Who are China’s environmentalists? How would you characterize today’s green advocates?

Journalists and broadcasters founded many of China’s most prominent green NGOs—after all, they witnessed the scale of the unfolding environmental crisis. China actually has a long history of civil society, which was suppressed during the Mao era. But the past 20 years have seen a flourishing of green NGOs. Now there are thousands registered, and many more unregistered. Today all sorts of people get involved in China’s environmental campaigns, from university students and middle-class urban residents protesting against the construction of polluting petrochemical factories or incinerators, to villagers in the countryside angry about pollution ruining their crops and their health.

[…] Why is public participation in environmental issues so important for China?

Without the public pressure to act responsibly, local officials will continue to chase short-term economic gains and disregard environmental concerns. A greener society needs journalists who can expose environmental problems, NGOs who can lobby for conservation measures, and lawyers who can represent communities that have been affected by pollution. That’s why citizens have been at the forefront of China’s environmental movement.

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Post tags: Chinadialogue, civil society, economic growth, environmental activism, incinerators, journalists, lawyers, local officials, middle class, NGOs, pollution, university students, villagers
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In a pointed reminder of the complex relationship between control and its subversion in China’s media, many professional journalists today mourned the passing of Zeng Li (曾礼), affectionately known as “Old Zeng,” a man who served as a “content examiner” (审读员) at Southern Weekly but also played a crucial role in the paper’s fight against overbearing censorship policies earlier this year.

[…] Journalists, writers and others took to Chinese social media, chatrooms and other forums to remember Zeng Li, his character and his contributions. They also widely circulated a copy of Zeng’s farewell letter, in which he looked back fondly but with some remorse on his time at Southern Weekly:

Looking back on these four years, I know I did things I shouldn’t have done, that I killed reports that I shouldn’t have killed, that I removed content I shouldn’t have removed. But in the end I had an awakening, preferring not to carry out my political mission, refusing to go against my conscience and to become a criminal of history.

The full letter is available (in Chinese) at CMP. At South China Morning Post, Patrick Boehler gave more details on Zeng’s role in January’s events, along with further praise from scholars and writers.

“This letter is surely an important document in China’s history,” Ma Yong, sociologist and history scholar at the Academy of Social Sciences wrote after Zeng’s passing.

“He used to be an in-house censor for Southern Weekly, he was entangled, but justice always dominated his mind,” wrote Li Chengpeng, a prominent writer. “When this thing happened some time ago, he behaved beautifully. Now that he’s gone, he will continue to edit this country in heaven.”

“He showed the strength of character and dauntlessness typical of a Southern Weekly newsman,” wrote Qian Gang, a former managing editor of the newspaper and now a scholar at the University of Hong Kong. “Everyone has a choice.”

Committee to Protect Journalists Asia Program coordinator Bob Dietz also noted Zeng’s passing on the organization’s blog.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, journalists, news media, obituary, Southern Weekly, southern weekly protest 2013
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Chang Ping, a former CMP fellow and a prominent editor at the Southern Daily Group, came under fire in 2008 after he published an editorial on FT Chinese about unrest in Tibet. That editorial, “Where does the truth about Lhasa come from?“, was the beginning of the end for Chang Ping’s long career with Southern Weekly. He was finally forced out in January 2011.

But one of the most interesting differences between Chang Ping’s case and that of Deng Yuwen is how much the latter has been talked about inside China. And one important reason for this is the rise of the microblog.

[…] It’s difficult to quantify the discussion over Deng Yuwen’s suspension and China’s policy toward North Korea, but there definitely is plenty of discussion out there. Once again, this raises the broader issue of how media control itself is being subjected to a greater degree of exposure than we’ve seen in the past, thanks in large part to the development of social media and other internet tools.

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Post tags: Central Party School, Financial Times, foreign policy, journalists, microblogs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, North Korea, weibo
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Decades of reform and opening have produced nearly 600 million Internet users, more than 400 million mobile users, and more than 300 million microbloggers. The amount of pure content and communication created and enjoyed hourly is staggering.

And much of that content would have been unimaginable in the very recent past: pointed comments, reporting, pictures, and jokes on corruption, food safety, transport conditions, dodgy deals, abuse of authority, and scores of other challenging topics.

