Lobsang Gendun, a 29-year-old Tibetan monk self-immolated in Golog Pema Dzong at around 7:45 pm (local time). He succumbed to his injuries at the site of his protest.

[…] “According to eyewitnesses, Lobsang Gendun had his hands clasped in prayers as he raised slogans while engulfed in flames,” Tsangyang said. “He walked a few steps towards a busy road intersection and then fell to the ground.”

Following the self-immolation protest, a minor scuffle broke out between local Tibetans and Chinese security personnel, who tried to confiscate Lobsang Gendun’s body.

[…] Security has been heightened in the region following today’s fiery protest.

The total of 92 excludes five self-immolations carried out in India and Nepal and two disputed cases in Sichuan.

At LinkAsia, Yul Kwon discussed the situation with historian Tsering Shakya. The crackdown on self-immolations has only spurred further protests, he explained, adding to a list of grievances including the relegation of Tibetan language to secondary status in schools.

Click here to view the embedded video.

At Foreign Policy, Oxford sociologist Michael Biggs examined the history and logic of suicide protests, in contrast with suicide attacks. He concludes:

So far, the recent wave of Tibetan immolations has not yielded any tangible political success. Repression has only increased in the Tibetan areas of China, and expressions of sympathy from the majority Han population within China are rare. Western public opinion, which already favored the Tibetan cause, has no means of exercising leverage over China. But it is too soon to assess the consequences of these immolations. Gauging their effect on Tibetans within China is effectively impossible given the degree of repression.

What we can predict is that suicide protest will continue. Its communicative logic is no less potent than the suicide attack’s sanguinary logic — and it is more readily carried out. A suicide bombing requires organization, coordination, and technical skills to prepare explosives. In conflict zones like Afghanistan, the attacker also needs assistance to reach what are often fortified targets. Suicide protest does not require organization. There is no defense against the practice, short of the total suppression of information. Where information about suicide protest can be suppressed completely, there is hardly any reason to perform it. In today’s world, the totalitarian control formerly exercised by the Soviet Union or Maoist China is no longer feasible, at least for a country participating in the global economy. For evidence, look no further than China’s inability to prevent us from reading about — and in some cases even watching — the immolations in Tibet.

This may risk underestimating the effectiveness of China’s suppression of information, however. While news of over 90 cases has escaped Tibet to date, its impact appears to have been substantially dampened by the difficulty of independent verification. The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts and McClatchy’s Tom Lasseter were able to reach Aba in February, but restrictions on foreign reporters have generally held firm, with coverage of the protests often muted as a result. Madeline Earp of the Committee to Protect Journalists viewed this near-blackout through the lens of Jigme Gyatso’s unknown whereabouts. The monk and filmmaker’s assistant has been missing since mid-September, and was presumed detained until local authorities publicised an award for his capture, accusing him of manslaughter.

Let’s concentrate […] on what we do know about Jigme Gyatso. After his initial arrest for making the film, he reported being tortured in Chinese prison. Radio Free Asia has reported he lost consciousness due to beatings, and was prodded in the face with electric batons. Publicizing that led to his re-arrest, according to CPJ research. Twice, authorities have moved him from a monastery where he lived, once in 2009, and again in 2012, when they razed his home, Radio Free Asia reported. This man has undergone unrelenting harassment since he collaborated with Dhondup Wangchen. An arrest order issued against him is a deeply troubling sign. Either he is already in secret detention, and this order is meant as a belated justification. Or, he is really missing–and there is nothing good waiting for him once he is found.

As long as foreign journalists are prevented from independent travel to Tibet, and reporting by Tibetans themselves remains criminalized, there is simply no way to get to the bottom of mysteries like these. And that is untenable. Twenty-seven Tibetans said so this month in the only way they believe they have left: They set themselves on fire, leaving messages calling for the return of the exiled spiritual and political leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama. Self-immolation, too, is now a criminal offense, as is documenting or caring for the body of anyone who does, Human Rights Watch reports. The urgent need to find out what has happened to Jigme Gyatso reflects a broader need to restore freedom of information to Tibetans in order to stop this awful tide of protest by those who contest Chinese rule. This is a story that cannot be suppressed any longer.

Lobsang Sangay, the Tibetan prime minister-in-exile, discussed the prospects for change with The Globe and Mail’s Stephanie Nolen. He explained his views on the legitimacy of the protests and the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation, and expressed his hope that Tibetans could reach an “equilibrium” of contented autonomy within China, analogous to Quebec’s status within Canada. This Middle Way of eschewing demands for independence has come under increased fire as the self-immolations have surged.

Q. How are you feeling about the new leadership in Beijing, installed at the 18th Congress of the Communist Part a few weeks ago, and what do you think it may mean for Tibet?

A. I think it’s too early to say. Of the seven leaders, most of them are in their mid-60s. … So in the 19th Congress there will be more wholesale changes – the 18th Congress is a continuation of the same people from the 16th and 17th. So if you are really looking for real changes you have to wait for the 19th. The likelihood of continuing the same policy is high. Particularly the fact that some of the more “liberal” people, who are of younger age and more open-minded, were not included … We might get some hint when Xi Jinping takes over the presidency in March of next year … He will give a speech and that’s where he will indicate his line of thinking. Otherwise it’s so opaque.

Q. The Dalai Lama has suggested he is optimistic about Mr. Xi Jinping, perhaps because he had a warm relationship with Mr. Xi’s father.

A. Optimism is too strong. As a human being you should always remain hopeful. Optimism you have some basis for. Xi Jinping is the son of [former Chinese deputy premier] Xi Zhongxun, who received His Holiness in Beijing in 1954 and was with His Holiness many times, and His Holiness gave him a watch that he kept even during the Cultural Revolution and after. They took a picture and Xi Zhongxun saved it … so it seems the [warm feeling towards the Dalai Lama] was genuine … Xi Zhongxun also had a close relationship with the late Panchen Lama … and he would tell him, ‘Have patience, don’t get angry, things will take time to change.’

See more on the self-immolations via CDT.

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Post tags: Aba, Committee to Protect Journalists, Dalai Lama, detention, jonathan watts, journalists conditions, Lobsang Sangay, reincarnation, self-immolations, suicide bombing, suicides, Tibet, Tibetan language
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Li Yuanlong, who once worked as a reporter for the state-run Bijie Daily in the city of Bijie in Guizhou province, was taken to the airport along with his wife early Wednesday afternoon and “told to take a vacation” his son, Li Muzi, told China Real Time on Friday.

[…] The Bijie Public Security Bureau could not be reached for comment. A person answering the phone at the Bijie city government propaganda office said Mr. Li was traveling with his wife, citing messages posted to former journalist’s account on the web portal KDnet. “They are very happy now! That’s his own personal matter – why are you asking us?” the person said before hanging up.

[…] Li Fangping, a Beijing-based lawyer who has been keeping track of the situation, said that he had talked to Li Yuanlong when he was on his way to the airport. “I can confirm that he is travelling under control,” the lawyer, who is not related to Li Yuanlong, said.

