The BBC has received reports that World Service English shortwave frequencies are being jammed in China. Though it is not possible at this stage to attribute the source of the jamming definitively, the extensive and co-ordinated efforts are indicative of a well-resourced country such as China.

[…] Director of BBC Global News, Peter Horrocks says: “The jamming of shortwave transmissions is being timed to cause maximum disruption to BBC World Service English broadcasts in China. The deliberate and co-ordinated efforts by authorities in countries such as China and Iran illustrate the significance and importance of the role the BBC undertakes to provide impartial and accurate information to audiences around the world.”

“The Chinese government has for years jammed VOA and Radio Free Asia Chinese and Tibetan language programs and blocked VOA vernacular language websites,” said VOA Director David Ensor, “but English language programs have historically not been blocked.”

[…] Monitors say the interference affects about 75% of the English language transmissions to China and is similar to the type of jamming aimed at VOA Horn of Africa broadcasts, which are targeted by equipment installed by China in Ethiopia.

According to the BBC’s Jo Floto, the current block “started at the end of last year and has intensified this month.” The slightly anachronistic air to the news has puzzled some, not least China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which declined to comment. Other observers expressed similar bewilderment. From Jonathan Kaiman at The Guardian:

“I don’t understand this situation,” foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said at a daily press briefing on Tuesday, when asked to comment on the allegations. She said reporters should contact “relevant departments” for further information, but did not specify which departments or how to contact them.

[…] Some analysts were confused by the timing of the BBC’s announcement. “This for me is very weird – it’s almost like 1990s,” said Michael Anti, a prominent media commentator in Beijing.

He said that in China people associate the BBC with its television dramas and Chinese-language news website, which is blocked but can be accessed using software to bypass internet censors.

“I doubt there is anyone listening to the BBC English radio in China,” he added.

At The Washington Post, Max Fisher suggested that the jamming might be retaliation for the BBC’s coverage of a recent report on alleged hackers in the Chinese military:

It’s hard to pinpoint the rationale behind the blocking, and not just because the Chinese government does not of course claim responsibility. But we have a pretty good hint in this story from last week, when members of the Chinese military detained some BBC journalists who were trying to film outside the Shanghai complex where China’s elite military hacker team is thought to work. The BBC journalists were held inside the building until they surrendered their footage, which sounds as it were mostly just banal exterior shots.

The incident, and now China’s possibly related move to block BBC broadcasts, are a sign of how serious the Chinese government is about keeping prying eyes away from the suspected military hackers.

VOA’s statement points in a different direction, however, noting that the interference is particularly intense in Tibet and along the Indian border. As self-immolations continue, Chinese authorities have fought to stem the flow of information into and out of Tibet, and state media have accused VOA broadcasts of fueling the protests by glorifying self-immolators. Officials have reportedly ordered the confiscation of TVs and dismantling of satellite dishes, but portable radios are easier to conceal, perhaps making jamming a more practical option.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BBC, censorship, Michael Anti, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, radio, self-immolations, Tibet, Voice of America
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

… The collective global attention paid to the world’s number-two economy has increased drastically in the media and within policy circles. Call it the “post-Olympics effect.” The triumphalism of the 2008 Beijing Games and the ensuing collapse of the global economy dramatically altered the extent and scope to which the world focused on China. Just a little over three years later, a “China story” is bound to splash across the front page of major U.S. papers week after week. The breadth and detail of coverage have increased significantly too. Many more Americans now likely know that there’s a gargantuan Chinese city called Chongqing and that its leader is in serious trouble. And many more will have heard of Vice President Xi Jinping. In 2002, how many people knew who Hu Jintao was or what a politburo standing committee was?

It is a given that this level of attention will persist. What is not clear is how China will ultimately adapt. While it’s theoretically positive for American public knowledge about China to grow, for Beijing, such endless attention is highly uncomfortable and unwelcome. What’s more, some of that attention carries the expectation that China should behave more like a top-two power. Even before the recent slew of political and human rights troubles, Beijing spurned the idea that it must play a more expansive global role, especially if that meant big distractions from the home front. In light of recent events, China may have had a point: The image it has projected lately is not of a country that is strutting onto the world stage confidently and unencumbered.