Local newspapers and magazines try to push the limits in reporting and editing and even commentary. Foreign reports on China reverberate internally like never before, becoming a part of the domestic debate.

[...]

So there has been huge, obvious, and palpable progress. And yet, like an electrified fence around a yard, evidence of the limits around tolerance and freedom is there, too, ominously looming.

The report includes chapters on challenges faced by journalists in traditional media; on the rise of online media and weibo (written by me), and on the Chinese government’s exportation of online censorship tools and practices. It also includes a video by the New York Times’ Jonah Kessel which profiles journalist Liu Jianfeng, as well as cartoons by Crazy Crab of Hexie Farm and an interactive timeline which retraces how the Bo Xilai scandal was revealed. The full report is available in Chinese as a PDF.

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Post tags: journalists, media conditions, online public opinion, press freedom, weibo
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A former CMP fellow, Wang is China’s best-known investigative reporter. Over the past decade he has tackled scores of sensitive stories, from systematic corruption in China’s taxi industry to the spread of HIV-AIDS through careless and unnecessary blood transfusions. He was forced out of his previous newspaper, the China Economic Times, in 2011 after a spate of hard-hitting reports, including a 2010 expose about the mishandling of tainted vaccines in Shanxi province.

[…] In a post made to Sina Weibo yesterday, Wang Keqin shared details with his more than 400,000 followers about the clearing out of his desk at the Economic Observer the day before:

Yesterday I cleared out of the @EconomicObserver. These are the petitioning materials I received over a period of ten years at the China Economic Times, two tons of them. For other people these might just be waste paper; for me, they represent the trust and hope the people place in me. The things stacked here are misery, blood and tears, but I’ve always seen them as treasures. They go with me wherever I go. I can throw away my furniture, but these cannot be discarded!

Click through for Wang’s photos of the treasured documents.

McClatchy’s Tom Lasseter reported last October on the current wintry climate for China’s investigative reporters. Wang himself wrote in 2011 that the fortunes of Chinese investigative journalism had “shown the wave-like pattern of the ‘camel’s hump’“, but expressed some optimism for its long-term prospects. See also a 2010 Guardian profile and more on Wang, including his 2011 departure from the China Economic Times, via CDT.

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Post tags: economic observer, investigative journalism, journalism, journalists, press freedom, Wang Keqin
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Southern Weekly has long been a thorn in the side of Party conservatives and entrenched interests. Over the past 10 years, the paper has suffered repeated assaults from the authorities and many of its best reporters and editors have been forced to move on. Propaganda officials repeatedly tried sending down ideologically rigid officials from Party newspapers down to Guangzhou from Beijing to serve as editors-in-chief of the newspaper. They appointed “reviewers” who would go over copy with a strict eye. But a consistently strong core editorial team at Southern Weekly meant it was able to withstand such encroachments.

In May 2012, the deputy director of Xinhua News Agency, Tuo Zhen (庹震), was appointed propaganda chief of Guangdong province. He made it his mission to bring Southern Weekly and Southern Metropolis Daily to heel. The campaign of pressure against Southern Weekly went into high gear. Instances of direct intervention and prior censorship began happening more frequently. In an open letter released in the midst of the Southern Weekly crisis last month, staff at the paper revealed that at least 1,034 reports had been killed in 2012 alone.

…

Every New Year’s special edition of Southern Weekly since 1999 has included features in which reporters return to the countryside and to city districts to witness the changes underway there. Together these pieces, which always deal with the same places, form a serial portrait of change in China over more than a decade.

Southern Weekly special editions are known for their outspokenness on core ideas like democracy and civil society. The 80th anniversary edition of the May Fourth Movement called for greater democracy. The 50th anniversary edition of the founding of the People’s Republic of China called for an end to a society of feudal subjects (臣民社会) and the building of a civil society. After 2001, the special New Year’s edition of Southern Weekly began choosing persons of the year as well as reviews of important achievements in press monitoring (much of it investigative reporting) over the past year. The newspaper also looked at some news stories it had been unable to cover during the previous year due to censorship instructions.