“This is a way for (the local government) to maintain stability,” he added. “The public still wants more details, even though the local government has already dismissed the relevant people. Because Li Yuanlong is the main information provider, and because he was a reporter who has a lot of friends in the media, they authorities are afraid that people will continue to contact him in search of more clues or that Li might even leak out information about other instances of social injustice.”

Chin had previously explored why this story in particular resonated so deeply with the public. Also from China Real Time Report:

Stories of suffering children are always hard to stomach, but they tend to hit with particular impact in China, where the one-child policy and a strong belief in the family as the most basic unit of society have combined to imbue the young with an aura of unsurpassed importance. In this case, the impact of appears to have been amplified by similarities between what happened to the brothers and the Hans Christian Anderson short story “The Little Match Girl.”

The story, about a poor Danish girl who dies from exposure on New Year’s Eve after running away from her abusive father and trying to sell matches on the street, was once included in Chinese primary school text books as an example of the difficulties faced by the poor in capitalist countries.

[…] Cao Lin, a columnist for the state-run China Youth Daily, [wrote:] “At a time when we’re crowing about the rise of the nation and the creation of a moderately well-off society, to have five children die while seeking warmth in a trash bin is truly bizarre [….”]

Cao Lin was one of many in the state media to ask what had gone wrong, and who was to blame. Eight local officials were swiftly identified and fired. From Lin Xi at Global Times:

Eight local officials including two district chiefs in charge of civil affairs and education were dismissed or suspended from their duties by the Bijie municipal party committee on Monday because of the accident. Some people believe that these boys’ families and society should bear the primary responsibility for the accident instead of the officials. They think that it was the ignorance and indifference from the boys’ relatives and society which caused this tragedy.

However, the officials are not innocent because it is their duty to guarantee every citizen’s safety. The death of the five boys reflects management problems within government.

If the education system was better, these boys would have been taking lessons in warm classrooms instead of leaving school. If the assistance system was more active, they could have been found earlier and may have escaped death. Indeed, governments and officials have done nothing which directly caused this accident. However, it was the officials’ inaction which left the boys to die in the cold.

Many doubted, however that the sacking these eight officials had adequately addressed the root of the problem. From Rachel Wang at Tea Leaf Nation:

[…] As @bll2012 opined: “We are used to finding scapegoats when we encounter problems, then they give you a scapegoat! Then you shut up! You are so pathetic! Why not find the real cause: The failure of the social protection system.” Independent Chinese media Caixin (@财新网) also sounded a note of caution: “The tragedy in Guizhou did not only reflect management loopholes in Bijie alone, but also the defects of the mechanism protecting Chinese children’s rights. China is among the few countries that does not have a professional child welfare department. Administrative systems for child protection and rescue urgently need to be built.”

Therefore, according to the lawyer Li Fangping, Li Yuanlong was detained to prevent the damage from spreading any further. At The Daily Beast, Duncan Hewitt linked his treatment to the cases of Zhai Xiaobing (@stariver) and Ren Jianyu, and suggested—as did Charles Custer at ChinaGeeks—that while local government may be directly responsible, the political climate in which such actions are tolerated and encouraged is one of Beijing’s making:

Li’s detention echoes what is now a common pattern in China, in which sensitive individuals are removed from circulation at sensitive times, and held either under effective house arrest at home, or in what are known as “black [i.e. unofficial] jails.” During the run-up to the recent Communist Party Congress, rights groups say over a hundred people faced such treatment—including the well-known human-rights activist Hu Jia, who was only released from a three-year jail sentence last year.

In some cases the hard line taken against dissidents may be the choice of local authorities rather than necessarily being decreed from the center, says Professor Kerry Brown, executive director of the China Studies Center at the University of Sydney, but he adds that it is nevertheless a sign of the prevailing mood in Chinese political circles:

“The golden rule seems to be that no one gets bad marks for picking on dissidents and others labeled trouble makers,” he says, “while for those who are lenient, on the other hand, the risks if things go wrong are still high.

Furthermore, a Central Propaganda Department directive previously published by CDT suggested that Beijing, while allowing some coverage, had chosen to grant local government considerable control:

[… Y]ou may report moderately on the incident according to Xinhua wire copy and authoritative information released by the local government. Do not put this news on the front page, do not lure readers to the story, do not link to the story, to do not comment on it, and do not dispatch journalists to the scene.

Li, the primary remaining conduit of information on the case, had long been a thorn in the side of local authorities. In 2006, he was sentenced to two years in prison for allegedly inciting subversion in a series of articles posted to overseas Chinese websites. From the Committee to Protect Journalists’ report on his trial in May 2006:

“Like many committed reporters in China, Li Yuanlong began posting his articles online after facing censorship at his newspaper,” CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper said. “He is guilty of nothing more than expressing his criticism of official actions and should never have been brought to trial. We call for his immediate and unconditional release.”

Li reported for Bijie Ribao on rural poverty and unemployment in his native Guizhou province and had frequently been censored in recent years because of complaints by local officials embarrassed by his reports, according to the New York-based advocacy group Human Rights in China and CPJ sources.

[…] Li pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, and his lawyer rejected the notion that his criticism threatened state authority.

“He only criticized wrongdoings of some Communist Party officials or local governments,” the lawyer told Reuters. “The Communist Party and state power is not the same concept.”

At EastSouthWestNorth, Roland Soong translated one of Li’s essays, On Becoming an American Citizen in Spirit, originally posted to exile site Boxun under the pen name Ye Lang (Night Wolf). In it, Li pecked at the raw nerve of China’s ‘crucifixion’ by foreign imperialists, defending former Peking University professor Jiao Guobiao‘s suggestion that it would have been better for the U.S. to “liberate” China from Communist rule at the end of the Korean War:

[…] If America really sent its soldiers to drive for Beijing, then this is more than ‘interfering internal politics of other countries’ and it is really the invasion by the ‘world police.’ I have been pondering why interfering in the internal politics of other countries and being the world police man have become terms of denigration that are natural and indisputable in “our” vocabulary. If your internal politics is a totalitarian regime covered up by dark curtains, then why should not the police in charge of maintaining world peace come and show you? As a common example, I am beating my wife and kids at home and someone else (such as the police) comes to stop me. I yell: “I’m beating my wife and my kids. What is this to outsiders? Why are you entitled to mind my family business?” Is that acceptable? As another example, a Chinese person falls into the river, or his house catches fire. There is an American on the side, but the patriots won’t let the Chinese person accept the help of the American. Instead, the Chinese person must wait for other Chinese to save him. The Chinese person will have to “sacrifice himself for the greater good.” Is this not the modernized version under the cover of patriotism of the old saying “It is a minor matter to starve to death; it is a major matter to lose your chastity”?

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: central propaganda department, china youth daily, Committee to Protect Journalists, Global Times, Guizhou, Hu Jia, illegal detentions, jiao guobiao, journalists, Korean War, Li Fangping, Li Yuanlong, local government, local officials, Ministry of Truth, poverty, poverty alleviation, subversion, vacation-style treatment
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Lu Yan, publisher of the Oriental Morning Post, was transferred to head another division of the Shanghai-based Wenxin United Press Group that owns the paper, and deputy editor-in-chief Sun Jian was suspended, according to two sources at the newspaper who declined to be named.