Two important components of China’s soft power plan are its network of Confucius Institutes—see The China Beat for two posts on the University of Kentucky’s—and its overseas expansion of state media organisations. The Guardian reported on Monday that China Daily is soon to launch an African edition:

The African operation of the state-run China Daily will generate a range of Africa-specific content. It is to be based in Johannesburg, South Africa, with another office pencilled in for Nairobi, Kenya, reports said.

The aim is to promote China’s interests in Africa, particularly mineral exploitation and easy immigration policies, and to counter what is seen in some countries as a negative reputation, a source said. “This is a massive thing,” the source said. “China sees Africa as the ultimate source of the minerals it needs for economic growth ….”

It is not clear how widely China Daily’s African edition will be published or who its target readership is. “I don’t think that is the priority now,” the source added. “This is a symbolic move. They are working it out as they go along ….”

Although the paper is state-owned, Gao said the paper had an independent editorial policy and its editorial board members were not government officials. “We do run reports criticising government and suggesting measures on how it should improve.”

While commentary on China’s soft power drive and global image tends to be unfavourable, a BBC World Service survey [PDF] suggested that Beijing’s efforts may in fact be bearing fruit. Responses from 22 countries suggested that positive views of China have jumped over the past twelve months, continuing the trend of the two previous years. Favourable impressions of China are spreading faster than those of any other country, and at the current rate will overtake those of the UK, Canada and Germany to take second place behind Japan next year. The survey finds China, like the US, to be relatively polarising, but shows negative impressions dropping as sharply as positive views are rising.

The poll … finds that views of China have improved significantly over the last year, in both the developing and industrialised world, and that the country has now overtaken both the EU and the US ….

Germany, the most positively regarded nation last year, has seen its positive ratings drop from 60 to 56 per cent. This puts Germany in second place behind Japan, which is now rated most positively—by 58 per cent on average, up two points from last year. Canada (rated positively by 53%) and the UK (by 51%) are the third and fourth most positively viewed countries.

Positive views of China rose from 46 to 50 per cent on average. They jumped particularly sharply in the UK (up 19 points), as well as in Australia, Canada, and Germany (all up 18 points). These gains follow modest rises between 2010 and 2011.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Beijing Olympics, Africa, BBC, Bo Xilai, Canada, Chen Guangcheng, China Daily, confucius institute, EU, Germany, Hu Jintao, Japan, kenya, soft power, South Africa, U.K., United States, Xi Jinping
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Chen’s call came into the iPhone of friend and fellow activist Bob Fu during the middle of the hearing of the Congressional Executive Commission on China (CECC), chaired by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ). Fu and Smith ran out of the hearing room to take the call and returned minutes later to put Chen on speakerphone so that he could address the audience.

“I want to make the request to have my freedom of travel guaranteed,” Chen said in Chinese, with Fu translating.

Chen said he wants to come to the United States for a period of rest because he has not had any rest in 10 years.

“I want to meet with Secretary Clinton,” Chen said. “I also want to thank her face to face.”

According to the terms of his departure from the US embassy in Beijing on Wednesday, Chen was to be allowed to remain with his family in China, where he would study law at a university of his choice, away from his former captors in Shandong, at the expense of the Chinese government and under the watchful gaze of the US. But once outside the shelter of the embassy, he decided that this would be impossible. From The Washington Post:

Blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng on Thursday began a second night isolated in a central Beijing hospital, as police and security guards barred U.S. diplomats, journalists and Chen supporters from seeing him, and as the activist told various news outlets that he now wants to leave China with his family for asylum in the United States.

In an interview early Friday with The Washington Post, Chen clarified that he wants to go to the United States only temporarily and insists on the freedom to return to China. He said he left the U.S. Embassy on Wednesday of his own free will, but he charged that the Chinese government is reneging on promises to U.S. officials to fully restore his freedom.