See also former Southern Newspaper editor Chang Ping’s recent interview with ChinaFile, in which he discusses censorship and China’s changing media landscape, as well as an op-ed by CDT’s Xiao Qiang and Perry Link about the Southern Weekly incident and the “China dream.”

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Post tags: journalists, media censorship, media freedom, Qian gang, Southern Weekly, southern weekly protest 2013
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Why does it seem like censorship is getting worse?

You are correct. Over the past decade, the rapid development of the Internet has led people to believe there will be more space for speech. But the constraints [on the press] have actually gotten tighter. Fortunately, journalists are resisting. Otherwise, it would be worse. Now, the government’s domestic strategy is to maintain stability. Hu Jintao once said China should learn from North Korea, and sent people to investigate the Eastern European system. Although this trend began in the Jiang Zemin era, the Hu and Wen administration furthered it, regardless of the cost. For example, they bought the most advanced Internet surveillance technology, say, from CISCO. Internet companies like Sina and Tencent have struck a deal with the authorities—or you might call it collusion. In order to secure their business interests, they spend huge amounts monitoring social media. The […] space society has carved out for free expression is being constricted. Moreover, the “stability maintenance” system is making social management crueler. For example, the way law enforcement handles petitioners and property demolition is becoming ever more gangster-like. Although the media tries to fight, it can’t be a counterweight to the giant “stability maintenance” machine.

[…] Do you think new media, such as social media, can further China’s freedom of speech?

New media by itself is a tool. What is more important is how it is used. The government definitely wants to use it to control and steer public opinion. And, indeed, they are spending hugely on it. People in society hope social media will expand the space for expression. It’s not clear how things will turn out. New media might become society’s tool if society uses it more aggressively. For instance, in the current Southern Weekend and Yanhuang Chunqiu cases, new media played an important role. Without new media, it would have been unimaginable for the propaganda department’s work to have been exposed.

See also Yu Jianrong’s recent critique of China’s rigid “stability maintenance” system via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chang Ping, cisco, freedom of information, freedom of speech, Hu Jintao, Internet surveillance, journalists, media censorship, news media, petitioners, reform, sina, social media, Southern Weekly, southern weekly protest 2013, stability maintenance, tencent, Xi Jinping, Yanhuang Chunqiu
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A statement issued by the meeting, reported by CCTV, said some party organs were not strict when enlisting members and the quality of new recruits needed to be looked at. Meanwhile, some party members were corrupt and not disciplined.

[...] ”The overall number of party members should be controlled, and the membership structure and quality should be optimised in order to let them play their role,” the statement said.

[...] ”Unqualified party members will be handled in a timely manner and the management of floating party members, those who do not work or live in places where their membership is registered and cannot regularly attend party activities, should be strengthened,” the statement said.

Following the statement, some Chinese political watchers  are calling for stricter Party recruitment standards for new members and harsher punishment for corrupt officials. From Yang Jinghao at Global Times:

Cai Xia, a professor of Party building with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, told the Global Times that the meeting showed that the Party leadership has fully realized the problems existing among Party members and its determination to administer the Party strictly.

[...] Cai Zhiqiang, a professor of Party building with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, said the CPC’s large size had inevitably brought many management challenges for the Party, considering the increasingly complicated domestic and international situations and diversified values and interests in the new era.

[...] ”The punishment of unqualified members should also be strictly in line with the Party regulations,” said Cai Zhiqiang. In May 2012, 102 Party members were expelled for poor work performances or violations of family planning policy. The cleanout was regarded as a landmark example of Party membership adjustment.

Just this week, yet another corruption investigation of a high-ranking official, Li Jianguo, once again demonstrates resolution on this issue from the top and a thirst for justice from the general public. From Celia Hatton at BBC:

Mr Li, who serves as vice chairman of China’s parliament, reportedly engineered the promotion of his nephew to a plum government position.

[...] Just last week, Mr Xi promised he would battle both “tigers” and “flies”, indicating that officials at all ranks were under scrutiny.

Li Xinde, an influential citizen journalist, was the first person to interview the whistleblower exposing Li Jianguo’s high-flying nephew. The fact that this case has been picked up by the authorities, he says, shows that things are changing in China.

