Freedom of Press: March 2008 Archives
By David Barboza | The New York Times
March 25, 2008
Chinese officials have sharply criticized foreign reporters here over their coverage of the riots in Tibet, accusing them of biased reporting and preventing them from traveling to Tibet or neighboring provinces to report on the unrest.
The government has also begun a propaganda campaign aimed at persuading the public that the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, instigated the violence in Tibet on March 14 and that China was a victim of separatist terrorist activity.
The Tibetan government in exile said Tuesday that the death toll from the demonstrations was about 140. Previously, it had said that 99 protesters had died. China has put the death toll at 22.
The Chinese government's effort is the clearest sign yet of its concern that the Tibet unrest, as well as antigovernment protests over Darfur, could disrupt the Olympic Games this summer in Beijing.
The government appears to be blocking foreign Web sites inside China and censoring foreign television broadcasts here about Tibet. Youtube.com was blocked after the riots began, and CNN and BBC broadcasts regularly go black after mention of riots in Tibet. The New York Times Web site appears to have been blocked or censored in recent days.
By Jake Hooker | The New York Times
March 26, 2008
In the back room of a Tibetan teahouse, three robed monks spoke in whispers.
One monk said his home in Luhuo County had been littered with fliers calling on Tibetans to protest. A second monk said soldiers had surrounded his monastery in Aba County. The third dialed home. After folding shut his cellphone, he said the police had killed one Tibetan protester and injured nine others in Serta County.
"Tibetans are dying for no reason," said the Luhuo monk, as the whine of a police siren drifted through an open window. "But this is happening in remote places, and nobody knows."
From this city of 10 million people in the middle of China, all roads leading west have been closed -- except to convoys carrying soldiers and riot police officers to subdue Tibetan antigovernment protests. Chengdu has always been a gateway to the remote Tibetan plateau, but now it feels like a border outpost, tense and anxious, at the eastern edge of what several Tibetans here described as a war.
If it is a war, it is one the outside world cannot see. Police roadblocks have closed off a mountainous region about the size of France, spanning parts of the provinces of Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai. Foreign journalists trying to investigate reports of bloodshed are turned away or detained. Even in big cities like Chengdu, Tibetans say they are wary of police retaliation. They pass along secondhand accounts of clashes mostly on condition that their names will not appear in print.
What seems clear is that in the isolated region west of Chengdu, the sometimes violent protests, already the broadest and most sustained agitation against Chinese rule in two decades, have continued despite the influx of armed security forces. Lhasa itself is now under heel. But a vast area of highlands and placid villages, where Tibetan life usually centers on temples and monasteries built of wood and earth, remains a battle zone.
On Tuesday, protesters and the police clashed in Garze, a prefecture of Sichuan, state media and a Tibetan rights group said. Some 200 monks and nuns began a march earlier in the day that turned violent when the police sought to suppress the crowd, the India-based Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy said.
By USA TODAY
March 23, 2008
Don't expect to turn on your TV during the Beijing Olympics and see live shots of Tiananmen Square, where Chinese troops crushed pro-democracy protests nearly two decades ago.
Apparently unnerved by recent unrest among Tibetans and fearful of protests in the heart of the capital, China has told broadcast officials it will bar live television shots from the vast square during the games.
A ban on live broadcasts would disrupt the plans of NBC and other major international networks, who have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to broadcast the Aug. 8-24 games and are counting on eye-pleasing live shots from the iconic square.
The rethinking of Beijing's earlier promise to broadcasters comes as the government has poured troops into Tibetan areas wracked by anti-government protests this month and stepped up security in cities, airports and entertainment venues far from the unrest.
In another sign of the government's unease, 400 American Boy Scouts who had been promised they could go onto the field following a March 15 exhibition game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres were prevented from doing so by police.