“The U.S. Embassy helped me a lot,” Chen said. “But I don’t think the Chinese side is obeying the agreement well.”

U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke said Thursday that “it’s apparent now that he’s had a change of heart” and wants to go to the United States. Chen had previously insisted that he wanted to remain in China, U.S. officials said. In an interview broadcast on CNN, Locke said U.S. diplomats spoke twice with Chen by telephone Thursday and met in person with his wife, Yuan Weijing. He said the United States was now assessing how best to assist Chen.

See also a video interview with Chen from Reuters, via The Guardian, and Louisa Lim’s report for NPR.

Chen’s tone towards the US has softened since a series of telephone interviews on Wednesday, for example with CNN’s Steven Jiang:

Q: U.S. officials said you looked optimistic when you walked out of the embassy, what happened?

A: At the time I didn’t have a lot of information. I wasn’t allowed to call my friends from inside the embassy. I couldn’t keep up with news so I didn’t know a lot of things that were happening.

Q: What prompted your change of heart?

A: The embassy kept lobbying me to leave and promised to have people stay with me in the hospital. But this afternoon as soon as I checked into the hospital room, I noticed they were all gone ….

Q: Do you feel you were lied to by the embassy?

A: I feel a little like that.

Q: What has this ordeal taught you?

A: I feel everyone focuses too much on their self-interest at the expense of their credibility.

The earlier sense of betrayal may have been in part a product of Chen’s exhausted and emotionally strained state, evident in another interview with Newsweek’s Melinda Liu. Liu described his family’s isolation in the heavily guarded hospital, their difficulty in obtaining food, and the psychological toll that recent events had clearly taken:

I’ve known Chen Guangcheng for more than a decade—he’s been through intimidation, beatings, jail, and extralegal house arrest—but through it all I never sensed he was scared. Now he’s scared. Chen, whose case has escalated into a bilateral crisis that threatens to dominate Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Beijing this week, was weeping as he talked to me over the phone from his hospital bed.

Speaking to Liu, Chen appeared to contradict his earlier statement—stringently denied by US officials—that he had been told his wife would be beaten to death if he did not leave the embassy. But as others including Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth agreed, there was a clear implicit threat in the fact that she would otherwise be sent back to Shandong. From The Daily Beast, again:

He told me there was no explicit threat that she would be submitted to physical violence, “but nobody had to say it, I know what we’ve experienced all these years back in Shandong. Our home was surrounded by guards, lots of guards. Our friends weren’t allowed to visit. If we tried to go out we’d be beaten, often with clubs.” Security personnel had even escorted his young daughter to and from school; Chen and his wife hadn’t seen their son for two years before their reunion at the hospital.

While Chen had hoped to continue his activism in China, overriding concern for his newly reunited family spurred his decision to try to leave. From Alexa Oleson at The Associated Press:

Chen Guangcheng’s sudden change of heart to leave China after insisting for days he wanted to stay has caught his American supporters off guard. But his reason was simple: His family’s safety came first.

Reliant on relatives to be his eyes on the world, Chen and his family share a bond strengthened by years of enforced isolation and a shared fight against vengeful local officials. His son was taken from him two years ago. His daughter has been harassed, his wife beaten, his mother followed by guards as she tilled their fields ….

Photos of the reunion released Thursday by the U.S. show Chen in a wheelchair in a bright hospital hallway smiling warmly as he greeted his wife and two children. His 6-year-old daughter, Kesi, wore pigtails and his son of about 10, Kerui, was dressed in a T-shirt and sweat pants. In a second shot, Kerui rested a tentative hand on his father’s wheelchair.

The moment marked the first time in two years that the boy had seen his father, diplomats said.

Chen’s immediate family are not the only ones at risk, however, as lawyer Teng Biao rather forcefully pointed out in a recorded phone conversation. From Kenneth Tan’s translated transcript at Shanghaiist:

Teng Biao: I heard one of the guards watching over you was detained, the one that helped you escape. Is this true?

Chen Guangcheng: Nobody helped me escape. I escaped by myself.

TB: Have you heard about Pearl [Nanjing activist who helped Chen escape]?

