Freedom of Press: August 2007 Archives

by CNN
August 20, 2007

Distressed family members shouted and scuffled with guards after a third day without word on 172 miners trapped in a flooded mine in eastern China, where rescue crews began pumping water Sunday.

Paramilitary police and emergency crews plugged a breach in a dike that burst Friday after heavy rains, flooding the Huayuan Mining mine, officials and state media said. As industrial pumps began siphoning water that stood 65 feet deep in the shaft, experts analyzed accident data to try to locate the missing miners, a provincial official said.

"There's some hope, and we will expend one hundred percent, a thousand percent of effort to carry out the search and rescue," Zhang Dekuan, spokesman for the government of Shandong province, where the mine is located, told reporters.

In contrast to the blanket coverage in the U.S. of rescue efforts for six miners in Utah, accounts in China's wholly state-owned media have been terse. Reports Sunday focused on the successful mending of the breach, but said little about the trapped miners -- a sign that the government remains nervous about public anger over perceived mistreatment.

Despite Zhang's media briefing in a local hotel, no officials or mining company executives emerged from Huayuan's sprawling, gated compound to talk to the miners' waiting, anxious relatives. No list of the missing had been issued, they said.

"They are treating these people like they are things to be sacrificed," said Li Chunmei, whose 42-year-old brother was believed to be trapped in the 600-yard shaft. "You would think an official could come and tell us what's going on, whether there are any signs of life, are they dead or alive."

Dozens of relatives -- sobbing mothers and children among them -- shouted "Why don't you come out!" at officials who stood with police and security guards behind the gate. At one point, the crowd surged, bending the aluminum gate and setting off a fracas of shoving. Later, a middle-aged woman broke through only to be wrestled away by two guards in camouflage.

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By CHARLES HUTZLER | Associated Press | via (uncensored) Yahoo! News
August 17, 2007

Communist authorities have banned most state media from reporting on the deadly collapse of a bridge in southern China, with local officials punching and chasing reporters from the scene, reporters said Friday.

The harassment and the reporting ban, issued by the Central Propaganda Department, came Thursday while reporters swarmed the tourist town of Fenghuang to report on Monday's accident.

Unidentified locals roughed up a group of five newspaper and magazine reporters as they interviewed families of those killed, according to a photographer and a reporter whose colleague was among the journalists involved.

The collapse of the bridge, which was under construction, left at least 41 people dead, making it one of the worst building accidents in China in recent years.

On Friday, rescue crews blasted massive stone and concrete columns to clear the way for a deeper search of the rubble for two dozen missing workers.

The rough treatment given the media stands at odds with the responsible, concerned image China's Communist Party leadership has tried to convey publicly in the wake of the accident and the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Officials from President Hu Jintao on down have promised a thorough investigation into the collapse and punishment for any wrongdoing.

But the accident has raised troubling questions about shoddy building and possible corruption between the officials and contractors, and by trying to control reporting on the disaster, Beijing is fueling those suspicions.

"The local government does not want the media to uncover the collapse," said Li Datong, a veteran newspaperman forced from a top editing job two years ago for running reports that angered authorities. Li said he was told about the harassment in Fenghuang by reporters involved.

A duty officer in the Fenghuang police department, Liu Xiajun, said reporters had made an emergency call reporting the harassment Thursday, but he said he could not elaborate.

An official in the Propaganda Department's information office who declined to give his name said he was "not clear" about the ban and declined further comment.

While all media in China is state controlled, some outlets have engaged in lively, aggressive reporting in recent years, taking advantage of greater social freedoms that have accompanied economic growth and seeking higher profits. Accounts of reporters being beaten by local thugs have increased, with one reporter even being beaten to death early this year.

After the Propaganda Department issued the ban, editors soon phoned their crews in Fenghuang, ordering them to clear out. Editors "told them to disappear within 10 minutes from Fenghuang," the photographer who was having dinner with a group of reporters Thursday night wrote in an e-mail.

The photographer and the reporter asked that they and their media not be identified for fear of reprisals by the department, China's top media censor.

Under the ban, state media were ordered not to send reporters to Fenghuang or independently gather the news but to rely solely on reports by the government's Xinhua News Agency, according to the reporter.

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By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | The New York Times
August 4, 2007

China is cracking down on cable television operators who offer unauthorized foreign satellite broadcasts -- the communist government's latest bid to maintain its monopoly on information, a newspaper reported Saturday.

China's TV regulator last month ordered local authorities to root out operators that provide Chinese homes with foreign channels, which are officially restricted to tourist hotels and compounds where foreigners work and live, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper reported.

Summaries of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television's order said it was aimed at strengthening regulation, maintaining government information controls and ''blocking the intellectual and cultural infiltration of enemy forces.''

Penalties were not stipulated, although the report said violators would have to reapply for the right to receive all satellite broadcasts.

The highest profile victim of the crackdown could be Hong Kong's Phoenix satellite news channel, hugely popular among China's urban middle class and received in millions of homes across the country despite the restrictions.

The report said the crackdown was intended to both silence voices other than official media and protect the monopolies of local stations that have lost viewers to channels such as Phoenix.

The joint venture with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. offers a wider range of news and views, although it largely hews to the official Chinese government standpoint and avoids sensitive political and social issues.