AP, Nov 20, 2010, 05.58am IST
BEIJING: China has sentenced a woman to a year in a labor camp for "disrupting social order" by retweeting a satirical message urging Chinese protesters to smash the Japan pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, an international rights group said.
Cheng Jianping, 46, reposted a message from the social networking site Twitter last month hinting that Chinese protesters should smash the Japan pavilion at the Shanghai Expo and adding on the message "Angry youth, charge!" according to Amnesty International, which condemned the sentence in a statement.
Amnesty and Cheng's fiance said her retweet was meant as satire, mocking anti-Japanese protesters who had grown in number since tensions between the countries increased after a dispute erupted in September over islands claimed by both Japan and China.
"Sentencing someone to a year in a labor camp, without trial, for simply repeating another person's clearly satirical observation on Twitter demonstrates the level of China's repression of online expression," Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific director Sam Zarifi said in a statement.
Cheng's fiance, Hua Chunhui, said he thought the government reacted the way it did to the tweet was because they are activists. He said he posted the original tweet because he was mad at all the anti-Japanese protests.
Twitter is blocked in China, but some human rights activists use it by bypassing government controls . Hua said his fiance arrived at a labor re-education center in central China's Henan province on Wednesday evening. He said he is not allowed to visit her.
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