WHO LEADS the world in jailing reporters? That’s an easy one: China has been the champion for the past six years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At the end of 2004 its count of imprisoned professionals was 42, including several singled out by the two-year-old regime of Hu Jintao. Now Mr. Hu, who has been tightening rather than liberalizing China’s totalitarian political system, is expanding the range of his repression…
Mr. Hu seems intent on intimidating foreign as well as domestic media from reporting on Chinese affairs his regime deems taboo, from Tiananmen and its legacy to his own consolidation of power. That he could succeed, even at home, seems far-fetched at a time when the Internet, cell phones and other technologies have rendered 20th-century totalitarianism obsolete, at least when it comes to the control of information. Still, China’s youngish but distinctly unmodern leader appears determined to keep trying — which is why China will probably lead the world in jailing journalists for a seventh consecutive year in 2005.
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