[...] All evidence, he says, that individual citizens are no longer working alone to expose corruption on a case-by-case basis. Instead, there is new hope that the system as a whole is becoming more transparent.

See more on Xi Jinping and anti-corruption work via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-corruption, high-level corruption, investigative journalism, journalists, online public opinion, transparency, Xi Jinping
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Unemployed journalist Li’s report created so much pressure that the official media finally weighed in on the story as well. On Nov. 19, the government-owned television network CCTV contacted Li and asked him to find the garbage collector. On Nov. 20, Universal Children’s Day, state-owned news agency Xinhua published a report that even pointed out the contradiction between the deaths of the five children and Xi’s rousing words.

Now officials in Bijie released the names of the dead boys: Zhonglin, 13, Zhongjing and Chong, both 12, Zhonghong, 11 and Bo, 9, all had the same last name, Tao. They were cousins, the children of three brothers, two of whom were migrant workers in the booming city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. The boys had been left in the care of the third brother, who was struggling in the bitterly poor village where he lived. Conditions were so bad there that the boys had run away. The city of Bijie also fired or suspended eight officials, including the director of the elementary school the children had attended, and where they hadn’t been seen in weeks.

But the children weren’t the only victims. While he was doing his research for CCTV, state security officers parked their SUVs on Li’s street and knocked on his door. They told him that things had gone too far, and that the case had been solved and he should delete his blogs and stop working on the story. Li refused. They threw him and his wife into a car, took them to the provincial capital Guiyang and put them on a flight to Haikou on Hainan, a resort island in the South China Sea.

When someone recognized the prominent dissident there, two officials dragged him off to another city. They told Li that the authorities had in fact considered issuing him a passport after the 18th party congress, so that he could visit his son. But that, they added, was now no longer an option. “Assume that you won’t see your son for the next 10 years, and perhaps not even for the rest of your life,” they said. They forced him to write a last blog entry, to the effect that he was traveling for personal reasons, to resolve a “family matter.” After that, Li’s voice fell silent, and he disappeared from the radar for the next four weeks.

Zand and a colleague visited Li in December, getting a first-hand glimpse at his situation and running into trouble of their own while investigating the boys’ deaths. From Part 2 of his report:

When Li told us about his arrest, his research and his abduction, it was with the muffled fury of a journalist who has been repeatedly prevented from reporting on what he knows. When he talked about his son in Ohio, he paused and swallowed. And when he reached the point in his story when the police came knocking on his door, there was another knock on the door. Li placed his finger over his mouth, disappeared for a few minutes, returned and said quietly: “That was one of the neighborhood security men. He had noticed movement.” A few days after his return from Hainan, Li said, outgoing President Hu Jintao was in Bijie, and after that he was no longer guarded as closely as before. But that, he said, would likely change again.

…

When we arrived at the village, neighbors prevented us from meeting with the boys’ family. It was unclear to us whether this was because the family didn’t want to see us, or whether the presence of Zhao and our other escorts intimidated them.

When we returned to the city, one of the police officers from the hotel joined us for dinner. After apologizing for the rude reception on the previous evening, he tried to ascertain what our next plans were. He also suggested that we refrain from reporting too critically on conditions in Bijie, noting that criticism is bad for the investment climate in the region. We remained under observation, and government agents sitting in the lobby filmed us whenever we left the hotel.

…

When we returned at 10:30 p.m., the light was on in my room, the bedspread had been pulled back and the curtains were closed. When I switched on my camera I noticed that my memory card was empty. My iPad had been plugged in incorrectly and I couldn’t switch it on anymore. Water was dripping from the plugs for the headphone and the charger. A mobile phone that I had left in the room had also been submerged in water. All the files on the desktop of my computer — and that of my colleague — had been deleted. Someone had broken into our rooms while we were out and manipulated and destroyed our devices.

