China Digital Times

Stories tagged with: citizen journalism (12)

• Beijing’s Black Secrets

  

  Though many thought detention centers for petitioners disappeared in China in 2003, Xu Zhiyong, a professor at the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications and citizen journalist, has discovered they’ve merely gone underground.

  On Sept. 21, 2008, Xu visited one of Beijing’s black jails after receiving an SMS message from a detainee inside the jail. (See CDT’s post from earlier last week on the topic.)

  
  The Youth Hotel in Beijing: Guests go in, but they can’t come out.

  When Xu arrived at the jail, he confirmed that the petitioner who had sent him a text message was in fact there. When he tried to get her released, he was beaten up. This translation, of his blog post about the incident, from Black and White Cat:

  Very quickly, six or seven men rushed out around me and one of them reached out to grab my camera. The bare-chested guy suddenly rushed up and punched me in the chest, acting like a crazy devil and carrying a chain-lock.

  I was very calm and submitted to their insults and occasional blows. At one point they wanted to drag me into the black jail, but they were stopped by their boss. When they’d spent all their aggression I said, “Can I go now?” They said no. Then they must have thought of something because they let me go. As I was leaving, I looked back and said “You’ll regret what you did today, whether it’s because you’re punished or because of your conscience.”

  I will go back. This isn’t meddling in other people’s business. Black jails are a tumor on Beijing. They’re a tumor on China. In the broad light of day, that there should be such dark and ugly corners. As a Chinese man, I have a duty to rise up in indignation.

  Xu returned to the jail, this time with a journalist friend. (Again, translated by Black and White Cat):

  Before I reached the entrance to the black jail, four or five guards were already waiting. As soon as I got close, they demanded to know what I was doing. I said I was looking for someone. They told me to leave right away. One of them, wearing a red jacket, looked familiar. If my memory is right, this person is Deputy Director Liu Fengxiang of the Kaifeng Bureau of Letters and Visits. Three years ago he and a group of other people picking up petitioners beat me up in an alley in front of the State Bureau of Letters and Visits. I hadn’t thought I’d bump into him here. I said, “You’re illegally detaining petitioners. It’s illegal.” Director Liu said, ” Who says we’re detaining people? They’re all here volutarily.” I said, “Well, for example, is Wang Jinlan voluntary?” He said, “How do you know she’s not?”

  I fished out my cell phone and was about to call Wang Jinlan who was locked inside. Director Liu snatched my phone. A fist hit my face and he yelled at me to fuck off. He said, “This is government business. It doesn’t concern you.” I later learnt that Director Liu has been the fiercest in beating petitioners. Many petitioners are afraid of him and they all know the guards all call him “Director Liu.” I suppose this is the only kind of person from the Bureau of Letters and Visits who’s suitable to come and work here.

  

  Xu Zhiyong and journalist Guo Jianlong near the black jail.

  This time, he managed to get the petitioner who had contacted him via SMS out of the jail. According to Xu:

  There are at least four black jails in Beijing where Henan province locks up petitioners: the Youth Hotel, the Fenglong Youth Hostel, the Juyuan Hotel and the Jingyuan Hotel. These black jails are just like the custody and repatriation centers of the past and they’ve become an industry. If we take the Youth Hotel as an example, the general situation is this: the man surnamed Liu and another surnamed Yin rent a room from the Youth Hotel. They employ some hired thugs and they’re entrusted by the Henan representative office in Beijing to grab petitioners from the Jiujingzhuang shelter and bring them here. The county governments come and pick them up and pay 150 yuan a day for each person.

  Here is an audio recording by citizen journalist Zhou Shuguang (Zuola) of an altercation that broke out during another trip to the jail (via Global Voices) on Oct. 5, along with journalist Chen Er (Doubleleaf). The event was reported in real time using Twitter.

  On Oct. 14, Isaac Mao wrote on his blog that Zhou’s and Chen’s visit to the black jail proves the transformative power of social media in China. “There are lot of things that go on that we don’t know about in China,” he writes, “but the only way we’re going to have a bright future is if citizen all over share information.”

  For more translations of blog posts from the multiple visits to the black jail site in Beijing, see Meng Zhang’s translations at Global Voices.