CGC: No, but I heard she has disappeared.

TB: Yes, she has disappeared. Guo Yushan has also been released but he’s also in danger. Without a doubt, they are going to sort all you guys out later. They also promised in [1989] they would not punish anyone, but look what happened next – how many people did they shoot?

According to unconfirmed reports online, Pearl, or He Peirong, was back home but under house arrest on Wednesday; her car, covered with dust, was apparently found abandoned in her home city of Nanjing. In an ominous sign of further reprisals against Chen’s friends and supporters, Zeng Jinyan was also placed under house arrest on Thursday:

Activist Zeng Jinyan was taking her young daughter to school on Thursday morning when public security agents who had been following her in a black car informed her she wouldn’t be allowed to leave her home, she said in a post on her Twitter account.

“We will do our utmost to see to it that your daughter is picked up and dropped off and do our utmost to see to your daily needs. You can’t go out for these next few days,” she quoted the agents as saying.

Ms. Zeng had been among the first to cast doubt on the deal for Mr. Chen’s release the previous night, saying on Twitter that Mr. Chen and his wife had told her Mr. Chen was willing to leave China with his family but left the embassy out of fear for his family’s safety. Ms. Zeng wasn’t answering her phone Thursday afternoon.

Teng Biao has also cut off contact with the media. But journalists faced other problems as the authorities celebrated World Press Freedom Day in their own distinctive way. The BBC’s global news head Peter Horrocks complained that its own report on the obstruction of reporters was blocked:

Horrocks said the BBC was targeted over its coverage of Guangcheng, the blind Chinese activist who escaped house arrest and fled to the US embassy in Beijing.

“Today is World Press Freedom Day and during recent days we have learnt that BBC World News, our 24/7 international news channel, has been jammed by Chinese authorities during stories they regard as sensitive,” said Horrocks in a blogpost on the BBC’s website.

“This deliberate electronic interference of the channel’s distribution signal is just the latest in a long line of examples to block our impartial news and prevent it reaching audiences.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists provides more information on the obstruction of reporters on the case:

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China circulated an email to members Thursday, warning them that “reporters have had their press cards confiscated (hopefully just temporarily) and have been escorted from the premises at Chaoyang Hospital.” Chen was being treated at the hospital on Wednesday for injuries he sustained during his dramatic flight from extrajudicial house arrest to the U.S. embassy last week, according to international news reports. The story is censored in China.

In two separate incidents, men in plainclothes harassed and threatened media crews from two outlets who were attempting to visit Chen’s home on Tuesday and Wednesday, the news outlets reported. Stephen Jiang, an editor for CNN in Beijing, described his encounter on the CNN website, saying that “a half-dozen burly men stood guard,” which led to scuffling and a cameraman’s equipment being seized. The reporting trip was intended to “find Chen’s family—but couldn’t get close,” Jiang reported.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BBC, Chen Guangcheng, Gary Locke, Hillary Clinton, journalists, Teng Biao, United States
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

“When we see reports of lawyers, artists and others who are detained or ‘disappeared,’ the United States speaks up both publicly and privately,” Clinton said in a speech at the East-West Center think-tank shortly before a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi ….

As Chinese President Hu Jintao arrived in Honolulu for the summit, Clinton said the US was “alarmed by recent incidents in Tibet of young people lighting themselves on fire in desperate acts of protest, as well as the continued house arrest of the Chinese lawyer Chen Guangcheng.”

“We continue to call on China to embrace a different path ….”

A senior US official said that Clinton also brought up the cases directly with Yang, but also sought cooperation on a range of issues including Iran amid new charges the Islamic regime is pursuing nuclear weapons.

Chinese Human Rights Defenders has published a new report on Chen’s case:

Based on interviews with a number of activists involved in the current campaign to free Chen, CHRD traces the genesis of this remarkable mobilization, which has spread beyond the small circle of human rights activists: citizens from all walks of life are undertaking trips to Dongshigu Village and participating in online activities in an effort to draw attention to Chen’s situation. Drawing on the meaning of Chen’s given name, they have coined the slogan for their movement from which this report takes its name: “Let there be light, let there be sincerity!” (要有光，要有诚).

