amanda rivkin, photographer

Last month when I was in Washington for the Fulbright orientation, I stopped by National Geographic headquarters for a brief interview with Boyd Matson for his National Geographic Weekend radio show. While the clip is not quite yet available online, it did air yesterday on satellite radio and several AM and FM stations across America. You can have a listen here.

Previously I was a guest of the show in early 2010 to discuss my work photographing everyday life and the economic reality facing Cubans in their country after a trip there resulted in several images being published in Foreign Policy.

China is blocking Gmail in China right now in an effort to stymie internet activism against the regime (given that it is an information war, seems most appropriate to link to the Voice of America story). Last year for Foreign Policy I wrote about the experiences Xu Zhiyong, a public interest lawyer and member of the Beijing City Council representing the Haidan district, a voice of dissent who has sought to work within the system to advance the causes of human rights and civil liberties. He was arrested in August of 2009 and held incommunicado for nearly a month in Beijing. A day following the arrival of former American Ambassador Jon Huntsman, Xu Zhiyong and two other activists were released. Below is my article for Foreign Policy published under the title “Raging Against the Machine” on January 19, 2010 (free subscription required for access on Foreign Policy’s website):

Xu Zhiyong was watching the 2004 Democratic convention in a shared common area at a Columbia University dormitory when we first met. After just a few words, I knew he could understand little of the speeches on television. It is so different from China, he said. Political conventions in his home country were pageants: Officials waited their turn, sat erect in their seats, and clapped only on cue and never too wildly.

Last July, my friend was the subject of a different form of high stakes political theater when he was arrested, detained, and held incommunicado for one month. As a young and extremely enterprising attorney in Beijing, he has represented a slew of disadvantaged clients in China, from a newspaper owner beleaguered by the authorities to the victims of the contaminated baby formula sold by the Sanlu company. When he disappeared, the first news I received appeared on the New Yorker’s website in the form of a headline that questioned directly, “Where is Xu Zhiyong?”

With Google’s threats last week to withdraw from China amid suggestions that the Chinese government was behind recent cyberattacks on its corporate infrastructure that specifically targeted the email accounts of prominent Chinese human rights activists, I was reminded again of my friend. This episode sheds light on the obstacles faced by those struggling to improve civil liberties within China and the consequences of Google’s potential withdrawal from that country.

In the summer of 2004, we lived across the hall from each other at Columbia University. A few nights a week, we held impromptu English lessons to improve his conversation skills. We began by reviewing formal pleasantries, one of the first steps in English language courses for foreigners. Toward the end of our first week, I realized he had only introduced himself with an English name, Sunny, and that I knew very little about him. He typed the English spelling of his name, Xu Zhiyong, into my laptop.

He told me he was a lawyer, but he struggled to describe his work in English so he reached for Google. A few articles had already appeared on his work and career, including a profile in the New York Times covering his campaign for a seat on Beijing’s city council from the prestigious academic district of Haidian. He also worked as an advocate for China’s disenfranchised petitioners who convene in the capital on the basis of an ancient tradition that allows citizens to petition the state for redress of grievances.

While we continued our formal classes, the conversation continued on the weekends, in nearby restaurants and bars. We watched gavel-to-gavel coverage on C-SPAN of both American political conventions. I will not forget how my new friend’s eyes grew wide when Bill Clinton spoke. When Clinton finished, to raucous applause, he offered just one reflection, “Wow!”

Originally from a rural village in the impoverished interior region of Henan, Sunny moved to the largest local city, Kaifeng, with his mother and brother as a young teenager. His mother was illiterate, and, as the issues that he tackled became increasingly sensitive, he resisted telling her about his work. He was concerned that she would fear for his safety and could be harassed due to his choice of career. His brother is a regional police chief.

Over time, his roster of sensitive cases, including the Sanlu melamine baby formula milk scandal, transformed him into something of a public-interest icon. He appeared on the cover of Mr. Fashion, the Chinese equivalent of Esquire. However, as he sat in an unknown Beijing jail, his name was not searchable by Google within China.