On Monday, Guangdong’s New Express announced that its chief editor, Lu Fumin, had been removed from his post to head the political section of a sister newspaper, while its national and international coverage was slashed and its op-ed page eliminated.

A separate veteran Shanghai-based journalist said that municipal party secretary Yu Zhengsheng was unhappy with the newspaper’s stories. “Yu has criticised some of the newspaper’s reports in recent months, so the paper had to do something about it,” he said.

[…] Shanghai party boss Yu has been widely regarded as a front runner to enter the party’s top echelons at its national congress in the autumn.

Tania Branigan’s report at The Guardian brought together a range of perspectives on the shakeups:

“I think these can probably be read as the surfacing of tensions playing out on a daily basis across the country’s media. These are probably more egregious examples of the tightening of everyday control ahead of the 18th party congress [where the new leadership will be unveiled],” said David Bandurski of Hong Kong University’s China Media Project.

He stressed that the moves should not be seen as part of a co-ordinated crackdown and could be related to local as much as national issues.

[…] Li Datong, an independent commentator and former journalist, said he thought it was probably not a press freedom issue, adding: “It might be just be an internal issue among Chinese officials.”

At China Media Project, Bandurski stressed the uncertainty surrounding the moves. Two of the articles widely cited as triggers the personnel changes, he pointed out, are still freely available online.

In the most general sense, the two actions — though not in any way related or coordinated — can be read as stemming from an all-round tightening of press controls in China ahead of the crucial 18th Party Congress later this year. That simple reading, however, tells us very little about the specific mechanisms that are at work in these cases.

So what is really going on? The bottom line, we don’t know. As the Hong Kong paper The Sun summed the cases up in an editorial this morning:

Inside the mainland propaganda system, there is a way to die that can be called “death by uncertain causes”. This is when the propaganda department settles a score once autumn has passed [as they saying goes]. If the bosses of a paper are not regularly and dutifully talking [the Party's] politics, they will be pulled down mysteriously. The New Express and Oriental Morning Post are both examples of this.

Right now, the reasons being given for these “deaths by uncertain causes” are themselves mysterious to media insiders.

Whatever the explanation, warned Madeline Earp at the Committee to Protect Journalists, the moves threaten to further chill China’s already wintry media climate:

Personnel changes can be an effective way to neuter a publication that pushes the boundaries in its coverage, according to CPJ research. So although we don’t know exactly why these two papers are under fire, and local journalists are unlikely to talk about it on the record, it’s safe to assume that the censors have decided it is better to be safe than sorry in advance of the sensitive political hand-off coming later in the year.

Our concern is that with sensitive periods occurring so frequently in China, and with crackdown the new normal for so many activists and journalists, there’s no knowing if or when the censors will loosen their grip. Meanwhile, fellow journalists in Guangzhou and Shanghai will likely be more circumspect for a while, lest the same fate befall them.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Committee to Protect Journalists, David Bandurski, Guangdong, journalists, leadership transition, Li Datong, media conditions, newspapers, Shanghai, Yu Zhengsheng
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“There is a very alarming disparity between the number of Chinese state media workers whom we grant visas to and the number of visas the Chinese grant to their American counterparts,” said Rohrabacher.

“We would welcome any free and independent Chinese reporters if such a thing existed. Every one of these reporters is an agent of the Chinese government and works for a news organization under control of the Communist Party in China. Chinese news agencies operating in the USA are not subject to censorship or purposeful disruption and they are free to broadcast as much communist propaganda as they like on U.S. soil.”

“By contrast, our two U.S. correspondents in China are routinely harassed by Chinese police and have been assaulted and detained by Chinese officials seeking to block their work. Voice of America and Radio Free Asia have been regularly jammed by the Communist Chinese for years.”

While Rohrabacker’s rhetoric effectively evokes thawed Cold War tension during a time of political and economic anxiety, it fails to note an important difference between the media landscapes of China and the U.S. – the role of state-owned media. In the first post of a three-part series on H.R. 2899, China Law and Policy explains this difference, and reports other major problems with this bill:

The Act has many problems.  First, it solely focuses on China, giving it the air of a Chinese Exclusion Act.  China is not the only country which denies foreign journalists visas – a quick review of the worst countries for journalists on Reporters Without Borders’ website reveals that Burma, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Eritrea similarly deny foreign journalists visas.  But this Act is exclusively about China.

Second, the rhetoric by the Act’s proponents leads one to believe that they are more motivated by a Cold War mentality than a true concern about U.S. journalists’ access in China.   Rep. Rohrabacher’s testimony in support of the Chinese Media Reciprocity Act is filled with red herrings concerning Confucius Institutes, billboards in Times Square, and the Chinese purchase of AMC movie theaters (in order to flood the US with Chinese propaganda films).  Testimony by John Lenczowski focused more on Russian spies in the US Embassy in Moscow during the Cold War than the actual treatment of U.S. journalists in China today.

Third, passage of the Act could lead to even worse retaliation by China.  China repeatedly harasses the two VOA reporters in China (see Nick Zahn’s testimony, p. 5-6) and it has consistently denied visas to RFA reporters.  Perhaps the most famous incident was when the Chinese government rescinded the RFA reporters’ visas only days before they were to accompany President Clinton on his 1998 trip to China.

The Committee to Protect Journalists also voiced similar concern with the proposed policy after initial discussion began in the House of Representatives last month:

CPJ’s many objections to China’s media policies, including its approach to foreign media, are well documented. But we don’t believe that the best response to press freedom restrictions in China is to implement press freedom restrictions in the U.S. We don’t approve of the use of specific visas for journalists in the first place, although we recognize that it is a widespread practice. In an ideal world, we would see as many journalists as possible in all countries, moving as freely as possible across borders.

[...]Media restrictions in China make the country a poor candidate for a mature partnership on economic or security issues, and must be addressed if the two countries are to move forward. The visa imbalance between China and the United States does seem unfair, and should be dealt with frankly and forcefully in the context of those many shortcomings. But the U.S., or any country, should not threaten to drive possibly hundreds of journalists from within its borders for any reason. Such a move might feed some people’s sense of justice, but would be short-sighted, counterproductive, and contradict one of the United States’ cornerstone liberties. The Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement should find a better way to solve this problem.

Part 2 of China Law and Policy’s series focuses on how the proposed bill is an ineffective policy mechanism to deal with the broader issue: visa restrictions facing foreign journalists in China, regardless of whether their paycheck comes from the government or the market:

Putting aside the shrill rhetoric surrounding the Chinese Media Reciprocity Act and the fact that it only deals with the harassment of a small segment of U.S. journalists in China (the VOA and RFA reporters), the Act does draw attention to an increasingly problematic issue: the Chinese governments harassment of foreign journalists through the visa process.  It also raises the question: what should the U.S. government be doing about this harassment?

Stay tuned for part 3 of China Law and Policy‘s series.