In this report, CHRD outlines the horrendous conditions of the house arrest to which Chen and his family have been subjected following his release from Linyi Prison in September 2010. It details how the treatment of Chen violates Chinese law and the international human rights standards which the Chinese government has vowed to uphold. The report shows how both central and local governments have completely failed in their duty to protect the rights of Chen and his family, and how this has emboldened local officials by tacitly approving the abusive measures they have employed.

Attempted visits to Chen in the village of Dongshigu where he is being held continue to meet with resistance, often violent. The BBC’s Michael Bristow describes his own recent encounter:

The three men acted swiftly and efficiently – they had a job to do. They yanked open the car door, barked a few orders and then snatched equipment from out of our hands: cameras, mobile phones and recording devices. We were told to stay put while one man radioed for help ….

When the BBC visited, it was clear the men who stopped us were well drilled and organised – although it was impossible to say who had hired them.

There appeared to be a chain of command: one man took took some money from our car and put it into his pocket, before someone else told him to put it back.

The men wore plain clothes, showed no identification and refused to answer questions about who they were. They did not ask before taking what they wanted.

After searching our equipment they gave it back and then told us to leave the village.

An anonymous letter has been circulated to local residents, encouraging them to support Chen. But many villagers, wary of further trouble, have simply burned it. From Radio Free Asia:

“Nov. 12, 2011 is Chen Guangcheng’s birthday,” said the letter, which was sent to an unknown number of households in Chen’s home county of Yinan this week. “There will continue to be large numbers of people trying to get through to visit him.”

“We will not stand idly by and watch this happen,” it said. “Unite in support of Chen Guangcheng!” […]

Wang [Xuezhen, a Shandong-based rights activist] said that many villagers had burned the letter, titled “Telling the elders about their fellow countryman,” as soon as they saw what it said.

“Local government propaganda has been telling them that there are enemy forces at work, which is why so many people have been set to guard a single man.”

“They have previously said that Chen Guangcheng is a spy for the United States, so those people are very frightened, and they burned the letter as fast as they could.”

See also more recent news on Chen Guangcheng and the situation in Tibet, and warnings of proposed changes to Chinese law that would give detentions such as Chen’s “a thicker veneer of legality”.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: apec, BBC, Chen Guangcheng, espionage, Hillary Clinton, house arrest, self-immolations, Tibet
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Eleven heavyweight media executives including New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr, BBC director-general Mark Thompson and AP president Tom Curley attended the summit and discussed things such as the protection of intellectual property rights, journalists’ safety, the media’s role in disasters and media cooperation in the new media era.

Also present were representatives of Thomson-Reuters, News Corporation, Google, Al Jazeera and Japan’s Kyodo news agency.

But why were foreign reporters denied access to the event? And what exactly is the “World Media Summit”? From David Bandurski at China Media Project:

Two years ago I wrote about the inaugural session of the World Media Summit, a gathering of world media “leaders” conceived, planned and by all accounts funded by China’s official Xinhua News Agency, which falls under China’s State Council and is subject to the public opinion controls of the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party. The biennial event, which China’s state media touted in 2009 as “the media Olympics,” kicked off again in Beijing yesterday ….

There is of course nothing wrong with global news executives meeting with their Beijing counterparts to discuss business cooperation and exchange.

The problem here is that news executives are being duped into participating in an institutional framework that is ostensibly “non-governmental [and] non-profit” but which is backed and funded by the Chinese state via its official news agency, and which clearly has agendas beyond simple business exchange that overlap with those of the Chinese leadership.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BBC, Google, Kyodo News, new york times, news media, Reuters, Xinhua
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

S. Pandiyarajan was fiddling around with his shortwave radio set one hot summer evening at Villupuram, Tamil Nadu, when he stumbled upon a strange station.

At first listen, it was a language he couldn’t identify. It sounded like Tamil, but spoken in an accent he could not recognise. He listened on, straining his ears. To his surprise, he discovered that the voices were coming from faraway China.

