Freedom of Press: April 2008 Archives

By Jill Drew and Maureen Fan | The Washington Post
April 21, 2008

China has spent billions of dollars to fulfill its commitment to stage a grand Olympics. Athletes will compete in world-class stadiums. New highways and train lines crisscross Beijing. China built the world's largest airport terminal to welcome an expected 500,000 foreign visitors. Thousands of newly planted trees and dozens of colorful "One World, One Dream" billboards line the main roads of a spruced-up capital. The security system has impressed the FBI and Interpol.

But beneath the shimmer and behind the slogan, China is under criticism for suppressing Tibetan protests, sealing off large portions of the country to foreign reporters, harassing and jailing dissidents and not doing enough to curb air pollution. It has not lived up to a pledge in its Olympic action plan, released in 2002, to "be open in every aspect," and a constitutional amendment adopted in 2004 to recognize and protect human rights has not shielded government critics from arrest.

The two realities show that when China had to build something new to fulfill expectations, it has largely delivered. But in areas that touch China's core interests, Olympic pledges come second.

"To ensure a successful Olympic Games, the government did make some technical and strategic efforts to improve the environment, human rights and press freedom. They did make some progress. But in these three areas, there's a long, long way to go," said Cheng Yizhong, an editor who tracks China's Olympic preparations.

With the Games less than four months away, the International Olympic Committee is scrambling to nail down specifics of how China will treat criticism of its actions during the event. Pressed this month, IOC President Jacques Rogge clarified that athletes would be allowed to speak freely in Beijing's Olympic venues, calling it an "absolute" human right.

"I can't help but feel cynical about all this," said David Wallechinsky, an Olympic historian, who said the IOC should have been more forceful with China earlier. "What are they going to do, take away the Games?"

>> Read complete analysis

By DENIS D. GRAY Associated Press Writer | ABC News
April 17, 2008

FRIENDSHIP BRIDGE, Nepal-Tibet Border

Three lithe Chinese security men shift silently into position so they are anchored abreast exactly midway across Friendship Bridge, high above a Himalayan river gorge.

It's the only international gateway into Tibet. As a small group of foreigners approaches, the guards' unspoken message is clear: the rebellious territory behind them is off-limits.

After anti-government riots erupted March 14, Beijing closed off Tibet to foreign and domestic tourists and cracked down on Tibetans trying to escape. And China's security apparatus doesn't stop at the border.

Chinese security police in athletic wear can be seen lounging in tea shops and strolling the sole street in the border town of Liping. They shadow three Associated Press journalists from the moment they arrive, ordering them not to take photographs -- on Nepalese territory.

And in the capital Katmandu, Tibetan exiles say China is pressuring the Nepalese government to crush anti-Chinese activities by the world's second-largest Tibetan exile community.

"The Chinese asked us unofficially to cooperate on securing the border. They are far stricter now," said one Nepali immigration official, requesting anonymity since he was not authorized to speak to the press. "Even an Austrian lady who was studying Chinese in Lhasa (Tibet's capital) was not allowed to enter."

Before the current unrest, some 1,500 foreigners a month would make the rough, four-hour car journey on a Chinese-built road from Katmandu to the border and then on to Lhasa.

Now, Chinese authorities have reversed an earlier decision to reopen Tibet to tourism on May 1, tour operators in Beijing said last week. There has been no official indication of when the border would reopen. The International Campaign for Tibet, a U.S.-based activist group, says it has information the region may remain sealed until after the Beijing Olympics in August.

>> Read complete report

By Howard W. French | International Herald Tribune
April 10, 2008

I had hardly finished writing a news article on repression in Xinjiang last week when word reached me of the violent suppression of yet another protest by Tibetan monks in western Sichuan Province.

There were conflicting reports. Some said eight Tibetans had been killed, some of them ordinary bystanders. Other reports put the number as high as 15.

