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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BBC, censorship, Michael Anti, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, radio, self-immolations, Tibet, Voice of America
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By its peak in the 1990s, the 6.5 acre Kowloon Walled City was home to at least 33,000 people (with estimates of up to 50,000). That’s a population density of at least 3.2 million per square mile. For New York City to get that dense, every man, woman, and child living in Texas would have to move to Manhattan.

[…] Kowloon Walled City began as a military fort in Kowloon, a region in mainland China. In 1898, China signed a land lease with Great Britain, giving the British control of Hong Kong, Kowloon, and other nearby territories. But the lease stipulated that the fort in Kowloon would remain under Chinese jurisdiction.

Over time, the fort became abandoned, leaving the area subject to neither Chinese nor British authority. This legal gray zone was attractive to displaced and marginalized people. Thousands of people moved there after the war with Japan broke out in 1937. Even more people moved there after the Communist Revolution. It attracted gangsters, drug addicts, sex workers, and refugees. And it also drew a lot of normal people from all over China who saw opportunity there.

Click through to 99percentinvisible.org for photos and video of the Walled City. Host Roman Mars also tweeted a link to a Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ session with user Crypt0n1te, who claims to have lived there as a child.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: architecture, Britain, Hong Kong, podcasts, radio
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Sunday’s edition of This American Life is a retraction of the earlier episode, pointing out Daisey’s “numerous” and “substantial fabrications”. From host Ira Glass on the show’s blog:

I have difficult news. We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products ….

Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we never should’ve put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake.

We’re horrified to have let something like this onto public radio ….

The problems were brought to light by Rob Schmitz of American Public Media’s Marketplace. He became suspicious when he heard Daisey’s claim to have met n-hexane poisoning victims in Shenzhen, almost a thousand miles away from the Suzhou factory where the poisoning had occurred. Schmitz then tracked down Daisey’s interpreter, who Daisey had convinced fact-checkers was unreachable. From Marketplace:

I pressed Cathy to confirm other key details that Daisey reported. Did the guards have guns when you came here with Mike Daisey? With each question I got the same answer from Lee. “No,” or “This is not true.”

Daisey claims he met underage workers at Foxconn. He says he talked to a man whose hand was twisted into a claw from making iPads. He describes visiting factory dorm rooms with beds stacked to the ceiling. But Cathy says none of this happened.

Daisey has defended his work, claiming that it “captured the totality” of his six-day trip “with integrity”. From his blog:

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic ­- not a theatrical ­- enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret. I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China.

The theatre where Daisey performs has also stood by the production, according to The New York Times:

The Public Theater in New York, which has been the home of Mr. Daisey’s show since last year, showed support for him on Friday. “In the theater, our job is to create fictions that reveal truth — that’s what a storyteller does, that’s what a dramatist does,” the theater said in a statement. ” ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’ reveals, as Mike’s other monologues have, human truths in story form.”

That said, the statement continued, “we wish he had been more precise with us and our audiences about what was and wasn’t his personal experience.”

Daisey’s suggestion that the problem is one of context is undermined by his use of the same material in a New York Times op-ed last October, following the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs:

I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, “It’s a kind of magic.”

(This paragraph has now been removed in response to the news of the fabrications.)

Daisey’s fabrications do not implicate The New York Times’ independent, in-depth reporting on labour conditions in Apple’s supply chain, or other coverage of the issue. He made up only specific encounters and experiences, not the underlying problems, many of which were included in Apple’s own 2012 Supplier Responsibility Report.

The full This American Life episode titled Retraction is now live on their website. It includes an interview with Cathy Lee, Daisey’s interpreter in Shenzhen, an interview with Mike Daisey, and an interview with Charles Duhigg, the reporter who covered abuses in Apple’s supply chain for the New York Times.

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Post tags: Apple, Foxconn, iPhone, labor abuse, labor conditions, radio, Shenzhen, steve jobs, Suzhou
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There are many reasons for thinking that Radio Era Baru and its manager were in fact prosecuted for political reasons.

Firstly, the Indonesian authorities have refused to grant the station a licence since 2007. It was forbidden to broadcast by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology’s frequency monitoring centre in Batam (Balai Monitor Frekuensi) on 28 March 2008, although it had complied with all technical requirements, including those specified by the Riau province branch of the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPID), which gave the station permission to broadcast at the time of its launch.

Secondly, the problems that Radio Era Baru has been encountering since 2007 seem to be a result of the nature of some of the programmes it broadcasts. It often denounces human rights violations in China, including violations of the rights of Uyghurs, Tibetans and members of the banned religious movement Falun Gong.

According to the station’s president, Raymond Tan, citing the leaked copy of a letter from the Chinese embassy in Indonesia, the prosecution is the result of direct pressure by the Chinese government on the Indonesian authorities with the aim of preventing the station from broadcasting its programmes.

For these reasons, we deplore the harsh sentence imposed on Mr. Machali. It violates Indonesia’s laws and Constitution, which says in articles 28-E-3 and 28-F that each person has the right to freely “express his opinions” and to “spread information via all kinds of channels available.”

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Post tags: Falun Gong, indonesia, radio, Reporters Without Borders, Tibet, Uyghurs
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Four years ago, shortly after Indonesian followers of China’s banned Falun Gong movement set up a radio station here, Beijing’s embassy in Jakarta sent a stern letter to Indonesia’s government.

Denouncing what it called an “evil cult” and a “tool for overseas anti-China forces,” the embassy urged Indonesia to pay “close attention to the matter” and “take measures” to halt the radio broadcasts so as to avoid upsetting relations with Beijing.

Gatot Machali, the director of the station, got a leaked copy of the letter and laughed off China’s demand. “It was ridiculous,” he recalled.