"It was never specifically mentioned to me it was because of Tibet that there were extra controls, but there were all these changes at the last minute," said a person involved in the Major League Baseball event who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The communist government's resorting to heavy-handed measures runs the risk of undermining Beijing's pledge to the International Olympic Committee that the games would promote greater openness in what a generation ago was still an isolated China. If still in place by the games, they could alienate the half-million foreigners expected at the games.
By BBC News
March 21, 2007
Chinese authorities are continuing to tighten security following days of protests by Tibetans in the main city, Lhasa, and in surrounding provinces.
In one town in Gansu, a BBC journalist saw rows of armed soldiers and heard broadcasts telling people to surrender.
On Thursday, China admitted for the first time that troops had shot and injured protesters during the unrest.
A senior US lawmaker, Nancy Pelosi, has called on the international community to denounce China's rule in Tibet.
Ms Pelosi is holding talks in northern India with the Dalai Lama, who Chinese authorities accuse of inciting the violence.
As Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Ms Pelosi is outranked only by the president and the vice-president.
Her visit to Dharamsala was planned before the anti-China protests began.
"If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China and the Chinese in Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak out on human rights," Ms Pelosi told a crowd of thousands of cheering Tibetans, including monks and schoolchildren.
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 18, 2008
The Chinese government is restricting foreign journalists from entering Tibet and neighboring areas, and blocking some news, video and Internet reports about the protests there from appearing inside China, according to journalists working here.
For the past few days, CNN, the BBC, Google News, Yahoo and YouTube have been blocked or have faced temporary blackouts or service disruptions in some parts of China. Some foreign journalists also say their e-mail service has been disrupted.
Such measures are not unusual here. China strictly censors news that appears in the Chinese media and occasionally disrupts the activities of international news organizations and foreign Web sites operating in China, particularly if the content they are distributing is deemed politically offensive to the government.
The Foreign Correspondents Club of China issued a statement on Monday calling for China to immediately allow foreign journalists access to Tibet, which is in far western China. The organization, made up of foreign journalists based here, said Beijing had failed to honor its promise that before and during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, it would allow foreign reporters greater freedoms to report in China.
By Bill Powell | TIME Magazine
March 17, 2008
It is still nearly five months before the Olympic torch is to be lit in Beijing, officially starting the 29th summer Olympics. But, diplomats in the Chinese capital believe that a high level game of chicken has already begun, one that has now turned deadly -- first, in Lhasa, the capital of what China calls the Tibet Autonomous Region, and now elsewhere, according to Tibetan exiles and human rights groups.
Yesterday, in China's Sichuan province, at least eight bodies were brought to a Buddhist monastery in Aba prefecture, allegedly shot dead by Chinese riot control police, according to an eyewitness account quoted by Radio Free Asia. The escalating confrontation in and around Tibet is a nightmare for China's top leadership, but one, some diplomats believe, that could not have taken anyone in the central government completely by surprise. It pits the leadership in Beijing against its domestic opponents -- who include not only Tibetan dissidents, but also separatist groups in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang, as well as human rights and political activists throughout the country.
Each side understood that the months leading up to the Games would be "extremely sensitive," as one diplomat put it. The government knew "from day one," another diplomat told TIME, that "a successful bid for the games would bring an unprecedented -- and in some cases very harsh -- spotlight" on China and how it is governed. On the other side, everyone from human rights activists to independence seeking dissidents in Tibet and Xinjiang -- "splittists" in the Chinese vernacular -- knew they would have an opportunity to push their agendas while the world was watching. "Thought the specific trigger for this in Tibet is still unclear, that it intensified so quickly is probably not just an accident," the senior diplomat says.
According to this view, it was never hard to imagine a scenario in which some group -- and maybe several -- would push things, try "to probe and see whether they could test limits." The critical issue, now front and center, diplomats say, is just how far angry Tibetan activists will push -- and how harshly the Chinese government will push back.