The Tibetans were not the only casualties, though, in the unfolding story of disaffection, protest and repression in China's western region. In a bitterly ironic way, the plight of Xinjiang's Uighurs had been obscured by the news of yet more brutality against Tibetans.

The news out of China in recent weeks has involved multiple, interlocking tragedies, with a cast of victims much larger and more complex than the easily digestible narrative people in the West are accustomed to thinking about, a tale of put-upon Tibetans and imposing Chinese.

The onrush of Western sympathy for the cause of Tibet is well-intentioned but often naïve. The way the Tibet story has been reduced to a binary matter, almost literally of Tibetan saints and Han Chinese sinners, is problematic on many levels, not least because of hypocrisy implicit in the West's selective outrage.

Moreover, our many oversimplifications and perceived double standards fuel nationalist outrage in China and provide ready ammunition for ripostes by propagandists, whose task is to drum up popular support for the government as it digs deeper into the very positions that protesters seek to overturn.

Unfortunately for conventional Chinese opinion, the first instance of hypocrisy that needs to be dealt with involves the plight of the Uighurs, whose situation very nearly mirrors that of the Tibetans, the distinction being that Tibetans have become lovable because of popular notions about Buddhism and because of the way Hollywood has romanticized Tibet and its saffron-robed monks and supported the Dalai Lama.

Natives of Xinjiang, by contrast, are Muslim, and geopolitics and popular culture have combined in ways that have been deeply prejudicial to the Uighurs, who have no celebrity sponsors or young Western sympathizers eager to identify with their culture or support their cause.

The biggest and least obvious victims in this crisis, however, are the Chinese themselves. This has nothing to do with the ritualized self-pity combined with zealous nationalism and occasionally vicious hate speech that one encounters from Chinese all over the Internet these days. Here, we speak of people who insist that any criticism of China is really motivated by deep-seated Western contempt for the Chinese people themselves, or of the strident Chinese voices that say that people in the West have no standing to criticize them because Westerners have plenty of awful things to answer for themselves.

Yes, it is true, the Americans massacred the Indians and the Europeans conducted a centuries-long Atlantic slave trade. One could go on and on compiling a list of sins. But surely it does neither China nor its image any good to say don't criticize us because of your past - or worse, it doesn't matter if we do bad things because you've done bad aplenty, too.

On one issue after another, many Chinese fashion themselves as victims in these terms, or cut themselves unlimited moral slack, doing themselves neither honor nor good. It often goes like: How dare you criticize us as undemocratic, since it took you hundreds of years of development to become democratic; or how dare you say anything about our pollution, because you've been the biggest polluters in the past.

Arguments like those are effective in China largely for one reason, because the state, which has so tightly controlled the narrative in China through the strict filtering of information and education, has pulled off a feat of monumental political manipulation, persuading China's great Han majority that any criticism of its government is a deliberate slight against the Chinese people.

One may spare a thought for China for having arrived rather late to the party of modernization, when things like environmental standards and democratic participation and human rights and openness are standard expectations, but demands for them won't go away, including increasingly from China's own people.

The reason the people of China are the biggest victims in the ugly spectacle of the last few weeks is that the Chinese government sold them on the Olympics as a measure of their standing and stature in the world. It did so, moreover, as if hypnotized by its own peculiar and stilted rhetoric, which demands that the world applaud its achievements with no pause for questions or thought.

That, after all, is the meaning of Beijing's insistence that politics have no place in the Olympics, even as the country uses the Games to bolster its domestic standing and to make an unsubtle statement to the world: We are successful and grand. Behold and admire us. We have arrived.

One hopes that the Chinese public, smart, increasingly sophisticated and more and more exposed to the kind of reality checks that come from contact with others, can figure out the trick that is being played on them. A criticism of an action of their government is in no way a criticism of them.

Go to any auto show and see for yourself. Whenever a shiny new model is rolled out and the manufacturer hands out glossy promotional brochures, the normal reaction of those in attendance is to kick the tires for themselves.