For more on journalists in China and the regulations they face, see prior CDT coverage.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Committee to Protect Journalists, foreign journalists, foreign media regulations, journalism, journalists in china, U.S. relations
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Wu Danhong, 33, an assistant professor at China University of Political Science and Law, and Zhou Yan, a female reporter from Sichuan Television Station, agreed Thursday to meet at 1 pm Friday at the park to “settle” a spat on Weibo.

Wu made a controversial post on Weibo on Tuesday saying that a molybdenum copper plant project in Shifang, Sichuan Province, later cancelled after protests, was not harmful to the environment, as molybdenum and copper are necessary elements for the human body.

[…] “Both Ai Weiwei and Yao Bo, a well-known columnist and affairs commentator came,” Wu told the Global Times on Friday. “About 30 or 40 people were with Zhou Yan while I was alone.”

Wu then claimed that “Zhou Yan, Ai Weiwei and Yao Bo beat me, and I suffered many cuts and bruises.”

(Update: for background and another side to the story, see Beijing Cream’s account.)

An editorial at the newspaper roundly condemned the incident, which it said “shames all Weibo intellectuals“:

[…] There was no winner in this farce.

Physical fighting over conflicting political thoughts is the most vulgar behavior yet carried out by a few online intellectuals, also tainting democratic movements on the microblog. Neither challenger nor defender could be labeled as brave, and they have forsaken the virtues of tolerance and decency in this incident.

It is especially disappointing that some famed people were part of that scenario or applauded the result.

We call on the police to punish those who beat others, so as to prevent this practice from seeming legitimate.

An earlier editorial had pointed out students’ key role in the Shifang unrest, described at Offbeat China. This echoed the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, Global Times argued, while stressing that last week’s protests had revolved more around environmental than political concerns.

The underage group, immature but passionate, and free of family burdens and social pressure, can easily be misguided by movements initiated by adults. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), red guards, mainly consisting of high school students, showed a tendency to violence and cruelty.

Their impulses and vulnerability to manipulation were fully displayed during that decade. In every normal peaceful country, high school students should focus on school work. It is a revolutionary instinct to urge young students to join a mass protest.

The protest in Shifang highlights the urgency of adjusting the decision-making process in China. Though violence broke out, it was a conflict caused by environmental concerns, and was obviously not a revolution. Similar concerns are common in many other countries.

Global Times also reported a reshuffling of Shifang’s leadership in the wake of the protests. Its coverage was an exception to the general rule, wrote David Bandurski at China Media Project: most Chinese media reports made no mention of social unrest in Shifang, mentioning only a business setback whose cause was unspecified.

Just to give readers a taste, here is the lede for the story appearing on page 28 of Chengdu Commercial News, a Sichuan newspaper:

Recently, Sichuan Hongda (600331) has been the focus of attention over its molybdenum-copper project in Shifang. Yesterday (July 4), Sichuan Hongda, which suspended trading for one day, said that the company received a notice on July 3 demanding that . . . construction be halted for the project. This negative factor drove Sichuan Hongda shares down 9.2% on re-opening of trading . . .

Elsewhere, views on the protests’ apparent success have been mixed. CDT founder Xiao Qiang celebrated the outcome in comments to CNN’s Jaime FlorCruz:

“It is a stunning case of a local NIMBY movement coalescing with the support of nationwide public opinion through the internet,” said Xiao Qiang, a U.S.-based expert on the Chinese internet.

“The new media, particularly through (Twitter-like) Weibo and popular forums such as Kaidi.net played an absolutely critical role in the whole process.”

Xiao said netizens spread the news instantly and widely, exposed police violence against protesters and generated popular outrage.

“With such national exposure and public opinion on the protesters’ side, the local authorities had no choice but to cave in instantly,” he said.

But Madeline Earp at the Committee to Protect Journalists argued that cases like Shifang “create the appearance of official accountability, but ultimately lack substance.”

The strategy of diverting criticism is perfectly illustrated by […] environmental protests in Shifang, western China, over a metal plant that locals feared would cause pollution. Police targeted protesters documenting the unrest, and censors erased coverage from social media, yet the sometimes-violent clashes were still the most searched topic on Weibo, Sina’s microblog service, on Tuesday, according to The New York Times. When the local government cancelled building at the plant which had sparked the riots and released some detained protesters, the international press almost universally hailed it as a victory for the people.

Officials kowtowing to citizens’ demands to quell protests has become routine in China, but the follow-through has not. Officials in Dalian said a chemical plant would be closed after protesters took to the streets in August 2011, but it resumed production in January, according to CNN. Authorities in Xiamen acceded to demonstrators’ demands to move a chemical plant in 2007, but publicly pursued the protest organizers, according to law professor Benjamin Van Rooij from the Netherlands.

[… M]iddle-class locals defending their hometown in Shifang, may be articulating their rights and demanding more from China’s leaders. But they are also perpetuating a cycle of protests that authorities can diffuse without the need for reform or redress for serious injustice. That is not a victory.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Committee to Protect Journalists, copper, Cultural Revolution, dalian, dalian px, David Bandurski, environmental protests, Global Times, Shifang, Sichuan, weibo, Xiamen PX, Xiao Qiang
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China didn’t give a specific reason for expelling the reporter. This ambiguity cannot be criticized. According to foreign journalist sources here in Beijing, Melissa Chan holds an aggressive political stance. According to foreign reports, she has a tense relationship with the management authorities of foreign correspondents. She has produced some programs which are intolerable for China.

Interfering with foreign media’s reporting is a retrograde act, and it is simply impossible to do. However, foreign journalists in China must abide by journalistic ethics. They have their values and reporting angles, but the bottom line is that they should not turn facts upside down ….

According to some Chinese people who work or used to work in foreign media bureaus, it is common practice for some foreign journalists to just piece together materials based on their presuppositions when reporting on China. If a foreign reporter cannot stay in China, we can only assume that he or she has done something cross the line.

The BBC’s Damian Grammaticas described the opacity surrounding the episode in Orwellian terms:

Today Melissa Chan, the al-Jazeera English television correspondent who, it was announced yesterday, had been expelled from China, seems to have become an “unperson” in China.

The only Chinese-language newspapers in which we could find reports on the expulsion on Wednesday morning were the Hong Kong-affiliated Ta Kung Pao paper from Henan province and the Global Times ….

The problem with the head-in-the-sand approach is that China has left itself voiceless, while in today’s YouTube world all Ms Chan’s reports are preserved online. So anyone (outside China, or with VPN technology to skirt the online censors if they are inside China) can access them and judge for themselves.

The South China Morning Post’s lead editorial on Friday also argues that expelling journalists is counter-productive:

Foreign correspondents are the world’s window on a country, witnessing, deciphering and interpreting. When they are denied the right to do their work, as has happened with Al Jazeera’s only English-language reporter in China, there is bound to be a negative reaction. Melissa Chan’s expulsion and Beijing’s refusal to allow the pan-Arab news network to have a replacement has predictably created a storm of criticism. By letting journalists report, a government benefits and presents an image of being open and tolerant; by closing the door, it says the opposite.