His release from detention in August was, in many ways, a greater surprise than his arrest. But he was still forced to contend with severe restrictions on his ability to communicate freely using modern technology. My friend abandoned one tampered Gmail account for another. For some time after his release, the authorities denied him access to an email account, blocking most all methods of communication but his cell phone, which we used to talk in those first few days after his detention suddenly ended.

For several years, we have communicated by Gmail accounts, knowing perfectly well that messages may be read, intercepted, and occasionally blocked. There is also nothing better; for now, we are able to communicate. If Google vanishes from the Chinese landscape, there might be no available alternative to such communication.

Google is learning a lesson my friend did years ago: There is no easy way to take on China’s ruling apparatchiks. If Google withdraws suddenly, as it has threatened, it will be abandoning China to authorities whose claim to power must be challenged, an outcome not in the interest of Google or the Chinese people. If there is a way to triumph over the authorities in China, Xu Zhiyong’s life and work reflects the need to vigorously challenge a system that has sought to fortify itself against internal and external attacks on its own terms. In the end, Google would do well to follow his strategy: displaying deference when the alternative is to be completely shut out from the country, but also pushing back hard when it is threatened.

The Year in Pictures 2010 by Amanda Rivkin available on PhotoShelter Archive.

Images from the year include:

Gitmo USA – the prison site designated for Guantanamo Bay detainees after the prison’s closure in rural Illinois that never quite opened because the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has not yet closed.
Portrait of William Fiedler, Owner of the Gallery Bookstore, Chicago – My former boss at one of the North Side’s finest used book stores.

Injured Veteran – Portrait of Michael Jernigan, injured in Fallujah, Iraq in 2004; photographed at The Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

Baltasar Garzon – Former examining magistrate of Spain’s Criminal Court, extraordinarily controversial for execution of the practice of universal justice and far-reaching indictments of foreign leaders and terrorist organizations; photographed at the Instituto Cervantes in Chicago.

Afghan Bowling Tournament (3 images) – Afghan-American bowling tournament in Annandale, Virginia.

Cuba (8 images) – The Second Age of Castro, published on ForeignPolicy.com and The New York Times “Week in Review”.

Spectacular Slovakia (13 images) – Weddings, floods, world cup, trains, planes, castles, even nuclear power plants; images from a 40 day odyssey across Slovakia for English-language newspaper The Slovak Spectator’s annual magazine-length feature travel guide publication’s 15th edition.

Azerbaijan (3 images) – Early impressions of the oil rich land include a peak inside the women’s section of the largest Shia mosque in the Old City, a meeting with satirical blogger Emin Milli on prison leave for his father’s funeral, and a visit to a polluted beach.

An Encounter with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan – And a book gets thrown at my head in Erzurum, Turkey in the country’s conservative northeast.

Hungary’s Greatest Ecological Disaster (4 images) – the aftermath and the survivors of the October 4, 2010 industrial accident caused by a rupture in a reservoir containing toxic alumina industrial waste.

On the campaign trail with Rahm Emanuel for mayor of Chicago (4 images) – running with Rahmbo as he opens a field office in the Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side and fields questions from attorney Burt Odelson challenging his residency and therefore eligibility to run.

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Thank you Mikko and Photojournalism Links for the mention of “The Year in Pictures” in the December 19, 2010 links.

In today’s New York Times, my friend Xu Zhiyong, “a public interest lawyer whose organization has investigated black jails,” is quoted in the story the story, “China Investigates Extralegal Petitioner Detentions” by Andrew Jacobs:

“The Anyuanding affair [named after a security company which allegedly operated black jails inside of China] is so sinister and damaging, it appears that the public security authorities were left with little choice but to intervene and investigate,” Mr. Xu said.