Beijing showed the world last week what happens to its own citizens who dare hold up a mirror to the system and assess things for themselves: The activist, Hu Jia, was imprisoned for daring to write. When you come to the Olympic Games in Beijing, you will see skyscrapers, spacious streets, modern stadiums and enthusiastic people. You will see the truth, but not the whole truth, just as you see only the tip of an iceberg.

The greatest insult an outsider could pay to the Chinese people would be failing to understand what lies beneath.

Note: Bold emphasis of text by Truth About China; not by the author of this outstanding "Letter from China".

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | The New York Times
April 07, 2008

Western reporters in China have received harassing phone calls, e-mails and text messages, some with death threats, supposedly from ordinary Chinese complaining about alleged bias in coverage of recent anti-Chinese protests in Tibet.

The harassment began two weeks ago and was largely targeted at foreign television broadcasters, CNN in particular. But the campaign broadened in recent days after the mobile phone numbers and other contact information for reporters from The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today were posted on several Web sites, including a military affairs chat site.

''The Chinese people don't welcome you American running dog. Your reports twist the facts and will suffer the curse of heaven,'' said one e-mail received by the AP. One text message said: ''One of these days I'm going to kill you.''

Those sending the messages and making the calls say they are ordinary Chinese, a claim that could not be verified.

Spokesmen for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the government's State Council Information Office and the national police ministry did not respond to telephone calls and faxed questions Monday seeking comment about the threats.

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By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | The New York Times
02 April 2008

China has intensified its jamming of a Tibetan exile radio network's news broadcasts into Tibet during a crackdown on anti-government protests there, the network charged Wednesday.

The Chinese use radio stations inside Tibet to block the shortwave frequency used by the Voice of Tibet, said Oystein Alme, a Norwegian who runs the nonprofit foundation's business office in Oslo. The jamming signals contain music, drumming and noise.

Most of the Voice of Tibet's 13 staff members work at its main editorial office in Dharamsala, India, with Alme handling administration and funding in Oslo. The network started broadcasting in 1996, and has daily evening newscasts about Tibet in Tibetan and Mandarin Chinese. The station says its mission is ''to provide a channel for unbiased information and news to the Tibetans living under Chinese oppression in Tibet.''

Alme said the Chinese government started jamming its broadcasts almost as soon as they began but now is using two or three signals instead of one to make sure that the signal can't be heard.

''They have been stepping it up in connection with the demonstrations,'' Alme told The Associated Press. ''There has been enormous focus on journalists not getting free access to Tibet. The other side of the coin is that information from the outside is not getting into Tibet.''

The Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing had no immediate comment.

Tibetans have been protesting and rioting in Tibet and nearby provinces in the longest challenge to China's rule in the Himalayan region since 1989. The crackdown by Chinese authorities has focused international attention on the country's human-rights record in the run-up to the Beijing Games in August.

The jamming also affects those trying to listen in India, Nepal and Europe, Alme said.

By BBC News
April 01, 2008

China must ensure open access to the internet during the Beijing Games, Olympic officials have warned.

Inspectors from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said China was obliged under its Games contract to provide journalists with web access.

The IOC's Kevan Gosper said there was concern that the web had been blocked during recent unrest in Tibet. He said this could not happen during the Games.

IOC inspectors are on a final visit to Beijing before the August Games begin.

Internet 'management'

Mr Gosper said blocking the internet during the Games would "reflect very poorly" on the host nation.

"There was some criticism that the Internet closed down during events relating to Tibet in previous weeks - but this is not Games time," he said.

"Our concern is that the press is able to operate as it has at previous Games during Games time."

Some 30,000 journalists are expected to be in Beijing to cover the Games.

China frequently blocks access to certain websites - often restricting access to foreign media sites.

But foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told the Associated Press that China's "management" of the internet followed the "general practice of the international community".

She declined to say if the internet would be unrestricted for journalists during the Olympics, AP noted.