutes of meeting them.
I’ve often seen and made the comparison myself that Shanghai is the “NYC of the East”, with a bit of Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Singapore and Texas built-in.
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Not bad.
Critical support to corrupt “dissidents” for scamming anti-China westerners out of millions of dollars?
I’m willing to guess. He pocketed the money. Excuse me, I mean… gifted it. (To himself).
love it when leopards eat whitey’s face
Did he name his organisation after the prison system, or after the place in The Last Airbender? If he’s trying to squeeze money out of libs, it could honestly be either of them.
The Last Airbender was kind of based in certain aspects, but the Legend of Korra become the Harry Potter equivalent.
I could write a damn thesis on everything wrong with the ATLA comics and LOTR. Lake Laogai aside, the original series was pretty good, though. Except the “we shouldn’t kill fascists” stuff at the end 🙄
I read some of the first ATLA comics, and some of the stuff I thought was wack, but I can’t remember what stuck out to me.
While Ozai deserved to be in the ground, I felt like him being in prison makes sense.
Yeah capturing him alive was definitely preferable. You wanna avoid rolling heads whenever possible although at times it can seem enticing. What I found odd was the deep turmoil in Aang over the prospect of killing Ozai. It is consistent with the character but I wouldn’t have worried about it personally.
Within the story’s ontology (as with most stories involving monarchies sadly), Ozai is not only the king by law but also a very poweful bender and his legitimacy as the king is derived from his talent. So taking away his bending is more effective than in a real world so to speak.
Yeah, Aang’s reluctance to kill Ozai is kind of comical. It makes sense in the story, and you have very good points about Ozai suffering psychologically and socially after being stripped of his power and imprisoned rather than killed and martyred, though.
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What was wrong with the comics? They figured out the magical solution to colonialism: Just let bygones be bygones and abandon all that silly “landback” nonsense!
Truly, genius praxis.
Man, I want to love Korra so much, because I liked ATLA a lot as a kid. The villain in the first season was such a badass. Same with season 3. But the writers really just fucking libbed out
I’m sure that Yahoo and the people who read this article won’t attribute this to all Chinese people to being inherently untrustworthy and greedy, right?
Right?
I mean Yahoo doesn’t care, they were just laundering money for the CIA, and the CIA promised him he could eat that money.
Does Yahoo crawl lemmygrad? I wonder if now is a good time to advertise an exciting new project: Lemmygrad Counter-China Services Inc, accepting donations now.
🤣
damn solid grift
should do this but pay chen weihua all da money
This is the best summary I could come up with:
While the lawsuit is largely focused on what happened in the past, the plaintiffs are also concerned about the future of people like them; they’re asking the court to force Yahoo to set up a new humanitarian fund with the same general purpose as YHRF, but made explicit and ironclad: to provide financial support specifically for Chinese dissidents imprisoned for online speech.
And the publicly known violations grossly underrepresent the true situation, according to Yaqiu Wang, Freedom House’s research director for China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, given the increasing opacity of the country’s court system and the high levels of self-censorship there.
In July, for instance, a judge in California ruled that a long-running lawsuit against Cisco can move forward and determine the company’s responsibility in building China’s internet surveillance apparatus—work that allegedly led to the arrest, detention, and torture of the plaintiffs and their family members.
At a congressional hearing in 2007, Representative Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, memorably scolded Yahoo’s founder, Jerry Yang (then serving as interim CEO), along with the company’s general counsel, Michael Callahan: “While financially and technologically you are giants, morally you are pygmies.”
To resolve the mounting crisis and to settle a highly publicized lawsuit brought by Shi Tao’s mother and Wang Xiaoning’s wife, the company promised to conduct human rights impact assessments before entering international markets and to fund internet freedom fellowships at Georgetown and Stanford Universities, among other actions.
They detailed the “gross irregularities” they had experienced when they requested money from YHRF and said the fund’s cash “has been abused, misused, and even embezzled.” That fact, they wrote, “is not only shocking, but inflicts direct damage on the Chinese dissident community.” This led to separate investigations by Foreign Policy and the New York Times, which ultimately brought more attention to the failures of Wu and of Yahoo to make good on their promises.
The original article contains 4,442 words, the summary contains 316 words. Saved 93%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