How extensive the violence has been thus far is not at all clear. Tibetan exile groups claimed on Sunday that 80 people were killed in Lhasa on Mar. 13 and 14. Those claims are as yet unconfirmed by any independent reporting and Beijing says just 10 "innocent" people were killed in Lhasa. It denies any deaths elsewhere. The Dalai Lama surely stoked Beijing's anger on Sunday by claiming, from the headquarters of the Tibetan government in exile, when he accused China of "cultural genocide" against Tibetans and by declining to urge his followers in Tibet to surrender to authorities there by midnight tonight, as Beijing had demanded.
Thus, the dilemma for the Chinese leadership is clear. "They need to get this under control, but to do so without a lot of brutality," the diplomat says. The reason for that is clear enough: the memory of Tiananmen Square, undeniably, now hangs in the background as the crisis in Tibet unfolds in this, the year of China's grand coming out party. The scale of the unrest in the Tibet Autonomous Region -- as well as the threat they pose to the Communist Party leadership -- doesn't compare to the massive political demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, which were brutally put down by Chinese military troops. But the issue, at bottom, was the same: how to respond? And here, China may well understand that 1989 was a long time ago. Beijing in those days could literally pull the plug on CNN and Dan Rather and then thumb its nose at the rest of the world. "It couldn't do that today even if it wanted to, and I don't think it does," the senior diplomat says.
By Jim Yardley | The New York Times
15 March 2008
Violence erupted Friday morning in a busy market area of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, as Buddhist monks and other ethnic Tibetans brawled with Chinese security forces in bloody clashes. Witnesses said angry Tibetan crowds burned shops, cars, military vehicles and at least one tourist bus. State media said at least 10 people died.
The chaotic scene was the latest, and most violent, confrontation in a series of protests that began on Monday and now represent a major challenge to the ruling Communist Party as it prepares to play host to the Olympic Games in August. By Saturday morning, Chinese armored vehicles were reportedly patrolling the center of the city.
Beijing is facing the most serious and prolonged demonstrations in Tibet since the late 1980s, when it suppressed a rebellion there with lethal force that left scores, and possibly hundreds, of ethnic Tibetans dead. The leadership is clearly alarmed that a wave of negative publicity could disrupt its elaborate plans for the Olympics and its hopes that the games will showcase its rising influence and prosperity rather than domestic turmoil.
Thousands of Buddhists in neighboring India and Nepal took to the streets Friday in solidarity. Concerned that the protests might spread elsewhere in China, the authorities appeared to be moving the military police into other regions with large Tibetan populations.
Roughly 1,000 special police officers were deployed in the town of Bamei, in Sichuan Province, the site of a temple sacred to Tibetans, witnesses said by telephone on Friday. Residents in Lhasa, reached by telephone, said the authorities had placed much of the city under a curfew by Friday night while military police officers were blocking many city streets. One resident reported seeing armored vehicles in the center of the city.
The United States Embassy in Beijing warned American citizens on Friday not to travel to Lhasa. The embassy said it had "received firsthand reports from American citizens in the city who report gunfire and other indications of violence."
By The Associated Press | The New York Times
16 March 2008
China blocked access to YouTube.com on Sunday after dozens of videos of recent protests in Tibet appeared on the popular U.S. video Web site.
The blocking added to the communist government's efforts to control what the public saw and heard about protests that erupted Friday in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, against Chinese rule.
Access to YouTube.com, usually readily available in China, was blocked after videos appeared on the site Saturday showing foreign news reports about the Lhasa demonstrations, montages of photos, and scenes from Tibet-related protests abroad.
There were no protest scenes posted on China-based video Web sites such as 56.com, youku.com and tudou.com.
The Chinese government has not commented on its move to prevent access to YouTube. Internet users trying to call up the Web site are presented with a blank screen.
Chinese leaders encourage Internet use for education and business but use online filters to block access to material considered subversive or pornographic.
Foreign Web sites run by news organizations and human rights groups are regularly blocked if they carry sensitive information. Operators of China-based online bulletin boards are required to monitor their content and enforce censorship.