There is, at least, little chance of a rift between China and Qatar over the affair, according to Reuters:

A senior Al Jazeera executive said the incident was unlikely to upset ties between China and its biggest liquefied natural gas supplier, even though the two countries are also at odds over Syria, where Qatar has proposed arming foes of President Bashar al-Assad, while Beijing advocates dialogue.

“It would be incorrect to suggest a bilateral rift of some kind,” said the executive, who declined to be named.

China is expected to bid for Qatar’s huge infrastructure projects, including a $36 billion rail network, an $11 billion new airport and a $5.5 billion new deep water seaport.

Chan’s expulsion, the first from China in 14 years, comes just as China is attempting to expand the global presence of its own state media. As Tom Rhodes writes for the Committee to Protect Journalists, Al Jazeera’s success in carving out an increasingly global audience offers a gleaming role model for this project. The network’s place was cemented, however, by its role as what a New Statesman headline called the “Voice of the Arab spring”. This can hardly have endeared the network to a Chinese government profoundly rattled by the slightest whisper of a “Jasmine Revolution” at home, and perhaps already suffering from a sense of betrayed kinship. From The Wall Street Journal:

In a conversation two years ago, Ms. Chan said she believed Chinese authorities saw parallels between main state broadcaster China Central Television and al-Jazeera, which is primarily funded by the government of Qatar.

“I think when China approved al-Jazeera English to start reporting in China, they expected we would be soft on the government because they saw us as being similar to CCTV,” Ms. Chan said when talking to other reporters about the channel’s hard-nosed reporting on a coal-mine disaster in 2010. “They realized pretty quickly that wasn’t the case.”

An illustrative tale appears at Rectified.name:

I remember an anecdote Melissa once told a group of my students. She said that when she first arrived, the Ministry folks were all smiles, figuring that any network which plays Osama bin Laden’s mix tapes must be alright. Six months later the same ministry folks complained to her that she was just as bad as CNN and the BBC. “Thank you?” she replied.

Tsinghua University professor Patrick Chovanec describes Chan’s expulsion as “sort of like China’s version of the Pulitzer Prize — tangible recognition that the work she was doing was important and powerful enough to strike a very high-level nerve.” He has collected a “greatest hits” of her coverage on his blog.

Not incidentally, Melissa Chan is selling a piano:

Piano for sale in Beijing: black upright, Chinese “Blessing” brand. Old. Not for pros, but for folks who like clunking for fun. Let me know.

— Melissa Chan (@melissakchan) May 10, 2012

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Yes my press credentials have been revoked and I will no longer report f/ China. More from @AlJazeeraPR: see.sc/Fksv69

— Melissa Chan (@melissakchan) May 8, 2012

The expulsion this week of Al Jazeera English’s Beijing correspondent Melissa Chan is the first such punishment China has meted out since the end of the 1990s, an unusually harsh measure even against a backdrop of tightening and capricious media controls. But Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei offered little explanation for the move beyond dogged citation of “relevant laws and regulations”, and even insisted that Al Jazeera English was “still functioning normally” in China. From Voice of America:

Q: Chinese laws and regulations are written down, so even if we don’t know which ones Melissa is accused of violating we know what they say. No where as I know is the Chinese government’s conception of journalistic ethics written down. How can we judge whether our behavior is consistent with Chinese conception of journalist ethics, and can you offer us guidance as to what that conception looks like?

Hong Lei: “I think our policies and laws regarding foreign journalists is very clear. In your work and exchanges with us we have briefed you on relevant Chinese laws and regulations which is also the basis for your work in China. With regard to relevant issue I think relevant media and journalists are clear about that ….”

Q: Where can we see those regulations because we are having some problem in finding which law and regulation was broken. So where can I check the regulation if I want to see some number or article was broken according to Chinese law?

Hong Lei: “I think have answered the relevant question.”

From David Pierson of The Los Angeles Times:

Good thing we don’t have to down a shot every time Hong Lei says “relevant laws”

— David Pierson (@dhpierson) May 8, 2012

Madeline Earp at the Committee to Protect Journalists analysed Hong’s performance in greater detail:

The word of the day was “relevant.” “I have just answered relevant questions,” Hong says plaintively at the start of the transcript. “The Chinese government will follow strictly relevant regulations in dealing with foreign journalists.” Then, “With regard to relevant issue I think relevant media and journalists are clear about that.” It was a convenient way to avoid being relevant himself: In the course of nine questions, he used the word 11 times, and we are still none the wiser about why Chan and her news outlet were blacklisted.

Flat denials from the ministry are nothing new. But it is deeply discouraging to hear them over the kind of expulsion not seen in China since the 20th century. The Chinese government issued regulations allowing foreign journalists to work freely before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. CPJ registered concern about the growing pressure on sources and assistants working for them, but the journalists themselves at least had something on paper that justified their right to report.

Chan herself posted a comical example of the vagueness and apparent improvisation of press regulations in March, after two Domestic Security Department officers invited themselves to sit in on an interview with lawyer Pu Zhiqiang:

Plainclothes Officer: I’m not telling you, you can’t be here. This is just my recommendation.

AJE [Al Jazeera English]: Oh! Your recommendation. Well, in that case … I will ask Mr Pu a couple of questions on camera. Thank you.

Plainclothes Officer (PO): No, you cannot.

AJE: Huh!? Um, didn’t you just say that was just your recommendation?

PO: My recommendation is: no.

Pu Zhiqiang: On what basis are you saying this?

AJE: Well – allow me to just show you my press card … and my press credential to attend National People’s Congress events …

PO: Everything has a bottom line.

AJE: Um, what do you mean?

PO [menacingly]: Yes, I mean it. Bottom. Line.

While Chan’s expulsion is part of an ongoing tightening of control, there is some disagreement on the longer-term trend for reporting conditions in China. At The New York Times, Didi Kirsten Tatlow describes the current deterioration as an aberration against a backdrop of general improvement, tied to the looming leadership transition.

Just how bad is press freedom in China? There are different ways of looking at it.

According to Reporters Without Borders, China ranks a spectacularly bad 174th out of 179 countries, when it comes to freedom of the press. But China is undergoing tremendous social change and, as with all change, it helps to view it comparatively. Old China hands — long-term foreign residents and reporters — cited by Mr. [Stephen] McDonell [president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China] believe that overall, press freedom in China is growing, for foreign journalists and for their Chinese counterparts, though there are cyclical rollbacks based on the overall political situation and sensitivities ….

With China about to undergo a once-in-a-decade, thoroughgoing leadership change beginning in October, the situation is tense. My colleague at the New York Times, Michael Wines, reports that “relations between the ruling Communist Party and the overseas journalists who cover it” are “fraying”, partly under the pressure of two major news events this year — the destabilizing fall from power of the Communist Party scion and former party chief of Chongqing, Bo Xilai, and the embarrassing flight to the United States embassy of the blind, self-taught lawyer, Chen Guangcheng.