  Also, see this 2005 report from Human Rights Watch on the violence and intimidation used against petitioners.

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  • October 18, 2008 9:35 PM

• Citizen Journalists Challenge Beijing

  

  From The National:

  Chinese authorities and the country’s bloggers are waging an online battle over push-ups. This is no pre-Olympic fitness craze, but attempts by the government to keep a lid on dissent.

  Push-ups are what two youths were reported to have been doing on a river bridge in the remote town of Weng’an in Guizhou province on June 21 when a 15-year-old schoolgirl, Li Shufei, fell into the water and drowned.

  That at least was the Chinese authorities’ version of events. But residents believe the boys raped the girl before tossing her into the river and that the truth was covered up because the boys are related to local government officials. About 30,000 people gathered in the city centre, overturning police cars and burning the multi-storey police building.

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  • July 20, 2008 5:17 AM

• A New Voice For China’s News

  

  From The Daily Tar Heel:

  In an effort to circumvent the sanctions on Chinese journalists, a Durham man, Weican “Watson” Meng, runs a massively popular site for news about China, supported by contributions from average citizens, many of whom conceal their identities for protection.

  Restrictions placed on Chinese media outlets by the Chinese government censor a wide range of topics, and put journalists at risk of losing their jobs or being incarcerated.

  In 2000, Meng, 42, started the site, called Boxun.com, (pronounced “bow shwin”), which includes coverage of top news, entertainment, finance and travel stories and by Meng’s count gets 500,000 daily views.

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  • May 21, 2008 7:55 PM

• The Great Sichuan Earthquake

  

  In the Far Eastern Economic Review, Michael Zhao reports on the role of information technology in spreading breaking news about the earthquake:

  In the moments following the quake, the world’s source of breaking news on the disaster was neither the Chinese government nor the Western media. As the first wave of shocks receded, Chinese and foreign residents across the country reached for the closest broadcast tools at hand, their cell phones and computers. Providing first-hand accounts of the earthquake and its immediate effects were thousands of “tweets”—blog entries posted to the Internet via text message. On QQ and MSN, two massively popular instant message services in China, friends traded second-by-second updates.

  Minutes before the U.S. Geological Survey reported the quake on their home site and hours before media outlets ran their first stories, technology blogger Robert Scoble was publishing reactions to the quake from Chengdu to Beijing, giving voice to a corps of citizen journalists. With telecommunications severed, and more than 2,300 cell phone towers in the region toppled, news teams remained hours away.

  Show on map

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  • May 15, 2008 10:39 PM

• China’s “Citizen” Reporters Dodge Censors And Critics - Reuters

  

  From Reuters:

  China’s muzzled press and burgeoning Internet have given citizen reporters an audience and an opportunity — however fleeting — to spread news quicker than government censors can control it.

  But the ability of bloggers to dodge censors and provide a voice for China’s poor and disadvantaged by covering news events Beijing would rather be left unreported has also given some bloggers the chance to profit from disseminating a rare commodity in China — uncensored news.

  Zhou Muguang, who blogs under the name of “Zola,” is a citizen reporter who found that the initial admiration he received from Internet surfers for championing the downtrodden soon turned to scorn for taking their money. [Full Text]

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  • November 13, 2007 1:00 AM

• ‘Citizen Journalism’ Battles the Chinese Censors - AFP

  

  From AFP, via Ninemsn:

  In the strictly controlled media world of communist China, “citizen journalism” is beating a way through censorship, breaking taboos and offering a pressure valve for social tensions.

  In one striking example this month, the Internet was largely responsible for breaking open a slave scandal in two Chinese provinces that some local authorities had been complicit in.

  A letter posted on the Internet by 400 parents of children working as slaves in brickyards was the trigger for the national press to finally report on the scandal that some rights groups say had been going on for years. [Full Text]

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  • June 24, 2007 10:06 PM

• Citizen Blogger Treading New Ground? - John Kennedy

  

  From Global Voices:

  Well, leave it to a young Hunanese vegetable farmer-blogger with social conscience and hunger for fame to throw down his basket, grab a camera and head off to any number of Chinese internet bars to blog one of the biggest news stories in China of 2007 and, by doing so, establish a precedent and a step-by-step guide for NewAssignment, Reuters and many others to follow. One just needs some sisu, thick skin, no hesitation in asking people for money and then spending it. No tax declarations or NGO status to worry about doesn’t hurt either. And, in contradiction to an earlier blog post, Zola“one of the earliest contributors to China’s latest blog buzz initiative”is not even China’s first citizen reporter, he’s just the first to bring it mainstream. [Full text]

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  • May 18, 2007 9:00 PM

• China’s Muckrakers for Hire Deliver Exposes With Impact - Edward Cody

  

  From the Washington Post, a look at Li Xinde and other investigative journalists who are using the Internet to publish expos√©s that wouldn’t make it into the print press:

  What happened here in Qinglong was typical of a new kind of journalism that is emerging in response to the Chinese Communist Party’s suffocating censorship of newspapers, radio and television. With no more investment than a computer and a taste for taking risks, several dozen Web-based investigative journalists have set up sites and started advertising their willingness — for a price — to look into scandals that traditional reporters cannot touch.

  Official censorship still protects authorities, including corrupt authorities, more than two decades after China launched itself on a path to reform. In a society that is swiftly modernizing, the security-conscious Communist Party continues to fear, and filter, the spread of information.

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  • May 1, 2007 8:43 PM

• ‘Nail House’ Blogger is Homeowners’ Hope - Zhuang Pinghui

  

  From the South China Morning Post, via Asia Media:

  As mainstream media were forced to abandon coverage of the “nail house“, Mr Zhou’s site became a popular alternative source of updates. At its peak, it attracted more than 37,000 visitors a day.

  Others hoping to negotiate better deals with developers or to highlight violations of their legal rights have asked Mr Zhou, a 26-year-old vegetable seller from Hunan, to feature their causes on his blog.

  In a country where many feel the legal system and governments have failed them, people are increasingly turning to the media — official and unofficial — to get redress. The Chongqing saga is a case in point. [Full text]

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  • April 30, 2007 9:29 PM

• Even in tightly controlled China, anyone can be a reporter - Dante Chinni

  

  From The Christian Science Monitor:

  When people are armed with camera phones, information is harder to quash.

  Much has been made of the great democratizing impact of the new media - the fact that anyone with a laptop, a modem, and a website can be a journalist.

  …… Eric Zhang, a former staffer at the China Daily news organization based in Beijing, has launched www.molive.cn, a site that lets ordinary people gather news with their camera cellphones. The site, launched three weeks ago, lets people post photos they have taken to their own personal websites with small descriptions of the scenes. Editors comb the postings and put the best ones on Molive’s home page. The site is young but already has more than 100 people posting on it from all around the country and more than 20,000 readers a day. [Full Text]

  Technorati Tags: Citizen Journalism

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  • September 25, 2006 8:13 PM

• Video save taskforce needed - John Kennedy

  

  From Global Voices online:

  When tens of thousands of Ruian, Zhejiang citizens came out to protest the official conclusion of an investigation into the death of high school teacher Dai Haijing, it didn’t take long for the news”despite being banned from mainstream media”to flash through Chinese blogs and BBS’.

  When short videos were taken by those at the scene with mobile phones and posted on the internet, it didn’t take long for the Chinese versions of Youtube to start deleting them. [Full Text]

  On the same 6room.com site (Chinese version of Youtube site), one can see video clips such as “Shenzhen City Management Force driving over a trash collector’s body on street.”

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  • September 13, 2006 11:19 AM

• In Shenzhen, workers protest at low wages, long hours

  

  South China Morning Post (via China Study Group) reported that “About 3,000 workers protested outside an electronics factory in Shenzhen yesterday against low pay and harsh working conditions.

  The workers, employed by the Hong Kong-mainland joint-venture company Computime, rallied outside the factory early in the morning, blocking the entrance and part of a main road. Long traffic jams formed.

  Minor scuffles broke out when more than 100 police officers arrived to keep order, and some workers claimed they had been beaten by the officers. ”

  The full article is here.

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  • October 7, 2004 2:48 PM