China has at least 210 million Internet users, according to the government, and is expected to overtake the United States soon to become the biggest population of Web surfers.
Beijing tightened controls on online video with rules that took effect Jan. 30 and limited video-sharing to state-owned companies.
Regulators backtracked a week later, apparently worried they might disrupt a growing industry, and said private companies that already were operating legally could continue. They said any new competitors will be bound by the more stringent restrictions.
By Caroline Gluck | BBC World News
March 16, 2008
Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to take part in rival political rallies across Taiwan.
What is known as Super Sunday is the last chance for big weekend rallies before polls to elect a new president.
The events, organised by the two main political parties, are also aimed at expressing public opposition to China's anti-secession law.
Passed three years ago, it legalises the use of force against Taiwan if the island formally declares independence.
China regards the island as part of its territory.
Government officials have warned that the violent events in the past few days in Tibet have implications for Taiwan - showing Beijing would not give up the use of force against the island to resolve disputes.
The events mark a big push by both political parties to rally their supporters and woo the undecided ahead of next week's presidential election.
The rallies are taking place at roughly the same time across the island.
In its carefully choreographed event, the governing Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, is hoping to mobilise more than a million supporters, asking them to gather at designated points so that they form two separate lines along the island's east and west coast.
At 1514 local time - symbolising the date, 14 March, when China passed its anti-secession law - they will begin walking.
They will move in an anticlockwise direction, highlighting the party's campaign slogan Reverse the Tide - to turn back their political fortunes and that of their candidate, who has been trailing in opinion polls.
For its part, the opposition KMT or Kuomintang, are also hoping to mobilise more than a million supporters, holding rallies in every city and county around the island.
One of the aims of their rally is also to show public opposition to China's anti-secession law.
The threats posed by the law have taken on added significance in recent days, following the use of force by Chinese troops to quell protests in Tibet.
Both presidential candidates have condemned the violence.
And government officials here issued strong statements, warning that the events in Tibet showed that China would never give up the option of using force against Taiwan to resolve cross-strait disputes.
Read complete news on RADIO FREE ASIA
Read complete news on RADIO FREE ASIA
Read complete news on RADIO FREE ASIA
By Christian Toto | The Washington Post
March 13, 2008
China, an emerging superpower with a booming economy to match its military might, appears to need a lesson in good, old-fashioned PR as it struggles with its international image prior to hosting the Olympic Games in August.
The country's latest public relations fiasco involves one of the country's newest movie stars, Tang Wei. The actress starred in last year's critically acclaimed "Lust, Caution" from director Ang Lee. This week, China unofficially blacklisted Miss Wei for her role in the movie as a student activist who displayed unpatriotic behavior during the Japanese occupation, according to numerous press reports.
"I am very disappointed that Tang Wei is being hurt by this decision," Mr. Lee said Tuesday. "We will do everything to support her in this difficult time."
Mr. Lee is not the first big-name Hollywood director whom Beijing has recently alienated.
Last month, Steven Spielberg withdrew as an adviser to the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics to protest China's refusal to exert pressure on Sudan to change its role in the five-year-old crisis in Darfur, which has resulted in the deaths of more than 200,000 people and forced more than 2 million from their homes.
China yesterday vigorously denounced the "groundless accusations" and "ulterior political motives" of international critics who have sought "to link the Darfur issue and other irrelevant issues with the Olympic Games in Beijing."
"They have even used sensational words to instigate [a] boycott of [the] Beijing Olympics," the Chinese Embassy in Washington said yesterday. "Their action is against the universally recognized principle of sports being nonpolitical, against the Olympic spirit, and against the wish of the people throughout the world."
But the catalog of Chinese public relations setbacks is lengthy and expanding. On Monday, London's Times Online reported that Ethiopian marathon runner Haile Gebrselassie was threatening not to go for the gold this summer for fear that Beijing's polluted skies could damage his lungs.
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