“I could hear two Chinese people speaking in perfect Tamil!” he said. “And this was Sentamizh [classical Tamil], which you never hear anywhere, anymore, even in Tamil Nadu ….”

With humble beginnings in the civil war-torn China in the 1940s, CRI today is at the centre of a massive multi-billion dollar effort to boost rising China’s “soft power” overseas, sending out daily broadcasts in 63 languages, 24 hours a day, from its expansive multi-storey headquarters in west Beijing ….

The Tamil station started broadcasting in 1963. Since then, it has continued to beam its shows uninterrupted, building up an almost cult following overseas, with its fans even organising themselves into a network of listeners’ clubs.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BBC, broadcasting, India, radio, Voice of America
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

I don’t mind if China has civil war, epidemics, panics, depressions, all of that. You can recover from that. The only thing you cannot recover from is water … China has a horrible water problem in the north. India has a worse water problem, there’s no question about that; America, in some places, has water problems. If China doesn’t solve its water problems then there’s no China story … I’ve been around the world a couple of times, I’ve seen whole societies, cities, countries that disappeared when the water disappeared.

They’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars … they’re spending staggering amounts of money trying to solve their water problem. I am presuming that they will. Now, maybe they won’t, and if they won’t, in twenty or thirty or forty years, the whole story’s over.

He acknowledges other looming problems such as demographics. “But I don’t see any other country on the horizon which will be the most important country in the 21st Century. It’s not going to be the UK. It’s not going to be the US. It’s not going to be Denmark.”

Rogers also discusses rising oil prices, America’s economic fate, and the Asia-centric education he has chosen for his children.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BBC, commodities, investment, Jim Rogers, speculator, United States, water crisis
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The government argument for ending the service, which began transmission in 1941, is that Mandarin broadcasts are no longer cost-effective:

Due to the jamming of short wave radio signals by the Chinese authorities over decades, BBC Chinese’s radio programming in Mandarin struggles to make a lasting impact and reaches a very small audience [595,000] given the size of the target population. Given the financial pressures, the service will refocus away from radio to concentrate on its online provision, which – while still subject to control and censorship – has greater future potential for growth. With rapid technological changes happening in China (the biggest broadband and mobile market in the world), the BBC will strengthen its online offer; continue to explore opportunities on new platforms such as mobile phones; and invest in new technologies to facilitate content delivery to its target audience in mainland China and to Chinese communities abroad. BBC World News, the BBC’s international English language news and information television channel, is available in China, generally without restriction, and is estimated to have a bigger audience than the Mandarin radio service.

But Peter Pomerantsev, whose father worked for the Russian Service, argues in Newsweek that the cuts are short sighted, and describes the impact of the World Service in the former U.S.S.R.:

It was my grandfather’s secret life and hidden ritual, but one that he shared with millions across the globe. Throughout the 1970s, in his tiny Kiev apartment, my grandfather would wait until his extended family was asleep, tiptoe to the kitchen, quietly switch on the transistor Spidola radio, and gently push the dial to shortwave. He wiggled and waved the antenna to dispel the fog of jamming, climbed on chairs and tables to get the best reception, steered the dial in between transmissions of East German pop and Soviet military bands, pressed his ear tight to the speaker, and, through the hiss and crackle, made his way to these magical words: “This is the Russian Service of the BBC. The time in London is 10 o’clock.” …

On March 22, many of the BBC Radio Foreign Language Services were silenced as part of the British government’s budget cuts. No longer will the BBC talk on the airwaves in Russian, Hindi, Mandarin, Turkish, Vietnamese, Azeri, Ukrainian, Albanian, Cuban-Spanish, Portuguese-African, Serbian, Albanian, or Macedonian. The station will have 30 million fewer listeners a week. There will be some websites and podcasts in the dropped languages, but these will be of limited relevance. Even in a fairly developed country like Russia, only 20 percent of the population has access to Internet connections fast enough to listen to audio podcasts ….