See also censorship instructions regarding the incident sent to the media by China’s Central Propaganda Department, part of CDT’s “Directives from the Ministry of Truth” series.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: central propaganda department, Der Spiegel, Guizhou, homeless, illegal detentions, journalists, Li Yuanlong, Ministry of Truth
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Even as the deal became public, the controversy spread to one of Southern Weekly’s sister papers, the Beijing News. A propaganda directive obtained earlier by CDT ordered newspapers and websites to prominently republish a Global Times editorial blaming the dispute on foreign forces rather than local officials. Some complied, adding disclaimers to distance themselves from the article and peppering their sites with barely hidden messages of support for Southern Weekly. The Beijing News did not. From David Bandurski at China Media Project:

According to one version of yesterday’s events, The Beijing News received a visit from a Beijing city-level propaganda official after it refused to publish the Global Times editorial, which appeared in many papers across the country (and had been pasted across the internet the day before). The official reportedly threatened to dissolve the newspaper if it did not comply with the central-level order to run the Global Times piece.

After receiving this warning, The Beijing News held a staff vote to decide whether or not to comply with the propaganda order. The vote was in favor of “not reprinting” (拒绝转载). Soon after, Dai Zigeng submitted his resignation to local propaganda authorities and the mood inside the paper was reportedly dismal, with many staffers in tears.

Global Voices’ Oiwan Lam collected and translated online postings on the episode by Beijing News employees, among others.

@宇过天新 Tonight, I remember every one of our tears, remember the unanimous democratic vote against the re-printing [of the editorial], remember the sobbing sound in the layout room, remember every single sigh, remember the sound of the beer can being opened, remember everyone standing still, remember ourcolleagues expectation, remember all the brothers who appeared at the newsroom upon receiving the call. Please remember tonight’s humiliation. Let’s remember all of it.

@刘刚在路上: I will live and die with Beijing News. Old Dai resigned, I will follow him, giving up journalism altogether.

@uponsnow explained what is the meaning of dissolving the newspaper:

The meaning of dissolving is not closing down. It means suspending, purging and reopening. In other words, all the staff who do not agree will be fired and the style of Beijing News will be totally different [when it reprints].

Another comment suggested that newspapers associated with the Southern Media Group, which owns Southern Weekly, had been somewhat singled out over the Global Times editorial. One of them, the Xiaoxiang Morning Post, printed it alongside a large ad for a pest exterminator, according to South China Morning Post’s John Kennedy. Beijing News, when it eventually relented, did so grudgingly, with a truncated version buried deep within the paper under an uneffusive headline:

Beijing News renamed the GT editorial: “Global Times published an editorial about ‘the Southern Weekly incident’” twitter.com/28wordslater/s…

— John Kennedy (@28wordslater) January 9, 2013

On Sina Weibo, censorship of the Beijing News story seemed even heavier than in the Southern Weekly case, as the editor of the Chinese Wall Street Journal Li Yuan noted:

Censors are much stricter with the Beijing News publisher resignation news than Southern Weekend. Impossible to tweet with any variation.

— Li Yuan (@LiYuan6) January 9, 2013

Update: The New York Times’ Edward Wong, who had previously noted uncertainty about details of the Beijing News case, tweets that Dai may still be the newspaper’s publisher:

I just heard that Dai Zigeng is still the publisher of Beijing News. Talk of his departure was premature?

— Edward Wong (@comradewong) January 9, 2013

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing News, censorship, David Bandurski, Directives from the Ministry of Truth, Global Times, journalism, journalists, media conditions, propaganda, sina weibo, Southern Media Group, Southern Weekly, southern weekly protest 2013
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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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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
Post tags: Al-Jazeera, Committee to Protect Journalists, FCCC, foreign media, journalists, leadership transition, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, news media
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To be a journalist in today’s China you sometimes need to have a few subtle tricks up your sleeve to get your stories to print.

Sun Hua, an award-winning investigative journalist for the Jinan Times, knows just what he can and cannot get away with and how best to persuade his bosses to allow him to continue his work. He is charming, philosophical – and also very determined.

This film follows Sun Hua at work as he investigates a story about possible corruption by a property developer, seeking out residents’ views, negotiating demonstrations and dealing with the police.

All the time, he quietly considers his position as a journalist in a complex country that itself is dealing with change. He dreams of ‘fairness, objectivity, truth’ – but he also knows there are real limits to what he can do. Yet he continues to push, to persuade and to publish.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: investigative journalism, journalists, media conditions, press freedom
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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.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, Committee to Protect Journalists, FCCC, foreign media, journalists, journalists in china
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