The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, on the other hand, sees a bleaker picture:

China is moving backwards. In fifteen years of studying and writing about this place, I’ve rarely had reason to reach that conclusion without one qualifier or another dangling off the end of the sentence—qualifiers that leave room, for instance, for “halting progress” or “mixed signals.”

But this week the evidence is unambiguous: for the first time in thirteen years, China has kicked out a foreign correspondent. In doing so, it revives a Soviet-era strategy that will undermine its own efforts to project soft power and shows a spirit of self-delusion that does not bode well for China’s ability to address the problems that imperil its future.

At The Globe and Mail Mark MacKinnon describes Chan’s expulsion as a sign of the failed promise of a “golden time” for China-based foreign correspondents after the 2008 Olympics. Instead of real freedom, he writes, journalists are now faced with invisible and unpredictable boundaries.

This false freedom given to reporters working in China is much more important than Melissa’s case or the careers of any of the foreign correspondents based in China. What’s at stake is not only the outside world’s (already poor) understanding of this rising but paranoid superpower, but also the future of journalism inside China. Chinese journalists have told me that they watch the foreign correspondents with envy, wishing they could report about their own country as freely as we do. Our fight to do our job is intertwined with their fight to do theirs.

When I got into trouble myself last year with Beijing’s Public Security Bureau over my coverage of a failed attempt to mimic the Arab Spring uprisings in China – as well as an article I wrote about how rich Chinese were cheating the system in order to immigrate to Canada – I turned to Chinese colleagues and legal experts for advice.

They were all sympathetic, but some couldn’t help but find dark humour in my travails. “I’m sorry to say,” a friend told me with a mirthless chuckle, “that they’re just treating you the way they treat Chinese journalists.”

At Foreign Policy, Isaac Stone Fish suggests that this may have been especially true for Chan, an Asian-American, noting that China has often exercised less restraint when dealing with foreigners of Chinese descent.

… Chan … fits into the troubling pattern of the foreigners Beijing has targeted over the last decade: those the Chinese government views of having less protection because of their ethnicity and nationality; often with Chinese backgrounds. It appears that someone in the Chinese government wanted to give a warning to journalists without causing an international incident; Chan, a Chinese-American working for a Qatari-based television station, seemed to be an appropriate target. The thinking seems to be that a foreign government will more loudly protest the mistreatment of a citizen who is both born and raised in its own country and working for a domestic company ….

… Executives and reporters with Chinese backgrounds have many advantages operating in China. Besides language skills and local networks, they can blend in a country where different color skin clearly identifies one as an outsider. Anecdotally speaking, they seem to be given less leniency when they don’t follow China’s laws; like they’re supposed to “know better.”

Many foreign news bureaus are hosted in two diplomatic compounds in the Jianguomen neighborhood. As a reporter based out of the compound for two years, I entered freely, while foreign reporters who looked Chinese (and, of course, those that were Chinese), often had to show their IDs to get in. Injustice in China affects more than just the locals.

On Twitter, New York Times correspondent Edward Wong pointed out a 1987 account by his predecessor John Burns of his own expulsion from China the year before. Burns was deported for allegedly spying on military installations during an unauthorised trip through “an unrehearsed China” during “a brief interlude of the mid–1980’s, when the country seemed more relaxed than at any other time in its modern history.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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She declined to be quoted about her departure, and the government’s motive was not explicitly stated. But among other broadcasts, officials were said by some to have been angered by an English-language documentary on Chinese re-education through labor camps that Al Jazeera produced outside China and broadcast on its network in November ….

Jazeera English officials expressed regret at the closing of their China operations, and said in a statement they had sought additional visas for journalists to expand their coverage here without success ….

Ms. Chan is believed to be the first accredited foreign correspondent to be denied reporting privileges since the October 1998 expulsion of Yukihisa Nakatsu, a journalist with Japan’s largest daily newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun. Mr. Nakatsu was accused of obtaining state secrets, apparently stemming from his contacts with a Chinese economic journalist arrested earlier by state security officers.

Al Jazeera has announced its determination to resume reporting from China:

Melissa Chan has been Al Jazeera English’s China correspondent since 2007. Chan has filed nearly 400 reports during her five years in China. She has covered stories about the economy, domestic politics, foreign policy, the environment, social justice, labor rights and human rights.

Salah Negm, director of news at Al Jazeera English said: “We’ve been doing a first class job at covering all stories in China.Our editorial DNA includes covering all stories from all sides.We constantly cover the voice of the voiceless and sometimes that calls for tough news coverage from anywhere in world ….”

“We are committed to our coverage of China. Just as China news services cover the world freely we would expect that same freedom in China for any Al Jazeera journalist. Al Jazeera Media Network will continue to work with the Chinese authorities in order to reopen our Beijing bureau.”

Though unusually harsh, the expulsion fits “a recent pattern of using journalist visas in an attempt to censor and intimidate foreign correspondents”, according to the “appalled” Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China. From a survey taken at the end of 2011:

Over the past two years 27 foreign reporters were made to wait for more than four months for visa approvals. Thirteen of these had to wait for more than six months and were still waiting at the time of the survey.

Three requests presented in 2009 had not received a response, which in practice meant they had been denied.

Twenty eight permanent postings or reporting trips had been cancelled since 2009 because applications for the required journalistic visas were rejected or ignored by the Chinese authorities.

In six cases foreign reporters say they were told by the Foreign Ministry officials that their bureaux’ visa applications had been rejected or put on hold due to the content of the bureaux’ or the applicant’s previous coverage of Chinese affairs.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has also condemned China’s decision:

“We urge China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to immediately grant Al-Jazeera English correspondents accreditation to report the news in China,” said Bob Dietz, CPJ Asia program coordinator. “The refusal to renew Melissa Chan’s credentials marks a real deterioration in China’s media environment, and sends a message that international coverage is unwanted ….”

“Surveillance and harassment are the norm for reporters on the China beat, and authorities will often delay visa approval or threaten to revoke it as part of an overall strategy of intimidation. But effectively shuttering an international news outlet is a disturbing development,” Dietz said.

In recent days, a number of foreign journalists have been threatened with visa revocation for reporting without permission from Chaoyang Hospital, the temporary home of escaped activist Chen Guangcheng.

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Mr. Qi was originally detained after he wrote a series of articles in the state-run media detailing corruption among local party officials in the city of Tengzhou. The articles included an expose into the construction of a lavish government building and the beating of a female employee who was late for work.

Less than two weeks after the articles were published, Mr. Qi was detained by the police and, according to relatives, subjected to 11 months of physical and psychological abuse by members of the Tengzhou Public Security Bureau. They said his time in prison was marked by repeated torture, beatings by other inmates and hard labor in a prison coal mine.

According to the organization Human Rights in China, the authorities decided to prolong Mr. Qi’s detention after he told the Tengzhou mayor and other top officials he planned to continue his anticorruption work after his release.

The Committee to Protect Journalists provides further information on Qi’s case:

Less than three weeks before the completion of his four-year prison term, a court in Shandong province sentenced Qi to a further eight years in jail, according to New York-based advocacy group Human Rights in China and Radio Free Asia. Qi’s wife, Jiao Xia, told Radio Free Asia the charges were still in retaliation for Qi’s reporting prior to his 2007 arrest, which exposed local corruption.

Human Rights in China, citing an online article by Qi’s lawyer, Li Xiaoyuan, said the court sentenced him a second time on June 9 for his original charge of extortion and blackmail. They added a separate charge of stealing advertising revenue from a former employer, China Security Produce News. Li’s article says local authorities informed Qi in May it had new evidence against him, prompting the latest trial–in which he felt Qi’s guilt was already decided. “I felt we were just going through the motions,” Li writes. Qi will serve a total 12 years.

“Qi Chonghuai’s harsh new sentence underscores that Chinese the legal system is being abused to prevent reporting,” said Bob Dietz, CPJ Asia program coordinator. “The release of some Chinese journalists does not change the fact that they should never have been behind bars, and could face harassment at home.”

Also last week, Zhang Jianjing, editor of China Economic Times, was transferred to a different publication, shortly following the closure of the newspaper’s investigative team led by Wang Keqin.

“Yes, that’s right,” Zhang replied when asked to confirm reports from sources close to the paper that he was being transferred to the China Economic Yearbook under the same cabinet-level research body ….

Sources close to the paper said that Zhang’s transfer and the shut-down of Wang’s team were definitely linked, but that Zhang would likely not lose seniority with the move.

“The fact that there was a lot of news released that revealed the truth under the leadership of Wang Keqin had a lot to do with [Zhang's transfer],” said the source, who declined to be named.

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Xie Baokang, assistant to the Times’ editor, told Agence France-Presse that the investigative department had been “dismantled.” Reporters from the team, including the veteran journalist Wang Keqin, have been moved to different departments, Xie told AFP.

The reasons for the move are not clear, but the lack of transparency surrounding the restructuring is characteristic of the behind-the-scenes political pressure that governs China’s media. Journalists are often fined, dismissed, or demoted in retaliation for outspoken reporting and warned not to publicize the penalty, according to CPJ research.

“This apparent crackdown of the China Economic Times’ investigative section is a loss for China,” said Bob Dietz, CPJ Asia program coordinator. “The shutdown carries the hallmarks of a political measure to curb a leading news outlet’s reporting that found disfavor within the government.”

From Jonathan Watts at The Guardian:

Contacted by phone, Wang said he was unable to comment. “Sorry, I have to hang up,” he said ….

“I had problems with black society [gangs], and problems with red society [officials],” Wang said in a Guardian interview last year. “I heard there was a special investigation team, [with the target of] sending me to prison.” He said his life had been threatened and he had been beaten up on several occasions.

Until now, however, it was assumed that his position was safe because he was protected by China’s former premier Zhu Rongji. There is little indication of what may have sparked a bout of pressure from the authorities. At midnight and from 5am to 9am, Wang posted a series of online comments calling for freedom and condemning the corruption of officials.

“Thanks for your support … Even if we can only change society a little, that is still progress,” he wrote in one. “Respect everyone’s freedom in order to achieve true freedom,” he noted in another. “Who but a corrupt man would want to become a governor?” read another.

At Economics Observer [zh], journalism professor Zhan Jiang expressed optimism for Wang’s prospects and those of Chinese investigative journalism in general. China Media Project translates:

As I wrote on my microblog, the breakup of Wang Keqin’s investigative team is not something intended by the high-level leadership. It should be understood as the intention of a handful of ignorant and incompetent people at the top of the newspaper. High-level leaders have voiced approval of the work Wang Keqin has done in recent years to uphold the public interest. They have at the very least not singled him out for trouble. Wang Keqin has worked as an investigative reporter in Beijing for more than 10 years now, and from his seminal work on taxi cartels in Beijing to today he has never been targeted with a libel suit, and the factual nature of his reporting has never been questioned.

Reporters have called to ask me about the state of investigative reporting in China and the predicament it faces. I respond that we should avoid this word “predicament.” And for this reason, I encourage against reading too much into this latest development, understanding it as necessarily a reflection of the worsening state of investigative reporting, or a sign that forces outside the paper have agitated against Wang Keqin. This should not in fact be the case. We should recognize that we’ve lately seen an upsurge in investigative reporting in many media, in financial media and commercial newspapers, and even at China Central Television, including such recent cases as tainted pork in China, and just this month revelations of counterfeit products by DaVinci furniture ….

When friends say that being a journalist is a dangerous road, I respond that, given the chance, I will still choose to be a journalist in the next life. Because Wang Keqin and others like him have made China a more transparent place, and they have transformed the values of our people. In a significant sense, they have taken us from a culture of propaganda and exultation (歌颂型文化) to a culture of criticism (批判性文化). Therefore, I suspect that the changes Wang Keqin is now experiencing might bring him an opportunity for fairer pay and greater comfort. If that’s the case, then I suppose we have Chairman Hang to thank.

Only a week ago, Wang himself wrote [zh] that, while the fortunes of investigative journalism have followed “the wave-like pattern of the ‘camel’s hump’”, the trends are generally positive. From China Media Project:

… [From] the standpoint of professionalism, the first true investigative reports in China perhaps have a history of just a decade. I believe we can date them back to the launch of Caijing magazine [by Hu Shuli (胡舒立)] in 1998. Along with the China Central Television program News Probe, which was launched around the same time and also exposed deeper stories, Caijing defined investigative reporting on the basis of “defending the public interest” (捍卫公众利益), “exposing the truth” (揭发黑幕), and “independent investigation by reporters” (记者独立调查), these three core characteristics, choosing its topics on this basis. News Probe in particular at the time defined the exposure of hidden truths (揭发黑幕) as a necessary component. This was the most basic expectation [of the program] ….

Making a broader observation, strictly-defined Chinese investigative reporting has shown the following trends over its history of just over ten years: 1. more and more reporters have been engaged in the writing of exposes (揭黑报道); 2. more and more media have been engaged in the publishing of exposes; 3. more and more good-quality reports and regular columns [on investigative reporting] have appeared in China; 4. investigative reports in China are showing a higher and higher degree of professionalism; 5. investigative reporters are receiving increasing attention and respect by general society.

See also past coverage of Wang Keqin on CDT.

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Family and colleagues have been unable to reach Caijing magazine journalist Zhang Jialong since the evening of April 28, according to Radio France Internationale. He was believed to have gone for a “talk” with Beijing police, but no notice of formal detention has been issued, RFI reported. Interrogations are informally referred to as “chatting” or “drinking tea” with police or security officials. The Global Post website posted a link to an online missing notice issued by Zhang’s family. Zhang, a 23-year-old intern, had reported on a contaminated milk activist, Zhao Lianhai, and on Ai, the notice said. Zhang had also actively discussed recent detentions on his Twitter account, according to RFI.

Freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker Wen Tao has been missing and believed detained since April 3, when he was taken away by officials in plainclothes shortly after Ai. Wen, a former Global Times journalist and also an active Twitter user, had been documenting Ai’s work; his whereabouts and legal status are unknown, according to international news reports.