Now that “London time” has been silenced, it is the audience who will suffer least. They can tune in to a host of new radio shows and other media developed by the dictatorships. And though Congress is threatening budget cuts, there’s still the American Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty—in lieu of London, one can keep “Washington time.” No, the loss of the World Service is all Britain’s. In the place on the dial where my grandfather used to hear the words “The time in London is … ” there is only a hoarse hiss and crackle. We are losing our voice. Are we to become history’s mutes?

See also: has a collection of photographs on the BBC Chinese website from throughout the service’s history.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BBC, censorship, Cold War, news media, radio, Soviet Union
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

BBC World Service Mandarin programming began back in 1941, pre-dating by eight years the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China.

To a country starved of information, BBC Chinese carried news from inside and outside China – most notably of the Vietnam War and Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s.

In June 1989, with the world’s attention on the democracy protests in China, more and more Chinese tuned in.

The English-language version of one of China’s largest papers, the Global Times, called it the “end of an era”. The Western broadcasters contend they have simply moved with the times.

BBC’s move echoes that of American counterpart Voice of America, which has said it plans to end its broadcasts to China on Oct. 1, 2011.From the Washington Times:

The plan was announced at a recent meeting of China branch employees by VOA Director Dan Austin, who said he supports the administration plan, despite opposition within the unit.

If Congress approves the plan, all shortwave VOA radio and television broadcasts in Chinese, under way since 1942, will end on Oct. 1.

The U.S. government will continue to operate Radio Free Asia, a less official and smaller news operation that will continue broadcasts into China and other closed states in Asia. It also is facing budget cuts that officials say will limit its effectiveness.

However, Voice of America has a much wider audience and larger reach that will be sharply curtailed by the shift to the Internet because many Chinese in rural areas or regions facing central government punishment do not have access to the Internet or cell phones.

Many have criticized the potential cancellation of Voice of America, saying it would greatly reduce mainland Chinese listener’s access to uncensored information , especially those of Chinese activists. From GovoritAmerika:

Their audience are not young, rich Chinese who go on shopping tripts to the U.S. and can access the Internet outside of China or buy a subscription to Newsweek. Their audience are the Chinese whose basic rights are being violated, those under house arrest, 750 million Chinese without Internet access. Yet, these BBG and VOA executives think they know better and want to fire 40 plus experienced VOA Chinese Branch journalists who specialize in human rights reporting and replace them with contractors who supposedly know how to produce slick content for the Internet.

To learn more about how to help save Voice of America in China, visit their Facebook Group.

© cdtstaff for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BBC, chinese censorship, Voice of America
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

In the Commons today William Hague, the foreign secretary, was forced to defend the government’s decision to cut the World Service’s budget after being condemned by Labour MPs. He blamed the BBC pension deficit and Foreign Office spending cuts required by the “vast public deficit inherited from the previous government”.

The BBC is being forced to implement the cuts after the World Service’s funding from the Foreign Office was reduced by 16% in the government’s comprehensive spending review in October.

From 2014 the World Service is to be paid for from the licence fee, rather than by direct Foreign Office grant, and the BBC has said it intends to reverse some of the cuts from that point ….

World Service radio broadcasts to western Europe – including south-east England – Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union, Turkey, India and China will be among the casualties as the BBC axes 650 jobs and looks to save £46m a year, 20% of the World Service’s £253m annual budget.

From the Financial Times:

The decision by the BBC to scrap its Russian short-wave radio service and concentrate on online media – managerial changes that do not require approval from the foreign secretary – provoked criticism. The Chinese service will also be scaled back, with all radio programming in Mandarin Chinese being closed, although Cantonese radio programming will continue.

One Foreign Office figure insisted the damage to the Russian service would be limited and the changes merely reflected the 80 per cent fall in radio listeners over the past decade and the rapid increase in demand for online output.

However, the decision dramatically cuts its potential audience and comes at a time when the Russian state is tightening its grip on the media. “The timing is awful,” said one MP.

Hague suggested that the Chinese service would see a similar shift in emphasis to that in Russia. From Yahoo! News:

Hague said the China service is used by a small number of people and needs refocusing on enriched online services designed to appeal to younger audiences and people outside China.

