The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. The name of the issuing body has been omitted to protect the source.
All websites must delete the Global Times article “A Visit to the Hometown of the ‘May 22’ Terrorists.” Do not hype [the issue]. (May 28, 2014)
环球时报《探访“5.22”暴恐分子老家》一文各网删除不炒作。
A Global Times feature calling Pishan County, Xinjiang the “hometown of terrorists” has infuriated netizens. Pishan is the home of one the people involved in the recent attack on a street market in Urumqi. From Andrea Chen at the South China Morning Post:
Cai Yuzhi, a retired former chief editor of a newspaper in Xinjiang, wrote an open letter on social media to the Global Times yesterday saying the story was unfair to the overwhelming majority of its residents. “Terrorists cannot represent an ethnic group or a region. The Global Times has departed from the country’s ethnic policies and violated media ethics,” he wrote in his letter. [Source]
The Global Times is a state-run newspaper run by the People’s Daily.
The central government has launched a “year-long nationwide crackdown on terror” in response to recent attacks in train stations and other public places perpetrated by “Xinjiang separatists.” Meanwhile, 55 people, apparently all Uyghur, were publicly sentenced at a sports stadium in Yining, Xinjiang yesterday.
CDT collects directives from a variety of sources and checks them against official Chinese media reports to confirm their implementation.
Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source.
