2y ago

Yahoo gave $17 million to a Chinese dissident for human rights work. You'll never guess what happened next.

www.technologyreview.com

Inside the decades-long fight over Yahoo’s misdeeds in China

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.)

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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.
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 🙄
  
  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.
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