The shift of Chinese-language material to the Internet had already become established over the last few years according to Connor Walsh, formerly a Broadcast Assistant at the World Service. He added that Mandarin broadcasts had long been “jammed to bejaysus” by the Chinese government, limiting the direct impact of stopping shortwave transmission.

Hague responded to rumours of impending cuts last September, saying:

“Of course in the current situation, all parts of the public sector have to be scrutinised for value for money and the BBC World Service themselves believe that it is possible to make economies without necessarily affecting the services they provide.

“You shouldn’t believe some of the wilder rumours that fly around.”

See also: the BBC’s Chinese-language website, explanation of licence fee vs. Foreign Office funding on Wikipedia, and BBC Director-General Mark Thompson’s article in The Telegraph about the World Service and its future.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BBC, radio, Russia, Voice of America
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

© dwang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989 protests, AFP, BBC, cnn, media censorship
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The Chinese authorities have impressed the world before with their response to economic crises – for example during the Asian financial crises of 1997-8. This crisis is of a different order. But so has been the response.

As a share of the US economy, China’s fiscal stimulus measures this year are larger even than America’s. While the loosening of credit conditions is greater than any that O’Neill has ever seen.

All this policy seems to be having an effect. He’s just raised Goldman Sachs’ forecast for Chinese growth this year from 6% to more than 8%, and next year’s from 9% growth to nearly 11%.

This optimism gets support from stories on the ground. Qu Hongbin and Sun Junwei, of HSBC, just returned from a tour of three big cities in inland provinces, which were never as dependent on exports as the coast.

They say that firms there are already benefiting from all the new infrastructure projects that the government is putting on stream. And consumer spending is holding up as well, growing at annual rates of close to 20%.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BBC, economic growth, economic stimulus plan
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

A BBC report alleging that China is breaking a United Nations arms embargo on Sudan is biased, the Chinese special envoy to Darfur said in comments published here on Tuesday.

Envoy Liu Guijin said China’s arms sales to Sudan were only small scale and that the trade in military equipment was not fuelling the conflict in Darfur, according to the China Daily newspaper. [...]

“China’s arms sales were very small scale and never made to non-sovereign entities. We have strict end-user certificates.”

The BBC broadcast a programme on Monday alleging that China was breaking the UN arms embargo by providing military equipment and training pilots to fly Chinese jets.

In related news, the BBC reports that the UN is pulling back staff from Darfur:

The United Nations is pulling back some non-essential staff deployed in Sudan’s restive Darfur region. It says the decision comes after recent violence and as a precaution after an international prosecutor accused Sudan’s president of genocide. Judges at the International Criminal Court have still to decide if there are reasonable grounds to issue an arrest warrant against Omar al-Bashir.

Mr Bashir is quoted by Reuters as saying the accusations are lies.

On 8 July, seven Unamid peacekeepers were killed and 22 injured, seven critically, when they were attacked by heavily armed militia in northern Darfur.

A UN peacekeeping official told the BBC News website the decision to move non-essential UN staff temporarily to locations out of the country – many to Entebbe in Uganda – had been taken after that incident, and as a prudent measure in anticipation of possible Sudanese reaction to the prosecutor’s announcement that he is seeking a warrant against Mr Bashir.

Also see related CDT posts:

* China ‘Is Fuelling War in Darfur’
* Spotlight on China as Sudanese President is Indicted

© Matthias Giessler for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Africa, al-Bashir, arms embargo, BBC, Darfur, genocide, Liu Guijin, Sudan, United Nations
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

This is London leads:

“I’m a Chinese girl and I love my country’s culture,” said Sa Dingding, accepting her Planet with a bow. “Now I bring my music to the world.” Kitted out in Björk-tastic gold and red, her long hair woven with silver, the diva with a name like a bell on a bicycle added a touch of much-needed glamour to an evening that often felt under-resourced.

See the BBC release

Here is the Youtube video of her song Mama Tianna shown at the awards ceremony:

Video from Sina.com of the live ceremony: