NEWSEAST ASIA

Background:

Tomorrow, December 1st, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be the first American Secretary of State to visit the Southeast Asian nation of Burma in 50 years. Her visit is a way for the United States to assess the sincerity of the Burmese military regime’s commitment to human rights and democracy -- including democratic elections and the release of Nobel Peace Laureate and pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi.

However, human rights activists want to be sure that Secretary Clinton will properly take advantage of this incredible opportunity and address the human rights violations that Burma is so widely known for.  Specifically, a Buddhist monk and Burmese political refugee named U Pyinya Zawta launched a campaign on Change.org calling on Secretary Clinton to push publicly for the unconditional release of all of Burma's political prisoners, including the venerable U Gambira, insist on an end to hostilities in Burma, and insist on changes to the 2008 flawed constitution.

Internationally renowned Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei was released from a Beijing prison late Wednesday night.

The news comes after more than 140,000 people in 175 countries joined an unprecedented Change.org campaign by leading global art institutions - including the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, London’s Tate Modern and the Association of Art Museum Directors - calling for the artist’s immediate release.

“This campaign has been quite a ride: in less than three months leading global art institutions and artists from all over the world came together to recruit more than 140,000 supporters in 175 countries,” said Ben Rattray, the founder of Change.org. “Their remarkable success led foreign hackers to launch a highly sophisticated cyber-attack on Change.org designed to prevent people around the world from simply voicing their opinion. But despite the challenges, Change.org is about empowering anyone, anywhere to call for action on the issues that matter to them, and it has been an honor to provide a platform for this inspiring campaign.”

The Situation
Sandblasting, which gives jeans a 'worn' or used look, is known to kill workers in garments producing countries like Turkey and Bangladesh where jeans sandblasting is done manually.

When workers fire sand under high pressure at jeans, dust then enters the environment, exposing workers to silica, which causes silicosis in the lungs. Eventually, workers die because they cannot breathe properly anymore.

The Solution
Versace needs to follow in the footsteps of other brands including Levi's, H&M, C&A and Gucci and publicly ban sandblasting from their supply chain.

In May, Vietnamese authorities responded to a land rights protest by the Hmong minority group in northern Vietnam with a harsh crack down. They detained over 100 people, and hundreds more have been reported in hiding.

In response, Bruce Thao launched a petition calling on the US State Depart to speak out about this human rights violation, successfully mobilizing first hundreds and then thousands of people to speak up for the Hmong.

I asked him a few questions to help get a better picture of the situation, and it became clear that this recent crack down is just the most recent incident in a multi-generational pattern of persecution. He told me, “My parents are Hmong refugees who fled Laos during the Vietnam War. They've endured war, migration, and refugee camps. I have also worked with Hmong in Thailand and have seen first hand the level of discrimination and high levels of poverty the Hmong live in in Southeast Asia as a result of being ethnic minorities, and particularly given our alignment with the United States during the Vietnam War. I can never turn my back on my people."

After the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Masaya Uchino - a law student in San Francisco - and his parents waited 12 hours to find out if our family and friends in Tokyo were alright. While waiting, he donated some money by texting the Red Cross with hopes that it would help the millions of other affected by the horrible tragedy.

The following Monday he found out that his donation wouldn’t actually reach Japan for somewhere between 30 and 90 days. So he started a petition asking the mobile phone companies to process donations for Japan in the same way they did for Haiti – so the money would get there straight away.

As the petition climbed toward 50,000 signatures, California Senator Barbara Boxer took note and wrote to the CEOs of the major mobile carriers echoing Masaya’s petition.

At the end of last week, California Senator Barbara Boxer joined the call for mobile phone companies to expedite donations to Japan in the same way the did for Haiti.

With her support, news organizations in San Francisco realized this was a real story, and Masaya Uchino – the law student who created the petition just a week ago – found himself doing interviews with his local news stations as to why expediting donations is such a big deal.

He did a terrific job emphasizing the importance of his petition to a large number of people around the Bay Area, and also had the added benefit of having the news crews calling mobile phone companies to find out why they are treating this emergency differently.

Text-to-give programs have proven a powerful way to collect donations, with the American Red Cross reporting that they raised $32 million from mobile phone donations to help relief efforts in Haiti last year. The effort catapulted mobile phone giving into the mainstream – it was even hailed as a turning point for mobile business more broadly.

But the way donations worked for Haiti is not the way they operate now. For Haiti, mobile carriers passed a donation along to relief organizations as soon as you texted. For Japan, they are waiting until your next billing cycle to pass along the donation.

It’s because of this switch in policy that Change.org member Masaya Uchino created a massively successful petition asking cell phone companies to follow the same policy for Japan as they did for Haiti. He said:

When you text on your cell phone to donate to a charity or NGO, the process works in a peculiar way.

First, the mobile phone company registers that you’ve made a donation and adds that amount to your next bill. Then after you pay the bill, your phone company will transfer the money to a non-profit like mGive, which has partnered with mobile phone carriers to certify charity organizations doing mobile donations. Then mGive transfers your donation to the charity you had specified with your original message. At this point as many as 90 days may have passed.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. As the mGive Foundation notes; “In response to the Haiti Relief Effort, carriers are remitting  donations immediately to nonprofit organizations. “

So why aren’t they doing that for Japan?

Masaya Uchino, a Japanese-American law student in San Francisco, has started a petition asking mGive, Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint to sort it out.

“When I first head about the earthquake I was in total shock.  I called my parents to see if they heard anything from our family. That was about 11:30 at night, and we didn’t hear back that they were all ok until around noon the next day.”

Twitter: the social network that has launched mini-revolutions, exposed corruption and brought down hundreds of politicians.

A bastion of democratic, online communication in 140 characters, Twitter is used by activists, organizers and dissidents everywhere from Britian, Canada and the US to Iran, Sudan and North Korea.  The microblogging site has played a major role in revolts, riots and resistance over the past two years, from the green revolution in Iran to the riots in Tunisia over the weekend.

But after a Chinese woman was arrested for a sarcastic tweet about anti-Japanese protests in China, for more than six weeks Twitter Inc. has not 140, not 130, not even 10 words to say about it.

Nothing.

As a writer for a blog on human rights, one doesn't wake up in the morning thinking the topic of the day will be a party in which 10,000 river crabs are served.

But we all wake up to surprises.

In Shanghai, this weekend's surprise came when thousands of chi-chi partygoers had to cancel their plans after the authorities decided to place Ai Weiwei, a highly influential 53-year-old Chinese artist planning a big shindig, under house arrest.

Had Ai Weiwei revealed documentation on China's execution of more people per year than all other countries combined? Had he exposed corruption at the highest levels of the communist party? Had he issued a provocative treatise on the lack of freedom of movement, press or religion?

No. Ai Weiwei had planned a party, a damn big one, as an ironic celebration of the decision by the authorities to demolish his Shanghai studio two years after he was invited by a senior Shanghai official to build it as part of a new cultural district.