What the article did not mention was that just over a year ago, Xu found himself disappeared when guards pulled him from his apartment early one morning in August 2009 before resurfacing in a Beijing jail where he was being held on the pretext of tax evasion charges. Earlier this year, I wrote about the experience of uncovering the news that he was missing for Foreign Policy in an article entitled “Raging Against the Machine”:

Xu Zhiyong was watching the 2004 Democratic convention in a shared common area at a Columbia University dormitory when we first met. After just a few words, I knew he could understand little of the speeches on television. It is so different from China, he said. Political conventions in his home country were pageants: Officials waited their turn, sat erect in their seats, and clapped only on cue and never too wildly.

Last July, my friend was the subject of a different form of high stakes political theater when he was arrested, detained, and held incommunicado for one month. As a young and extremely enterprising attorney in Beijing, he has represented a slew of disadvantaged clients in China, from a newspaper owner beleaguered by the authorities to the victims of the contaminated baby formula sold by the Sanlu company. When he disappeared, the first news I received appeared on the New Yorker’s website in the form of a headline that questioned directly, “Where is Xu Zhiyong?”

Since his release in August 2009, less than a month after his extralegal arrest and detention began, he was once again freed so he could be free to be arrested again – as was the case recently at a demonstration in Beijing:

One reason Beijing is so nervous about demonstrations is that based on past experience, “troublemakers” often take advantage of such rare occasions to air grievances regarding nondiplomatic issues, especially corruption within party and government departments. That explains why at least nine activists, according to the watchdog Chinese Human Rights Defenders, were detained or warned not to participate in the rallies in Beijing and Guangzhou. Among them were Xu Zhiyong, a lecturer at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and Teng Biao, a lawyer. Xu and Teng are well-known NGO activists who have stood up for victims of official corruption.
- “Is China Afraid of Its Own People?” by Willy Lam, Foreign Policy
September 28, 2010

Entry Title: ” Cuba: Semper Fidel”
Name: Amanda Rivkin, United States

Entry Description: Twenty-one years after official Washington declared communism dead with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unraveling of the Soviet Union, life in Fidel and Raúl Castro’s socialized Cuba chugs along, fifty-one years after Fidel first took power in the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Cuba’s current situation is not without economic and social absurdity however as Cubans receive rationed fruits, vegetables, legumes, meat and bread with government-issued ration cards at subsidized prices but must fend for themselves in most other respects, including clothing and with the notable exception of health care and medicine. Two currencies, the Cuban national peso is used to pay for many basic goods and services, but is challenged by the dominance of the Cuban convertible peso, are in wide circulation.

About the Artist:
Amanda Rivkin, 24, is a photojournalist currently based in her hometown, Chicago. She has photographed for Agence France Presse/Getty Images, Der Spiegel, The New York Times, Newsweek, among others. Her work has appeared on the front pages of Le Monde, The New York Times, and The Washington Post and in such international publications as The Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and The London Sunday Times Magazine. Since early 2008, Amanda has been based in Chicago. She has covered Illinois and national politics including Barack Obama’s election night victory, transition to the presidency, and historic inauguration, the corruption scandal surrounding Rod Blagojevich and his final day in the Illinois governor’s office where she was the sole photographer to shadow him for The New York Times. Amanda produced several features surrounding the financial crisis and its impact on the midwestern United States as well as spot news, features, and personal projects on a range of topics including public housing, education, and immigration. Additionally she has received support and funding to pursue stories and other reporting opportunities in Ethiopia, Germany, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Spain and the United States. She speaks fluent Spanish, Portuguese and Polish. Amanda previously worked as a writer and researcher for news media, policy, diplomatic, and cultural organizations and is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York. Amanda will relocate to Washington, D.C. in August 2009 to complete a one year master’s degree in terrorism and sub-state violence in the security studies program at the Georgetown University Edmund Walsh Graduate School of Foreign Service.

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press

"The Second Age of Castro" in Foreign Policy on April 9, 2010

“The Second Age of Castro” in Foreign Policy on April 9, 2010

National Geographic Weekend Radio Program with Boyd Matson (Airdate: May 1, 2010)
“Photographer and National Geographic Young Explorer Grantee Amanda Rivkin recently returned from Cuba. Rivkin joins Boyd to talk about her work documenting everyday life in Cuba.”