Today, the 51-year-old Falun Gong devotee is on trial for illegal broadcasting, the climax of a long campaign by Indonesian authorities to shut down Erabaru Radio, an unlicensed station that mixes pop music, news and fervent hostility to China’s ruling Communist Party.

See also earlier coverage of Falun Gong on CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Falun Gong, indonesia, radio
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S. Pandiyarajan was fiddling around with his shortwave radio set one hot summer evening at Villupuram, Tamil Nadu, when he stumbled upon a strange station.

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

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

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

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

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Post tags: BBC, broadcasting, India, radio, Voice of America
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The government argument for ending the service, which began transmission in 1941, is that Mandarin broadcasts are no longer cost-effective:

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BBC, censorship, Cold War, news media, radio, Soviet Union
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The 2012 budget proposal submitted to Congress this week would end VOA’s Mandarin-language short-wave radio broadcasts, focusing instead on transmitting news through the Internet and mobile phones. The U.S. would continue broadcasting in Chinese by bolstering Radio Free Asia’s Mandarin-language broadcasts.

The move is a reflection of both budget pressures and changing technology. The U.S. is rethinking how it can best promote democracy around the world in the wake of the revolts in the Middle East that were spurred in part by social networking.

Initially created during the Second World War, the Voice of America and sister networks such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia were part of the government-sponsored effort to promote U.S. values around the world, especially during the Cold War.

While moving online may appear to make VOA’s message more vulnerable to Chinese censorship, shortwave is itself not immune to interference. The Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees VOA, has described jamming of shortwave broadcasts by China as “an ongoing problem”. Inharmonious foreign radio is routinely drowned out by Firedrake, a notorious (at least among radio enthusiasts) and extremely powerful transmission of loud Chinese classical music whose drums and strings overwhelm other signals. This jamming has helped limit VOA’s Chinese listenership, which amounts to just 0.1% of the population, according to the latest audience survey.

Nevertheless, cutting the broadcasts has attracted some strong criticism. From the Taipei Times:

“Shocking and idiotic,” said Arthur Waldron, professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on China [and author of The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth].

“Information is our strong point. As true news about China comes out, it will be easier for us to deal with them. Radios are very effective indeed at shaping public opinion,” he said.

“I would think this was bad satire, but I fear it is true. It shows a complete lack of understanding of the world situation and correlation of forces,” Waldron said.

More immediate disruption to shortwave broadcasts has come this week from electromagnetic interference caused by solar flares, reported by Xinhua.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, radio, United States, Voice of America
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In the Commons today William Hague, the foreign secretary, was forced to defend the government’s decision to cut the World Service’s budget after being condemned by Labour MPs. He blamed the BBC pension deficit and Foreign Office spending cuts required by the “vast public deficit inherited from the previous government”.

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

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

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

From the Financial Times:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BBC, radio, Russia, Voice of America
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Two days ago, a Shanghai radio station, AM990, broadcast a program where the host said that Shanghai people speaking the Shanghai dialect (Shanghainese) in public was a bad habit and that Shanghai people use speaking Shanghainese to show that they are superior to other Chinese/people.

This angered a lot of Shanghainese people.

Maybe Shanghainese have already gotten used to various offences by people from the rest of China. However, this time, it came from one of their very own radio stations. See how some Shanghainese handled it:

From KDS, “Radio AM990 openly anti-Shanghai, everyone sign this boycott of the station!!!“:

For a full translation of the discussion, visit the blog.

© Thome for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: radio, Shanghai
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At 7:50 a.m., it’s time to go. I take my bag and walk toward the BIMC. It’s early. I can see fewer policemen than I did last night. I sit on a wall on the other side of the road, trying to act casually, as a tourist. The antennas are hidden within hiking sticks. I take them out of my backpack and screw them together with an additional piece supposed to link the antennas and to allow the signal to be transmitted. I put a huge Beijing 2008 flag on top of the hiking sticks and it looks as though I am holding a flagpole.

You can also listen to the content of the broadcast in Mandarin, English, and French at the Reporters sans Frontieres site.

© Timothy Lesle for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Olympics protests, radio, RSF
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Emissions-wise, the Shengs stack up pretty well against the Sheppards, a couple from North Carolina with two young children who took the carbon challenge last May. The Sheppards produce about 14 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year — enough to fill about nine hot-air balloons. Their emissions were about 40 percent lower than the average North Carolina family — until they added in their air travel. With air travel, the Sheppards account for nearly 27 metric tons of carbon emissions per year.

© Kiran Goldman for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: environment, greenhouse gas emissions, radio
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Commentator Alison Klayman has been living in China for a year and a half. She had some idea of what it was like to celebrate the Chinese New Year: fireworks, dumplings, red lanterns and envelopes of money. But this year was special. She was invited to celebrate the New Year in a countryside village, in the hometown of a friend and colleague.

She knew it would be a 650-kilometer bus ride from Beijing on the busiest travel week of the year. She knew she would stand out as the only white person everywhere she went. She did not realize she would spend most of the holiday in bed with her friend’s grandmother.

© Kerry Seed for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: family, lunar new year, radio, Spring Festival
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(Photos by redheart)

(...)
Read the rest of Songs of the Old Days at Chinese Park – Anthony Kuhn (0 words)

© Wu Nan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, photos, radio
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Listen to the interview here.

- Listen to some of Jocelyn Ford’s reports, such as her stories about Land rights in China .

(...)
Read the rest of CDT ChinaCast: Interview with Marketplace’s Jocelyn Ford (135 words)

© Wu Nan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: foreign correspondents, Jocelyn Ford, radio
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