“The disappearance of two journalists who were reporting on Ai Weiwei and other Chinese activists is deeply concerning,” said CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney. “We fear they are the latest victims of the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to stifle the flow of independent information.”

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A rights activist in Sichuan has been formally arrested and charged with inciting subversion against the state, according to a statement on Wednesday by China Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group that tracks violations by the Chinese government. The advocate, Chen Wei, was charged on Monday, and his family was notified on Tuesday.

Mr. Chen is the third person in recent days to be charged with inciting subversion in an extraordinarily harsh crackdown on progressives in China that has been unfolding since late February. The other two, Ran Yunfei and Ding Mao, are also from Sichuan and are known, like Mr. Chen, to be promoters of rule of law and democracy-oriented reforms.

Parts of Sichuan Province, a rugged, populous area in western China, are known to be havens for liberal thinkers, and the region has had a long literary and philosophical tradition. The authorities there are now at the forefront of pressing charges against people advocating political reform.

Though formal charges have only just been brought against the three, they have been in custody for over a month, according to Amnesty International (PDF):

On 19 February, the police in Mianyang city, Sichuan province, detained activist Ding Mao on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power”. At midnight on 19 February, Ran Yunfei, an activist, writer and blogger, was detained in Chengdu, the provincial capital. The next evening, the police escorted him home, searched his house, confiscated his computer and returned him to the police station. On 24 February, the police issued Ran Yunfei’s family with a written notice, dated 21 February, stating that Ran Yunfei is held on suspicion of “subversion of state power”.

On the morning of 20 February, the police also searched the home of another Sichuan activist, Chen Wei, in Suining city. They confiscated his computer, external hard drive and mobile phone, and took him away to “have a cup of tea” with them. On 22 February, the police gave his wife a written notice, dated 21 February stating that Chen Wei is held on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power.”

While a long list (compiled by ChinaGeeks) of government critics have disappeared, others have faced different reprisals. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports the dismissal of two journalists in Guangzhou:

Time Weekly opinion editor Peng Xiaoyun reported on her Twitter account Monday that she had received an official dismissal notice from the Time Weekly company, which operates under the Guangdong Provincial Publishing Group. International news reports said Peng had taken “involuntary leave” in January after including controversial figures, such as jailed food safety advocate Zhao Lianhai, in a December 2010 retrospective of 100 influential contemporary figures.

In a separate case, outspoken Southern Weekend commentator Chen Ming, who publishes under the name Xiao Shu, also announced Monday via his local Sina microblog that he was taking a two-year sabbatical. The term “sabbatical” was likely a euphemism for permanent notice since journalists have to resign after six months on leave, U.S. government-funded Radio Free Asia reported. The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post confirmed the news with an unnamed former colleague of Chen’s ….

“In their drive to stifle public discussion, China’s propaganda authorities are depriving the people of some of the country’s most forward-thinking opinions,” said Bob Dietz, CPJ Asia program coordinator. “Not just bloggers and activists who straddle the realms of politics and journalism, but mainstream journalists who have long operated in traditional Chinese media are now being targeted.”

The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch reports that another Chengdu resident, writer Liao Yiwu, has had his permission to travel abroad revoked:

Liao has spent much of his life in and out of Chinese police custody, on account of his insistence on describing the world as he sees it, but for years he has hoped to be able to accept an invitation to the PEN World Writers Festival in New York. Last week, the public-security bureau approved his travel. He got a ticket for a flight leaving next Monday. Then, a few days ago, the police showed up, and said that there had been a change of plans. He was grounded.

“From now on, I’ll apply for my travel permit at the public-security bureau every two weeks until they allow me to go,” Liao said to a Chinese friend, now living elsewhere, who passed his words on to me. “I told them repeatedly that what I’m going to participate in is a literary event, not a political one. I told them that I’m an ordinary writer and they can’t deny me my basic rights to travel. They refused to listen. I’m dealing with a scoundrel government. I’m so outraged.”

March 31 Update:

See reports on the ongoing crackdown from The Guardian:

At least 23 people have been detained, mostly in relation to charges of incitement to subversion or creating a disturbance; three more have been formally arrested; and a dozen people are missing, including several prominent human rights lawyers. Rights groups say they are increasingly concerned that those who have vanished may be at physical risk.

The AFP has a similar report with slightly different numbers:

At least 26 activists have been detained in the wake of the political upheaval that has rocked the Arab world and sparked calls for anti-government demonstrations in China, human rights organisations said.

More than 30 others have been “disappeared” by authorities without charge, Hong Kong-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) said, with the victims including prominent rights attorneys and bloggers who had otherwise been tolerated for years.

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In March, Andrew Jacobs, a correspondent working for The New York Times in Beijing, peered for the first time into the obscure corners of his Yahoo e-mail account settings. Under the “mail forwarding” tab was an e-mail address he had never seen before. That other e-mail address had been receiving copies of all of his incoming e-mails for months. His account had been hacked.

Jacobs’ experience as a journalist in China is not unusual. Over the past two years, other members of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC) have been the victims of a series of targeted computer hacks. In 2009, carefully crafted e-mails from an elaborately constructed false identity—“Pam Bourdon,” economics editor of the Straits Times—were sent to their local news assistants via unpublicized e-mail addresses. If the assistants opened an attached document, they were shown exactly what one might expect from the e-mail’s cover explanation—a detailed list of dates that “Bourdon” would be available during a Beijing visit. Simultaneously, a hidden program capable of taking over and spying on the recipient’s computer would launch. Control of the assistant’s computer—and that of anyone who opened the forwarded document—would pass to remote servers controlled by unknown parties ….

When CPJ exchanged e-mails with Jacobs later in the year, he seemed philosophical about the degree of surveillance in which he and his Beijing colleagues worked. “Yes, I feel vulnerable,” he wrote, “but I’ve always assumed my e-mail was being read and that my phones are tapped. … It’s most unfortunate and creepy, but to be honest you just get used to it and communicate accordingly.”

Also mentioned is the growing sophistication of online surveillance and attacks in Vietnam, whose targets have included news sites reporting on ecologically damaging bauxite mining carried out there by Chinese companies.

Various aspects of reporting from within China are discussed in interviews with Berlingske’s Kim Rathcke Jensen on The China Beat and The Guardian’s Tania Branigan and McClatchy’s Tom Lasseter at ChinaGeeks.

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Some 150 journalists are currently in jail, including 60 in Iran where the CJP says the authorities have in effect criminalised journalism.

The group said online journalists were particularly vulnerable to repression… As in the previous 10 years, China remained the world’s worst jailer of journalists – with 24 being held… Speaking at a news conference at the UN, CPJ officials said international pressure was still the most effective way to combat both government repression and impunity for non-state players who attacked journalists, the BBC’s Barbara Plett reports from the United Nations headquarters in New York.

The growth of new media – such as blogs and social networking sites – had created new opportunities fight repression and censorship, they said.

But CPJ officials warned that states like China and Tunisia can sabotage such technologies and turn them against journalists.

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Post tags: Committee to Protect Journalists, journalists arrested, reporters
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